10. CHAPTER 10 #2
Blinding sunlight. The open sky, wide and hot.
Sand beneath her. The crash and pull of waves close enough to taste the salt.
And warmth. Not from the sun. A body. His body pressed along hers.
His hand lifting a biscuit to her mouth.
Her lips closing over it, brushing his fingertips, and the ginger and the sea salt and the taste of his skin all at once, and she was laughing, and they were… naked.
Both of them. Under a blue sky, on pale sand, nothing between their bodies and the world but light.
Her back against a blanket. His arm beneath her head.
His fingers at her lips, feeding her a biscuit with a smile she could almost see.
Not his face, not yet, but the shape of it. Tender. Amused. Possessive.
One searing heartbeat, then gone. Scattered. The edges dissolved even as she reached for them. It all vanished — the sand, the sun, his body. She was sitting in a yellow room in a castle with a half-eaten biscuit in her hand and her heart hammering in her chest.
She opened her eyes.
Margaret was watching her. Paul was frowning.
"Are you all right, dear?" Margaret asked.
"Yes." Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. "Yes. These biscuits are…" She looked down at the Cornish Fairing in her hand. "They are wonderful."
She took another bite. The flavor was the same, but the vision didn't return. It had come and gone in a flash, leaving only the afterimage: a happiness so physical, so simple, so instinctual, that it made her careful life on Guernsey seem thin by comparison.
She had been happy here. With him. She didn't remember it. Not as a story, not as before and after. But her tongue knew. The ginger on her palate was a key, and it had unlocked something warm. Safety. A life she had lost without knowing what she had lost .
She finished the biscuit and poured herself tea with hands that were not quite steady.
"I think," she said to Margaret, "that I used to eat these often."
"I would say your body remembers what your mind has not caught up with yet. Which is rather encouraging, would you not say?"
Paul said nothing. He was looking at the plate of Cornish Fairings as though they had personally offended him.
Vivienne took another biscuit. Nothing else happened. No more memories. No more doors unlocked. But she didn't need another vision.
She already knew she was where she was supposed to be.
After tea, she left Margaret to her letter-writing and walked back along the guest corridor. Paul fell into step beside her uninvited. The silence between them was not comfortable, but not hostile either. Two people adjusting to new terrain.
"I want to apologize for earlier. Margaret was right to correct me. The duke has been… generous."
The word cost him.
"He has," she agreed. Then, because she owed him this: "Paul, I know this is difficult for you. I never intended any of it."
"You couldn’t have known." He stopped walking. They were at the junction where the guest corridor met the main hall. The border, she realized, between his territory and hers. "But I want you to know I am here for you. Whatever you decide at the end of these seven weeks."
"Thank you, Paul. That means a great deal."
He nodded. Turned. Walked back toward the guest wing, spine straight, chin up, holding his dignity with both hands.
Lucy was waiting in the duchess's chambers.
"I have drawn back the curtains, Your Grace, and laid out some things. Would you like to see the wardrobe?"
Vivienne crossed into the dressing room and stopped.
Wardrobes lined every wall, floor to ceiling, carved from dark wood.
Lucy began opening doors, and her mouth fell open.
Silks in dove gray and sapphire, and a green the color of deep water.
Velvets in garnet, amethyst, and midnight blue.
Cottons and linens trimmed with lace so fine it looked like frost. Furs — sable, ermine, fox.
And shoes. Rows of shoes: kid-leather slippers, walking boots with pearl buttons, satin dancing shoes in colors she didn't have names for.
"Was all of this mine?" It seemed too much for only one person.
"Every stitch, Your Grace. The duke ordered nothing moved or given away."
Seven years of a wardrobe standing idle, maintained and preserved, while its owner wore the same three cotton dresses on a Channel Island and mended them by candlelight when they frayed.
She ran her fingers along a gown. The silk was cool, smooth, and beneath the lavender of the sachet she caught another scent. Roses and bergamot. Her own perfume, still held in the fabric after all this time.
