His At Night

Chapter Ten

The interior of the church was stone, the architecture Norman Romanesque. A gray, damp light fell from the windows of the clerestory. Here and there the cool gloom of the sanctuary was dispelled by the golden light of fat white candles, held aloft on candelabra as tall as Vere.

Freddie, who had been waiting outside, entered with Mrs. Douglas, helping her into a pew. Lady Kingsley came up to the altar and gave Vere a small nod—she would act the part of the matron of honor.

The church door opened and closed again, accompanied by a draft of humid, nippy air—the arrival of the woman who was to become Lady Vere in short order. Vere swallowed, agitated despite himself—and not merely with righteous indignation.

She was halfway down the aisle when he at last looked in her direction.

She wore the plainest wedding gown he’d ever seen, unadorned by anything lacy, feathery, or glittery. Her accessories consisted of a bouquet of violets in her hands, a veil covering her hair, and her smile.

He did not like her but he had to admire her, for it was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen on the face of a bride. Nothing gloating or boastful to it, only a simple and shyly serene joy—as if she were marrying the man of her dreams and could not believe her sheer good fortune.

He turned his head away.

The ceremony lasted and lasted—the clergyman was the wordy sort who saw no reason to abbreviate his homilies, even though the irregular nature of the proceedings must be obvious. The rain, which began at the same time as the ceremony, had intensified to a steady shower by the time Vere and his bride emerged from the church, arm in arm.

He handed her into the waiting carriage, then climbed in himself. She was surprised when the carriage door closed behind him. Her gaze flickered to him. In the sudden tightness of her posture he sensed her understanding—deep down—of what being married meant. That she would now be alone with him, and there would be no one to chaperone them.

No one to say what he could or could not do.

She smiled at him, a very proper, blissful-new-bride smile—it was her method of exerting control over any given situation. And yet he, who should—and did—know so much better, experienced once more an unwarranted flutter of happiness.

He tried to call to mind his once-constant companion, but he could no longer form an unpolluted image of her. Her simplicity had been spoiled by Lady Vere’s complicity, her warm ease distorted by his wife’s cold calculation.

He did not smile back at the woman he’d married. It occurred to him that there was quite enough time on the drive to the hotel—only two miles, but the rain was certain to cause delays in the traffic—for him to take her.

That would wipe the smile from her face.

Her fingers flicked away drops of rain that had landed on the glossy silk of her skirt. The material was heavy and chaste. She was swaddled, every single inch south of her chin. Even her hair was largely invisible beneath the veil. But he already knew what his sweet-faced liar looked like undressed, didn’t he?

If he lowered the window shades, he could disrobe her this moment, from the top down—or bottom up, if he were so inclined. Actions had consequences. These would be her consequences: horror, revulsion, and eventually arousal; her nakedness separated from the elements by nothing but the black leather-padded walls of a Clarence brougham; the sounds she’d make, under him, muffled by the hard drumming of the rain on the roof, the clacking and grinding of a torrent of carriages, and the continual din that was London being London.

She turned and looked out the rear window. “Ah, they are right behind us.”

As if it mattered.

He did not answer her, but turned his face toward the soggy world outside, while his bride sat still and breathed with quiet, meticulous care.

Elissande stood on the balcony of her suite at the very top of the Savoy Hotel. London was a muted, distant murmur. Light from Victoria Embankment rippled on the dark waters of the River Thames. The great spires of the city rose tall and black against the shadows of the night.

She had been married four hours.

She’d describe her marriage thus far as hushed.

She’d also describe it as long.

His silence had been nerve-wracking on the drive back to the hotel. There she’d discovered that neither Lady Kingsley nor Lord Frederick would join them for dinner: The former was in a hurry to get back to her guests, the latter, having recently accepted a commission, needed to gather the necessary matériel to begin his work. After she’d seen to Aunt Rachel’s dinner and put her to bed, she and Lord Vere had dined alone in a private room and he’d said not a word to her—not a single word—beyond a barely audible “Amen” at the end of grace. And now this interminable wait in their suite, which, while in terms of absolute time had yet to surpass the length of dinner, already had her in a state of head-throbbing tension.

