A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) (25 page)

So let her be ruined, here, in this style, by the most virtuous man she was likely ever to meet, and let him feel all the guilty pride of having done it. She seized every surge of pleasure and gave it back to him in evidence, gasps and writhings and partly stifled cries, while he coaxed her steadily nearer the pinnacle she’d only ever scaled alone.

Then all at once she was there, drawn tight against him and clinging for life as her insides lit up with a shower of stars.

Well. So much for not laying a finger on his side of the scale. He couldn’t have broken that resolve more flagrantly if he’d tried.

“You’re laughing.” Her voice came sluggishly through the dark: this was what a sated woman sounded like. “Was I truly so comical, or are you having your revenge for my laughing before?”

“No.” He rested his hand on her naked hip. He ought to help her set her nightgown to rights, but he wasn’t ready quite yet. “No, you were the furthest thing from comical. It’s just as you said: everything is perfect and I have to laugh.”
Perfect
might be an understatement. He felt like a colossus bestriding the earth. He felt as if he’d just learned every good secret the world had to tell. A husband must feel like this every day, knowing he could put his wife into such a stupor of satisfaction.

“
Nearly
perfect, I think you mean.” With remarkable quickness her stupor receded, giving way to a sly mischief. She rolled to her side; her hands came through the darkness to his nightshirt-front and started feeling their way down. “Will you show me what to do for you?”

Gently he caught her wrists and halted her. “Not tonight.” He wasn’t half done savoring her pleasure, let alone savoring her willingness to please him. To add his own carnal gratification to what he already felt would be like trying to drink the ocean.

“Not tonight?” Now she was the one to laugh, quick and low and luscious. “Did you have some other night in mind?”

“Some other day, more likely. I doubt I’ll be able to wait for nightfall.” He released one of her wrists, lacing his fingers with the hand he still held. “In fact I suspect I’ll be hauling you upstairs the second the last guest has left the wedding breakfast.”

She didn’t speak, and he couldn’t read her face in the darkness. His words, unanswered, seemed to grow in both coarseness and presumption with each passing second.

“I’m sorry, Lucy. I promised myself I wouldn’t trouble you with this again, but I can’t seem to…” He twisted his face away, as if the right sentences hovered overhead and might drift down to him. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve no intention of writing to your father. I don’t at all regret what we’ve done. It’s not because of duty that I—well, it’s a little because of duty. I wouldn’t like you to be under any mistake about who I am, in that respect. But in the main, it’s…” God. Possibly the most consequential speech of his life thus far, and he couldn’t string ten words together without having to change direction. “It’s just—you felt it, didn’t you?” He turned again, to say this part to her by the shortest distance. “You
do
feel it. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice sank near a whisper. Her fingers, still woven with his, clenched and unclenched. “I felt a great deal, of course. I
do
feel regard for you, and fondness, and, obviously, the sorts of feelings that promote unchaste behavior.”

“Don’t call it that. You’re not unchaste.” If someone had described to him, even two days ago, a young unmarried woman who allowed a man to touch her in the way he’d done,
unchaste
would have been exactly the label to come to mind.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to reduce it to… I know it was more than that, what we did; I only don’t know what words I ought to use. There’s so much I don’t know in this.” She paused, and he could hear her swallow. “Maybe too much. I don’t want to mistake one thing, one feeling, for another.”

“Something transitory for something abiding, do you mean?” Somewhere in the last minute his heart seemed to have lurched off its moorings like a hot-air balloon and now it drifted unsteadily about the cavity of his chest.

“I haven’t any idea how to tell the difference. Have you?”

No, quite honestly. He hadn’t any idea. But— “I don’t imagine anyone does. You can’t really know whether a sentiment is abiding until it’s had a few years over which to abide, can you? Surely everyone who marries must let go the need for certainty, and proceed to some extent on hope and faith.” Hark at him, holding forth like some kind of authority when he was nearly as inexperienced in these matters as she. But it did feel true, what he told her.

“I wonder at you.” Her fingers were fidgeting again. “Only yesterday you said no man and woman in their right minds would marry on so short an acquaintance as twelve days. Shouldn’t two days and a half be even more unthinkable?”

“To the man who made that arrogant pronouncement, yes. But I hope I’ve learned to be more thoughtful, under your influence. I hope I’ve learned to consider, as you suggested, how people who must make do with hasty courtship—members of the Navy, for example—manage to settle into happiness in spite of the precipitous beginning.”

“And how do you think they do it?” A tremor of hope underlay her question. She wanted to believe he’d puzzled out the secret. She wanted him to say something well-reasoned and thoroughly substantiated, that could sweep aside all her doubts and convince her a marriage with him would prosper.

“I don’t know, Lucy.” With his free hand he finally caught the hem of her nightgown and drew it back down to cover her. “But I find I don’t need to know. I find I’m satisfied to trust that two clever, resourceful, well-intentioned people can work out between them how to be happy.” He settled his hand at her hip again, atop the flannel this time.

“That might be all very well if we were better acquainted. But we met only the day before yesterday. You have no way of knowing whether I’m clever or resourceful or well-intentioned.”

“Yes, I have. Miss Sharp, are you clever?”

“Well, of course
I
would say so.” She punctuated this with an impatient puff of breath.

“And are you resourceful, and well-intentioned?”

