She needed more time to relax. Fortunately, he’d planned for that possibility. “And now you’re going to have me. Not yet—” He stopped her when she started to press up against him, smoothed her beautiful hair away from her face while he imprinted the adorably pinkened features in his mind. “This time is all for you.”
“I don’t understand.”
He reached for the blindfold he’d left on the bed. “Call it my wedding gift to you—to us,” he reiterated when her brows drew together. “I’m binding a sash over my eyes…” Which he did, floundering a bit when she started to protest. “Nay, let me. My chambers, my choice.”
“Our chambers,” she chided with a light laugh. “Lest you forget.”
“Never! And now…” Lowering his arms, he told her, “I’m taking off my dressing gown and dropping it—”
“Not near the fire!”
“No, no, at the foot of the bed—ow! Damn! Laced my toe. Damn, da— Pardon. These trunks masquerading as posts are hard as Hades!”
She was giggling full-out by the time he’d situated his naked self in the center of the massive canopied bed occupying the lord’s chambers. Blast it, how was he to know the piece of insanely huge furniture would feel so very empty without her?
“I’m in the middle of the bed, eager for your company,” he told her, having a devil of a time with the sash—it kept slipping down over his ears. He bunched it up and tightened the knot, telling her as he did so, “Now then, if you haven’t moved, the bottommost left corner is approximately three paces in front of you.”
He expected, now that she knew her orientation, she’d join him any second. “For the rest of the evening, my darling Issybelle, I am your servant to explore and use as you will. Tonight, we each discover the other on equal footing, as it were.”
Her giggles had quieted.
The blackness of his vision amplified the howl of wind outside, the slap-bang of a shutter in the distance, and the lack of sound from his wife. But the fire flamed on, crackling and popping merrily, oblivious to his growing concern.
“Are you warm enough?” God knew he was.
She made an affirmative noise in her throat.
But his ears told him she hadn’t moved a muscle. “Still nervous?”
“Just a little.”
“Take all the time you need,” he said soothingly, exhibiting the patience of one expecting to be sainted any moment now. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And still he waited.
And waited.
Damn. Now that he was practically spread-eagle, nude as a babe, baring his soul and body as never before, and beyond ready for his wife, she was nowhere to be found. And it was dark as hell behind the thick sash.
An odd choking noise came from the foot of the bed.
“Isabella?” Nicholas scrambled to a sitting position. One long tie of the blindfold flopped against his nose. It was tempting to take it off, to see her in the firelight. But he wouldn’t.
He’d meant what he said—they’d blindly learn each other’s secrets together. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough to behold all her charms in the light. To tell her how lovely she appeared to him, his charming Issybelle.
For now, he just wanted to hold her. So where the dickens was she? “Isabella?”
Sexual intercourse. Mating. Breeding. Lovemaking.
Aye, that was the one.
Lovemaking with her new husband.
There were so many words for it and so much she didn’t know. Such as how to do it.
Oh, Anne had shared the basic fundamentals, but Isabella surmised intimate relations were much like eating raspberry cobbler. No matter how much description one received from others, one never knew how it really tasted until the crumbly, gooey sweetness crossed from a fork into their own mouth.
But how could she think of food when her stomach was a roiling twaddle of spikes and stickers?
She knew nervousness was to be expected.
She knew it would likely sting—but just for a bit.
She knew her comfort surrounding the act would assuredly improve with time.
She also knew she was not—most certainly not—supposed to find any of this funny.
But the tickle in her throat, the gurgles of laughter fighting their way up from her neck, the giant smile she tried to stifle by mashing her lips together, they all said otherwise.
“Isabella?” Rustling ensued and she feared he was about to call a halt to the little game he’d instigated. That or possibly stop his thoughtful seduction altogether. “Isabella!”
“No! I am f-fine,” she choked out. “Stay in bed, I beg you.”
“You don’t sound fine.”