“Something you can do right here.”

“—and we won’t have to put up with sly innuendoes and nasty whispers from those we meet socially,” Charlotte finished triumphantly.

“I have every faith that if you tried hard enough, you could turn the other cheek to any whispers or innuendoes you might find distressing.”

“Aaaaaagh!” Charlotte slammed her fork down onto the breakfast table and glared at her husband. “You are deliberately being obese just to annoy me!”

“Obese?” Dare looked at his plate, blinked twice, then smiled at his wife. “Obtuse, perhaps, but I hope not obese. Charlotte?”

Charlotte pouted at a quite atrocious painting of a man and his hunter that hung on the wall of the small dining room. “What?” she asked, snapping the word off with an edge sharp enough to slice bread.

“Have I told you this morning how beautiful you are?”

She allowed herself to be mollified just enough to glance at him with haughty disdain. “No, you haven’t. I shall add that to your list of imperfections.”

His smile deepened. “Have I told you how the sight of you lying next to me this morning gladdened my heart?”

The disdain melted in the warm glow of happiness resulting from his words. “No, you haven’t. I consider that very churlish of you, too.”

“Ah. Perhaps, then, I mentioned the extreme pleasure I found in undertaking the Egyptian Salutation to a Lady in the Full Glory of Morning with you last night?”

A small, very pleased smile curled Charlotte’s lips as she remembered the joy of their first connubial calisthenic. It had been everything Vyvyan La Blue had promised and so much more. “I shall never again hear of Cleopatra’s Needle without thinking of you,” she murmured.

Dare had been quite correct, she mused as she colored delicately and peeked at him through the screen of her lashes. If all went as it should, bathing was most definitely necessary afterward.

His eyes lit with a glint that was becoming familiar to Charlotte. She might have answered that look had not Batsfoam chosen that moment to bring in a fresh pot of tea.

“Will you be needing the carriage this morning, sir? I ask not for my own sake—I would gladly undertake the twenty-minute walk to the stables despite the fact that the lower part of my unfortunate limb appears to be resting on hot coals and several sharp pieces of glass, thus causing a sensation remarkably like agony to fill the limb itself, snake upward to my right hip, curl around that portion of the body commonly referred to as the trunk, venture across my spleen, throbbing deeply into my lungs, and finally culminating in a sharp pain behind my left eye—indeed, as I said, I would be happy to undertake the walk to the stables in addition to the many other tasks you have so graciously allowed me to fill my day with, but in truth I ask so as to ascertain whether the boy Wills will be needed to accompany the carriage. His livery suffered a most grievous accident when he fell into a coal scuttle. But should you, most beneficent sir, be requiring the use of the aforementioned carriage, I will add cleaning the lad to my extensive list of tasks to be accomplished today, tasks that you may be assured I will undertake to fulfill in such a manner as to leave you unaware of the mundane and tiresome day-to-day necessities I and others of your staff are happy to assume in order that your household runs with the clockwork precision you demand.”