Chapter 15
At first Thomas thought it was some idiosyncrasy of the weather or, perhaps, a dislocated tree branch beating against the rectory door. But it was too regular, too desperate, too human somehow, a noise.
Micha’s hand coiled about his wrist. “Ignore it,” he snarled, his eyes wilder than the storm.
Thomas could not have denied that it was a tempting idea, though not truly, not dangerously so.
It was, in fact, an odd sort of pleasure, to have something—someone—so utterly worth wanting that delay was its own sweet pain.
But Thomas believed a love that made him think only of himself was a poor tribute to lay at Micha’s feet.
Perhaps not even love at all. “Someone may need me.”
“And I?” asked Micha, a peculiar note, almost anxiety, in his voice.
Thomas smiled as the other man’s fingers slackened and slipped away. “Already have me.”
A sudden sense of sheer, exhilarating joy bubbled up and possessed him at his own words.
Micha did have him. And what was more extraordinary still, Micha wanted to.
Thomas bent down and pressed his lips to Micha’s with fresh urgency.
Micha’s mouth opened instantly upon a moan, and Thomas forgot everything but the kiss.
The press of Micha’s naked skin. The rain-sharp taste of his breath.
His sudden and absolute surrender. Micha’s hands clawed into his upper arms, needy, clinging, frantic, dragging Thomas deeper until he fell to his knees between Micha’s spreading thighs.
Micha sprawled back upon the hearthrug, his throat sleek and bare, his eyes half-closed.
His body arched in brazen invitation, vulnerable and vulgar, and undeniably, dizzyingly provocative.
This was not like the broken fragments of himself that Micha had hesitantly offered up before.
It was everything, and perhaps nothing, and Thomas knew something was different but his capacity for reason had all but abandoned him.
His teeth grazed the edge of Micha’s neck, and Micha made a low, feral sound.
“Yes,” Micha murmured, and his voice was softer, more inviting than Thomas thought he had ever heard it. “Yes. Like this. Take me.”
And that was when Thomas heard the silence amid the storm.
The knocking had ceased. Horrified, he pulled clumsily away and scrambled to his feet.
Micha pushed himself onto his elbows, watching him with sharp eyes, and Thomas was confused.
He had the strangest sensation of having evaded something.
Had Micha done that deliberately? But why?
“Forgive me, I must go.” Thomas made a hurried gesture.
“I will close the door to ensure your privacy.”
“Don’t worry.” Micha came to his knees, his mouth pulling into its customary sneer. “I’m a prof—” He snapped off the end of the sentence, and Thomas lacked the time to consider what he might have been about to say. “I can be discreet.”
“Thank you.” Thomas had no choice but to put aside his half-formed concerns.
He ran his hands through his hair, put his clothing back into some sort of order, and hurried into the hall.
He undid the lock and yanked open the front door to admit only the night, the wind, and a flurry of freezing rain.
“Hello?” he called, raising a hand to his eyes to shield them from the onslaught. “Is there someone there?”
Dimly, through the darkness, he saw a pair of figures, drifting away from him like grey ghosts.
“Hello?” he tried again, but the storm batted the words back in his face. He ran, hatless, coatless, into the downpour.
“Wait,” he shouted. “Please wait.”
Finally, they heard him, stopped, and turned. He could just about make out the smudged-charcoal outlines of a woman and a girl.
“Mr. Mandeville.” The woman spoke so softly he hardly heard her.
He pushed forward a few more steps.
The wind whipped the woman’s dark hair into wild snakes, and the rain deepened the anxious lines that scored her young face, but he recognised her at once.
“Mrs. Clark.” Surprise rippled through his voice. “What brings you to—”
At that moment, she fainted. Not gracefully or delicately, but with the weight of sheer, hopeless exhaustion.
Thomas darted forward and just about succeeded in catching her before she slumped onto the ground.
She was as brittle as glass, as thin as moonlight, as though she would drift away on the wind.
Thomas had never held a woman so closely.
It was not like touching Micha. He was fire and fury; she was ice and shadow.
He whispered her name and, when she did not rouse, gathered her gently into his arms. He looked up and found himself pinioned on the pale, luminous gaze of the girl.
“Mama,” she explained, with all the solemnitude of childhood, “has not eaten today, and we have been walking for a very long way.”