Or perhaps that was the three glasses of champagne that she’d tossed back one after another.

Had she never read the book on matrimonial law that had once been in her uncle’s library, perhaps she would now be tentatively rejoicing that she was both married and blessedly left alone. But with knowledge came fear: an unconsummated marriage carried severe risks.

Had her uncle returned to Highgate Court yet? Had he learned what had happened and set out in pursuit? Was he even now hunting them in London?

And where was Lord Vere? Smoking? Drinking? Gone elsewhere by himself, even though a small suitcase of his had been delivered to the suite?

What if her uncle should locate her husband, sit him down for a talk, and point out all the obvious reasons why he did not want to be married to Elissande? Once he had Lord Vere convinced, it was only a short hop to an annulment, which would leave her with no husband, no protection, and not even the right to brag of having ever been married.

The height of the hotel was suddenly dizzying. She retreated into the relative safety of the sitting room, where on the table sat a small, beautifully iced cake, with pale blush marzipan roses blooming along deep green marzipan vines—her wedding cake, compliments of the hotel. With the cake had come a cake knife, napkins, plates, a bottle of champagne, and a bottle of Sauternes.

And no one to share any of it with.

She had been certain some mishap would erupt during the wedding ceremony. Lord Vere would mangle his vows. He would say the name of some other lady. Or, God forbid, he would decide at the last moment that he could not go through with the wedding, his reputation and her ruin be damned.

Instead he’d been solemn and steady. And she’d been the one to say his name wrong—Spencer Russell Blandford Churchill Stuart was quite a mouthful—and stumble over her vows not once, but twice.

Married.

She dared not understand it fully.

The door handle rattled lightly. She leaped to her feet. She’d locked the suite door out of fear of her uncle’s sudden appearance.

“Who is it?” Her voice was wobbly. Breathless, almost.

“Is this Lady Vere’s room?”

Lord Vere’s—her husband’s voice.

She squeezed her eyes shut a second, then moved forward.

Smile.

She had her smile in place before she opened the door. “Good evening, Lord Vere.”

“Evening, Lady Vere.”

He still wore the dark gray formal coat in which he’d been married—and which had somehow remained miraculously immaculate.

“May I come in?” he asked very politely, his hat in hand.

She realized that she had been standing in his way, staring at him. “Of course. I beg your pardon.”

Would he notice her flushed complexion? He might, if he’d look at her. But he only walked past her into the middle of the sitting room and glanced about.

The suite had been furnished in the manner of a gentleman’s home, the wallpapers a muted blue, the furniture sturdy yet unobtrusive. In Aunt Rachel’s suite there had been Chinese vases painted in red ochre; here there were blue Delft plates displayed in a semicircle above a mahogany chiffonier.

“The cake is here,” she said for something to say, locking the door again behind her.

He turned around, not so much at her words, but at the sound of the door locking—for that was where his gaze flicked before coming to rest on her face.

He had misunderstood what she meant by locking the door. He thought she signaled that she was ready to be his wife in truth: There was a tautness to his stare, a challenge almost.

She found she couldn’t hold his gaze. Her eyes instead focused on the boutonniere on his lapel, a single blossom of blue delphinium, the color so deep and rich it was almost purple.

“The cake is here,” she repeated herself. “Would you like me to cut it?”

“It would be a pity to eat it; it’s too pretty.”

She hurried to the table and reached for the cake knife. “Even something too pretty to eat will still spoil if no one eats it.”

“How profound,” he murmured.

Was that irony she heard in his voice?

She glanced at him and belatedly noticed that he clutched a bottle of whiskey by its neck in his left hand. She swallowed. Of course he was not happy. He’d been abused abominably. He knew quite well he had been entrapped.

Any idiot would know that.

She grimaced at the vocabulary of her thought, lowered her face, and attacked the cake, heaping his plate with an oversized slice. He set down the whiskey bottle, accepted the cake, and walked across the sitting room to the balcony.

