“Was it.” He was watching her face now, in the mirror, his own expression still even. “How so?”
“That was—” She stopped. That was negotiation. That was survival. That was the part of today I had rehearsed. “That was a different kind of situation.”
“And this one,” he said quietly, “you have not rehearsed.”
It was not a question. She said nothing.
He continued brushing. The fire settled. The room was very warm and very quiet and she was, she was acutely conscious, wearing approximately nothing, and he was standing near enough that she could feel the warmth of him behind her, and every careful, unhurried stroke of the brush was doing something very unhelpful to her capacity for rational thought.
Her nipples tightened again, as they had when he’d kissed her senseless in the carriage. Before today, that had only ever happened when she’d been cold. This was a decidedly different feeling.
“Imogen.” He said it gently, not with the cool precision he had employed in the carriage. Differently. As though the evening were its own country with its own rules. “Tell me, did your mother have a specific talk with you to explain the activities shared between husband and wife?”
She blew out a breath. “Not officially. I did overhear her having such a conversation with two of my older sisters. However, I can’t say that it was very informative. It was mostly about flowers and petals and lying very still.”
He rolled his eyes.
“It matters,” she waved her hand dismissively. “If you do not mind a slight delay, I can send for George to come and explain things to me.”
“You will do no such thing.” His features had taken on a sharper edge. “I’ll be damned if I have some random male cometo my home and detail lovemaking to my bride. I can explain it to you myself.”
She folded her lips in on themselves and then laughed.
“I fail to see the humor in the situation.”
“George is my sister. Georgiana. She has recently wed the Duke of Dunmere, and I’m assuming, since they are quite besotted with one another, that she would be able to explain things quite well to me. And she’s far too pragmatic to use floral imagery.”
He shook his head. “I will tell you what we are going to do.”
She looked at him in the mirror.
“We are going to take this as slowly as you require,” he said. “Every step of it. If you want me to explain what comes next before it happens, I shall explain it. If you want me to stop, I will stop. If you want to talk—” The corner of his mouth moved, slightly. “—I suspect you are capable of talking through most situations, and this need not be an exception.”
Something unknotted in her chest. Quietly, without fanfare.
“You would—” She stopped. Started again. “You would talk me through it.”
“If you want.” He held her gaze in the mirror steadily. “I have been told I can be quite instructive.”
She almost laughed. The almost was enough—she felt her shoulders drop, fractionally, from where they had been residing somewhere near her ears.
“Granted, that had been in reference to shooting. I am an excellent shot.”
And then she looked at herself again. In the mirror. In the nightrail. All of that.
And the almost-laugh faded.
“I should tell you something,” she said.
“You may tell me whatever you like.”
She kept her eyes on his reflection, because looking at his actual face felt—too direct, suddenly, for what she was about to say. The mirror was better. The mirror was the glass of water between them.
“I am aware,” she said, with great care, “that I am not what you would have chosen. This—” She made the smallest possible gesture toward the mirror, toward what it showed, the full, unambiguous abundance of her barely-covered self. “—is not your version of female beauty. I know that. I only want you to know that I know it, so that you do not feel obliged to—” She stopped. “You need not pretend. I would prefer that to—” A breath. “I would prefer honesty.”
The brush stopped.
He was still looking at her in the mirror. He was very still, in the way he went still when he was thinking—not tense, but gathered.