Chapter 5 #2
Emma startled at being so neatly dissected. She wanted to protest, to be contrary, but instead found herself nodding. “I don’t much care for standing still,” she admitted. “Not for long.”
“Then perhaps there is something worth painting in you, after all.”
The way Amélie said it—soft, unhurried, with an undertow of challenge—made Emma’s pulse thump in her injured arm. She felt exposed in a way she was unprepared for, as if the duchesse had peeled away her skin and rearranged her, bone by bone, into someone new.
“May I?” Amélie’s hand hovered, palm up, between them.
Emma stared at it, unsure what was being offered, unsure even what she wanted. She set her cup aside and gave a single, cautious nod.
Amélie took her uninjured hand, just the tips of their fingers touching, nothing more.
The contact was gentle, but it vibrated through Emma like an aftershock.
Amélie’s thumb traced a tiny circle on the side of Emma’s index finger—a motion so intimate, so deliberate, Emma nearly snatched her hand away. She did not.
“You have a powerful hand,” Amélie observed, turning it palm-up in her own. “A hand made for tools. Or for holding on.”
Emma looked at their entwined fingers, at the contrast between her own square, freckled knuckles and the duchesse’s elegant, olive-toned ones. “I never thought of hands as beautiful,” she said, too abruptly.
Amélie’s smile was a private one, visible only in the slight softening around her eyes. “Nor did I. Until I learned what they could do.”
She lifted Emma’s hand to her lips and pressed a kiss into the hollow of her palm.
It was over in a second, but the sensation—heat, and the faintest moisture—scorched itself into Emma’s memory. She felt drunk, but her cup was empty. She could smell the wine, the berries, the faintest trace of Amélie’s perfume—a scent like orange blossom and woodsmoke.
“I should…” Emma started, but had no idea how to finish. She did not pull back her hand. “It’s late.”
“Or early,” Amélie corrected. “Time means little in a house like this.”
Emma tried to laugh, but the ache in her shoulder and the ache under her breastbone combined to choke her. “If anyone saw us—”
The duchesse’s grip firmed, just enough. “No one will,” she said. “And if they do, let them wonder.”
Emma could not bear the weight of that gaze. She looked down at the battered kitchen table, at the crumbs and stains and the empty plate.
“My mother believed if you did a thing in darkness, it would stay there,” Emma said, her voice low. “But I’m learning that nothing ever stays hidden, not really.”
A silence stretched between them, elastic as a wire humming between them. Emma’s heart battered her ribs, as if seeking escape from the cage of her chest.
“I should go,” she managed, though she did not move. The kitchen pressed in close, the gaslight making shadows grow thick around the edges of the room. The heat of Amélie’s hand lingered on her skin, a ghostly imprint.
Amélie did not release her fingers. Her thumb pressed gently into the soft flesh of Emma’s own. There was a question in the way she held on, no more than that. Emma could have drawn away, could have slammed the vault on this moment and buried it alive with all her other secrets.
Instead, she let herself stay.
“You needn’t be afraid,” Amélie said quietly, as if reading the tremor in Emma’s frame like a book left open on the table. “Of me, or of this.”
Emma laughed, brittle and too loud for the sleeping house. “I fear nothing,” she lied, and the words tasted like old ha’pennies.
Amélie’s lips curved, half amused, half sad. “Bravery is not always the absence of fear,” she said. “In my experience, it is simply doing things regardless of your uncertainty.”
Emma pulled her hand free, but gently, not as a rejection—more to test the strength of her own will. She found it lacking. Her palm tingled where the duchesse’s lips had touched it. “I came down for tea and a biscuit,” she said, and the absurdity of it made her want to weep or shout.
Amélie refilled her cup, with more wine instead of willow bark, and slid the plate of fruit closer.
“Not biscuits, but these berries would have been ripe enough to tempt Persephone.”
Emma took a blackberry, biting it in half.
The juice bled darkly down her thumb. She remembered the story about the duchesse’s wedding dress—how she had set it alight in the Place Vend?me, left it in ashes and walked away.
Emma tasted the tang of the wild fruit, sweet and faintly bitter on her tongue.
