It should have been a slightly frightening thing, even after what the last few years had done to her, for a man to ask her to lie back for him. Belle had heard the stories any young woman did, about how it was a thing only men enjoyed and women's only choice was to grit their teeth and do what they must. But she would have trusted him to be more than that, even before today--she'd always trusted herself with him, even when it had looked much more foolish than it did now. So instead of a tiny bit of fear, she could only feel a kind of dizzying excitement--she only had the vaguest ideas of what he might have in mind, but knew it would be more than the awful stories she'd heard women whispering amongst themselves in her village.
So it was easy to grin, even if her breath was shuddering, and lay back.