Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You are staring,” Cressida said, without opening her eyes.
There was a brief pause, then: “I was not aware that was prohibited.”
She opened her eyes.
The morning light lay across the coverlet in long, flat bands. Theodore was propped on one elbow beside her, dark-eyed, dark-haired, simply watching her with an openness she had not previously seen from him in daylight.
His hair was disheveled from sleep, a dark fall of it down his shoulders that he had not bothered to push back.
His jaw was unshaven. There were marks on his throat, faint and half-concealed by the open collar of his shirt, and he was looking at her with an expression that belonged to low firelight and drawn curtains.
He had permitted it regardless in full morning light, without arrangement.
She registered this without comment, having learned over the previous months that drawing attention to his unguarded moments was the surest way to end them.
“It is not prohibited,” she said, pushing herself upright against the pillows. Her hair was an absolute catastrophe. “It is merely noted.”
His gaze moved briefly to her hair and then away, and the line of his mouth held something she was almost certain was amusement.
“You may say whatever is amusing you,” she offered.
“I am not amused,” he said, then thought better of it. “I am,” he admitted, after a dignified pause, “exercising considerable restraint.”
She laughed, and his expression shifted in response.
There it was, the thing she had spent the better part of a season coaxing out of him by degrees.
A knock at the door preceded Mrs. Agnes by approximately no time whatsoever.
She entered the room, followed by a footman bearing a tray laden with dishes—a silver coffee pot, a folded linen, a small vase containing a careful spray of flowers that had not been in the garden yesterday—and the whole apparatus was set on the small table by the window with swift efficiency.
Cressida, watching the spectacle from the bed, noted that Mrs. Agnes was doing considerable work keeping a neutral expression.
“Breakfast, Your Grace. Your Grace.” The second address was accompanied by a deep curtsy in Cressida’s direction. “Cook has prepared a soft egg and toast for Her Grace. The kitchen was informed that Her Grace expressed a preference last Tuesday.”
“I am sure it was,” Theodore said in a lazy drawl.
The housekeeper and footman withdrew, the door closing behind them.
“She has been waiting to do that,” Cressida said.
“Oh, that I wholeheartedly agree,” Theodore replied.
He sat up and reached for the coffee pot, pouring two cups without asking how she took her coffee because he had been paying attention.
They ate in his chambers, which had never been done before, and the domesticity of it settled between them. Slightly awkward, but not uncomfortable, a garment put on for the first time that would fit better with wear.
For the first time ever, he was visibly unmoored in her company, with his hair disheveled and his jaw unshaven. The Duke of Ashmere, without any of his considerable armor. It was, she thought, a remarkable thing to witness.
She was attending to the egg when he reached across and took the small spoon from her hand. She looked up at him just as he lifted a bite to her lips.
She held his gaze and opened her mouth, and the corners of his eyes creased very slightly.
“I am perfectly capable,” she informed him, once she had swallowed.
“I am perfectly aware,” he said, and offered her another bite.
She considered refusing on principle and found she could not be bothered. She accepted it.
Then she took a piece of toast, buttered it with some deliberateness, and held it out to him. He looked at it, then looked at her. A beat passed, and then he leaned forward and bit from her hand, his eyes holding hers the entire time.
“You could simply take it,” she pointed out.
“I could,” he agreed, but did not.
They finished breakfast in this manner. Then he refilled her coffee cup. She watched his hand wrap around the silver pot, unashamedly basking in the sight of his strong arms and bare chest. She did not even look away when he caught her at it.
“Come here,” he said.
Her breath hitched, her heart pounding at the base of her throat.
She moved the tray to the side table, then paused, because her hand had found the small pot of honey. She picked it up and held it between them with the expression she wore when she had decided to do something and was curious what he would make of it.
He looked at the pot, then looked at her.
“No,” he said.
“You haven’t even heard the proposal.”
“I have inferred it. The answer is no.”
“You are very swift to refuse proposals before they have been made.” She turned the little pot in her fingers. “It is quite a character flaw.”
“I have several.” He folded his arms. “Put it down.”
“Or?”
His eyes moved from the pot to her face with the measured patience of a man who had extensive experience managing estates, difficult tenants, and hostile Parliamentary committees, and found all of them less troublesome than the woman currently sitting on his side of the bed holding a pot of honey.
“Cressida.”
“One moment.” She dipped a finger in, unhurried, and drew it in a slow, deliberate line along his jaw.
He went very still. Not the stillness of the corridor, or the terrace, or any of the composed and guarded silences she had catalogued over the previous months. This was an entirely different stillness.
“You,” he rumbled, “are going to regret that.”
“I very much doubt it.”
