Enchanting Pleasures (25 page)

Mr. Moir put his hand on top of their joined hands. “I pronounce that they be man and wife together.”

Quill stepped forward and put one hand under Gabby’s chin, tipping her face up. He bent his head and his lips met hers. There wasn’t a trace of the intoxicating fever that generally assailed him when he touched Gabby. His lips lingered with a sense of sweet possession.

Gabby’s arms came up around his neck and she clung to him. For a moment Quill forgot where he was in a rush of exultant triumph. He had wooed her and wed her. She was
his
, this whole enchanting bundle of woman, Gabby, wife.

Then Kitty hurried around the bed, and a second later Gabby was enveloped in a scented hug. “I am so happy, darling, and so would Thurlow be as well. He would wish you all the best. That is, he
is
wishing you all the best, because I’m quite certain that he is aware of what just happened, Gabrielle.”

“Mother,” Quill said quietly. He was still standing at the head of the bed.

The viscount’s eyes were closed and his hands were relaxed. Gabby thought he had gone back to sleep. But then Quill tenderly laid his father’s hand back on the coverlet, and Mr. Moir came forward, touched the viscount’s head, and said, “Go with God.” Kitty whispered, “Oh, Thurlow, no,
no,”
and Peter came around the bed and drew her into his arms.

Soundlessly, Gabby retreated to a chair next to Lady Sylvia.

L
IKELY
,
MARRIAGE VOWS
always brought with them a terrifying feeling of change, Gabby thought later, back in her room.

One part of her was fascinated by the fact that Quill could—he had the right!—walk into her bedchamber at any moment, even though she was wearing nothing more than a slight chemise. A hastily summoned seamstress was measuring her for a suit of black clothing.

Another part of her was trying hard not to think of her wedding as a turn from white to black, from joy to sadness. That was the problem with an imagination like hers. It was entirely too active and too ready to leap to idiotic suppositions.

Superstition, her father had often said, was the bane of uncivilized cultures. Gabby tried to hold on to that thought.

But it wasn’t until the door swung open and a large body walked through, as if there was nothing unusual about entering a lady’s bedchamber, that Gabby really understood just how much her life had changed.

Quill’s eyes moved down her body, his face inscrutable. His eyes dropped to the seamstress, who was scrawling notations, and then to Margaret, waiting to dress her mistress again.

He jerked his head, and Margaret jumped to her feet and grabbed the seamstress’s arm.

And then, before Gabby could have said Jack Robinson, Quill was standing alone in the middle of her bedchamber.

G
ABBY
BIT HER LIP
. Was he going to consummate their marriage right now? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, Quill had kissed her on the library rug when it was only eight in the morning. She felt a prickly flush rising up the back of her neck.

Likely he was. She had heard maids talk of newly wedded husbands. Husbands who didn’t let their wives out of bed for three days after the marriage. Husbands who couldn’t keep their hands from their brides, even during the ceremony…. Gabby had always listened with fascination.

She stood still, watching as her husband sent Margaret away. Her skin woke up, all over her body, and spoke to her about Quill’s fingers and where they would linger, about his lips and slow kisses.

In fact, Quill had no such intention when he entered the room.

He had in mind a sensible conversation with his wife. He would instruct her, plainly and simply, about the parameters of their marriage. He would inform Gabby that consummation would have to wait until after the funeral. He could not risk missing the ceremony because he was reduced to a pain-ridden husk, lying in a darkened room with a wet cloth over his eyes.

It was too late for her to back out, Quill had told himself all the way down the inn corridor. She’d done it: married him. Promised to obey him. Perhaps he’d consummate the marriage in a month or so. When they were back in London. After his father was—he shied away from that thought. He had never been close to Thurlow, and they had grown quite distant in the years since the accident, given his father’s inability to hide his shame at having a crippled heir, let alone an heir who dabbled in commerce and other ungentlemanly business pursuits. But Thurlow had been his father. There was a hot feeling at the back of Quill’s eyes that stiffened his backbone.

The important thing was to begin the marriage as they meant to go on. He would tolerate a certain amount of nonsense on Gabby’s part—talk of love and such—but only a reasonable amount. And he himself wasn’t going to indulge her by telling more lies about being in love. She was his now, and there was no further reason to perjure himself. Honesty had always served him best.

