She blushed even as her chin came up. “Nor will I. We can eat later. A midnight snack.”
Oh ho. Gill followed her into the bedroom, though doing so felt precipitous. “I did not mean that I’d fall upon you like a plundering barbarian.”
“I was rather hoping you would, because now that the moment is here…” Penelope halted before the cheval mirror. “I did not exactly dress for the occasion, did I?”
Gill came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. “Now that you are about to have your wish come true—and one of my wishes, too, lest there be any doubt—you feel awkward. You are suffering cold feet and doubting yourself, but let’s not take that path tonight, Penelope. Let’s not be so polite and careful and proper. Let’s take the other path, the one where we speak honestly with each other, we show some trust and patience, and we listen without leaping to conclusions.”
They’d made a start down that other, wilder path in the past week. Too little, too late, but not in vain. Not entirely in vain. Even without this last night of passion, Gill would treasure the memory of this week for the rest of his life.
Penelope turned to embrace him. For a moment, they simply held each other, and for Gill, that was a time to relearn the pleasure of having his wife near. She was petite but sturdy, curved in all the right places, and she always smelled of flowers.
He paid attention to the exact texture of her hair, so thick and fine.
To the rhythm of her breathing, to the moment when she finally let herself lean into him.
“I am afraid, Gill.”
So am I. “What scares you the most?”
“The fear that I am making the worst mistake of my life.”
He realized two heartbeats after she’d spoken that she did not refer to a night beneath the covers. She referred to giving up on a ten-year marriage, very likely the only marriage she would have.
Gill set aside the rising joy of sexual anticipation and set aside his own myriad fears as well.
“I suspect had we been more willing to err, to share doubts and worries, we might not have come to this moment. But we were not brave the way we might have been. We were… proper, correct, tidy. We minded our elders and the etiquette books instead of minding each other. We were as we thought we should be, and now you want to live as your heart tells you to. That adjustment will take time.”
“And you?” she asked, stepping back. “What adjustments will you make?”
Gill had thought about this during the late-evening hours in his solitary room. “I will be more ruthless in the Lords. I won’t abandon my scruples, but I will take the gloves off, Pen. The world is changing, and change for the better in the midst of upheaval will take concerted effort.”
He sat on the vanity stool to pull off his boots. “The same with Bella, Mama, and Tommie. You have kept them from plaguing me too awfully, but they will descend upon me, expecting to get the same reception they had from me when I was one-and-twenty and new to the title. They are in for a polite, stern awakening.”
“Good,” Penelope said, turning down the bedcovers. “Long overdue, and if you truly wanted a challenge, you could have MacMillan take a look at the Lychmont account books.”
Gill stripped off his stockings and draped them over his boots. “A daunting thought, but of course the creditors will expect me to cover my brother’s debts.”
“Cover them once if you must, then put the trades on notice that Tommie has been cut off. I will do the same with the modistes and so forth, because Bella won’t allow a little thing like an annulment to interfere with her larceny.”
“You sound very determined.” While Penelope looked quite fetching, sitting on the bed steps, her slippers in her hand.
“I will no longer have the threat of your intervention to hold Bella or the trades or anybody in check. I must learn to be ruthless, too, and I suppose that is another fear I have about living on my own.”
“Let me undo your hooks,” Gill said, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it over the back of the wing chair. “And for your information, you are already quite formidable. Ask anybody who has ever tried to bring you a bit of tattle, anybody on your charitable committees. You are a force to be reckoned with, do you but know it.”
This time, he did kiss Penelope’s nape and had the satisfaction of knowing he’d earned her attention.
“I’ve always enjoyed that particular preliminary,” she said, making no move to march off to the wardrobe and hang up her dress.
Gill was out of practice, but he wasn’t stupid. He lavished kisses on his wife’s nape and on her shoulders while he eased the dress down to her waist. Penelope wore no stays, bless her foresight, and thus he could gently cup the lovely shape and weight of her breasts through her chemise.
He would have been content to go slowly, to let desire build gradually, but Penelope wasn’t having any of that. She rounded on him, lashed her arms around his waist, and fused her mouth to his. The shock of her passion rocked through Gill, stirring his own ardor from embers to flames in moments.
“Penelope… There’s no…”
“Nine years, Gill. Nine years I’ve waited to taste you again, and they have been long years.”
The gleam in her eye did not bode well for Gill’s buttons. He fumbled out of his waistcoat and shirt, but kept his breeches on lest he disgrace himself.
“We have all night,” he said as Penelope wiggled out of her dress and tossed it—tossed it—atop the vanity stool. “We need not—”
“I need,” Penelope said. “I need and I want and yearn, Vergilius. For you.”
A tempest blew through the bedroom in the next quarter hour. Penelope had Gill on his back atop the covers, his breeches unbuttoned, and his hands pinned to the pillow. She sank onto his erect cock with the confidence of a woman who knew absolutely who and what she wanted.
As a new wife, Penelope had been sweet, playful, ardent, funny… but nine years had taught her how to take what she needed, how to demand her lover’s cooperation.
Gill gloried in her newfound wisdom. Nine years had taught him a thing or two as well, about strategy and patience. When Penelope was riding him hard, satisfaction eluding her by the smallest, most frustrating increment, he wrapped his arms around her, rolled with her on the bed, and drove into her with all the passion in him.
The tempest became a one-woman gale, a silent, thrashing force of nature determined to seize her pleasure and hold it fast. By some miracle of marital devotion, Gill managed not to spend—perhaps the shock of Penelope’s loving had done that for him—but they remained joined as her hips slowed, and her arms eased from about his neck.
“Good God, Vergilius. Almighty, everlasting, merciful God.”
“Catch your breath,” he whispered, resting his cheek against hers. “We’re just getting started.”
He caught his breath, and the second loving was gentler but no less passionate. Gill managed to hold out once more, though the third time capsized his self-restraint as effectively as it sank Penelope’s.
He was vaguely aware of hunger as his wife drowsed against his side and also of a creeping sadness. In the coming weeks and years, he’d stay busy, he’d maintain decorum when anybody was watching, and he’d find ways to distract himself from this new version of his ongoing marital sorrow.