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Ooh, men were so selfish! She was sick, utterly sick of having to live her life on a man’s terms. Her only function in the vicarage had been to make sure her brothers and her father were free to pursue their own ambitions. To smooth their way. Make life easy for them. Nobody ever asked her what she would have liked to do with her day. With her life. Not even when Father died and she could have…could have…well, she didn’t know what she could have done, there had been no time to think. But she certainly hadn’t deserved to be swept to one side without even being asked whether she wanted to go and look after an elderly invalid.
Although she wasn’t going to have to do that now, was she? Thanks to Rawcliffe. She shot him a repentant look from beneath her eyelashes, for bracketing him with her male relatives. He was holding a document between his forefinger and thumb, an expression of irritation on his face. Slater muttered something in an apologetic tone and scribbled something down in the book he had open on his portable desk. And Rawcliffe put the offending document to one side and reached for the next one in the pile that lay between them.
And just like that, she got a searing, vivid memory of him plunging that very same hand down her bodice while the waiter was busy arranging the chafing dishes on the sideboard.
Her face heating, she turned to look out of the window again. She really shouldn’t have accused him of being selfish, even if she had only done so in her head. For he hadn’t been totally selfish last night, had he? No, he’d made sure she’d got a great deal of pleasure from that encounter as well.
Which had, ironically, made her writhe with shame the moment he’d left. For he’d made her glory in a swift, hard, animalistic coupling, when she’d always dreamed that what a man shared with his wife would be an almost spiritual union .
Why did he always have to drag their encounters in the bedroom down to such a…well, it was almost as if he was determined to keep their encounters as basic, and brutal as he could. Even the position in which he’d taken her, on her knees, from behind, was positively degrading. Why, when she thought of the way he used to smile and flirt with Betsy Woodly, the charm she’d seen him exerting on a variety of females at local assemblies, she could…
Oh, she didn’t know what she could do, she was so jealous of all his other conquests. Well, she always had been. Which was why she’d always vowed never to appear eager to join their ranks. And she hadn’t. Except that now she was his wife, she just wished…
No. There was no point in wishing for what she didn’t have. In fact, it was contrary to scripture. The bible taught that, in everything, she should give thanks. And wasn’t that an attitude which had kept her going through some of her darkest moments? She’d only had to think of the things she could be grateful for and her lot had always become easier to bear.
So that was what she ought to do now.
She bowed her head, as if in prayer, and clasped her hands in her lap. And as she did so she began to rub her thumb over the ridge in her glove where she wore her wedding ring. Which was the first thing she could be thankful for. That he had married her at all. If he hadn’t, she’d have been pitched into a household full of strangers, to care for that elderly lady about whom she knew nothing. After spending the last few years enduring that backbreaking, depressing role for her own father, whilst colluding with the curate to conceal the worst of his decline from the parishioners.
And there had been no real need for Rawcliffe to have done anything so chivalrous. It was far more than most men would have done for a woman they’d denounced, for most of their lives, as a termagant.
She supposed he felt entitled to have some reward for performing an act of such outstanding selflessness. He was a man, after all. And all men seemed to think a lot more about carnal things than women. She glanced across the coach where her eyes lit on the firm muscles of his thighs, which were lovingly outlined by the fabric of his breeches…
Which reminded her what those thighs had felt like, straining between her own, the night before.
She shut her eyes with a grimace of annoyance as her thoughts drifted back towards the things she resented about him, rather than counting her blessings.
