She bolted straight, barely remembering to hang on to her blanket. “What? But Bridget was supposed to wake me up at eight.”
“She came by at eight. But you were still fast asleep so I dismissed her.”
She blinked. “You still were here at eight?”
“Yes, sleeping.”
“Bridget saw the two of us together?”
He tapped his riding crop against the top of the footboard, his tone mock patient. “It’s quite forgivable these days, you know, to be found in bed with one’s spouse. I’m sure Bridget would find the strength to accept it.”
She only heated more, feeling flustered and gauche.
At least she didn’t need to hide the hairpins or the buttons from Bridget anymore, as the latter had already seen what all that pin-tossing and button-ripping had led to.
“Well,” she said—and didn’t know what else to say.
Tongue-tied, too.
Fitz tilted his head. “Are you quite all right?”
Would he be, if he knew he had only six months with Mrs. Englewood?
And what did she have to say for herself, going after him like a pack of wolves?
“I—” She looked down to see strands of her hair tumbling over her shoulders. Such a strange sight: She never had her hair loose except for drying it after a bath. “You were right all those years ago, when you suggested that I was curious about the act itself. I guess it was past time for me to have a go at it.”
“Sore?”
“Negligibly so. You?”
She realized the stupidity of the last word the moment it was uttered, but it was too late.
He tried not to smile and didn’t quite succeed. “Not at all. I’m perfectly well.”
The playful curve of his lips, the teasing light in his eyes—she’d always wanted him to look at her like that. She didn’t know whether the pain in her chest was the anticipation of losing him or the expansion of new hope cracking through the barricades.
She cleared her throat. “I was just asking since you didn’t seem to have left for your ride yet.”
“I was waiting for you to wake up. Didn’t seem right to go anywhere before I’d spoken to you.”
He rounded the corner post of the bed and came toward her. She hiked the blanket up to her nose. He pushed it down, but only so that he could take her chin between his fingers and turn her face.
“Best choose something with a high collar today,” he said.
She did not understand him until she was alone again, sitting before her vanity. She examined her reflection in the mirror for any outward differences, something that might cause pedestrians to stop on the sidewalk and whisper to each other, Look, there goes a woman freshly plucked.
And that was when she saw the lover’s mark on her neck.
Look, there goes a woman laid something proper.
Many newlyweds’ first dinners were disasters. But Venetia was an old hand at managing a household and the Duke and Duchess of Lexington’s first dinner, a small, intimate affair for family and select friends, proceeded without a single snag.
Venetia and her husband had invited Helena to stay with them, starting this very night. Helena had accepted, her mind already busy, trying to think of a way to take advantage of the change.
“You are scheming something,” said Hastings.
The man was beginning to read her all too easily, as if she were a children’s alphabet primer. She looked longingly toward the other occupants of the drawing room, hoping someone would saunter by. But as was usually the case, once Hastings had cornered her, no one else came.
“I don’t advise you on how to live your life, Hastings. You should return the same courtesy.”
“I would. Except if I were to set off a scandal, you wouldn’t need to marry me. If you did, however, I wouldn’t get off the hook so easily. I’m practically part of the family and people will look at me and wonder why I didn’t step in and save you.” He paused dramatically. “But I’d rather not marry you.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t?”
“I’m an old-fashioned man, Miss Fitzhugh. The little woman ought to be, well, little, to start. She ought to agree with everything I say. And she ought to look at me with stars in her eyes.”
“And yet your fictional bride would have had you for breakfast.”
His gaze raked her. “That’s why I keep her hands bound,” he said slowly. “And her person fictional.”
Her breaths came in shallowly. “Then don’t marry me. I won’t cry my little heart out.”
“But I will, when it comes to that. I won’t have any choice. So don’t push matters to their logical end, I beg you, Miss Fitzhugh. You are the only one who can stop our marriage from taking place.”
And with that, he rose to accost the dowager duchess at the other end of the room.
Fitz had never thought his wife beautiful—pretty, yes; lovely, at times; but not beautiful. How blind he’d been, like a novice gardener who only understood the gaudy spectacle of roses and dahlias.
The light lingering on her smooth, fine-grained skin. The way she held her head, her throat, slender and elegant. The courtesy and interest in her eyes, as she listened to her neighbor.