Once Upon a Tower (15 page)

Heard, learned, and understood.

After a time, he slid his hand down her body, curving around her inner thighs—God, but he thought that might be what drove him over the edge, the soft curve of her legs. He wanted to bury his face there and leave bite marks all over her, and then shift a couple of inches higher and play.

But no. He had to keep his mind on the task at hand. So he ran his hands up her thighs and touched her very core. She was so much more pink than he imagined: more beautiful, softer, wetter, a fluted flower. And she was trembling all over, her hands gliding over his shoulders, stroking him wherever she could reach.

He couldn’t permit himself to think about that, so he blocked out the signals coming from her caresses.

She felt wet and ready, but when he gently slid a finger inside her she was so small that he froze.

“Gowan!” He heard her voice through a fog. His mind scrambled, trying to imagine how this would possibly work.

Between the two of them, with him the size he was and her . . .

Presumably Englishwomen were simply smaller there, just the way Englishmen’s biceps were smaller.

Damn.

Nineteen

E
die felt as if she were living the experience and observing it at the same time. The two of them lay on the bed, but the other version of her watched them from above.

She was spread out like a feast, trembling from little erotic pulses radiating down her legs. The logical part of her supposed she should probably roll on her side so that her legs didn’t look plump. Generally speaking, she liked her legs, but her thighs . . .

Gowan lowered his head and put out his tongue and nuzzled her, very delicately,
there
, and she lost her train of thought. A second later, her instincts overcame an initial faint feeling of horror, and she heard herself crying, “
Please,
” over and over, just as Layla had demonstrated in the drawing room.

Once he was licking her, her body ignored the odd thoughts going around in her head. The logical part of her felt a bit lonely, which was stupid, because it was Gowan kissing her, in this erotic, intimate way . . .

Her legs had just begun to feel peculiarly warm when he stopped and came up above her again. “I think you’re ready, Edie.”

She frowned. The word made her feel like a loaf of rising bread, and instantly dispelled the warm fuzziness, but she nodded and pulled him closer because she still felt alone.

“I want you so much,” he said, his voice hoarse as he dropped a kiss on her lips. “But I’m afraid I will hurt you.”

She smiled at that. Now that his face was near hers, she felt better. “I have been told it doesn’t hurt very much. Layla called those rumors old wives’ tales.”

He reached down and put himself there, at the opening of her body. Edie stared down with some bemusement. He looked huge, like a giant pink mushroom stalk, which was accurate, though not a very romantic metaphor.

The first few seconds felt good. Odd, but nice. Gowan stopped and said, “How is it?”

It was so
intimate
that Edie could hardly bear it. His face was next to hers, closer than that of any person she could remember. Together with the fact that his body lay right on top of hers, and now part of him was actually
inside
her—it made her shiver all over. She wanted to push him away, and at the same time, pull him closer.

“It feels good,” she said, her breath puffing against his face.

“May I continue?”

Edie nodded. Gowan flexed his hips, and from that moment, it was not good at all. Involuntarily, she sucked in a deep breath of air, and dug her nails into his shoulders.

“Am I hurting you?” His voice had fallen an octave.

“A little,” she managed. A little? It was
agony
.

“Shall I stop, Edie? We could try again tomorrow.”

Edie had lost every bit of happy sensuality she felt a few minutes ago. Her body was being torn apart. But the last thing she wanted was to have to try this again the next day. The anticipation alone would kill her. “You just have to do it,” she said, her voice rasping. “Get it over with. Please.”

He dropped a kiss on her lips, a sweet, tender touch.

And then he thrust, one deep, convulsive movement that seemed to take a minute, or an hour. Her mind shuddered away from the pain, from the pressure and sense of being sliced in half.

He was stuck inside her as if she were a bottle and he a cork. Edie was completely outside the experience now. A flood of curses went through her mind, things she would say to Layla next time she saw her. This pain was no more than an old wives’ tale? Bloody hell.