Lucy cleared her throat, snagging her attention.
"Excuse me, Your Grace. I was wondering if you would require my assistance with your bath and getting ready for dinner."
She had not had a lady's maid at Margaret's house.
If anything, she had been the lady's maid.
Not that she had been required to help Margaret dress every day.
Her friend was a practical lady who wore simple gowns that she could don herself.
But occasionally, when Margaret had attended a ball or event at the town hall, she had helped her benefactress dress and done her hair.
She seemed to be good at it, and the older lady had appreciated the help.
Now the idea of having a maid dedicated to helping her dress seemed extravagant, but given her wardrobe, probably necessary.
"A bath would be lovely, thank you," she said.
"Of course, Your Grace. I already instructed the kitchen to have hot water ready. They will bring it up at once."
Half an hour later, lounging in the hot bath while her maid washed and rinsed her hair, she contemplated that she could get used to this.
"Tell me, Lucy, were you my maid before?"
"No, Your Grace. I was merely a kitchen maid at the time. I got promoted to parlor maid and then to upstairs maid last year. "
"What happened to my lady's maid? I presume I had one?"
"Yes. Lynwood. The duke offered to keep paying her wages if she wanted to stay, but with no lady to serve, she decided to find another position where she could apply her talents.
She left with a good severance and a glowing letter of recommendation.
She is a superb lady's maid. Very much in demand.
I hear she found another position in no time. "
"And how did you become a lady's maid?"
The girl hesitated. "I am not really," she confessed. "But I want to be. I have been practicing on my fellow maids in my free time. And last spring I had the opportunity to put my skills to the test when Lady Venus visited without her maid. She was very pleased with my efforts."
Lady Venus? Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, and desire. What kind of name was that? It sounded seductive. Risqué. Something a high-flying courtesan might be called. Oh, God. Was she her husband's mistress? No. Surely not.
But she found it difficult to dismiss the thought.
He was a man of wealth, power, and — she had noticed, however much she wished she had not — no small physical appeal.
It would be na?ve to think he had spent those years in monastic solitude.
Men of his position kept mistresses as a matter of course, even when they had their wives by their sides.
Dalton had been alone for years. He had considered himself a widower.
It was to be expected that he would have a mistress. Or possibly several.
The jealousy hit before reason had a chance. Irrational. Premature. Scalding.
She wanted to be sophisticated about it, but could not. Every fiber in her being rebelled against the idea. Where on earth was this possessiveness coming from?
She barely knew the duke. She could not remember his face from before last week. And yet the thought of him with another woman made her hands curl into fists.
She unclenched her fists. Arranged her voice into something she hoped sounded idle.
"Who is this Lady Venus? "
Lucy's mortification was swift and painfully evident. A flush climbed from her collar to her hairline, confirming her suspicions. Lady Venus was Dalton's mistress, and the maid had committed a terrible faux pas by mentioning it to the wife.
"Oh. Oh, Your Grace, I'm so sorry. I forgot. Mrs. Trevena explained about your memory, and I just assumed you would know, but of course you do not — "
Had she known about her husband's mistress? And she accepted it? Unlikely. But of course, the woman she used to be seemed to be a completely different person from who she was now.
Lucy pressed both hands to her cheeks. "Lady Venus is the duke's sister, Your Grace."
"His sister," she said, then laughed.
Not a polite laugh. A real one. Startled out of her, half-embarrassed, and entirely beyond her control. The jealousy collapsed, and what replaced it was worse: the clear, undeniable proof that she cared about this man far more than she had been admitting to herself.
The curiously named Lady Venus was not her husband's mistress, but his sister.
Of course, that didn't mean he did not have a mistress.
Would it be impertinent to ask Dalton about it?
She felt rather strongly about mistresses.
She cared whether another woman touched him, heard his voice go quiet, coaxed out that reluctant half smile he sometimes aimed at her.
The degree to which she cared was fierce, and it had no business being this fierce this soon, and there was not a damn thing she could do about it.
