building that ache of not-really-pain until she heard someone moan to the rhythm of it and realized it was her. He gave her his weight again then and pounded into her until something exploded inside her and she went slack with pain become pleasure too intense for words, even mental words. He held deep and she felt a gush of heat at her very core.
The marriage, she thought needlessly as she listened to the beat of her heart slowing and felt his slow with it, was consummated. She was Gabriel’s wife. He was her husband. Until death did them part. It seemed a lovely, lovely thought. Not so much the death part of it, but the sense of eternity. That they belonged together forever and ever.
He withdrew from her and moved off her after a few minutes, and she regretted it even though he was a heavy man. But he had an arm about her shoulders and turned her against him. He was hot and sweaty. So was she. The sunlight from the window slanted warm across their bodies, just missing their faces.
She was so, so glad they had done this in daylight. She wondered if the family, the wedding party, was still at Archer House. She was almost sure they would be. How strange that life was proceeding normally there.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked.
“No.” He had, but it had not really been pain. Not as other pains were. That was impossible to explain in words, however. “No, Gabriel.”
He turned onto his back, his arm still about her, and bent one leg to set his foot on the mattress. He rested the back of his free hand over his eyes. And he slept, his breathing becoming deep and even.
It was almost—oh, not quite, but almost—the loveliest moment of the consummation. They were husband and wife in bed together, and he had made love to her and then fallen asleep.
Jessica smiled, turned her face to rest against his shoulder, and closed her eyes.
One’s wedding day was supposed to be the happiest day of one’s life.
She had just become the quintessential bride. For in her case it was surely true.
Eighteen
Gabriel was gazing up at the ceiling, thinking about his father. There was a time—it went on for years after he had been taken to Brierley to live—when his grief had been a raw wound, a daily ache of longing, an almost nightly anguish, with sleep elusive. How could his papa have been so very different from Uncle Julius, he had wondered then, and from Philip? His uncle had not been unkind to Gabriel, just . . . indifferent. He had been an abrupt, autocratic, impatient man who seemed to lack all finer feelings, even with his wife. Especially with her, perhaps. It had been difficult for Gabriel to believe that Uncle Julius and his papa had been brothers.
The intensity of that early grief had faded over time. But he had never forgotten how much his father had loved him, how much he had loved his father. When he had gone to America, he had transferred some of that love to Cyrus.
He missed them both today. But for his father he felt some of the raw ache his childhood self had felt when he was led away from the cemetery beside the vicarage where they had lived, and he had understood, perhaps for the first time, that he would never see his papa again. Never. Never had seemed an unfathomable expanse for his nine-year-old self. It still did today.
His father had not been at his wedding.
Or his mother. But he had known her only through the stories his father had told of her—and those Cyrus had told him. The rawness of loss had not been so immediate with her. His father had once told him that he had cried inconsolably for a whole week after her death.
“A penny for your thoughts,” a soft voice said from beside him, and he turned his face toward Jessica’s.
It was very close. His arm was about her. Her head was nestled against his shoulder. Her eyes were dreamy with sleep. Her dark hair, which he had so thoroughly brushed not long ago, was spread about her in a disordered mass. He had pulled the top sheet over them, but beneath it they were both still naked—except for her pearl necklace, he realized for the first time. He could feel her, soft and warm, all down his side.
And now someone else belonged to him. Just to him.