impersonally as he could, when what he wanted was to bury himself in her again and again and again.
“Why shouldn’t it have happened?” Leah asked, bewilderment coming to the fore. “It was beautiful, and ordained by God, and one of the few pleasures any married person is entitled to expect of his or her mate.”
Beautiful—and potentially tragic.
“But not us,” Nick said, firing the towel across the room with unnecessary force. “We’re not entitled to that. I am not entitled to that.”
“But, Nicholas, why not?”
“I could get you with child, even if I don’t spend inside your body,” Nick said wearily. “I wish it were not so, Leah. I desperately wish it were not so, but I was honest about my terms when you agreed to marry me. I am profoundly sorry to have breached my word to you as far as I have, and I can only hope there won’t be consequences we both regret.”
“I do not understand you,” Leah said in quiet misery. “You are a sumptuous lover, Nicholas, and I will not, not ever, regret what has passed between us here tonight. I will instead resent until my last day that you deny us both what is our right.”
She flopped back down to the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.
He had hurt her, hurt her in the one area a spouse’s trust and protection ought to be inviolate, and the need to comfort her was a living, writhing misery in Nick’s soul.
He hadn’t the right. He also hadn’t the right to stalk from the bed and leave her even more alone than she felt now.
And he hadn’t the courage to ask her if she wanted him to leave.
So he waited until Leah fell asleep then carefully folded himself around her once more, and like a thief in the night stole what consolation from her he could, while darkness hid his anguish.
***
“Is it time to rise?” Leah asked, blinking.
“Not yet,” Nick said. “There’s tea on the hearth. Shall I fetch you a cup?”
He was polite, at least. They’d spent the previous day being so polite Leah’s teeth nigh ached with it, and then last night in his sleep, Nick had held her desperately close.
“Fetch us both a cup.” Leah pushed her braid over her shoulder and wrestled the pillows behind her back. “How are you on this day, Nicholas?”
He rose from the bed, naked—at least he wasn’t going to deny her that much. “I feel like I felt when Ethan was sent north to school: bewildered, powerless to stop someone I love and rely on from being taken away.” He brought the whole tray to the bedside table and sat on the mattress, his back to Leah.
“You have known a bucketload of loss,” Leah said. She wrestled the bedclothes aside and knee-walked over to Nick, wrapping her arms around his shoulders for a brief hug. He tolerated it, closing his eyes on a sigh.
“Let’s drink this in bed,” Nick suggested, maybe by way of an olive branch. “Soon enough we’ll be up and about, dressed in sobriety and grief.”
“Maybe at first, but you grieve in proportion to how you loved, and eventually, the love pushes back through the loss.” She knew this. If it was all he’d allow her to give him, she’d offer it freely.
Nick settled back against his pillows and sipped his tea.
“You speak such eloquent words, Wife. Nonetheless, I am royally out of charity with my papa, and that is hardly worthy of me or the life he lived.”
Of course he’d be angry, and Nick was not comfortable with anger in any sense.
“You think I wasn’t wroth with my mother for leaving me so soon after my child died? It frightens us to be without our parents, whether they were doing much parenting before they died or not. Nicholas?”
“Wife?”
Wife—that was something.
“For today, don’t shut me out. I know you are displeased and upset over what passed between us in this bed, but you bury your father today, and that must take precedence over our troubles. Your family will need to lean on you, and…” She looked away, self-conscious, yet unwilling to back down. “I am inviting you to lean on me.”
“I have leaned on you.” Nick reached out a long arm and let the backs of his fingers drift over her cheek. “And, Leah, I am so damned sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night. You are not to blame.”