She wished he’d revert to his blabbering ways. She could not have imagined that his silence would be so difficult to ignore—or to fill.

“Would you like something to drink with the cake?” she asked. “Some whiskey, perhaps?”

“Whiskey doesn’t go well with cake.” He sounded faintly impatient.

“Sauternes then?”

He shrugged.

She looked at the bottle of Sauternes. There was a cork underneath the wax seal. She believed it called for a corkscrew. And indeed, one had been supplied, between the bottles. She picked it up and turned it around in her palm. How did one use it? Uncorking bottles was the work of the servants at home.

“Should I call for assistance?” she asked timidly.

He returned to the table and set down his untouched cake. Taking the corkscrew from her, he inserted it into the cork. With a few deft turns of his wrist and one decisive pull, the cork emerged with a clean pop. He poured a full glass and set it before her, poured a full tumbler of whiskey for himself, and returned to the balcony with only that.

The rain had abated to a near-mist when she had returned to the suite after dinner. But now a strong, cold wind whipped, and the clouds looked ready to burst again. He drank slowly but steadily from his glass. The shaded electric light of the sitting room illuminated his profile against the dark, overcast sky beyond.

He was supposed to fidget, to tap his fingers against the glass or scrape his feet back and forth across the floor. He was not supposed to cut a stark, almost ominous figure ahead of an approaching storm.

She could not look away from him.

To distract herself, she raised her own glass. She didn’t much care for wine or spirits, but the Sauternes was sweet, almost like a dessert on its own. She drank with a nervous thirst and, within a minute, stared at the bottom of her glass.

“It’s been a long day,” he said. He straddled the threshold between the balcony and the sitting room. “I think I’ll retire early.”

Was that her cue that he was taking her to bed? Her stomach felt as if someone took it by the ends and gave it a twist—though not as awful a twist as she would have expected. It must be the Sauternes and the champagne from dinner. She was only mildly panicked.

“You don’t wish for a taste of the cake?” she said, not sure what else she could say. Good night? I’ll join you shortly?

“No, thank you.” He set down his empty glass and ran his hand through his hair. She’d thought he had brown hair with strands of dark blond. She was quite mistaken. It was the other way around—he had mostly dark blond hair, and a few chestnut streaks here and there. “Good night, Lady Vere.”

He disappeared into the en suite bathroom. She poured herself another glass of Sauternes. A few minutes later, as she was once more looking at her empty glass, he came out of the bathroom, headed directly into one of the two bedrooms, and closed the door.

Only to come out thirty seconds later, grab the whiskey bottle from before her, and leave again with a perfunctory nod.

She was flummoxed. She did not want to go to bed with him, but given the way he’d looked at her when they were at Highgate Court—and inside the Clarence brougham this afternoon—she had not considered the possibility that he would ignore her outright on their wedding night.

Well, this would not do. She could not possibly give her uncle such an easy opening as an unconsummated marriage. He was not going to stroll through the courts with some trumped-up invalidity concerning her wedding ceremony, and then wave this non-consummation before the judges. He’d have to exert himself to prove that she was of unsound mind, at the very least.

This marriage would be consummated, and that was that.

Easier said than done.

Half an hour and the rest of the Sauternes later, Elissande was still where she was, alone in the sitting room.

Well, what was she waiting for? Consummation didn’t happen by itself. If he wouldn’t come to her, then she had to go to him.

She didn’t move. She was so very ignorant of those things. And frankly, the thought of coming into renewed bodily contact with Lord Vere kept her bottom fastened firmly to the chair.

She had to use the sledgehammer on herself. She had to actually recall her uncle’s image to mind, when her entire life she’d tried her best to banish it: the cold eyes, the aquiline nose, the thin lips, the soft-edged menace that lay at the root of her nightmares.

She took a few deep breaths and rose. And swayed so much she had to sit down again. Her uncle frowned upon women drinking. Until Lady Kingsley’s guests arrived with their own supply, wine was never served at Highgate Court.

