Chapter Twenty-Six
“You always were an annoying child, Amsonia!” sneered her uncle in his sinister voice, folding his hands into his garnet sleeves.
“When I learned you’d escaped, I sent my men after you, but that cursed Qavox thwarted them!
I do wish he hadn’t, could have saved me from this annoying little confrontation you’ve contrived . . .”
“Enough!” she cried, tears of rage and fear coursing to her troubled breast. “Uncle, you do disturb me mightily! Have you no heart? Take me to my father at once!”
—The Dragon and the Blue Star by Analise Crewe
“You look uncommonly well this morning,” Tessie observed.
“I feel uncommonly hungry.” Ana attacked her bacon and eggs with voracious intent.
Tessie smiled knowingly. “I’m glad you have such an appetite.”
And not only for bacon. She hungered for Dex.
Their lovemaking hummed in her veins, sang her a song about freedom.
The freedom to seek pleasure, to give pleasure.
It wasn’t only those hours in bed. The glow spread through her body and lasted the whole next day.
Pleasant little after-ripples when she walked, crossed her legs, bathed.
Her body reminding her that she was something wholly new, a woman well-pleasured. A woman who had cried out her release not caring who heard, wanting the world to know how happy she was.
Let me love you. He’d said that to her last night. That was clear progress. Even if he only meant love her with his body, she’d heard the subtext, the silent message.
He was afraid to relinquish the armor he’d pieced together over his heart like dragon’s scales.
Take me again. Harder this time. Words she never thought she’d say. This secret pleasure-haze, this darkness that filled her with a need so sharp it felt like she was still subsisting on bread and butter . . . that he was the only thing that could fill her, satiate her.
Each morsel of him that she consumed made her want more. Not only his body, his confident commands. She wanted him to talk to her, tell her the dark secrets he held in his heart. She wanted to understand him.
She wanted more. She wanted everything. She wanted him wholly, not just during the nighttime. How could she make him see that it wasn’t enough? That as beautiful and feverish and ecstatic as it was, it wasn’t enough?
While he was away, she spent her days in Clovercote with the familiar characters living out their complicated lives through her pen, and completing the light edits she’d received on her fantastical novel from Mr. Norwood.
She threw herself into the work, welcoming the distraction.
She’d be finished very soon, then she would travel to London to submit the manuscript.
It never ceased to give her a thrill when she thought about holding her book in her hands.
She’d stopped being upset with Dex for giving the publisher a donation.
It was exactly as he’d said, her book would have to stand on its own merits upon publication.
He couldn’t very well purchase the entire British public.
The critics might hate her book, or they might ignore it completely.
Or, just maybe, someone out there might read it and fall in love with it.
Someone other than her husband, of course.
Oh Papa, she thought. I wish you could be here to see me achieving my dream.
He would be very proud. She had written the dedication to her father.
Only appropriate for a book about a girl who lost her father and found him again with the help of a great and terrible dragon.
She hadn’t given up hope of finding him yet, even though she hadn’t received any credible information about his whereabouts.
She’d been sitting at the breakfast table for nearly an hour, lingering over her mostly empty plate.
Her stomach was full, yet she felt . . .
hungry. Restless. One thing she had learned about herself in the hard years following her father’s disappearance, was that inactivity rubbed her the wrong way.
She wasn’t one to mope, to swan about, to wallow in self-pity.
She needed to take solid steps toward her goals, although she admittedly preferred taking wild fantastical leaps.
The crumbs of progress she felt she’d made, as meager as the remains of her breakfast, the subtle shifts in his manner with her, the passionate language he used during their lovemaking—none of it was enough. Further action was required.
She’d spent a few hours the day before wrestling with a particularly tricky detail of Lady Claridge’s plot outline—the heroine, unsure of her paramour’s fidelity, had invited all members of the ton to a masquerade, the invitation instructing guests to “wear your feelings,” the goal being to force all unsaid emotions out into the open.
