Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
He hadn’t intended to admit all of that.
To show his hand, as it were. To stand behind a woman at a dressing table and lay out, in plain English, the precise nature of the problem she presented to his self-governance.
It was not how he conducted himself. It was not, frankly, how he conducted anything.
And yet.
She had looked at herself in that mirror with such composed, matter-of-fact resignation—as though she had simply cataloged a fact about the world, filed it away, and prepared to endure the consequences of it—and something in him had refused, with a vehemence he had not anticipated, to let it stand.
He could not do with his wife believing herself a disappointment.
Not when the truth was so comprehensively otherwise.
He set the brush on the table.
She was still looking at her reflection, and he was looking at hers, and the fire behind them both threw its warm, indifferent light over everything it could reach—her hair loose now across her shoulders, the nightrail doing precisely what it had been selected to do, which was to say nothing whatsoever useful in the way of concealment.
He had chosen it himself, in ten minutes, from a modiste Flynn had recommended, and he had felt briefly absurd doing it, which had not stopped him.
The lawn had been the sheerest option available.
He had not asked the modiste to confirm this.
He had simply looked at it and known, and purchased it without discussion.
He was, he reflected, perhaps less in command of himself than he had previously assumed.
“Imogen,” he said.
She looked at him in the glass. The color was still high in her cheeks.
“Stand up.”
She hesitated—a single beat, the small internal gathering he was becoming fluent in—and then she rose from the stool, the nightrail falling in a whisper of lawn around her feet.
She was not a tall woman. She came to his shoulders, which he had not registered precisely until this moment, standing behind her, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her without touching.
He reached up and drew her hair back from her shoulder. Slow, deliberate. She held very still.
“I told you,” he said, “that I intend to take my time.” He let the weight of her hair settle over her other shoulder, baring the side of her neck, the curve where it met her collarbone. “I meant it. But I want you to understand something first.”
“Yes?” Her voice was steady. He was consistently impressed by how steady she managed to keep her voice.
“I am going to tell you what I am thinking,” he said, “as I go. You said you preferred honesty.” He held her eyes in the mirror. “I intend to give it to you.”
The pulse at the side of her throat jumped.
“Alright,” she said.
He lowered his mouth to the curve of her neck—not a kiss, precisely, not yet, simply the warm press of his lips to the thin, soft skin below her ear—and felt the shiver travel through her immediately, involuntarily, from the point of contact all the way down.
“That,” he said against her skin, “is what I am thinking about. The fact that you do that.” He lifted his head. “Every time I touch you. You are so very responsive.”
She exhaled. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“I know.” He turned her, unhurried, to face him.
She tipped her head back to meet his eyes, and he held her gaze for a moment, simply looked at her the way he had been suppressing the urge to look at her since the church, fully, without the social discipline that made such looking inadvisable in public.
Then, he reached for the ribbon at the throat of her nightrail and drew it loose with one slow pull.
He watched her breathe.
“Still with me?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Completely.”
He slid the nightrail from her shoulders and let it fall.
The sound it made was almost nothing—a breath of fabric against the floor—and then she was standing before him in the firelight, and he found he was not as prepared for it as he had believed himself to be.
He had known, in the abstract, what was beneath the lawn.
He had known it in the carriage, in the breakfast room, at every point in this very long day when he had applied his considerable discipline to not knowing it too specifically.
But the abstract and the particular were, it turned out, two entirely different countries.
She was—
He did not have a word for it that felt insufficient.
Extravagant was the one that came, and he let it come.
She was extravagant. The full, heavy curve of her breasts, the soft, generous slope of her waist giving way to the wide flare of her hips, the pale skin catching the firelight, giving her a nearly ethereal appearance.
She was more of everything—more warmth, more weight, more woman—than any figure his imagination had managed in the anticipatory hours of this evening.
She was one of Ruben’s painted nymphs come to life. His wife, his own personal nymph.
She had her chin up. Her hands had gone still at her sides, and her expression was the particular expression of a person steeling themselves for a verdict.
He took one step forward, cupped her face in both hands, and kissed her.
Not like the church. It wasn’t even like the more passionate kiss they’d shared in the carriage.
He kissed her the way he had wanted to since the moment he lifted the veil, since she had looked at him with that clear, undefeated, treacherous gaze and dared him to expose her, since she had sat beside him at breakfast and said you are my love match, do keep up with the composure of a woman twice her experience and half her nerves.
He kissed her slowly, and thoroughly, and with his hands in her hair and his thumbs at her jaw, and felt the small, startled sound she made against his mouth with a satisfaction that settled low and warm in his chest.
Her hands found the fabric of his shirt. She held on.
He lifted his head.
“Still with you,” she said, before he could ask.
He almost smiled. He lowered his head and pressed his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, taking his time with each one, and with each press of his lips he felt her hands grip the fabric of his shirt more firmly, felt the steady evenness of her breathing becoming something less steady.
He pulled back to look at her. “The shirt.”
She looked at him.
“My shirt,” he said. “Help me with it.”
Her hands moved to the remaining buttons.
They did not move with the fluid ease of experience, but with a determined precision that was, he found, rather more affecting than ease would have been.
When she had the last of them, she pushed the shirt from his shoulders and he shrugged it off, and then she was looking at him the way he had just been looking at her, a frank and unselfconscious accounting that sent a specific, uncomplicated message to the lower half of his body.
“You are very—” She stopped. Appeared to reconsider. “Your forearms were alarming enough,” she said. “This is somewhat worse.”
That made him chuckle. “Should I apologize for alarming you with my forearms?”
She shook her head, her eyes still tracing over every bared sinew of his chest.
“You are exceedingly handsome, Tristan. Though I’m certain you’re already aware of this fact.”