“Are you done?” she whispered, when he still didn’t move. His breath was harsh in her ear.

“No.”

“Does it pain you as well?”

“Nay, it feels better than I could have imagined.” He pulled out and then pushed back inside again. The sensation was terrible.

And again.

He did it four times, five times, six . . . It felt as if he were a metronome, counting off staves.

“How long does this go on?” she gasped. Seven, eight . . .

“I can go as long as you need me to,” Gowan said, his voice strained but calm. “Don’t worry, sweeting, it will improve. Any moment you’ll start feeling a wave of pleasure.”

She didn’t. Her brain presented her with the opening chords of a funeral dirge put to the rhythm of Gowan’s thrusts. Nine, ten, eleven . . . fourteen, fifteen. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Excuse me,” she whispered, “I would truly appreciate it if you could finish now.”

He paused for a moment. “I’m not coming until you are.” He sounded stubborn and Scottish.

“Maybe next time, Gowan.
Please.
”

“I’m sorry it hurts so much.”

“It’s just the first time.” Some sort of instinct came to her and she arched against him so he penetrated even deeper inside her. “Do it, Gowan. Go faster.”

He pulled back and then thrust again and again. Sixteen, seventeen . . . twenty . . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight. It hurt and hurt and hurt, and she could no longer imagine a time when it wouldn’t.

“Gowan!” she cried, on the very edge of informing him that if he couldn’t get where he was going, they would have to try tomorrow.

“Oh, Edie,” he groaned, and then she felt him pulsing deep inside her.

She actually gasped at the relief of it; it must be almost over. But it wasn’t.

Twenty-nine.

Thirty.

Thirty-one.

Finally, his body slumped, and he collapsed on top of her, shuddering all over. Edie patted him on the shoulder, discovering he was positively slick with sweat, which was rather disagreeable. So she picked up a corner of the sheet and dried his shoulder with it, and then patted him again.

Then, mercifully, he braced himself on his hands and withdrew.

Even that hurt so much that she felt tears stinging the back of her throat. When Gowan rolled to the side of the bed, she lay frozen for a moment, afraid to look down.

There must be blood everywhere. It would be soaking into the mattress. At home, the maids would have whisked it away and a new mattress would appear by the evening. But they were at a hotel, and how was she to explain it? With all her heart, she wished she were home.

There must be something wrong with her, because Layla had said it wouldn’t hurt. Or there was something wrong with him. Or both of them. She didn’t know what to do about it. She couldn’t imagine telling a doctor about something so intimate.

Then Gowan raised his head, his eyes still dazed with pleasure, and asked, “Edie, was it horribly painful?”

She swallowed and knew, in that moment, that she couldn’t bear to disappoint him. And so she told her first lie, because she said, “No,” when she meant,
Yes.
And when he said, tenderly, “We won’t do it again tonight,” she said, “All right,” when she meant,
We’ll never do it again.

She looked down at that huge part of him and blurted out an observation. “I thought you were supposed to grow soft afterwards, and smaller.”

He looked down as well. “I believe I could pleasure you all night long if you wished, Edie.”

She must have turned pale, because he didn’t offer.

And even after she discovered that there wasn’t as much blood as she’d feared—though a good deal more than Layla had described—she couldn’t bring herself tell him that she might have suffered serious internal damage.

Instead, she let Gowan wash her, which he did.

When he finally fell asleep, she moved his arm from her waist and turned to face the other way. Then she curled up into the smallest possible ball and cried, very quietly, so he wouldn’t wake.

And he didn’t.

Twenty

W
hen Edie woke up, she jumped out of bed, leaving Gowan sleeping, and fled into the palatial bathing chamber attached to their suite. She was feeling much better. It was over. Yes, it had been horrible, but now it would all be different. Not that she was precisely looking forward to their next encounter, but obviously, with the virginity business out of the way, things would improve.

