The truth was, she had not expected to be frightened of her husband seeing her.
As it turned out, though, it seemed her husband seeing her would be worse than the rest of it. But there it was, in the mirror, perfectly legible: all of her, barely obscured by cloth that might as well have been water, illuminated by firelight that had no regard whatsoever for her preferences on the matter.
Despite her mother’s protests and constant narrative about how she could manage to keep her shape after bearing all of her children. Yet her daughters were all portly.
Imogen had never disliked her body, precisely. She was not the sort of woman who wept at her reflection or catalogued her flaws with the obsessive precision she’d seen in some of her sisters. She knew what she was. She was large. Abundantly, comprehensively, architecturally large—a fact she had spentthree-and-twenty years making her peace with, with variable success, on a day-by-day basis.
But she had never had to show it to anyone.
And she had never, before today, had particular cause to think about how it would look to him.
A man who was frankly beautiful in his own right. Distractingly handsome with those piercing blue eyes of his and his tall, undeniably athletic frame.
A man who had chosen Eliza.
Imogen set the brush down properly this time, and looked at herself in the mirror, and tried to be fair about it. Eliza was lovely—genuinely, undeniably lovely, fine-boned and fair, with the kind of slender elegance that gowns were designed for. Eliza walked into rooms and drew eyes effortlessly, gracefully, without apparent awareness of the effect.
Tristan had looked at Eliza Reeding with all her lithe beauty and grace and decided she would make a suitable Duchess.
And then he had lifted a veil and found Imogen instead.
She picked up the brush again.
Eighty. Eighty-one.
The sound of the adjoining door reached her before she had composed herself adequately for it—a soft knock, more courtesy than question, and then the handle, and then light from the other room spilling briefly across the carpet.
She looked up.
He was reflected in the mirror behind her, and the image of him arrived before she had fully turned—the dark jacket gone, the cravat gone, his shirt open at the throat with three or four buttons undone and the collar loose, the sleeves rolled back to the elbow in a manner that was so far from the composed, immaculate figure he had presented at every other point in this extraordinary day that she found, for a moment, she simply stared.
His forearms were—she had not thought about his forearms. She had not had occasion to think about his forearms. They were rather distractingly muscular for a man who appeared to spend most of his time managing estates and intimidating people with his silence.
He met her eyes in the mirror. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then he crossed the room—unhurried, that same even, deliberate movement he brought to everything—and came to stand behind her. He looked down at her reflection with an expression she could not read, and then, without ceremony, held out his hand.
She looked at it.
“The brush,” he said.
She gave it to him.
He began to brush her hair.
The first stroke disarmed her so completely that she had to press her hands flat against her thighs to keep from showing it on her face. It was exceedingly intimate to have a man tend to her hair. And his touch was unexpectedly gentle, careful at the ends where it might catch, slow enough that she could feel each separate pass of the bristles against her scalp. She watched his reflection. He was looking at her hair, not at her face, with that same focused attention he gave to everything, as though the task at hand deserved to be done properly.
She counted, because counting was still the only discipline left.
One. Two. Three.
“You are very quiet,” he said, after a while.
“I am often quiet,” she managed.
“Mm.” He drew the brush through a long sweep of hair. “Not in my experience, thus far. In my experience thus far, you tend to have rather a great deal to say.”
“That was different.”