“I think you should consult a midwife, Esther, if not a physician.”

She did not want a doctor or a midwife. She did not even want a nap. What Esther wanted, just then, was her husband’s embrace. The impulse was surprising, but it did not fade as it ought. “I am not sickening, Percival, and as far as I know, I am not carrying.”

He should know that too. They slept together and shared a bedroom. Some husbands might not notice a wife’s bodily cycles, but Percival was in nowise some husbands. Reconnaissance came to him as easily as command.

“You’ll think about it? A little bleeding can rebalance the humors.”

He wasn’t wrong, and yet Esther had parted with enough blood in her various lying-ins to feel rather possessive about the quantity yet flowing in her veins. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I ask.”

And then, just when she thought the skirmish had played itself out, he took her prisoner. Scooped her up against his chest and carried her from the room, the spoils of an altercation Esther hadn’t seen coming and certainly hadn’t won.

* * *

An officer could raise his voice when the situation warranted, could swear a bloody streak, drink himself into oblivion, and order some miscreant flogged for serious transgressions.

A husband and father had no such outlets, not with children sleeping in the next room and a wife who looked so lovely and sad nursing her infant that Percival wanted to tear his hair in panic.

In his arms, Esther felt light as a wraith, and her very docility scared him worse than the French, the Indians, or the wild creatures of the Canadian forest ever had. She offered not even a “Percival Windham, put me down,” across the length of the entire house—and with such a precious burden, he did not hurry.

He deposited her beside their bed then divested her of her robe. “To bed, madam, and you will sleep in tomorrow. If you are fatigued, and you refuse to consult medical authority, then you will submit to my authority when I tell you to rest.”

His authority was nonexistent with her. He’d known that before they married and had delighted in her independence. A man in love was a fool.

While he tried to glower at her—please God, let his glowers be more effective with the children than they were with his wife—she met his gaze. He knew that look, knew that obdurate, mulish expression, and felt a predictable response to the challenge it portended. His blood quickened in anticipation of a great row—maybe their most rousing argument so far—when Esther slowly, deliberately, crossed her arms and inched her nightgown up over her head.

Sweet suffering Christ. Like a damned upstart colonial, she was launching a sneak attack.

“I’ve missed you, Percival. Perhaps you’d like to get into this bed with me.”

She flung the words at him like a gauntlet, an accusation of intentional neglect that was not at all fair. Then the infernal woman plastered herself—her entire naked, warm, lithe self—against him and took his mouth in a kiss.

“Esther…”

Holy God, she felt wonderful. His hand, sliding down the elegant turn of her flank, gloried in the absence of flannel and propriety. Could a man’s hands be hungry? For his surely were—for the feel of her, for the exact contours and shifts of her muscle and bone beneath his palms. Her nudity, so rare in recent months, topped any argument his reason might have put forth about their mutual need for rest, or a man not pestering his wife beyond the necessary.

This was necessary. It was necessary that Percival fling his clothes away between kisses; it was necessary that he heave his wife onto the bed like he hadn’t since the early weeks of their marriage. It was as necessary as his next breath that he climb over her and trap her body beneath his, the better to plunder her mouth with his own.

And then—because he was not just a husband and father, but also a man still in love, it was necessary that he try to exercise some damned restraint.

“I should find a sheath, Esther.” Though the sheaths were clear across the room, secreted somewhere in the wardrobe—halfway to Canada, according to the compass needle pointing directly at Percival’s wife.

She got her mouth on him again, sank her teeth into his jawbone, not enough to hurt, but enough to distract. “Sheaths break. Love me.” To emphasize her words, she traced his lower lip with her tongue, dipping inside his mouth then feinting back.

“Esther, I am concerned for—” Worried sick, he was. Somewhere beneath the tempest of passion she was evoking, he was worried for her, for their marriage, for his family. Nigh distraught with it.

His cock, however, was distraught in an entirely different and—just at that moment—more convincing manner.

“Love me.”

“I do. I do love you, dammit, but for the love of God, if you don’t stop—” He went on the offensive, covering her mouth with his own, trapping her hands beneath his against the pillow.

She went still, breasts heaving beneath him, a tease and retreat of puckered nipples against his chest. By the narrowing of her eyes, he realized she understood what even her breathing did to him.

“I love you,” he said again, more softly. A plea this time. “Let me love you.”

She closed her eyes, as much surrender as he would get from her in a duel he neither understood nor welcomed. When he kissed her cheek, the grip of her fingers in his shifted, became a joining of hands rather than a prelude to whatever sexual hostilities she had in mind when she’d challenged him with her nudity.

“I love you, Esther. I will always love you.”

How to love her was becoming both increasingly obscure and increasingly more important.

Joining with her, though, remained within his gift, thank God. For a small eternity, he kissed her. He reacquainted himself with the texture of each of her features, used his lips and his nose—Esther had once admitted to an affection for his nose—to map her face. He used the tip of his tongue to trace her lips, then paused to rest his chin, then his cheek, against her hair.

He loved her hair, loved the golden abundance of it spilling over her shoulders before she trussed it up in thick, shiny braids.

