A Rogue of Her Own (Windham Brides #4)(33)
The clock was chiming ten when Charlotte gave up pretending to embroider in the library, and returned to the bedroom. She dismissed the maid, built up the fire for the night, and started rehearsing her first proper rant as Mrs. Lucas Sherbourne.
The unforgivably neglected, furiously impatient, anxious-beyond-all-bearing Mrs. Lucas Sherbourne.
*
Thus far, Sherbourne did not like being married. He liked his wife well enough, what he knew of her, but he did not like his household having been put at sixes and sevens by the addition of a female. His valet was nowhere to be found, when by rights, Turnbull ought to have been dozing in a handy dressing closet.
Sherbourne’s sleeping arrangements, his staff, his schedule, his everything was changing because he’d taken a wife.
And there she slept, in the same chair by the fire where he’d found her the previous night.
Sherbourne washed as thoroughly and quietly as he could, and decided against shaving. As tired as he was, he’d probably cut his own throat and not notice until Charlotte scolded him for the resulting mess.
Another night in the library beckoned, lest he waken at some ungodly hour and reach for his wife uninvited.
“Mr. Sherbourne.” Charlotte hadn’t moved, though she had opened her eyes. Cats did that, went from restful contemplation to poised alertness merely by opening their eyes.
“Madam, I apologize for waking you.” Apologizing was a skill smart husbands doubtless perfected in the first week of marriage.
“Where have you been, sir?”
Charlotte’s tone—one he’d not heard since he’d been in leading strings—rather woke him up. “At the colliery, where apparently nothing can go forward without my hand on the figurative plough. If you want to tear a strip off me for abandoning you the livelong day, now is a good time to do so, because I’ll sleep through most of your lecture.”
He dared not admit that he’d been so overset by the state of works that he’d lost track of the time.
Charlotte rose and came closer, bringing with her the floral scent of French soap. She wore a dressing gown that covered her from neck to toes, but the way she moved told him that beneath the satin finery, she wore no stays or bindings.
“You had the master bedroom moved to the ground floor. Why?”
Because my wife shouldn’t have to be afraid even as she dreams. “Because you’ll sleep better in a room without a balcony. If you sleep better, so will I.”
His honesty earned him a small smile. “What’s amiss at the mine?”
“Everything, and it’s not even a mine yet. My engineer claims he was laid low by an ague, but I suspect he overimbibes, which was why I could hire him away from the works at Waxter. If something seems too good to be true, it is too good to be true.”
“What about last night?” Charlotte smoothed the lapels of his dressing gown. “Were you at the works last night too?”
In his nightmares. “I fell asleep at my desk in the library.”
“Ah, but why did you fall asleep at your desk in the library? Are you having second thoughts about this marriage?”
And third and fourth thoughts. Also married thoughts about the woman standing barefoot before him.
“I spoke vows, Charlotte. Second thoughts don’t come into it.”
She gave him a disappointed look. Too late Sherbourne realized he’d blundered into a verbal trap. If he’d answered honestly—yes, this hasty, expedient union had left him with many reservations—Charlotte would be hurt, even if she’d been harboring similar doubts.
If he professed a false enthusiasm for their marriage, she’d be disappointed in him for dissembling.
“If you have no second thoughts, Mr. Sherbourne, you are the first newlywed in the history of marriage to enjoy certainty about nuptial obligations entered into under dubious circumstances. I have second thoughts.”
After firing off that round of marital artillery, Charlotte marched to the bed, unbelted her robe, and climbed beneath the covers.
Sherbourne considered another night on the library sofa, another retreat into a bachelor’s privileges, and rejected the notion. The library was chilly, the sofa lumpy, and the whole room smelled of peat smoke and books.
Charlotte smelled much nicer, and she was his wife.
Sherbourne blew out the candles, banked the fire, draped his dressing gown over Charlotte’s at the foot of the bed—a metaphor, that—and appropriated the opposite side of the mattress. Some fool had forgotten to warm the sheets, which was probably a blessing.
“Tell me of your second thoughts, Mrs. Sherbourne.”
A gusty sigh greeted his invitation.
“Madam wife, I’d like to hear your second thoughts, if you’re inclined to share them.”
On the other side of the bed, a good yard from where Sherbourne lay, Charlotte shifted. “I was prepared to endure you.”
Likewise, I’m sure. “We are man and wife. I’m confident a fair amount of enduring will be necessary all around.”
She stirred about some more. “I meant…”
Sherbourne waited. He was not up to this conversation at this hour, but the alternative was sleeping in the library, possibly for the next thirty-seven years.
“I worried about you,” Charlotte said. “The weather was fickle, you were gone for hours, and you didn’t send a note. Men are pigheaded, and mines can be dangerous.”