“I come from a good family, and I brought a fat dowry.”
He frowned. “You do know you’re speaking arrant nonsense, don’t you? You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. I took one look at you across that ballroom, and I knew I’d met my destiny.”
“Oh,” she said breathlessly, desperate to keep her heart from taking wing and flying up into the heavens. None of this was exactly a declaration of love, but she now saw she’d badly miscalculated his emotional stake in this marriage. A trembling hand reached down for the sheet.
“Don’t.”
She met eyes ablaze with yearning. No matter how awkward she felt, sitting here without a stitch to cover her, she couldn’t deny him. She left the sheet where it was.
“So why did you marry me?” he asked.
Because I loved you so much, I felt likely to perish of it.
But although t
hey’d done so much to bridge the distance between them, admitting her love remained a step too far. Traces of her old shyness lingered, for all that she sat naked before him.
“I liked you.” That much she’d dare. “I still do.”
He arched questioning auburn eyebrows. “That’s a damned lukewarm reason for accepting a fellow.”
Stupid to blush, when she’d made no secret that she wanted congress with her husband. “You were a catch.”
He shook his head. “Not good enough. That season, you had a duke’s heir and a marquess after you, not to mention a couple of baronets who could buy and sell me ten times over.”
She ventured a little more honesty. “You were the only one who made my heart beat faster. And you were always so kind and gentle.”
He looked horrified. “You make me sound like a dashed milksop.”
She smiled. “No. There’s strength in your sweetness. You’re the bravest, best man I know. I was a naïve country girl when I accepted you, but I’ve never been sorry about my choice.”
He shifted as though her praise brought equal pleasure and embarrassment. “While you were smart and lovely, and I couldn’t believe my luck when you said yes. I’ve never regretted my choice either, but you were so pure and untouched, I feared my passion would terrify you.”
“I’ve always been stronger than you knew.”
“I see that now. But you trembled in my arms and cried the first time I came to you. And you seemed no more reconciled to my attentions by the time I left.”
“It was all so…overwhelming.” She was old enough now to see how her reticence had hurt him, broken the trust between them. Blast her shyness and her ignorance. “And I wasn’t sure what you wanted of me.”
“You didn’t like it?” he asked gently.
“At first, what you did was so outlandish, I was frightened. By the time you left, I’d started to enjoy our encounters.” She looked down into her lap to avoid his eyes. “I liked that you made me feel I was the center of your world.”
“You were.” His jaw squared with determination. “You are. You must know that by now. I wonder that you were uncertain of it then.”
Warmth flowed along her veins, feeding a frail optimism. He wouldn’t say these breathtaking things if he didn’t mean them. “You were always in such a hurry to leave afterward, I was sure I’d done something wrong.”
“Never.” Guilt darkened his expression. “But what I wanted was so primitive, so all-encompassing, I held back for fear of giving you a disgust for the act. And for me. I couldn’t trust myself not to turn to you again and again. Yet you felt so fragile in my arms, you deserved my care, not my fierceness.”
Her smile contained a fair dose of remorse, too. “And because you showed me such care, I felt you didn’t care.”
His hand tightened on the base of the bed until the knuckles shone white. “Never think I don’t care, Flick.”
She gave a broken laugh. “Edmund, it seems we’re both victims of our good intentions. If I’d known you wanted me, I’d have been braver. At least after the first time.”
He still looked troubled. “We didn’t know how to talk to one another then.”
“But we know better now.”