Not Quite a Husband (33 page)

He shed his own clothes. Now she could at last dig her palms into the smooth muscles of his back. Now she could at last kiss his throat and shoulders. Now she could at last have her heart beat next to his.

He had become as impatient as she. They forewent all other preliminaries for the joining. She did not need lovemaking. She needed only him. The physicality of him. The vitality of him. The strength and power and intensity of him.

They broke together like a summer storm, heat and motion and pent-up energy releasing in wild bursts and electrical torrents.

She checked on his scar. “Everything is fine?”

“Everything is fine. I can walk. I can ride. I’m going to postulate that I can even dance.”

She lowered her head and nibbled the length of the scar. He held his breath. He was hard again already. She took him in her hand. He stared at her lovely breasts—God be praised, he was finally seeing her naked—and licked his lips.

“I know a great deal about the penis,” she said. “I can name its every last component, from the fundiform ligament that anchors it to the pubic bone, to the fascia that covers and binds the entire structure.”

“No,” he said. “Not my wife. Never.”

She laughed. “Now, the column of the penis is composed of three cylinders—a pair of corpora cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum, which is this ridge along the length of the penis.”

She rubbed her finger along that ridge. His poor captive member jerked with the stimulation. “Blood comes down the aorta, flows into the internal iliac artery, passes under the pelvic bone via the pudendal artery, and finally enters the common penile artery for engorgement. Then, through the corporoveno-occlusive mechanism, the veins are blocked and the influx of blood kept in the penis, thereby maintaining the firmness needed for penetration.”

Ah, penetration.

She batted her eyelashes at him. “Don’t you want to know how I know all this?”

“No.”

She laughed again. “Anatomy classes. Muscle and blood vessel diagrams. And dissections.”

Not dissections. He moaned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

She lovingly wrapped her other hand about him. “I used to think the penis very boring, tedious and of no consequence whatsoever.”

“The ignorance of our educated women is absolutely shocking.”

“But now I have been re-educated.” She smiled, almost coquettishly. “Now I look upon it as a feat of flesh-and-blood engineering.”

He pulled her in for a kiss. Then quickly flipped them around so that she was underneath him. “My turn.”

“Your turn for what?”

“For doing what you just did to me, a scientific examination of a certain body part.”

“No!”

It was his turn to laugh. He used one hand to push her knee down, preventing her from clamping her legs together. “You know what I think about when I’m alone and you are far away?” he murmured. “I think about you, naked, under the sun.”

He licked her nipple. She whimpered.

“Not the English sun, mind you, because it is never adequate. But the sun over the Arabian sea. Or the sun of the south of France. Light brilliant enough to shatter mirrors. And you, naked, in that light, your thighs open this wide—”

He pushed her thighs apart so much she gasped
again. And then panted, the sounds of heightened arousal. Music to his ears.

He took off his hands and sat back. She trembled, but her thighs remained open as he’d arranged them.

She was truly beautiful all over.

He kissed her there, inhaling her hungrily. His kiss turned into an openmouthed possession. She moaned and undulated, her hips soft, her thighs even softer, and her mysterious center the most heart-poundingly soft place he’d ever encountered.

And she came so beautifully, at once almost bashful and with complete abandon. He could not hold back. He was inside her in a heartbeat and immediately towed under by those currents of pleasure.

She traced her finger over his brow bone. “You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think your beauty is your great misfortune.”

“It got me you.”

She smiled half in embarrassment, half in delight at his understanding of her. “True. But I still think it’s a shame that when people look at you, they see only this gorgeous exterior. I can’t wait until you are wizened and toothless, then people who meet you will be struck by your inner beauty.”

“You sure they won’t just be struck by my toothlessness instead?”

She was very sure. “No, inner beauty.”

He blushed. There was such an adorable shyness to him. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him look shy before.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “It means a great deal to me that you think so.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Hmmm,” he said. “I love your hair. I love your eyes. I love your shoulders. I love your arms. I love your breasts. I love your hips. I love your thighs. I love your—”

She put her hand over his mouth.

He removed her hand. “I love you madly.”

She snuggled closer into him. “I like Cambridge.”

“You haven’t even seen Cambridge.”

“I want to live here, in this house.”

“And give up your practice? Cambridge doesn’t offer the same assortment of opportunities London does for a lady doctor.”

“It’s only an hour to London by train.”

“Each way,” he reminded her.

“Time for me to read all the medical journals in English, French, and German, which I need to do anyway—and I read slowly in German.”

