Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The fire had been lit and currently banked high enough to warm the room against the evening chill, the flames casting a soft, unsteady light across the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar walls, the unfamiliar ceiling of a room that was now, by every legal and sacramental measure available to the English-speaking world, hers.
Imogen sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair.
She was counting the strokes. It was the only discipline left to her.
Forty-one. Forty-two.
Her trunk had arrived mid-afternoon—sent for, Mrs. Richards had explained with tactful brevity, on the Duke’s instruction, from her family’s townhouse.
It had contained her own things: her own brushes, her own small bottle of rosewater, her own familiar nightgowns with their sensible flannel and their rather less sensible association with solitary, uncomplicated sleep.
She had opened the trunk with something very close to relief, had pressed her hands against her own possessions with the private gratitude of a woman locating solid ground.
And then she had found it.
Laid across the top, with the tissue paper still folded beneath it in neat, deliberate creases, as though whoever had placed it there had understood exactly what they were doing: a nightrail.
Not flannel. Not anything remotely related to flannel.
The finest lawn she had ever touched, so thin the candlelight passed through it when she held it up, so sheer that the tissue paper beneath had been entirely visible through the fabric.
She was wearing it now.
Fifty-three. Fifty-four.
She had considered wearing her own nightgown instead.
She had held it up—a perfectly respectable garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, the kind of thing a sensible woman wore without self-consciousness—and she had looked at it, and looked at the nightrail, and understood, with a clarity that was somewhat difficult to argue with, that the nightrail had not been placed in her trunk by accident.
He had put it there. Or instructed someone to put it there. Which amounted to the same thing.
Sixty. Sixty-one.
The fire shifted and popped behind her, and she watched her own reflection respond to it—the light moving across her face, her bare shoulders, the slope of her collarbone.
The mirror at her dressing table was extremely large and placed at an angle that left her nowhere to hide from herself.
The nightrail had ribbon ties at the throat, loosely knotted, and beneath the lawn, she could see everything.
The full, heavy curve of her breasts. The soft roundedness of her stomach.
The wide flare of her hips where the lawn pooled on the cushioned seat of the stool.
She set the brush down.
Picked it up again. Seventy.
This was, she told herself, a perfectly ordinary situation. Women had wedding nights constantly. Women had been having wedding nights for the entirety of recorded human history and most of them had survived the experience without any particular—
The truth was, she had not expected to be frightened of her husband seeing her.
As it turned out, though, it seemed her husband seeing her would be worse than the rest of it.
But there it was, in the mirror, perfectly legible: all of her, barely obscured by cloth that might as well have been water, illuminated by firelight that had no regard whatsoever for her preferences on the matter.
Despite her mother’s protests and constant narrative about how she could manage to keep her shape after bearing all of her children. Yet her daughters were all portly.
Imogen had never disliked her body, precisely.
She was not the sort of woman who wept at her reflection or catalogued her flaws with the obsessive precision she’d seen in some of her sisters.
She knew what she was. She was large. Abundantly, comprehensively, architecturally large—a fact she had spent three-and-twenty years making her peace with, with variable success, on a day-by-day basis.
But she had never had to show it to anyone.
And she had never, before today, had particular cause to think about how it would look to him.
A man who was frankly beautiful in his own right. Distractingly handsome with those piercing blue eyes of his and his tall, undeniably athletic frame.
A man who had chosen Eliza.
Imogen set the brush down properly this time, and looked at herself in the mirror, and tried to be fair about it.
Eliza was lovely—genuinely, undeniably lovely, fine-boned and fair, with the kind of slender elegance that gowns were designed for.
Eliza walked into rooms and drew eyes effortlessly, gracefully, without apparent awareness of the effect.
Tristan had looked at Eliza Reeding with all her lithe beauty and grace and decided she would make a suitable Duchess.
And then he had lifted a veil and found Imogen instead.
She picked up the brush again.
Eighty. Eighty-one.
