Page 36 of To Swoon and to Spar
The next part of the plan—and the reason it was so crucial that Penvale remain in his own bedroom—was a night of thoroughly interrupted sleep, and while Jane was not precisely thrilled about her own sleep being disrupted as well, she was willing to make a sacrifice for the cause.
At that moment, Penvale walked into the room—he’d been in the dressing room adjacent to his bedchamber, evidently removing his clothing, because he approached her in a nightshirt, the sight of which, oddly, made her want to burst into hysterical laughter. It seemed so strangely ill-suited to him, and she had a flash of curiosity: What did henormallywear to bed? She was certain it wasn’t this; she couldn’t have said why, but she somehow knew that this was for her benefit.
He paused and gave her a strange look. “What are you doing?”
Jane glanced down and realized that she was in the midst of pattingthe bedsheets as though they were a beloved pet. She attempted to think of some sort of explanation for her behavior that would sound remotely sane, then abandoned this as fruitless. “Examining the quality of the bed linens,” she said.
“All… right,” he said, sounding mystified.
“Have you been bribing the servants?” she asked suspiciously.
“For… better sheets?” His look of confusion—evident in the line forming between his brows—only deepened.
“Precisely.”
“I have not,” he said slowly, continuing to approach the bed. “Are yours dissatisfactory?”
“I didn’t think so until I felt these,” Jane informed him, at last ceasing her patting and leaning back against the pillows, tugging the sheets up to her neck. She tried to subtly turn her head to catch a faint pleasant scent on the pillowcase—was it lavender?Hersheets were not lavender-scented.
Apparently, she had not been sufficiently subtle, because a look of faint satisfaction spread across Penvale’s face. “Smells nice, doesn’t it?”
Jane froze. “It’s fine,” she said coldly, permitting herself one last surreptitious sniff.
“Like a summer day in the south of France, I expect,” he said cheerfully as he climbed into bed, offering Jane a quick flash of calf and thigh. She’d never spent much time thinking about what a man’s legs would look like under breeches, but she’d had a brief glimpse of muscle and surprisingly golden skin. Why would the skin of his legs be golden? Surely he wasn’t in the habit of going about…nude.
Outdoors.
And then, because evidently she no longer had even the faintest ability to guard her tongue when she was in his presence—though hewas probably the person she should be guarding her tongue around most carefully of all—she asked, “Do you prance around naked outdoors?”
Penvale, who was in the process of tucking the sheets neatly around his waist, froze. “What a question,” he said conversationally, turning to face her. Even though his bed was positively enormous, it seemed considerably smaller now that he was in it, fixing her with that odd hazel gaze. It didn’t seem particularly piercing at first, nothing like the icy blue or green gazes of heroes in some of the novels Jane had read, but she’d come to realize that it was uncomfortable to be trapped beneath for very long. He was not a terribly intimidating man, her husband—he was tallish but not imposing; athletic in build but not heavily muscled—and yet she had the sudden impression that he saw far more than she had realized the first afternoon she had met him, and when he fixed his eyes on her, she was almost certain he was seeing more than she would wish him to, as if she were a puzzle that he was desperately trying to work out.
Jane didn’t like it—or, rather, she didn’t dislike it, even though she knew she should, and it was this fact that vexed her more than anything else.
“May I ask why you are inquiring?” he continued.
And Jane—who all at once decided that she would simply have to brazen this out—said, “Your legs look as though they’ve seen sunlight at some point within memory.”
He let loose a surprised laugh that lit up his face, making his eyes come alive, erasing the creases from his forehead that he had no doubt earned through many a lifting of an ironic brow. For certainly they could not have come fromfrowning.What did this man have to frown about?
“Fair enough,” he said, still chuckling, turning fully onto his side to face her, a movement that Jane mirrored before she could stop herself. “They haveseen sunlight,as a matter of fact—I like to swim.” Seeing her appalled expression, he added, “Not here—not yet, at least. It’s a bit cold even for my tastes. But in a couple of months, I expect I’ll start swimming in the sea in the mornings.”
“It will still be freezing,” Jane said, very skeptical about this plan. “It’s England. We’re not known for our balmy seas.”
“No, we’re not,” Penvale said with a faint grin. “But in London, I swim in the Serpentine until the first frost. It’s bracing.”
“When do you go?” Jane asked curiously; one of the things that had struck her about London was howbusyit was. She loved Cornwall because she could bundle herself up and strike out on a walk and, if she walked in the right direction, not see a single other person. How did you find that same sense of peace, of space, in London?
“In the morning,” Penvale said. “One doesn’t have to rise terribly early to be awake before the rest of theton, so I just got into the habit of rising to go on a morning swim. In the country, I don’t have to be quite so clandestine, so I can swim whenever I want.”
“Where in the country do you go?” Jane asked; after all, until a couple of months before, the country property that was his by ancestral right had not belonged to him at all.
“Jeremy and Audley both have country houses,” Penvale said, the sound of his friends’ names warm and affectionate. Jane found herself strangely curious about these men who had been like brothers to her husband for so long. She had spent a little bit of time with their wives but not with the gentlemen themselves, though she didn’t suppose she would have been comfortable around them,anyway. Not for the first time, Jane wished for some sort of cloak of invisibility she could fling over herself so that she might observe all the people around her without being expected to participate in any of their conversations.
“Well,” Penvale added, “Audleyhada country house—he gave it up last year, gave it back to his father.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” Jane asked. She couldn’t imagine willingly giving up a country escape and resigning oneself to a life spent in town.
“Audley and his father… don’t get on,” Penvale said, a strange twist to his mouth. “He was proving a point, shall we say. And his father’s quite unpleasant, make no mistake about it. But I just… “He paused, long enough that Jane wasn’t certain he’d continue, before he finally said, “Well, I miss speaking to my own father, that’s all.”
