It was amazing that neither of us starved that night. Every so often, my insides would rumble in protest, or I would be able to hear quite clearly that Luke’s stomach was long past empty. But each time he thought of getting up, he fell back into bed. And each time I made to get dressed and go and grab something, Luke held on to me. Apart from a tactful knock at the door from Higgins, which Luke answered by saying that he didn’t need anything to eat and Miss Quinton had told him that she had decided to rest, we were not disturbed at all.

“Mrs. Barlow,” I corrected him after the fact. He only answered with a smile and a kiss. And if I was worried that he did not respond to me by saying something about how I was now Mrs. Barlow, I did not have the time or foresight to tell him.

Once, Luke’s death was so violent that I thought he had fainted, and I insisted that he find some food.

“How can I leave my bed when there’s a beautiful woman in it,” he asked, seeming quite honestly perplexed.

“You can provide for the woman, who is starving,” I said, and he tried to simply hold me, stroking my back in the way he had just discovered that I loved.

“I can provide her with caresses,” he murmured, beginning to stroke my shoulders again.

“Not sufficient,” I insisted. “I require food.”

Of course, when Luke finally did manage to don his dressing gown and seek out some sort of sustenance so that neither of us would become incapacitated by our exertion and lust, he found a tray sitting neatly outside his door with cold meats and fruit.

The thought that Higgins might have figured out precisely why his young master was not emerging from the room filled me with shame. “Do you think that we might be caught,” I whispered to Luke, who was somehow managing to show the same rapturous enjoyment of both my breasts and a slice of cold ham at the exact same time.

“Caught, perhaps,” he whispered back. “But, I must remind you, we have been perfectly virtuous.”

I nearly laughed. “What, eating meats in this bed without any of our clothes on? If this were known, it would be enough scandal to fill three counties! Or perhaps four, if many of the counties here are as starved for recreation as your household appears to be.”

I thought this might offend him, but he only laughed. “We have been joined in wedlock, and with the approval of none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. What happens between the curtains of a married pair’s bed cannot be scandalous, provided there is nobody there but the two married parties themselves.”

This made me smile. For, although the library in Woodshire was not a terrible one, I had almost certainly got my hands on far more smut than Mr. Luke Barlow could ever dream of. I knew things that married couples did that would have shocked him.

Putting down my plate, I ran a hand up his inner thigh, then let my lips follow until they were moistening the low-hanging fruit underneath his newly hardened prick.

“Nothing that we could do in this bed would be shocking?” I asked, deepening my kisses as my new husband’s eyes fluttered shut. “Nothing at all?”