“Let’s also have a place in London, then. That
way, I can live in London between terms and you don’t need to spend so much time traveling.”

She thought about it. “I like that. Then we’ll have time to play chess too.”

Their future settled, they celebrated by making love again, more leisurely and tenderly, until all leisure and tenderness became forgotten and there was only hunger and urgency and need. And then, only glowing satisfaction.

He dressed himself then coaxed her out of bed.

“It’s almost two o’clock in the afternoon. You haven’t had anything for lunch. Come, let’s go get you something to eat.”

He laced her corset, buttoned her jacket, and adjusted her collar so that it sat properly. “Now you almost don’t look as if you’ve been shagged three times in a row.”

She hit him with her hat before setting it on her head. But just as she was about to push her hat pin through it, he removed the hat again and caressed her hair where it was white and fragile.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did I do this to you? Callista said I did.”

She shook her head. “It was a freak happenstance,
though at that time I took it as a sign. I asked for the annulment the next day.”

He sighed and pressed his lips to her white hair.

“Should I dye it?” she asked. “I dyed it for a year or so. Then the effort didn’t seem to make much sense.”

“No, don’t dye it. It might be imperfect, but it is still lovely beyond words.” A reflection of their story: imperfect, but to him the most beautiful of stories.

She gazed at him, her green eyes deep and luminous.

“I think you are right,” she said, pulling him into a tight embrace. “It
is
lovely beyond words.”

 

I
n the course of his long and illustrious career, the Honorable Quentin Leonidas Marsden, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, was the subject of numerous newspaper and magazine articles. For introduction, the articles usually brought up the astonishing papers he published while he was still a student at Cambridge, one or two of his more daring globe-trotting adventures, and the Victoria Cross he’d received as a civilian fighting in the Swat Valley Uprising of ’97.

Some of the articles would also mention that he was married to the medical pioneer Bryony Asquith Marsden, though only one article, which appeared in an American magazine, ever ventured to relate that he’d married Mrs. Marsden not once, but twice.

It was also only in America that Professor Marsden
ever commented on the subject of his marriage in public. Or rather, he wrote about it, at the end of the brief biography that Princeton University always requested to be included in the printed programs for the lectures that he was invited to give there every few years.

Over the decades, the body of the brief biography changed to reflect his accomplishments and accolades. But the last paragraph, however, never changed. It always read thusly:

During terms, Professor Marsden lives in Cambridge with his wife, chess player extraordinaire and distinguished physician and surgeon Bryony Asquith Marsden. His favorite time of day is half past six in the evening, when he meets Mrs. Marsden’s train at the station, as the latter returns from her day in London. On Sunday afternoons, rain or shine, Professor and Mrs. Marsden take a walk along The Backs, and treasure growing old together
.

 

Coolies carrying a bathtub over difficult terrains? Native cooks serving European desserts on mountain treks? Had I read it in a book of fiction, I’d have scoffed at the author for lazy research—and transparent scheming for the use of the bathtub. But such had indeed been the case, according to
A Sportswoman in India: Personal Adventures and Experiences of Travel in Known and Unknown India
by Isabel Savory, a fascinating glimpse into not only the common touring practices at the very end of the nineteenth century, but the fierce, opinionated independence of the woman who authored it.

In the April 27, 1901, issue of the
New York Medical Journal
, in an article documenting women physicians holding hospital appointments in the United
States and the British Empire, the following was said of the New Hospital for Women in London: “Staff consists of 41 physicians and surgeons, of whom 28 are women, holding the following appointments: 4 consulting staff, 5 physicians and surgeons for in-patients, 6 physicians and surgeons for out-patients, 6 clinical assistants, 2 ophthalmic surgeons, 3 anesthetists, 1 pathologist, 3 resident assistant medical officers.” (The numbers don’t add up to 28, as a select few physicians and surgeons probably held multiple appointments.)

In the second half of 1897 multiple uprisings broke out in the vast geographical area referred to as the North-West Frontier of India. Guess which ambitious young journalist got himself to the front as soon as possible to cover the uprising in the Swat Valley? None other than twenty-two-year-old Winston Churchill himself, who later published his account as
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
.

Will and Matthew Marsden first appeared in my book
Delicious
, with the irrepressible Will as the secondary hero. I’d given Will four brothers in order for his lady, who didn’t know any of the younger Marsden sons, to plausibly mistake him for Matthew in some respects. Then, once
Not Quite a
Husband
reached the casting stage, I knew I needed a younger hero so I thought to myself, hey, why not the baby Marsden? And thus was born my first two interconnected books.