by Mary Balogh
She looked down at Beauty, who was trembling and yipping in the throes of a dream.
“Will there be children?” she asked. “I thought that perhaps your daughter—”
“She will need brothers and sisters,” he said. “I once thought, you know, that I would like a dozen children so that I could give them the sort of life children should have. But— Well, perhaps three or four?”
“I would like that.” Her eyes had come back to his. There was a flush of color in her cheeks.
And he dared to dream again. Tomorrow they would go to London and call upon his lawyer. Soon they would have Katy and take her home. And he would make Abby happy, and they would have more children and . . .
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a footman, still in his best uniform, with the tea tray, and neither of them spoke even after he left. Abby poured and he went to take his cup and saucer from her hands and the piece of their wedding cake she had put on a plate for him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Tell me about your childhood, Gil,” she said, sitting back in her chair, her own plate in her hand.
“I survived it.” But that answer, besides being another conversation killer, was not good enough. She was his wife now. Good God, his wife. “Thousands had it much worse. At least I always had a roof over my head and some food in my stomach and clothes to wear, even if they were often ill fitting and bore patches upon patches. I had a mother who cared for my basic needs and insisted I attend school and instilled basic good manners in me. She was not demonstrative by nature—at least, not during the years I knew her. She never showed me open love in the form of hugs and kisses and smiles and words of approval and encouragement. But love, I have learned in all the years since my boyhood, comes in many forms. She never abandoned me. And sometimes, I suspect, she went hungry so that I could eat. She was always pale and thin with red, chapped hands and forearms from all the work she did at her washtub.”
His heart ached for her in retrospect. She was probably eighteen or nineteen when she gave birth to him, though he never knew her age.
He had had no friends, and the children who occasionally played with him would do so only until their parents found out. Friends were something he had always yearned for. But children were resilient. On the whole he had not missed what he never had. The vicar had been strict with him at school but good to him too. He had taken Gil fishing with him once—ah, what a vast and memorable treat that had been—with the purpose, it seemed, of explaining to him why he needed to learn to read and write, though both skills appeared useless and boring to him at the time. Those abilities would be his escape route into a life that would raise him from abject poverty and perhaps bring him happiness and fulfillment. Gil had enjoyed the fishing, ignored the lecture, and taken two fish home for his mother to cook for their supper.
“It was the proudest moment of my life,” he told Abby. “But perhaps the advice he gave me, at which I silently scoffed at the time, bore fruit after all. It would not have been possible for me to be promoted in the army as I was if I had been unable to read and write. I have been happy in the army, especially when I was a sergeant.”
“You were not happy to be an officer?” she asked.
He thought about it. “I suppose I welcomed the new challenges,” he said. “And if I had not been an officer, there would not be Katy.” There would not have been the disaster of Caroline and his marriage to her either. “And if I had not been an officer, I would not have come here with Harry. I would not have met you.”
She set her empty plate aside. “Is that not a strange fact of life?” she said. “If that had not happened, then this would not have happened, and then that would not. And so on. I am glad we met. I am glad you learned to read and write.”
“Against all the odds,” he said. “I was a morose, rebellious pupil. I skipped school a few times, but my mother had a stout wooden stick she used for dunking the wash in the tub. She also used it on my backside when I skipped school. And washing clothes had given my mother strong hands and arms.”
“She wanted a better future for you,” Abby said.
“I suppose so,” he said. “I often wish my adult self could go back and sit down for a good talk with her. She had a hard life. I do not even know if I was born of a consensual encounter between her and the man who begot me or something worse. I am sorry. I ought not to have said that aloud.”
“My father went through a grand ton wedding with my mother,” she told him, “knowing full well that he was already married to someone else—Anna’s mother, who was dying of consumption but was still alive then. My father was desperately poor, and my mother’s dowry was large. We are not responsible for the ugliness surrounding our own births, Gil.”
“I like to think,” he said, “that my mother was proud of me before she died. I was a sergeant. I wrote to her a few times, though she would have had to have the vicar read the letters to her. I like to think she would have been proud of the man I have become. She always fed stray cats and dogs, you know. It used to make me furious. We had no spare food to give away.”
“I think,” she said, “you loved her.”
He found himself blinking against a stinging sensation behind his eyes. Good God, he was not about to weep, was he? What the devil would she think of him?
“I suppose,” he said, “I ruined her life the moment she conceived me. But she never, ever said so or even implied that it was so.”
“I am sure she was proud,” Abby said softly, though there was no way she could know any such thing.
“Come to bed?” he said.
She gazed at him for several long moments.
“Yes,” she said, getting up to stack their dishes on the tray before pulling on the bell rope to summon the footman to remove it.
Beauty scrambled up, shook herself all over, and yawned hugely.
