by Julia Quinn
“I believe he said something about whatever my needs were.”
“Your meal . . .” Martha said weakly. “I could carry it up.”
There was a resounding crash from the kitchen. Martha made an awkward step toward the door just as Nicholas strode back through it, ducking to clear the doorway with a limp boy slung over his shoulder.
“Georgie!” Martha called out in what was clearly concern and surprise.
That stopped Georgie cold. “Excuse me?”
“Georgie,” Martha said, pointing at Nicholas.
“His name is Georgie?” Nicholas asked Martha.
“Me clotheid brother,” Martha said, using the colorful Scottish modifier without a lick of a Scottish accent.
“And his name is Georgie?” Georgie asked Martha.
Martha nodded.
“My name is Georgie,” Georgie said, her palm flattened on her chest.
Martha looked aghast. Whether she was horrified at the prospect of a lady with a man’s name or at a lady suggesting a tavern maid call her by said name—this was unclear.
She also seemed entirely unaware she was making such a dramatic face.
Georgie, on the other hand, suddenly realized she no longer felt even a little bit tired. There was no way Nicholas was going to get out of letting her help this time.
The other Georgie picked that moment to groan.
If Nicholas reacted to the noise, neither Georgie saw it. “Martha,” he said, “your brother is going to be fine. But I can’t fix his arm in the kitchen.”
“Why not?” Martha said, swinging her head around looking for—
Mr. Kipperstrung, who burst through the doorway in an incongruous cloud of flour. “Why not?” he demanded.
Nicholas clenched his teeth, and Georgie could see that he was losing his patience. “Why not here?” she asked cheerfully, swinging her hand across the expanse of the table. When no one responded, she lowered her arm, and less-than-deftly started to sweep the leftover mess from the sour-faced family that Martha hadn’t been able to get to yet.
“Wait,” Nicholas said. He looked surprised when this actually worked, and everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him. He shook his head slightly and then maneuvered Boy-Georgie to the other end of the table.
“What happened?” Georgie asked.
Nicholas gave her a brief glance before turning back to his patient. “He fainted the moment I touched his arm.”
“He tried to tell me it didn’t hurt,” Martha whispered.
“May I have a small pot of hot water and some clean linen?” Nicholas asked the proprietor.
Mr. Kipperstrung stared, mouth agape. “Me, fetch water?”
Nicholas smiled. “Yes, please. If you will.”
“How can I help?” Georgie asked with cheerful eagerness.
“Honestly?” Nicholas asked her.
She nodded.
“Feed me.”
Chapter 18
It was only when Nicholas climbed the stairs to his room at the Alconbury Arms that he realized two full hours had passed.
Georgie had been amazing. Spectacular. True, she’d looked at him as if he might be a lunatic after he’d asked her to feed him, but only for a moment.
Once she’d realized what he was about, she gave him a businesslike nod and turned to the food on the table, ripping off small bits of bread, cheese, and something he hoped was sliced beef. Piece by piece she popped the food into his mouth so that he could keep his hands free to work on Boy-Georgie.
When he’d asked her to take Jameson and go back out to the carriage to hunt for his personal medical supplies she hadn’t balked that he was sending her away from the area, she just did it, then came back and continued to give him food while he assessed the situation and began the initial debridement of the wound.
Georgie had rolled her sleeves up to match his and waited for him to need her. She wiped his brow, helped remove bits of burned skin from the area he was working on, and, when he asked, held the candle closer. She even caught a drip of wax with her bare hand.
But once she’d got involved with tending to the boy’s arm, she’d forgotten to keep up with supper. He’d forgotten, too, but this was typical. Hunger, the passage of time—none of it seemed to interfere with his concentration when he was with a patient. Only his hair falling in his face (which Georgie held back), and the waning of the light (which Georgie fixed with a second candle) interrupted his systematic attention to the boy’s arm.
It was not as simple an endeavor as he’d first thought. The burn was more than a day old, and no one had cleaned it properly. Bits of dirt and dust had embedded themselves in the tender skin, and Nicholas thought it a minor miracle that there was no sign of infection. He worked carefully and methodically—he liked this type of medical care; there was great satisfaction to be had when one could see results as one went along—but it took time, especially when he was trying extra-hard not to cause the boy any more pain.
When he’d finally got it down to just some minor burning at the edges of the main injury, Nicholas looked up from Boy-Georgie’s arm to Girl-Georgie’s face and saw that she was literally falling asleep.
“Darling,” he whispered.
She jerked and opened her eyes.
“You should go up to bed.”
“No,” she said blearily, shaking her hand. “I’m helping you.”
“And you’ve been indispensable,” he assured her. “But I’m almost done. And you’re dead on your feet.”
She blinked and looked down. At her feet, he could only presume.
He smiled. He couldn’t help it.
“Don’t you need the candlelight?” she asked.
“There are still people about,” he said. “Someone else can hold it. Go on. I will be fine, I promise.” And then, when she did not look convinced, he said, “I would not let you leave if I were not sure I could manage without you.”
