Chapter Twenty-Six
Celine’s mind was whirling. Everything had changed in the space of a single evening.
Everything. She had been at war with the world for so long, fighting for the chance—just the chance—to live a good life.
She had won herself dangerous, difficult advantages and taken risks that might have killed her.
But now … now she had options. More than just blackmail or destitution.
She hadn’t even started to sort through all the implications. She felt like her thoughts were about to spill over.
She hadn’t even—
—The duke was about to kiss her.
The duke was about to kiss her.
Without a second to think, she raised her hand before her mouth, palm out, knuckles pressed into her own lips. It brought the duke up short, half a breath away.
The duke held Celine’s face between her hands, her long fingers up behind Celine’s ears, plunged into her tightly wound hair. They were closed in together, and the duke looked right into her eyes—a feral, otherworldly creature, denied what it wanted.
Celine panted short, hard breaths into the back of her hand.
Her heart scrabbled at her chest, drowning, drowning.
The duke shook her head as though to clear it. But she couldn’t. Celine saw everything in those brilliant eyes. She saw desire unwind the duke’s every thought, slow and heavy. And saw the moment it obliterated her, just before the duke’s eyes slid shut.
The duke pressed a searing kiss into Celine’s palm. Her welcoming palm.
She had never realised how palms were made purely for receiving. How her palm could do nothing but take the duke’s kiss and take it and take it. That tender part of her had no capacity for thought, no defence against feeling.
It just received pleasure.
The duke pulled back, panting. Her eyes collided with Celine’s horrified gaze, and then she dove in to kiss Celine’s palm again, this time without closing her eyes, this time watching the pleasure hit Celine.
Her breath.
Her lips.
Her mouth kissing Celine’s but for the barrier Celine’s hand made between them. She hummed and rubbed her face deeper into Celine’s palm, her hair softly brushing Celine’s fingers.
What Celine felt then frightened her so badly she found the strength to push herself away. Her head smarted where the duke’s fingers had been wrenched from her hair. They stood staring at each other, panting. When the duke took a step towards her, Celine held out her hand and stepped back.
“Just,” she said, “let me think.”
“No,” the duke said, then advanced on her again.
God, she felt terrible. Wrong. Her whole body like a coat she’d fished out of the Seine, half-decomposed and pulled on. A moment ago, she had been on top of the world, flush with victory. Then the duke had—the duke had—
“What are you trying to prove?” she said, her voice startled and shrill.
The duke kept coming, as though Celine hadn’t spoken.
“If you think I’ll let you near me, then you have taken absolute leave of your senses.”
The duke stopped at that, and awareness entered her body.
Their eyes caught and held. In a way Celine didn’t entirely understand, it felt like she was speaking to the duke for the first time in three years.
That they were alone, together, for the first time in three years. Tears rushed into her eyes.
You left me, Celine thought, looking into that brutal face, those drowned-god eyes. You left me.
“You left me,” she said, the words ripped from her. She had wanted so badly to live, and the duke had left her to die. “You left me.”
The duke’s expression became inscrutable, the heat in her eyes cooling. “Yes,” she said at last, an aristocratic drawl, “and yet here you are. Not even a little bit dead.”
The words robbed Celine of breath, her anger splintering and breaking up until the wreckage scattered over her skin, making her shiver and shake. She stared at the duke and her throat felt raw, like she had been swallowing down screams all morning.
“Not even a little bit dead,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
“Not even a little bit.” Her voice was rising.
She thought, in a remote, alarmed way, that she sounded hysterical.
She began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Up and up it came, these surges of laughter, up from her guts and spilling out her mouth. Not even a little—
KATE HAD THOROUGHLY cocked up. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about kissing Celine, touching Celine, her breasts, her hot, slick mouth and cunt, Celine with her hair unbound all the way to her arse. The fatty cheeks in each hand, the tender heat between them.
She had thought Celine would welcome her advances. She had thought because blackmail was no longer enough to deter her that it wouldn’t deter Celine, either.
Celine stopped laughing and turned away.
Kate thought she might simply leave, but after a moment she said quietly, “All right … All right.” A hesitation.
