She scrubbed herself from head to foot, then scrubbed herself again. The day’s memories would not wash away, but bathing helped put them at a slight distance. Then too, Nick’s tub was nigh large enough to swim in and shaped to encourage a lady to repose at her bath, and even to close her eyes.

“Lovey.” Leah heard a sound like a chair scraping. “Leah? Sweetheart? Lamb?”

She opened her eyes to find Nicholas Haddonfield looking large and concerned from his perch on a stool by the tub. His sleeves were rolled up, suggesting he’d been sitting there for more than a moment. Gracious.

“I fell asleep,” she murmured—inane comment. She had sense enough not to sit up, but realized the water and the fading bubbles provided her only so much camouflage.

Nick smiled at her with only a hint of innuendo in his expression. “As long as I’m here, shall we wash your hair? I promise not to peek, and your bubbles hide the best parts anyway.”

He sounded as if he were inviting her to stroll his back gardens or take tea on the terrace. Such was the savoir faire of the man who’d proposed to her.

“For now,” Leah muttered. It wasn’t right, however tempting it felt to be with him under such circumstances. It should feel shocking, upsetting, wrong… not reassuring, not comforting. Sitting in the warm water, seeing the concern in Nick’s blue eyes, Leah realized something else: She was going to marry him.

“You’ll have to take down my hair.”

He shifted his stool to sit behind her, giving Leah a measure of privacy in which to grapple with the truth of her realization. Downstairs, she’d told herself marrying Nick was the sensible, safe course. A good match, a friendly match, one she could accommodate if she dwelled on the things Lady Warne and Ethan Grey had suggested about propinquity and happenstance.

Here in Nick’s house, with him so casually at ease with a significant intimacy, accepting the notion took on bodily ramifications. They would occasionally share a bed, or at least a bedroom. She would see him in casual dishabille. He’d know when her monthly plagued her with cramps.

Nick’s fingers in her hair were deft. He stacked her pins neatly on the vanity and tugged her hair down over her shoulders in long, unfettered skeins. He’d undone many a lady’s coiffure. The knowledge left Leah more sad than angry.

“Down you go, lovey. All the way.”

She submerged completely, a baptism of sorts into a marital reality she had yet to inform Nick she’d accepted.

“Now close your eyes,” Nick instructed, “and lean back.” He used both hands to lather her wet hair, taking the weight of her head in one broad palm and massaging soap into her scalp with the other. The sensations were novel, both soothing—to be cared for—and arousing—to entrust her welfare literally into his hands.

The arousing part, she’d have to learn to deal with.

“I’ve always liked your hair,” Nick observed conversationally. “My sisters are all fair, save the youngest, and so many of the blushing little debutantes aspire to that pale-English-rose sort of beauty. On most of them, it’s insipid and childish. You have color and substance. Your hair is full of fiery highlights, and it always smells lovely.”

“You notice too much,” Leah murmured, eyes still closed.

“Dunk.” Nick’s voice held a smile. To Leah’s pleasure, he repeated the shampoo and finished it off with several thorough rinses with warm water.

“My thanks.” Leah sat up, blinking water out of her eyes. “I’ll ring for you when I’m through.”

“Not so fast.” Nick rose from his stool and retrieved a bath sheet from the wardrobe. “We have things to discuss.”

“We can discuss them when I am dry and decently covered,” Leah replied. If the bath water weren’t cooling, though, she would have been just as happy to drift off and discuss things in the morning—or never. Once Nick was assured they’d be marrying, she doubted there would be any more cozy baths.

Which might be for the best, drat the man.

“Out you go, lovey.” Nick averted his face and held the sheet wide. “I won’t peek, if you’ll recall.”

He wasn’t going to be nagged into leaving, and Leah was too tired to argue with him. Then too, she was hardly a blushing virgin, and he was no callow youth.

She wanted him to peek, though, which made the sadness a little harder to ignore. “Close your eyes, Nicholas.”

He did, and she rose, stepping carefully from the tub, and backing into the bath sheet to wrap it around her. Nick’s arms finished the task, enfolding her in clean, soft toweling and his fleeting embrace.

That had been nice, that simple hug. Also heart wrenching.

“Your robe?” Nick held it out then smiled as he saw that holding the bath sheet closed required both of Leah’s hands. “I’ll hang it behind the screen. When you’re decent, I’ll start on your hair.”

“There’s no need for that.”

“Can’t have you taking a chill,” Nick replied, the soul of equanimity. He probably bathed women regularly, the wretch. When Leah had retreated to the screen, Nick bellowed for the footmen to remove the bath, and by the time Leah emerged, it was gone.

And Nick was sitting on her bed.

Maybe her husband-to-be had a cruel streak? “Why are you still here, Nicholas?”

“Because we need to talk, lovey.” Nick’s tone had lost its teasing quality, and Leah knew a sinking dread in the pit of her stomach.

“I’m too tired for this,” she said, crossing to the bureau and retrieving a brush.

Nick rose and prowled across the room to her. “And yet we do need to have a very personal conversation, Leah, and sooner rather than later. I would spare you this if I could, but soon Della will arrive, and until such time as you are my countess, she will afford us little real privacy.”

“You are going to bully me into marrying you,” Leah said, lowering herself to the thick rug on the floor before the hearth. She arranged her robe so she could sit cross-legged, and started on her hair with the brush.

