Chapter 8 #2
"Your questions are not routine, Inspector. Let us dispense with that fiction." I set my own glass down on the sideboard, untasted. "You are looking at me the way one looks at a locked door. You have the key somewhere, or you believe you do, and you are simply deciding whether to use it."
His expression shifted. The sympathy did not vanish, but something harder moved behind it, something professional and alert. I had startled him. Good. Startling a man is the first step to disarming him.
"That is a vivid metaphor," he said.
"I have been told I have a vivid mind." I took a step toward him.
He did not step back. "I also have a vivid sense of self-preservation, Inspector, and I want you to understand something.
I am not frightened of your investigation.
I am not frightened of you. What I am is curious.
I am curious about what you think you have found, and I am curious about why you keep coming here, week after week, when your superiors have surely told you to close this inquiry. "
He set his glass down beside mine. The two glasses stood together on the polished mahogany, the wine catching the last of the afternoon light. His hand was steady, but I could see the pulse in his throat, quick and irregular. His body knew what his mind was refusing to acknowledge.
"My superiors have not told me to close this inquiry," he said.
"But they have told you to be careful. A countess is not a common criminal.
The law bends for people like me, does it not?
" I was close enough now to smell him. Wool and soap and the faintest trace of tobacco.
Beneath that, something warmer, something animal and specific, the scent of a man whose blood is running faster than he would like it to.
"You are walking a very fine line, Sebastian. "
I used his Christian name. It was the first time. The effect was immediate and gratifying. He flinched as though I had touched him with a live wire.
"Lady Ashworth."
"Cecilia." I said it plainly, without coquettishness.
"If we are going to stand in my drawing room and pretend that this is an ordinary interview between a detective and a witness, you may call me Lady Ashworth.
But if we are going to be honest about why you are still standing in my drawing room, then you will call me Cecilia. "
He opened his mouth, and I watched him try to form a sentence, any sentence, the way a drowning man tries to grasp a rope.
Nothing came. I had stripped him of his professional vocabulary.
He was standing in the house of his primary suspect, five days before Christmas, with no witnesses and no alibi and an erection that he could not hide, and I was offering him something he had not known he wanted until this moment.
I reached up and touched his jaw. My fingers found the thin scar that traced its line from below his ear to the point of his chin, a reminder of whatever violence had shaped him before I met him.
The scar was warm under my touch. His skin was rough with stubble.
He had not shaved that morning, or he had shaved carelessly, and the oversight pleased me.
It meant he was distracted. It meant I had been in his thoughts.
"What are you doing?" he said. His voice was lower than it had been, stripped of its official register, reduced to the raw material beneath.
"I am touching you," I said. "If you wish me to stop, you may say so. You are a large man, Inspector. You are quite capable of stopping me."
He did not stop me. He stood very still, his dark eyes fixed on my face, and I could see the war being fought inside him: duty against desire, suspicion against the bone-deep loneliness that I had identified in him the first time we met and that I had been cultivating ever since.
Sebastian Aldric was a man who had no one.
He had colleagues, but not friends. He had a profession, but not a life.
He ate alone and slept alone and worked until his eyes burned, and when he lay in his narrow bed at night, he thought about cases.
He was the kind of man who had been built for purpose and had been given too little of it.
And now purpose had collided with something far more dangerous.
I kissed him. Or rather, I pressed my mouth to the corner of his jaw, just below the scar, and held it there.
It was not a kiss in the romantic sense.
It was an experiment. I was testing a hypothesis, and the hypothesis was this: Sebastian Aldric wanted me, and the wanting was strong enough to override his training, and if I demonstrated this to him, I would own him.
The hypothesis proved correct.
His hand came up to the back of my neck, and his fingers threaded into my hair, and the grip was not gentle.
There was desperation in it, the desperation of a man who has been starving without knowing it.
