Her ghost of a smile cheered him. “We have.” Then her face darkened again, like the sun going behind a cloud. “But I don’t know if I can ever . . . I mean, I had hoped that after all these years, the thought of marital relations wouldn’t panic me so.” She blushed. “I do want to be with you . . . I like all the beginning parts, the kissing and the touching. It’s just later on—”
“It’s all right,” he said, seeing the anxiety come into her face again. “We will take it slow, get through it together.” He refused to believe that his bold and sassy wife couldn’t conquer this with a little help.
He caressed her cheek. “Tell me what to do to make it better.”
Her breath hitched in her throat. “I don’t know. Everything is fine until you get on top of me, and I remember the orangery and the Vile Seducer and I . . . go a little mad.”
Thinking of how well she’d reacted when he’d been behind her, and below her, he said, “What if I don’t get on top of you?”
She blinked. “What do you mean? How else can you . . . can we . . .”
A rueful smile escaped him. “I forget that you can still be as na?ve and innocent as any virgin.”
“That’s not true,” she said mutinously. “I know things.”
Her taking umbrage amused him. He would never figure Clarissa out, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “You know some things, yes. Clearly not others. Like the fact that a man doesn’t have to be on top of a woman to bed her.”
The hint of hope in her gaze struck him to the heart. “He doesn’t?”
“No, minx, he doesn’t. The woman can be on top, can make love to the man, just as easily as he can make love to her.”
Her brow knitted as if she were trying to work it out. “I can’t see . . . I don’t understand—”
“Shall I show you?”
He regretted the words when she tensed up and glanced away. “I—I don’t know . . .”
“Clarissa,” he said, catching her head in his hands and drawing her gaze back to his. “We won’t ever do anything you don’t want to. We can stop in the middle as often as you want, as many times as you want—”
She raised an eyebrow at that.
“I’m not saying it won’t frustrate me, because it will. But I imagine it’s just as frustrating for a woman not to have a whole and fulfilling life with her husband because she’s afraid of the past.”
“Yes.” She squared her shoulders. “I think you’re right. And I do want children, after all.”
She would do this to have children. Somehow that made him sad. He wanted her to do it for herself. For him.
But no matter; he would work with what he had. “My point is, we have plenty of time to do this however we want. For tonight, all I ask is if you’ll let me demonstrate how it works. Nothing more. We don’t have to actually do what I show you. Or we can, and the minute you balk, we’ll stop. The minute you’re frightened, we’ll stop.”
Her gaze turned hard. “I once heard that a man can’t stop. That it’s almost impossible to stop.”
He snorted. “That’s a lie men tell women to get under their skirts. Have I not stopped more than once? Was I not fully aroused this afternoon?”
She sucked in a ragged breath. “Yes. But you said you couldn’t keep going through that.”
“I was wrong.” He buried his fingers in her loosely pinned hair. “I can go through that as many times as it takes to make you comfortable. I only ask that you talk to me. To tell me what you’re feeling, what you want, what you—”
“Kiss me, Edwin. Just stop talking and kiss me.”
He didn’t need another invitation. He took her mouth, feeling all at sea. While he was glad he now knew why she’d shied from him, it was hard to realize she both wanted and feared him. He hated having her fear him.
So when her lips parted to let him in, it touched him deeply. His determined wife was always willing to “try”—and now that he realized how difficult even that was for her, he couldn’t be insulted by it.
They kissed, his heart thundering in his chest, her breath stuttering against his. She tugged at his coat, so he shrugged it off and let her unbutton his waistcoat while he spread openmouthed kisses down her cheek and jaw and throat. He pulled off her coat and waistcoat—odd to be doing that—and then tugged her shirt out of her breeches so he could slip his hands beneath the linen to fondle her breasts.
“Yes,” she murmured. “I like that. It feels wonderful when you do it.” She pulled his shirt out, and ran her hands beneath the fabric and all over his bare chest. “You’re so hard, so strong. It thrills me. And scares me.”
“Your softness does the same thing to me. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you.”
“You won’t. In my head, I know that.” She stretched up to brush a kiss to his lips. “It’s only my body that doesn’t know it.”
“Perhaps you should show your body that there’s nothing to fear.” Taking her by the hand, he drew her over to the window seat that overlooked the garden. He shucked off his trousers and his drawers and sat down, letting his shirt cover his erection. “When I’m afraid of something, it always helps me to get a good look at it. So perhaps if you get a good look at my . . . er . . .”
“Cock?”
He blinked. “You know that word?”
“I learned it from Yvette’s slang dictionaries. That’s what men call their . . . their things, isn’t it? Cocks?”