Chapter 1 #3
And then she slipped her arm in his and he deliberately pushed all thoughts of the Baroness aside. He shoved them deep down into the shuttered corner of his heart where he kept them, and concentrated on his wife.
Inside, the ma?tre d’ bowed and whisked them to a private alcove screened by rich drapery.
Candlelight glowed on silverware and crystal, casting Julianna in a halo of warm light.
She looked radiant, her cheeks flushed with the cool evening air.
A new gown—an order that had never been picked up from the modiste’s and that could be quickly altered—clung to her spectacularly.
Even through the tension that was slowly ebbing out of his body, he could see how beautiful she looked this evening. He ought to send flowers to Madame Tremaux for that gown. Or, hell, he might purchase the woman a Mayfair townhouse for the way Julianna smiled when she looked down at it.
She was reading the menu when he realized he’d been staring at her. He jerked his gaze back to his wineglass and lifted it, though his throat was still too tight to swallow.
“Fred?” Her voice was light and soft, slightly teasing. “Where has your mind gone? You’re elsewhere.”
“Nowhere.” He forced his mouth into a half-smile. “I’m precisely where I ought to be. Here with my wife.”
The words pleased him more than they should have. My wife. He felt himself relax just a little bit more. And more still when he saw her luminous eyes soften, the candlelight catching them until something in his chest gave a slow, dangerous lurch.
The first course arrived—a rich and fragrant beef broth—and Fred drank his down. Julianna, however, barely lifted her spoon. Which would not do. Not tonight. Not here.
He tore a piece of bread, dragged it through the broth, and held it out to her. “Try that. The kitchen does bread well. I believe their chef is Lyonnais.”
She leaned forward and took the bread from him, her fingers brushing his as they touched. It was a brief, accidental skim of skin against skin that made his pulse leap treacherously. He felt arousal bloom in him again but it was still edged with panic.
He forced himself to breathe as she bit down on the broth-soaked bread. Her expression changed when the taste of it overwhelmed her senses. It was subtle but he saw it, and he was filled with a primal kind of satisfaction that he’d put that expression there.
Good.
He gave her another piece before he returned to his own meal with renewed purpose.
The next course soon arrived: thick slices of roast beef, potatoes slick with butter, greens that were bright and tender—still sweet before the summer sun made them bitter. And a Yorkshire pudding that had risen so high it nearly collapsed under its own weight.
Fred cut through the roast beef and placed a slice on his tongue. He made a sound of delight that would have been embarrassing were he paying any attention to it. He wasn’t.
“By God, Jules,” he said, cutting off a tender chunk for her. “You have to try this.”
He held his fork out to her and this time—this time—she leaned forward and took it directly from his proffered hand. And then she closed her eyes and moaned.
Christ.
He was going to buy the chef a Mayfair townhouse too. There could be a whole block dedicated to those men and women who made his wife happy.
It settled him to see her smile. To see her eat. Those were realizations he would have found too abominably maudlin a month ago. But not now, especially not when he knew how much he needed that soothing balm to his nerves.
“I do remember,” Julianna said, “that you loved my mother’s cooking.”
“Your mother was an extraordinary cook. I’ve never had any other meal like the ones she served. Whatever she put in her rice was beyond comparison.”
“Coconut,” Julianna said. “When she could find it. Or other spices. Allspice, nutmeg, cloves. My father would procure them for her every time he came to London.”
She tasted the Yorkshire pudding, closing her eyes again to savor it.
“Although she would have loved this too. This is delicious.”
“It is.”
He held out his fork for her again, this time laden with the greens, watching closely as she accepted it without hesitation and took it into her mouth as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
The meal stretched on, unhurried. Fred demolished his plate and then another, his mind soothed, the Baroness not forgotten exactly.
But pushed far away for the moment so he could enjoy the shared table, the candlelight, the ease of her company.
And how right all of it felt. So much so that he allowed himself the illusion that this was normal.
That this was allowed for a man like him. That he could have it.
And when Julianna finally set down her fork, plate clean, he felt monumentally pleased.
He had not seen her eat like that once these last weeks.
She looked content, happy, cheeks rosy again and awash in candlelight.
He wanted to reach out and place his palm against that pinkened cheek and hold her suspended here in this moment.
Where nothing could reach them, nothing could weigh them back down.
Back in the carriage, the city passed in a wash of lamplight and shadows. Inside it was dark and their bodies were close. Julianna leaned forward, toward him. “What is it?” she asked, voice low. “What’s happening tonight, Fred?”
She placed her fingers over his, and her touch was light, gentle. But it shot through him like lightning. His whole body hummed with the charge.
How many times a day, he wondered, did he brush against his butler, his chef, a stranger in the street, and never notice at all? How many collisions went utterly unremarked? Yet every single time any part of him so much as grazed Julianna, he was undone.
He leaned toward her against his better reason. Their faces were so close he could see the fine tremor of her breath, could count every eyelash, could taste the question trembling in the air between them.
But then he clenched his hands on his knees hard. His chest constricted. He was a maelstrom of too many thoughts and emotions, only some of which he could understand.
No. He would not, could not, touch her. Not again. It was all too much. The meal had finished and the idyll with it.
He fixed his gaze on the window and pretended she wasn’t there. He’d let the idyll go too far and he was realizing he didn’t know how to pull it back. How to pull himself back. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t be intimate with her.
He felt a sharp spiral of anxiety at the thought. Then he cursed under his breath and spat out, “Leave me be, Jules.” Before he turned his head and leaned his body back into the shadows.
Julianna’s eyes widened, but then she narrowed them.
She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
He couldn’t look at her and he didn’t know what more to say.
He was trapped and he didn’t know how to free himself, like the foxes who could only escape the hunter’s snare by chewing off their own legs.
If only he could chew away the dark, defiled parts of himself.
He would if it would let him go to her untainted, but a heart was harder to amputate than a leg.
“Fred, talk to me,” she said and he pretended like he hadn’t heard her.
When the carriage halted, he stepped out first but instead of waiting for the coachman to help her down, he strode into Chester House alone.
Dear Jules,
I promised you once—though you will never read those words—that I would not reach for you. That I would never lay a finger upon your beautiful skin. I promised myself the same. I believed that vow would protect you. And yet I have broken it.
I despise myself for that weakness. That I cannot be the man you need me to be.
That remains true, even as some even weaker part of me wishes only to repeat the action, to touch you and touch you and touch you until I’m sated. To drink my fill of you, although I don’t know if that’s possible. It would take weeks, months. Forever, I imagine.
I keep thinking of your face at dinner—how it changed when you tasted the broth and again with the roast beef. The small, unguarded pleasure of the sounds you made. How your breath caught. How swiftly joy finds you when you permit it.
You meet the world honestly, dearheart, and somehow it does not manage to break you. I envy that more than I ought. And I dread—more than anything—that it may be me who finally does.
So know this, I am trying—clumsily to be sure—to keep faith with the man I believe you would wish me to be. The one who will choose the path of the better angels and leave you alone. Because the man I am now would fail you utterly and that I cannot stand.
I remain, as ever,
yours,
Fred