Page 30 of Their Wildest Dreams

“I was remembering the chocolate.”

“No, you were not. But if you do not wish to speak of it, I shall not badger you. I am far too pleased with you at present to risk driving you away.”

Harriet took the cup. “Pleased with me for what?”

“For marrying Benedict, naturally.” Lady Denham settled back in her chair. “I had begun to think the pair of you would continue circling one another for the next twenty years, snapping and snarling until one of you married someone else out of sheer spite.”

“That was not what happened.”

“No. Your fathers interfered before either of you could make such a muddle of it.”

There was no useful answer to that. Harriet drank her tea and waited for the subject to pass. Lady Denham, who had raised Benedict and therefore possessed considerable experience in refusing to be diverted, continued without pause.

“And now Everton is occupied again. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. The house has been shut up for far too long. Houses fare badly when there is no one inside them to quarrel, slam doors or drag mud across the floors.”

“If that is all Everton requires, Benedict and I should have it restored within a fortnight.”

Lady Denham laughed. “I imagine you will. Though I hope there will be happier noises in time.”

Harriet caught the change in her tone too late. “What noises?”

“Children, of course.” The countess said it as easily as if she had expressed a preference for new curtains. “Everton has a lovely nursery. Or it did when I last saw it. The rooms face west and receive the afternoon sun. Benedict’s grandmother complained that it faded the carpet, but children are very unlikely to object to faded carpet.”

Harriet set down her cup with care. “We have been married for slightly less than one week!”

“I am not suggesting that you produce a child before dinner. I am simply saying that I look forward to grandchildren. I have looked forward to them for years, though Benedict has always refused to discuss the matter without behaving as if I had made some outrageous demand upon him.” Lady Denham’s expression softened. “And now it will be your children, Harriet. Yours and his. I have always considered you to be like a daughter and now you are my daughter, even if through marriage. I confess, I could not be more pleased by the prospect.”

Harriet had no answer. She was embarrassed, certainly. Any woman might be when her husband’s mother began discussing the occupation of a nursery only days after the wedding. But beneath the embarrassment was something else—an unexpected little ache that seemed to spread through her chest.

She pictured a child with Benedict’s dark hair and grave expression. A boy, perhaps, trying to appear solemn while concealing some appalling mischief. Or a girl with his eyes and the same stubborn certainty that the rest of the world would eventually be brought around to her way of thinking. Harriet could see Benedict with either of them far too easily. He would pretend to be stern. He would fail at it quite miserably.

The image warmed her in a way she had not anticipated.

She had never spent much time thinking of children. Marriage itself had held little appeal when it meant surrendering her independence to a man who might resent her opinions or simply disregard them. Children had belonged to that same vague and unwanted future. They had been a duty, not a longing.

But she did not dislike the idea now.

She did not dislike it at all.

“I have shocked you,” Lady Denham said.

“No. Well, perhaps a little.” Harriet reached for her tea again, then realized she had nothing more to say and put it down. “It is not a subject Benedict and I have discussed.”

That was true enough. They had discussed separate chambers, the concealment of their arrangement and the precise length of time he must remain in her room before retiring to his own. They had not discussed what might happen if either of them began to want something more.

“There is no hurry,” Lady Denham assured her. “You have both had enough forced upon you. Whatever comes next should belong to the two of you.”

Harriet looked at her. For all the countess’s enthusiasm, there was no demand in the words. No warning about duty or heirs. She merely believed that grandchildren would come because they were the natural product of marriage.

Except they would not. Not unless Harriet changed the terms she had established before the wedding.

The thought of a child gave way to the more immediate question of how such a child would be conceived. Harriet had lived in the country all her life. She was not ignorant. But what she knew of the act itself had never included Benedict’s mouth hovering above hers or his hand firm against her back. It had never included the feel of his body pressed to hers in the library or the almost painful disappointment she had experienced when Mrs. Mercer entered leaving her poised in that now crystallized moment of anticipation.

For the first time, the agreement between them did not feel like a protection. It felt like a barrier Harriet herself had erected and might now have to find the courage to remove.

Benedict had already told her what would be required.

They would have to renegotiate.