Then he set the brush on the table.
He did not look away from her reflection. He held it, held her eyes, in the glass, with the same direct, unhurried attention he had bent upon her at every difficult moment of this very long and eventful day. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, and even, and entirely without the performance of reassurance.
“Let me tell you something about Eliza Reeding,” he said.
She waited.
“I chose her,” he said, “for precisely the reason you imagine makes her preferable to you. Because she was…” He paused, selecting it. “Safe. Manageable. I looked at her and I felt nothing of any particular inconvenience, which was, at the time, exactly what I was looking for.” He held her gaze in the glass without flinching.
“I have a certain amount of control where women are concerned. I am not a reckless man. I do not make a habit of being—” Another pause. “—led by appetite. I intended to marryand be faithful and discharge the obligations of the marriage with appropriate civility, and I wanted a wife who would make all of that as simple as possible.”
Imogen said nothing. She was barely breathing.
“Eliza,” he said, “was never going to make me lose my head. I knew that from the first evening.” His eyes did not move from hers. “She was never going to make it difficult to think clearly in her presence. Never going to be the thing I was thinking about when I should have been thinking about something else.” He paused. “I chose her, Imogen, because she posed no real temptation. Because I knew, very certainly, that she was not the kind of woman who would test my control.”
The fire shifted.
She looked at his reflection. He looked at hers.
“And I,” she said, very carefully, “am to understand that the distinction you are drawing is?—”
“That you are not that,” he said. Simply. Directly, without decoration. “That you have been, since approximately the moment I lifted that veil, a very considerable problem for my control. That your friend’s primary recommendation, as a wife, was the total and absolute absence of everything currently sitting in front of me at this dressing table.” His gaze moved—briefly, deliberately, and without any pretense of being anything other than what it was—to the mirror’s full accounting of her, the firelight and the lawn and all of it, and then back to her eyes. “Does that answer your concern?”
Her mouth had gone entirely dry.
“It—” She stopped. “Yes,” she said. “That answers it.”
“Good.” He reached past her shoulder and picked up the brush again. “Then we will proceed.”
She looked at her own reflection—the color high in her cheeks, the slight unsteadiness of her breath, the unfamiliar landscape of herself in firelight—and found, to her considerablesurprise, that it looked somewhat different than it had ten minutes ago.
Not smaller. Not less.
Just—seen. Differently.
He drew the brush through her hair one more time, slow and deliberate.
“Imogen,” he said.
“Yes.”
“When I said I would talk you through every step.” His eyes found hers in the glass. “I did not say it would be an efficient process.”
She felt the warmth of it move through her like the fire at her back.
“No?” she managed.
“No.” The brush set aside again, and his hands settling with quiet intent at her shoulders, his thumbs tracing one slow, unambiguous line along the ridge of her collarbone, and his mouth dropping to the curve of her neck just below her ear, and his voice arriving low against her skin. “I intend to take my time.”
Chapter Nine
He hadn’t intended to admit all of that. To show his hand, as it were. To stand behind a woman at a dressing table and lay out, in plain English, the precise nature of the problem she presented to his self-governance. It was not how he conducted himself. It was not, frankly, how he conducted anything.
And yet.
She had looked at herself in that mirror with such composed, matter-of-fact resignation—as though she had simply cataloged a fact about the world, filed it away, and prepared to endure the consequences of it—and something in him had refused, with a vehemence he had not anticipated, to let it stand.
He could not do with his wife believing herself a disappointment.