Chapter Nineteen
If I’d known that night would be the last time, for two endless months, that I’d see the real Stefan—not the drawling, foppish dilettante he posed as, but his true self—I might have run after him and begged him to make me accept his apology after all.
Or accepted it if he’d tried again in the morning.
Half a night of pacing, raging at the walls, crying in the bath, and singeing a hole in my breeches in the attempt to angrily light a candle with magic had left me exhausted; the other half of the night, spent miserably asleep, had left me doubly so.
When Aldrich brought me my tea in the morning, he told me Stefan had gone out already. He’d left me a verbal message that the carriage and an escort had been left at my disposal, and also a thick, sealed envelope.
Waiting for Aldrich to leave the room before I opened it nearly killed me.
Abbot Junius hadn’t exactly encouraged us to read lighter literature, but he hadn’t forbidden it, either.
The tattered copy of Dignity & Desire I’d kept by my bed had a scene in it that I’d read enough times to contribute mightily to the tattering: the dashing aristocrat, laconic in person but passionately in love with the young hero (who, at that point in the book, detested him), delivered a letter that poured out all the bitter longing in his heart.
A letter that greatly resembled this one…
my heart pounded unsteadily as I tore into it the instant Aldrich had gone.
A pile of banknotes fell into my lap. More money than I’d ever seen before in my life.
I choked down a moan of disappointment. Aldrich might be lurking in the hall ready to spring through the door and fuss over me at the slightest sound of distress.
One single small sheet of paper accompanied the money: a note telling me to spend half of it how I liked, but that the other half would be the right amount for the temple donation, and that he’d provide more the moment I made my wishes known.
I crumpled the note in my fist and flung it toward the empty fireplace, hating it, despising him—and the paper sparked and burst into flame as it flew through the air, and I cried out and lunged for it, and the tea tray went flying with a crash, and Aldrich did burst into the room then, shouting and having to stamp out the burning carpet as we both cursed and I hopped around trying to avoid flame and broken crockery with my bare feet.
Aldrich ground his heel into one more spark and then stared down at the scorched patch on the previously exquisite carpet.
“Pardon my language, my lord,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Not that I’m not mightily impressed by what you can do, but any chance your magic also extends to repairing things, as well as burning things?”
“None whatsoever.” He and Stefan really ought to form a club to bemoan my strange facility for ruining rugs I couldn’t fix.
I staggered over to my bed and dropped onto the edge of it.
Banknotes fluttered down to the floor. A giddy bubble rose up in my throat.
“Roll the damn thing up and put it in the attic. If anyone asks, I didn’t like it.
We’ll go out later and buy a new one. The most expensive one we can find. ”
“Yes, my lord,” Aldrich said, after a short, startled silence. “I’ll ring for a housemaid and more tea.”
We went out half an hour later, stopping at the Great Temple first so that I could apologize for my overly hysterical confidences about my marriage and leave a substantial donation.
His Eminence hinted that he would of course be willing to assist me if I were to change my mind and want to publicly accuse Lord Ettori and Stefan.
I hinted that I’d let him know and that the donation would be repeated quarterly. We parted mutually satisfied.
And damn Stefan for being right about the bribe, anyway. Abbot Junius would be disgusted and cynically amused in equal measure if he knew.
After that, my carriage, bearing me and my absurd entourage—Aldrich, the coachman, a footman for carrying bags and opening doors, and a second man in a footman’s livery whose muscles strained both the jacket and my credulity—rattled off to an elegant emporium selling housewares, and then home through the city’s most exclusive park, which featured a carriage drive around an ornamental lake.
The salesman who helped me choose a new carpet had fawned over me.
The other customers had whispered behind their fans.
Everyone in the park had turned their heads and stared.
Aldrich had been approached while I shopped, he informed me, by no fewer than three men who offered him a bribe to tell them where I lived and what I might want as a courting gift.
Which would be yet another type of bribe, of course. Or payment, if one wanted to be vulgar. Aldrich should’ve just given them the address of Stefan’s favorite brothel. Apparently money really did keep Nevaia turning.
I hated it. I hated all of it, and as I climbed out of the carriage and wearily made my way up the steps to the house, with the fake and real footmen toiling behind me with the enormous carpet on their shoulders, I longed for my abbey.
