The Sherbrooke Bride - Catherine Coulter [144]
She was staring up at him, not moving, just sitting there, her legs dangling over the side of the bed, wearing Janine’s gown that was too long and bagged around her.
She moistened her lips.
“Do you cherish me, Douglas? Perhaps just a little bit?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
He walked, smiling to himself, into her adjoining bedchamber, soon to return with a nightgown. “Come, let’s get you into this. You need to rest now.”
He pulled the gown over her head, found himself staring at her breasts, then swallowed and quickly pulled the fine linen nightgown over her head, smoothing it down her body. “There.” He put her between the covers, then sat down beside her and arranged her hair on the pillow even as he said thoughtfully, “Our marriage hasn’t been so very smooth thus far. Do you think perhaps that you could moderate your actions? Perhaps think a bit before you hare off to do something outrageous? Like running away from me and becoming ill? Like getting yourself kidnapped and taken to a foreign country? Like trying to save me when you are really the one in jeopardy?”
She stared up at him, perfectly still as he continued to artfully arrange her hair on the pillow.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “You are very important to me, Douglas.”
He liked the sound of that. He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose. “I have decided that if I keep you in bed for, say, three hours a day—not to mention the nights of course—you just might be too busy focusing on me or too busy recovering from lovemaking to bring gray hairs to my head.”
“And would you also be too busy recovering from our lovemaking?”
“Never too busy to cease thinking about the next time I would haul you off to bed and have my way with you. You already occupy a great deal of my poor brain.”
He frowned then as she remained silent. “Not just haul you off to bed to make love to you. I fancy also I’ll haul you off to the stable, to the floor in the library on that soft rug in front of the fireplace. Perhaps also in the breakfast room with the morning sun streaming in on us and then on the formal dining table. You could clutch that ghastly epergne while I made you scream—”
She laughed and poked his arm.
“Tell me you love me, Alexandra.”
“I love you, Douglas.”
“Do you agree that a man needs to hear that every day of his life?”
“I am in full agreement.”
“Good. Now, wife, I want you to rest. I will see to the family, censor our tale just a bit unless Sinjun has already pried all the facts from Tony, and store up all the recent gossip to tell you later on.”
He kissed her mouth. He’d intended only a light, sweet kiss, but her arms went around his shoulders and she held him to her and parted her lips.
“You came after me,” she said into his mouth. “You were worried about me.”
“Naturally,” he said, kissing her nose, her lips, her chin, his breath warm against her skin. “You are my wife, I love you, I will even go so far as to say that cherishing has a good deal to do with it. Are you satisfied now?”
“Do you know that a wife must needs hear that every day of her life?”
“I’m not surprised. No, not at all.” He kissed her again, tucked the covers about her shoulders, and left her alone to rest.
Two weeks later in the late afternoon, Douglas came into their bedchamber. Alexandra looked up from her mending, smiling automatically. Good Lord, she loved him so very much.
“What do you have there?” she asked, trying not to look so besotted.
He was frowning. “I had to know,” he said more to himself than to her. “I just had to know so I went looking in Sinjun’s bedchamber.” He spread out on her lap the items he’d found in the back of Sinjun’s armoire.
Alexandra gasped. “It’s a wig! Goodness, it looks like the Virgin Bride’s hair! And that gauzy gown! Douglas, you can’t mean it, no, surely not, I—”