“Tell me why you dread parties so much?”
Emma shrugged, the movement tugging at her wounded shoulder. “I dread being seen,” she said. “Not by guests. By the family. They have a talent for hitting every wrong note. Every time I say what I mean instead of what I ought.”
“Perhaps it is time they heard you,” Amélie said, her gaze steady, her tone as if this was the simplest problem in the world.
Emma shook her head. “That’s not how it works. In my family, you are either the mender or the wound. Never both.”
Amélie nodded as if this, too, was familiar.
She was silent for a while, swirling her wine.
“Would you let me sketch you?” she said, after a time.
“Not tonight. Not even tomorrow. But once the wedding madness is over. I would like to capture the way you look when you are thinking of anything but yourself.”
Emma nearly choked on the last of her berry. “Why? I’m neither beautiful nor interesting.”
Amélie smiled, but it was not a smile meant to persuade; it was an unshakable certainty, as if Amélie was simply stating a law of gravity. “You are both,” she said.
Emma looked away, unable to hold that gaze. She reached for the bottle, pouring herself a splash of wine more than she intended, and drank it off in a bracing swallow. The heat of it seared her throat, but it did nothing to slow her racing pulse.
Amélie’s hand was still on the table, palm up in invitation, a small dare.
Emma stared at it, at the slender strength of the fingers, the faint tan line where a ring had been.
She found herself wondering what it would feel like to have those hands pressed to her jaw, her neck, her bare skin.
The thought set off a trembling low in her belly, a fear so sharp it felt like hunger.
“Will you walk with me?” Amélie said, rising to her feet in a slow, deliberate movement that made the silk robe whisper against her body. “The garden will not judge, I promise.”
Emma hesitated, but the urge to flee was now matched by the urge to see what would happen if she did not. She nodded once, and together they stepped out into the black and silver world beyond the kitchen.
The air was cold enough to bite, the dew dampening the flagstones beneath their bare feet.
Emma shivered, but Amélie showed no sign of discomfort.
The moon was a pale coin, punched through with drifting scraps of cloud.
They walked in silence, the night pressing close around them, until they reached the shelter of a yew hedge.
Amélie stopped, turning to look at Emma, her expression unreadable in the half-light.
Emma felt her body strung tight as a wire. She did not know what was expected of her, only that she wanted—desperately wanted—something she had no words for.
Amélie reached out, her hand grazing Emma’s cheek, her touch featherlight and unhurried. Emma’s breath caught. She could smell the wine and the berries and the faintest trace of orange blossom, and it made something inside her unravel.
Amélie’s thumb traced the line of Emma’s jaw, then her lower lip, slow and deliberate. “I have wanted to do this since the first moment I saw you,” she said, her voice low and rough.
Emma’s heart hammered so hard she feared it would burst through her ribs. “Why me?”
Amélie smiled, and for once it was not sad. “Because you want, and you do not know how to say it. I find that very beautiful and very sad.”
Emma opened her mouth to reply, and found her words stopped by a kiss.
It was not a gentle, chaste thing. It was hungry, unashamed, the kind of kiss that demanded response. It was a kiss she’d expected of a man…
And it set her aflame the way no masculine touch ever had.
Emma’s mouth opened beneath it, her body moving without thought, pressing closer.
Amélie’s hand slid into her hair, her other arm slipping around Emma’s waist, pulling her tight, tight against her.
The silk of Amélie’s robe was hot as fever under her hands, her fingers encountering nothing but smooth, living skin beneath the loose silk.
She felt every ridge of muscle, every shallow thrum of Amélie’s pulse, every shivery tremor that ran through her own body.
Emma’s good arm wound instinctively around Amélie’s waist, her fingers digging into the silk and deeper, to the heat beneath.
The kiss was a storm. It swept Emma into a space where nothing existed but the insistent press of lips, the urgent taste of berries and wine, the hard thump of her own heart battering against the wall of her chest. Amélie’s tongue traced the seam of her mouth, coaxing it open, and when Emma answered with a hitching gasp, Amélie caught the sound with her own mouth, devouring it.