Still, she had absolutely no inclination to return to the bedchamber and test that hypothesis, and when Gowan knocked on the door to ask if she would care to stay in London for some time, or leave for Craigievar, she chose the castle.

“After all, Susannah is waiting for us,” she said, putting her head out the door.

From his expression, Gowan had forgotten all about his sister, but he nodded readily enough. “I’ll send a groom ahead to reserve our rooms. We should begin our journey immediately if we are to make Stevenage in time to have luncheon at the Swan.”

He stepped forward. He really did have the most beautiful eyes. “Good morning, wife,” he whispered, towering over her.

Edie stayed in the doorway, feeling that her position signaled that she would not welcome a return to the bed, in case he contemplated something of that nature. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her so sweetly that she felt ravished. “If only . . .” she said, looking up at him when he drew away.

He ran a finger down her cheek. “If only what?”

But she couldn’t voice,
If only one got children from kissing,
so she went up on tiptoes and gave him a little buss by way of answer, and then retreated back into the bathing chamber.

A mere hour later, they were on their way. Edie was rather surprised when Gowan’s factor, Mr. Bardolph, joined them in the magnificently appointed ducal coach and briskly wished her a good day. Given her druthers, she would have uninvited him, but the moment passed when she might have done that without seeming rude.

It certainly wasn’t a matter of space. Though four service carriages had left already, the carriage that would follow theirs contained a solicitor, two estate managers, and her maid. After a bit of explanation she understood that the men would take turns consulting with Gowan. A third carriage brought her cello, under the care of Gowan’s personal servant, Trundle.

She had been hoping that perhaps she and Gowan could talk in the carriage. She even thought that perhaps she would describe what it had really felt like last night. After a night’s fitful sleep, she felt less frightened, but even so, she would like to talk about it.

Obviously, she could not bring up the subject in front of Bardolph. “It’s like a Star Chamber,” she told Gowan as he, too, entered the carriage, pushing away her hopes for the day. “As if you are the sovereign of a smallish principality.”

Bardolph cleared his throat, and then, practically before the carriage had rocked its way around the first corner, he had three or four ledgers open and was droning on about a particular kind of wheat that only sprouted in winter.

What’s more, Gowan acted as if this was entirely normal, this conducting of business the morning after one’s wedding, and sat in his corner listening as Bardolph enumerated the acres of wheat that were sown versus those that were harvested.

“Must you really itemize these things?” Edie asked, after about an hour. London lay behind them now, and Gowan and Bardolph had moved on to baskets of butter and milk. Or lard. Something like that.

Bardolph paused. She couldn’t help but notice that his nose looked like a flying buttress on a cathedral.

“Yes, we do,” Gowan replied. “There was a great deal of waste on the various estates before we established a system by which to see the balance between what is put into the land and what is taken out.”

“Are you trying to control theft?”

“That is one goal. But more importantly, by ascertaining whether a certain technique was successful in one field, we can make an informed decision about whether to carry it over to different locations.”

Edie nodded and lapsed back into silence. Numbers flew past her ear, and Bardolph turned page after page with his whispery fingers. She started to loathe the factor’s voice. It was curt and dry, and emerged from a mouth so tight that she never saw his teeth.

When he began enumerating the eel traps at one estate and contrasting them with the eel traps at another estate, she broke in again.

“Gowan, will we stop for the midday meal?”

He had been listening to Bardolph, occasionally putting in a directive or command, even though he was perusing a different ledger at the same time. “Of course. We should be in Stevenage, our first stop, in precisely an hour and a half. We will take three-quarters of an hour for luncheon.”

“His Grace makes the trip from London so frequently,” Bardolph elaborated, “that we have devised a precisely timed itinerary for the entire journey.”

“A
timed
itinerary?” Edie repeated.

Bardolph nodded like a nutcracker. “We take the Great North Road, rather than the Old North Road, as it is in better condition and fewer carriages have accidents there. His Grace dislikes being detained for any reason. The inns we regularly frequent stable our horses, so we will switch to fresh livestock.”

