Lowering myself to one knee, I reach for the bar of Proven?al soap on the bath stool. The soap lathers richly, its aroma that of lemon and sunshine. I start at her shoulder, working my way down to her hand.
“I know how this ends,” she says without looking at me, the back of her head on the rim of the tub.
“So do I: I fuck you, and fuck you well.”
She is about to say something when a series of enthusiastic barks erupt.
She raises her head. “Is that Grisham?”
“How do you know about Grisham?” I ask in surprise.
She has never before visited Larkspear Manor, so she could not possibly have seen Grisham, my three-legged pup that I found one morning on a country lane, miraculously alive after having been run over by a carriage.
“He made quite an impression the last time my brother visited.”
I rise to my feet, wipe my hands with a towel, and open the door of the bath just enough to allow Grisham entry. He leaps happily into my arms, tail wagging.
I set him down and point him in her direction. “Did you come to meet my missus, Grisham? There she is.”
Grisham looks toward her with great interest but he only barks and does not approach the tub.
“It’s all right,” I encourage him. “Nobody will try to bathe you today. You can approach.”
“That’s right. I won’t bite,” says my bride, holding out her hand.
Her expression is friendly, almost smiling; I am shamefully jealous of my crippled dog.
Grisham hesitates a little longer, then bounds toward her—he never just walks; he is either asleep or he is leaping and bouncing—and sniffs her hand with both fascination and approval.
“Proven?al soap,” she tells him. “Do you like it?”
Grisham yelps a little at the word “soap.”
“Yes, I know,” she says in a conspiratorial tone. “Just between the two of us, I also hate being washed when I haven’t asked for it.”
My ears burn: She is speaking of me, the instigator of the unwanted washing that she hates.
Grisham bounds a few more times inside the bath; then he stands before the door and barks. I let him out and close the door again.
“That dog is the only thing worth knowing about you,” declares my bride.
I want to say something about the care I’ve lavished on him to turn him from a maimed, frightened pup to the boundlessly enthusiastic hound he is today. But what is the point?
I resume washing her. I want to prove to her—and to myself—that not everything I do for her is for my own sake. Sliding my hands beneath the water, I soap her sides and her belly. Her fingers tighten on the rim of the tub.
“I am surprised you did not bring a book for your soak.” A tremendous lover of books, my bride. Yet she has never been bookish, only sharp, clever, and confident.
She does not answer. Her breath is suspended as my soapy hand moves up her torso, approaching her breasts. But I do not pay particular attention to them, moving over them as if they were no more erotic than a pair of shoulder blades.
Yet even without lingering, I feel the erect state of her nipples. My cock stirs.
I move behind her, let down her hair, lather it, and gently dig my fingers into her scalp. I could do this for hours, this sweet husbandly labor, pretending that the silence is one of comfortable intimacy, rather than a cold shoulder on her part.
“I’d like to comb your hair too. Such beautiful hair—imagine it cocooning me as you ride me astride.”
The cascade of her hair spilling loose, the soft, weightless mass tickling my chest, my shoulders, and my neck, even as her hard nipples graze my chest. At the thought, my cock tightens further.
She shifts. Belatedly I realize that I have spoken my thoughts aloud.
“With my hands tied in front of or behind me?” she asks mockingly, breaking her silence.
She does not understand that I want her willing. Eager. Wild. My head fills with fantasies of her ripping off her clothes so that we can be skin-to-skin, of her bruising my lips by kissing me too hard, of her pushing me into bed, then leaping atop me and riding me as if she means to break me.
I inhale. “In front, of course, so I can see those hands manacled. I enjoy having you at my mercy.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” she says, her tone frosty.
Have I just made things worse?
I place an empty bucket beneath under her head, rinse her hair, and wrap her bright auburn tresses in a towel. At the other end of the tub, I take her slender foot, stroke her instep, knead her sole, and massage all the tendons and muscles.
“Pretty feet.”
“Really?” she counters haughtily. “If memory serves, on more than one occasion you have described my feet as being the size of coal scuttles.”
Will my erstwhile stupidity never stop coming back to haunt me? I have no choice but to admit, “I lied.”
“Then or now?” She does not relent.
I am almost tempted to lie again. “Then.”