Emma had been kissed before—sloppily, in the dark. Once by a stable boy, and another time by a suitor.
No one had ever kissed her like this. As if she was something rare and necessary, as if Amélie would starve on the spot if denied. The thought was terrifying, and it sent a hot, shuddering thrill down the length of Emma’s body.
Amélie broke the kiss, but only to move lower, her lips tracing the line of Emma’s jaw, her teeth grazing the thin skin just below Emma’s ear.
Emma’s knees buckled, and she would have fallen if Amélie had not tightened her grip, holding her upright, her hands delicate and sure on Emma’s hips.
The world tilted. The night air was suddenly not cold at all, but charged with heat, a feverish energy that crackled with every shared breath.
They pressed together, bodies flush from breast to thigh, and Emma could feel the hard tips of Amélie’s nipples through the thin silk and the scant cotton of her own nightgown.
She wanted to touch, to seize, to be unmade—but her bandaged arm hung useless between them, and the frustration of it was almost enough to make her weep.
She managed to cup the base of Amélie’s neck with her good hand, feeling the rapid thud of the duchesse’s pulse, the slick warmth of skin beneath her palm.
“Is this all right?” Amélie murmured, her lips moving against the tender skin behind Emma’s ear.
Emma could only nod, her breath coming in ragged, shallow pulls.
Want coiled hot and liquid between her thighs, a sensation so overwhelming it momentarily eclipsed every other pain.
She tried to speak, but her voice had dissolved in the heat of the moment.
She tilted her chin, wordlessly pleading for more, and Amélie obliged, mouth returning to Emma’s with a fierceness that left Emma with no air, no thought, nothing but the wild, headlong rush of desire.
They might have stayed there—hidden in the shadow of the hedge, devouring each other—until the sun rose and found them.
Emma broke first. The strength of her own want terrified her, and something in her core buckled at the enormity of it. She jerked her mouth away, chest heaving, lips throbbing and wet.
“I think—” Her voice came out strangled, her breath ragged as a bellows.
The hedges spun, silvered and unfamiliar.
She steeled herself, managed a half step away, and held out her bandaged arm as if to bar Amélie from approaching.
“I think the laudanum and the wine don’t mix,” she said, and immediately hated how brittle and ridiculous it sounded.
Amélie’s hand hovered for a second, suspended in the space where Emma’s face had been. The duchesse’s expression was shadowed, unreadable. “I apologize,” she said. The words were soft but not remotely ashamed. “I misread—”
“No, I—” Emma’s voice caught, the chaos in her body racing ahead of her mind.
“I just can’t—” She blinked desperately, searching for language that would not betray her utterly.
“I should not have come out here. I should not have—” She could not finish.
She wanted, more than anything, to rewind the moment and start again, but she was already in motion, already backing away along the flagstones, her bare feet numb with dew and cold.
The kitchen was a small, safe haven. She rushed for it, rapping her hip on the edge of the table and nearly knocking over the bottle of burgundy. Her heart slammed against her ribs, her mouth tasted of copper and shame. Amélie had not followed, not immediately, and that was worse than if she had.
Emma braced herself on the battered wood, squeezing her injured shoulder tight to her side.
She could see her own reflection in the faint shine of the window: a flushed, wild-eyed creature, lips bruised and hair mussed.
She barely recognized herself. She ran her tongue over her teeth, tasting the ghost of berries, the salt of her own sweat, the faint echo of Amélie’s mouth.
She poured a finger of wine into her teacup and knocked it back, hoping it would cauterize the hollow, aching place between her lungs.
It did not. She watched her hand tremble, the veins standing in sharp relief under the kitchen lamp.
She could still feel the duchesse’s thumb on her jaw, the pressure of Amélie’s body against hers, the wanting that had left her dizzy and weightless.
Her shoulder pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She pressed her palm flat to the table and tried to breathe evenly, but her chest would not obey. The cold from outside seeped into her bones, mingling with the heat that still throbbed under her skin.
She could not stay here. Not in the bright, accusing light, not with the evidence of what she’d done—what she’d nearly done—hanging in the air like a scent.
She fled.