Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
She did not answer at once.
The fire crackled and settled. For a moment, she looked as though she were listening for something. Her own answer, perhaps, arriving from a distance.
“I think,” she said at last, “that I have been waiting to be asked that question.”
“How long?” he teased.
“Longer than is sensible,” she quipped, leaning into him.
He set his glass on the table beside him. The movement was unhurried, but he was aware of it as one was aware of a first step onto ice.
He rose, knowing there was no going back. He crossed the small distance between his chair and where she sat. He did not sit beside her immediately. Rather, he stood for a moment, looking down at her.
Anne tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, and in that movement, he saw her consent. It took everything he had not to scoop her up into his arms right then and there.
Instead, he sat. Close enough that his knee touched the folds of her skirt. Close enough to see the pulse at the hollow at the base of her throat, which had begun to flutter faster than it had a moment before.
“Anne,” he said, almost reverently.
“William.”
He lifted his hand. He watched himself do it, as though he were removed from his own body. He brushed his fingertips against her jaw, light as a question. Her skin was so warm, so soft.
She did not look away from him. She did not lower her eyes.
She has decided this is all right, in spite of my gruesomeness. This angel is here, in front of me, and wanting.
He slowly traced the line of her jaw with his thumb, and her lips parted. Not deliberately, he thought, but simply from the loss of a small breath.
That small, unguarded thing undid something within him.
He leaned in and kissed her hard.
It was not a tentative kiss. He had done tentative as a nervous young man. But he had not come to her to be a young man. He kissed her as though he had been thinking of little else for weeks, which was true.
Her lips were so pillowy soft, and they opened easily under his. She made a small sound low in her throat that he felt more than heard.
Her hand came up to the lapels of his coat. Not to push him back, he understood immediately. She wanted to hold him there. Her fingers curled into the fabric. He felt the small tremor that ran through them, and it moved something in him that he did not wish to name just yet.
He drew back a fraction. Not to end it, but to see her. Her eyes had darkened. Her cheek was flushed where he had touched it. A strand of her hair had come loose at her temple.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, wanting to ensure this was what she wanted, “and I shall.”
“Do not,” she breathed.
“Do not… Do not stop, then?” he asked, feeling a fool but needing to hear the words once more.
“Will you stop asking me such foolish questions?” she groaned impatiently.
“So impatient for such a delicate creature,” he teased. “You wouldn’t be so brazen if you knew just what I plan to do to you.”
“There is nothing you can do to me that I wouldn’t like.”
“I suppose you are right. I think I know every button to push on that perfect body.”
“Well, can you get to pushing them then?”
“You are incorrigible, my sweet.”
He let out a laugh, a surprised, low sound, and she smiled.
He liked the way she read his mind. And he kissed her again.
This time, her hand slid from his lapels to the back of his neck, and she pulled him in.
His own hand found her waist. Through the silk of her gown, he felt the shape of her, the warmth of her, the quickness of her sweet breath.
He let his palm slowly trail up her ribs, to give her every opportunity to object, but she did not. Instead, she shifted nearer, which was answer enough.
He broke their kiss to graze his lips against her jaw, the column of her throat where her pulse thrummed. Her head tipped back, and he heard her breath catch. He pressed a kiss to the hollow at the base of her throat, where her collarbone began its elegant slope.
“Oh,” she breathed.
Only that. But the shape of it in her voice nearly undid him.
“Anne,” he murmured against her skin.
“Yes.”
“We should not do this here.”
“No.”
Neither of them moved.
His hand had risen to the row of small buttons at the back of her gown. He put his thumb on the topmost one but did not undo it. He only rested his hand there, as a man might rest his hand against a door he had the key to and had not yet decided to open.
“Anne,” he said again. “Look at me.”
She lifted her face from where it had settled against his shoulder. Her gaze was very direct. He had always liked that about her, the directness. He liked it even more now.
“I would like to do this properly,” he murmured. “Not hurried. Not half-undressed in a drawing room with the servants liable to come in.”
“William.”
“Yes.”
