Read Online The Ideal Wife by Mary Balogh - Free Book Online

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    She was twenty-four years old, Abigail thought, eyeing the bed again with a lurching of the stomach and licking dry lips, and knew nothing at all about gentlemen except that their bodies and minds could disintegrate with alarming totality under the prolonged influence of liquor and other dissipations. And she knew what those bodies looked like—in their disintegrated state, anyway. She had done everything for her father for the final year of his life.
    She straightened up hastily when she heard a door open nearby. She should be doing something. Reading a book? But there were none in the room. Brushing her hair? But it was in a braid.
    There was a tap at the other side of her dressing room door and it opened before she could call to him to come in. She found herself stranded five feet from the foot of the bed with empty hands and a blank mind.
    “Have I kept you up?” he asked, his eyes passing over her long white cotton nightgown.
    He was wearing a dark blue brocaded dressing gown. She had not thought to put one on. She felt suddenly naked and had to resist the urge to lift her hands to cover her breasts.
    “No,”she said. “It is quite all right, my lord. I have been busy.”
    If she had spent the past half-hour dreaming up the most stupid reply she could make to such a question, she thought, mortified, she could hardly have done better. Busy!
    “Oh, Abby,” he said, coming toward her, taking her by the shoulders and turning her, “I thought so. Your hair must be very long, is it? Your braid reaches almost to your waist.”
    “I mean to have it cut,” she said. “Mrs. Gill’s maid told me just this morning that there is no way of dressing my hair fashionably when it is so long.”
    “Then dress it unfashionably,” he said. “It looked very becoming as it was today. May I?”
    He did not wait for an answer, but unwrapped the ribbon from the end of the braid and began to unravel the hair. Abigail stood meekly and swallowed awkwardly. She was going to feel even more naked with her hair all down about her.
    “Ah,” he said, his hands passing through the ripples that the braiding had created, “it is quite breathtakingly lovely.” He turned her to face him again, and his eyes were laughing down into hers. “You did promise this morning that you would obey me, did you not? Here is my first command, then. You must never cut your hair. Promise me?”
    “I have never wished to,” she said. “What if I did not
like it shorter? I could not stick it back on, could I? And it would take years to grow it back again. But I thought you would wish me to be fashionable, my lord.”
    “Miles,” he said.
    “Miles.”
    “And don’t ever braid it at bedtime,” he said. “I want to see it loose, like this.”
    He threaded his fingers through her hair to rest them against the back of her head. And he lowered his head and kissed the side of her neck.
    “Oh, goodness,” she said, her voice sounding quite unnaturally loud. “I really don’t know what to do.”
    “You don’t need to,” he said, raising his head and looking down at her so that she had the sensation of swimming helplessly in the blue depths of his eyes, a mere few inches from her own. “I shall do the doing, Abby. Are you frightened?”
    “No, not at all,” she said, her voice blurting out the lie a moment before his mouth came down to cover hers.
    It touched hers lightly, warmly. His lips were not closed, but slightly parted. She recoiled, startled, making an audible smacking sound, as if she were kissing the girls for bed. But one hand stayed behind her head while the other circled her waist, and he kissed her again, lingering on her lips, moving his own, holding her head steady as he brought her loosely against him.
    Oh, dear good Lord in heaven!
    He was all hard-muscled maleness.
    Abigail became aware of her arms hanging loosely at her sides, one of them awkward over his. She did not know quite what she should do with them. Let them