Thomas was, truthfully, not very accustomed to children.
He encountered them in the course of his parish duties but rarely without the mediation of helpful adults.
Mostly they treated him with wary, nervous civility, and—too self-conscious to show them warmth or understanding—he kept his distance.
It was yet another matter in which his brother outstripped him.
George adored children and they him, though there were few enough of them in their lives.
For a long moment, Thomas and the child regarded each other distrustfully while the rain pelted around them.
He sought something to say—something that might lessen the outlandishness of standing in front of her, carrying her unconscious mother—but he found himself wordless and more than a little ridiculous.
“Please come inside.” He led the way back to the house.
Micha was waiting in the hall, fully dressed and leaning against the banisters as though he had not less than five minutes ago been kissing Thomas as if he might die if he stopped.
“What the f-f-f . . .” he began, stuttering to a halt as soon as he saw the child. Then he saw Mrs. Clark and turned so pale that Thomas half-thought Micha might be about to swoon as well.
“Would you be so kind as to see if we have some hartshorn somewhere?” Thomas asked. “And I know there’s a decanter of brandy in the library. Would you bring it, please?”
“Uh. Yes.” Micha fled.
Thomas bore Mrs. Clark into the drawing room and laid her down on a sofa close to the fire.
She stirred and mumbled something, already reviving in the warmth.
After a moment of utter awkwardness, Thomas bent over and began to work free the sodden knots of her bonnet and travelling cloak.
It felt like an unspeakable intimacy, and his fingers trembled.
After a moment, a pair of small hands brushed his away impatiently, and the girl finished the task herself.
She had already shed her own bonnet and cloak.
The clothes beneath, though not stylish, were neat and practical and had survived the worst of the weather.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”
She turned her mother’s cool, pearl-pale eyes on him.
“You are quite welcome,” she said, in the refined accents of the carefully coached.
She had a pale, narrow face, sharp and intent, and wishbone-yellow hair that had straggled lankly free from whatever bindings had once held it.
There was a brief silence. Then her composure wavered. “Is Mama dead?”
“No,” returned Thomas, quickly. “Oh no. She has merely fainted. She will come round directly and be quite well.”
She swallowed. “Good. I should not like it were Mama to die.”
Thomas gazed helplessly at Mrs. Clark and, because he had once seen Esther do it when Ada had taken too much sun, took up one of her hands and rubbed it vigorously.
She was very cold, the skin as delicate as paper, despite the calluses that speckled her palms and fingers.
The child watched him gravely, as though he performed some obscure miracle.
One that, against all reason, seemed to have some effect. After a moment or two, Mrs. Clark’s eyes fluttered open, and she took in a startled breath.
“Mrs. Clark,” said Thomas. “Please don’t be alarmed. You’re amongst friends. All is well.”
The girl almost knocked him out of the way in her rush to get closer to the sofa.
“Mama.” She flung her arms around her mother’s neck.
The two embraced and Thomas glanced away, oddly confused by the ease of their familial affection.
It was not something he had ever experienced, and it filled him with a strange wistfulness.
He had never before thought of children.
But now he imagined himself with his own son or daughter, perhaps reading them stories as Edward had once read to him and George.
Lifting this imaginary person, this girl, this boy, onto their first horse, never mind that Thomas was no horseman himself.
Helping with Latin homework. But try as he might, he could not make it anything more than a moment of fancy.
It was too impossible even for dreaming.
He could not picture a wife. Only Micha, burnished in the firelight.
“Oh dear.” Mrs. Clark broke gently into his thoughts. He met her eyes, and the faintest suggestion of a smile tugged wearily at her lips. “How wretched. I suppose it serves me right for boasting to you that I never faint.”
Thomas, conscious that he was looming over her, lowered himself to his knees at the far end of the sofa. “Extraordinary circumstances. So we will not count it.”
Footsteps sounded from the hall and Micha came in, just as they were laughing. “What a pretty tableau,” he drawled. “I brought brandy, but I couldn’t find any smelling salts.”
Mrs. Clark looked towards him, surprise flashing on her face. Their glances locked like blades for a moment, and then broke apart.
“You remember Michael Dashwood?” asked Thomas, in some confusion.