Chapter 30
Thirty
Rome wasn’t built in one day. For the sake of my self-esteem, let’s leave it there.
Before I could say a word, Godric—my husband!—scooped me up and left the room to the sound of Colette’s laughter.
I was not entirely ignorant of what was to come. In my very first season, the Honorable Miss Margery Pentwhistle had shared everything her mother had told her about the wedding night.
Godric didn’t seem to have read the same advice manual as Lady Pentwhistle. For one thing, it wasn’t nighttime.
“It’s broad daylight,” I pointed out.
My husband carried me down the colonnade, my white skirts spilling over his arm. “We shall not consummate our marriage now, Evie. I’ll help you change into something warmer, and then we’ll play.”
Play?
I was still thinking about the way his deep voice rumbled over my body when he kicked my bedroom door shut and set me on my feet.
“Would you like me to ring for tea?”
“No, thank you,” I answered, refusing that beverage for the first time in my life. I was feeling wretchedly nervous. I didn’t have a script. For all my disdain of civilized behavior, I would have preferred to know what was expected of me.
Godric began plucking pins from my hair. “I’m sorry we have to return to the library for the reading of that bloody will, but I could imagine Burnsby trying to do something illegal with his property.”
His fingers whispered over my hair as he dropped pearl-topped pins into a silver bowl on my dressing table.
I should have been feeling romantic and passionate. Instead, I felt edgy and nervous. My heart was beating as fast as a cat’s.
“May I remove the charcoal on your brows?” Godric asked.
I nodded, and he gently rubbed one eyebrow free of charcoal and tackled the second. “Moonshine,” he said a moment later, satisfied.
Which started me thinking that if he wanted me to stop darkening my brows, I would refuse. Meanwhile, his fingers were flying through my buttons. He eased my white gown over my head and would have tossed it to the side, except I caught it.
“You can’t throw my garments to the floor. It takes work to wash and press them.”
“You’re under Tess’s thumb,” Godric said, one side of his mouth crooking up as he began to unlace my corset.
I toed off my slippers. I felt a little nauseated. The oil lamps were lit (Tess having pinned the curtains tightly shut), and the room seemed brighter than ever before. White sheets glared from the corner of my eye. All my senses were heightened, and Godric’s peppery smell made my head swim.
My fingers were trembling. Was I supposed to be doing something? Touching him, perhaps?
When only my chemise remained, Godric hesitated. “May I?”
I nodded, clipped. “We’re consummating. Let’s consummate.”
“That’s one way to put it.” I heard amusement in his voice. “I thought that you would prefer to wait for the night, Evie.”
I had no idea what I would prefer—other than being one hundred miles away, perhaps in a different country. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Godric, because I did.
But I was embarrassingly, hopelessly unprepared.
Before I knew it, I was standing before him wearing nothing but my stockings. I glanced down. My chest was bare. I had never allowed any man to grope my breasts, obviously. But Godric was different, because I had married him.
He had the right to grope.
My stockings were silk, with flowers woven up the sides, and fastened with ribbons around the largest parts of my thighs. Was I supposed to untie the ribbons myself and put the stockings to the side?
My heart was thumping out of rhythm.
“You are exquisite,” Godric breathed, his voice gruff and not at all gentlemanly. He took off his boots and began shedding his clothing.
I felt as stoic and immobile as a china doll, unable to make my lips curl into a smile. “Do you need my help disrobing?” I asked.
“No—” he said, and stopped. “Would you like to undress me?”
I stepped forward, feeling extraordinarily naked. “I dislike cravats,” I said, once I had his untied and unwrapped. I was close enough that my breasts brushed his coat, making my nipples twinge with sensation.
Godric’s fists were curled at his sides. Perhaps our bodies weren’t supposed to touch until both of us were unclothed. I edged away and began unbuttoning his waistcoat. All the time I was stealing glances at his body from under my lashes.
I felt odd. Slippery between my legs and tight everywhere else. Being naked, I should have been cold, but instead I felt overheated.
His shirt tied behind his neck and came off easily. Godric’s chest was ridged with muscle, thick and powerful. I paused, glancing up at him. “May I?”
“Yes,” he said. He stood before me, looking as rigid as I felt. The idea that we were in the same state was comforting.
I touched his chest delicately, as if he were red-hot, as if his skin might burn my fingertips. He sucked in his breath when I flattened my palms, discovering that muscles are hard, as if carved from stone.
