Lady Bedlow, however, had not forgotten. She kept up a steady stream of sighs and theatrical yawns, and after an hour, she said, “I’m very tired. Louisa, it’s time to go home.”

Nev was not at all tired. Singing always made him feel awake and alive and full of energy. When they were gone, he said, “Louisa was impressed. You know an awful lot of songs about sailor maids.”

Penelope reseated herself on the piano bench and smiled. “She wanted to run away to sea when she was younger, didn’t she?”

Nev laughed. “I think she still does. Did you ever? That is, you do know all the songs.”

“Of course I did.” There was a touch of self-mockery in Penelope’s smile now. “I think every girl has dreams like that, until she realizes how foolish it is to rebel against something she cannot change.”

“What do you mean?”

She traced a pattern on the smooth surface of the bench. “It’s like wanting to be a soprano: I can want it all I like, but it won’t make me anything other than a contralto. It’s entirely more sensible to stop repining.”

“You wanted to be a soprano?”

She flushed. “I know it’s foolish, but…it always seemed so ordinary, being a contralto. So common. Just what a Miss Brown would be. I was very young; I got over it. It’s the same with wishing for a man’s freedom. When I was a girl I loved these songs.” She paused, and glanced at him. “This one in particular.” She struck up and sang,

“A merchant did in Bristol dwell,

As many people knew full well;

He had a daughter of beauty bright

In whom he placed his heart’s delight.

He had no child but only she;

Her father loved her tenderly.

Many to court her thither came,

Gallants of worth, birth and fame.

Yet notwithstanding all their love,

A young ship’s carpenter did prove

To be the master of her heart,

She often said, ‘We’ll never part’-”

She stopped abruptly, eyes fixed on her still hands. “There’s about a hundred more verses. Her father sends the true love to sea. And the girl follows and becomes the surgeon’s mate, and heroically nurses him through an illness, and the father regrets his unkindness, and everything turns out wonderfully.”

She smiled crookedly and raised her eyes to his face. “It’s about a merchant’s daughter, you see, and she’s brave and noble and saves her true love. My first year at school, I was very unhappy. I thought about running off and volunteering for the navy all the time.”

None of which explained her remorseful look, but he could guess. She had imagined the ship’s carpenter as Edward. He didn’t know what to say; he only knew that he was sorry, and painfully, irrationally jealous. “Did you ever try it?”

She shook her head, smiling up at him. “Even as a silly little girl I knew enough to know that things like that only happen to beautiful merchants’ daughters.”

“Who told you you weren’t beautiful?” The idea was absurd, and yet it made him feel obscurely triumphant. Surely Edward had deserved to lose her, if he hadn’t even told her she was beautiful.

“Oh, please don’t. I have got a mirror.”

He supposed she wasn’t beautiful, not like the women he had had before. She was just a pretty girl; but Nev thought, suddenly, that those other women hadn’t been any prettier. They had painted their lips crimson and done up their hair and swept into rooms knowing that men’s heads would turn. That was all. Penelope was pretty and she had a sweet voice and the candlelight turned her skin an impossible gold, and Nev realized that he’d been wanting to kiss her all day.

He was just reassuring her, he told himself. Reassuring her, and making her forget about Edward. That was all; it would go no further than that. He sat on the bench beside her. “I think you’re beautiful,” he whispered, and kissed her.

She let him, and when he stopped she sighed softly and leaned against him. He could barely keep from deflowering her right there on the piano bench.

“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, though,” she said. “You told me you would never feed me Spanish coin.”

“I’m not.” If she looked at the front of his breeches, she would see just how English his coin was, but of course a gentleman couldn’t say a thing like that to his wife.

She shrugged and went back to their previous conversation. “Besides, they have to press men for the navy; no one volunteers. So it seemed like I probably wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Nev wrapped his arms around her. “You were a very practical girl.”

She stiffened, but before she could speak, he bent and kissed her neck. She sighed again, a resigned little sound, and gave up on whatever she had been going to say. He thought of Penelope as a girl, miserable and excluded at some fancy finishing school, weighing the pros and cons of running off to join the navy. She had probably made a list. He was abruptly, fiercely glad that she hadn’t been practical about marrying him.

Penelope leaned back against her husband. His arms were warm around her. For a moment she wished she weren’t so very practical and unfeminine, so she would know how to make him mean the things he had said, about her being beautiful. She wished, almost, that she were fool enough to take him at his word. But if he saw that she believed him, and it had been only a polite fiction-she shivered in humiliation at the mere thought.

“Penelope-I want-that is, I know I said I wouldn’t touch you, and I won’t, if you ask me not to.” She could feel his breath on her neck. “I won’t do anything that might hurt, not yet. But I want to make you feel good. Will you let me do that?”

It was like his proposal all over again. There was that note of wistfulness in his voice, and part of Penelope wanted to say yes to whatever he asked. “I-” she stammered.

If she said nothing, it would only be another kind of consent. She would forget herself when he touched her, and she would tell herself she had never agreed, he made her feel like that and there was nothing she could do-

If this was going to happen, Penelope intended to take responsibility. She pressed back against him. “Yes. I will.” It felt like an echo of her marriage vows.

Nev ’s hands tightened on her arms. “Thank you. Come upstairs with me.” She followed him up the stairs, the shivery knot in her stomach growing with every step.

At last they were in her room. “Change into your night things,” Nev said. “I’ll start a fire in my room.”

“We don’t need a fire. It’s a waste of fuel, it’s summer-”

“Just this once,” he said, and left her.

Penelope could not help blushing the entire time Molly was helping her, as if Molly somehow knew what was about to happen. By the time she stepped into Nev ’s room in her night rail and dressing gown, she was so overheated that the fire he had lit in the grate made her begin to sweat. She could not look at Nev.

“Take off your robe and come here,” he commanded gently.

Her hands trembled as she undid the knot and slid the dressing gown off her shoulders. She wished her night rail were more attractive.

It didn’t matter for long. Nev reached down and grasped her hem. He pulled it up slowly, and every inch of flesh tingled as air hit it. Then she was standing naked, and Nev took a step back to look at her.

How many women had he looked at like this? What did he see? She was thin and drab and brown; her bosom was disappointingly small. She fought not to try to cover herself with her hands-it would only make her feel more foolish.

“Mm,” Nev hummed, low in his throat. “Definitely worth the wait.”

She flushed with pleasure. He put his hands on her hips-his hands on her bare skin burned her like a brand-and guided her to the bed. “Lie down.”

She obeyed him. The soft down coverlet under her bare skin was the most hedonistic thing she had ever felt. A moment later Nev was hovering half over her, his leg between her thighs. Penelope felt herself tightening in response.