Page 89 of The Captive
May-December pairings were common enough, particularly among titled men who had the wealth and position to take their pick of the debutantes on the market each year. Gilly had known some of those couples among Greendale’s cronies, and even their marriages could be characterized by affection and respect.
She’d never been more relieved than when Theo Martin had told her Greendale was unlikely to recover. Her husband had taught her how to hate, how to loathe and abhor another human being. How to endure a nightmare with a fixed smile.
With Christian, she was learning how to cherish and esteem, and no matter how she chided him for his presumption or made noises each morning about him overstepping, each night, she clung to him and gave him her body and another piece of her heart.
“You’re quiet,” Christian said. How long he’d been standing in the doorway to her sitting room, she did not know. “You’ve made this place your own nest. I like it.”
He liked her, and Christian Severn’s liking was a precious rarity.
Gilly had appropriated pillowcases and slipcovers from her trousseau, such that embroidered flowers and designs from her wildest imagination were creeping over the couches and chairs.
“You’ll be after my curtains next,” he said. “And you’ve started Lucy on this habit of decorating every fabric in sight.”
“Greendale allowed it,” she said. “He thought a woman with her head bowed over her hoop was a pleasing sight.” To take what her late husband had permitted and make it an excess had been a form of revenge.
Sharing herself with Christian was more of that same revenge, at least in part, and Gilly hated herself for that.
Christian crossed his arms.
She rose and drew him forward by the wrist. “Whatever it is, say it.”
“I’d prefer you were bowed over my sated and prostrate form.” He pulled the door shut behind him and let her tug him into the room.
“We shall not be indiscreet here in the broad light of day,” she said, but she’d left a question in the words when she’d intended a stern admonition.
He smiled down at her. “Someday, Gillian, I will have you writhing and moaning in the broad light of day. Outdoors even.”
“You’d get leaves in my hair.” She could afford the humor, because he was behaving.
“Among other places, but then I’d help you remove them.”
“You are so naughty.”
“Do you mind?” He kissed her ear and rested his chin on her crown.
“You cannot spend your entire day seeing to my safety. I ought to leave,” she said, genuinely sorry to bring this up again when his mood was so winsome.
“Not without me. We’ve had no word of the girl who prepared your lunch basket with the poisoned tea, and inquiries at the Lion and Cock yield only the information that she began to work there last winter and hailed from the West Riding.”
“If she could get to my food, anybody can.” Or they could get to his.
“No, they can’t.” His eyes were very sober, his hands on her shoulders steady. “I’ve sent everybody from the house staff whom I can’t vouch for personally off to visit family, which is common enough between haying and harvest. Your footmen or I attend you wherever you go, and the entire staff has been warned to watch for strangers.”
“They’ve been…protective,” Gilly said. “Discreet, but protective.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I left my slippers in your bedroom that first night.”
“So?”
The great lout was genuinely perplexed. “Below stairs, they know.”
“That we share a bed? If you say so.”
“I don’t like that they know.” She hated that they knew, hated that they might think her guilty of every weak, wanton behavior Greendale had accused her of.
Christian’s gaze narrowed, more closely approximating the ducal sphinx Gilly had barged in on weeks ago in London. “Will you pretend you don’t like what we do?”
