This was a new facet to Nicholas Haddonfield, this thoughtful, quiet man with excruciatingly gentle hands. Leah tried to tell herself it was yet more of his cozening, but the notion simply wouldn’t wash.

Nick’s thumb brushed over her lips. “Maybe someday when I am an old, blind hound, I will know your moods by touch, sound, and instinct, Leah Haddonfield, and perhaps you shall even know mine.”

In the soft darkness of the spring night, Nick sounded so wistful, and his hands were so tender as they skimmed and caressed and danced across her face, she felt a lump constrict her throat. Maybe Darius had been right, and this misbegotten union might flower into something real and lovely and permanent.

“I would like that, Husband.” Leah turned her cheek into his palm and kissed the heel of his hand. “I would like, someday, to know you by instinct.”

Leah drifted off, content in Nick’s embrace, and did not wake up until he was hefting her into his arms and trying to extricate her from the coach without disturbing her.

“Nicholas, I can walk.”

“Nonsense,” Nick said, shifting as he freed her from the coach. “I will carry you over this threshold, for it’s one we own. Belle Maison, thank God, is still in my father’s hands.”

Leah did not protest, though she wanted to. With his talk of blind fathers, dying fathers, and thresholds that “we” owned, he was looping one thread of longing after another around Leah’s heart.

“My lord, my lady.” An old fellow standing by the mounting block bowed and picked up his lantern. “Congratulations, and welcome to Clover Down. The lad will light your way.”

Nick nodded his thanks as the coachmen steered their conveyance around to the carriage house and a young footman held up a second lantern to illuminate the front steps of the manor house. The butler opened the door, offered them congratulations and welcome, and was quickly waved off to bed. Leah gained her feet only when Nick had deposited her in the master bedroom, which to her surprise boasted an enormous tub of steaming, rose-scented water.

“A lookout was no doubt posted,” Nick said, “and the water kept heating in the laundry until we were spotted. Your staff wants you to feel welcome.”

“I most assuredly feel welcome. Perhaps you’d like to go first?”

“We can share. Because this is our wedding night, I will be your lady’s maid.”

Leah turned and offered him her back, thinking how odd it was, to be so casually intimate with Nick once again, and how nonchalant he seemed with the whole business.

“I feel as if I’m watching some woman who looks like me embark on her married life with a man who resembles Nicholas Haddonfield,” Leah said, her back to her spouse.

Nick’s fingers made short work of the myriad buttons on Leah’s wedding dress. “Maybe married life, if it’s to be successful, is no different from the rest of one’s life, or it shouldn’t be.”

“This feels different,” Leah decided, “but not strange.” She turned, the back of her dress gaping, and lifted her hands to Nick’s chin.

“Hold still,” she said, unfastening his sapphire pin and untying the elaborate knot in his cravat. Without pausing, she undid the buttons of his waistcoat, and then relieved him of his sleeve buttons, which also sported inset sapphires.

“You do clean up well, Nicholas.”

“You aren’t going to stop now, are you? I am hardly ready for my bath.”

He was teasing, so Leah humored him. Many married men had no valet, and this was something she could do for him as his wife. She undid the buttons at the knees of his satin breeches and the garters to his stockings, slipped off his shoes, then took another step back. Nick reached forward, turned her by the shoulders, then eased her gown down to her hips and unlaced her stays. Leah balanced on Nick’s shoulder to step out of her gown and found herself facing him in chemise and petticoat.

He smiled down at her. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He knelt to deal with her stockings, garters, and slippers, then unfastened the tapes to her petticoats, gathering the entire frothy pile and dumping it on the couch that faced the hearth.

Leah watched him pad barefoot across the room, and it was as if with each piece of clothing they shed, Nick became more himself and less that polite, well-dressed aristocrat she’d married hours ago.

“You are looking at me, Wife. I like that.”

“You are rather hard to miss.”

Nick walked right up to her and gathered her close. “I will blow out all the candles, sleep in my clothes, pledge to leave you in peace, but on our wedding night it will be expected that we share a bed. I’ll sleep elsewhere if that’s what you prefer.”

He offered her a reprieve. Nick, in his boundless kindness and perceptivity, was offering her a reprieve.

“Let’s begin as we intend to go on,” Leah said, though she could only manage it with her cheek resting against Nick’s chest. The fine linen of his shirt lay beneath her nose, and below that his beating heart. She pushed his shirt aside, put her ear over that heart, and listened to its steady rhythm while Nick’s hands caressed her back.

“It shall be as you wish.” He rested his cheek against her temple, and silence spread around them until Leah planted a tasting kiss over his heart.

“Lovey?”

“Nicholas?”

“What are you doing?”

Such a careful question. She dropped her arms from around him. “I honestly don’t know, though of this much I’m certain: I am not enamored of what passed between us earlier, when you pleasured me and I allowed it. We are to be married, though.”

He remained unreadable, watching her as she visually took in the tub, the bed, the flowers in a vase on the windowsill—red roses, of course, with maidenhair and baby’s breath.

“We are married,” Nick said, as if picking up the conversational shuttlecock and batting it to her.

Leah had thought about this, after he’d left her aching in her bed, when she’d dressed in her wedding finery, and on the coach ride out from London. Her husband was a stubborn, independent, shrewd rogue of a man, but he was also kind and the closest thing Leah had to a friend. She hadn’t been at ease with what had passed between them, but neither was she ready to toss all intimacies with him aside.

Which left only one course: “Nicholas, will you teach me what pleases you?”

Nick could not form an answer, for his mind was whirling, robbing him of coherence.

Why, why in the name of sweet, squalling baby Jesus, did his wife have to be the first woman to ask him how she might please him?

Women who were intimate with Nick were safe with him; they could take and take and take to their hearts’ content, and that was how he wanted it. He’d learned, to his eternal heartache, that when he took, misery followed.

So he gave generously and skillfully, and got his pleasure that way.

He wanted to give to Leah—had planned on years of that very martyrdom—and here, she wanted to give as well.

For the first time, he experienced the subtle rejection of the pleasured by the pleasurer who would not yield to her own desires. She sought to make love to him, not with him, and the distinction made his heart shrink even as his cock began to stir.

And between bewilderment and arousal, Nick felt fear licking through his veins.

He wasn’t going to be able to keep his distance from her, to offer her pleasure and companionship and the kind of fondness he offered most any woman who sought it. She was going to wind herself around his body, and around his heart, and he’d be reduced to begging, breaking a promise he’d made to himself on Leonie’s behalf, and regretting and regretting and regretting.

God help him, if he wasn’t careful he’d be falling in love with his own wife.

“Nicholas?” Leah peered up at him, concern in her pretty brown eyes. “Are you all right?”