“I will not bully,” Nick said, folding his long frame down behind her, “but I will attempt to persuade. No matter what scheme we concoct, Leah, you will not be safe as long as your father is the male in authority over you.”

“He won’t live forever,” Leah said, giving up the brush without a fight. Nick put it aside and took a towel to her hair, twisting lengths of hair with toweling to wring moisture in his strong grasp.

“You shouldn’t brush it when it’s sopping wet,” Nick chided. “And while your father will not live forever, he is in good health and not that old. He could live for a long time. Rather than coming up with schemes to buy you time, Leah, I think we need to discuss what about marriage to me makes the idea so objectionable.” He wrung the rest of her hair to dampness with the towel, then added, “I want you to be honest.”

Leah drew her knees up and rested her forehead against them. The honest truth was that she was likely to desire this man, to harbor an attraction to him until she was older than Lady Warne. “This topic is hard to even consider.”

“All the more reason to broach it now, when we have peace and quiet, and privacy.”

Leah’s throat constricted, and a wave of homesickness washed through her—but homesickness for where? Not Wilton, though the green terrain of Hampshire had seen most of her childhood years. Not the sterile, tense atmosphere of the earl’s town house, and not even Italy, where she’d known some happiness and much pain. She thought maybe she missed her mother, but in truth, that lady’s life had become so circumscribed by bitterness and disappointment, her death had been a blessing.

“I am tired of being an outsider, Nick,” Leah said, raising her face from her knees. “You do not want to let me in. You want to keep me at arm’s length in this marriage.”

“I want to keep children at arm’s length,” Nick replied, unwrapping the towel from her hair and taking up the brush. “Have you set your heart on children, Leah? Is that why my conditions are so unbearable?”

“One cannot set one’s heart on children,” Leah observed wearily. “They come, or not, as God wills.” They also left, as God willed. “But yes, given my preferences, I’d present my husband with his heirs.”

Nick sighed mightily behind her. “I do not give one goddamn which of my nephews inherits. I love all my brothers and will be proud to call any of their sons my heir.”

“Fine for you, Nick,” Leah said, feeling honesty about to gallop past her common sense. “While I gain significance from what, exactly? Running into all the Society ladies you’ve taken to your bed in my place? Not asking where you go when you are from home night after night? Not allowing myself to drive past the house where I’ve been told you keep your current mistress? I watched my mother suffer torment upon torment at Wilton’s hands. She went into her marriage hoping for the best, offering that man her heart. She ended up bitter, hurt, and as mean to him as he was to her. And supposedly, at one time they cared for each other.”

He drew her hair over her shoulders in a slow, soothing caress, proof positive men had more courage than brains. “I can promise never to take a mistress.”

“Nicholas,” Leah said in weary disgust, “you said you’d never taken a mistress—you prefer variety, remember? Don’t think to fence with me then ask that I, alone, be honest.”

Memories of Nick plucking a sprig of arbutus jabbed at Leah’s composure. Perhaps the lady was something beyond even a mistress to him.

“You don’t want us to end up hating each other,” Nick said, his tone aggravatingly reasonable, “and you do want to bear my children. I don’t want you to hate me, either, but neither do I want to think of you naked, handcuffed to a bedpost, while some deranged old man takes a riding crop to you and beats out of you what self-respect you have.”

Leah shuddered at his graphic description. There were rumors about Hellerington…

“I’m sorry. That was not helpful.” Nick fell silent again, and Leah felt him dabbing at a handful of hair with the brush. He was suited to the task, working his way slowly, slowly up each lock, dealing patiently with each little tangle until her hair was drying in smooth, shining waves. He’d do the same with her arguments, parse them one by one, until her resistance to his offer was obliterated.

“What would help?” he asked, putting the brush down and drawing Leah back against his chest. “What would make marriage to me less unattractive to you?”

Less unattractive. He did not know what he asked. She remained against him, holding herself away from him even as their bodies touched.

“You use the word attraction,” she said, “but you don’t want to be attracted to me, and you want to pretend I am not attracted to you. That is the problem in a nutshell, Nick. I need you to protect my very life. You need me merely for the sake of appearances. Our stations are unequal. In any marriage, a man and woman are of unequal station, but an earl’s daughter—even under Wilton’s roof—is raised to expect her consequence, her household skills, and her willingness to secure the succession can even the balance and allow her to hold her head up. Those assets allow her to expect her husband’s protection, respect, and affection.”

“You have those things from me,” Nick said. “And I am attracted to you.”

“Nicholas,” Leah said with pained patience, “the first time you kissed me, you couldn’t even see me. How can you be attracted to someone you can’t see? And yes, I comprehend that when we are… affectionate, your body responds. I am not a virgin, and I understand men are prone to such reactions. That is not the caliber of attraction I would hope for from a husband.”

“You think I become aroused for just any woman?”

“You’ve said as much, Viscount Variety, and you can’t tell me you are attracted to me in any personal way, and then tell me we won’t be intimate. You are frighteningly intelligent, Nicholas, and you would not put yourself in such a position for the rest of your life, wanting what you cannot have, and yet you expect me to step gladly into such a role.”

She was making herself upset with the extent to which she could assure herself of misery in this marriage, and yet… chained to the bedpost, naked, the sound of a riding crop slicing through the air above her…?

She was going to marry Nicholas Haddonfield and be grateful for the privilege.

“I did not say we would not be intimate,” Nick replied, his voice a whisper against Leah’s neck. “I said I would not risk conception with you.”