The sound of the adjoining door reached her before she had composed herself adequately for it—a soft knock, more courtesy than question, and then the handle, and then light from the other room spilling briefly across the carpet.
She looked up.
He was reflected in the mirror behind her, and the image of him arrived before she had fully turned—the dark jacket gone, the cravat gone, his shirt open at the throat with three or four buttons undone and the collar loose, the sleeves rolled back to the elbow in a manner that was so far from the composed, immaculate figure he had presented at every other point in this extraordinary day that she found, for a moment, she simply stared.
His forearms were—she had not thought about his forearms. She had not had occasion to think about his forearms. They were rather distractingly muscular for a man who appeared to spend most of his time managing estates and intimidating people with his silence.
He met her eyes in the mirror. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then he crossed the room—unhurried, that same even, deliberate movement he brought to everything—and came to stand behind her. He looked down at her reflection with an expression she could not read, and then, without ceremony, held out his hand.
She looked at it.
“The brush,” he said.
She gave it to him.
He began to brush her hair.
The first stroke disarmed her so completely that she had to press her hands flat against her thighs to keep from showing it on her face.
It was exceedingly intimate to have a man tend to her hair.
And his touch was unexpectedly gentle, careful at the ends where it might catch, slow enough that she could feel each separate pass of the bristles against her scalp.
She watched his reflection. He was looking at her hair, not at her face, with that same focused attention he gave to everything, as though the task at hand deserved to be done properly.
She counted, because counting was still the only discipline left.
One. Two. Three.
“You are very quiet,” he said, after a while.
“I am often quiet,” she managed.
“Mm.” He drew the brush through a long sweep of hair. “Not in my experience, thus far. In my experience thus far, you tend to have rather a great deal to say.”
“That was different.”
“Was it.” He was watching her face now, in the mirror, his own expression still even. “How so?”
“That was—” She stopped. That was negotiation. That was survival. That was the part of today I had rehearsed. “That was a different kind of situation.”
“And this one,” he said quietly, “you have not rehearsed.”
It was not a question. She said nothing.
He continued brushing. The fire settled.
The room was very warm and very quiet and she was, she was acutely conscious, wearing approximately nothing, and he was standing near enough that she could feel the warmth of him behind her, and every careful, unhurried stroke of the brush was doing something very unhelpful to her capacity for rational thought.
Her nipples tightened again, as they had when he’d kissed her senseless in the carriage. Before today, that had only ever happened when she’d been cold. This was a decidedly different feeling.
“Imogen.” He said it gently, not with the cool precision he had employed in the carriage. Differently. As though the evening were its own country with its own rules. “Tell me, did your mother have a specific talk with you to explain the activities shared between husband and wife?”
She blew out a breath. “Not officially. I did overhear her having such a conversation with two of my older sisters. However, I can’t say that it was very informative. It was mostly about flowers and petals and lying very still.”
He rolled his eyes.
“It matters,” she waved her hand dismissively. “If you do not mind a slight delay, I can send for George to come and explain things to me.”
“You will do no such thing.” His features had taken on a sharper edge. “I’ll be damned if I have some random male come to my home and detail lovemaking to my bride. I can explain it to you myself.”
She folded her lips in on themselves and then laughed.
“I fail to see the humor in the situation.”
“George is my sister. Georgiana. She has recently wed the Duke of Dunmere, and I’m assuming, since they are quite besotted with one another, that she would be able to explain things quite well to me. And she’s far too pragmatic to use floral imagery.”
He shook his head. “I will tell you what we are going to do.”
She looked at him in the mirror.
“We are going to take this as slowly as you require,” he said.
“Every step of it. If you want me to explain what comes next before it happens, I shall explain it. If you want me to stop, I will stop. If you want to talk—” The corner of his mouth moved, slightly.
“—I suspect you are capable of talking through most situations, and this need not be an exception.”
Something unknotted in her chest. Quietly, without fanfare.
“You would—” She stopped. Started again. “You would talk me through it.”
“If you want.” He held her gaze in the mirror steadily. “I have been told I can be quite instructive.”
