With a quick, gentle squeeze of each foot, Press tucked my feet beside him on the hassock.
“Did you know that you’re a queen, my love?” Leaning forward, he touched my hair.
I shook my head, already a bit silly with champagne. He’d greeted me with the first glass after I’d finished putting the children’s toys away. “I’m just the. . . .” I considered for a moment. My mother-in-law had been the queen of Bliss House, and Eva Grace, napping in her trundle bed in the nursery a few feet from one-year-old Michael’s crib, was certainly the princess. Where did that leave me? My pedigree was respectable, as Virginia pedigrees went. My father was a Carter, even though he owned an office-supply store, and my mother’s family had moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia before the Revolutionary War. But I was just plain Charlotte Frances Carter, daughter of a merchant from Clareston, Virginia, and hadn’t come from money as Preston had. There were people—people in my own family, in fact—who weighted pedigree far more significantly than money, and believed that Olivia had encouraged our marriage because pedigree was something that she and the Bliss family lacked. But my aunts hadn’t really understood Olivia. She hadn’t cared at all about such things.
I felt languorous, even a little sleepy, and I suspected that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I didn’t care. Press hadn’t been himself, but more opinionated, tense, and somehow bolder since Olivia’s death, and I’d been so occupied with the children that I was happy to have this playful, attentive Press to myself.
“I’m more like the daughter of a baronet. I don’t know what that would be. A baronetess?”
“No. You’re a queen. My mother adored you, and she always told me that I didn’t treat you nearly as well as you should be treated.”
His words made me happy. That day I was still such a girl, and the wine—at first surprisingly bitter, yet pleasing on my tongue—had given me the feeling of being on a honeymoon again. His watchful brown eyes still regarded me with a proprietary sense of both pride and indulgence that I identified as true love. At thirty-one, he was four years older than I and, when the weather was fine, kept himself trim with early-morning rowing on the James. I’ve described him as compact, and while his shoulders were square and facial features quite blunt, he was not a small man. He was only an inch shorter than my unladylike height of five feet, nine inches. His “golden goddess,” he called me, as though I were Kim Novak or a blond Bergman.
He kissed me again, his hand covering the back of my bare neck, his fingers sliding up into my hair. (I’d had my hair cropped stylishly short to keep Michael from constantly pulling on it.) Tired as I was, I couldn’t help but respond. I had been a virgin when we married, and my attraction to Press showed no signs of abating. He was deeply sensual. I saw his effect on other women, too, though I never questioned his faithfulness. Later you may wonder at my na?veté, but try not to judge me too harshly.
I almost stopped him as he unbuttoned the cotton blouse so beautifully ironed by Marlene, our housekeeper, and slipped his hand inside. But I remembered that we were alone. The house was ours, and our children were asleep, and the birds were noisy outside the open window, and the champagne was pleasing on our twining tongues.
Finally he pulled back and stood to help me from the chair. When I tried to stifle an unexpected yawn, he smiled. I giggled like a teenager. I was as in love with him at that moment as I ever had been. His faintly olive skin was also flushed, and I only felt a tiny amount of the embarrassment that I would have felt a few weeks before at being half-undressed in such a public room, the doors open to both the garden and Bliss House’s enormous central hall. I felt brave and desirable and voraciously needful of what we were about to do there. As he led me to the largest sofa (brocade chrysanthemums in varying shades of blue—I’ve long since gotten rid of it), I tripped, dizzy with heat and wine, but he caught and steadied me.
I had a fleeting thought, wondering if it would always be like this, but I knew the children would soon wake, and the staff and Nonie, the woman who had raised me and was our children’s nanny, would return, and our lovemaking would again be confined to my bedroom or his. But then the thought was gone, and I asked for more to drink. Press laughed and said there was no more for me, but that he had something else I’d like, and I thought him terribly wicked.