“Yes.”
“Really sure?”
“No question. Is that what you’re worrying about?”
“I’m not worried.”
“Because I could show you.”
She felt her eyes grow round. “What?”
He had a wicked smile. He started pulling open his greatcoat. “I could show you—”
“Don’t!” she snapped.
“The truth is that I find it rather difficult to be around you,” he said, leaning back and leaving his greatcoat alone, to her relief.
She felt inexplicably hurt. Of course, he was eager to get an annulment, but there was no need to be so brutal about it. “According to that solicitor, there are other ways to dissolve our marriage,” she said a bit stiffly. “So you needn’t give up the dream of your docile little hen-wit.”
“Hen-wit? Not a kind word, Isidore…But I wasn’t referring to the question of annulment, but to the state of my cock.”
She gasped. “You—”
“Mayn’t I use that word in front of a lady?” he inquired, as mild as sweet butter and all the time his eyes laughing at her.
“No!” she managed. “It makes you sound like—like—”
“Tsk, tsk, Isidore. I have the strangest sense that you and my mother are actually quite alike. But how can that be? After all, I rescued you from Lord Strange’s notorious house party, did I not? Even I have heard tell of its brothel-like atmosphere. But here you are, quailing at a good, solid Anglo-Saxon word like—”
“Don’t!”
“Are you telling me that language like that wasn’t flying around Strange’s dining room?”
“I tried not to listen to that sort of conversation.”
“You did?” He leaned forward suddenly. “Then without inappropriate words, Isidore, may I assure you that when I’m in your presence that part of my body stands to attention?”
Isidore could feel herself growing pink. And she always thought she looked her worst with ruddy cheeks. “Must you say these things?”
“You impugned my manhood,” he said. “I couldn’t have you thinking that I was a limp lily.”
“How would—” she said, and broke off.
“How would I know?” His whole face was alight with amusement. “Really, I do have to show you, Isidore.”
“No!”
He barked with laughter. “I can’t imagine you at Strange’s house. Even in the half hour during which I managed to stay awake, I was told an entirely salacious story about a bishop. And his miter.”
Isidore shuddered. “I hated that place.”
“Then why were you there?”
She took a deep breath. “To force you to return home, of course.”
“That’s what my mother said.”
“She was right. I had reached the point at which I thought either you came home or—”
“Or?”
Isidore suddenly saw exactly how to get back at him for offering to show her his equipment. She leaned forward and patted his hand. “Jemma told me once that it is a wife’s duty to provide an heir if a husband is incapable. Since you showed little signs of returning from Africa, I decided I should begin to explore the possibilities.”
All traces of amusement were gone from his face.
“You were going to produce an heir for me?”
She shrugged. “And Cosway, if things are not entirely successful on our wedding night, should we decide to stay together, I wouldn’t want you to worry. I can always—”
“You will never substitute another man for me! I don’t know where you got the damned idea that I might be incapable!”
“Neither one of us can know the truth to that,” she pointed out. She was dancing on the edge of jeopardy and it felt wonderful.
His mouth opened like that of a fish out of water.
She leaned forward and patted his knee this time. “A virgin at your age…well. I would never tell a soul.” And she beamed at him.
It was a beautiful moment. It almost made up for the way he was planning to annul their marriage due to her unsuitability as a wife.
He surprised her.
After staring at her for a moment, he collapsed into a howling fit of laughter.
She sat silently for a moment, but Cosway had the kind of laughter that made you want to join in, and she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
“You think that because I haven’t tried out the equipment on a woman, it doesn’t work at all?”
“It’s a reasonable—”
He started howling with laughter again, and finally straightened up.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said with reasonable dignity.
“It’s you. I suppose it’s due to being a lady. One can only assume from your idea about my equipment that you yourself have never—” He raised an eyebrow suggestively.
“What?” she asked, completely confused.
“You’ve never pleasured yourself.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Bloody hell, you haven’t.”
She felt herself turning pink. “I see no need to engage in coarse language.”
“Shit and dam—”
“Don’t!”
“I’m talking about pleasure,” he said. “The kind you apparently have never had.”
Isidore kept silent. What pleasure she had had or not was none of his business.
“I should have known,” he muttered to himself. “Now look here, Isidore. My—well, what word am I allowed to use, then?”
“I don’t know. Pizzle, I suppose. Though no one ever talks to me about pizzles.”
“They want to,” Simeon said. “You just haven’t given them the chance. Pizzle, for Christ’s sake. Sounds like a word a five-year-old might use when learning to take a piss. Are you sure we can’t do with a bolder word, one more in line with the size of the thing?”
Isidore opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again and said: “Pizzle.”
“Right. Well, my pizzle is a pizzalone, in Italian. A big pizzle, Isidore.”
He was still making fun of her. She folded her arms over her chest. “There’s nothing sadder than a man who feels the need to boast about the size of his equipment,” she said sweetly.
“It’s not boasting, just stating.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Want me to prove it?” And he put his hands back on the front of his greatcoat.
“No!”
Simeon looked at Isidore. She was laughing and indignant at the same time. She didn’t look docile, or sweet, or biddable…she looked like a banked fire waiting for just one spark to flare. She had never pleasured herself…she had never…she had waited.
His blood was pounding through his body, begging him, telling him, commanding him. It took all his strength to resist the impulse to pull her into his arms. “I can completely understand your anxiety,” he said.
“You can?”
“You’re buying a pig in a poke. Unlike the rest of the Englishmen around here, I haven’t been strutting around brothels for the last fifteen years. But if we did marry, I wouldn’t bring you any diseases, Isidore.”