This seemed to mollify her, and she yawned. “You’re certain?”
He nodded. “Go. You’ll want some time to yourself before bed, I’m sure.”
“I’ll wait up,” she promised.
But she didn’t. Wait up, that was. Nicholas had no doubt she’d tried, but he’d been stuck in the dining room much longer than he’d expected. As he was finishing with the boy’s wound, Martha came forward shyly and asked about a lump on her elbow. Then Mr. Kipperstrung confessed to a terrible earache, and Mrs. Kipperstrung—Nicholas still could not quite believe there was a Mrs. Kipperstrung—pulled him aside and asked if he might take a look at her bunions.
Bunions. Ah, the romance of medicine.
By the time he entered his room, he was bone tired. He moved quietly; he suspected Georgie would not be awake when he opened the door, and indeed, she was lying on her side, one hand near her face, her chest rising and falling softly with each breath.
“It seems that we’re to be denied our wedding night once again,” he murmured. He barely made a sound; it was really no more than a movement of his mouth. But he wanted to say it, to feel the words on his lips. He wanted to stroke her hair, too, to brush aside the wisps that tickled her face. But he did not want to wake her. He needed her, but she needed sleep more, and he suspected that he did, as well.
Nicholas did not know if he could make their first time perfect, but he was determined to try, and he knew this did not mean mauling her while they were both so tired they could barely function.
He looked down at Georgie, asleep in a moonbeam across her pillow. In all of their families’ matchmaking, a more contrived visual could not have been concocted. The moonlight through the window was romantic, and his sleeping wife’s long plait falling off the side of the bed was oddly inviting. Nicholas was gripped by a whimsical urge to lift her braid and put it on the pillow next to her.
He could not imagine what it was like to have so much hair one had to contain it before bed. Nicholas had never grown his hair long; it simply wasn’t his style, and frankly, it seemed more
of nuisance than it was worth. His brother Andrew had once worn his past his shoulders, but he’d spent nearly a decade at sea as a privateer, and apparently queued hair was an expected aspect of the role.
Nicholas liked Georgie’s hair. He’d never seen it down, or at least not since they were children. But even pulled back, the color was an undeniable beacon of warmth. It was red, but not red, not in the way one usually thought of redheads. Which was to say, it wasn’t orange.
They’d napped a bit in the carriage, and during one stretch while she was dozing and he was not, he’d peeked down at the strands, marveling that each was somehow a different color—red and brown and blond and even a few he’d swear were white, and they all combined to make something he could only describe as the morning dawn on a winter’s day.
He changed into his nightshirt and crawled into bed, taking care not to disturb her. But as he drifted off, it occurred to him that there was nothing more welcome on a winter’s day than that first glimpse of sun, that promise of warmth. And even though he’d tried so hard to give her the space she needed to sleep, his body felt the pull of hers, and he moved. He curved behind her, and his hand found hers, and he slept.
Georgie came awake slowly, one sense at a time. The cool morning air on her face, the pink of the sunlight filtering through her eyelids. She felt impossibly cozy and cocooned under the quilt, and even as her brain slowly rose through her sleepy fog, she wanted to burrow in, to press herself into the warmth, into the strength.
Into Nicholas.
Her eyes flew open.
He was in bed with her. Which shouldn’t have been shocking, except that she had no memory of how he’d got there. What had happened the night before? Nothing intimate, surely. They’d helped the boy, the other Georgie, and then Nicholas had insisted that she go up to the room and get ready for bed. He’d thought she’d want some privacy to get ready. She’d thought him so considerate. And then . . .
She must have fallen asleep.
She closed her eyes again, abject in her embarrassment. What sort of bride fell asleep on her wedding night? Or the night after the wedding night, as her case was. But it didn’t matter. She was still a terrible wife.
She stayed like that for several seconds, trying to hold herself utterly still. What was she supposed to do now? Wake him? Surely not. Should she try to slip out of the bed? His arm was thrown over her waist. Could she move it without disturbing him?
Could she move herself without disturbing him?
She gave it a little test, edging forward just a smidge.
Gremmremph.
As noises went, it was sleepy. And adorable. And she wished she could actually see him, but they were both on their sides, and she was facing away, and if her miniscule motion elicited his sleepy mumble, she’d surely wake him if she tried to turn.
But maybe if she moved just a little more. And then a little more after that, inch by inch until she could slip out from under his arm. Then she could turn. She could see what he looked like when he slept. Was he a quiet sleeper, or did his dreams play out on his face?
Were his lips closed, or did he hold them ever-so-slightly open? And what of his eyes? Had she ever truly looked at him when they were closed? No one held a blink for long enough for someone else to remember the expression. Did he still look like a Rokesby if she could not see the electric blue of his irises?
She pushed herself forward again, wiggling across the sheets, using all of her concentration just to move an inch. And then she waited, because it wouldn’t do to move too quickly. She needed to be sure he’d settled back into sleep before she moved again.
And maybe she also needed one last moment before leaving the bed, because nothing had ever felt quite so perfect as his hand on her hip.