She’d completely underestimated the effect of an entire bottle of Sauternes—plus three glasses of champagne—on her balance.

Gripping on to the table, she rose again, this time with much greater caution. There, she was upright. She inched along the edge of the table, not quite looking as if she were an untried alpinist upon the north face of the Matterhorn.

The other side of the table was closer to Lord Vere’s bedroom. She turned so that her back was to the table and carefully set off to negotiate the ten-foot distance to his room.

It was like walking on water. No wonder he had stumbled about when he’d had too much to drink; one really couldn’t help it, not when the floor swelled and dipped without the least warning.

At the doorway she gratefully gripped the door handle and rested her weight, for a moment, against the jamb. Good gracious, the room was sliding back and forth—best get on before she became too dizzy. She turned the handle.

He was in bed already, naked from the waist up. She blinked, so that he would stop sliding back and forth in her vision. Who knew something as sweet as syrup would have such fascinating ophthalmological effects?

Slowly he came into focus. The periphery of his person became less blurred, his torso gained sharpness and definition. Goodness, he must be a Muscular Christian, for he was certainly muscular, his physique something Michelangelo would approve of, since the maestro never painted a young man who didn’t have such a body.

And look, he had a book with him. Vaguely she remembered what he had said about using books as general anesthesia. No, that wasn’t quite right. Laudanum, that was it. He used books as laudanum.

But it didn’t matter just now. He looked halfway intelligent with that very big book in his lap.

She liked it.

“My lord,” she said.

His eyes narrowed—or was that also an optic effect? “My lady.”

“It’s our wedding night.” It was very important to state the obvious, lest he’d forgotten.

“So it is.”

“Therefore I’ve come to oblige you,” she said grandly. She felt at once brave, dutiful, and resourceful.

“Thank you, but it will not be necessary.”

What silliness. “I beg to differ. It is absolutely necessary.”

His tone was pointed. “Why?”

“For the flourishing of our marriage, sir, of course.”

He closed the book and rose. Hmm, shouldn’t he have risen as soon as she entered? She could not decide.

“Our marriage has come as a shock to both of us. I’m loath to impose myself on you when everything has been so rushed and…bizarre. Why don’t we go on at a more leisurely pace?”

“No.” She shook her head. “We don’t have the time.”

He gave her a look that was almost sardonic. “We’ve a lifetime—or so the clergyman said.”

She needed to be mindful about her future consumption of Sauternes. Not only were her eyes functioning only questionably, her tongue had become thick and unwieldy. She had a coherent argument in her head concerning the urgency of the consummation. But she could not motivate her mandible to deliver that argument. It flatly refused.

So she tilted her head and smiled at him instead, not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

His reaction was to pick up the whiskey on his nightstand and take a swig directly from the bottle. Oh dear, but that was a very masculine thing to do. Very forceful and decisive.

Attractive.

Indeed, his whole person was attractive. Outstandingly handsome. That thick, slightly unruly hair that glinted like polished bronze. That bone structure. Those wide, tightly sinewed shoulders.

“I forgot what color your eyes are,” she murmured.

How preposterous that after four days of acquaintance—and a wedding ceremony—she didn’t remember the color of his eyes.

“They are blue.”

“Really?” She was beguiled. “How wonderful. May I see?”

With that, she approached him and peered up. He was very tall, taller than she’d remembered, somehow, and she had to place her hands on his arms and stand on her tiptoes to see deeply into his eyes.

“Many people have blue eyes,” he said.

“But yours are extraordinary.” Truly they were. “They are the color of the Hope Diamond.”

“Have you ever seen the Hope Diamond?”

“No, but now I know what it must look like.” She sighed. “And you smell good.”

“I smell like whiskey.”

“Yes, that too. But”—she breathed in deeply—“better.”

She could not define or describe it. It was a warm scent, like that of sheets freshly returned from the laundry. Or that of sunbaked stones.

“You’ve had too much to drink, haven’t you?”

She stared at his mouth, firm yet enticing. “‘Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.’”

“You’ve had too much to drink.”

