She watched, fascinated, as his tension slowly eased, his mouth softening, the grip of his hands gentling. How young he looked, suddenly—his lower lip as full as a child’s.
His head now dropped to her breast, his forehead settling into the crook of her neck. She pushed a hand through his hair as his ragged breath slowed. Another, smaller shiver moved through him, and wonder touched her. She could never have guessed that a man might seem so vulnerable at this moment—or that, lying beneath him, she might feel so curiously strong. Her body bore Simon’s weight so easily. She did not feel used at all. She felt ferociously, vibrantly alive.
That night Nell lay awake long after Simon had fallen into sleep. With his arms around her, she found the whispering of the rain at the windows didn’t sound melancholy as much as … peaceful. Noises in the night didn’t make her flinch; they gave her an excuse to move closer to him, more deeply into his embrace.
But after long minutes or hours in the silence—she no longer had any grasp of how time was passing—a strange excitement crept over her. She was lying next to him, and he wore not a lick of clothing. Sleep seemed positively wasteful.
She inched out of his grasp. Several slow tugs on the sheet bared him to the scope of the moonlight. The air across his bare skin caused him to shift in his dreams, and her breath caught as the bands of muscle across his abdomen contracted with his movement.
So much to see: a dark line of hair arrowed down to his cock, which slept cradled between hard thighs dusted with more black hair.
His thighs narrowed in sharp vees into neat, square kneecaps. Earlier, when he had padded away to fetch water, she had noticed the sharp shelves of his calf muscles, how they flexed as he walked. His bum had looked taut, with twin dimples above each cheek.
As his wife, was it her right to pinch them?
She bit down on her fingers to keep them from misbehaving, then looked up his body again. His shoulders were broad and thick, his biceps bunched in the arm tossed over his head.
He’d mentioned, once or twice, swimming: he liked to swim in the early mornings, she gathered, at some gymnasium in Kensington. She supposed that explained his body.
Never stop swimming, she thought.
It came to her that she was grinning like a loon. She yanked the sheets back over him and then squirmed into his side, putting her arse against his groin.
His arm came around her waist and tightened. For a second she thought she’d awakened him. “Simon?” she whispered.
He murmured something unintelligible—goose pastry, it sounded like—and put his face into her hair.
She swallowed a giggle and forced her eyes to close. Sleep, she told herself. No reason not to sleep. You’re happy, is all.
Which seemed miraculous in itself.
This was happiness, she thought. And this was her husband. Both of them—both of them—were really, truly hers.
Nell St. Maur was not a creature of the morning hours. Simon woke her with a kiss only to watch her fall back asleep. He nibbled on her ear for a bit, which coaxed out an appreciative noise that collapsed into a snore. He sat beside her, at a loss for a moment, and then lost for a long minute in simply admiring how frankly her face advertised her spirit: the stubborn square of her jaw, the saucy point of her chin, the bold lines of her dark brows.
He ran a finger down her cheek. No response. She was dead to the world.
Whimsical thought: he wanted her awake because he missed her.
He leapt off the bed and opened the curtains, then watched in amusement as she rejected the daylight with a hand tossed—more accurately, flopped—across her eyes. When he returned to the bed and blew on her cheek, she made a small noise of irritation and rolled away from him.
An idea struck. He turned and padded from his own rooms into hers, where her blushing maid sat waiting beside a cooling pot of chocolate. No, he told the girl, he did not require her help to carry the tray.
Her smothered giggles followed him back into his apartment.
One wave of the cup beneath his wife’s nose brought her to scowling, rumpled life. The fingers shielding her face widened, allowing him a glimpse of lashes rising, falling, then rising again. With an audible sniff, she pushed herself up by an elbow. “Chocolate,” she said hoarsely, and seized the cup.
He sat back, smiling as she shoved a handful of chestnut hair out of her face. At the first sip, her eyes closed again and the look on her face made his body tighten. They’d enjoyed each other three times last night, but another day brought with it new opportunities. And they were, after all, in a bed together already.