He turned his face toward mine, and then we were kissing properly, his mouth hard against mine, and I tasted wine and tobacco and the faint metallic edge of a man who has bitten his lip in restraint.
I did not close my eyes. I never close my eyes.
To close one's eyes is to surrender a degree of control, and control is the one thing I will not surrender.
I watched his face as he kissed me, cataloguing the shifts in his expression, the flutter of his eyelids, the way his breathing quickened.
He was a man experiencing something he had not anticipated, and the experience was rewiring him in real time.
His suspicion was not gone, I could see that.
It sat in his eyes beneath the desire, a dog on a leash, and the leash was thin.
But the desire was winning, and I let it win, because desire was the tool.
I drew back. He made a sound, a small involuntary noise of protest, and I let the sound wash over me without responding to it. Control. Always control.
"Come with me," I said.
I did not wait for his answer. I turned and walked toward the corridor that led to the back stairs and from there to my bedroom.
I did not look to see if he was following.
I did not need to. I could hear his footsteps behind me, measured and deliberate, the footsteps of a man who was telling himself that he could still turn back, even as he climbed the stairs.
My bedroom was on the second floor, at the front of the house.
It was a large room, high-ceilinged, with windows that overlooked the square.
In summer, the light poured in. In December, it was soft and grey, filtered through fog and the bare branches of the plane trees.
The fire had been lit that morning and kept burning; I had instructed Dorothea to ensure it before she left.
The bed was a wide mahogany affair, dressed in white linen and dark curtains.
I had chosen white linen deliberately. White conveys purity, innocence, the suggestion that what is about to happen is natural and clean.
It is, of course, none of those things. But aesthetics matter.
I turned to face him in the doorway. He stood at the threshold, filling it with his angular frame, and I could see the physical strain of his restraint.
His hands were at his sides. His jaw was clenched.
He looked at me as a man looks at something he knows will destroy him and decides to be destroyed.
"This is a mistake," he said.
"Almost certainly." I began to unpin my hair.
The process was slow and deliberate. I wore it in a low chignon, secured with jet pins, and I removed each pin with care, setting it on the dressing table.
Underneath the pins, my hair fell in a heavy auburn cascade to my shoulders.
I shook it free and watched his eyes follow the movement.
"But you are going to stay regardless, aren't you? "
He did not answer. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch was the sound of a trap closing, and we both knew it, though only one of us had set it.
I crossed the room to where he stood. The firelight made shadows on the wall, and the gas lamp I had left burning at a low flame cast everything in amber.
I could smell the beeswax polish on the furniture, and the lilies I had placed on the mantelpiece that morning, and beneath it all, the clean scent of woodsmoke.
I began to undress him. I started with his coat, sliding it from his shoulders with the efficiency of a woman who has dressed and undressed men before, though never for reasons quite like this.
With Richard, undressing had been a duty, performed in the dark, with the minimum of contact.
With Arthur, it had been perfunctory. With Henry Ravenscroft, I had closed my eyes and thought of other things.
With Sebastian, I was present. I was choosing to be present, and that choice puzzled me even as I made it.
His coat fell to the floor. His waistcoat followed.
I loosened his cravat and drew it over his head, and my fingers found the buttons of his shirt, and I unbuttoned them one by one, slowly, maintaining eye contact throughout.
He was breathing hard. His chest rose and fell beneath my hands, and I could feel his heartbeat, rapid and unsteady, as my knuckles brushed his skin.
"You are shaking," I observed.
"I am aware."
"Are you frightened?"
"No." He swallowed. "I am furious."
"At me?"
"At myself." His voice was rough. "I know exactly what you are, Cecilia."
It was the first time he had used the name, and the sound of it in his mouth sent a current through me that I had not anticipated.
I paused with my hands on his shirtfront, my fingers resting against the warm plane of his chest, and for a moment, just a moment, I was not thinking about leverage or control or strategy.
I was thinking about the way he said my name, as though it cost him something, as though speaking it were an act of surrender.