Page 57 of Miss Delightful
“Of course I do, but that doesn’t signify. I want you to be happy, Dorcas.”
I don’t know when I was last happy.Except that wasn’t true. She was happy chatting with Alasdhair over a cup of tea. Happy watching him hold his one-sided conversations with John. Happy simply walking down the street at his side.
“I will marry you, Alasdhair. I esteem you greatly, I delight in your kisses, and I want to be your wife. I’m simply… wary of what awaits on our wedding night. I want that ordeal behind us.”
He did sit back, but kept hold of her hands. “We will take each other to bed, Dorcas, and if you truly don’t care for what happens there, you will tell me that we don’t suit. You will not consign yourself to decades of intimacies that you don’t enjoy. You will not exchange one form of captivity for another. Promise me that.”
She wanted to argue. Marriage to Alasdhair could never be captivity, but life at the vicarage was certainly taking on the quality of an incarceration.
“I promise. Enough talk, Mr. MacKay. To bed with us.”
* * *
Nobody had seenfit to warn Alasdhair that Dorcas bided in his sitting room. He’d thus come upon her all unaware, his mind still offering up clever, learned retorts he should have fired at Thomas Delancey’s paternal conceits.
Then Alasdhair had seen Dorcas, felled by exhaustion and curled up in his reading chair. Her peacefully slumbering form was the best argument he could have made for a permanent union with her: Shetrustedhim. She trusted him enough to come and go from his home unescorted, trusted him enough to encourage his advances, trusted him enough to leave John in his care…
And trusted him enough to confide the details of her sorry initial foray into sexual intimacies. Mornebeth had chosen the worst possible manner in which to bungle, but in true Dorcas fashion, she’d not considered that her erstwhile lover might have failed her.
She, who excelled at recounting society’s shortcomings, looked for the flaw within herself.
“I should shave,” Alasdhair said, scrubbing a hand over his cheeks.
She marched past him toward the bedroom. “You shaved before calling at the vicarage. If you tarry behind the privacy screen, I might lose my nerve.”
Alasdhair stopped her on the threshold by putting a hand to her shoulder. “Then lose your nerve. Tell me you’ve changed your mind, that you have decided to send me packing. The only request I make of you, Dorcas, is that you be honest with me and with yourself. I insist upon it.”
She gazed up at him, expression unreadable. “Women are not generally encouraged to have opinions, much less to speak them.”
“If a woman is not entitled to hold forth about her own bodily joys and woes, then she has been reduced to the status of an automaton, a device fashioned for the convenience of men and children. Is that how you think of yourself?”
Her hesitation was a blow to his heart. Him, she might trust, but herself? Damn Mornebeth, Vicar Delancey, and anybody else who had caused an eminently intelligent, kind, sensible, and dear woman to doubt herself.
“It’s complicated,” she said, moving into the bedroom.
“Then let me simplify it,” Alasdhair said, coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. “I love you. You can tell me that your ears are ticklish.”
“My ears are not ticklish.”
Oh, but her dignity was. To Alasdhair’s first outright declaration of love, Dorcas had no retort, and that pleased his enormously. “Youcouldtell me if your earswereticklish. I would desist from nuzzling your ears.”
She stood quite straight in his arms. “Would you tease me about it? Bring it up as a private joke with your cousins?”
Mornebeth had done worse than bungle, he’d shown himself to be an utter buffoon. “My dearest heart, I might remark to my cousins that I cannot wait to become your husband, that I want a honey month of five years duration, but the particulars of your ears or toes or the way you sigh when I take you in my arms… Those belong to us alone. They are private. Sacred.”
She let him have the smallest increment of her weight. “With you, I hope it can be. Will you see to my hooks?”
Hell yes.“Hold still.”
She undid his cravat, and he assisted with her hooks, but they mostly undressed on separate sides of the bed. For Alasdhair, that was a sop to self-restraint. For Dorcas… maybe a chance to assess him in an undressed state? She folded her clothes tidily on the clothes press. Alasdhair hung his over the top of the privacy screen. He wanted to tackle her, and she likely wanted to leave.
By the time Alasdhair was wearing only his breeches, Dorcas stood in her shift and bare feet, looking chilly and uncertain.
He draped his dressing gown around her shoulders. “Borrow my toothpowder. I’ll warm the sheets.”
She scooted off behind the privacy screen, while Alasdhair filled the warmer with coals. Their first intimate encounter was off to a miserably unimpressive start. The issue was not one of skilled kisses or alluring caresses—he had no doubt whatsoever that he was adequate to those challenges—but of the mind and heart.
Taking a new lover always entailed mustering a dash of courage in hopes of a banquet of pleasure, but in Dorcas’s case, the boot was on the other foot. She was marshaling her courage in anticipation of no pleasure whatsoever.