The quiet. The garden. Even the over-brewed tea and bland cheese, and the cold plunge pool, and why had I yearned so breathlessly for the excitement of the capital?
Stefan’s voice floated out the open door, and I straightened up as if someone had reached through my shirt and yanked on my spine.
He’d come home! What if he turned his gaze on me the way he had last night?
With those dark eyes. Smoldering with suppressed emotion…
possibly only paranoia and dismay, but still.
The heat of him, no matter its source, sparked within me the way I’d lit the carpet on fire: his own magic, no less potent for having no supernatural tinge at all.
If I tried to resist its pull, he might need to overcome that resistance, and…
oh, please gods, let the dark fabric of my breeches hide the hardness between my legs, but I couldn’t disguise my flushed cheeks or the way my chest heaved…
I stepped into the hall and stopped short, my stomach curdling into knots, as two men turned to me: Stefan and another gentleman in a shiny silk coat.
“Ah, Remi, excellent timing,” Stefan said, voice as bland as porridge.
His hand slid into his lace cravat, emerging to flip up that fucking quizzing glass.
My fingers twitched with the urge to rip it off of him, but I could only stare in horror.
He scanned me up and down. “You look a bit worn around the edges. Need a drink, what? Let me present my good friend, Ser Lorenz. Lorenz, my consort, Lord Remigius.”
Ser Lorenz bowed, and through the buzzing in my ears I half-heard him offer his compliments, including a jab at Stefan for having described me as “worn.” “I’m nearly blinded by your attractions, Lord Remigius, I tell you frankly,” Ser Lorenz added, rising from his bow. “You’re a dog, Stef.”
Not that I disagreed, but…Stef? What a stupid nickname.
Ennolu save me. And I caught a whiff of brandy despite the hour.
It was hardly past tea-time! I muttered a greeting, hopefully in a tone that could pass for polite.
Stefan appeared entirely unruffled, as if we truly had the dull, indifferent society marriage that anyone would expect.
As if he’d never pressed me up against the wall in the alcove of Lady Vienni’s ballroom, hard cock pressing between my legs, or pinned me to the floor of his study, or confided state secrets after promising to trust me, or wrapped my hands around the bars of my bed and kissed down my fevered body and then…
The air between us thickened, while Ser Lorenz, and the servants carrying the carpet through the hall, and the carriage pulling away outside, all faded into half-existence as if behind a sheet of glass.
Stefan’s eyes narrowed, fixed on me, and he took a step forward—and then he stopped. Relaxed. As if by force of will.
“We were about to depart,” he said abruptly, and then cleared his throat, visibly settling into his languid persona. “You’d be most welcome, of course, if your own plans have fallen through? We can wait for you to dress, can’t we, Lorenz?”
“Of course,” Ser Lorenz said, with another bow. “Your consort would be worth any wait, Stef. I say.”
His flattery had the practiced ring of total insincerity, without any lustful edge to it—and it didn’t disgust me the way Lord Griset’s had at the ball.
But it didn’t seem to bother Stefan in the least, either.
Nothing sounded more horrific than the prospect of dressing in something revealing and tagging along to whatever debauched entertainment they meant to attend.
I had no idea what it would even be like.
Similar to the ballroom, only with more drunkenness and dimmer lighting?
Loud laughter and crude remarks? Scantily-clad companions?
I’d be more easily mistaken for one of those, in my corseted finery, than for one of the gentlemen paying for their services.
I’d know no one but Stefan. If he acknowledged me at all, he’d be pretending I hadn’t ruined his evening, as a model husband must.
“No, I thank you.” I forced a smile and forced down my rising bile at the same time. No, I might not be socially experienced, but anyone could pick up a cue as obvious as the one Stefan had handed me. “My plans for the evening are settled already.”
Ser Lorenz made a polite protest, but Stefan didn’t even pretend to be disappointed, bowing over my hand with the same flourish he’d have offered anyone and then sauntering out the door with Ser Lorenz in his satin-coattailed wake.
The front door shut behind them. The silence echoed around me. Someone cleared his throat, and I jumped a foot in the air and spun on Aldrich. “Don’t sneak up on me!”
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” he stammered. “But—will you be wanting dinner?”