Chapter 13
The Illusion of Control
I grabbed her arm. I did not plan it. I did not think about it.
Three weeks of dead ends, three weeks of following trails that led nowhere, three weeks of wanting her and suspecting her and wanting her more because I suspected her, and all of that compressed itself into a single motion: my hand closing around her wrist, not hard enough to bruise but hard enough to hold, and the feeling of her skin beneath my fingers, cool and smooth and impossibly fine, was like a spark igniting something I had been trying to keep contained since December.
She did not flinch. She did not pull away. She looked at my hand on her wrist with an expression that was not surprise and not fear but something closer to assessment, as though she were measuring the pressure of my grip against some internal standard I could not see.
"Tell me the truth," I said.
"The truth about what?"
"Everything. The leads. The false information.
What you are protecting." My voice was rough, stripped of its professional register, reduced to the raw thing beneath.
"I am done being led, Cecilia. I am done being managed.
You have been playing me like a card since November, and I am finished with it. "
The private room was small. The lamp threw shadows on the dark mahogany walls. The sounds of the club below were muffled by the heavy door and the thick carpet, and the silence in the room was so complete that I could hear her breathing, slow and even, the breathing of a woman who was not afraid.
"You are not finished with anything," she said. "You are frustrated. There is a difference."
She was right, and the rightness of it made me angrier.
I tightened my grip on her wrist and pulled her toward me, and she came, not resisting, not yielding, simply allowing herself to be moved the way water allows itself to be poured.
Her body collided with mine, and I could feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her dress, and the smell of her was closer now, lilies and something clean and particular, and I wanted her with a force that was indistinguishable from rage.
"Say something," I said. "Defend yourself. Explain. Do something other than stand there and look at me as though I am performing exactly as you expected me to."
A faint smile touched her lips. It was the smile of a woman who is watching a prediction come true, and the smile made me furious, because even now, even at this moment, she was in control, and I was the one who had grabbed her arm, and I was the one who had pulled her against me, and I was the one who was supposed to be dominant, and none of it was working.
"You are angry," she said. "Good. Anger is honest. It is also transparent. You are not angry at me for the false leads. You are angry at yourself for following them."
"I am angry at both of us."
"Then direct the anger where it belongs.
" She placed her free hand flat against my chest, and I could feel the pressure of her palm through my shirt, warm and steady and utterly calm.
"But do not pretend that this is about the investigation.
You came here tonight to confront me about the leads, and we both know that you could have done that in a letter, or at my front door, or in any of a dozen other settings that would not have required you to enter a gambling club and follow me to a private room.
You came here because you wanted to see me, and you wanted to see me because wanting me is the thing you cannot stop doing, no matter how many dead ends you chase or how many false trails you follow. "
She was right. She was always right. And the rightness of her was the most maddening thing about her, because it meant that even when I tried to seize control, even when I used force, even when I abandoned every principle that had governed my professional life, she remained three moves ahead, watching me with those grey eyes, reading me like a page she had already finished.
I released her wrist. For a moment, we stood apart, the width of a breath between us, and then I reached up and touched her face, and my hand was not gentle.
I cupped her jaw and tilted her face up toward mine, and I saw something in her eyes that I had not seen before: not calculation, not assessment, but something that might, in a woman less controlled than Cecilia Blackwood, have been anticipation.
I kissed her. It was not the kiss of December, when she had pressed her mouth to my jaw and I had followed where she led.
This was my kiss. I took her face in both hands, and I kissed her with the full force of three weeks of frustration and desire and self-loathing, and she opened her mouth to me, and her tongue met mine, and her hands came up to my shoulders, and I felt the tremor in her fingers, and the tremor was either real or so perfectly performed that the distinction was meaningless.
I pushed her back. Her shoulders hit the wall beside the door with a sound that was swallowed by the curtains and the carpet.
The lamp flickered. I pressed my body against hers, pinning her there, and I could feel the length of her against me, the curve of her hips, the rise and fall of her chest, and she was not resisting, she was not pushing me away, she was simply standing there, pressed against the wall of a private room in a gambling club, with my hands on her face and my body against hers, and her eyes were open and fixed on mine, and she was watching me with an expression of such controlled interest that it made me want to break something.
"Tell me to stop," I said.
"No."
"I should stop."
"Then stop."
I did not stop. I kissed her again, harder this time, my hands moving from her face to her shoulders, pulling the fabric of her dress down, exposing the pale skin of her throat and the sharp line of her collarbone.
She arched her neck against the wall, and the motion was not passive but responsive, the kind of motion a woman makes when she is choosing to yield, and the choosing was visible in every line of her body.
I was rough with her. I was rough because I was angry, and I was angry because I was compromised, and I was compromised because she had made me so, and the chain of causation led back to her, always to her, and the roughness was my way of asserting something I had lost: control, authority, the sense that I was the one deciding what happened between us.
I bit the side of her neck, not hard enough to mark but hard enough to feel, and she made a sound, a small sharp intake of breath, and her hands came up to the back of my head, and her fingers threaded into my hair, and she pulled me closer.
"You think this is you taking control," she said against my mouth.
"Shut up."
She laughed. A low sound, barely audible, and the laugh was the most infuriating thing she had ever done, because it told me that she was not threatened, she was not overwhelmed, she was not surrendering, she was allowing, and allowing is not the same as surrendering, and the difference between them was the difference between power and its appearance.
I reached for the hem of her dress. It was a complicated garment, with hooks and buttons and layers that resisted my urgent hands, and she reached down and helped me, her fingers finding the fastenings with an efficiency that should have annoyed me and instead only increased my desire.
The dress came open. Beneath it, a petticoat, and beneath that, a corset, and beneath that, a chemise of fine white cotton that clung to the shape of her body and left nothing to the imagination.
"You are wearing too many clothes," I said.
"Then remove them."
I did. I was not gentle. The corset was a puzzle of laces and stays, and I pulled at them with an impatience that bordered on violence, and she stood against the wall and let me fumble with the fastenings, and I could see the faint amusement in her eyes, and the amusement was fuel and the fuel was fire and the fire was consuming whatever was left of my restraint.
The chemise came last. I pulled it over her head, and she stood before me in the lamplight, half-naked, her skin white against the dark panelled wall, and I stopped.
Not because I wanted to stop. Because the sight of her was a physical force that stopped me, the way a view stops a man on a cliff edge, and for a moment I simply looked at her, the length of her body, the curve of her waist, the fullness of her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach, the dark auburn hair falling across her shoulders, and I understood, with a clarity that was almost painful, that I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted this.
She reached for me. Her fingers found the buttons of my jacket, and she pushed it from my shoulders, and then the waistcoat, and then she was unbuttoning my shirt, and her hands were on my chest, and her touch was not rough but it was not gentle either, it was deliberate, the touch of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and is doing it with full intention.
She pushed the shirt from my shoulders, and then her hands were on my belt, and I heard the buckle clink, and the fabric loosened, and she pulled my trousers down, and I stepped out of them, and then I was pressed against her again, my skin against hers, and the heat of her was a shock.
I lifted her. She weighed almost nothing, and I pinned her against the wall with my hips and her legs wrapped around me, and I could feel her, hot and wet against my stomach, and she gasped, a real sound, not performed, and the reality of it cut through the anger and left something rawer.
"I hate you," I said.
"I know." Her voice was breathless. "Do it anyway."