Not Quite a Husband (12 page)

When their conjugal relations had become more awkward, not less, with time, he’d stopped coming to her at bedtime. Instead, he’d come in the witching hours of morning, when she was fast asleep, and made love to her then
.

For several days things seemed to thaw inexplicably between them. He smiled more often. Spoke more at dinner. And looked at her in ways that made her breath catch and her face burn
.

And for those several days she thought she’d had frightfully vivid erotic dreams. Until one night she woke up
to find herself naked and impaled, her ankles on his shoulders
.

She couldn’t stop—not him, not herself. She could only whimper and pant and moan helplessly
.

The next day she’d asked him to desist. She could not live like that, so thoroughly in his power. But of course she did not say that to him. She only listed how important it was for her to get her night’s sleep and that he was welcome to exercise his conjugal rights at any other time, but not when she was asleep
.

He’d listened very quietly as she’d delivered her speech. Then he left without giving any response. That night she’d awakened screaming with a climax brought on by his lips and tongue. And of course she could only shudder futilely as he entered her, whispering in her ear that one day she would return the favor
.

The next day she spoke to him again, this time in sharper tones. For her trouble, she found herself bent over the edge of the bed, her feet on the floor, her legs pulled wide apart, trembling too close to the edge of pleasure to wield any mastery over the situation
.

Her requests to halt these nocturnal jaunts were met with stares more and more hostile—and pleasures more and more addictive. She feared the pleasures. She feared
him,
especially when he promised her that one day she would beg him to fuck her. Because she might
.

And on it went. Until she couldn’t go to sleep for fear of
what he would do to her that night. What he would make
her
do. Until she almost killed a patient because she was so under-rested and distraught
.

That evening she went home, bolted all the doors to her chamber, and never let him into her bed again for as long as they lived under the same roof
.

He’d gone to her in her sleep because he was tired of playing the lion to her martyr. He wanted a chance to hold her and touch her without being made to feel that he somehow defiled her
.

He hadn’t meant to go further than that, but as he’d lain next to her, she’d turned and fitted herself to him. Her body, always so rigid, had been as pliant as a belly dancer’s. He had not been able to help himself. He’d disrobed them both and made love to her. And she’d put her arms about him and clutched him tight to her for the very first time—asleep, but whispering his name
.

Leo,
she’d said
. Leo. Leo. Leo.
And he’d emptied into her like a dam breaking
.

It frightened him, the hold she had over him, that in one moment of crushing pleasure he would forget all his resentment and hopelessness. But the sweetness of it, he could not get enough of it—he could not get enough of
her,
his wife of the witching hours
.

Perhaps this could be a new beginning for them. He
could woo her with lovemaking, something as sweet and artful as spun sugar, a meringue of sensations, a froth of kisses and caresses to float her to the clouds
.

He wanted it, how he’d wanted it, that newlywed idyll they never had, that halcyon of mad corporeal infatuation. If he had it, a year, a month, or even a solid week of it, he could change her, repair the misalignment of their temperaments, and remold their marriage into something lovely and worthwhile
.

Instead she banished him altogether. They grew further and further apart. And their marriage dissolved like a pearl in vinegar
.

The summer night sky over the Hindu Kush, domed by the Milky Way’s mage light, was infinitely splendid. Strewn against this craggy luminosity, millions of tiny stars shone, a diamond heist gone awry.

Bryony left the flaps of her tent open, the next best thing to sleeping under the stars. If only she could sleep, that was. But the otherwise inoffensive camp bed felt like a heap of rocks against her back. And she was hot in the frustratingly still air—Chitral Valley was a good two thousand five hundred feet lower than the village of Balanguru in Rumbur Valley, and noticeably warmer in climate. The collar
of her nightgown chafed her throat. Within the long flannel sleeves, her arms sweltered.

She wanted what she should not want, what she could not have.

She wanted
him
.

The bath had been her way of scratching her itch, to touch him under a semi-legitimate guise. The weight he’d lost and the illness had not been enough to diminish what months of strenuous daily exertion had done for him. His body was efficient and compact, his shoulders strong, his abdomen ridged, his legs long-thewed and shapely.

And his skin, so very wonderful to the touch. When she’d brought the sponge down to his forearm and her wrist had slid over the hair on his skin, she’d almost jerked her hand away in surprise. She’d forgotten how different a man felt.

Or perhaps she never truly knew.

I assume you lost the sponge and were feeling around for it
.

No, she’d let go of the sponge to touch him. But she’d been too timid to grab him along his length—it seemed an awfully rude thing to do. She’d only barely brushed him, in the end. And his response had been truly out of all proportion to her hardly-at-all caress.

