Page 17 of Their Wildest Dreams

The words were meant for the servants, no more than a commonplace arrangement between husband and wife. His eyes met Harriet's briefly before he closed the dressing-room door behind him. The assurance in that look reminded her of his promise. Nothing would be required of her tonight.

Mrs. Mercer asked no questions. She brushed Harriet's hair and helped her into the white nightrail and the accompanying pale blue velvet wrapper. Harriet attempted to speak of Everton House, but the words faltered whenever she heard movement beyond the closed door. A boot struck the floor. A drawer opened and closed. Each sound announced Benedict's nearness.

At last Mrs. Mercer gathered the discarded clothing and departed with the chambermaid. Harriet stood alone before the fire, holding the wrapper closed at her throat despite the warmth of the room. She had been alone with Benedict countless times—morse so in their youth than since they’d both come of age. But she had never before been alone with him while wearing so little, with a bed turned down behind her and the entire household expecting the customary conclusion to a wedding day.

The dressing-room door opened.

Benedict had discarded his coat and waistcoat. His cravat was gone, and the open collar of his white shirt revealed the strong line of his throat. He wore only that shirt and his breeches, an entirely respectable degree of undress for a husband in his own chamber and one Harriet found alarmingly intimate. Without the severe precision of his evening clothes, he appeared broader, less guarded and far more dangerous to the composure she had been determined to preserve.

He took one look at her and stopped. Concern replaced whatever thought had occupied him. “Harriet, you need not be afraid. I have not forgotten my vow.”

She tried to answer, but her mouth had gone dry. Benedict mistook her silence for confirmation. He crossed to the hearth and reached for the folded blankets left upon a chair.

“I mean to sleep upon the floor.”

Chapter

Seven

The carpet before the fireplace had been woven for ornament rather than repose. Benedict had determined that within the first quarter hour. By the end of the second, he had discovered that two folded blankets did nothing to prevent the floorboards beneath it from finding every bone in his body. He shifted onto his back and drew the spare pillow lower beneath his head. A hard ridge pressed between his shoulders. When he turned upon his side, the hearth was too warm against his face; when he turned the other way, he found himself staring directly at the bed which he was not permitted to occupy.

He had endured worse accommodations without complaint. During a journey north, he had once passed a night in a posting inn where the mattress harbored creatures of such industry that he had chosen a chair instead. A damaged bridge had left him sleeping in his carriage on another occasion. Neither memory offered consolation now, for discomfort was only partly responsible for his wakefulness.

Harriet lay in his bed.

He could not see her clearly. The lamps had been extinguished, and the fire cast more shadow than light beyond the edge of the carpet. But he had seen her before she climbed beneath the covers: her hair loose over her shoulders, the pale wrapper concealing a nightrail he knew must be thinner still. That single glimpse had been sufficient to torment him. His imagination, never notably poetic, had developed a distressing attention to detail.

Benedict closed his eyes and ordered himself to think of Everton House. The stable roof required inspection. The south chimneys had smoked in his grandmother's time, and Pritchard's list had made no mention of whether the cause had ever been remedied. There would be accounts to examine, servants to interview and a dozen practical decisions to occupy him before they removed there.

Every one of those thoughts led inexorably back to Harriet.

He imagined her walking through Everton with the ring of household keys at her waist. He pictured her in the estate room his mother had described, frowning over a ledger and disputing every recommendation he offered. He saw her at the breakfast table, her hair pinned severely while the morning sun found the red hidden within its brown. None of those images ought to have been improper. They unsettled him more than any improper fantasy might have done. Because the level of detail his mind supplied hinted that perhaps she’d been occupying more of his thoughts all along than he’d been cognizant of.

Desire could be resisted. The prospect of wanting her woven through every ordinary hour of his life was another danger altogether.

He shifted again, seeking a position in which the brass fender did not threaten his knees and the corner of the pillow did not fold beneath his ear. The blankets rasped over the carpet with a sound that seemed unnaturally loud in the sleeping house.

From the bed came Harriet's voice. “If you turn over once more, Benedict, I shall be compelled to ring for a footman and have you secured to the floor.”

He went still. “I beg your pardon. I had believed you asleep.”

“I might have been, had you not spent the last half hour wrestling the carpet into submission. Since the carpet appears likely to prevail, perhaps you would concede defeat with some dignity.”

Benedict stared up at the darkness of the coffered ceiling. Her voice was blurred at the edges by fatigue, and the intimacy of hearing it in darkness tightened every muscle he had only just persuaded to relax. “I assure you, my dignity suffered a mortal wound when I arranged my bed before the grate. There is very little left for the carpet to conquer.”

The bedclothes rustled. A moment later Harriet sat up, her shape faintly outlined by the glow of the fire. Her hair fell loose about her shoulders. Benedict looked away at once, fixing his attention upon the carved leg of a nearby chair.

“This is utterly ridiculous,” she said. “That bed is large enough for four people, yet you are lying upon the floor as if I had banished you there for some grave marital offense. You will be unable to move by morning.”

“Then my valet may dress me where I lie, aching joins and all. He has long complained that I make his work unnecessarily difficult. No doubt he will appreciate the convenience afforded by my immobility.”

“Do not turn this into a joke merely because you know I am right.” Harriet drew the covers higher, though whether against the chill or from a belated awareness of her state of dress, Benedict could not tell. “There is no sensible reason you cannot sleep upon the other side of the bed.”

There were several reasons, none of which he intended to explain while she sat there in her nightrail asking him to join her. The most pressing was that now being her husband, he’d discovered a heretofore unknown desire for the woman who he’d previously considered the bane of his existence. Perhaps that had been the source of his irritation with her all along and he had concealed the fact beneath irritation because irritation was safe. It required nothing from her and exposed nothing in him. And he had little hope that her own consistent annoyance with him was born of similar cause.

Sharing a bed would not be safe.

He might lie beside her without touching her. He did not doubt his capacity to keep his word. But he would feel her warmth across the space between them and listen to her breathing in the darkness. By morning, the barrier he had erected between marriage and desire would have become far more difficult to defend. Once he permitted himself to think of her as a wife in truth, he did not know how he was to return to the careful agreement that had allowed her to marry him without fear.