And yet for all that, for all his arrogant decisions and composure, Quill felt like a drowning man when he walked into Gabby’s bedchamber. Because she was wearing nothing, his wife. Naught more than a scrap of delicate cotton.

The gray sky had parted to reveal scraps of blue. A pale spill of sunlight turned Gabby’s chemise into nothing more than a thin veil between himself and the rounded curves of her hips. He could see the outline of her body as if drawn in ink: the delicate way her waist curved in from her ribs and then blossomed out again, a hint of full breasts between her left arm and her side, the turn of her neck as it blended into delicate collarbone.

He inspected her from head to foot, from the sheen of her glossy hair to the tips of her silk slippers. He surveyed her as if she were a figure made of the finest china, one that he was considering for purchase.

He couldn’t find any words.

“Quill?”

Gabby sounded nervous, to Quill’s mind. She was clutching her hands rather tightly before her.

In the nick of time, his self-possession, gained from six years of crippling injury, abruptly reasserted itself. His body would
never
rule his mind—even in matters of erotic pleasure rather than acute pain. But he was shocked at how close he came to leaping on Gabby, and to the devil with his headaches.

Instead, he nodded casually and strolled past her to sit down in a chair by the fireplace. He stretched out his boots and stared at them meditatively, quite as if his body wasn’t on fire, straining at every pore to jerk his half-naked wife into his arms. Take her there, without ceremony and without forethought. Take her on the carpet, on the bed, on the chair. Over and over until this intolerable lust was satisfied and he could return to being himself: a calm and rational person. A person whose emotions were mild and composed into neat categories labeled
marital duty and filial respect
.

Filial respect. He had almost forgotten about the funeral again.

Gabby’s heart was beating so fast that she felt ill. The moment Quill took his eyes off her she rushed over and put on her night-robe. If she wasn’t mistaken, he had seriously considered tumbling her right on the bedchamber floor.

She didn’t mind that he had changed his mind, Gabby told herself. Everyone knew that men and women did those things—tumbled about—in the dark, in their beds, under the covers.
Not
in the early afternoon. At a decent time, in a decent place.

She tied the cord of her robe firmly about her waist and sat down opposite her husband. He looked dangerously magnificent, relaxed in a chair. Since he was temporarily ignoring her, Gabby let herself stare at him. Quill hadn’t changed into black clothing yet. His thighs were large and muscular in his fawn-colored pantaloons. In the sunlight she could see red tints in his hair as it tumbled forward. Those large hands—they had done amazing things to her in the library, when he asked her to marry him. She felt a delicious tremor in her knees.

Gabby flushed and shifted slightly in her chair. She had a rising sense of confusion interlaced with an uncomfortable wish that Quill would look at her again.

But when he did, there was none of that wicked pleasure with which he sometimes looked at her. His eyes were flat, unspeaking.

“I feel we should discuss our marriage.” He cleared his throat. “We should…make a beginning. Begin as we mean to go on.”

Quill ground his teeth together. He sounded daft. No wonder Gabby looked so bewildered.

“I mean to say that we ought to be frank with each other.”

Gabby nodded. Her stomach was curling into knots. It didn’t sound good, all this talk of frankness. Her mind darted desperately in several directions at once. Perhaps he regretted the marriage. Oh, why was she wearing such a thin shift when he walked into the room! Perhaps he didn’t like her hips. Perhaps …

“There will be times when you will say the same to me, my dear, and I will accept it with equanimity. With luck, after all, we will be married for years.”

Gabby didn’t understand what he was talking about. She knit her brow.

He kept talking, calmly speaking of separate chambers and marital courtesies.

By a moment later she was quite certain that Quill was regretting their marriage. She stared at him, flabbergasted, and then blurted out, “No!”

Quill lifted an eyebrow.

“I had no idea that you were looking forward to this event so eagerly, Gabby. I would prefer to sleep alone, given my father’s impending funeral. But if you insist?”

Gabby felt a hot wash of humiliation. Of course she wasn’t looking forward to it to
that
degree. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t find words. But she was…she was
… Be frank with each other
, he’d said. But how can one be frank about things that weren’t spoken out loud?

“I have no objection.” Then she couldn’t think of a single comment to add. Having no experience, she could hardly make a slighting remark about the expendability of the act.