But it had shaken her and aroused her. And the memories of it had continued to arouse her for the remainder of the day, though she’d taken pains to avoid him around the camp. And now the lack of him was a physical torment. Her skin was oversensitive for the want of his touch. Her head, already aching from her inadequate rest during his illness, throbbed with frustration. Certain other parts of her throbbed too, biological imperative exerting itself at the worst possible moment.

She raised herself to a sitting position and shoved her fingers into her hair, digging her nails at her scalp. After a few minutes she got up and ducked out of the tent.

Overhead the sky was so saturated that it was a wonder it did not rain stars, the way an over-festooned ball gown shed seed pearls and crystal drops deep into a waltz. The mountains were massive shadows. The silence was unearthly, the eerie quiet of the deepest night, when birds dozed and nocturnal creatures slunk soundlessly on their unseen hunt.

She walked the thirty feet or so that separated their tents and slipped into his tent to check on him. He slept, his breaths quiet and steady. She knelt down, took his pulse—normal—and his temperature
—also normal. He was young and hard-wearing; by morning he would be back to his old self.

She tucked in the sheet more snugly about him. There, all done. Now she would go back to her tent and try again to sleep.

Except she didn’t move. She remained as she was and listened to his hypnotically easy breaths. Then she touched him again.

Her hand landed on his shoulder. She followed its outline to his throat, then his chin. He’d shaved before the bath, but already the beginning of stubble scraped her palm. Her hand shook—the rest of her shook too—but whatever it was that drew her toward him was more powerful than her much-justified, tremor-inducing fear.

She leaned down and kissed him, his neck, his cheek, his ear. He smelled still of her Castile soap, of oil of olive from faraway Iberia. It made her lightheaded, the feel of him, the scent of him, the madness of what she was about to do.

She unbuttoned her nightgown at the throat and pulled it over her head. It had affected her strangely to know that he’d been in the same countries she had, as if they’d been fellow refugees, fleeing from the same wreckage. That did not diminish the stupidity of what she was about to do. But stupid things had a gravity and a momentum of their
own; they crushed good thinking and resistance as colonists with guns and cannons overcame spear-throwing natives.

Her heart hurt. But her skin felt delicious, freedom after an eon of oppression. “Leo,” she said softly, more to herself than to him.
Why must it always be you, Leo?

She pulled off the sheet she’d just carefully tucked in around him. He wore nothing to cover his torso. His chest was smooth and taut. She drew a finger down the center of it, from the base of his throat to his navel, then she pressed her lips to his skin and kissed the trail she’d drawn.

Her hand traveled further down the center of him. She was not surprised to find him hot and hard. It seemed almost … inevitable.

He slumbered on, even as she climbed onto the camp bed, straddling him, careful to keep her weight on her own hands and knees. Even as she grazed her nipples against his torso. Even as she took him inside her.

The slip and slide of her hair on her own skin was an unfamiliar, decadent feeling. Where his sheets had shifted, her knees sank into the raw canvas of the camp bed. The smallest movements on her part brought her floods of sensation. She heard herself murmur, little prayers at the altar of Eros. What did
she want? Surely not this terrible loneliness, this complete isolation in the midst of the most physically intimate act possible?

Then her prayers were answered and a long chain of climaxes began. She shuddered and cried out in desperate gratitude. “Leo. Leo,” she breathed. “Leo.”

Suddenly he joined her in it. His hands clamped over her thighs, his pelvis raised, his breaths tumbled out in gasps. He was rough and massive against her. She couldn’t help coming again, her entire body seizing with the violence of her pleasure.

And then her mind seized in dismay. For he touched her, tracing a line down the center of her torso as she had done with him.

“Bryony,” he murmured. “Bryony.”

O
n the day Bryony asked for an annulment, Leo had bought her a present: a W. Watson & Sons microscope. An imposing piece of equipment, with a rotating slide holder, two substage condensers, a camera lucida attachment, and a magnificent finish of polished brass that gleamed like Cupid’s golden arrow
.

Why the present? He had not a single reason. He didn’t even know whether she needed a new microscope. But sometimes the males of the species brought home shiny, beautiful things, with hope burning in their hearts
.

The microscope and its numerous accessories had come in a handsome mahogany case. He laid the case on the desk of the study, then crossed the room to pour himself a drop of brandy
.

“Do you have a moment? I need to speak to you.”

He turned around in astonishment. She stood at the door
of the study, dressed in a jacket-and-skirt set of blue silk, her usual uniform for heading to the hospital. Except it was the middle of the afternoon—he hadn’t seen her home during the day in God knew how long
.