He would force it out of his wife, damn her silly hide. Ugly? Silly wench, did she have a broken fingernail?
He looked sleepily over at the clock. Nearly ten o’clock in the morning. And there was a lot of sunlight streaming through the windows. At least Victoria hadn’t closed and fastened all these draperies. He threw back the covers, rose, and stretched.
After he had shaved, grunting with displeasure at the cold water in the basin, now wishing he hadn’t dismissed Lizzie as he had Tom and Mrs. Ripple, he gritted his teeth and prepared to bathe himself with that same cold water. It was then that he saw the blood on his sex. Victoria’s blood. Slowly he walked from his bedchamber into hers. It was still very dark despite the strong sunlight. He unfastened the heavy brocade drapes and flung them back. He then walked to the bed and pulled back the covers. Her blood and his seed were dried splotches on the white sheet. His virgin wife. She hadn’t lied to him. She’d been a complete innocent.
And suddenly he remembered.
When he’d thrust through her maidenhead, he’d shouted aloud his relief—that he couldn’t have borne it if Damien had had her first.
He’d also made love to her three times and given her pleasure each and every time. Immense pleasure. Of that he was quite certain. He knew that many women feigned pleasure, but Victoria wouldn’t know how. She responded to him wildly for some remarkable but as-yet-unexplained reason, and he guessed it would be beyond her to feign anything.
She wouldn’t be able to forget those sensations he gave her, that pleasure he drowned her in. Nor would he let her. No matter how enraged she was at him, he now knew that he could control her with sex.
It was odd, this reversal of the natural order. It was normally women’s prerogative to use sex to get what they wanted from men. He grinned. Not so with his beautiful wife.
He was on the point of taking her water to add to his when he saw the washcloth in the basin. The cloth was stained with blood, as was the water in the basin. He hoped she hadn’t been frightened. He closed his eyes a pained moment, remembering his story to her about the bride who had used chicken blood on her wedding night to fool her husband. No, she probably hadn’t been scared to see her virgin’s blood. He felt a bounder, worse, like a barbarian who had hurt and raped a vestal virgin.
He hoped she wouldn’t be too angry with him this morning. He had, he supposed, meant what he’d shouted out during their lovemaking, but he was willing to lie, to say anything to make her forget those ghastly words. He thought of Victoria lying on her back, her eyes wild and vivid on his face as he plunged into her. It made him instantly hard.
He walked back into his bedchamber. If she was still angry with him, he would simply love her until she was screaming, her beautiful breasts heaving, her long legs tightening around his flanks. He tried to stop those images, for his body wouldn’t be reasonable about it.
“Randy goat,” he said to himself as he cleaned his teeth and dressed himself.
He ran Victoria to ground in the kitchen some thirty minutes later. She’d tied her hair back with a black velvet ribbon and wrapped one of Mrs. Ripple’s enormous aprons about her waist.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” he said with jovial optimism, immediately pulled her against him, and kissed her soundly beneath her left ear. “You’re making bread? Without me, the chef?” He turned her to face him and ignored her rigid expression. “I like the daub of flour on your nose,” he continued in what he hoped was a loverlike tone. “Cute.” He kissed the tip of her nose.
Victoria slowly pulled away from him. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look squarely at him. Every step she took reminded her of the previous long night. She was very sore. She lowered her head, unaware that she was turning quite red.
He grinned at her, and gently lifted her chin with his finger. “What is this, love? You are regretting your wifely state?”
And his perfidy washed over her again, and she ground her teeth.
“We leave for Cornwall tomorrow?”
He accepted her shift of topic, and her cold voice, and nodded. “Yes, right after luncheon.” He gave her one of his lovely white-toothed grins. “I can’t imagine that either of us will want to be up with the sun.” He didn’t expect a reply, and turned to fetch himself an apron. He tied it about his waist, washed his hands, then joined her beside the array of ingredients on the kitchen table.
She was behaving with more restraint than he deserved, or hoped for, for that matter. Sleeping dogs deserved to be left alone, he thought as he kneaded the bread dough. They worked companionably, in reasonably easy silence, for another ten minutes.
“What is that, pray?”
She was staring at the bread loaf he had fashioned. He laughed. “You don’t approve my artistic endeavors? Why, wife, I have shaped a very special loaf, just for you.”
“But it’s . . . it’s . . . “
“Too much for you, huh? Well, I call it my Statue of David, or if you prefer, the Statue of Your Husband.”
She stared at the dough man and the very large phallus Rafael had molded. Besides that ridiculous endowment, there was a wide smile on the dough mouth.
“Should you like more detail, Victoria? Ribs, for instance? Teeth? Perhaps something lower, maybe—”
“No! Goodness, are you completely lost to civilized manners? You are—”
“—desirous of making love with you again, Victoria. You have this effect on me. You daub flour on the tip of your nose and I’m gone with admiration and lust. Will you give me a good-morning kiss or a thank-you kiss for my artistic bread man?”
He grabbed her about the waist and lifted her. He swung her around, grinning up at her. “You know that the yeast should make our bread man even more impressive while he’s baking?”
Victoria felt overwhelmed. He was impervious, oblivious of her feelings to his own shocking dishonesty. Now he was holding her off the floor, jesting with her as if nothing at all had occurred, as if they were newlyweds and very much in love, which was utterly ridiculous, at least the love part. And that ludicrous, obscene dough man. She could just imagine how he would look after baking. And she was supposed to spread butter and honey on him and place him on her bread plate?