He steered her toward the bed.
She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him, and he held that gaze for a moment—the warm brown of her eyes, the slight unsteadiness in them that she was working hard to conceal—and then he came down beside her, and reached for her, and let his hands do what they had been waiting, all day, to do.
He explored her the way he did everything that warranted his full attention—methodically, unhurriedly. He learned the weight of her in his hands, the precise responsiveness of different points of contact, the catalog of sounds she made, and what produced each one.
She had, as he had theorized, considerable natural capacity. Her body responded to him with a generosity and immediacy that undid his composure faster than he would have predicted. Several times he was required to remind himself that he had promised her slow.
He fully intended to keep said promise.
When he found the soft curve of her breast with his mouth she made a sound—sharp, surprised, nothing like the managed quietness she had maintained all day—and her hand came up to grip the back of his head, her fingers curling into his hair.
“That is—” She swallowed. “That is quite—”
“Good?” he said against her skin.
“Yes.” Breathless. “You might have mentioned that was an option.”
“I am mentioning it now.” He shifted, gave the same thorough attention to its twin, and felt the tremor move through her. “This,” he said, lifting his head, “is what I told you I was thinking about. At the breakfast. When Flynn gave me that look.”
She laughed—a genuine, unguarded sound, quickly dissolved into a sharp intake of breath as his hand moved lower, tracing down her soft skin to reach her inner thigh. “Lord Cavendish—” she managed. “You were thinking about—oh—”
“Yes,” he said. “Precisely that.” He watched her face. “Breathe, Imogen.”
She breathed. And then, when his hand ghosted over the brown curls at the apex of her thigh, she made a sound that he was quite certain he would be thinking about for some considerable time.
“Lay back for me, wife. I want to explore your beautiful body.”
“I am failing to see how flowers play into any of this,” she said.
He laughed. He’d never before laughed with a woman, in bed. It was natural to do so with her. Imogen. His wife.
“I believe there are some who refer to the delicate folds here.” He slid his finger over the outer lip of her core. She was slick here, her body already preparing her for their union.
“Oh,” she breathed, her voice edged with awe as if his touch was a revelation.
“You are already so wet for me, my little nymph. So responsive. Almost as if your body was made specifically for mine.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have you ever explored yourself down here? Brought yourself to climax?”
“No. That is to say, yes, I have explored, once or twice. But it only led to frustration.”
“I’m going to do it for you now,” he said.
He took her methodically apart with his hands—learning first, then employing what he had learned with focused, unhurried application.
She proved, conclusively and with enthusiasm, that she was exactly what he had suspected in the carriage: genuinely, abundantly responsive, with no reserve of restraint left to her by the end of it, and that was before he had done anything particularly ambitious.
“Tristan—” His name arrived in a register he hadn’t heard from her yet, lower and looser than her usual voice, stripped of all the careful management.
“I have you,” he said. He pressed his mouth to her temple, her cheekbone, the hinge of her jaw. All while his finger circled that tight bundle of nerves that would bring forth her pleasure. “Let go.”
She did.
He held her through it. Felt the whole bright shuddering collapse of her against him, her fingers white-knuckled at his shoulder, her face pressed against his throat.
He found, somewhat to his surprise, that the thing he was most aware of was not the physical fact of it, satisfying as that was, but the particular weight and warmth of her in his arms afterward.
The way she exhaled against his neck, slow and undone, all the day’s composure temporarily spent.
He had not expected to find that quite so…
addictive. Nothing, to his memory, had ever felt as right as this moment did.
He’d never given much thought to fate or destiny.
Only that his birthright, this duchy, and then his duty to bring forth the next heir.
That had been the culmination of his thoughts regarding the course of his life.
Right now, though, all of it seemed pale in comparison to this woman. His wife. Perhaps their union was more than her taking matters into her own hands and stealing a groom for herself while allowing her friend to marry for love. Perhaps this was how it was all meant to play out.
He set the thought aside.
“Still with me?” he asked.
A pause. Then, muffled against his throat: “Barely.”
He chuckled. “Don’t give up on me now, there is still so much more.”
He gave her a moment, his hand tracing a slow, absent path up and down her back, and then he shifted and came over her, bracing his weight, and looked down at her. The firelight moved across her face.
Her hair was a lovely disaster across the pillow.
Her eyes found his, a little unfocused, very dark, and the expression in them was different to anything he had seen there thus far.
She was unguarded, open in a way she hadn’t been before, and watching him with a quality of attention that he found he had no armor whatsoever against.
“You called me your little nymph,” she said.
“I did. It occurred to me when I disrobed you that you are as lovely as one of Ruben’s nymphs. As if you’d stepped from his painting and into my bedchamber.”
She swallowed visibly. “You find me lovely?”
He shook his head. “I find you impossibly beautiful. Distractingly lovely. Infernally tempting.”
“That’s very poetic for a man who claims to be so sensible.”
“Yes, well, that was before my wife was laid bare before me.”
He leaned down and kissed her then. Giving himself the freedom to feel as much as his body allowed. When she writhed beneath him, he broke the kiss and trailed his lips down her body.
Stopping first at her magnificent breasts and spending time lavishing both with the attention of his hands, tongue, and lips. Her mewls of pleasure were so damned arousing, he was rather surprised he had not spilled himself in his own trousers.
Then, moving down her stomach, kissing and nipping as he went until finally he wedged his shoulders between her thick thighs.
“What exactly are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to taste you. Lick you to completion so that you’re nice and wet for me. I want to alleviate as much of the discomfort as possible.”
“Lick me? Is that something normally done in marital beds?”
“It is something done in ours. Now, lie back and let me enjoy you, nymph. You smell divine.”