Page 12 of To Swoon and to Spar
And that room had only one bed.
“Fine,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “There’s nothing to be done about it, I suppose.”
“Thank you, Penvale, for finding us accommodation in the midstof extreme difficulty,” he murmured as he shrugged out of his coat. “Despite everything that has gone wrong today, you have managed to secure us lodging and a warm dinner.”
“If you’re waiting for me to fall at your feet in gratitude, you’ll be waiting a long time,” she warned, removing her cape and laying it neatly on the back of a chair. “If you hadn’t been so certain that we could reach Trethwick Abbey by nightfall—”
“An assumption that made considerably more sense this morning, as we were departing under sunny skies, than it does at the moment, yes,” he shot back, plainly irritated. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, which she had noticed he tended to do when he was tired or frustrated. Or, as was the case at the moment, both.
It had been a bad-luck sort of day; they had departed their last inn just outside Plymouth under promising conditions—the roads were unusually dry for February, and Penvale, eager to hasten their arrival at Trethwick Abbey, had insisted they push on even after dark fell in the late afternoon.
And then it had started raining. The road had quickly turned into a muddy mess, slowing their progress until they had little choice but to stop for the night—and they’d been in the middle of bloody nowhere, as Penvale had phrased it, when this decision was finally made.
Which was how they found themselves here, at a tiny, tucked-away inn, staring at the bed that was to accommodate both of them this evening.
Further contemplation was forestalled by the arrival of dinner and a small copper tub, and by the time Penvale and Jane had dined in testy silence and then bathed in less testy silence, since they’d takenturns stepping into the hall while the other took a bath, Jane wanted nothing more than to curl up in a warm bed and see this day finished. She tucked herself into bed while Penvale went about the room extinguishing the candles, and she burrowed deep beneath the sheets, even pulling a pillow over her head for good measure. She was nestled down in her warm little cocoon, eyes shut, ready to sink into a well-earned slumber…
When what felt like a block of ice was suddenly in direct contact with her skin.
“Good God, did you stick your feet in a cold stream before climbing into bed?” she cried, sitting bolt upright the moment his foot brushed her ankle. She was wearing her warmest and least seductive nightgown, a high-necked flannel monstrosity that was supremely cozy and supremely unattractive. (Those attributes often, she had found, went hand in hand.)
“My feet are always cold in the winter!” he said defensively, sitting up as well.
“Then why aren’t you wearing moreclothes?” she hissed, gesturing at his general person. He’d put on a shirt after his bath, which had—if she was completely honest with herself—prompted her quick retreat to the bed, because the sight of him in nothing more than a shirt and his smalls was disturbingly distracting. Oh, it was decent enough—all the interesting bits of him were demurely covered—but there was more of his legs visible than she felt was entirely proper, and where the shirt was loose at his chest, she could see golden skin and hair.
It had made her appreciate the vital role that cravats played in keeping society functioning, and now, thanks to his unnaturally coldfeet, she was sitting up next to him, and her eyes kept snagging on the skin visible at his throat and chest, and it was…
Well, it was very difficult to focus.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, sounding halfway between concerned and annoyed. “Do you have a fever? You look flushed.”
“A fever?” she exclaimed, lowering her head and allowing her heavy curtain of hair to partially shield her face from his gaze. “I don’t feel feverish—I feel half frozen!”
“I promise you, I did not kick you on purpose,” he said stiffly, and then there was a fair amount of rustling as he made rather a production of scooting to the side of the bed, putting as much space between them as was possible under the circumstances. “Is that better?”
“I suppose,” she grumbled, aware on some level that her degree of indignation was out of proportion to the offense. However, she was doing exactly what she always did when she felt shy or embarrassed or uncertain: She was excessively bad-humored to make up for it.
“Good night, then,” he said, and she glanced over in time to see him roll away to extinguish the final candle on the bedside table, his back to her, allowing her to gaze appreciatively at the broad expanse of his shoulders, covered by the fine linen of his shirt. She settled back down to sleep as well. She wondered idly as she shut her eyes what he did to gain those muscles—it wasn’t as though the life of a dissolute aristocrat would lend itself to much labor.
To be entirely fair, she wasn’t certain that hewasdissolute—at least not by the standard of other men of his class. His uncle had mentioned that he had a taste for gambling, but she’d never seen him drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or spirits at once.
He was a bit of a puzzle. And they were going to live together,so she’d have plenty of time to figure him out. If she wanted to. She wasn’t sure shedidwant to—particularly not when he was tugging on the bedspread so hard that she was pulled toward him against her will.
“Were you raised in a barn?” she asked, cracking open one eye to glare at him, realizing as she did so that she was considerably closer to him in the bed than she’d been a few moments before.
“Wereyou?” he demanded. “You’ve stolen all of the bed linens.”
She lifted her head, peering down first at her side of the bed, then his, and realized that he wasn’t entirely incorrect. “And you couldn’t have just politely asked for some rather than rolling me around like a fat sausage in a pan?”
“I apologize, little sausage,” he said with exaggerated gallantry. “But perhaps you would like to share a bit of your warmth?” Jane pressed her lips together to suppress a sudden, slightly hysterical urge to laugh; for his part, Penvale looked almost embarrassed, a somewhat remarkable state for a man who did not, so far as Jane had observed, seem to be remotely self-conscious. “I could have phrased that better,” he added sheepishly.
“Quite,” she said in her frostiest tones. She flung a handful of blankets in his direction, deliberatelynotconsidering what other ways she could offer to warm him here, in a bed, on a cold winter night.
Her last words to him, as she rolled over once more and prepared to drift off, were: “If you call me a sausage again, I will murder you in your sleep.”
His only reply was a low chuckle.
Penvale came awake slowly the next morning. At some point during the night, he’d burrowed deep under the bedspread, where he lay facedown, the sheets pulled up to his neck. He could feel the cold air of the room on his head and was reluctant to leave the coziness of the bed—or, for that matter, to open his eyes. Perhaps Jane was still asleep as well, and they could simply lie here peacefully, dozing on a chilly February morning, the picture of comfort and domesticity.
