Not when the truth was so comprehensively otherwise.
He set the brush on the table.
She was still looking at her reflection, and he was looking at hers, and the fire behind them both threw its warm, indifferent light over everything it could reach—her hair loose now across her shoulders, the nightrail doing precisely what it had been selected to do, which was to say nothing whatsoever useful in the way of concealment.
He had chosen it himself, in ten minutes, from a modiste Flynn had recommended, and he had felt briefly absurd doing it, which had not stopped him. The lawn had been the sheerest option available. He had not asked the modiste to confirm this. He had simply looked at it and known, and purchased it without discussion.
He was, he reflected, perhaps less in command of himself than he had previously assumed.
“Imogen,” he said.
She looked at him in the glass. The color was still high in her cheeks.
“Stand up.”
She hesitated—a single beat, the small internal gathering he was becoming fluent in—and then she rose from the stool, the nightrail falling in a whisper of lawn around her feet. She was not a tall woman. She came to his shoulders, which he had not registered precisely until this moment, standing behindher, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her without touching.
He reached up and drew her hair back from her shoulder. Slow, deliberate. She held very still.
“I told you,” he said, “that I intend to take my time.” He let the weight of her hair settle over her other shoulder, baring the side of her neck, the curve where it met her collarbone. “I meant it. But I want you to understand something first.”
“Yes?” Her voice was steady. He was consistently impressed by how steady she managed to keep her voice.
“I am going to tell you what I am thinking,” he said, “as I go. You said you preferred honesty.” He held her eyes in the mirror. “I intend to give it to you.”
The pulse at the side of her throat jumped.
“Alright,” she said.
He lowered his mouth to the curve of her neck—not a kiss, precisely, not yet, simply the warm press of his lips to the thin, soft skin below her ear—and felt the shiver travel through her immediately, involuntarily, from the point of contact all the way down.
“That,” he said against her skin, “is what I am thinking about. The fact that you do that.” He lifted his head. “Every time I touch you. You are so very responsive.”
She exhaled. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“I know.” He turned her, unhurried, to face him.
She tipped her head back to meet his eyes, and he held her gaze for a moment, simply looked at her the way he had been suppressing the urge to look at her since the church, fully, without the social discipline that made such looking inadvisable in public. Then, he reached for the ribbon at the throat of her nightrail and drew it loose with one slow pull.
He watched her breathe.
“Still with me?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Completely.”
He slid the nightrail from her shoulders and let it fall.
The sound it made was almost nothing—a breath of fabric against the floor—and then she was standing before him in the firelight, and he found he was not as prepared for it as he had believed himself to be.
He had known, in the abstract, what was beneath the lawn. He had known it in the carriage, in the breakfast room, at every point in this very long day when he had applied his considerable discipline to not knowing it too specifically. But the abstract and the particular were, it turned out, two entirely different countries.
She was?—
He did not have a word for it that felt insufficient.
Extravagant was the one that came, and he let it come. She was extravagant. The full, heavy curve of her breasts, the soft, generous slope of her waist giving way to the wide flare of her hips, the pale skin catching the firelight, giving her a nearly ethereal appearance. She was more of everything—more warmth, more weight, morewoman—than any figure his imagination had managed in the anticipatory hours of this evening.
She was one of Ruben’s painted nymphs come to life. His wife, his own personal nymph.