were right,” she said. “I felt left behind when Abby married Gil. When I went there for the christening of their baby just before Easter and then stayed for a more lengthy visit, I even felt a bit resentful, as though she had owed it to me to remain single and unhappy. I felt a little humiliated when I realized which way my thoughts were tending. I decided that when I came back here for the Season this year, I would marry at last.”
“You have legions of admirers,” he said. “Why not one of them? Why me?”
“I like them all,” she said. “I am even rather fond of most of them. Perhaps of all of them.”
“You do not like me?” he asked her. “You are not fond of me?”
She looked at him for a long time, with something of a frown. The light of the lanterns gave a rosy glow to her complexion and her forearms, which were not covered by her wrap. It made her dress look more like a deep rose pink. A reminder of his first sight of her after he arrived in London.
“To be honest, I do not know the answer to either question,” she said at last.
“Why do you want to marry me, then?” he asked her.
She drew breath and closed her mouth again. He waited.
“I think,” she said at last, “it is because I want you.”
Well, that was an unexpected answer. He guessed that she thought so too. He wondered what her cheeks would look like if the light were not already pink. It was clear she was talking about sex.
“In bed?” he said.
She turned her head away for a moment as though to examine the flowers, but she looked back into his face before she spoke. She had some courage, this woman he wanted to marry.
“Yes,” she said. “Virginity becomes tiresome, Mr. Thorne, when one is twenty-five. You have had a strange way of romancing me, if that is what you have been doing. It has been curiously effective, however. Now, though, I want you to take it a stage further. I want you to make love to me.”
“And you think I can do it better than any other man of your acquaintance?” he said. “You think I can give you pleasure?”
“Yes.” Her eyes wandered over him, across the breadth of his shoulders, down over his chest and even lower. She lifted her hands and spread them very lightly, very tentatively, over his chest. She took a step closer.
The evening air between them fairly sizzled. He had to remind himself of where they were, and, God damn it, it was far too public a place. The sounds of human revelry were not far distant.
“And in return,” she said, raising her eyes back to his, “you will have a duke’s daughter and sister for a countess, Mr. Thorne. Someone who has learned from a master—her own brother—how to use her aristocratic identity and upbringing to command respect and obedience. Someone who has learned from her mother how to run an aristocratic home and how to manage a houseful of servants and how to lead and entertain neighbors. Someone who knows that her primary duty as a wife, at least for the first few years, is to give birth to sons and raise them to know their duty and their place in society. It is what you want, is it not? And why you chose me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you can have me,” she said. “And I can have what I want. But answer something else first. Am I just an aristocrat with all the right qualifications in your eyes, Mr. Thorne?”
He thought about it. He did not need long. “No,” he said.
“What else am I, then?” she asked. Her hands were still against his chest, though they were sliding higher, toward his shoulders.
“I want you,” he said. “In bed. Very much in bed. I want you naked. I want to arouse every inch of you. And I want to be inside you and to pleasure you until you cry out with the sheer pain and wonder of it.”
Well, she had asked.
He set his hands on either side of her waist. It was a very small waist through the loose folds of her gown. He could feel the flare of her hips below it. Very nice.
“Pain?” she said.
“Pain,” he said again. “Or what will feel very near to pain until it bursts into something quite different. If it is done right, that is.”