Chapter 4 #3
Gordie managed to wipe mutton out of his eyes in time to catch a fist to the jaw, dropping him to the floor immediately.
Vanessa whirled to Bess, who wiped her hands on her apron and reached beneath the bar.
“Go back to yer room, dearie. I’ll restore order here.
” When she extracted a plank the size of an oar, Vanessa quickly retreated.
She passed Balthazar on her way, grinning and rolling up his sleeves as if eager to join the fray.
Picking up her skirts, she ran to her room, dove inside, then shut and locked the door behind her.
Her skin burning with humiliation, she went to the window and threw it open, letting the cold air steal her breath in a welcome blast.
Johnathan appeared, his color heightened and sharpened as his entire form slammed into the room like a mountain of muscle and wrath.
“Those bog-faced sons of a whore! Were I myself, I’d wrench his arm from his socket and beat him to death with it, and then I’d decapitate his friend just so I could piss into the empty cavity where his spine used to be. ”
“Please, calm down.” Vanessa let out a few shaken puffs into the blizzard, pressing her freezing hands to her burning cheeks as the storm pricked her with crystals of ice.
She could stand it no longer than a few seconds, so she wrestled the window closed and latched it.
John paced the length of the bed next to her, his fists white with unspent rage.
“Are all gentlemen in this age such smarmy, weak-limbed dandies? Makes one wonder how many cousins had to fornicate to produce such a slithering strop of a rubbish heap and call it a man. I have a few regrets in my life, and my afterlife, but not slicing him open with that bottle is going straight to the top.”
Even as she pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane, she fought a sad little smile at his vehemence. “Yes, well, none of that was necessary, but thank you all the same.”
“He called you a slag!” John roared.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, her breath spreading in an opaque circle in front of her.
Even though his motions made no noise, she could sense that he stopped pacing. “Doesn’t. Matter?” he said with a great deal of emphasis on all the T’s.
She closed her eyes. “I’ve been called that and worse. I’m used to it.”
“How is that bloody possible?” he thundered. “You’re…well you’re—”
“I’m ruined,” she said gently, finally gathering the strength to turn around.
She had expected to see him be incredulous, but not his head cocked to the side in doglike befuddlement. “What? Ruined?”
She breathed in a deep breath through her nose, preparing to lose his respect and regard.
Mourning it already. “This is why I am not with my family at Christmas. Or any holiday, really. I’m persona non grata in the eyes of society.
My reputation couldn’t be lower if I actually sold myself on Whitechapel High Street. ”
At that, he became impossibly still.
“It happened long ago,” she explained, already exhausted. “I fell in love with William Mosby, Viscount Woodhaven. He gave me a ring with the largest diamond I’d ever seen. We made love beneath the Paris sky…”
“And then?” he growled.
“And then he married Honoria Goode, the daughter of my father’s shipping rival, for her dowry was ten thousand pounds more obscene than mine.”
“He broke his word to you.” The statement was murmured softly, almost without inflection. “Did he break your heart?”
Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“Well…not irreparably at first. Not until he—until he published a pamphlet scoring the lovers he’d had.
Prostitutes, mostly. But I was on the list, and my score wasn’t very favorable.
Pathetically eager, but impossible to please, he said.
He called my… my um…” She looked down, wondering why it was so difficult to say.
Why she’d stopped feeling ashamed so long ago, but was suddenly afraid of the opinion of a dead man. “Well he said I am broken.”
The rickety chair at the bedside shattered against the far wall.
“Have you no brothers?” John thundered. “Your father didn’t kill him in a duel?”
She stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment for a moment. He was magnificently angry. His muscles seemed to build upon themselves as he heaved in breaths to a chest she could still mostly see through to the fire on the other side.
The effect was rather apropos, as the flames licked at his chest, seeming to ignite the scarlet coat with the same inferno that blazed in his eyes.
“Well,” she answered somewhat demurely. “Duels have been illegal for some time now.”
He gaped at her. “You’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You mean to tell me, there is no recourse to besmirched honor?” He gestured broadly as if he couldn’t comprehend the idiocy. “Any blighter can walk around and say whatever they might to defame an innocent, and others do what… believe them?”
It did sound rather ridiculous the way he said it. “If they’re a man of influence, they are believed,” she answered. “That seems to be the way of it. I mean, there are libel laws, but…that recourse is rarely taken.”
He made a disgusted face and threw a gesture at the door toward the chaos on the other side of it. “This age isn’t enlightened, it’s barbaric.”
“I don’t know about that. Fewer people die in duels, so…I suppose you might call that progress.”
“Not in my opinion. Not this bloody—” He whirled on her. “What was his name again?”
“William Mosby.”
“William… I’d cheerfully murder the ponce myself. I’d strike his entire legacy from the annals of time until—”
“No need.” Vanessa held her hand up against him. “Truly. He’s…well, he’s met his fate. What’s done cannot be undone.”
Suddenly. Miraculously. His features softened as he looked down at her, his arms dropping to his sides as he lingered close. Closer. His hand reached out as if to lift her chin, but he never quite managed. “I am sorry that you suffered.”
