Chapter 22
Catherine stirred, and for the first time in many days, felt herself truly awake. Weak, but somehow no longer bound.
The fever had dissipated. Her limbs trembled with weariness, but they did not ache. Her head felt clear and her heart light. The curtains were open, as was the window. Soft air drifted into the room, carrying a pleasant nature-esque chill that contrasted with the warm, enveloping glow of the fire.
She sat up slowly. The room was changed.
“Oh my! Am I dreaming…” she whispered.
Everywhere she looked, there were flowers. Wild blossoms in jugs exploded with color. Roses filled vases with regal splendor. Lavender was tied in bunches and filled the room with their fresh, clean scent. A bee had found its way in, buzzing lazily about the space. It was every inch a dream.
Yet it was solid and real.
Her eyes were drawn to the blanketed shape that lay on the floor in front of the hearth.
It was Aaron.
His dark head rested on his arm. The blanket had slipped, baring a glimpse of stockinged feet.
The fire had burned itself to embers, and he slept on his side, back to the dying hearth, facing her bed.
He looked younger in sleep. The hard lines of his face had gentled, the sharp edges worn smooth as river stone.
A crease she had not noticed before sat between his brows, faint as a pencil mark, even now.
Pulling her knees close, she propped her chin against them and watched him in silence.
He looks even more handsome when he is not so moody all the time.
A smile touched her lips. Quietly, she rose, her bare feet making no sound upon the boards.
She took up a corner of his blanket and slipped down beside him.
The floor was hard, but the warmth of his body and the steady rhythm of his breath drew her close.
She nestled against him as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Memories flickered through her mind. Dreams. Nightmares.
Hellish meldings of the conscious and unconscious when her mind had been wracked by fever and desperate longing.
People in masks. Pulling away their faces to reveal different identities beneath.
She could not tell what was truth and what was illusion.
Except there was one constant through it all.
Aaron had been there. Guiding her through. A beacon, steady and unyielding.
Except… he is the biggest mystery of all. He is the one whose identity I am least certain of. Why, in my mind, is he a rock? Why do I feel comforted when I am with him?
She pressed her forehead against his and breathed him in. Warmth. Wood smoke. Something underneath that was simply him.
His eyes opened suddenly. Dark and alert. For a moment, he looked startled to find her so near. Then his gaze softened.
“Sally has gone back to Caerleon,” he murmured, his voice still husky from sleep. “She will bring supplies before evening.”
Catherine only nodded, pressing closer her cheek against his chest.
“You stayed,” she whispered.
“Of course. How do you feel?”
“Better. Much better. I feel…” She fished for the right words, “...free.”
“Do you still believe it to be a curse?” he asked, intently.
She looked back at him, equally as intent.
“I have the evidence of my body. I was being poisoned. I will know why—and if the same thing happened to my parents.”
He frowned, his face diving into a magnetic intensity that made her heart thunder.
She wet her lips, mouth suddenly dry. He had his arms around her, holding her close.
Her breasts pressed against him. He would certainly be aware of the increase in her breathing.
The added pressure of her bosoms, protected by a thin layer of muslin.
“I will help in any way I can,” he whispered.
Catherine opened her mouth to thank him and found that the words had fled. His eyes, his mouth, the press of his chest against hers—all of it conspired against rational thought.
“Thank you,” she managed. “For staying.”
“I have seen enough poppy juice withdrawal to know that someone ought to be near at hand.” A pause. “Sally is capable, but I would not leave it to her alone.”
“You have said something like that before.” She tilted her head, studying him. “Where, Aaron? Where have you seen such things?”
“I told you. My father exiled me,” he murmured. “That bastard discarded me, and the hells of London rose up to catch me. I sank into them for a long time before I was able to pull myself out with the lifeline of my father’s death.”
The plainness of it was what struck her hardest. No self-pity, no performance of suffering.
Just the bare fact of it, laid down between them like a stone.
Catherine looked at him and saw, very clearly, someone close to the boy she had known.
The bright, confident boy with mud on his boots and laughter in his throat, standing at the edge of something vast and dark and utterly undeserved.