Gil got to his feet too and, after the tray had been removed, offered his arm for his wife’s hand.
Beauty trotted after them as they climbed the stairs.
Gil stopped outside Abby’s room, took her hand from inside his arm, and held it in both his own. “You would like me to come here?” he asked. “Rather than you come to me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ll return in a short while, then,” he told her. “I had better take Beauty outside for a few minutes first.”
He leaned past her and opened the door. He shut it after she had passed through.
“Well,” he said, looking down at his dog, “you are going to have to sleep alone tonight, Beaut. But a walk first? A very short walk?”
Beauty wagged her tail.
* * *
• • •
She ought to be feeling nervous, Abigail supposed. But she was twenty-four years old and of course she knew a thing or two, though no one had ever spelled out the lesson for her. Knowing what happened was somewhat different, of course, from knowing how it would feel. But she was far more eager than apprehensive.
Being a twenty-four-year-old virgin was not altogether a comfortable thing. For there were longings and needs that one felt from really quite an early age, and they did not lessen with time. Quite the contrary, in fact. But as a lady—even an illegitimate lady—one could not express those longings in any way except through marriage. Hence the husband search as soon as a girl left the schoolroom—or the unexpressed reason, anyway.
Even as recently as a month ago she had been seriously fearful that she might never marry. Not because no one would ever offer, but because she would never feel . . . right about any man who did. She would not marry in order to gain a foothold back in the world of the ton that had once been hers. Neither would she marry a man of slightly lesser rank who was prepared to overlook the blot on her birth. Yet she had always believed she could not possibly marry quite outside the world in which she had been raised. It was not
snobbery but practicality. It was a matter of compatibility.
But was that what she had done today? The answer was undoubtedly yes. The worlds in which she and Gil had grown up were more like different universes.
Why, then, did marrying him feel right?
Her small trunk and portmanteaux were packed and stacked neatly in her dressing room with her new, brightly embroidered needlework bag, she saw. Mrs. Sullivan had told her she would send up a maid to do it. The same maid had set out the prettiest and fanciest of her nightgowns and brought up a pitcher of hot water, which was now lukewarm.
They would be leaving in the morning, quite early, and she did not know if they would be coming back anytime soon, and even when they did it would be only to visit. Hence the fact that she was to take all the belongings she had brought from London. It had not lasted long, her homecoming. But during it she had found the one man who felt right to her as a lifelong mate. She could be wrong, of course, but one could not live one’s whole life avoiding everything that might prove to be a mistake. One might thus pave the way to an old age that would be full of regrets for things one might have done but did not. That would be even worse.
She undressed and washed and drew on the nightgown. She brushed out her hair, considered braiding it so that it would not get hopelessly tangled during the night, and decided against it. She went into her bedchamber and pulled the curtains back from the window. She could see only the reflection of the candles burning on the mantel behind her, but it was a cozy sight. She half opened one of the windows and listened to the sound of silence. Strangely, it did have a sound, different from the indoors. It was the sound of vastness and peace. It was like an assurance that all was well and always would be.
An owl hooted in the distance.
He must have come back inside with his dog. She could not hear them. But even as she thought it, there was a light tap on her door and it opened.
“Ah,” he said after stepping inside and closing the door behind him. “Beautiful.”
“Thank you.” She smiled at him.
She would not say he looked handsome, exactly. He was wearing a silk dressing gown of a dark gold color and tan slippers. But both garments, rather than diminishing his size and the power of his physique, somehow enhanced them instead. For the silk was a fine fabric and clung to him above the belt. She had seen him naked to the waist. She had seen him wearing only hip-hugging breeches and boots that molded his calves. Now he seemed somehow less clothed, and she felt a stabbing of what she recognized as raw desire in her womb.
His dark hair had been freshly brushed. Even so, that one errant lock had fallen over his forehead. His dark eyes looked very directly at her. He must have shaved before coming here. But he could not shave away the brutal scar. He looked stern and dour, with not even a gleam of an answering smile. But she realized something about him suddenly.
His stern expression was a mask, a defense. It was something all his life experiences from childhood on had imposed on him. The world might reject and isolate and ridicule and even hate him, but it would never see him vulnerable. That he had suffered had come through in some of the things he had told her during the past few weeks and in what he had said earlier about his childhood. But it would never show on his face.
Well, we will see about that, Lieutenant Colonel Gil Bennington, she thought.
She was not the love of his heart. Probably no one ever had been, even his first wife. And perhaps no one ever would be. He was a man of unusual reserve. But he was also an honorable man. And there was kindness in him, even gentleness, despite the outer appearance of granitelike toughness he liked to project. Oh, and love too. And love did indeed come in many forms, as he had said earlier when speaking of his mother.