“I do believe you prefer chocolate to me,” he said teasingly.
She lowered the cup and met his eyes. “No.” She cleared her throat. “I do not.”
The color rising on her cheeks riveted him. “Blushes?” She’d been so magnificently uninhibited last night.
“Not for shame,” she said softly.
“No,” he agreed, just as quiet. “That would be foolish indeed.”
Their look held, becoming magnetic somehow: comfortable yet all-consuming; he felt no need to look away and she did not lower her eyes. Perhaps this was what obsession felt like. Yes, he thought: he had a full-blown and still growing obsession with this woman he’d married.
Should it unnerve him? It had, in the past. He could no longer remember why. This blush, so lovely … Every moment he looked at her, she seemed to offer something new. “Drink,” he said.
She lifted a brow, then took his suggestion with enthusiasm. Once upon a time, she had slurped. No longer. The grime was gone; her accent was smoothing out; she no longer fell on her food as though she feared it might be taken from her. Often he found himself forgetting her roots entirely.
Or, no—he hadn’t forgotten whence she came. But lately he found himself marveling at her for reasons that had nothing to do with her history. He did not admire a guttersnipe’s quick wit or a guttersnipe’s grasp of sophisticated literary techniques; he admired, simply, her: a woman of unusual insight, unafraid of disagreement, but also generous in her concessions when he made a sound point; intelligent, quick-witted, delightful company.
Delicious company. She yawned, showing a small pink tongue, covering her mouth with one hand, kittenish, impossible not to touch. He caught a lock of her hair, rubbing the silken strands. How demure she looked, how small in his bed. Such a deceptive appearance of fragility. When the mood struck, she could deal a set-down as sharp as any her father ever authored.
The thought gave him pause. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the first woman to truly capture his interest in years also happened to be the first to disapprove of him so sternly. He wasn’t in the business of sticking his head into the sand: he could see that his feelings for her might contain an echo of his old, quixotic quest. In her disapproval, she bore more than a passing resemblance to Rushden—whom he’d tried to please, time and again, until it had become clear that his own spirit would be the cost for it.
He smoothed her hair back behind her ear and she gave him a frowning little look. Ironic that her disapproval should wreak the opposite effect of her father’s. It filled him with a frustrated, hungry, unnervingly intense desire to discover how to please her. How to locate, or fashion, the key that would unlock her trust—or, failing that, the spot to hit with a hammer to crack her open.
“What?” she asked. He’d been staring too intently. “Do I have chocolate somewhere?” She reached up to pat the corners of her mouth, looking flustered and entirely feminine.
“No,” he said. “No chocolate. Only you.” And that, he feared, was enough.
Her flush was spreading down her throat, into smooth terrain concealed by the sheet hiked beneath her arms. It occurred to him that he’d wondered about that blush. He reached for the sheet and she squealed, leaning away from him. “Hey! What’s this?” she demanded.
“A husbandly inquiry. I believe I once expressed a need to know how far your blushes extend.”
?
??Oh.” She eyed him for a moment before breaking into an impish smile. “Well, then,” she said, setting aside the cup of chocolate. “Why don’t you come find out?”
Some two hours after they awoke, Simon escorted his new wife from his apartment toward the breakfast room. “I am quite serious,” he said, speaking over her laughter. “I’m going to carry you over some threshold or another. It’s quite scandalous that I didn’t even lift you into my rooms. I can’t imagine what I was thinking last night.”
With a sparkling look from under her lashes, she said, “Oh, I can think of one or two things that were on your mind.” She lowered her voice, mocking his own: “Took you long enough,” she said gruffly.
He laughed back at her. He was in charity with the world, too amazed with his good luck, with the wondrous kindness that fate had performed in presenting him this woman. “Take care,” he said. “I might have hauled you over my shoulder long before this: to the magistrate, that first night.” The memory of it now amazed him. How fortunate for him that he hadn’t. So easily she might have been lost to him.
