Gigi came only after a good quarter hour. Her footsteps stopped outside the door. Then nothing happened. The silence unfolded and unrolled, shrouding him in its oppressive strata, chafing at his patience and nerves.
The doorknob finally turned, softly. She closed the door behind her but advanced no further, standing with her back against it, her feet just beyond the imprint of moonlight. He was reminded of a night long ago, in a different house that also belonged to Mrs. Rowland, where a similarly lustrous moon also silvered a long swath of the room—the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.
“Like old times, isn't it?” he said, after a full minute had passed.
More silence. “What do you mean?” she said at last, her voice slightly creaky.
“Don't tell me you've forgotten.”
She shifted, barely audible sounds of silk sliding on flesh and against the panels of the door. “So you were awake,” she said accusatorily.
“I'm a light sleeper. And I was on an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house.”
“You took advantage of me.”
He chuckled. “What did you expect, after you felt me up and down? I could've done more and you'd've let me.”
“I could've done more too. I almost climbed back into your bed that night. Would have been a short path to the altar.”
“You don't say,” he murmured. “What stopped you?”
“I thought it was dishonorable. Something beneath me. Ironic, isn't it?” She pushed away from the door and advanced until she stood by the bed, on the farther side from him, her silhouette limned against a nimbus of moonlight, the dark curves of her body just barely visible inside the diaphanous shadows of her peignoir.
He swallowed.
“I should have gone ahead and done it that night,” she said. “You'd have married me, knowing you'd been had. But you wouldn't have been infuriated enough to run to America, only disgusted enough to not be happy with me. We'd have been like every other couple in Society—a normal life, you see.”
“No,” he said, his voice harsher than he'd intended. “You should have done the honorable thing. Theodora married one day before we did. Had you a little more patience, when I returned to England for Easter, you could have had your cake and eaten it too.”
The bed dipped beneath her weight. She slid under the covers, safely on her side of the bed. “I think I've learned my lesson already.”
“Have you?”
She didn't answer. Instead, she asked a question of her own. “Why do you place so much importance on reaching financial parity with me?”
Because I am married to you, the richest woman in England after Victoria Regina, you idiot. What's a man who still dreams of fucking you to do?
He reached under the cover, grabbed her by the front of her peignoir, and yanked her toward him. She gasped. And gasped again as his teeth scraped the crook of her neck.
He rolled on top of her . . . groaning with the heavenliness of her under him. Since his return, he'd seen her naked. He'd climaxed inside her. But he had not allowed himself to feel her, the dense, smooth texture of her skin, the firm undulation of her body. He grabbed a fistful of her peignoir and pushed it upward. “Take it off.”
“No. You can do what you want perfectly well with it in place.”
“What I want is you naked. Without a stitch.”
“That wasn't part of our deal. You never said I had to disrobe for you.”
“What's the matter?” he said softly into her ear, enjoying her quiver. “Afraid to be naked under me?”
“It's not right. I'm not going to dishonor Freddie by allowing you any more liberties than I must.”
Suddenly he was enraged, at her obduracy and her obtuseness. Lord Frederick would make her about as happy as a clam in a bowl of bouillabaisse. He gripped her peignoir at her throat and tore it down its length, the shrill sszzzzz rudely rending the somnolent darkness. “There. Now if Lord Frederick asks, which is none of his business, you can tell him in all honesty that you didn't allow me any liberties.”
She panted, the sound of a woman unable to get enough air, her exhalations drowning out the muffled chirping of sleepless crickets in the garden.
He lowered himself onto her, the sensation of her skin against his at once shockingly familiar and un-nervingly new, as if he'd never left her bed all these years, as if this was only the second night of their honeymoon and he'd been staring at her all day, dying for the sun to set and a blessed, endless night to descend.
He was a fool. A fool to fall for her the first time. And a fool to come back now, when he already knew his weakness all too well, having wrestled with it every day of these past ten years.
Too late.
He drowned himself in the velvety feel of her, marveling at the way her skin slid over her clavicles with her every breath, kissing a trail along the top of her shoulder, reluctant to leave each square inch of her glorious skin, impatient to savor all of her.