He must not feel the same way she did. She, Gabby, felt as if she might suffocate if Quill didn’t take her in his arms again. She knew without hesitation that she wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. The moment Quill said, “with my body, I thee worship,” she had come into a strange sense of her own body. An awakening sense that arrived with a quickened pulse and hummed through her body, a sense that intensified whenever she looked at him, at the masculine perfection of his body and the sense of leashed power about him.

“But I thought—” She stopped, the words choking in her throat. This was just going to embarrass her more than ever. So he didn’t want to consummate their marriage until they returned to London. Where was her sympathy? Her father was still alive. Likely she wouldn’t want to…to do whatever it was either, if she had her father’s funeral to attend.

She bit her lip. “I am so sorry, Quill.” She bent her head. “I did not mean to be disrespectful to your father or to your grief. I am ashamed that I questioned your feelings.”

Tears mounted to her eyes and she scrambled to make amends. “I feel so badly for you and for your family.
Please
forgive me. I’m afraid that my father and I are not close and so I forgot how very much you must be missing the viscount. It was inexcusable of me to forget your grief. That is, I didn’t forget your grief, it’s just that I …” Her voice trailed off in a near whisper.

Grief? Quill thought likely it
was
grief he was feeling, watching the pale skin of Gabby’s wrist. He couldn’t risk looking at her face, at her wine-red lips.

He had rarely had such a cruel sense of the world’s injustices. He, Erskine Dewland—no, Viscount Dewland now—couldn’t bed his new wife when and where he pleased. It was manifestly unfair. And the queer pang around his heart had nothing to do with Gabby’s bewildered disappointment.

For disappointed she was, his new wife. He’d already disappointed her, and they had been married less than three hours. Quill savagely pushed the feeling away. He had disappointed his father a thousand times, starting when he could not rise from his bed just after the accident.

“Dewlands don’t malinger!” the viscount had thundered. “Look to your will, man! Rise from that bed!” And he couldn’t. Quill still remembered his catastrophic sense of failure. He’d tried. And tried again, after his father stamped from the room. Couldn’t do it, and fell on the floor—and even more humiliating, had to remain there until his valet arrived, hours later. He’d wet himself while sprawled on the floor, because he was unable to crawl to the chamber pot and unable to reach the bell cord. Twenty-some years old, and as useless as a newborn babe.

The memory made him feel sick, and a wash of useless anger swept over him. His father was dead. And if he did what Gabby, with every embarrassed tremor of her lips, was asking, he would be unable to make arrangements for his father’s funeral.

The thought stiffened his backbone. He could bed Gabby later. She was his and she could wait. But his mother would never forgive him if he succumbed to a migraine attack when she needed him most.

“Probably it is all for the best,” he said coolly. “We haven’t known each other for very long, after all.” He shrugged. “And bedding is painful for women at first, Gabby. But I suspect you know that?”

Gabby swallowed, yet another flush following the one that had barely faded. “No, I didn’t know that,” she whispered.

Irritation replaced the ugly memory of his father’s disappointment. By God, Gabby was his possession, and she could damned well wait until he had time to see to her. He wasn’t some sort of stallion, to perform on demand from his wife. After they returned to London, they would share a bed only every few weeks. He had far too much work to suffer migraine attacks more frequently than once a month.

He got up and walked to the other side of the room, fierce indignation in the tilt of his chin, rejoicing in the restoration of his self-possession. Gabby had almost lured him into an indecent intimacy, only hours after his father’s death. He took a quick turn at the end of the chamber, turning on his heel next to the bed Gabby had slept in the night before. Anger made him feel careless and cruel.

“I realize that you are a very passionate woman, Gabby.” He tossed it over his shoulder, not bothering to look. “But since we are being frank, let me say that I will not tolerate it if you make sheep’s eyes at anyone other than myself.”

Gabby could hardly breathe. “I won’t,” she said. She was ready to die of mortification. He obviously thought she was a strumpet. He was treating her as if she couldn’t wait until after the funeral to be bedded.

Quill didn’t hear her. “What did you say?” He was inspecting the mantelpiece, running his finger along the polished mahogany slab.

“I won’t,” Gabby repeated.

“Right. Well, then, I think we have reached an understanding, Gabby.” He turned about and rocked back on his heels. “As I said, it’s best to begin as we mean to go on.”

There was a moment’s pause in the room. Gabby took a deep, unsteady breath. Quill looked as if he was about to leave, and she couldn’t allow it. She might not have known Quill very long, as he had pointed out, but she knew that his unpleasant tone was not normal.