“I am sorry for the tedium,” Gowan said, with a paternal solicitousness in his voice that grated on her nerves. “Are you dreadfully bored?”

“Bored by the recitation of eel traps? Not I,” she said. “Do go on. So one estate set their eel traps by night. Did timing have any effect on the eel harvest, if one might use the word?”

Bardolph recommenced from where he had left off, without seeming to notice the sarcasm in her voice. Edie stared out the window at the passing fields, because if she faced her fellow travelers she could not help watching Bardolph’s lips shape words without seeming to open.

When they reached the Swan in Stevenage, they were escorted into a private parlor where a hot meal awaited them. Some forty minutes later, just when Edie was contemplating whether she would shock Gowan by dismissing the footmen attending them, Bardolph stepped back into the room. A moment later, the plates were whisked from the table.

“I wasn’t quite finished with that trout,” Edie said, but it was too late; the plates had been lifted in a beautifully synchronized motion and were gone. A tea service was being brought in.

Gowan looked concerned. “Bardolph, it seems your order was precipitous.”

“Never mind,” Edie said, selecting a piece of fruit.

“In future, Her Grace is to be consulted before anything is removed,” Gowan pronounced.

Edie would have thought that went without saying, but it seemed she was being introduced to life in a monarchy. Where there was only a king and no consort. Bardolph’s bow made that clear enough, as did his remark, some three minutes later, that in order to keep to schedule, they should return to the carriages.

She considered volunteering to ride with Gowan’s solicitor, Jelves, who seemed like a nice man, but it emerged that he was joining them in their carriage.

So Edie kept to her corner while the three men talked among themselves for the remainder of the afternoon’s journey. By the time they reached the designated stop in Eaton Socon where they would be laying over for the night, she felt as if she’d been pummeled, her private parts both numb
and
sore, which was quite a feat.

Gowan took her arm to lead her into the George and Dragon, but she stopped him. “Just look at that,” she breathed, pointing to the roof.

The sun was setting, and its rays spread like copper wires from the horizon, painting the shingles a dark mulberry.

“No sign of rain,” Gowan remarked.

She tried again. “See how the sun is turning the roof that beautiful color and the swallows are swooping through the light as if . . .”

“As if what?” he asked.

“Well, as if they were listening to Mozart. As if the rays were staves of music. It would have to be Mozart because of the way they swoop up and down—” She tightened her grip on his arm. “There! Did you see that one? He’s dancing.”

She looked up. Gowan was smiling down at her rather than looking at the swallows. His eyes were dark and hungry. “You’re right,” he said, clearly not meaning it. “The swallows are dancing.” He put a finger on her lower lip, and Edie felt that odd quiver in her middle that she felt whenever he looked at her like that, as if she were delectable. As if he wanted to lick her from head to foot, the way he had promised to do, back at the wedding.

Standing there in the fading, coppery sunshine, Edie thought it would be a fine thing to be licked by a man who looked like her husband.

She was about to say it aloud when Bardolph stepped forward, making a scratching noise in his throat. At home, Layla had always handled the servants, and Edie had had little role other than to listen to her stepmother complain about the staff. Even given years of listening, she had no idea what Layla would do in this circumstance.

If she objected to Bardolph’s presence in the carriage—and in their life—it seemed likely that Gowan would simply overrule her. She didn’t have a sense that the servants were
hers
, as much as she had somehow just joined the ranks of Gowan’s retainers. In fact, she had an uneasy feeling that Bardolph outranked her.

So she stood there in the courtyard of the George and Dragon, staring blindly at the sunset, while Gowan listened to Bardolph’s recitation of how the best rooms were already made up with ducal linen (because it seemed the duke traveled with his own linen as well as his own china).

