Once Upon a Tower

Page 48

That afternoon the coach pulled over in a tiny town square. Gowan escorted her into a good-sized hall and stationed a footman outside the door to make certain she wasn’t interrupted.
Edie bent over her strings with a solid sense of purpose. If she put in two hours’ hard work on the Boccherini, she wouldn’t feel so restless in the coach. And she had decided to bring the score with her in order to go over it a few times, just as if it were a ledger.
An hour or so later, Gowan slipped back into the hall. She raised her head and saw him, but her fingers were nimbly following a thundering cascade of notes, so she looked back at the score.
He was still there a half hour later, his arms thrown to the back of the bench, staring at the ceiling. She drew the last note to a pause. Gowan brought his chin down slowly. “Are you finished?”
Was it her imagination, or did he sound regretful?
“No,” she said firmly. “I shall take every second of my allotted two hours.” But she was weary of the Boccherini. Instead, she raised her bow and began the opening notes to Dona Nobis Pacem.
When the final note died, she began the piece again. She had crowded the third and fourth sections. She needed peace in her heart.
But her bowing knew the truth, and she began speeding up again. She had no peace inside her at the moment. Gowan was still staring at the beams far above them, and all she could see was the powerful line of his jaw.
She usually immersed herself in the music. But this time she let the music be an accompaniment as she feasted on him: the strong column of his neck, his broad shoulders, and the glint of red in his hair. The extraordinary brilliance of him. The incisiveness that was an integral part of him. The way he ruled an empire without raising his voice. The way he had bent his life around her passion for music.
She was lucky. She was so lucky, barring that one thing.
Her eyes drifted to his legs, spread wide as he sprawled on the bench. It felt wicked to ogle him when he was swept away by the music. When the piece ended, she went straight into a Telemann sonata, hoping not to stir him. His eyes were closed, so perhaps he was dozing.
For the first time, she found herself wondering what it would be like to lick him. She could imagine her tongue tracing patterns over his flat stomach, even lower perhaps.
When she was on the final measures, he opened his eyes and then stood, stretching. She felt as if spangles of fire were racing through her in time to the music. If only they could be like this all the time: alone, with no Bardolph and no reports.
She slowly lifted her bow from the strings.
Twenty-five
By a week later, Gowan was fairly certain that he was losing his mind.
Edie spent the days tucked in the corner of the carriage with a score. At one point, she actually declared in a surprised tone that she now understood his method of traveling.
“Normally I would sit in a coach laughing with Layla while my father rode outside. But even without an instrument I have made astonishing strides on this score.” Then she bent her head over the score again, and he had to fight not to throw her pages out the window.
She may be concentrating, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t stop looking at her. Over the hours and days and miles, he had studied everything from her delicate little nose to the tiny dent in very middle of her lower lip. When she reached a difficult part in the score, she would worry her lower lip with even white teeth.
He wanted to bite that lip. He wanted to throw himself on his knees in front of her and push up her skirts. Push her onto the seat and . . .
If things were different, Gowan would lay Edie on the carriage seat and kiss every inch of her.
He would throw himself down on his back and lift her on top of him. He would . . . It wasn’t pleasant to spend the day ravaged by desire, knowing full well that his wife did not share the feeling.
Poor Edie had had a terrible time accommodating him. He knew it, and yet it didn’t stop him from succumbing to lust. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her long, pale legs and the luxurious fullness of her breasts. She sat there in the corner of the carriage, chewing on a pencil, then making sudden marks on the score, oblivious to him, and he could scarcely breathe because of the intensity of his hunger.
Knowing that making love hurt her made him feel like a brute. The second, third, the fourth times, her body had gone rigid when he entered, and a whimper had broken from her lips that made his blood run cold.
But even so, he longed to thrust into her warmth. A mere glance at her bent neck, and lust seared his groin. Yet her orgasms were paltry, thin affairs compared to the way his body caught fire, shuddering as he gave her everything he had.
She . . .
Edie was a mystery to him, and it didn’t help that he knew damned well that most men thought all women were mysteries. Even before her monthly courses arrived, he was already putting away the fantasies he’d had that someday she might pull up her skirts and seduce him, riding him to the jostle of the carriage wheels.
Edie wouldn’t care for that. She remained primly in place under him when they made love. She froze at the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside; he couldn’t imagine that she would welcome caresses in the daylight, in a carriage.
Except that reminded him of the way she had trembled when he touched her after the Chuttle ball. She seemed to think that he had lost his sense of humor, but he would say she had lost something as well.
Perhaps that was the nature of marriage. You started out enchanted with each other’s sense of humor and responsiveness . . . and then real life intervened. But everything in him revolted against accepting that notion. The sensual Edie he had first met could not have disappeared, leaving a woman uninterested in making love.
It wouldn’t bother him in the least to make love during her courses, but she was fastidious. He hated the way she dried him with a sheet, as if she were rubbing down a horse.
It emphasized how much their intimacy was a failure.
Failure.
It felt better to acknowledge that, if only to himself. Something didn’t feel right. It wasn’t all he’d hoped . . . not what the poets described. Even in the depths of pleasure, he felt as if she were doing him a favor. He even suspected that she was thinking about music while he was shuddering over her.
The worst of it was that he felt as if Edie wasn’t really his. She laughed and talked, and she wore his ring, but he had failed to imprint himself on her. When her courses were over, things would have to change.
Still, it would only make things worse if he tried to persuade her into intimacies that she wasn’t ready for. He had no idea how long these female complaints lasted. Would it be another week? A few days?
When they reached Berwick-upon-Tweed three days later, Lady Gilchrist joined their carriage, and he even felt jealous of her, of his own mother-in-law, because Edie was so blindingly happy to see her. She and her stepmother sat together, holding hands, throughout the afternoon, until they stopped for the night at the Bumble and Berry, a mere two-hour drive from Craigievar. He didn’t want to introduce Edie to the castle and its residents in the dark, so he sent Bardolph and most of his retinue ahead, but the three of them and their private servants stopped to rest.
After supper, they bade each other a genial good night in the corridor of the inn and retired to separate chambers. But Gowan lay awake, thinking about his marriage.
The next morning he entered his wife’s chamber and sat down on the bed. Edie was just waking up, her hair tousled and her eyes heavy-lidded and languorous. He choked back the lust that flooded his body, leaving him with an ever-present erection, and asked, “Are your courses over, Edie?”