He must not feel the same way she did. She, Gabby, felt as if she might suffocate if Quill didn’t take her in his arms again. She knew without hesitation that she wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. The moment Quill said, “with my body, I thee worship,” she had come into a strange sense of her own body. An awakening sense that arrived with a quickened pulse and hummed through her body, a sense that intensified whenever she looked at him, at the masculine perfection of his body and the sense of leashed power about him.

“But I thought—” She stopped, the words choking in her throat. This was just going to embarrass her more than ever. So he didn’t want to consummate their marriage until they returned to London. Where was her sympathy? Her father was still alive. Likely she wouldn’t want to…to do whatever it was either, if she had her father’s funeral to attend.

She bit her lip. “I am so sorry, Quill.” She bent her head. “I did not mean to be disrespectful to your father or to your grief. I am ashamed that I questioned your feelings.”

Tears mounted to her eyes and she scrambled to make amends. “I feel so badly for you and for your family. Please forgive me. I’m afraid that my father and I are not close and so I forgot how very much you must be missing the viscount. It was inexcusable of me to forget your grief. That is, I didn’t forget your grief, it’s just that I …” Her voice trailed off in a near whisper.

Grief? Quill thought likely it was grief he was feeling, watching the pale skin of Gabby’s wrist. He couldn’t risk looking at her face, at her wine-red lips.

He had rarely had such a cruel sense of the world’s injustices. He, Erskine Dewland—no, Viscount Dewland now—couldn’t bed his new wife when and where he pleased. It was manifestly unfair. And the queer pang around his heart had nothing to do with Gabby’s bewildered disappointment.

For disappointed she was, his new wife. He’d already disappointed her, and they had been married less than three hours. Quill savagely pushed the feeling away. He had disappointed his father a thousand times, starting when he could not rise from his bed just after the accident.