“You’re lucky I didn’t get away,” she replied promptly. “If I hadn’t been kind enough to tarry and chat with you, I’d have made a neat job of it, too.”
“I’d like to hear how,” he said. “One shout from me and the entire house would have been up in arms.”
She snorted. “Right here,” she said, waving in front of him; they had reached the top of the staircase. “I would have slid down this banister, past all your gawping servants, and shimmied on out the door.”
“The balustrade?” He ran a skeptical eye down its length. “A happy thing you decided to tarry, then. You’d have broken your neck.”
She snorted. “This here is a prime prospect for sliding, St. Maur.”
He opened his mouth but was startled by a dim recollection that caused him instead to laugh. “You’re right.” As a boy he’d had these exact thoughts: it was the perfect banister for sliding. He’d never done it, of course; it hadn’t taken long to realize that banisters in this house were not meant even for gripping: a proper gentleman should make his way down the stairs straight and stern and untroubled by any obstacle, even a missed step.
A devil seized hold of him. “Let’s do it,” he said. Why not?
Disbelief deepened her smile. “You can’t be serious.”
“God help us, but that’s a phrase nobody should have taught you,” he said. “Now you sound like every stuffed-up lady I’ve ever known.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Stuffed up, am I? I’ll wager you can’t keep your seat past the curve.”
He eyed the drop from the aforementioned curve. A good ten feet to the marble flagstones below. It could crack a man’s head. “For the sake of the St. Maur line, one hopes otherwise. But I suppose there’s only one way to find out.” He leapt up to sit on the rail.
She shrieked. “No! I wasn’t—”
“Serious?” he finished for her, and then let go.
Like flight. No friction: his staff was too well trained; they oiled this banister morning and night. Nell continued to shriek above him. He laughed as he leaned into the curve, exhilarated and also aware of how absurd this was, to laugh his head off at a boy’s game. Such a simple pleasure. Such joy.
The bend flew by; he was home free now, bound at startling speeds for the bottom of the staircase. He remembered this skill at the level of muscle and sinew; he pushed himself off the rail and landed on his feet at the base of the stairs.
He turned around. She stood at the top of the stairs, hands cupped over her mouth.
“Graceful as the breeze,” he called up.
She dropped her hands to her hips. “More like a lunatic!”
“And you’re a braggart. All talk. No follow-through.”
He could see from here the sudden tilt of her chin. Another laugh welled in him as she stalked over to the banister, her movements jerky with spite. She was too easy.
But she didn’t hop up on the railing quite as easily as he had. Of course. Her skirts would impede her.
Concern overlaid his amusement. “Don’t,” he said. “I was only jesting. You’re not dressed for—”
She launched herself down.
He made an aborted movement to mount the stairs. But she was moving too quickly; he would be as likely to knock her off as catch her. His mind began to calculate the best place to position himself on the ground floor, so that when she fell backward and came tumbling down, he could break the fall—
And she whooped. “Here I come,” she cried, and he realized she was going to make it.
Laughing himself—from relief as much as from delight—he stepped backward to provide her space to land.
She made nearly a perfect dismount. But the speed caught up to her, so that she came stumbling forward, right into his arms.
No, he thought—a perfect dismount all around.
She was breathing hard, flushed, her eyes sparkling. “Told you,” she said. “I would have gotten away.”
“And I would have caught you then, too.” As his attention fixed on her mouth, he remembered, with a pleasant shock, that they were married. He could kiss her wherever in his house he liked.
He leaned down. Her eyes widened, then her soft hands were covering his elbows, drawing him closer as she went up on her tiptoes. Their lips brushed, a hot reminder, too sweet not to be a prelude to something more.
“Upstairs,” he murmured into her mouth, and felt her soundless laughter warm his lips. He was physically turning her, goading her to mount the stairs again, when a throat was pointedly cleared behind them.
