Page 100 of Trouble

Tomorrow, hiding would become impractical, as she would be due at the business end of a church, and she was finding it difficult to sleep.

She had been moved into an extravagant guest bedroom, just for one night. All the bedrooms had all been turned over and refreshed, the cushions beaten, the windows left open to expel some of the dust – Amy and their mother would be arriving in the morning, as would a handful of Captain Edwards’s cousins. Emily had found it more than a little ridiculous when Meera insisted that she should sleep in one of the beds she had just helped Akia make.

‘You shouldn’t be making beds at all,’ Meera said ruefully, and Emily had almost hit her with a pillow.

‘I am becoming somebody’s wife,’ she had said grimly, ‘not an incompetent ninny incapable of stripping a bed.’

Now, after hours of twisting said bed sheets into knots, Emily gave up on sleep entirely and pulled on her shawl so that she could pad barefoot down the hall and make her predicament somebody else’s problem.

When Captain Edwards opened the door, he had clearly already been asleep.

‘Emily,’ he said, everything about him soft and unfocused. He was only wearing a nightshirt, which skimmed his knees. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know if anybody has told you, but we’re getting married tomorrow,’ Emily said, walking past him into his bedroom, despite the fact that she had very much not been invited in.

‘Yes,’ he said, rubbing his eyes as he let the door close. ‘I plan to be there. Awake. Well rested. Please vacate my bed.’

‘No,’ Emily said.

She did not feel quite as nonchalant about sitting on his unmade bed sheets as she was trying to make out; they were warm, and they smelled of him, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to be lying down on them the night before they were to be married. The lying-down-on-bedsheets part traditionally happened afterwards, as far as she knew.

‘Emily—’

‘Ben.’

He narrowed his eyes at her but then came to sit down next to her on the bed.

‘You’ve been married before,’ she said, enjoying looking at him in profile and the fact that she was allowed to stare at him like this. His hair was sticking up slightly on one side as if he’d been sleeping on it, and she found it excruciatingly endearing. ‘I haven’t. I have no idea what to expect.’

‘It’s mostly just arguing over what to have for dinner.’ He was still trying to seem irritated, but was failing completely. ‘You’ll be fine.Wewill be fine.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ said Emily, crossing her arms over her chest and radiating petulance in his direction. ‘Youknow what you’re getting yourself into.’

Captain Edwards sighed, and then to Emily’s surprise, he lay down next to her and felt across the bedclothes until he found her hand and squeezed it.

‘What is it that you are so particularly concerned about?’

There was quite a lot, but there was one thing in particular at the forefront of her mind right now.

No matter what he said to her – how kind his words were, how much he insisted on trying to tell her that she washandsomeorbeautiful, words that made her wince – it was still impossible for her to truly believe that he saw her that way. What if they married, and on their wedding night he realised that she wasn’t soft and delicate at all; that she was the sort of person who belonged hard at work with her hands, notrecliningin a man’s bed for the purposes of pleasure?

She would have preferred to be shot in both kneecaps rather than speak any of this out loud, and so she did the thing that she so often did when words failed her, and kissed him. She had to turn over onto her side and lean over him to do it. He returned the kiss very briefly before pushing her away, leaving her looking down at him with her cheeks flushed and her brows furrowed.

‘You did not answer my question.’

‘I did,’ Emily said. ‘Sort of.’

Captain Edwards frowned up at her, and then his eyebrows jolted fractionally upwards as he seemed to catch her meaning.

‘Oh,’ he said, reaching up to touch his fingers to her chin. ‘Well.’

Emily didn’t want him to keep looking at her like that, so careful andkind, so she just kissed him again, and when he didn’t push her away she screwed her courage to the sticking place and actually moved on top of him. He froze at once, and she pulled away, feeling slightly wronged.

‘What?’ she said, as matter-of-factly as if they were arguing over tea in the drawing room.

‘Emily,’ he said, low and strained, ‘we are to be marriedtomorrow. Would it not be wiser to—’

‘Damn being wise,’ Emily said, noticing a slight lift of his chin when she swore. ‘Show me. That time I was here before, when we .?.?. Show me the rest.’