28. In Which there is a Wedding Night – Ashbourne Park, Derbyshire #2
He did not stop. And what followed drove every word I knew clean out of my head — the slow, gathering heat of it, the way the world narrowed to his hands and his mouth and the building, impossible tension that wound tighter and tighter until I was arching off Mama’s second-best bedlinen with my fingers in his hair — and when the tension finally broke, it broke like a wave, like a held breath released, and I heard myself cry out in a voice I did not recognise and could not bring myself to regret.
I lay there afterwards, stunned and boneless, while he kissed his way back up to me.
“Well,” I said, when I could speak.
“Well?”
“Nobody told me.“ I stared at the canopy. “Eighteen years, Edward. Eighteen years and an extensive program of reading, and nobody so much as implied.”
“It seems an oversight.”
“It is a scandal. I shall have to reconsider everything I thought I knew about why people behave as they do. Half the marriages I have arranged make vastly more sense to me now.”
He laughed — really laughed, the unguarded laugh I had spent a season learning to provoke — and gathered me against him, and I felt the evidence of his own state pressed against my hip and was reminded that we had, as yet, completed only a portion of the curriculum.
I reached for him.
He caught his breath when I touched him — went still in that particular way of his, the stillness of a man holding very hard to his composure — and I explored with growing fascination, cataloguing what made his breathing fray, what drew that low sound from his chest, until his hand closed gently over my wrist.
“Charlotte.”
“You said we would discover it together. I am discovering.”
“You are succeeding,” he said, somewhat hoarsely, “and if you continue succeeding, the discovery will conclude prematurely.”
“Ah.” I filed this away. “Then perhaps we ought to proceed to the principal matter.”
“The principal matter.” His mouth twitched. “You make it sound like an item of business.”
“Everything is an item of business if you keep proper minutes. Edward.” I drew him over me, and the weight of him, the warmth, the way he braced himself on his forearms to look down at me — my heart was beating so hard I thought he must feel it.
“I want you. I am informed there may be a moment’s discomfort and I am formally waiving all objections in advance. Please.”
Something in his expression cracked open — that raw, unguarded thing he showed no one else, the thing I had first glimpsed behind a pillar at a ball and had been pursuing ever since.
“I love you,” he said. “You should hear it now, before. Not after, where it might be mistaken for a courtesy.”
“I love you,” I said. “Minuted. Witnessed. Binding.”
He went slowly. Carefully — so carefully, watching my face the whole while, and there was a moment, a sharp bright sting of a moment, when my breath caught and his stilled entirely — “Charlotte —“ — “Don’t stop“ — and then the moment passed, eased, melted into something else altogether, and my eyes fluttered closed, and the sound I made was not pain.
“All right?” he breathed.
“Better than —“ I had no end for the sentence.
There was no end for the sentence. There was only the impossible closeness of him, the fullness, the astonishing fact of being joined to another person — to this person, this quiet, careful, secretly ridiculous man who had chosen me with full knowledge of all my notebooks — and when he began to move I stopped attempting sentences altogether.
We found it together, as promised. Awkwardly at first — a rhythm missed, a breathless laugh shared against each other’s mouths, an adjustment, there — and then not awkwardly at all.
He whispered my name against my throat like something sacred.
I rose to meet him, my fingers pressed hard into his back, and the heat built again, lower and deeper than before, gathering with every movement until the whole world had contracted to the place where we were no longer two separate items in anyone’s inventory.
“Edward —“ I was close to something, climbing toward it. “Edward, I —“
“I know.” His voice had come apart entirely. “I have you. Let go.”
I let go.
It took me like a storm front, sudden and absolute, and I cried out into his shoulder and felt him shudder and follow me over the edge moments later, my name breaking on his lips, his face buried in my hair — and then stillness, and firelight, and the two of us wrecked and tangled and breathing like survivors of some glorious catastrophe.
For a long while, neither of us moved.
“Well,” I said, finally, into the quiet.
His chest shook with silent laughter beneath my cheek. “Well?”
“I shall require a new notebook.”
“A dedicated notebook.”
“Colour-coded. With a locking clasp, given the household.” I tipped my head to look at him. In the dim light he was rumpled and warm and entirely mine, which continued to strike me as improbable in the best possible way. “I should warn you that the first entry will be extensive.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” He pressed his lips to my temple, and then — because he was Edward, and could never leave a true thing unsaid once he had decided to say it — “I have been in love with you since you found me behind the pillar at the Pemberton ball and informed me I was hiding incorrectly.”
“Nobody hides incorrectly.”
“You had opinions.”
“I always have opinions.” I settled closer against his side. The fire had burned low; the candles had long since guttered. Somewhere below us, the house full of my entire family — and the vicar — slept on in perfect ignorance, and I found I could not bring myself to care. “I still do.”
“I know.” His arm tightened around me. “Sleep, wife.”
Wife.
I closed my eyes.
The moonlight shifted slowly across the floor. Outside, August lay quiet over Derbyshire. And I — Charlotte Eleanor Ashford, née Ashbourne — slept in the best guest suite of her childhood home, in her husband’s arms, and did not make a single note in her notebook.
It was the finest night’s sleep I had ever had.