"Of course. Venus is an interesting name."
"I am told the late duke and duchess were… very romantic."
"Valentine and Venus." She shook her head. "Indeed, they must have been. What sort of person is she?"
"Spirited, Your Grace. Speaks her mind. She and the duke are close. She is the only person I have ever seen talk back to him without getting the eyebrow."
"Does she visit often? "
"Not so much anymore. She has her own household in London."
"Is she married, then?"
"No, Your Grace. Lady Venus is a spinster.
And seems quite proud to be so. She could have married any time she wanted, for she is beautiful, rich, and well-born.
But she never wanted to. And His Grace allowed her to set up her own household when it was clear she didn't wish to marry. He quite dotes on her."
Interesting. The forbidding, controlled duke was a doting brother who granted his sister freedoms that were rather uncommon. She tucked that information away in the ever-growing collection in her mind dedicated to the Duke of Dalton.
The maid poured another vial of water over her head, where it rested against the edge of the bath, her hair draped over the rim into a basin placed behind it.
"Your hair is done, Your Grace. If you want me to dry it and style it before dinner, we had better begin now."
"Yes, of course." She sat up, and Lucy held a huge bath sheet and wrapped her in it as she climbed out. Then the maid led her to a seat in front of a merry fire and began the tedious process of drying her hair. Followed by the less tedious, but perhaps more difficult one of styling it.
Her hair done, the maid came back, her arms overflowing with two silk dresses. "Which one do you prefer, Your Grace? The blue one or the rose one?"
Her eyes went to the rose one without hesitation. "The rose, please."
The warm, dusky shade of a late sunset. She reached for it without thinking. The silk slid against her fingers.
She should not wear rose. Everyone knew the color did not suit redheads. And yet her hand had gone to it the way it had gone to the Cornish Fairing — without asking permission, certain of something she could not name.
She drew the gown out of Lucy's arms and held it against herself, turning toward the glass .
The color was right. Warm and rich. It made her skin glow without clashing with her hair. Whoever had chosen this dress knew what suited her.
And then, standing before the mirror with the rose silk pressed to her body, the air changed.
She was in this same spot. This mirror. This gown, but wearing it, fitted snug at the waist, the skirts falling in a soft bell. Her hair was up, elaborate, the work of skilled hands. And behind her…
Him.
Dalton. Close enough that she could feel his chest through the silk at her back.
His hands raised, and in them, something that caught the light.
A necklace. Red rubies set in gold. He was fastening the clasp at her nape.
His fingers grazed the fine hairs there, and then his head dipped to her shoulder.
His lips grazed her skin just below the clasp.
So light it was more breath than kiss. She shivered — both the woman in the mirror and the woman holding the dress.
His reflection straightened. His eyes found hers in the glass.
Gone. She was standing in the dressing room with the gown against her chest and her pulse in her throat and the ghost of his mouth fading from her skin.
Was that a memory or a fantasy? The edges were too soft to be sure. It might have been longing dressed up as the past.
But the necklace had been specific. Red stones. A gold clasp. And the kiss… She pressed her fingers to the spot. The curve between her neck and her shoulder. It tingled. That was not the sort of sensation she would have imagined. It was something her body remembered.
She laid the dress on top of the bed.
"Lucy, do I have a ruby and gold necklace?"
"You do indeed, my lady."
"I shall wear it tonight."
"Wonderful choice. It will complement that dress beautifully."
Half an hour later, she stood in front of the mirror once again, observing her reflection.
The dress fit her perfectly. The necklace sparkled around her neck.
Lucy had done a great job with her hair.
She had arranged it artfully atop her head, with a few tendrils allowed to escape to graze the curve of her neck, where the ghost of that kiss still tingled.
She didn't look like herself in these grand clothes.
No, she looked like the lady in her dream-memory. And that was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to look into Dalton's eyes when he saw her and see if he remembered that moment as well.
Tonight, she wanted to remind Dalton of her.