“My father had a ladder especially built for retrieving me. He married quite late and was forty-five by the time Fitz and I were born. So he was at least fifty when I developed my habit of angry tree scaling. But he always came for me himself instead of sending a servant, and some of my happiest childhood memories consist of being carried on his back while he negotiated his way down that long, long ladder.”
He’d gazed at her steadily as she recounted her story, but now that she was silent, she found it more difficult to hold his gaze. “You probably already know the story,” she said, for something to say.
“No, it’s the first time I’ve heard it,” he answered, sounding thrilled about it. “You think someday Bea will speak of the trunk and her waiting father to someone?”
“She should. I would.”
The praise felt too warm—so warm that her cheeks turned hot. The way he watched her, she was sure he sensed this rise in her surface temperature. She cast about for something less warm. “What did you do to your hair? I don’t like it as much.”
His brow knitted. “How do you like it?”
“I prefer the curls.”
He looked as if she’d told him she preferred him with three eyes. “You used to make fun of them. You told me that if Bo Peep had a child with one of her sheep it would have hair like mine.”
She burst out laughing—and gasped at the pain that shot through her scalp. “You are not making it up, are you? Did I really say that?”
“Sometimes you called me Goldilocks.”
She had to remind herself not to laugh again. “And you married me? I sound like a very odious sort of girl.”
“I was a very odious sort of boy, so you might say we were evenly matched.”
She didn’t know enough to comment upon that, but when he was near, she was…happier.
Neither of them said anything for some time. The silence was beginning to feel awkward when he glanced at the door and asked, “Fitz and his wife weren’t actually dozing, were they?”
That seemed a much safer topic of conversation. She seized upon it. “No, they were kissing as if there were no tomorrow.”
He grinned. “And you were peeping as if there were no tomorrow?”
If only she could toss back her head. “I will have you know that once I realized what they were doing, I kept my eyes firmly shut. They should have made sure I was truly asleep before pawing each other.”
“It was probably all they could do to dispatch the nurse elsewhere.” He looked toward the bedpost, where his fingers probed the depth of its spiral grooves. “When one has kissing on the mind, it becomes difficult to think of many other things.”
The man was doing something to her. Despite her weakness and discomfort from the accident, and despite the fact that only hours ago on this same day she’d had no idea who he was, she felt…stirrings. “Did we used to kiss like that?”
Surely she hadn’t meant to ask such a question. But there it was, hanging bright and shameless between them.
His fingers stilled. “Occasionally.”
She bit the inside of her lower lip. “Only occasionally?”
He glanced at her askance, a half smile about his lips. “How often do you recommend we should have done it?”
She had no choice now but to brazen it out. “As often as I wanted, of course.”
Had it not been deep in the night she might not have heard the catch in his breath—or the subsequent unsteadiness as he exhaled. Heat curled in her abdomen.
“In that case, we did it as often as you wanted.” His hand was again on the edge of the bed, fingers rubbing against the linen sheets. “And you liked it very, very well, if I may add.”
That same heat was now everywhere inside her. “Am I supposed to take your word for it?”
He took a step closer, his eyes the color of a clear sky. “You can have a demonstration if you don’t believe me.”
A knock came on the door, startling her. “That…must be the nurse.”
“Drat it,” he said, a touch of rue to his smile. “So much prowess, so little chance to prove it.”
“Maybe when you have curly hair again.”
“Maybe I’ll make you kiss me first and prove your sincerity,” he said as he walked toward the door, “before I will stop pomading my hair.”
After the nurse took her seat, he did not leave, but sat down in