Page 55 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

She cried harder, and he didn’t know what else to do, so he kissed her. She pressed herself against him fully, throwing a leg over his hip, and placing herself over his cock again. Joseph groaned.

“I want more,” she whispered, nipping at his lip. Her tears made her face sticky, and his. “I want all of you.”

He leaned his forehead to hers. “I want the same. But I fear leaving you with a babe.”

That was what men like Reuben did. They planted a babe in a woman, then left her with a belly, and then because she could not find a position after that, she must find a rotten husband, or go into the streets to earn her keep.

He did not know what awaited him at Penwellen and could promise her nothing yet. He did not know if he would be able to support himself, much less a woman and child.

To say nothing of a wife.

“There are ways.” She spoke hesitantly, glancing at the table behind them.

“There are…other concerns. Of mine,” he said, when her face darkened instantly, and he feared he had tread on that sensitive nerve that he always seemed to tread on with her.

She drew back, her dark brows rushing together. Her gaze probed every inch of his face, looking too closely. He was too vulnerable with her, so bare.

“What concerns?”

“Hunger, at the moment,” he lied, freeing himself from her arms and sliding out of the bed. “I want that pudding.”

She let him go and watched from the bed, hair tousled, eyes dark and deep, her manner languid as a cat’s. He cut a piece of pudding and put it on a plate. The scent of nutmeg filled his head, hot, smoky, every delicious thing. He would associate it forevermore with Inez, and likely get a cockstand every time he smelled it, remembering her like this, long legs tucked to her side, the tops of her breasts showing above her shift, a slope of brown skin gleaming above her stockings. Cotton stockings. She deserved silk.

He hopped back to bed, conscious of his own wool stockings, balancing the plate as he joined her once more.

“I’ve never done this either.” His throat rasped around the confession. He was revealing too much. “The post-coital loll.”

“You depart instantly?” She pulled the bedcovers over both of their feet, and the small gesture, so tender, went straight to his gut.

“I’ve never had the coitus part. So, no lolling after.” Usually slinking away in shame, those few times until he grew wise to his own weakness.

“You’ve never⁠—?”

He cut off the question by scooping up pudding and holding the spoon toward her. She leaned forward, allowing him a brilliant view of her breasts, and closed her mouth over the spoon. He watched her lips pull closed and his groin tightened.

“I think I’m impotent. Sorry to say.”

She struggled not to—he watched the conflict on her face—then her eyes fell to the obvious bulge in his breeches. He was still hard as a bolt for her. He could hold the copper plating to the hull of a ship with this rod.

She swallowed. “I’ve heard that happens to some men. So you…” She lifted her gaze to his face. “Think you cannot? At all?”

There was no scorn in her face, no judgment. Not like he’d seen in others. She was the daughter of a town woman; she likely had heard reports. There were others like him. He’d done the reading, found what medical information he could. None of it told him why he was so difficult to arouse. It was likely why he pursued with such determination, when he finally found a woman who could stir him.

But every time, when it came to the act, and he realized the attachment was not what he had thought, he failed. Wilted like a wildflower plucked from its root.

“I told Susannah Pettigrew this,” he admitted. “The night before we were to be married. Thought it fair to warn her. And the next day, there I stood at the church with the vicar, looking an utter fool, while she ran away with Viktor Vierling.” Who likely swived her in the carriage front, back, and sideways before they reached the next posting stop.

She’d jilted Viktor, too, so he’d done something wrong also, but Joseph didn’t doubt the Hessian could rise to the occasion and didn’t need to like the girl to use his spear. Joseph was malformed, not like other men, and there was no remedy.

“Susannah Pettigrew was not for you.”

Between them, they devoured the pudding, and Inez set the plate on the floor beside the bed. Then she crawled toward Joseph, and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to stare at her eyes, her lips, her breasts, or the dark shadow of hair beneath the thin linen of her shift as she placed her knees of either side of his.

“Susannah Pettigrew was a mewling, milk-livered girl with no spine in her.”

“You never met Susannah,” he murmured, ridiculously pleased by the streak of jealousy in her tone.

“I saw her when you left for Gloucestershire with her, and I knew on sight there was no steel in her backbone.”