(An aside: No part of my body resembles his chest. I am soft all over.)
I was reaching for his breeches when a groan broke from his throat. I froze, my hands on his waist.
“Give me a moment.”
“I apologize,” I said, shaken. “Am I doing it wrong?”
“Oh, God no,” he replied. “Might we move to the bed?”
I nodded.
(Frankly, I felt like saying no, but what was the point? The bed was the point of this entire exercise.)
“What are you thinking about?” Godric asked, his eyes focused on my face.
A snippet of Macbeth was going through my head, something like, If it were done, ’twere well it was done quickly. Macbeth, talking about cutting off the king’s head.
Not a maidenhead. (Ha.)
It wasn’t a romantic line, and I shouldn’t be thinking about puns or regicide.
“Ah, nothing,” I gulped.
He picked me up and placed me on my back on the bed, my legs hanging off the side. Then he leaned over me, bracing his hands beside my shoulders. “I have a strong feeling that you’re fibbing.”
“I was thinking about Macbeth,” I admitted, rattled into confession.
He looked surprised. “I haven’t read that play in years.”
“I love your brows,” I said, daring to touch him there. “If this were a play, that dashing scar would make you the villain.”
“I love your eyebrows, too, because charcoal made me understand you put on a shell to hide yourself from the world. I’d had only glimpses of the real you before that.”
I raised a (pale) eyebrow.
“You giggled in the chapel when we first met,” Godric offered.
I couldn’t remember what had amused me. “You do know that applying charcoal to one’s brows is an unexceptional cosmetic aid, employed by most ladies in polite society?”
“You’re a snail, Evie. Protecting yourself with ladylike behavior and charcoal.”
He was enjoying himself. I didn’t bother to argue. Besides, he was right, even if he reached that conclusion through strange means.
“I shall continue to use charcoal, no matter what you think,” I told him.
Godric smiled down at me. “Your moonlit brows will be a secret known only to me and your maid.” Then he added, as if it was inconsequential, “I would never tell you how to dress yourself, Evie.”
What skittered through my memory then were all the times when Burnsby had done exactly that.
The day after we married, he remarked that my gown “didn’t show my charms” and sent me to change it.
Actually, it began on the way to our wedding, when Burnsby told me that my lip color was “too red for a lady of my breeding” and offered me a handkerchief to wipe it off.
I remember my father scowling, but I wanted to please my would-be husband.
“Is it time to consummate?” I asked.
I felt more naked than ever, because my stockings didn’t do anything to shield my middle, and he was looming over me, his weight braced on his arms. My legs were clamped together, and I did not feel like spreading them—but I would.
When I had to.
He blinked. “Not quite, darling.”
“We virgins know very little,” I admitted.
The only advice I could bring to mind came from Miss Pentwhistle, whose mother had told her that a lady should lie still and count from one hundred backward with her eyes closed, and then it would be over.
It didn’t feel like sufficient advice for this moment.
It didn’t explain Godric’s wish to “play.”
If I were brave enough, I would touch his shoulder, because it was thick, and powerful, and enticing—and so unlike my own. I just wasn’t sure if that was allowable. He hadn’t touched mine.
“I hope to be making love to you for forty years,” Godric remarked, his eyes soft.
I bobbed my head, trying to look welcoming. Feigning eagerness was beyond my acting skills. “Should I close my eyes now?” Macbeth’s edict went through my head again.
“Close your eyes?”
I opened them. “Miss Pentwhistle told me that a lady in my position closes her eyes and counts backward from one hundred.”
Godric smiled ruefully, straightened, and moved to sit down next to me. “Miss Pentwhistle was wrong.”
I sat up. His breeches were tented in the front, so she hadn’t been wrong about male anatomy.
“What would you do if you had never been informed about ladylike behavior?” Godric asked.
I couldn’t imagine that state. My nanny’s favorite admonishment—essentially the only sentence I had retained from my early childhood—was that young ladies were to be seen and not heard.
That spoke volumes for a proper lady’s right to advocate for her own desires: She wasn’t meant to have any.
Godric put a hand on my leg. I stared down at his fingers, so much larger than mine. They spanned the whole of my kneecap. “Our bedroom is a place where we needn’t pay any attention to propriety. Whatever you and I want to do together is proper, whatever that may be. There are no rules.”
I would describe his voice as yearning.
“Do you mind my touch?”
“Not at all,” I said. It was almost true, but I failed to sound convincing, even to my own ears.