“Your mouth glides on well-oiled wheels.”
She sighed. “I suppose so. You’re a constant contradiction, Rafael. It’s difficult to keep pace with you.”
“Not really. I’m just a man, Victoria, and now I’m a husband, your husband.”
“Just what is that bit of obvious information supposed to convey? That I am to come to heel? I won’t let you forget yourself again, Rafael.” She’d spoken calmly, a layer of contempt in her voice, but all the same, as she’d spoken, she was backing up until her shoulder touched the doorframe.
“Why not? As I recall with great clarity, you couldn’t get enough of me fast enough.” His white-toothed smile wasn’t lovely now, it was predatory.
She forced herself to smile in return. “That’s true, but now I realize that a virgin is supposed to behave according to certain rules—rules, I am certain, that men came up with centuries ago. You touch me, Rafael, and I am to shudder with disgust and shriek with outrage. Have I got that right at last?”
He said nothing for a long moment. Finally he said easily, “Let’s play piquet now.”
“What is so very odd about all this is your anger. It would seem to me that you, as a man, would feel ver pleased at my reaction to you. Shouldn’t it make you feel a good deal of masculine pride? Make you crow about your prowess as a lover? You’re a contradictory, perverse creature, sir, truly you are. Shall we play piquet?”
“You expect me to answer yes or no a
nd ignore what you just said?”
“You do it to me with great regularity.”
“I had not realized what an impertinent mouth you had, Victoria.”
Then he must be quite slow-witted, she thought. “Ah, you wouldn’t have married me had you realized it?”
“Yes, but I would have at least been prepared for the shrew, and not caught off guard.”
“I imagine that you can ignore anything you wish to, Rafael. After all, you managed to come away with the spoils. Fifty thousand pounds. Perhaps you can even buy a moldering estate somewhere in the north and send me there. Then you have my money without my shrewish company.”
“You will cease pushing me, Victoria, and you will stop your silly nonsense about the fifty thousand pounds.”
He wasn’t smiling, and his face, without a smile, looked stern indeed. Forbidding. She bowed her head and turned on her heel. “I shall ask Mrs. Ripple for a deck of cards,” she said over her shoulder, not looking at him.
She paused in the doorway, but didn’t turn to face him. “Oh, Rafael, is a virgin supposed to play piquet well? Or is she to stutter and flutter about helplessly? Perhaps shuffle the cards badly? Make nonsensical plays?”
She was doing him in quite nicely, he thought, at once angered at her and admiring. She had guts, his wife. It was her other qualities he was concerned about. He managed to say easily, “I have never played piquet before with a virgin. I should say, though, since a female’s goal in life is to procure a husband, she would play badly so that he would win and thus feel superior.”
“She, of course, could then act admiring?”
“Ah, yes, indeed. How well do you coo, Victoria? Can I assume that you have been a virgin at least part of your female life?”
Amazing how just one short series of words could be the final straw. She said with amazing calm, “The truce is over, Rafael. I wish you would go to the devil and roast yourself.”
She turned away from him with great stateliness, shoulders squared in disdain; then, as if she thought her exit too slow and fraught with possible reaction from him, she grasped her skirts and fled the entrance hall up the stairs.
He raised his hand, then dropped it to his side. He’d done it. Ruined things again. His damned mouth. He cursed softly, grabbed the brandy decanter from the sideboard, and strode to the small, very masculine study at the back of the cottage.
He wasn’t at his best the following morning. The steaming bath Lizzie brought up had helped a bit, at least the hot water helped unkink his stiff muscles, but his head felt like a lead pipe was wrapped about it.
He’d awakened at dawn, cramped in the chair in the study, and staggered to his bedchamber. He moaned. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything.
It was Tom who saved his life. “You look a bit underground, sir,” he said as Rafael drew in deep breaths of fresh morning air. He grunted and kept breathing.
“My ma taught me a marvelous recipe for the morning after. Should you like me to prepare you some?”
Rafael felt a shaft of hope. He nodded.
The potion was brown and thin and tasted of vile, thankfully unknown ingredients, but was possessed of remarkable restorative powers.