She sighed. She loved his hands. Big and strong and capable, with flat square nails. Was she mad to find a man’s hands so attractive?
Then she felt him move, a yawning, stretching motion, the kind one made when one wasn’t quite yet awake. “Georgie,” he said, his voice sleep-slurred and husky.
“Good morning,” she whispered.
“Georgie,” he said again. He sounded a bit more lucid this time. And happy.
“You were sleeping,” she said, not really knowing what to do with herself. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”
He yawned, and she took the moment to rise from the bed, but his hand tightened on her. “Don’t go,” he said.
She did not leave the bed, but she did sit up. “We probably need to get ready. It’s—” She looked around. If there was a clock, she didn’t see it. “I don’t know what time it is.”
He rustled in the bed behind her, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him sit up and look toward the window. “It’s barely dawn,” he said. “The sun is still very low on the horizon.”
“Oh.”
What was he really trying to tell her? That she didn’t need to get out of bed yet? That he didn’t want her to get out of bed?
“I love the dawn,” he said softly.
She should turn around. He was right there behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat from his body, even beyond the hand that still rested on her hip. But she was nervous, and she felt oddly misplaced, and she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do.
And no one liked not knowing what to do.
“You were asleep when I came in last night,” he said. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Thank you, I mean—” She shook her head, just a little, in that way people did when they weren’t sure what to say. “I mean, thank you,” she said again. Not that it sounded much different backward. “I was very tired.” She turned to face him. She was a coward if she didn’t, and she did not want to be a coward. “I meant to wait for you.”
He smiled. “It’s all right.”
“No, I don’t think it is.”
“Georgie,” he said, affection coloring his voice. “You needed to sleep. Hell, I needed to sleep.”
“Oh.” Did that mean he did not want her? That didn’t seem to make sense after the hours they had spent in the carriage. He’d kissed her like he wanted her. He’d kissed her like he wanted more.
He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Stop thinking so hard.”
She frowned at him, taking in the amusement in his azure eyes. “How do I stop thinking so hard?” she asked, with perhaps just a touch of peevishness in her voice. This was easy for him. Or if not easy, at least not quite so complicated and new.
He gave a shrug. “I don’t know, but I swear if you think any harder, steam will start coming out of your ears.”
“Steam. Really.”
He grinned. “Smoke?”
“Nicholas.”
“You’d be surprised what they teach us these days in medical school,” he said, his expression oh-so-innocent.
“Apparently so.”
His fingers walked their way up her thigh, crossing to her hand, and then up her forearm. “I’d like to kiss you again,” he said softly.
She nodded. She wanted that, too, but she wasn’t sure how to put it into words. Or even into action. It wasn’t that she felt frozen—that was far too cold a sensation to describe what had come over her body.
But she was still. Utterly motionless save for her breath, which had, in opposition to everything else, begun to quicken. She didn’t know how to move; she’d lost the ability to do so. All she could do was react, and once he touched her . . . really touched her . . .
She wasn’t sure what would happen, only that it would be like nothing she’d ever known.
He sat up, his nightshirt gaping a little at the neck to reveal a sprinkling of chest hair. It seemed so intimate, especially since she, too, was dressed in the loose white muslin of sleep.
“Georgie,” he said, and his hand came to her cheek, part caress, part entreaty. He leaned in, and she leaned in, and they kissed.
It was exactly how it had been in the carriage.
And at the same time
completely different.
He groaned her name again, and his other hand came up so that he was cradling her head, holding her close as he explored. The kiss was deep, and it was hot, and it stole everything from her in a way that made her just want to give more.
The entire moment was a contradiction—the same but different, stealing but giving. It was all so new to her, and yet he seemed to know exactly what to do.
How did he know how to do this? How to move and touch and give and take in exactly the right way to make her simmer with desire?
“Tell me what to do,” she whispered.
“You’re already doing it.”
She did not see how this could be the truth, but she wasn’t sure she cared. She just kept kissing him, doing what felt right and trusting that he would tell her if it was wrong.
He touched her leg, his hand trailing delicious shivers along her skin. “You tell me what to do,” he whispered.
She felt herself smile. “You know what to do.”
“Do I?”
She drew back, feeling the confusion on her face. “Haven’t you done this before?”
He shook his head.
“But—but—you’re a man.”
He shrugged, the very picture of nonchalance. But his eyes didn’t quite meet hers. “Everyone has to have a first time.”
“But—But—” This made no sense. Men of their society sowed their wild oats before they married. It’s what they did. It was how they learned. Wasn’t it?
“Do you mind that you’re my first?” Nicholas asked.
“No!” Goodness, that had come out with a bit more force than she’d intended. “No, not at all. I’m merely surprised.”
“Because I’m such a rogue?” he said with a self-deprecating quirk of his brow.
“No, because you’re so good at it.”
His mouth slid into a wide, naughty smile. “You think I’m good, do you?”
She covered her face with her hands. Dear God, she was blushing so hard she was going to burn her palms. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh, I think you did.”
