“Neither one of us can know the truth to that,” she pointed out. She was dancing on the edge of jeopardy and it felt wonderful.
His mouth opened like that of a fish out of water.
She leaned forward and patted his knee this time. “A virgin at your age…well. I would never tell a soul.” And she beamed at him.
It was a beautiful moment. It almost made up for the way he was planning to annul their marriage due to her unsuitability as a wife.
He surprised her.
After staring at her for a moment, he collapsed into a howling fit of laughter.
She sat silently for a moment, but Cosway had the kind of laughter that made you want to join in, and she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
“You think that because I haven’t tried out the equipment on a woman, it doesn’t work at all?”
“It’s a reasonable—”
He started howling with laughter again, and finally straightened up.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said with reasonable dignity.
“It’s you. I suppose it’s due to being a lady. One can only assume from your idea about my equipment that you yourself have never—” He raised an eyebrow suggestively.
“What?” she asked, completely confused.
“You’ve never pleasured yourself.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Bloody hell, you haven’t.”
She felt herself turning pink. “I see no need to engage in coarse language.”
“Shit and dam—”
“Don’t!”
“I’m talking about pleasure,” he said. “The kind you apparently have never had.”
Isidore kept silent. What pleasure she had had or not was none of his business.
“I should have known,” he muttered to himself. “Now look here, Isidore. My—well, what word am I allowed to use, then?”
“I don’t know. Pizzle, I suppose. Though no one ever talks to me about pizzles.”
“They want to,” Simeon said. “You just haven’t given them the chance. Pizzle, for Christ’s sake. Sounds like a word a five-year-old might use when learning to take a piss. Are you sure we can’t do with a bolder word, one more in line with the size of the thing?”
Isidore opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again and said: “Pizzle.”
“Right. Well, my pizzle is a pizzalone, in Italian. A big pizzle, Isidore.”
He was still making fun of her. She folded her arms over her chest. “There’s nothing sadder than a man who feels the need to boast about the size of his equipment,” she said sweetly.
“It’s not boasting, just stating.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Want me to prove it?” And he put his hands back on the front of his greatcoat.
“No!”
Simeon looked at Isidore. She was laughing and indignant at the same time. She didn’t look docile, or sweet, or biddable…she looked like a banked fire waiting for just one spark to flare. She had never pleasured herself…she had never…she had waited.
His blood was pounding through his body, begging him, telling him, commanding him. It took all his strength to resist the impulse to pull her into his arms. “I can completely understand your anxiety,” he said.
“You can?”
“You’re buying a pig in a poke. Unlike the rest of the Englishmen around here, I haven’t been strutting around brothels for the last fifteen years. But if we did marry, I wouldn’t bring you any diseases, Isidore.”
She nodded.
“You have a reasonable suspicion that my pizzle is not in working condition. Out of shape. Withered from lack of use. Tired from my own handling—”
“That’s enough.”
“So I would have to prove it to you, obviously, before I could expect you to commit to our marriage.”
“But you yourself are not committed, since I’m not a docile little hen-wit.”
There was a moment of silence in the carriage. Her summary of his marital ambitions seemed unnecessarily harsh. “It’s not that I want to marry an unintelligent woman,” he began painstakingly, but she interrupted him.
“You just don’t want to marry me.”
“It’s not a question of you, Isidore.”
He had that look again, the one of total calm and control. Isidore understood Simeon a bit better now—and pitied him for it. Her husband thought he had anger and lust under control, not to mention fear. He thought he had life under control.
He was a fool, but that wasn’t the same thing as being a madman, the way she and Jemma had thought he might be. And from what he was saying, he wasn’t incapable. Clearly, she needed to think about what to do next.