She smiled. He was so very amusing too. Her hands spread against his arms. So firm, they were, yet so smooth. She remembered the night of Squeak Piggy Squeak. She’d liked touching him even then. No wonder. He was marvelous to touch and he smelled like Lebanon.

She looked up into his eyes. He did not smile back at her. But he was very handsome this way, severe and judgmental.

“‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,’” she murmured. “‘For thy love is better than wine.’”

“No,” he said.

She wrapped her arms about his neck and touched her mouth to his. But only for an instant. He firmly removed her person. “You are completely inebriated, Lady Vere.”

“No, not inebriated. Intoxicated,” she declared proudly.

“In either case, you should go to your room and lie down.”

“I want to lie down with you,” she breathed. “‘He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.’”

“Jesus,” he said.

“No, Elissande. My name is Elissande.”

“This is enough, Lady Vere. You may leave now.”

“But I don’t wish to.”

“Then I will leave.”

“But you cannot.”

“Oh, can’t I?”

Her tongue, which had been effortlessly lithe for quoting from the Song of Songs, again refused to cooperate here. “Please don’t. We must, for my aunt. Please.”

Surely he’d seen how shrunken and faded her aunt had become in her uncle’s house. Surely he understood the importance of keeping her free from further oppression. Surely he was as compassionate and perceptive as he was handsome.

Gorgeous, really. She could not get enough of looking at him. God in Heaven, what a sensational jaw. Those magnificent cheekbones. And those Hope Diamond eyes. She could stare at him all day.

And all night.

“No,” he said.

She threw herself at him. He was so solidly built. How she wished she’d had someone like him to hold on to in all the darkest days of her life—hugging Aunt Rachel had always made her sadder, but Lord Vere made her feel safe. He was a fortress.

She kissed his shoulder—she loved the taste and texture of his skin. She kissed his neck, his ear, his jaw, which was not quite as smooth, but had a slight roughness that scraped her chin most deliciously.

She kissed him on the mouth, capturing those very seductive lips with her own, savoring the taste of whiskey that lingered just inside his mouth, running the tip of her tongue over his teeth.

Oh, dear. His—his—

They stood hip to hip and she felt it. Him. Hard and growing harder.

And then she felt it no more as she sailed through the air. Landing on the mattress rather knocked the breath out of her and made the room spin like a kaleidoscope. But, goodness gracious how strong he was. She weighed a solid nine and a half stone. But he’d picked her up and tossed her as if she were a bridal bouquet.

She smiled at him.

“Stop smiling,” he said. It sounded as if he ground his teeth as he spoke.

Never smiling again was exactly what she aimed to do. For understanding her, she smiled at him with even greater abandon. Perhaps she ought to rethink the wholesale banning of smiles. They were quite enjoyable at times like this, when she was under no duress whatsoever, when she was relaxed and happy and at peace with the world.

She beckoned him with her index finger. “Come here.”

For once, he obliged. He loomed above her for a moment, then leaned down and took her jaw between his fingers.

“Listen and listen well, if you can get anything into your barmy, addled head: no. You can force me into a corner and make me marry you. But you can’t make me fuck you. Say one more word and I will have this marriage annulled tonight and send you back to the bedlam where you came from. Now shut up and get out.”

She smiled at him some more. His lips moved in the most mesmerizing fashion when he spoke. She would have him read to her, so she could ogle him for long minutes at a stretch.

Then his words began to make an impression on her ear. On her mind. She shook her head. No, he could not have meant it. He was her fortress. He would not toss her over the rampart to her uncle.

“I mean it,” he repeated. “Out.”

She could not. She could only lie there and shake her head helplessly. “Don’t make me go. Please don’t make me go.”

Don’t make me go back to a place where I cannot take a single free breath, where never a moment passes without its share of fear and loathing.

He yanked her off the bed and to her feet, his fingers clamped about her arm to keep her upright. Without any mercy, he marched her to the still open door, then gave her a shove that sent her stumbling to the middle of the sitting room.

Behind her the door slammed shut.