She’d had a devilish time designing the correct costumes for the corresponding players in the novel but had finally landed on the perfect costumes for the protagonists to wear to signal their true colors, so that all the intricacies of the plot could be neatly resolved by the conclusion of the ball.
It was a big scene, rather farfetched, but full of satisfying drama and meaty confrontations and by the end of it (or so she had felt, throwing down her minuscule pencil nub triumphantly on the desk) the characters had all learned something about themselves and each other, enough to enable the much sought-after happy ending her readers would require.
She was jealous of her heroine, who had forced her lover’s feelings out into the open quite easily.
Real life didn’t afford such neat endings.
Dex would never don Romeo’s doublet and proclaim that her beauty was “too rich for use, for earth too dear!” She smiled at the thought.
Besides, if she threw a ball, who would come?
They were certainly very isolated here at the castle, their only neighbor the estranged brother, Rupert.
She could speak to Rupert. She gasped, feeling an echo of the excitement she’d experienced finishing the masquerade scene. Inspiration was striking again.
She could talk with this important figure from Dex’s past. He was possibly the only person who could shine some light on the dark corners that made up her husband.
Why not? At the very worst, he would reject her advance or have no insights to offer.
Maybe he was as closed and unyielding as Dex, and that was why they were locked into this enmity.
Maybe it had all started over something very silly in their childhood, a coveted pony being gifted to the wrong brother, something trivial that had grown hard layers of meaning over time.
Shells that slowed each brother down and kept them from seeing each other clearly.
She could peel off the layers, get to the heart of it. And maybe get to the heart of Dex in the process.
Ana arrived at the door of the neighboring estate in a sorry state.
She’d charged out of the castle with the barest of goodbyes to Tessie and the rest of the staff, fastening her coat as she went.
She didn’t want to tell anyone where she was going, lest they try to stop her, give her some logical reason not to undertake this quest. Logic be damned today. She was giving her intuition free rein.
It had led her to this doorstep, out of breath and windswept, raising the heavy knocker with a shaky hand.
In the moment before the door opened, she had enough time to conjure up a thousand potential forms her new brother-in-law might take, none of them pleasant.
A dastardly cad, a pompous imbecile. A bitter man, jealous of Dex’s birthright, plotting his downfall from just down the hill.
The attractive brown-haired gentleman with the ready grin and friendly crinkles around his eyes was wholly unexpected.
“Hullo! You’ll have to excuse me for opening the door myself—Mallard’s been taken ill and our footmen are helping the stablemaster with a breached foal’s birth. I’m Rupert. You must be Analise, the authoress? Come in, please! Come in.”
“How did you know it was me? How do you know my name?” Confusion contributed to her overall ruffled state, as she slid her arms out of her coat and passed it into Rupert’s helpfully outstretched arms. He was taking her in with interested and approving gray eyes, the mirror of Dex’s but with warmth tempering the steel.
“I like to keep abreast of my brother’s doings, as much as he would rather I didn’t.
We’d heard he’d brought a young bride to the castle, and you fit the description.
I hope you aren’t terribly shocked by my lack of propriety, I’ve just been hoping to meet you but unsure how to make it happen, and here you are, on our doorstep. Astonishing!”
She could hardly help smiling back at him—his easy manner was contagious. “You know more about me than I know of you! I’m so pleased to be received like this, I felt positively gauche arriving unannounced.”
“Did my brother—are you here with his blessing? Does he know you’ve come?”
“Your brother is in London on urgent business. I haven’t had a chance to write him,” she said, neatly evading his first question.
“I wanted to invite you over for dinner so that we could all spend time together as a family. I never had a large family; it was always just me and Papa. So, I thought—wouldn’t it be better to deliver the invitation in person?
So that we could dispense with the awkwardness of first introductions?
” She looked at him hopefully, willing him to let her gloss over Dex’s participation, or lack thereof, in the scheme.
He seemed relieved and pleased to do so.
“Quite right! Admirably so. Firmly believe in avoiding awkwardness at all costs. My wife will be overjoyed to meet you. Come into the drawing room.”