Then she grabbed an upright chair and dragged it, scraping and shuddering, across the room.
She placed it in front of Kate and sat, slipping one foot out of its shoe and tucking it up beneath her.
She looked drawn and very serious. “Let me tell you about how I didn’t die, after you left me in Paris. ”
Kate didn’t want to talk about Paris. She wanted to kiss. “We are not doing this.”
“Bastien wasn’t killed straightaway. Were you aware of that? They held him for three months before the trial even began, as beheading the king took some precedence.”
“Miss Genet, I—”
“So you may think I lingered in luxury a little while, but landlords do not wait for the jury to pass its verdict. I was tossed out of the rooms Bastien rented for me a week after he was taken. They were sweet rooms. Rather fine, I would have said, before I came to live with you.”
She both wanted and did not want to hear what Celine was telling her. They had never spoken of personal matters—of autobiographical context. What might she discover, if she allowed Celine to keep speaking?
“Celine,” she said quietly. “That’s enough.”
She had noticed it before—when she spoke Celine’s name it had a physical, traceable effect.
It seemed to shiver over Celine now, who wrapped both arms about herself, hands tucked into her armpits.
Celine still had one foot on the floor, balanced on the ball, and the heel bounced energetically in and out of its shoe.
Celine’s eyes fixed on her, bright and hot.
“It’s where I found your letter. My apartment. ”
Celine’s heel suddenly stopped bouncing, and she brought that foot up underneath her as well, leaving a pair of pointy yellow shoes on the floor, slightly askew. She considered Kate. “You would be arrested in Paris,” she said at last. “For cross-dressing.”
For rather a few more things than that. But Kate couldn’t help saying, “They would have to realise I was a woman, first.”
It surprised a smile out of Celine. There, then gone. And a blush that didn’t disperse.
Despite herself, Kate’s interest had been engaged. She pulled a chair over and sat, partly as a tacit signal she would listen, partly because she was warm with thwarted lust and still hoped she might make her advance.
Celine looked down and said, “The letter was tucked behind the frame of a painting that hung in my apartment, I found it when I took the painting down. I sold everything I could get my hands on. You would’ve found the letter easily, if you’d only thought of searching my rooms. I was still comfortable enough then that I didn’t think I’d ever use it.
I just liked having it. It felt like winning a game you didn’t even know we were playing. ”
The bouncing Celine had suppressed in her heel found new release in her knee.
“Did you ever meet Jacques Heber? No? He was a caterer, but his real trade was in information. He became a darling of Bastien’s crowd.
They thought having an acquaintance from the third estate made them enlightened.
He was a horrid little man. Sycophantic and extreme.
Exactly the man to thrive in Paris that year.
He did thrive. He offered to keep me, and I accepted because within three months, every other man I knew was in gaol. ”
It had been obvious from Celine’s appearance that first night that she had fallen on hard times. But hearing the details was … unpleasant.
“You,” Celine said with certainty, “have never fucked someone repugnant to you. You’ve never had to.
Rather … it’s not only that he was repugnant to me, but that he knew it, and he liked that I let him do it anyway.
It’s not even remotely like fucking for pleasure.
I used to imagine it had more in common with a hateful marriage.
Meeting, in the inner sanctum, not a sympathetic partner but an adversary.
There is—was—a very outspoken woman in Paris, Mme Olympe de Gouges, who called marriage a tomb, where love and trust had died.
” She blinked a couple of times rapidly, and then seemed to recall the point she had been making.
“Fucking Heber kept me comfortable, anyway, until he was arrested as well. Revolution eats every man who tries to pat it.”
Celine drew her knees up before her, hugging them into stillness. She rested her forehead on them, and the only exposed parts of her were the stockinged toes that peeked out from beneath a ruffled hem and curled over the edge of the chair.
She looked very small folded up, the trapezoid seat clarifying how little physical space she actually occupied.
Kate’s outer defences, weathered and tempered and tested over the years, remained impenetrable.
The breach, when it came, was inward. A tender caving.
A desire to take one of those feet very gently between her hands and set it on her thigh.
To stroke it. To coax Celine to open again and take up more space than a chair seat.