Page 93 of To Pleasure a Prince

“Did you then decide that there was something wrong with your legs and your bottom? That you should never ride again?”

“No.” She drew back from him. “But that happens to everyone—their legs hurt and their bottoms hurt and they all know to keep going until they learn. I’m the only one who has headaches when she reads.”

“How do you know? Have you asked every lady you’ve ever met? Every girl in a grammar school? For all you know, there could be twenty, fifty, a hundred of you ladies who get headaches when they read. There might even be men who do.”

Her breath was coming quickly now, and her eyes were riveted on his face.

“If you are so reluctant to talk about it,” he went on, “what makes you thinktheywould? Why would they risk being called stupid or lazy? How do you know there aren’t hundreds of ‘brain-damaged’ people wandering London as we speak?”

“What are you saying?” she whispered.

“That I truly don’t believe you can hurt your brain by taxing it, dearling. But I’m certain that you’ll never know unless you try.”

The sudden yearning in her face tugged at his heart. Now he understood why she craved London society, why she feared being “trapped” in the country. For a lady like Regina, who couldn’t read but was too clever to be content with only needlepoint and wifely duties, being in the country would be a curse.

In London she could feed her mind at the opera, the theater, the salons. Her companions might be idiots, but they were probably entertaining idiots, and they distracted her from dwelling on her “damaged brain,” as she called it.

Out here at Castlemaine, she would be bored to tears. So if he wanted to keep her here with him…

“Later today,” he went on, “I’ll ride over to the house and fetch some of Louisa’s old primers. If we take it slow—”

Hope filled her face. “Do you really think I could learn?”

“I know you could.”

“Oh, Marcus, if you could teach me, you don’t know what it would mean!”

“I can guess. Without my books to keep me company these past nine years, I would have gone mad.”

A sudden cloud dimmed her face. “But what if the doctor was right? What if I turn myself into a blithering idiot—”

“You won’t.” He pressed a finger to her lips. “I won’t allow it. And you know us dragons—we always get our way.” When that didn’t seem to reassure her, he tried another tack. “Besides, surely if I could brave Almack’s for you, you can brave a few headaches for me.”

Perhaps if she wouldn’t do it for herself, she would do it for him, out of some sense of duty. Somehow, he was going to get her reading. He had to. It was the only way to keep her here with him.

“All right.” She settled against his chest with a sigh. “I promise to try.”

Chapter Twenty

Your charge will follow your rules more eagerly if she has first seen the consequences of breaking them.

—Miss Cicely Tremaine,The Ideal Chaperone

Regina had tried. And tried. And tried some more. Yet after four days of torture, she was no closer to learning to read than she’d been before. Worse yet, she wanted to strangle the person who’d devised that horrible invention, the primer. She even wanted to strangle Marcus. Because he simply would not give up.

It was midmorning of the fifth day of their honeymoon as she sat with him in Illyria’s pretty drawing room, laboring over the primer he had brought back from the main house. She was tired of feeling stupid, tired of the worry on his face when she said the wrong thing, tired of his frustration, which mirrored her own.

Most of all, she was tired of the headaches. And Marcus, curse his soul, would not forget his mission for one minute and let her go to bed with a cold compress. Not unless she seduced him first, which she couldn’t manage when her head hurt.

Some honeymoon this was turning out to be.

“Again, Regina.” He turned a page of the red-covered book she’d come to loathe. “Look at the shape of the letter. A ‘b’ has the belly to the right, not to the left. The letter thatyouare writing is a ‘d.’ ”

“For ‘dolt,’ ” she muttered. “Or do I have that wrong, too?”

“You are not a dolt.”

“I wasn’t speaking of myself.” Thrusting the book aside, she sat back to glare at him. “When will you just admit that I cannot do it? After all these hours of work, I can still barely read my name, much less a book. And as for writing…”