looked him over in that cool way of hers, and he resisted the urge to shift his feet. Bloody woman always saw more than she ought to.
“Were you talking to yourself in the mirror?”
His lips pressed together. “If you have to ask, you must have heard me.” Christ, please say she did not hear the specifics. “So I’m going to assume the question is rhetorical.”
She rolled her eyes and began to unbutton her dressing gown. “Fine. I won’t ask you what you were muttering about.”
You could. It might be interesting. Say, Pop, fancy a quick shag for old time’s sake?
“I simply was trying to make conversation to ease this awkwardness,” she said.
“Commendable but futile.” He fluffed a pillow, and then another, punched it actually. “I don’t think there is any good way to ease—” His voice strangled to a halt as she shrugged out of the dressing gown. “You must be jesting.”
Her head lifted. “What?” She tossed the gown upon a chair back and frowned at him from across the bed. “Good lord, Win, don’t look at me like that. I’m perfectly respectable.”
“Respectable,” he repeated as if every muscle in his body weren’t quivering. As if right this moment his cock wasn’t rising. Shit. He sat at the edge of the bed before he betrayed the proof of his interest. Damn her eyes, but she was wearing his nightshirt. The very one she’d stolen from him so many years before.
For a moment, all he could see was Poppy, naked and wriggling against him in bed on their wedding night. Win took a bracing breath. That damned nightshirt. She’d worn it almost every night of their marriage. But he didn’t think she’d be so heartless as to wear it now. It was his shirt.
“That thing is so old and worn it has holes in it,” he said through his teeth. Inconvenient holes that showed glimpses of things he could not have.
Her hands went to her hips. “It’s comfortable.”
“It’s a rag.” A nearly transparent one at that. Sweet mother of… What was a negligee compared to seeing one’s wife draped in one’s own, very thin and very revealing, nightshirt? Hells bells, it would almost be better if she were naked. He fisted the sheet. Maybe he ought to ask for a comparison just to be sure.
“You’re being ridiculous.” She tossed the covers back and flopped onto her side of the bed. “And hurtful.”
Her slim arm whipped out from under the covers to lower the lamp, and the room plunged into darkness. He sighed and got under the covers, gritting his teeth at the stiffness in his lower extremity and the way his body hummed with awareness of her. But the tight way in which she huddled on the far side of the bed cut through his skin. Damn it; how was it that her pain affected him so much more than his own? It was like a hand pressing on his chest, making his flesh crawl with shame. Because he had caused it.
He drew a deep breath through his nose as he lay like a lump of coal on his side of the bed. “I did not mean to be hurtful.”
Silence greeted him. Then her small voice broke it. “I love this shirt.”
Hell. Win squeezed his eyes closed, even though it was dark as pitch. “I know.”
Her response was a decidedly feminine sniff that communicated both a grudging acknowledgment and made it clear that his effort wasn’t enough. Well, he rather doubted she’d appreciate his other method of apology. Win closed his eyes and prayed for sleep, for his cock to go to sleep, rather. But no, it lay, a heavy, nagging weight against his belly, pushing against the strings of his smalls in a valiant attempt to get free. Architecture. That was soothing. Sleep often took him when he made a mental tour of London’s architectural wonders.
Westminster Palace, The Clock Tower, Tower of London, Cleopatra’s Needle. Christ, stop thinking of erect monuments.
Poppy made an abrupt, irritated move, disrupting his musings and unfortunately aggravating his current situation when her bottom hit his hip. Gritting his teeth, he risked a glance. The hunched shape of her shoulders were outlined in the darkness. Her head lay significantly lower than his. Again she shifted. A covert sort of move she employed when she did not want him to notice. Ridiculous, as he was always aware of her. He wondered how long she would go on pretending she wasn’t vastly uncomfortable. Forever, it would seem. So