That brought him out of his chair. He strode across the dining room and was appalled when she flinched backward. He stopped cold in his tracks.
“Why do you want laudanum? What the devil is wrong?”
She quickly slithered past him out the dining-room door. “It’s not important. Good night.”
“If you take one more step, I’ll bare your bottom and thrash you.”
All the wretched tears, she thought inconsequentially at that moment. It was her monthly flow that was making her so abysmally emotional and a stupid watering pot. She hated it even as she felt the tears now, brimming in her eyes. “You can’t do that,” she said, thrusting up her chin. He took a step toward her. “You can’t. You have all my money, why can’t you be satisfied? Why must you torment me?”
“Torment? I assumed that my behavior was motivated by caring and concern for your welfare. But I see that you don’t wish that. Very well. You are ill? Well, then, go away and hide and bear it, please, in silence. I don’t wish to be bothered. By the way, I don’t have any laudanum.” With that, he turned on his heel and strode back into the dining room.
Victoria picked up her skirts and ran back to her bedchamber.
It was just past ten o’clock that night and Rafael was pacing the small library downstairs. He wasn’t drunk, not even close. He’d consumed only a third of a bottle of brandy. Smuggled French brandy, of course. Excellent stuff. He paused in his perambulations and looked upward. What if she was truly ill? Bosh, he thought, shaking his head, she was too thick-headed and too stubborn to be sick. She had run, quite literally. She had run away from him, hadn’t she? Still, it nagged at the edges of his mind, goading him until he couldn’t bear himself anymore.
He changed from his clothes into his dressing gown, snuffed the candles in his bedchamber, and very quietly entered her bedchamber through the adjoining door. She hadn’t drawn the draperies across the windows—she’d showed some sense—and he could dimly see her outline in the center of her bed. His intention, he told himself yet again, was merely to see that she was all right.
He stood over her, so still that he could have been an errant shadow. It didn’t take him long to realize that she was fully awake. He said softly, still not moving, “Victoria, where do you hurt?”
“Please go away, Rafael,” she said, moving a bit further away from him on the bed. Slowly she eased her arms away from her belly, praying that he wouldn’t notice.
It was a prayer in vain. “Your stomach? Your stomach hurts? Something you ate?” Then he touched her very gently, his fingers curling around her upper arm.
“No. Unlike you, I am different, and things happen to me that never happen to you.”
“Well, that’s true,” he said slowly, taking apart her words in his mind and reshaping them to give them her true meaning. It wasn’t long in coming.
“Ah,” he said.
She stiffened. Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped. She gritted her teeth, hoping against hope that just this once he would keep still.
He didn’t. Instead, she felt him lift the covers and slip in beside her. His big warm body was quite naked.
“No, I can’t.”
“Hush, Victoria. I’m a very weary, concerned husband. Let me hold you. You’ll feel better in the morning—you’re right about that.”
And that was that.
She didn’t say a word when he pulled her back against his chest, fitting her bottom against his belly, nor did she do anything but suck in her breath when his large hand lay lightly over her belly. The warmth was marvelous, and she sighed deeply.
Rafael listened to her even breathing in sleep and smiled to himself. He very softly kissed her ear and tried to make himself more comfortable. Poor little tyke. Then he realized that his ardor had been effectively doused for several womanly days.
“The sacrifices I make for you,” he said, more to himself than his now-sleeping wife. He gently kneaded her belly until he himself fell asleep.
They left the following day just after luncheon, as Rafael had planned, after Mrs. Ripple’s last attempt at a luncheon.
“How, I wonder,” Rafael said pensively, “can a body ruin perfectly good ham? Ham, I am compelled to add, that you and I had already baked to perfection?”
“Perhaps, it was the overabundance of some herb.”
“You’re right. It was dill, I believe. Gallons of it.
Perhaps I should have made her one of my special bread men, changed the direction of her culinary thinking—it could have only improved the outcome, I think.”
“Ah, here’s Tom,” said Victoria, laughter in her voice.
Rafael heard it, and gave her a quick look. He studied her face for signs of any lingering discomfort, but found none. Her color was healthy, her eyes bright. He lightly touched his fingertips to her cheek. “You are feeling just the thing again?”