He came across the room to her, set his hands on either side of her waist, and looked at her, rather the way he had done on that very first day but from closer—from her head to her bare toes and back up. His eyes on hers, he drew her against him, one arm sliding about her waist, the other hand coming to cup the back of her head beneath her hair, his fingers pushing through it. And he kissed her.
She might have swooned if he had not been holding her firmly. For it was not an embrace just of lips and mouths this time. She was touching him all along the front of her body, and he was all warmth and hard muscle and a hand that moved lower down her back to nestle her against him where he was hardest. And he smelled of something—eau de cologne? shaving soap?—unmistakably male. She could do nothing but yield to the pressure of his hands and press herself to him and open her mouth to him and wonder if anything they did on the bed could possibly be more shocking or more wonderful.
“No maidenly nerves?” he asked, his lips still almost touching hers, his eyes gazing into her own. And though he did not smile, nevertheless she thought there was a thread of humor in his voice.
“No,” she said. “But you must forgive me for not knowing what to do.”
“You were doing well enough a moment ago,” he said.
“Was I?” She had not known it.
“Come to bed,” he said.
“Yes.”
She lay down and he came to the side of the bed and leaned over her. “Do you want darkness or candlelight?” he asked.
Oh. Would it not be a bit embarrassing . . . But she could not bear not to see him. “Candlelight,” she said.
He drew back the covers she had pulled up to her waist and she realized his intent when he took hold of the hem of her nightgown. A moment later the garment was on the floor at his feet and she wished she had opted for darkness. But only briefly. His eyes moved over her, and it seemed to Abigail that he liked what he saw. And as he looked, he undid the knot in his belt and shrugged out of his dressing gown. He was not wearing a nightshirt beneath it.
Oh my!
He came around the bed and lay down beside her. He did not draw the covers over them. And she began to find out what it felt like, this nameless experience for which she had yearned in secret through all the years since she had grown past childhood and into womanhood.
His hands, slightly rough, even calloused, and dark against the paleness of her body, moved over her in what might have seemed a leisurely exploration except they left in their wake a longing that became as physical as it was emotional and a raw need for something more. He leaned over her and kissed her as his hand moved between her thighs and his fingers explored secret places that surely ought to remain secret—except that the rawness of her need became almost a pain. And then, quite shockingly, the feeling moved beyond pain into something unutterably pleasurable as his thumb pressed upon part of her and she said something incoherent and he murmured something equally unintelligible into her mouth.
Yet there was still the leftover ache of longing, and he came over her and pressed his knees between hers and brought her legs up to twine about his own. His hands came beneath her, and she felt him there where she throbbed with need again, and he came into her. She expected shock. She expected pain. And there were both. But there was wonder too and the desire to feel it all, even the pain, and to enjoy every single moment of it.
When he was deeper in her than she had ever known was possible, he held still and she sighed. He lifted some of his weight off her onto his forearms and looked into her eyes, mere inches from his own.
“I am sorry,” he murmured. “I am heavy.”
“But every pound feels good,” she said.
He began to move then, out to the brink of her and in deep. And again and again while she closed her eyes. Hot, wet, hard. With steady, firm rhythm. She matched it after a while by flexing and relaxing inner muscles and then rotating her hips the better to feel him. And she opened her eyes again and looked at him in the flickering candlelight, at his muscled shoulders and chest slick with sweat, at his closed eyes, a frown of concentration between his brows, at the terrible scar left behind by a cavalry blade.
&
nbsp; He dipped his head, and his weight came down on her again as his hands slid beneath her to hold her still and steady while the rhythm of his loving increased. And then he held deep and she felt the hot flow of his release inside her.
There was no great moment of release for her, but she did not believe she had ever been happier in her life. Which was how anyone would wish to feel on her wedding night at the moment of consummation.
He sighed, his breath warm against her ear, and lifted his weight away from her and off her. He moved to her side and lay there, his shoulder heavy against her own.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked. The back of his hand was over his eyes, she could see.
She knew she would be sore tomorrow. She already was. But how was she to explain that some pains were also pleasure, that even her soreness was something to savor?
“Silence is my answer,” he said softly. “I am sorry, Abby.”
“I am not,” she said. “And I was silent because I could not find the words with which to say that pleasure and pain can sometimes be the same thing. A strange paradox. There was pain, Gil. There was also pleasure. More pleasure than pain.”
“Do you want me to return to my room?” he asked.
The candles were still burning. His shoulder was warm against her own. Actually it was slightly above the level of hers. She could tip her head sideways and rest it against his shoulder.
“If you wish,” she said. She had not thought about it as a possibility. It would be horribly bleak if—
“What do you wish?” he asked.
She laughed suddenly and he removed the hand from his eyes and turned his head to look at her. “We could go on this way all night,” she said. “What do you wish? No, what do you?”