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She took a deep breath, clasped her hands tightly again and determinedly sought for something else to be thankful for today.
Once again, it was the supple material of her gloves that inspired her. And the glossy sheen of her carriage dress upon which they were now resting. It was terribly, terribly worldly of her to count shopping for clothes as something for which to give thanks to God, but truly, it had been like a sort of fantasy for her to send for dressmakers, who brought samples of the most glorious and costly fabrics, and know she could choose any of them and have them made up in whatever style she wished. Even if they did have to be predominantly black. It was such a contrast to the hours she’d had to spend mending and darning, and making over old gowns to disguise the most worn areas, that she’d gone a little mad.
To assuage her guilt over what had felt, after a day or so, like the most reckless extravagance and self-indulgence, she’d vowed to donate a tithe of her allowance to worthy causes before she went anywhere near a dressmaker in future. To charities that supported girls who couldn’t afford to buy whatever they wanted, for example. Girls who were as destitute and friendless as she’d been, or at least had felt before Lord Rawcliffe had swept into that inn and transformed her life with one wave of his magical wand.
No. Not his wand. His wand was not magical.
Oh, dear. How very easy it was, now she was married to such an earthy, carnal sort of man, for her thoughts to turn in a carnal direction. She ground her teeth in frustration. It must have taken all of five minutes for her to descend from her ambition to apply spiritual principles to her state of mind, to recalling how it had felt to stroking and fondling his…his wand. To realise that she was the one causing it to…
Oh, dear. How she wished she had a fan in her reticule. Or had the excuse that it was unseasonably warm to explain her suddenly overheated face.
But that would make him look at her. And he’d discern somehow what she was thinking about. And he’d smile that lazy, knowing smile and half-lower his eyelids and she’d know he was now thinking about it, too. And…
Oh.
He would be thinking about it, too. Because he wanted her. Just about all the time. In the most inappropriate places. And whether there was anyone else in the room or not. It might not be the least bit romantic, let alone spiritual, but did she have any right to complain that he didn’t want her in exactly the way she’d hoped he would? Or feel cheated because he hadn’t even courted her? For here she was, married to him. As married as it was possible to be. And she was always going to be his wife.
Which was something she could be truly thankful for.
As was the prospect of one day having a baby. A baby to love. Which would grow into a child that would love her back. Even if her husband didn’t.
And why would he, considering the fact she wasn’t the wife he’d have chosen, if he’d actually been looking for a wife?
Perhaps she’d do better to start trying to learn how to be the kind of wife he wanted her to be, rather than complaining that he wasn’t being a perfect husband. Why should he be a perfect husband when he hadn’t wanted to be any kind of husband at all? In his eyes, he was probably already going the second mile.
Very well, then, from now on she would…
‘Oh!’ She leaned forward in her seat as she glimpsed what looked like a body of water, in the gap between two hills. A large body of water, ending at the horizon.
‘Is that…?’ She turned to Rawcliffe, her confused thoughts tumbling to the back of her mind in the need to ask him if that water was what she thought it was. ‘Is that the sea?’
‘Yes.’
She pressed her nose to the window in her eagerness to look at it. ‘The sea! Oh! Are you taking me to the seaside?’ She turned to look at him properly for the first time that day, no longer struggling to think grateful thoughts, so genuinely thrilled was she by this unexpected, and completely unearned, treat. ‘I have never seen the sea.’
‘I would never have guessed,’ he replied drily.
She pressed her nose to the window again, but the carriage was rounding the foot of another hill, which obliterated her view of the sea. Almost in the same way his sarcastic attitude had blotted out her pleasure.
