Not Quite a Husband (11 page)

A drop of tear tumbled down her cheek. Shock paralyzed him—he hadn’t even known she was capable of tears.

She was as flabbergasted as he. “I’m sorry.” She
fumbled for her napkin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

He handed her his handkerchief. Clumsily she dabbed at her eyes. But her tears did not stop. For a long minute, he did not move. Then he stood up, thinking to give her some privacy. Instead, he rounded the table and pulled her to her feet.

He’d embraced her before, toward the beginning of their marriage. Her rigid unresponsiveness had put an end to that. He took a deep breath and drew her into his arms.

She stiffened. He almost stepped away by instinct. Instead he hugged her tighter.

“It’s all right,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s all right. You can cry. Sometimes God makes perfect people. Why shouldn’t you be devastated?”

“I don’t cry,” she said, her words muffled. “I never cry.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “It’s fine. You can cry as much or as little as you want.”

As if he’d given her the permission she needed, her quiet tears turned into trembling sobs. She was slight in his arms—she’d become thinner, a wisp of a woman. He stroked her back and kissed her hair, as if she were a niece who’d skinned her knee. After a while, she relaxed into him—her body surprisingly
supple, surprisingly soft—and her sobs subsided into hiccupy exhalations.

“There is something I never told you,” he said. “When we were still married, I paid a call to one of my mother’s old friends. Her sister happened to visit her on that day and it turned out that the sister and Toddy had gone to finishing school together. When she learned who I was married to, she said to let you know that Toddy had thought you the most wonderful child who ever lived.”

They’d been still married, but her bedroom door had already been barred. And he’d been in no mood to pass on such compliments. In fact, he’d thought Toddy sadly deceived, given how little Bryony remembered
her
.

She raised her head. “She did?”

“Those were Lady Griswold’s precise words. When we get out of the mountains, I’ll cable her and see if she can find some of Toddy’s old letters to give to you.”

She lowered her face again. “You don’t have to go to so much trouble for me.”

He let her go. “It’s no trouble.”

She stood in that spot for a long moment. Then she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, a quick brush that barely touched his skin. “Thank you. Good night.”

“Good night,” he said to the darkness beyond the reach of the lamplight, as her footsteps faded behind him.

Before Toddy, Bryony’s memories had consisted of dim, gray impressions of Thornwood Manor’s cavernous rooms. Her mother, disappointed to bear only a girl after years of infertility, had died of acute pneumonia before Bryony turned two. Her father, preferring to be a widower in town, but believing children were better off in the country, had been overwhelmingly absent.

But with Toddy’s arrival, her world burst into color. According to all accounts, they’d been instant friends, the lively twenty-year-old new Mrs. Asquith and her shy, reserved four-year-old stepdaughter. And from that moment on, for the entire three short years that remained to Toddy, they were never apart.

They traipsed over the estate and the nearby hills, collecting leaves, petals, and seeds to help Toddy document the local flora. They organized picnics and children’s parties and scavenger hunts. And when the weather did not allow for walking or riding, they drank hot cider, played chess, and stuffed
their minds with obscure bits of knowledge by opening the encyclopedia to random pages.

They’d had so many plans, she and Toddy. The arrival of the baby was to be such a celebration. But then Toddy had died in childbirth—smiling, vibrant Toddy who’d been full of life and energy and curiosity and kindness.

It had been the end of the world.

Three months after Toddy’s funeral, Bryony’s nanny died. Six months to the day after Toddy’s death, Bryony’s father married again. But between the engagement and the wedding, misfortune befell the third Mrs. Geoffrey Asquith: one of her sons was struck by poliomyelitis, the other tuberculosis.

Immediately after the wedding, she came up to the estate and deposited a governess to take command of her stepchildren, the wet nurse, and the new nanny that the housekeeper had hired. Then Bryony did not see her again for five years, as she shuttled between the sanatorium in Germany and a hospital in London.

The governess she hired, Miss Branson, was better suited to manage a half-dozen criminally inclined boys than two orphan girls. Miss Branson instituted a reign of fanatical order and discipline, until she married the vicar and left to tyrannize the vicarage instead.

The governess who followed, a Miss Roundtree, was a great improvement, an absentminded old dear. Bryony’s father, her stepmother, and her two still-sickly stepbrothers came to live part of the year in the country. The family was together at last.

Callista took to her suddenly enlarged family like a fish to water. But for Bryony it was too late. By that time she’d already turned resolutely inward. Humans, herself included, held no interest for her except as living machines, mind-bogglingly intricate, beautiful systems that somehow housed individuals not quite worthy of the miracle of their physical bodies. In due time, she left home without a backward glance, studied with the single-minded focus of those who cared for little else, and practiced with a cool, impersonal dedication.

And forgot that she’d once wanted pageantry, companionship, and love.

L
eo asked for a bath the next day—he’d come to be in a rather medieval state of hygiene. The tub was set up for him in the bathing tent. He undressed, set himself down in the steaming water, and closed his eyes in the enjoyment of it. Several minutes later, someone entered the tent behind him. He first thought it was a coolie, bringing in more buckets of water. But he did not hear anything being set down.

