Page 82 of The Belle of Belgrave Square

She was being extraordinarily good-spirited about the whole thing.

“Jasper,” she said as the innkeeper fetched them a key.

He bent his head to hers. “What is it?”

Her voice dropped to a bashful murmur. “I’m not certain I’m able to climb four flights of stairs.”

“There’s no question of you doing so.”

She bit her lip. “But surely you can’t—”

“Here you are, sir,” the innkeeper said. “The boy’s lit the fire and brought in your bags. All’s in readiness for you.”

Jasper accepted the key, and then, once again, picked his new bride up in his arms. She made a muffled sound of protest, burying her face into the curve of his neck as he carried her up the stairs.

“Hush,” he whispered to her. “It’s no hardship on my part, I assure you. Quite the contrary.”

“I’m mortified,” Julia whispered back. “What must everyone think?”

“They’ll think I’m an eager husband with a very fetching new bride.”

She groaned in embarrassment.

He wasn’t merely being gallant. It was no effort to convey her up the stairs to their attic room. Reaching the fourth floor, he found a single door at the end of a short passageway. He had to duck to carry her through it, knocking off his hat in the process. Only when they were safe inside, the door shut and locked behind them, did he set her down.

The room, though tidy, was ludicrously small, even by the standards of a modest coaching inn. Shadows cast by the flames from the newly prepared fire shifted over the slatted floor, the worn armchair by the hearth, and the washstand in the corner topped by a chipped porcelain bowl and pitcher.

A bed in an old iron frame stood at the center of the room. Made up with clean sheets and a patchwork quilt, it was barely big enough for one large-sized man, let alone that man and his wife. Unless, that is, the couple slept together with a particular degree of familiarity.

A frown notched Jasper’s brow.

Bloody hell. This was his wedding night. A night he was meant to spend in that bed deflowering his new bride.

It wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. He’d promised her that. Nevertheless . . .

The bed was there, an almost taunting reminder.

Julia hadn’t noticed it yet. After being set down, she stood against him for a moment to get her bearings, head bent and gloved hands flat on his chest. Her bosom rose and fell rapidly, as if she had been the one to climb the stairs and not him.

Blood loss made one short of breath. Jasper recalled that much from his own experience. The saber cut to his face had bled like the dickens. In the aftermath of the skirmish, packed onto a ship with hundreds of other injured and dying soldiers, he’d made the brief voyage from Sebastopol to Constantinople, breathless and weak, falling in and out of consciousness, only to awaken boiling with fever in a bed at Scutari Hospital.

He didn’t know how much blood the doctor had taken from Julia, but he could well imagine how she must be feeling.

“Easy,” he murmured as he untied her bonnet. Removing it from her head, he tossed it onto the bed alongside his hat. Her cloak followed, then her gloves. She submitted to his ministrations without a word. “Would you like to sit down or lie down?”

“Sit down,” she said. “And then lie down.”

A smile tugged at his mouth. “Both, then.”

The chair was only a few steps away, but Julia made no move to go to it. She seemed reluctant to leave him.

He smoothed a hand over her rumpled hair, brushing it back from her face. It was one of the dozens of minor liberties he’d already taken with her—as tender as it was proprietary.

It should have been enough.

But this was the first time they’d ever been alone. Truly alone. There were no servants about. No riders on Rotten Row or party guests smoking on a balcony or encroaching at the edges of a darkened garden. For the first time, he had her all to himself, inside a bedchamber, behind a securely locked door.

And she was his wife.