An hour later Vere came out of his room for the cake. He hadn’t eaten much the entire day, and all the whiskey in the world couldn’t mask the gnawing of his hunger anymore.

He was on his second slice when he realized that she was sobbing in her room. The sound was very faint—almost inaudible. He finished the cake on his plate and returned to his bed.

Five minutes later he was again in the sitting room. But why? Why did he care? What he’d said was expressly designed to make any woman cry. And feminine tears had absolutely no effect on him: Women who were criminally inclined or mentally disturbed—not to mention merely manipulative—tended to be terrific weepers.

He went back to bed and tilted the whiskey bottle for the last drop. But bugger it to hell if he wasn’t back in the sitting room again three minutes later.

He opened her door but did not see her. He had to round the bed to the farther side to find her sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest, crying into her wedding veil, of all things.

The veil was a soggy wad. Her face was red and splotchy, her eyes puffy. She hiccupped convulsively. The front of her wedding gown, too, was damp from tears.

“I can’t sleep when you are crying like this,” he said crossly.

She looked up, a very dull expression on her face, no doubt waiting for his person to coalesce in her blurred vision. It did. She shivered.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll stop right now. Please don’t send me away.”

He couldn’t decide which one he hated more: the devious and dementedly smiling Lady Vere, or the devious and abjectly sniveling one.

“Go to sleep. I won’t send you away tonight.”

Her lips quivered. With gratitude, for God’s sake. In annoyance—and resentment and anger, which an ocean of spirits couldn’t drown—he made the mistake of saying, “I’ll wait till tomorrow morning.”

She bit her lower lip. Her eyes filled with renewed tears. They rolled down her already wet face to disappear into the bodice of the wedding gown. But she made no sound at all, her weeping as silent as death.

Looking away from him, she began to rock back and forth, like a child trying to comfort herself.

He didn’t know why it should affect him, why she should affect him—this woman had meant to force herself on Freddie, for God’s sake—but she did. There was something about her wordless desperation that made him hurt.

She had no one else to whom she could turn.

It was partly the whiskey. But one bottle of whiskey wasn’t enough to explain why he didn’t march out of her room, now that he’d effectively silenced her. He fought it, the alcohol-fueled compassion, the onslaught of her bottomless misery, and the stupid sense that he of all people should do something about it.

She had brought it on herself, hadn’t she?

She gasped as he lifted her bodily. But this time he didn’t toss her. Instead, he set her on the edge of her bed. He bent to remove her shoes. Then he reached behind her to unhook her dress. Her dress, her petticoats, her corset cover, and her corset itself fell from her.

Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped her face—carefully. Fresh tears swelled. For years she’d wiped away Aunt Rachel’s tears. But no one had ever done it for her.

She caught his handkerchief when he would have put it back into his pocket and brought it before her nose. “It smells like Lebanon too,” she said with wonder.

He shook his head briefly. “Let me tuck you in.”

“All right,” she said.

Their eyes met. Really, he had ridiculously beautiful eyes. And such unbearably alluring lips. She remembered kissing him. Even if she must take Aunt Rachel and go on the run, she would always remember kissing him.

So she kissed him again.

He let her kiss him, let her run her teeth lightly over his lower lip, nibble him on his jawline, and lick him, a tiny lick at the base of his throat. He emitted a small, strangled sound as she bit lightly where his neck joined his shoulder.

“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked, his breaths uneven.

Did such things have to be learned?

“I’m only doing what I want.” And what she wanted was to sink her teeth into him, the way someone would bite a gold coin to ascertain its purity.

“You are a horny drunk, Lady Vere,” he murmured.

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t wait for an answer but kissed him again. There was such pleasure in kissing him, in touching him.

He exerted a gentle pressure against her shoulder. After a moment, she realized that he meant for her to lie down. She did, holding on to him, still kissing him.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, even as he stretched out beside her. “I might prove a horny drunk too.”

Neither of them should be here. Lady Kingsley’s house should never have been invaded by rats. And the Cumberland Edgertons should have had the decency to take her in after her parents’ death.

