Edith Layton Read Online Free

forgotten to blow out all the lamps, as one still burned. But she was too comfortable to move. She closed her eyes—and opened them when she heard the door open.
    Her new husband ambled into the room and closed the door behind him. His hair was dewed with droplets of water, and he wore a long dressing gown. As he approached the bed he began to draw the sash and shrug the dressing gown off.
    Annabelle sat bolt upright. “What are you doing?”
    “Going to bed. With my wife,” he added blandly.
    “I had not thought…I didn’t think…You surprise me, sir,” she managed, because, after all,of course he had the right, but she hadn’t imagined he’d want intimacy so soon.
    “Now, why should you be surprised?” he asked, pausing by the bedside.
    “You don’t know me! That is to say, we don’t know each other.”
    “Indeed?” he said, looking at her with interest. “But we are married, are we not?”
    “Yes, but we’re scarcely well acquainted, even so.”
    He put his head to one side. “Time to remedy that, I’d think.”
    He was so mild, so logical, so peaceful that she relaxed. This wasn’t a man in the throes of any kind of lust. He simply didn’t understand. “But we are, in many respects, strangers,” she explained.
    “Yes. And so, soon we won’t be,” he said gently.
    Her hand flew to her neck to cover her chest where her shift didn’t. “I’d think there’d be plenty of time to…start that.”
    She knew about lovemaking, of course, had been aware she’d have to submit sooner or later. But this man had been so quiet and disarming, she’d believed that intimate relations with him, like her eventual death, would take place in some unspecified future she didn’t have to worry about yet.
    “You are ill?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    “Frightened?” he persisted.
    “Definitely not!” she said.
    “Revolted by the thought of my touch?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous!”
    “But not longing for it,” he said on a sigh. “Well, then, we’ll see what we can do about that.” He plucked up the coverlet.
    “You want me to long for you?” she gasped. “You mean to treat me like a…prostitute?”
    He blinked. “Of course not. My dear Annabelle, you’re quite mistaken. One doesn’t care what prostitutes think. That’s why they’re so popular. I do care about how you react to my lovemaking, though. Look,” he said, with a smile that held true amusement, “if we put this off you’ll become so anxious you’ll startle at every sound. Just think, every time I make a move toward you, you’ll bolt, wondering, Is this the moment, does he mean to begin now? Come, we’re husband and wife. You’re very lovely, you can’t be that surprised…” He hesitated, one hand on the sash of his dressing gown.
    His eyes grew thoughtful. “Or is it that you thought I wouldn’t be interested? Have I been that mannerly? I’d have thought you’d have seen it in my eyes—but you weren’t looking, were you? A convenient marriage isn’t necessarily a barren one, and I’m not just speaking of getting children. Sharing pleasure can be part of the arrangement. Even if it weren’t, I won’t have an unwilling bed partner. I thought at your age…” He saw her expression and changed what he was going to say. “But if reluctance to bed your husband is why you haven’t married before this, you really ought to have told me.”
    “That isn’t why I haven’t married!” she said quickly.
    “But you aren’t willing?”
    “I thought to know you better before we proceeded.”
    “Given the progress we’ve made toward that end so far, that isn’t likely in the near future. Unless we proceed, of course. I’m quite looking forward to it.”
    She bit her lower lip.
    He paused. “I’m not unreasonable. It may be that this was a mistake, after all. If so, something may yet be done to end this marriage—if it’s done before we begin it, in a physical sense.”
    She gasped. Was he threatening her?