When she began small, restless movements of her hips, he settled between her legs and by lazy, comforting increments, threaded himself into her body.

How had he forgotten this? How had he lost the memory of that first, beautiful, soft sigh near his ear when he pushed himself inside her?

Before they’d found a rhythm, before he’d given her a hint of satisfaction, he damned near spent, so startling was the depth of pleasure he found in his wife’s body. She flung herself against his thrusts, strained against him, and made a solid bid to wrestle Percival’s control from his grasp. While Percival held the balance between a ferocious determination to please his wife and the equally ferocious effects of sexual deprivation, he dimly perceived that something besides desire had Esther in its grip.

The first shudder went through her; then she bucked against him, signaling that he could follow her into pleasure. He thrust hard, then harder as she clung and moaned, then harder still.

His last thought—a desperate flight of imagination surely—was that Esther’s passion was real, but as she shook and keened and beneath him, she was wrestling not only with desire but also with despair.

Three

“Esther, this remove to Town has you looking peaked and wan. Percival must be beside himself.”

Gladys had sent word that another day cooped up at Morelands would give her a megrim, and Tony, apparently having a full complement of prudence and a mortal fear of his wife’s megrims, had collected his family from the country accordingly.

Having rested for all of one night, nothing would do but that Gladys would muster the troops for an outing to the park, regardless of the cold, regardless of anything.

“I haven’t bounced back from the upheaval,” Esther replied slowly. She could be honest because the boys were in the next coach back, with the maids and Gladys’s eldest daughter.

Gladys glanced over at her sharply. “From the move? You haven’t bounced back from the move up here?”

“Not from that either.” Dawning truth was not always a comfortable thing, but there was relief in it. “From Valentine’s birth, I think.”

The coach clattered along past the dormant trees and dead grass of Grosvenor Square. Gladys peered out the window then huffed a sigh.

“It was worse for me with Elizabeth. I thought I’d never stop weeping. Her Grace, of all people, was a comfort.”

The idea that Her Grace could have been a comfort to anybody was intriguing. “How?”

“She’d lost Eustace, you’ll recall, when he was only five. She said a mother must not give in to the melancholy, that your children will always be with you in some regard, despite that you must send them out into the world. I think she also cornered Tony and told him to cosset me within an inch of his life.”

“As if he doesn’t anyway?”

They shared a smile, though as conversation again lapsed, Esther marveled that she and Gladys hadn’t had this discussion before. Perhaps, with six children between them under the age of six, they’d been too busy.

Melancholy was a serious word, a potentially dangerous word. “I don’t weep, much. Hardly at all, but there’s a sense…”

Gladys barged into the silence. “Your heart aches abominably after the baby arrives. When I was girl, we used to go to Lyme in the summer. I’d stand on the beach in my bare feet and let the water swirl about my ankles. After Elizabeth was born, I felt like something was dragging at my ankles the same way, taking all my happiness and pulling it out to sea. I’d cry at anything and nothing.”

In for a penny… “Did you faint?”

“Not until Charlotte came along.”

Another shared smile, nowhere near as merry.

“I don’t think I’m carrying again.” Though after last night… Last night had been a mistake in some senses, and much needed in others. Esther hadn’t completely sorted the whole business out, but she’d slept well, and she had not made arrangements to consult any physicians.

Nor had Percival brought it up again at breakfast.

“Esther, lower the shade.” Gladys reached over and unrolled the leather that covered the window.

“Why are we shutting out the last sunshine we might see for days?”

“Because that beastly O’Donnell woman was sitting in her open carriage, flirting right there in the street with some poor man.”

“She must earn her living too, Gladys.” Esther could be charitable, because Percival had assured her early in their marriage—early and often—that he’d been ready to divest himself of the drama and greed of professional liaisons.

At the time, she’d believed him. Through a crack between the window and the shade, Esther studied Cecily O’Donnell, one of Percival’s former mistresses—the tabbies had been all too happy to inform a new bride exactly where her competition might lie. The lady’s coiffure was elaborate and well powdered, a green satin caleche draped over it just so. Her white muff was enormous, her attire elegant to the point of ostentatious, and in her eyes there was a calculation Esther could see even from a distance of several yards.

The carriage rolled past Mrs. O’Donnell’s flirting swain, and Esther thought of Percival’s words from the previous night: I do love you. I’ll always love you.

She’d believed him then. She still believed him in harsh light of the winter day.

* * *

“Good of you to receive me, Kathleen.”

Percival bowed over the hand of a woman he had seen little of in the previous five years, and had seen every inch of prior to his marriage. Her hands were still soft, her smile gracious, and her modest house welcoming.

And yet, she had aged. The life of a courtesan was a life of lies, of making the difficult look easy and fun, when it was in truth dangerous and grueling. Percival knew that now, now that he was married.

Or maybe he’d always known it, only now he could afford to admit his part in it.

Kathleen St. Just rose from a graceful curtsy. “My lord, you look well. May I offer you refreshment?”

He loathed tea, and he did not want to consume anything under her roof for reasons having to do with Greek legends regarding trips through the underworld. He parted with her hand.