Hemple. Blast the woman. Simon would have ignored her on any day but this one. Sighing, he transferred his hand from Nell’s hip to the more decorous perch of her muscled upper arm. “Mrs. Hemple,” he said in greeting. Nell’s instructor looked pink. “I was just fetching your charge for you.”
“How fortuitous,” said the matron, looking between them anxiously. “It’s an important day for her ladyship. A very momentous day, indeed. We cannot waste a minute.”
He felt his bride tense. “What happens today?” she asked.
Christ, had he forgotten to tell her? He caught her hand and kissed it in apology. “Tonight,” he said, “you make your debut into society.”
Nell moved through the day like a drunkard, silly with thoughts of Simon. Hemple put her through her paces, demanding that she mime all manner of situations—being introduced to a fellow countess (a fellow countess!); to a marquess; to a princess; to some sorry baron who barely merited even a curtsy (and what an idea that was—that there were nobs now who ranked beneath her!). Nell bobbed as directed, her body barely registering the indignities. Her flesh no longer seemed her own. At the very thought of her husband, it throbbed.
Dressing for society was no small task. It began immediately after a late tea, when Sylvie, nervous as a fluttering bird, drew her upstairs to choose a gown. Apparently Simon had set her into a tizzy by informing her that the party would be small but exclusive.
Exclusive was the word over which Sylvie fretted. The heliotrope satin was cunning but its flounces, she argued, were too bold for elegance. The sapphire velvet would look lurid beneath the Allentons’ electric lights; best save it for gas. The lavender-tinted taffeta—was it not too girlish? But the emerald silk shot through with threads of peacock blue, over which floated an overskirt of green tulle—this gown was sprightly yet mysterious in a feminine way, sure to strike a most elegant picture.
Nell, who hadn’t known dresses had personalities, felt relieved to be offered the chance to approve. She rose to don a chemisette of fine silk in preparation to being strapped into her corset.
As she stripped off her woolen combination, Sylvie hastily averted her eyes. Nell looked down for the cause and found a love bite on the upper slope of her breast.
She felt her face catch fire. The high color still lingered when she sat down at the toilet table a quarter hour later so Sylvie could dress her hair
. Could this feverish, bright-eyed girl in the mirror—this girl whose knees were quivering with thoughts of the night past—really be herself? For so long she’d believed that the only safe way to enjoy a man was to enjoy him less than he did her. But this giddiness that had seized her didn’t allow for caution.
They were married. Surely she was safe now to feel as much as she liked?
Sylvie turned her hair into a high roll at the crown of her skull, then threaded the roll with a fine chain of emeralds that glimmered like green stars. “Very elegant,” she pronounced.
“Half naked,” Nell suggested. The gown had long, tight sleeves but it dipped very low in the front. Her breasts popped up like fresh-baked muffins.
“Elegant,” Sylvie said adamantly. “Like a countess.”
“Beautiful,” came a low voice from the doorway.
Simon came forward, long and lean in a black evening suit, a leather box in his hand. He circled her once, a smile playing on his lips. “Elegant as well, of course—but the word is too bloodless to suit you.”
His mouth was so beautifully shaped. Full, well-chiseled lips. She wished he wouldn’t waste them on flattery. They had such better uses.
Her next words sounded hoarse. “Thank you; that’s very kind.” Mrs. Hemple had told her that a lady never argued with a compliment.
His smile widened briefly before disappearing. “This is for you,” he said in a different, more formal voice.
She felt a flicker of unease as he opened the box—something in his manner put her on the alert. But the contents within the velvet-lined compartment robbed her of her wariness.
The necklace sported emeralds the size of robin’s eggs. Those on the bracelet were not much smaller. The stones seemed alive in the light, casting a sparkle so vivid that she hesitated to touch them for some irrational fear they would singe her.
These jewels were fit for a queen.
“These have always belonged to the Countess of Rushden,” Simon said. “Your mother wore them. She particularly loved the bracelet. In many of my memories of her …”