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It echoed in his head. When she had begged him. By name. To be taken.
He had not been able to resist. She was all tight heat and need, and every night when he sank into her he felt himself slipping further and further away from what he had promised he could be, and embracing the darkness of what he wanted.
He did not spill his seed inside her.
She was adamant that she would speak to a physician about the risk of her carrying a child.
Still, he knew that the precautions they took were no great assurance that there would be no baby.
He was primitively satisfied in the image that came into his head of Beatrice swollen with his child.
Serena had not wanted him to touch her when she’d been pregnant, and it was entirely possible that Beatrice might feel the same way. But she would not hide her body from him. That much he was certain of. He was deeply certain he would find the sight erotic.
Not thoughts he should be having in the carriage with his wife beside him on his way to a ball where her brother would be present.
She was leaning against him, her head on his shoulder. Those things were so easy for her. Casual touches.
She touched him all the time. She freely gave sweet affection to his son, and she gave it to him in equal measure. He had not realised how hungry he was for such a thing. Something as simple as touch. Not the sort of pleasurable touch they shared in the bedroom, but this simple close touch. That was simply pressure against his body, assurance that she was there.
In cutting these sorts of relationships from his life, he had lost that.
You’ve never had it.
‘You look beautiful tonight,’ he said, distracting himself by returning to her physical beauty.
The crimson gown she was wearing tonight felt wicked. It did not reveal any more of her body than anything else she wore, but there was something about the colour that felt an announcement of sin.
And he was so well acquainted with the kinds of sin that he could commit with Beatrice.
It was all he could think of. That and dragging her out to the garden for re-enactment of previous interludes in the outdoors.
‘When did you begin sneaking out of your house?’
It was something that he had puzzled over recently.
For when he had met her she had seemed a pale and drawn creature, and he did not know when those things had changed. Or if she was simply very good at putting up a smokescreen.
‘When I was fourteen. I would climb out my bedroom window in the night. And sometimes I thought... Sometimes I thought it would be acceptable if it killed me. Because I was so very tired of those four walls.’
‘I do not find it acceptable,’ he said, looking at her. For he understood now, if reluctantly, what she thought about the baby really.
&
nbsp; She was not concerned for her own safety. She was hungry. Hungry for experience. And perhaps he could find a way to be enough.
To be enough so that she did not feel the need to have a child.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘But you know, every day we take risk when rising from our beds.’
‘For some it is a deeper risk,’ he said.
‘Perhaps,’ she returned. ‘But life is all the dearer to me for that reason. I fought for the chance to run in the moonlight. I had to engage in subterfuge to spend time swinging in my own garden. I had to beg for my husband’s possession. I had to fight for a husband at all. Do you not see how much more dear these things are to me for that reason?’
‘Beatrice,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘You are strong. I am in great admiration of it. But...’
‘You wish to protect me.’
‘Yes.’
