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She ate her dinner, washed, and dressed for bed. She didn’t bother to don the red and black nightgown. She doubted His Lordship would arrive in a suitable condition to appreciate it. Instead she put on a less interesting cream-colored one and a pastel brocade dressing gown over it, and settled down in a comfortable chair by the fire with Byron’s Don Juan.
It was long past midnight when she heard a trio of clumsy footsteps in the hall outside and a trio of drunken voices slurring over a bawdy song. She rose and opened the door.
Dain, who’d been leaning upon his two comrades, pushed himself off and lurched toward her. “Behold, the bridegroom cometh,” he announced thickly. He flung his arm over Jessica’s shoulder. “Go away,” he told his friends.
They staggered away. He kicked the door shut. “Told you not to wait,” he said.
“I thought you might want help,” she said. “I sent Andrews to bed. He was asleep on his feet. And I was awake, reading, anyhow.”
His coat and previously pristine shirt were rumpled, and he’d lost his neckcloth. His blood-spattered trousers were damp, his boots caked with dried mud.
He released her, and swaying, stared at his boots for a long moment. Then he swore under his breath.
“Why don’t you sit down on the bed?” she suggested. “I can help you get your boots off.”
He moved unsteadily toward the bed. Clutching the bedpost, he carefully lowered himself onto the mattress. “Jess.”
She approached, and knelt at his feet. “Yes, my lord.”
“Yes, my lord,” he echoed with a laugh. “Jess, m’lady, I believe I’m castaway. Lucky you.”
She began tugging at his left boot. “We’ll see about my luck. We’ve only the one bed, and if drink makes you snore the way it does Uncle Arthur, I’m in for a ghastly night—or what’s left of the night.”
“Snoring,” he said. “Worried about snoring. Henwit.”
She got the boot off and started on the other.
“Jess,” he said.
“At least you recognize me.”
The right boot proved more stubborn. Yet she dared not yank too hard, lest he topple forward and crash down on her. “You’d better lie down,” she said.
He grinned stupidly at her.
“Down,” she said firmly.
“Down,” he repeated, giving the room the same vacant grin. “Where’s that?”
She rose and set her hands on his chest and gave him a hard shove.
He fell back, setting the mattress bouncing. He chuckled.
Jessica bent and renewed her struggle with the boot.
“Dainty,” he said, gazing up at the ceiling. “Dainty Lady Dain. She tastes like rain. She is a great pain. In the arse. Ma com’ è bella. Molto bella. Very beautiful…pain…in the arse.”
She yanked the boot off. “That doesn’t rhyme.” She rose. “Byron you are not.”
A soft snore answered.
“Behold the bridegroom,” she muttered. “Thank heaven it’s a large bed. My conjugal devotion does not extend to sleeping on the floor.”
She moved away to the washstand. After washing the mud from her hands, she took off her dressing gown and hung it on a chair.
Then she walked round to the other side of the bed, and pulled back the bedclothes as far as she could. It wasn’t quite far enough. The upper half of his body sprawled diagonally across the mattress.
She pushed at his shoulder. “Move over, you lummox.”
Mumbling, he rolled first onto one side, then onto the other.
Jessica shoved harder. “Move, drat you.”
He grumbled something and rolled a bit more. She kept pushing, and eventually—and unconscious all the while—he got his head upon the pillow and his feet off the floor. Then he curled up in a fetal position, facing her side of the bed.
She climbed in beside him and angrily yanked the blankets up. “Pain in the hindquarters, am I?” she said under her breath. “I’d have done better to push you onto the floor.”
She turned to look at him. Tangled black curls fell over his brow, which, in sleep, was as smooth as an innocent babe’s. His right hand clutched a corner of the pillow. He was snoring, but very softly, a low, steady murmur.
Jessica closed her eyes.
Even though his body wasn’t touching hers, she was acutely aware of him, of his weight upon the mattress…and the mingled masculine scents of smoke and spirits and himself…and the warmth his immense body generated.
She was also aware of a most irrational frustration…and hurt, if she were to be completely honest.
She had expected Dain to toss back a few glasses with his friends. She’d expected him to arrive the worse for drink. She would not have minded. He would not be the first or the last bridegroom to come tipsy to the bridal bed, and it had occurred to her that hazy perception might make him more tolerant of her inexperience.
Actually, if truth be told, she would have preferred to have him as close to unconscious as possible. Deflowering a virgin was not the most aesthetic of experiences, and Genevieve had told her that it was often the biggest, most thick-skinned brutes who became hysterical over a few drops of maidenly blood. She had also explained how to deal with the hysteria—and everything else.
Aware that her entire future with Dain could hinge upon this night’s experience, Jessica had prepared for it as any wise general would prepare for a crucial battle.
She was well informed, and fully determined to do her very best. She was prepared to be cheerful, willing, responsive, and attentive.
She was not prepared for this.
He was no schoolboy. He knew his drinking limits. He knew how much it took to incapacitate him.
Yet he hadn’t stopped. On his wedding night.
Reason told her there must be a typically crack-brained masculine reason for his behavior, and sooner or later she’d figure it out, and it would turn out to have nothing to do with trying to hurt her feelings or make her feel undesirable or any of the other gloomy sensations she was experiencing at the moment.
But it had been a long day, and she realized now that she’d spent most of that time tense with mingled anticipation and anxiety about what, it turned out, wasn’t going to happen.
She was exhausted and she couldn’t sleep, and she must ride another million miles tomorrow at the same hectic pace, in the same agitated emotional state. She wanted to cry. She wanted, even more, to scream and beat him and pull his hair and make him as hurt and angry as she was.
She opened her eyes and sat up and looked about for something she could hit him with without doing permanent damage. She could dump the contents of the water pitcher on him, she thought, as her gaze fell upon the washstand.
Then she realized she shouldn’t have been able to see the washstand. She’d left the lamp burning on the bedstand beside her. She moved to the edge of the bed and put it out.
She sat there, staring into the darkness. From outside the window came the predawn chirping of birds.
He grumbled and stirred restlessly.
“Jess.” His voice was thick with sleep.
“At least you know I’m here,” she muttered. “I suppose that’s something.” With a sigh, she lay down again. She was tugging the blankets up when she felt the mattress shift and sink. There was more incoherent grumbling. Then he flung his arm over her midriff and his leg over hers.
He was on top of the bedclothes. She was under them.
His big limbs were heavy, but very warm.
She felt marginally better.
In a few moments, she fell asleep.
Dain’s first conscious sensations were of a small, soft bottom nestled against his groin and a deliciously rounded breast under his hand. In the instant it took him to mentally connect the agreeable parts with the female they belonged to, a host of other recollections flooded in, and his mood of sleepy amorousness swept away on a tide of self-loathing.
