Chapter 39
He was careful with her, which she had expected, and slow, which she had not.
He entered her inch by inch, watching her face the whole time, with one forearm braced beside her head and his other hand under the small of her back, angling her up to him. She hissed at the stretch, which she was not proud of, and he stopped at once.
He stayed still with his forehead pressed against her shoulder, his whole body shaking from the effort. He did not move again until she had caught her breath and pulled him down.
“All right?”
“Do not stop.”
“Leonora.”
“I am telling you not to stop,” she pressed. “You have never once in five weeks failed to do exactly as I say, and I would be extremely disappointed if you started now.”
So he did not stop.
It was strange for a while, and then it was not strange, and somewhere in between she stopped bracing and began to move with him, and discovered that this altered everything.
“Slower,” she said at one point, and he slowed his pace. “Not that slow.”
“You are going to have to decide, wife.”
“I am one-and-twenty, I have been married for five weeks, and I have no notion of what I want,” Leonora said. “You are going to have to bear with me.”
“I have no one else in the world I would rather bear with.”
With that, Colin slid his arm further under her, and she stopped issuing instructions.
Then it changed.
It stopped being anything either of them was managing.
Leonora had read a great many books in a great many window seats, and not one of them had mentioned that it would be so close, that she would feel his breath on her face and his hand under her shoulder and the whole ruined side of his face at four inches, and that she would be able to watch him lose control.
“Look at me,” she breathed.
He looked at her.
“There.” She cupped the scarred side of his face in her palm, and he turned his head and pressed his lips to it.
The pleasure built the way weather built, and this time there was nothing patient in it at all.
Her heels dug into the back of his thighs. Her hands trailed down his shoulders and pressed flat against his back, and she felt everything he did travel up through her palms. He slid his hand under her knee at some point and changed the angle, and the world went briefly white at the edges.
“Colin!”
“There,” he panted against her ear. “There. Again.”
She cried out his name again.
She heard herself say a great many things after that, including a sentence she would think about with horror at breakfast, and Colin groaned something into her hair that she did not catch and would spend a week trying to reconstruct.
As it drew close, he cupped her cheek in his free hand and made her look at him, and she watched all of it leave his face: the arithmetic, the fifteen years, the carefulness.
“Colin—”
“I know.”
“I cannot—”
“You can,” he said. “Hold on to me.”
She held on to him, and he got his hand between them, and it took almost nothing after that.
It went through her from the inside out, longer and deeper than anything he had done to her in daylight, and she heard herself make a sound she would not have recognized as her own.
She felt him lose it a moment later, felt the whole strung length of him go, felt his mouth open against her shoulder and his hand close hard in her hair, and it was the first time in five weeks that Colin Walford had not been holding on to a single thing.
Afterward, neither of them could move at all.
Her hair was full of sawdust and would have to be dealt with. She had a splinter in one shoulder. There was a candle guttering on the sill that neither of them had the smallest intention of getting up for, and the beech was swaying slightly in the wind.
Colin found her hand and took it.
“Say something,” Leonora murmured.
“I cannot.”
“You must. It is the rule. You have made the longest speech of your life tonight and I have hardly said a word, and I am not going to be the one who talks us both down out of this tree.”
“I have no words at all,” Colin said to the ceiling. “That is the entire report. I am thirty years old, and there is nothing whatsoever in my head, and I should like to stay here until Thursday.”
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“I want to say something, and I want you to let me say it without stopping me.”
“Go on.”
“I have thought about this since the day we got married.” She was looking at the candles along the beam.
“Not the act per se—well, that as well, and you may be as pleased with yourself as you like in the morning—but what comes after. I have lain in the blue room for five weeks with a door on my left and thought about lying next to you afterward and having nothing to be careful about, and it turns out that is the part I wanted. The rest was extremely good, and I intend to have a great deal more of it. But this is the part.”
Colin did not say anything for a moment.
“I have been careful for fifteen years,” he rumbled. “I do not know how to stop.”
“You will learn. You have four days of practice already, and you are doing very well.”
“Four days.”
“You lit a path,” Leonora said. “That was you not being careful. It was the least careful thing anybody has ever done for me, and you did it with six lamps and no words.”
“Leonora.”
“Mm.”
“There is a nail in the doorframe.”
“I am aware. You told me about it in June, and I have thought about it a great deal since.” She turned her head. “Colin.”
“Mm.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” Colin said to the ceiling, with her hand in his. “I have loved you since the lake. I intend to say it out loud in front of your entire family Tuesday week, so that Evan may hear me do it.”
“He will be appalled.”
“He will be delighted. He will pretend to be appalled, and then he will attempt to buy something off me.”
Leonora laughed until the boards shook.
“Wife.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s get down,” Colin said. “There is a bed in the house that I have been avoiding for five weeks, and I should like to see what it is for.”
Leonora laughed. “In a moment.”
“Duchess, it is midnight, and there is a splinter in your shoulder.”
“There is. You may take it out downstairs, and I shall be extremely brave about it.” She rolled onto her side and put her hand flat on his chest, where his heart was still beating faster than it had any business to.
“In a moment. Nobody has ever been up here except you, and tomorrow there will be a house and a child and a housekeeper and a county. I would like eleven more minutes of the only room in England that has only ever had the two of us in it.”
Colin put his hand over hers and held it there.
“Eleven minutes,” he relented.
They took forty.