“That is the most seductive thing you have said to me. Perhaps ever. This new you is… remarkable.”
Remarkable, he laughed inwardly.
His forehead rested against hers. Her hand had found his and did not move away.
“Come upstairs,” he coaxed.
“Yes.”
Still, neither of them moved.
William thought that perhaps they were drawing out the last of this, the wanting, the suspense. The sense of before, because they understood that it would not come again.
This is it?
Then Anne rose without releasing his hand, and he rose with her.
He grabbed the lamp from the side table and led her out of the room.
His bedroom was dim, one lamp burning low on the mantelpiece. He carried a second lamp in with him and set it beside the first. The two small flames leaned toward each other and then settled.
The curtains had been drawn against the night, heavy jacquard things, the color of wine in poor light. A fire had been laid in the grate but not lit. He did not light it now.
Anne understood, without him saying so, that he had judged the warmth between them sufficient. To add more fuel to their flame would be to make a performance of something he wished to keep quiet.
She stood in the doorway, but not out of hesitation. She had decided downstairs—or perhaps on the stairs themselves, with her hand in his—that she was not going to hesitate tonight.
She stood there because she wanted to look. She had wondered about this room. She felt she had earned the small indulgence of taking its measure before stepping into it.
It was plainer than she had expected. She had imagined something graver, with dark paneling, a great imposing bed, the oppressive dignity of a man who took himself seriously in private as well as in public.
But it was not that.
The bed was large but not huge. There were books stacked on the table beside it, three deep, one lying open and face-down in a way that would have scandalized her governess.
A coat had been draped over the back of a chair and forgotten there, one sleeve nearly touching the rug.
On the washstand, a razor had been set down at an angle, as though he had been interrupted mid-thought and had not come back to straighten it.
The small, private disorder of a man who lives here alone.
To her surprise, she found that it moved her more than the grandeur downstairs had. Downstairs, she saw the William the world was permitted to see. In this room, she saw the William who set a book face down because he meant to return to it, forgot, and went to bed anyway.
“I have wondered,” she said as she took a small step forward, “what this room looked like.”
“Have you?” he teased, his voice low. “Is it to your standards?”
She did not turn to him yet. She was not finished looking.
“Yes,” she said with a click of her tongue.
“And…?”
She turned now.
He was watching her with that steadiness he had, the one that had undone her by degrees over the last few weeks.
His hair had begun to come loose at the temples. His color was high. He was, she thought, more nervous than he permitted himself to be.
The knowledge of it made something behind her breastbone go soft and solid at once.
“It is very you, I suppose,” she murmured.
He crossed to her. He did not hurry. He cupped her face in both his hands this time, the gesture more deliberate than any he had made downstairs.
He kissed her, and she felt herself rise on her tiptoes to meet him.
Her arms wrapped around his neck of their own accord.
His hands on her face were warm and not quite steady, and she registered the tremors with a small, bright pleasure that shamed her slightly and that she did not, in the end, try to suppress.
I have spent too long denying myself this, yet I must be smart. Oh, but how can I be smart when I am in his arms?
He held her like that for a long moment, only kissing her. He was, she understood, learning her. The way her body answered him. She let him. She had no wish to be anywhere else. Besides, she had a great deal she wished to learn in return. She needed this as much as she needed air.
He drew back just a fraction, then pressed his lips to her temple. Then to the soft spot beneath her ear, where no one had ever kissed her before, and at which she made a small sound she would not be able to account for. Then to the line of her jaw.
She had not known before this evening that a jaw could be a thing one was kissed along, as though it were a sentence being read.
His hands went to the buttons at her back, and this time, he did unfasten them. Slowly. Painfully so. One, then the next, and then the next. At each one, she was perfectly still. Not because she was afraid, but because she wished to watch his face while he worked and did not want to miss anything.
There was a small crease between his eyebrows. His lips were parted very slightly. He looked like a man reading something he had waited a long time to be permitted to read.
“You are very careful,” she noted, her voice low and breathy.
“I am trying not to rush this… as hard as that is. I want to savor you, Anne.”
“I know.”