Chapter Five
Gareth stared at his wife in disbelief. Not the dreadful, nauseating disbelief of waking up in a sickbed and discovering that he no longer had two arms, but something milder, like an unexpected slap across the face. Mild or not, it left him speechless for several seconds. He found his tongue, and said, “Women don’t enjoy physical congress? Who told you that?”
“No one,” Cecily said. “I learned it for myself.”
“But . . .” Gareth said, and then he closed his mouth and thought back to what she’d said earlier: that she and her first husband had only had s*x five times. “How old were you and—” What was his name? “—Frederick when you married?”
“I was sixteen, Frederick was nineteen.”
“That’s . . . young.” Younger than he’d realized. Dear God, the pair of them had been little mor