She almost laughed. The almost was enough—she felt her shoulders drop, fractionally, from where they had been residing somewhere near her ears.
“Granted, that had been in reference to shooting. I am an excellent shot.”
And then she looked at herself again. In the mirror. In the nightrail. All of that.
And the almost-laugh faded.
“I should tell you something,” she said.
“You may tell me whatever you like.”
She kept her eyes on his reflection, because looking at his actual face felt—too direct, suddenly, for what she was about to say. The mirror was better. The mirror was the glass of water between them.
“I am aware,” she said, with great care, “that I am not what you would have chosen. This—” She made the smallest possible gesture toward the mirror, toward what it showed, the full, unambiguous abundance of her barely-covered self.
“—is not your version of female beauty. I know that. I only want you to know that I know it, so that you do not feel obliged to—” She stopped.
“You need not pretend. I would prefer that to—” A breath. “I would prefer honesty.”
The brush stopped.
He was still looking at her in the mirror. He was very still, in the way he went still when he was thinking—not tense, but gathered.
Then he set the brush on the table.
He did not look away from her reflection.
He held it, held her eyes, in the glass, with the same direct, unhurried attention he had bent upon her at every difficult moment of this very long and eventful day.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet, and even, and entirely without the performance of reassurance.
“Let me tell you something about Eliza Reeding,” he said.
She waited.
“I chose her,” he said, “for precisely the reason you imagine makes her preferable to you. Because she was…” He paused, selecting it.
“Safe. Manageable. I looked at her and I felt nothing of any particular inconvenience, which was, at the time, exactly what I was looking for.” He held her gaze in the glass without flinching.
“I have a certain amount of control where women are concerned. I am not a reckless man. I do not make a habit of being—” Another pause.
“—led by appetite. I intended to marry and be faithful and discharge the obligations of the marriage with appropriate civility, and I wanted a wife who would make all of that as simple as possible.”
Imogen said nothing. She was barely breathing.
“Eliza,” he said, “was never going to make me lose my head. I knew that from the first evening.” His eyes did not move from hers.
“She was never going to make it difficult to think clearly in her presence. Never going to be the thing I was thinking about when I should have been thinking about something else.” He paused.
“I chose her, Imogen, because she posed no real temptation. Because I knew, very certainly, that she was not the kind of woman who would test my control.”
The fire shifted.
She looked at his reflection. He looked at hers.
“And I,” she said, very carefully, “am to understand that the distinction you are drawing is—”
“That you are not that,” he said. Simply.
Directly, without decoration. “That you have been, since approximately the moment I lifted that veil, a very considerable problem for my control. That your friend’s primary recommendation, as a wife, was the total and absolute absence of everything currently sitting in front of me at this dressing table.
” His gaze moved—briefly, deliberately, and without any pretense of being anything other than what it was—to the mirror’s full accounting of her, the firelight and the lawn and all of it, and then back to her eyes. “Does that answer your concern?”
Her mouth had gone entirely dry.
“It—” She stopped. “Yes,” she said. “That answers it.”
“Good.” He reached past her shoulder and picked up the brush again. “Then we will proceed.”
She looked at her own reflection—the color high in her cheeks, the slight unsteadiness of her breath, the unfamiliar landscape of herself in firelight—and found, to her considerable surprise, that it looked somewhat different than it had ten minutes ago.
Not smaller. Not less.
Just—seen. Differently.
He drew the brush through her hair one more time, slow and deliberate.
“Imogen,” he said.
“Yes.”
“When I said I would talk you through every step.” His eyes found hers in the glass. “I did not say it would be an efficient process.”
She felt the warmth of it move through her like the fire at her back.
“No?” she managed.
“No.” The brush set aside again, and his hands settling with quiet intent at her shoulders, his thumbs tracing one slow, unambiguous line along the ridge of her collarbone, and his mouth dropping to the curve of her neck just below her ear, and his voice arriving low against her skin. “I intend to take my time.”