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“So do as I say and stop being obstreperous,” she said.
“Obstreperous,” he repeated, rolling the syllables around in his mouth. A playful half-smile brightened his face and his dark eyes fixed on hers. “But I like being obstreperous.”
“And you’re very good at it too,” she managed to say, curiously breathy. “But perhaps, until this matter blows over, you could take a brief hiatus from insulting people and getting into fights and having affairs. I mean…That is…Oh no.”
She pressed her fingertips to her traitorous lips and willed away the heat sliding up her cheeks. This was the trouble. She lost control of her tongue around him and expressed thoughts she didn’t even know she had. All the restraint she was raised to show, the self-control that was meant to distinguish the rational, refined upper classes from the masses—a single conversation with him and twenty years of training went out the window.
And that look on his face: She knew that one. The playful, wicked one. The look that set her body clamoring for his touch.
He pushed off the wall and sauntered toward her.
She pressed a hand over her eyes, so she couldn’t see him approach, but she could feel his presence, all that energy shooting through her, coiling and pulsing deep within. He came so close that his legs stirred her skirts and the faint spicy scent of him teased her nostrils, and part of her was back in that bed again.
“You do realize,” he drawled softly, “that when you cover your eyes, I can still see you.”
“No you can’t.”
He gently took her hand, his fingers warm and firm through her gloves, and she let him lower her arm. When he released her, she twisted her fingers into her skirts so she would not loop her arms around his neck. How silly her body was, wanting a baby so badly it overlooked the facts that she did not like him and he did not want her.
“Tell me true, now, Mrs. DeWitt. Are you jealous?”
Heaven help her, she was. How smug she had been, before, when he was a stranger and she cared nothing for him at all. And he was teasing her again, the fiend, but now she enjoyed it, because now she knew that he was kind under his brash facade, and this teasing was just for her, and that made her feel special.
“For appearance’s sake, I mean,” she said.
“So forappearance’ssake, you would have me be a monk.”
“No need to be a monk.” Her heart performed a little quadrille and she had to swallow before she could speak again. “After all, we are married, and you know your way to my bed.”
* * *
Bloody hell.He had walked right into that one, hadn’t he? No longer could he use bedsport to frighten her away. It seemed she was no longer wary of the marriage bed.
And for the worst possible reason. It was nothimthat she wanted.
“I will do my duty, as your wife,” she added, which words had the merciful effect of a bucket of ice water on his groin. Joshua backed away from her. Kept going until his back hit a wall.
“And?” he said.
A mistake to ask the question when he already knew the answer.
Her unspoken words filled the space between them, expanding like a giant balloon, taking up all the air in the room so there was none left to breathe. He needed her not to say those words. He understood what she wanted; she had given it away last night. He had to burst that balloon, burst it before she let it carry them both away.
Too late.
“And we might have children,” she finished.
Her voice was so soft he almost didn’t hear her, so loud he wanted to tell her not to yell.
“I can imagine them now, our children,” she added, dreamily. “Running through Sunne Park, bright and energetic. Laughing. They’ll have dark hair, I suppose, and be bright and mischievous. Little boys sliding down the bannister. Little girls running through the rose garden. Or the other way around. I don’t mind.” She laughed shortly, an unnaturally high-pitched sound. “If you saw Sunne Park, you’d know that it’s a marvelous place to be a child.”
She didn’t know what she was asking. He could tell her—what? That she stood at the start of a path into a wood. There were terrible things in that wood: wolves and monsters and beloved, bright-eyed children. She would skip down the path anyway, picking flowers and singing.Stay out of the wood, he wanted to say.It looks nice, but it isn’t. It’s full of things that will destroy you, like wolves and monsters and beloved, bright-eyed children. But he could scream and yell and she would never listen.
Naive, optimistic fool that she was. They shared a kiss and a secret and she thought it changed things. Last night changed nothing. So he understood her better now, perceived the edge of worry underlying her smiles, saw that her pigheadedness was actually a breathtakingly fierce protectiveness, that she was trying so hard to be good when part of her longed to misbehave. Even knowing that, in the end, changed nothing.
She was a disruption, and this Bolderwood nonsense was a disruption, but they were small disruptions, and once he got back to his busy life in Birmingham, everything would go on as peacefully as it had before.
“Why don’t you get a cat?” he said.