She was inordinately remorseful. Of course he had every right to be angry with her. She’d manipulated—indeed, wrangled—him into this marriage. And he’d been very kind and very tolerant. Was it any wonder she looked to him for safety and guidance in such a confusing and uncertain time?

She lifted herself to her elbows and kissed him again, a straight trail down the center of his torso.

He stopped her, but only to unspool her hair. It spilled in a long cascade over her right shoulder. “So much of it, but so light, like spun air.”

She smiled at the compliment and lowered her head to his navel. He stopped her once more, his fingers sinking into her shoulder.

A question suddenly popped into her head. “What makes you grow hard?”

His gaze took on that peculiar tautness again. “Your kissing me and pulling me into bed, among other things.”

“Why?”

“Arousal is necessary to performance.”

“Are you aroused now?”

A beat of silence. “Yes.”

“What is to be this performance then?”

“I really shouldn’t,” he said, even as his body turned in to hers and she felt his arousal very clearly. “I’m not thinking with my head.”

“Is there anything else you can think with?” she wondered aloud.

He chuckled briefly. Then, at last, he touched her. He’d touched her before, of course, but always to do something else: escorting her to her seat at the dinner table or shoving her away from him, for example. This was the first time he’d touched her for the sake of touching her, for no other purpose than to feel her.

Before Aunt Rachel completely faded, sometimes she’d petted Elissande on her hair or her hand. But that was many years ago. Elissande had not known until this moment how desperately she missed it, the simple grace of being touched. He stroked her slowly, on her face, her shoulders, her arms, her back.

Still stroking her, he kissed her. She swam in pleasure. When he pulled away, she told him, “I want more.”

“More what?”

“More you.”

That was when he disrobed her, peeling away her combination, leaving her wearing only a pair of white stockings.

She should feel mortified to be so naked before him. But she did not. She felt only a little shy.

“What am I doing?” he murmured, even as he pressed kisses to her collarbone.

She shivered with the pleasure of it. “You are making me very happy,” she whispered.

“Am I? Will you remember it in the morning?”

“Why won’t I?”

He gave an enigmatic smile and kissed her down the center of her torso, as she had done with him. The air he exhaled teased her nipple. She tensed with the indescribable sensation of it, which grew a hundred times more indescribable when he took her nipple inside his mouth.

“It doesn’t appear to be very difficult to make you happy,” he said.

Indeed, it was not. A little freedom, a little security, a little love. It was all she’d ever wanted.

He continued to extract divine sensations from her. And she continued to be near teary eyed from happiness. When he removed his trousers at last, the size and weight of his arousal almost did not surprise her. She trusted that he would know what to do, even though she had trouble conceiving what he would do in relation to her.

“I shall regret this in the morning,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“I shan’t,” she said earnestly, eagerly.

He kissed her chin. “Actually, I have a presentiment you will—very much. But I cannot seem to stop now.”

He captured her mouth. His body settled over hers. He was hot and hard. And he—he—

She screamed. She hadn’t meant to, but it hurt. It hurt so much.

All the kisses and caresses that led to this moment, then, were but to make it more palatable. But they did not. It was the most terrible burning in a most sensitive place.

Tears streamed anew down her face. Everything was always so difficult. Everything. Even this, so sweet and pleasurable, must turn out to entail such agony. But it was not his fault. Hadn’t the Good Book declared “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”? No doubt this was what it had ominously prescribed.

“I’m sorry,” she said shakily. “Quite sorry. Please, do go on.”

He withdrew. She hissed at the pain of it and braced herself for more. But he left the bed altogether. She heard him dress. When he returned, it was with the handkerchief that smelled of Lebanon. He wiped away her newest tears.

“I’m quite done,” he said. “You can go to sleep now.”

“Really?” She could not believe her good fortune.

“Yes, really.”

He pulled a cover over her and turned off the light by the headboard. “Good night.”

“Good night,” she said, trembling with relief. “And thank you, sir.”

In the dark, he sighed.