“There’s really not much more to it,” Annabel said. She was on the verge of giggling again.
“Don’t ignore me,” Josie hissed. “I’m not a baby anymore. I’m about to marry—no! I just married a man who has slept with a great many women, and I need—I need—” She couldn’t put into words what she needed. Some trick, some stratagem to make him think that she was a better bed partner than all those others.
Tess smiled at her, and there wasn’t mockery in her eyes. “Just enjoy yourself.”
“That’s right. Enjoy yourself,” Annabel affirmed.
Josie had never felt more rage toward her sisters in her life. “I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but I’d like you to be specific.”
“There are some things that can’t be spelled out,” Annabel said.
Josie turned on her. “Spell them out anyway.”
“Use your imagination,” Tess suggested.
“My imagination,” Josie said, stunned by the enormity of what she couldn’t visualize. “Where does imagination come into it? As I understand it, the man climbs on top of his wife and—and does what he has to do. I don’t see any room for imagination. From what I’ve heard, it’s painful. Mrs. Fiddle, in the village, said there might be blood.” She made a face.
“Oh, as for that first time,” Tess said, “don’t worry about it. I hardly felt it.”
“I was exactly the same,” Annabel said, nodding. “A tiny pinch, and no blood. I think Mrs. Fiddle must have been rather hysterical on the subject.”
“You still don’t understand. You don’t seem to grasp what I’m facing. Mayne has slept with the most beautiful and seductive women in London. And I am—what I am. I need some sort of special technique.” She felt desperate. “Annabel, you must know something!”
Annabel frowned at her. “There aren’t any special techniques. That is, perhaps there are, but they’re something you have to discover on your own. Between you and Mayne.”
“Don’t be fearful,” Tess put in.
“That’s wonderful,” Josie snapped. “I’m going into this situation blind, and you tell me not to be fearful. Tell me something helpful!”
“The most helpful thing I can tell you is to allow your husband to give you pleasure,” Annabel said. “I never understood that before I was married. What will drive him mad with pleasure is if you are overcome by the same emotion.”
Josie sat down and tried to think about that one. Whether that was enough to keep Mayne at her side when he had fled the beds of so many other women, doubtless all of whom were overcome by pleasure.
“I wish Griselda was here,” Annabel said. “She would know the precise details, but I do think that Mayne has never managed to keep a relationship with a woman going above a week. Or is it two? Tess, do you know?”
Tess made a face. She hated this sort of gossip as much as Annabel loved it. “My understanding is that it has been a question of a week, if that.”
“So, Josie,” Annabel said. “All you have to do is keep your husband in your bed over a week, and you’ve won the battle.”
Josie thought about that.
Annabel came and perched on one side of her armchair. “I think that you and Mayne will be very happy together,” she said, smiling.
Tess sat on the other side and stroked Josie’s hair. “Mayne has just won the greatest Ascot of them all.”
Josie managed a wobbly smile. They seemed to have forgotten that Mayne was in love with another woman. She didn’t have the heart to bring Sylvie up. It was one thing to contemplate a victory, if one could call it that, over all of Mayne’s married lovers. It was another to imagine ever dislodging his love of Sylvie from his heart.
“I’m going to be the best wife he ever has,” she said in a little stony voice.
“Of course you will be! And luckily, you’re his first and only wife, so you needn’t even worry about competition,” Annabel said.
“I’ll have to be—” she gulped “—well, nice.”
“You are nice,” Tess offered.
But Josie wasn’t interested in compliments. “Not most of the time,” she said, looking at her sisters. “I’m a bad-tempered beast, just as you’ve called me so many times. I really am. I’m horrible.” Her face started to crumple and she caught herself. “You don’t understand just how much I hate all those people who called me a sausage. Or who laughed along with it. In fact, sometimes I think I hate most of the population of London.”
“You might wish to disguise that a bit,” Annabel suggested.
“I’m going to be much, much nicer than I really am,” Josie stated. “Sweet. Honey-sweet, like all the heroines in my books.”
Tess was looking doubtful.
“Don’t you think I can do it?”
“Of course you can do anything you wish—”
There was a knock at the door. It was Lucius, who put his head around the door and said, “My lord bishop is begging leave to return to his house.”
Josie rose to her feet, feeling the comforting presence of her sisters at her sides. “I am ready,” she said.
It seemed that Lucius was accompanying the bishop to his house, and that meant—that meant she and Mayne were free to leave. To go to his house.
“I have no nightgown,” Josie whispered to Tess in a moment of pure terror.
“My maid already gave a bag to the footman,” Annabel said, giving her a warm hug. “I’m so happy for you, darling.”
Tess came too, and the three of them stood in a wreath of arms and kisses. “I just wish that Imogen were here.”
“I love you both,” Josie said a bit damply.
“You’ll be all right,” Annabel whispered in her ear. “Just—”
“I know!” Josie said, panicked that Mayne would hear her sister’s advice about pleasure and the rest of it. Or worse, advice about her temper. Because there he was at her elbow: the man who had, according to gossip, slept with virtually every beautiful woman in London—and left them a week later. And she thought to keep him as a husband?
He didn’t look like a seducer at the moment. There was something wild and dark in his eyes, a note of anguish that Josie didn’t like. “I’m all right,” she said to him, before she even knew she spoke.
“Shall we…” He hesitated.
How could she go with him? She couldn’t! But before she even knew what was happening, she was being wrapped in a pelisse. She couldn’t even find her voice when they were in the carriage, so they sat in silence for at least five minutes while she sank deeper into a morass of embarrassment. If she told him the truth, what would he do? What would he say? He only—
“I just want you to know, Josie, that I would never force you into any sort of intimate experience that you are not prepared for,” Mayne said suddenly.
She could hardly see his face, but then he leaned forward and the light from the small lamp hanging at the side of the carriage fell on him. He looked so earnest, kind, and resolute that her heart dropped into her toes. She didn’t deserve him.