A Bloom in Winter Read Online Free PDF

new home was cramped, confining, and common, and she didn’t want either Vic or Ro to know of her exact circumstances. She set the letter on the mantel behind the coal stove. Later. She would figure that out later. She had enough on her mind.
    She pushed the other trunks into the back bedroom, trying not to look at her bed as she did so. She and Mrs. Tannin had hired two men off the street to unload it and haul it up the narrow stairs for them. It was large enough for two, but the fine virginalwhite and blue feather quilts looked strangely out of place in this plain bedroom. Maybe because the quilts had belonged to another life, one that would be ending tonight.
    Her husband had been curiously reluctant to start their married life on the narrow bed provided at the boardinghouse. Not that Prudence disagreed with him—indeed, she was grateful for his scruples. To accommodate the crush of people coming in from the country to work in the city, tiny rooms had been further split up by sheets acting as makeshift walls, strung between beds. They were put into a room with two other married couples, one of whom had no qualms about committing the physical act of marriage with other people within spitting distance.
    Her face flamed upon remembrance of the unfamiliar noises issuing from the other side of the sheet. She understood from Andrew’s stillness next to her that he, too, had heard and interpreted the sounds. She lay beside him for several weeks, disconcertingly conscious of the way his strong form pressed next to hers and how the hair on his arm felt against her cheek as he held her. Her face flushed. She’d only felt that butter melting in the center of her middle once before and as it wasn’t with her husband, it shamed her to think of it. It also shamed her that the man in question didn’t have to touch her to make her feel that way.
    Prudence had always wondered what would come next. She and Rowena had held a few whispered conversations after a trip to a farm to buy a new horse for Sir Philip, but these had always ended in embarrassed giggles. For all Sir Philip’s liberal ideas, sex education for his daughters was not one of them.
    She pressed her hands against her heated cheeks. Tonight, she would be sharing this bed with Andrew and there would be noone to stop the inevitable. The thought left her both thrilled and anxious. How would she know what to do?
    She jumped guiltily when she heard the key in the lock. Was it that time already?
    She hurried into the main room just as Andrew stepped through the open door. He filled up the doorway and the room with his height, one of the reasons he had been selected to be a footman at Summerset Abbey. His hazel eyes crinkled into a tired smile when he saw her. They might not have consummated their marriage yet, but she had no doubts about his love for her. She only hoped that in time she would grow to feel the same way.
    He caught her with one arm around her waist and pulled her close and she gave him a shy kiss. At first, she’d been taken aback by his easy physical affection with her. She knew the Buxtons loved one another deeply, but it wasn’t in them to be that demonstrative. Somehow in that mean little farmhouse where he’d grown up, he’d learned to give and receive love more easily than the aristocrats in their Mayfair mansions. After her initial shock, she grew to rather like it. He never failed to make her feel special.
    “Where did you work today?” she asked him. Andrew had found a place that hired workers on a daily basis. He was picking up some extra work a few days a week when he wasn’t studying.
    “Down at the docks.”
    She looked in dismay at his dirty clothing. She had learned this morning that the laundry had to be done belowstairs and then hung to dry either out the back window or on a line in the cellar. She didn’t want to admit to him that she’d never donewashing before and didn’t have the first idea of how to go about it. At the