Once Upon a Tower

Page 43

Edie told herself that marriage involved compromises.
If only she hadn’t lied . . . Her stomach clenched every time she thought of it. But if she confessed, he might think she was incapable. And there was that terrible word, frigid. It made a woman sound like an icehouse. What if she was? What if she could never achieve all that noise Layla described?
She wasn’t a very loud person ordinarily.
But if she told the truth now, would Gowan make her see a doctor about the pain? She couldn’t imagine telling anyone. Well, she could tell Layla, if only they were still in London.
The whole thing was a mess.
Twenty-two
Another interminable morning passed in the carriage, more or less indistinguishable from the day before. Edie kept to her corner of the carriage all morning, ignoring the stultifying conversation Gowan was conducting with a bailiff. She certainly had nothing to contribute. Instead, she brooded over what had happened the night before. Or rather, what hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t so much that she had failed at the petit mort yet again; she was beginning to believe that it wasn’t likely to happen for her. But she felt awful about the way she had handled it. Lying to her husband. Dissembling—
She cut herself off. It was just plain wrong, and she knew it. And—she peeked at Gowan—she was starting to like him. That was a good thing for a wife to feel toward her husband. The aversion she felt about the marriage bed? That was not a good thing.
She had to tell him the truth.
After the carriage had stopped for luncheon (served and eaten at a galloping pace), she put her hand on Gowan’s arm. “I would like to speak to you.” She said this in front of Bardolph and a footman, because if she didn’t speak before servants, she would never speak at all.
“Certainly.” Gowan had been about to escort her from the dining room, but he paused expectantly.
“In the carriage,” she clarified.
“Yes, that would be more efficient.” He turned to leave, nodding to his entourage to follow, thus displaying a deafness to nuance that was, to Edie’s mind, the distinguishing trait of his sex. She didn’t budge.
“Alone, Gowan.” If her husband consulted with Bardolph before he agreed to this, she would . . .
She wasn’t sure what she would do, but it would be violent.
The duke glanced at her, one eyebrow raised ever so slightly, then at Bardolph, who offered a brisk little bow and walked away. Only then did she realize that she’d just won a skirmish in the war shaping up between herself and Bardolph.
But the factor was nothing if not tenacious. She left Gowan to instruct his retinue as to the afternoon’s work, and made her way to the carriage. But when she climbed in, she discovered three ledgers had been placed on the seat for her husband to review. She poked her head back through the door and a footman leapt to attention.
“These will travel in another carriage,” she said, dropping them into his arms.
“His Grace said . . .” the boy bleated.
So the war wasn’t just between herself and Bardolph; it had a wider scope. “Her Grace has just informed you otherwise,” she told him.
Then she settled back inside the carriage to wait.
Moments later, Gowan strode past a footman trotting away with the ledgers he had intended to review during the afternoon’s journey. By rights, he should feel irritated. He deplored time lost sitting in a carriage.
But the truth was that he felt only anticipation.
Of course, he’d known from the moment he’d first seen Edie that she posed a threat to his ordered life. One cannot succumb to such a primal lust for a woman that one marries her before a month has passed, and not understand that routines would be disrupted, at least initially. Time with Edie could not be counted toward his obligations to the estate. But, on the other hand, if he indulged himself now, perhaps he would stop wanting her every minute of the day. With time, he thought, he could relegate his body’s need for her to the evening. Or at least to once during the day.
He didn’t believe it for a minute.
Bloody hell.
He had responsibilities. People depended on him. Whole estates. The banking system.
He dimly remembered caring about all that. But right now he only had to think about Edie to feel a clench of desire flare in his body with mad ferocity. One look at her and he wanted to dismiss Bardolph and throw the ledgers into the fire.
He cursed again. If he didn’t get control over himself, he’d discover that his days were spent in her bed, losing himself in her body. Falling for her. Worshipping her. Drinking himself to death if she played him false, the way his father . . .
That thought steadied him. Lust was nothing more than a bodily urge. It had its place in life and needed to be kept to that realm. Instead of slamming the carriage door and pulling her beneath him—servants be damned—Gowan forced himself to settle onto the opposite seat and gave Edie a measured, gentlemanly smile, reaching up and giving the roof a considered tap so the coachman would know they were ready.
Her smile, from under the brim of her bonnet, was demure and utterly adorable. Just like that, carnal desire surged in a wave that dragged him under to drown. Work could damn well wait. He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, appalled that he had almost blurted out, Naked. I need you to be naked.
One didn’t say that to a duchess in a carriage. He curbed the demand, but the emotion behind it slipped out: “Someday, I should like to love you in the morning.”
An emotion flashed across her eyes that he couldn’t interpret. Without answering, she undid the ribbons under her chin. As he watched, she took off her bonnet and dropped it on the seat beside her. Could it be that she had read his mind, and meant to unclothe herself? The carriage was well onto the post road so no one could open the door.
A cascade of lustful images filled his head—only to evaporate when she leaned forward and tapped him on his knee with a slender gloved finger.
“Bardolph,” she said, lowering her voice to an absurdly masculine growl, “I intend to tup my wife tomorrow morning from seven fifteen to seven forty-five, so be good enough to delay our departure to take account of the event.” Then she gave him an impish grin.
Gowan was so surprised he burst into laughter.
“Well, thank God,” Edie said, pulling off her gloves and placing them beside her hat. “I was beginning to fear that you’d lost your sense of humor entirely.”
He frowned.
“I do know that you have one,” she said, with a wicked little grin. “It’s too late to pretend that your brain is devoted entirely to the admirable task of managing all those eel traps.”
“I shall never live down the eels, shall I?” Gowan asked, stretching out his legs so that they fell on either side of her slippers. He’d made up his mind. He meant to have his saucy wife at some point during their journey. She had arranged the afternoon so that he had no work on which to concentrate.
Very well: he would concentrate on her.
“You brought it on yourself,” Edie said with a delightful chuckle. “I fully expect that at the age of eighty, I’ll still be pulling you away from fishy reports and teasing you into a display of humor.”
“A sense of humor?” he repeated lazily. “Are you quite certain I have one?”
She nodded. “I am sure. Although the wry, funny part of you disappears during talk of wheat and eels, and instead I find myself looking at a man who’s finding no pleasure in life.”