He regarded her for one more moment. Then, with the same air of a man closing a ledger—though a rather different ledger than the one in the carriage—he nodded.
“Greece,” he said. “After Rome. Autumn, I think, is the better season for it in any case.” He reached for the final inch of his wine. “We will spend the summer at Whitmore—my estate in Wiltshire. It will give the more inventive members of the ton adequate time to construct and then exhaust their theories about this morning, and it will give us—” He paused, and looked at her directly, with the same frank, unhurried attention he had employed to such unsettling effect earlier. “—adequate time to become acquainted.”
The faintest color.
“Adequate time,” she repeated. “That is one way to describe a summer.”
“I am a practical man,” he said. “I find adequacy aspirational, in a first marriage.”
She made a small sound—not quite a laugh, not quite the suppression of one—and looked away toward the dwindling room. “Are you already planning my demise then?”
“Not specifically,” he said.
“Whitmore,” she said, after a moment, turning the word over as if testing the sound of it.
“You will like it,” he said, with the particular confidence of a man who knew his house. “The library is excellent.”
She turned back to him.
And this time, the smile was entirely real—unperformed, unguarded, quick and warm and gone almost before he had fully registered it, like a phrase of music heard through an open window.
“Well,” she said, quietly. “That is something.”
He found, with some surprise, that he agreed.
Chapter Eight
The fire had been lit and currently banked high enough to warm the room against the evening chill, the flames casting a soft, unsteady light across the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar walls, the unfamiliar ceiling of a room that was now, by every legal and sacramental measure available to the English-speaking world, hers.
Imogen sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair.
She was counting the strokes. It was the only discipline left to her.
Forty-one. Forty-two.
Her trunk had arrived mid-afternoon—sent for, Mrs. Richards had explained with tactful brevity, on the Duke’s instruction, from her family’s townhouse. It had contained her own things: her own brushes, her own small bottle of rosewater, her own familiar nightgowns with their sensible flannel and their rather less sensible association with solitary, uncomplicated sleep. She had opened the trunk with something very close to relief, had pressed her hands against her own possessions with the private gratitude of a woman locating solid ground.
And then she had found it.
Laid across the top, with the tissue paper still folded beneath it in neat, deliberate creases, as though whoever had placed it there had understood exactly what they were doing: a nightrail. Not flannel. Not anything remotely related to flannel. The finest lawn she had ever touched, so thin the candlelight passed through it when she held it up, so sheer that the tissue paper beneath had been entirely visible through the fabric.
She was wearing it now.
Fifty-three. Fifty-four.
She had considered wearing her own nightgown instead. She had held it up—a perfectly respectable garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, the kind of thing a sensible woman wore without self-consciousness—and she had looked at it, and looked at the nightrail, and understood, with a clarity that was somewhat difficult to argue with, that the nightrail had not been placed in her trunk by accident.
He had put it there. Or instructed someone to put it there. Which amounted to the same thing.
Sixty. Sixty-one.
The fire shifted and popped behind her, and she watched her own reflection respond to it—the light moving across her face, her bare shoulders, the slope of her collarbone. The mirror at her dressing table was extremely large and placed at an angle that left her nowhere to hide from herself. The nightrail had ribbon ties at the throat, loosely knotted, and beneath the lawn, she could see everything. The full, heavy curve of her breasts. The soft roundedness of her stomach. The wide flare of her hips where the lawn pooled on the cushioned seat of the stool.
She set the brush down.
Picked it up again. Seventy.
This was, she told herself, a perfectly ordinary situation. Women had wedding nights constantly. Women had been having wedding nights for the entirety of recorded human history and most of them had survived the experience without any particular?—