He caught her wrist, turned it, and pressed his mouth to the inside of it slowly, with complete and undivided attention. She felt warmth travel up her arm and spread through her whole body, and she conceded privately that his counterproposal had considerable merit.
“That,” she said, once she had recovered something resembling composure, “was not the retaliation I anticipated.”
“I know.” He was watching her mouth. “This is.”
He kissed her with the honey still on his jaw, and she laughed against him. He made a sound low in his chest that she felt rather than heard, and his hands found her waist and drew her closer. Her laughter dissolved into a soft moan.
His mouth found the curve of her throat, and she tipped her head back.
“You have honey on your jaw,” she reminded him.
“I am aware.” He did not stop.
“It seems impractical.”
“Mm.”
“Also,” she said, and then stopped because his hands had moved, and practical objections ceased to be relevant.
Outside, the castle had begun its day in full. She could hear the bustle of the stable yard, a footman’s measured tread along the passage below, the distant clatter of the kitchen beginning its morning preparations.
The world of Ashmere Castle was proceeding with its customary efficiency, entirely indifferent to the fact that the Duke and Duchess were proceeding rather less efficiently in the ducal chambers and had no intention of amending this.
His mouth found her collarbone, the soft curve below it. She turned her face into his hair and pressed her lips against his temple and felt the low, involuntary sound he made against her skin, and she thought, as she had thought the night before, There he is.
“Theodore,” she said softly.
He lifted his head, the morning light across his face exactly as it was—ungoverned and entirely his.
She reached up and touched his jaw, the rough growth there, the trace of honey still warm at the corner.
He turned his face briefly into her palm before kissing her again, and the morning ceased to matter altogether.
After the last shivers of pleasures receded, he lay with one arm behind his head, and she lay with her cheek against his shoulder. His fingers found her hand against his ribs and rested there.
The ornamental lake threw its faint ripple of light across the ceiling, shifting and unhurried, and neither of them said anything for a long while. There was nothing in the silence that required filling.
After a time, Theodore moved to pour water from the carafe on the nightstand. He handed it to her without ceremony and waited while she drank, and there was something in the plainness of the gesture that she found she liked considerably.
Then he settled back, and his hand moved to her hair, working through a section of it with idle, careful fingers.
“Are you sore?” he asked. His voice was low, matter-of-fact, addressed to the ceiling.
She considered the question with the same seriousness he had given it. “A little,” she replied. “Not badly.”
“I think you will need to rest for a long while yet,” he said as his hand continued its slow work through her hair.
After a moment, he shifted, drawing the coverlet over her with one hand, arranging it without fuss.
“I am perfectly well,” she said, because she thought he might want to hear it plainly.
He looked at her. “Good,” he said, and went back to stroking her hair.
She closed her eyes and let him.
“The Duchess,” he said eventually, addressing the ceiling, “ought to make another visit to the village. The tenants will wish to see their Duchess again.”
“Naturally,” she agreed. “When would be convenient?”
“End of the week, if the weather holds. I will accompany you.” He said this as casually as he possibly could, as though it were an offer that carried no heart. But she knew otherwise.
“Then the end of the week it is.”
He rose, crossed to the washstand, and attended to himself with the economy of a man accustomed to solitude.
Cressida was content to watch him from the bed.
And then the thought crossed her mind, one that had nagged at her for the longest time, and she felt as though this was as good a time to ask about it.
“About… about the portrait in the gallery,” she said.
He stilled immediately.
“The one that is covered.” Her voice was mild. She refused to burden these words with any particular weight. “I have thought about it since. The staff will not speak of it.”
He turned. “Where did you hear about that?” His voice was low and careful. Wholly suspicious.
“I did not hear about it. I saw it myself. Months ago.” She held his gaze steadily. “I did not ask the staff… because I wanted you to tell me about it.”
He looked at her across the room, and the silence between them extended past the ordinary length of silences, past comfort and into something more significant. She held his gaze and said nothing further.
The moment broke with a rap at the door, and it was clear he was grateful for the interruption because he soon left without another word. The door closed behind him.
Cressida lay in the morning light and looked at the ceiling—the faint ripple of reflected light from the lake was still moving, indifferent to what had just taken place beneath it.
Then she looked at the vase of flowers on the table, Mrs. Agnes’s addition, arranged with the precise care of a woman who had been waiting a considerable while to arrange it. Early roses, white and cream, the stems cut at a careful angle.
Someone had risen before dawn to cut them from the garden. Someone had carried them up two flights of stairs and placed them where the morning light would catch them first.
She thought about a portrait draped in cloth, and a man who had gone completely still at the sound of two syllables. She thought about his face in the moment before he turned away, about the shape of it, old and private and somehow heavy.
He would come back to it. She believed that with a certainty she could not entirely account for, and did not try to.
By now, she had become very good at waiting.