By the time Gowan turned back and offered his arm to escort her into the inn, the swallows had swooped below the roof and flown off straight as arrows into the fields, heading into the setting sun.

In contrast to the Royal Suite at Nerot’s Hotel, here they had separate rooms; presumably there was no suite grand enough for the both of them. Feeling human again after a hot bath, Edie descended to the private dining room. She could not help but feel a creeping anxiety. What if it was still painful tonight? Perhaps she should tell Gowan her fears before he even came to her bed.

As soon as she was seated, Gowan’s butler launched into an interminable disquisition of something that looked to Edie exactly like a ham pie, although Mr. Bindle had a far fancier name for it. When Bindle was done, Rillings took over, describing the first wine that would be served during the meal.

The footmen standing against the wall behind her seemed to have little to do but to fill her glass, so one of them would lunge forward after she’d had two sips. It was so disconcerting that when the second course was served and Rillings solemnly opened a bottle of Tokay wine, Edie declined.

“I would prefer some water,” she said.

Rillings frowned. “Water in an establishment such as this is likely to be unhealthful, Your Grace.”

Edie sighed and accepted a glass of wine. It was sweeter than she liked.

“Tokay wine originates in Hungary,” Rillings was saying. “Its deep garnet color comes from the Tokaji grape that . . .”

When he finally had imparted the entire history of the Hungarian wine trade and left the room, Edie pushed her glass away. “Gowan, why must we know the origins of the wine we drink? I would rather not know that these grapes were infested with rot.”

“I don’t think
infested
is quite the right word,” Gowan said. “The mold that forms on the outside of these grapes is referred to as ‘noble rot.’ ”

“I don’t care if it’s noble or ignoble. I would prefer merely to drink the wine than listen to a lecture on the subject.”

“I understand,” Gowan said. “I will ask Rillings to deliver his report to me at another time.”

“Another report. How many reports do you already listen to daily? Why this one?”

“We paid thirty pounds for a dozen bottles of this wine. If I make an expenditure of that sort, I should like to know precisely what I am getting.”

It was disconcerting, this marriage business. She couldn’t seem to stop observing her own life. On the one side, she was sitting at the table with her new husband; on the other, she was watching Lady Edith Gilchrist—no, the Duchess of Kinross—dine with the Duke of Kinross while four footmen darted around the room tending to their unspoken wishes. Bindle moved to and fro, ushering in new courses. The duchess accepted a slice of almond cake and a bite or two of syllabub. Yet another wine and a delicate elderflower mousse followed that course.

“Please give my compliments to the innkeeper,” she said to Bindle. “This mousse is delicious.”

“I will inform His Grace’s chef of your pleasure,” Bindle said, bowing as he left the room yet again.

Edie raised an eyebrow.

“My chef travels with me,” Gowan explained.

“Isn’t that a bit . . . well . . . excessive?”

“I instituted the practice three years ago, after we were all sickened for five days—one groom to the point of death—by an improperly prepared meal. At that point I determined that it was worth the additional expense to add another person to the entourage.”

Edie nodded, looking down at her plate, which carried the ducal crest. “Is that why you travel with your own china?”

“Precisely. There is a lamentable lack of science when it comes to illnesses of this sort, but the condition of the kitchen and dishes surely figures into them.”

There was a logical and unassailable reason, it seemed, for every person in the retinue, for each practice and custom. The duke needed so many grooms because one man traveled daily to Scotland, only to be replaced by a man coming from the other direction. The estate managers came and went; his solicitor might be needed at any moment; Bardolph
was
needed at every moment, apparently . . .

“I am not accustomed to being surrounded by so many people,” she observed. She badly wanted to say what she meant—that she didn’t like it—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

Gowan was like a force of nature. His body seemed to be formed of coiled energy; no wonder he kept six men in constant motion doing his work. His mind was exploding in many directions at once. All this made sense to him. It made sense to carry a chef in order to do away with the risk of losing five days, or any days at all, to illness.