Could onerutwith a wife? The word felt wrong. Vulgar.
What did one call marital consummation, apart from consummation, which surely only applied the first time? Amorous congress, perhaps?
Amorous. His mouth further tightened. Heshouldlove his wife.
His sweet wife.
His gentle, biddable, careful wife, with her dark, thick chestnut hair, her long, soft fingers, and her wide, perceptive, intelligent blue eyes. His wife, whom he had known for mere weeks. His wife, whom hedid notlove but had still bound to him until death they would part.
He did want her, however.
His breath had caught when she’d appeared on the threshold of the church’s open doors. His throat had further constricted as she’d advanced toward him, her gown’s silver cloth shimmering and swishing over a champagne-pale chemise. Her contained bearing, her pale skin, and her faint-but-gracious smile created the impression of otherworldliness, inviolability.
Except now, he—in the name of ducal dynasty—was tasked with breaking the spell.
After tonight, she would be inviolable no more.
Well—he took another deep breath—he would begin as he meant to go on. Dutifully. Honorably. She was his, under the law and in God’s eyes. And, for better or worse, he would, as promised, worship her with his body.
He nodded to himself, banished the ghosts, and knocked on the door to his wife’s boudoir.
“Enter,” she called out in a voice almost too quiet to hear. After abeat she added, “please.”
Just like her to say “please.” She was always so very polite.
He entered. The sconces on either side of the bed were aglow, further softening the already delicately elegant interior. He was alien inside her bedchamber. Hard, large, and male. He knew how to demand, how to choose an aim and bluster his way to the end. But to petition? To entreat? To lure? What did he know of such things?
Tonight, the skills on which he had been taught to rely were useless.
“Well…” his voice trailed.Well, what?He couldn’t simply ask, Fancy a tumble?He chose a simple greeting. “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” she replied with a blush.
The physical sign of her responsiveness sent another, overwhelming surge of desire washing over him—want, keen and focused. The wave withdrew, leaving him with increasingly leaden limbs and a tight, uncomfortable feeling in his groin.
His gaze dropped from her averted eyes to her lips. He contemplated kissing her as he wanted to kiss her—open-mouthed and passionate.
The location of his stomach shifted, leaving him queasy.
In the nascent years of his manhood when he was no longer a boy but not yet of age, he’d spent hours clandestinely kissing Vivianne—who, by then, was employed as his sister’s companion. Experience made him bolder, and soon he’d taken to whispering outrageous suggestions into her ears. Suggestions which left her giggling and sighing and promising him all once they were wed. But she’d married another.
Twice.
The first, after taking a bribe from his father. The second—more painfully—of her own volition.
He couldn’t kiss Cassandra in the same manner he’d kissed Viv. It wouldn’t be right. Even when church consecrated, lust without lovefelt like sin.
Like disrespect.
In silence, his wife pulled back the coverlet. She shifted her position, creating more space on his side of her bed. Even in the dim flicker of candlelight her white night rail merely muted her long, shapely legs, the dark patch of her womanhood, and the hints of color around her nipples.
She was lovely. Not overtly alluring like Viv, but still—
He shuttered the disloyal thought.
To be thinking now of Vivianne was not just unkind, but a betrayal, both to his wife and to his future children.
Cassandra lifted her hand. Her first finger stretched toward him while the others draped as if curling over an invisible balustrade. He knew so little about her, but he liked her hands. Her features she kept schooled, her posture erect, but her hands were nearly always in motion. Those hands hinted at deeper secrets. Secrets she might never trust him enough to reveal.