“Why?” she said, more a gasp than a word.
“Because my father was a fanatic, obsessed with…” He exhaled, “with his son proving himself worthy of the Dukedom. And when I did not…”
“How old were you?”
His eyes bored into hers. She could not have looked away if the room had been on fire or the King himself had walked inside.
“Fifteen,” he said, finally.
“Just a handful of years after I left.” The words left her in a breath. “I’m sorry. If I had known, I would have—”
“Done nothing. There was nothing to do.”
“My parents would have helped...”
“Against a Duke?” His voice was not unkind. Simply certain, the way a man is certain of gravity. “No one could.”
Catherine said nothing to that. You are right, I don’t think they could have helped. Because I don’t believe you are Aaron Tarnley.
And still.
His fingers threaded lazily through her hair, each slow stroke a spark striking tinder.
She felt it in her spine, in her breath, in the warmth coiling low in her belly like honey left out in the sun.
Her lower lip caught between her teeth. Something in her that had been wound tight for weeks loosened, and what rushed in to fill the space was not fear.
It was appetite.
She lifted her face and pressed her lips to the line of his jaw. Held them there. Felt the sharp intake of breath move through him like a shiver.
He tilted his head, and his mouth found hers. Softly at first. A question she had no intention of leaving unanswered.
She opened her mouth to him, and the question burned.
His tongue slid against hers, and the sound that left her was embarrassingly easy to draw out.
A low, wet moan that she felt in the soles of her feet.
Her fingers curled into his hair, and she pulled, not gently.
The groan that came from him in response was so rough and so pleased that it set her nerves alight.
“They were good people,” she murmured against his mouth, because she was not quite ready to surrender the conversation, because there was something intoxicating about talking and kissing at the same time, about feeling his breath catch against her lips mid-sentence.
“I was beyond it,” he managed.
She pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were frost blue, yet there was something unguarded in them that made her stomach turn over.
“I will help you now.”
“Catherine…” Low. Husky. A little desperate. His arms closed around her, and she felt the hard ridge of him against her belly, as her body hummed with it like a plucked string.
The kiss that followed was nothing like the one before.
It was deep and slow and devastating, his mouth roving against hers with a patience that bordered on cruelty.
He tasted of maleness and want, and she wound herself tighter against him, chasing the sensations.
All of the sensations. Hands caressing her spine, tracing her shoulders, tangling in her hair, trapping at the curve of her waist. The thin cotton of her nightdress felt like less than nothing between them.
“This is… tremendously inconvenient,” she rasped against his mouth.
A laugh, low and surprised, vibrated against her lips. “Which part?”
“All of it. The clothes. The floor. The fact that you are still being unbearably patient when I would very much like you to stop being so...”
Something shifted in his expression. The amusement darkened into something hungrier, and his hands stilled on her hips, fingers pressing in just hard enough to make her heart pound.
“You are certain of that?”
“Are you offering me a chance to renege?”
He kissed her then in a way that made her forget she had ever spoken at all.
His mouth dropped to her throat and stayed there, sucking gently at the skin beneath her jaw, and her hips bucked involuntarily against his.
The friction was maddening. Exquisite. She whimpered against his temple and felt him smile.
“You taste,” he said against the hollow of her throat, his breath hot and deliberate, “like summer peaches and something I have been chasing for a very long time.”
The words went through her like a lit fuse.
His hands found the bow at the front of her nightdress and pulled.
The fabric parted with a quiet tearing sound, buttons giving way one after another, and the nightdress slipped from her shoulders and pooled at her waist, and the cool air kissed her bare breasts and she did not feel it, because his eyes were on her, and the way he looked at her made the cool air irrelevant.
He stared. Openly. Shamelessly. His gaze dropped to her breasts and stayed there, and the raw hunger on his face, the way his nostrils flared slightly, the way his tongue darted out to wet his lower lip without any apparent awareness that he was doing it, made heat flood through her in a single, scalding rush.
“Well…” she whispered. “Are you going to look at them all evening, or—”
His mouth closed over her nipple, and she forgot how to enunciate words.