“I believe I am,” she answered, after a short but powerfully grudging pause.

“Then I’m satisfied. I need no further evidence.” He stroked his palm up the curve of her waist and back down. It was good to be reminded that she could be the stern, sensible, disapproving one. Just as she’d been in the Longs’ hallway, after that debacle under the mistletoe had dismantled all his poise.

They would make an excellent team, if his hopes all came to fruition, and in spite of everything he could not help believing his hopes would do exactly that.

“I don’t mean to dismiss or minimize your trepidations. I have trepidations too; probably all the same ones you have and more besides.” He felt behind her for the single thick plait of her hair, and took up its end to toy with. “The happier our marriage, the more I think I would fear to lose you.” He lowered his voice. “To send you to an early grave, as my father did my mother.” He’d never voiced the fear aloud before.

“In childbed, do you mean? That wouldn’t happen.”

“Now who’s speaking of what she can’t possibly know?” But his unmoored heart surged heavenward at her blunt assurance; at how readily she could imagine that future with him, trepidations or no.

“Well, it’s at least very unlikely. I’m not delicate.” Her toes brushed his, the reminder of her height underscoring her words.

“I’d worry nonetheless. But I wouldn’t let that worry prevent me from marrying you—from having you—if you would have me.” He touched her plait-end to the back of her neck and feathered it, paintbrush-style, over her skin. “Lucy, I have a proposal to make.”

She went very still. Even in the dark, even touching only her hand, and her plaited hair, he could sense it.

“Not
that
proposal.” He switched at her shoulder with the tail of her hair. “I understand you’re not ready to decide. I won’t demand that of you. But what if, after Twelfth Night, I came to call at Mosscroft?”

“I thought you had to go back to London. I thought you had engagements.” Her hand tightened on his, and her voice got a little higher, and he knew he’d said the right thing.

“I do have engagements in London. Social invitations and business meetings both. And I’ll forgo them all, for the hope of securing a better kind of engagement in Norfolk.”

“I can’t promise…” She halted, as though completing the sentence required more effort than she’d first allowed. “I cannot promise that your hopes will be answered.”

“Of course not. You might meet with a man who better suits your taste while you’re at Hatfield Hall.” Again he flicked at her with the plait, this time tickling along her jaw. If there was any justice in the world, he’d have many many nights ahead in which to explore the qualities and uses of her hair. “Write to me before Twelfth Night if you meet that man—or if you simply find that your attachment to me subsides in my absence—and I’ll remind myself to be grateful I didn’t bind you to a promise you would later have come to regret.”

Two seconds went by in still silence. Then her hands scrabbled up to catch him by the ears, and then she was kissing him, long and hard and fervently. “Thank you,” she whispered, and kissed him again. “Thank you.”

“Well, you needn’t be quite so enthusiastic about the prospect of casting me off for this other man.” Their nights and days would be full of this sort of thing, he’d wager. Teasing and laughter and patience and the process of each learning to accommodate the other.

“That’s not what I’m thankful for, and you know it.” She pressed her point by pushing his shoulder down to the mattress, and once she had him on his back she kissed him from above, bracing herself up on her arms at first and eventually lowering her body to rest on his, stomach to stomach, bosom to chest, one set of long limbs tangling with another. “Mr. Blackshear,” she whispered, somewhere well after he’d lost track of all time. “I have a secret to tell you.”

“Have you?” He let his mouth take its smiling shape from hers.

“I won’t be sending you any letter from Hatfield Hall. I know that already.”

“I know it, too,” he answered. And from the surest, truest place inside him, he did.

December 1808

“And so you must teach him, as soon as he is old enough to understand.” Mr. Blackshear paused in his schoolmaster-like pacing on the hearth to adjust the infant at his shoulder. “Cover your head, get down on the carriage floor, and curl up small. Thus did Mrs. Blackshear’s father instruct her, and thus did she come through our accident unscathed.”

Mrs. Thursby,
née
Julia Porter, listened gravely, lifting her arms to her own head in experimental fashion. Her husband put a fond hand on her elbow, as if to assure her he’d keep her safe in the event of the drawing-room sofa suddenly overturning.

“Such wonderful presence of mind on Mrs. Blackshear’s part.” Mrs. Porter, seated in a fine floral-patterned armchair that hadn’t been here last year, sent Lucy a smile not very unlike the ones she’d been sending her daughter over the course of this call. “I suppose even knowing what to do is no guarantee you’ll remember to do it in the moment of need.”

“You’re quite right about that.” Lucy set down her tea, lovely strong gunpowder tea, one of six varieties she and Mr. Blackshear had brought for a Christmas gift. “But you mustn’t credit me with presence of mind, because I assure you I had none. My actions were mere rote response.”

“Rote response that came as a result of diligent practice.” Her husband twisted to aim his words away from the now-sleeping child, sinking his voice for good measure. Again he addressed the baby’s parents. “That’s how you must instruct your young Samuel: teach him the actions, and then have him practice and practice until they come without thought. Practice is the key to it all.”

His eyes came to hers, and if a certain blissful understanding passed between them, at which the others must all wonder, well, let the others wonder.
Practice
had already been a word of special resonance to them. It held an extra secret significance now, as he paced on the hearth, working out the most comfortable way to carry a sleeping baby.