He said something against her hair that she didn’t catch, and the world came apart again, and this time he came with her.
Afterward, when he had cleaned them both up, she had expected him to retreat to his bedchamber. Instead, he’d crawled between the sheets and pulled her naked body to his.
With her head nestled on his chest and his arm wrapped around her, they lay together, husband and wife.
She had not planned for him.
She had planned for a husband. An abstract husband, useful and distant, the solution to her father’s red envelope. She had not planned forTristan—for the cold-weather eyes that turned out to be capable of warmth. For his controlled composure that cracked in the bedroom with her. For the man who had brushed her hair, patient and gentle.
She had not planned to find him interesting.
But most of all, she had not planned on finding in his arms a comfort that felt almost like coming home.
Chapter Eleven
May, 1816
Winfield Hall
She had expected, based on her parents’ marriage, to be largely ignored.
This was not an unreasonable expectation. She had assembled it carefully from the facts at hand: he was a duke, with a duke’s attendant obligations and correspondence and the general administrative weight of several thousand acres requiring his daily attention. He had a study at Winfield that she had glimpsed on the first tour—a large, serious room with dark wood and a massive desk. She had assumed, with what she felt was sensible pragmatism, that it would swallow him whole from approximately eight in the morning until dinner, and that her days would be largely her own.
She was not complaining about this. She had plans for her days. The library at Winfield was, as he had promised, excellent. Two full walls of it floor-to-ceiling shelving, with a rolling ladder on brass rails and a window seat wide enough to lie down on. Which she had confirmed empirically on the second morning by doing precisely that.
There was also a walled garden that the head gardener, a compact Scotsman named MacAllister, who regarded her initial questions with cautious professional suspicion before apparently deciding she was serious, had begun to walk her through in daily increments. There was correspondence of her own to manage. Her mother’s letters arrived with the regularity of small, anxious clockwork, and contained mostly gossip and complaints about all of her daughters leaving her to her own devices.
She’d heard from all of her sisters. And she had heard from Eliza more than once. She was currently trying to coordinate a visit from her and her Mr. Ashworth.
She had, in other words, sufficient occupation.
She had not expected her husband to appear at the library door on the third morning with his jacket off and his cuffs rolled back. A maid followed closely behind him with a tea cart. He had greeted her with a brief kiss and then settled into the armchairacross from her window seat. As if this was where he went every Thursday morning.
She had looked at him over the top of her volume.
He had looked up, briefly, with an expression of mild inquiry.
“I’m not disturbing you?” she said.
“You are reading,” he said. “I am reading. I fail to see the disturbance.”
She had returned to her book. He had returned to his. The fire had crackled. The clock had ticked.
After a while, she had looked up again and found him still there, entirely absorbed in whatever he was reading, and something had shifted quietly in the arrangement of her interior.
She had not expected to find it pleasant.
She was finding it very pleasant. She rather enjoyed being in the presence of her husband.
By the second week she had stopped being surprised to see him at breakfast, though she had not stopped noticing him. She supposed she’d notice him even if she were blindfolded.
He rode in the mornings. She had watched him from the library window on several occasions. Not with any particular intention but because the library window faced the east paddock and he was, on a horse, striking an imposing and most attractive figure.
Once he had caught her watching and raised an eyebrow.
She had raised one back and returned to her book.
That evening at dinner he had said, with perfect neutrality, “Do you ride?”