She summoned that false-bright smile for him.
The one she’d learned so well. “I am lucky, in many respects. I still have a generous stipend from my father, to assuage his guilt, I imagine, for keeping me away from them socially. And with it I plan to see the world. I go on adventures like this one. And, reputation-wise, I’ve nothing to lose, so I may do what I please. ”
His brow furrowed in consternation. “But you’re alone. Why not have a companion to take on such adventures with you?”
She let out a very unladylike snort. “The idea of compelling someone to keep me company with coin never appealed to me. Besides, then I’d be responsible for them, wouldn’t I?
And, if I’m honest, very few would consider an association with one as besmirched as I a very desirable position.
No one would consider my references a boon. ”
The look on his face caused her own to fall. She couldn’t bear the tenderness. Or the pity.
“It is not so much suffering,” she all but whispered. “When there are so many in the world who know such pain, my bit of shame and isolation seems rather small in comparison.”
He dipped his head, his lips hovering above her forehead. “Suffering can be profound or prosaic, but it is suffering all the same. Yours is not inconsequential.”
His words melted her like honey decrystalizing in the summer heat. His presence washed over her like silk flowing in a breeze. Insubstantial, sensual, and yet compelling.
“You’re not broken,” he said. “You’re not ruined. Not to me.”
“You’re being kind,” she choked out over a lump of emotion lodged in her throat.
“I mean it,” he said fiercely.
She ducked away from him, turning to hide the burn of tears, pinching the bridge of her nose against their ache. She was too proud for this. She could not come apart in front of a veritable stranger.
“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You—have a ruthless side,” she admitted breathlessly. “It—um—it makes my blood rush around a bit.”
He was close again. Right behind her. His presence a relentless affectation. “I frightened you?”
“No! I mean. Not entirely. You’re the only person who has ever stood up for me before,” she admitted, moving toward the fire and smoothing her dress down her thighs in a nervous gesture.
“Then why retreat from me?” he persisted.
She could tell the flames nothing but the truth. “When you touch me I…Well, actually, you don’t touch me. But you were able to hold on to inanimate objects. To do a man violence.”
He let out a long breath. “I’m little better than an awareness most of the time.
Something I could slip in and out of at will at first, but the longer I tarry, the more I spend in the void.
But there are holy days—solstices and equinoxes where, if I concentrate very hard, I can become something like corporeal.
At least, for a moment. I can will things to move, but it depletes me.
On nights like Na Fir Chlis I am the most visible, but I cannot sustain contact for long. ”
“I see,” she whispered.
His voice ventured closer, until she could almost feel his warm breath against her ear. “When I reached for you in the bath, my hand went through you… You felt that?”
“I feel—something. Not your skin, per se. Something else. It’s like…” She cast about for the word. “A tingling. No, stronger than that. A vibration, perhaps.”
He made an amused noise deep in his chest. “Really?”
“It’s disquieting.”
“Does it cause you pain?”
“No. No, quite the opposite.”
“The opposite?” He drifted around her, standing so close to the flames a normal man would have caught. “The opposite of pain is pleasure.”
She retreated a step. “So it is.”
He advanced, his eyes liquid pools of carnal promise. “Does my touch pleasure you, Vanessa?”
“I don’t—I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Why?” he pressed. “Why after being so fearless, is it pleasure that scares you? Do you fear your desire for it?”
She swallowed. “Yes. Maybe. I couldn’t say.
” She feared the ruin it had already brought her.
The derision of another lover. Another man she thought she might care for.
Who might profess to care for her. She feared the strength of her feelings, her desires, after only knowing this man for the space of an hour.
His hand reached out, a tremor visible in the long, rough fingers. His palm caressed her face, but not in the way she wished it would. It was there, but it wasn’t. The warmth of his touch lingered; a callus might have abraded her soft cheek. There. Right there. But also, just out of reach.
It was both bliss and torment. The vibrations of his energy, of the very striations etched into the palm of his hand, were tangible. But whatever touched her was not flesh. Not exactly.
It was enough to make her weep, the longing she sensed in the gesture. The cavernous pain she read etched into the grooves branching from his eyes, and in the tension of his skin stretched tight over his raw, beautiful bones. “I haven’t touched a woman in a lifetime. In a handful of lifetimes.”
“Do you want to?”
“Is that an invitation, Vanessa?” His voice was like liquid velvet, his eyes twin azure flames. “If I could, would you let me?”
“I—Um…” She was a quivering, boneless puddle of sensation. Of desire. Her loins ached, moistened, bloomed for him. Her lips plumped and her skin burned to be touched.
Her entire body was one thrumming chord of need.
Was she the only one undergoing this torture? “John?” she whispered, turning her head out of his palm, if only to spare them each more impotent longing. “Can you feel desire as you are?” she queried. “Can you—erm—manifest it? Physically?”
His lips actually stirred her hair as he growled against her ear. “I’ve been hard as a diamond since the moment I watched you undo your buttons.”