He turned halfway around. It was Bryony, standing just inside the tent flaps, holding a cloth bag in one hand and a stool in the other.

“Why are you here?”

“To help wash you,” she said.

He looked at her with more than a little disbelief. Their ayah was Hindu, not Muslim, and could therefore,
presumably, be persuaded to help him with the bath. Failing the ayah, they had no shortage of other lackeys, any one of whom could be prevailed upon to scrub a back, pour some water, and hand him a towel. There was no need for her to trouble herself.

“I’m unclothed,” he said.

Not that she hadn’t seen him plenty in the past few days, changing his clothes regularly so that they could be laundered.

“I imagine you are since you are in a bathtub.”

She unbuttoned one sleeve and rolled it up, in neat, creased folds, exposing her arm inch by inch and stopping only well past her elbow. Then she did the same with her other sleeve.

He was not easily moved by the sight of a woman undressing. But with her, everything was different. The sight of her removing her gloves used to make his heart beat faster. And in the library of the Wyden town house, he, no stranger to the female anatomy, had been wholly seduced by what on any other woman would have been a most prim neckline—he’d never seen her shoulders, let alone the swell of her breasts, which she’d traced absentmindedly with one thumb as she flipped the pages of the encyclopedia, as if she were unfamiliar with the topography of her own body.

“Lean your head back,” she said.

He did. She poured warm water over his hair and washed it with a bar of Castile soap, her fingernails scraping his scalp gently. When she was done, she poured more water over his hair. The water collected in a bucket she’d set under the edge of the tub.

She toweled his hair before sitting down on her stool by the side of the tub. From the cloth bag she’d brought she took out a piece of sea sponge, briefly submerged it underwater to moisten it, then soaped it with the meticulousness of a surgeon preparing for an operation.

Her hands were wet. Her forearms too glistened. Lovely, smooth, wet skin. His breaths came in a little shallower. She started at his left shoulder and washed him down to his fingertips. Then she changed sides and did the same to his right arm, her gaze staying well away from the center of the tub, where the water, though turning slightly opaque with suds, hardly disguised his reaction.

The tent was warm and dimly misty with the steam from the bath. Her face was dewy and flushed. He licked the back of his teeth. He wanted to lick
her
teeth: There was a slight chip to her front tooth that he’d wanted to lick since he sat down to dinner that first night at her father’s town house.

He lifted his hand and undid the top button of
her blouse. She rose immediately, knocking over the stool.

“Please don’t do that.”

She rounded behind him, sponged and rinsed his back. Then she returned to his side and tapped on his kneecap, which was above the water, to indicate that he should raise his foot to the rim of the tub.

From where she now stood it was impossible for anyone not three-quarters blind to miss what had happened to him below his waist. And did she really think that she of all people could bathe him without provoking this very reaction?

The sponge made its way up the length of his leg. It was soft and just slightly grainy against his skin. She was efficient about it—swift, firm strokes, no teasing, no dawdling.

And yet his arousal only burgeoned. The sponge brushed his erection. He hissed. As if she hadn’t heard, she moved to the other side of him and tapped on his other knee. Again she washed him to almost the top of his thigh.

He considered defining cock-teaser for her and decided he was being much too harsh. This was Bryony, who was probably doing her best to give him a proper bath while ignoring his rampant erection.

She scrubbed his torso and his abdomen. He thought they were done, but she rolled her sleeves
further up and knelt down. She reached underwater to his midsection. He sucked in air. The sponge lapped at his scrotum. And below and to the sides of it, light, smooth strokes on skin that was extraordinarily susceptible to touch. He swallowed. And swallowed again.

The sponge climbed. It moved up the trunk of his erection, skimmed around the head, slid down, then up again. The sensations of it … as if she were an electrical source. Or a wildfire.

Then it was no longer the sponge touching him, but her bare hand. A skimmer, almost like the brush of a fishtail. But it was still too much after nearly three and a half long, starved years. He came, his hips tilting, his facing contorting, his throat working sounds of hopeless pleasure.

When he opened his eyes, she stood a few steps away by the foot of the tub, her arms held stiffly at her sides. The sea sponge floated just beneath the surface of the water.

“I assume you lost the sponge and were feeling around for it,” he said. He could not imagine that it could have been anything
but
an accident.

She made no response for a long moment. And then, “Shall I rinse you?”

There was nothing else for it. He rose to his feet. Her gaze swept him. Then she looked away and hurried
to the buckets of water that had been brought earlier just for this purpose.

Warm water sluiced over him. When all the soap residue had been rinsed from him, she held out the towel for him.

“I’ll let you dress now.”

After having seen him in the altogether and brought him to orgasm, however accidental?

“Are you sure you are the same person who refused to let me remove my nightshirt when we were married?”

“If God wanted men to go to bed unclothed, he would not have made nightshirts,” she said, already outside the tent. “And besides, you removed your nightshirt anyway on certain occasions.”