Chapter 12
Juliana had been very certain, just a few hours ago, that sleep would claim her easily.
She had been wrong.
The silk sheets, which she had initially regarded as one of the finer compensations of her new situation, had since twisted themselves into a strangling tangle around her legs.
The room was warm enough. The pillow was perfectly adequate.
And yet sleep refused her, because her wretched, traitorous mind had taken it upon itself to replay, with agonizing clarity, every moment in the sunroom.
The water beading down the planes of his chest. The lazy, devastating certainty in his voice.
‘Sooner or later, I am coming for you.’
She rolled onto her side. Then her back. Then her side again.
It was mortifying, truly, that a man she did not even like could reduce her to this: a restless, overheated creature tangled in her own bedclothes, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer some counsel on the matter of unwanted desire.
She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek and found it warm.
The pulse at her throat beat with a kind of urgency she could not account for, and lower…
She pressed her thighs together and refused to finish the thought.
He bought you, she reminded herself sternly. He is Kit’s enemy. You know nothing about him.
She knew the precise width of his shoulders.
She knew, against her will, exactly how they looked as he rose from a tub, water sheeting down the carved planes of his chest. She knew how his voice dropped when he wanted to unsettle her.
She knew the weight of his hand around her wrist. She knew what it meant to be pressed against a wall by him and to understand, with every nerve she possessed, that he was holding himself back.
She despised herself for it, for the way her body had simply decided— without consulting her better judgment—that Cassian Cavendish was something it wanted. It was involuntary, she told herself. A purely physical response to a man who was extraordinarily well-made. It meant nothing.
“He bought you,” she said again, more firmly, to the ceiling. “Remember that.”
The ceiling offered no useful counsel.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to stop thinking about her husband and his threat that felt more like a promise.
Suddenly, a sound split the silence.
Juliana went rigid.
What was that?
It was not the settling of old timbers, nor the wind finding its way through a poorly fitted casement. She knew those sounds now, had catalogued them over days of lying awake in exactly this fashion. This was different. This sounded almost… human.
A scream rose from somewhere above and to her left, then collapsed into silence so abrupt it was almost worse than the sound itself.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She waited, counting her own breaths, telling herself she had imagined it, that Gothic novels and penny dreadfuls had done exactly what her grandmama had accused them of doing to her imagination.
Then it came again.
She was out of bed before she had made a conscious decision to move.
Her feet found her slippers. Her hands found the candlestick on the nightstand, not because she thought to bring light, she realized, but because her fingers had closed around it like a weapon, and she had not corrected the instinct.
The corridor outside her chamber was long and dim; the wall sconces burned low for the night. Juliana moved quickly, her nightgown whispering against the floorboards. The sound had come from the west wing; she was certain of it now. The West Tower.
‘You are forbidden from the West Tower.’
She slowed, her candle guttering in the draft that snaked along the floor.
‘That part of the house does not concern you.’
He had not given her a clear reason. As if she were a child to be managed rather than a woman living under the same roof, breathing the same cold air, lying awake listening to screams that he would tell her, she was quite sure, were nothing more than the wind.
But she knew the difference between the wind and a human voice.
She had grown up in a house where the walls groaned and shrieked in winter, and not once had any of it sounded like that.
Not once had the timbers produced something so raw, so jagged, as if wrenched from a throat that could not help itself.
Her fingers tightened around the candlestick.
She thought of everything she did not know about her husband.
She was told that he had fought in the war, and men came back from wars with things she could not name.
She thought of the finality with which he had told her not to test him.
She thought of the money he had handed over without blinking to purchase a woman he claimed to hold in contempt.
What manner of man did such things? What manner of man had rooms in his house that his own wife was not permitted to enter?
And what, precisely, was kept inside them?
The candle flame bent sideways. A cold breath moved through the corridor, and Juliana felt it on the back of her neck like a hand.
What if there is someone in that tower? What if he is dangerous? What if I have been a fool, and the only person who could have warned me was the brother I am forbidden to speak of?
She pressed her back to the wall, breathing carefully through her nose. The darkness at the far end of the corridor was absolute. She could see nothing beyond the weak halo of her candle.
Go back to your room, said the sensible part of her. You are in a strange house, it is the dead of night, and you do not know what lives behind that door.
Her feet did not move.
Because there had been a sound. A real one. And somewhere in this house, behind a door she had been expressly forbidden to approach, someone had screamed.
The shadows at the far end of the corridor shifted.
Every hair on her body stood upright. For one suspended, terrible moment, she could not breathe, could not think, could only stare at the darkness moving toward her, and every Gothic novel she had ever read collapsed into a single blinding certainty: something is very wrong in this house, and I am alone in it in the dark.
She did not think.
She spun, raised the candlestick in both hands, and collided with something large and solid and very much alive.
The candle went out. There was a grunt, and then the floor came up to meet her, and she came down on top of him in a graceless, breathless tangle, her knees slamming down on either side of his hips, the candlestick still raised above her head with both hands wrapped around the base and every intention of bringing it down with everything she had.
“Put the weapon down, Juliana, unless you are planning to finish me with that tonight,” said the Duke of Stonevale, somewhat breathlessly, from the floor. “I was aware that you disliked me, but I confess I did not anticipate you attempting to stave my head in over it.”
The candlestick did not move. Neither did she.
“I… I heard screaming,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected, given that her heart was trying to escape her chest. “It was coming from the West Tower. I thought…” She swallowed. “I did not know who was in the corridor.”
“Evidently.” His gaze moved to the candlestick with mild consideration, then back to her face. “You may lower that at any time.”
She lowered it. Slowly. As if granting him a concession she was not entirely certain he had earned.
He made no move to dislodge her. Suddenly, she became aware of the solid warmth of him beneath her, the steady rise and fall of his chest against her knees, the fact that his hands, which could have lifted her off him without effort, had simply settled at his sides as though he had nowhere more pressing to be.
Her nightgown was a wholly insufficient barrier against the reality of him.
She could feel the hard planes of his body through the thin fabric, the heat radiating off him in the cold corridor, and something else—something that made her breath catch and her grip tighten reflexively around the candlestick, because she needed something to hold onto that was not him.
“Did you hear what I said?” she pressed. “I heard a scream. It came from—”
“I heard you the first time.”
“Then answer me. Is there someone in that tower?”
Something moved behind his eyes. Not amusement, or not only that. It was a flicker of something more carefully contained, surfacing briefly before he could suppress it. She might have called it exhaustion, except that exhaustion had never looked quite so guarded.
“Are you perhaps one of those ladies who like to read too many Gothic novels?” he teased.
“No! I do not read such things,” she lied, clearly embarrassed to admit that this might have been a product of her imagination.
“Well, the house is old. The sounds it produces are varied and frequently unsettling. There is no prisoner in my tower, no first wife, no deranged relation. I am not that sort of villain.” A pause. “I am told I am other sorts.”
“Then why,” she said quietly. “Are you prowling the corridors at this hour?”
The amusement returned, faint and deliberate.
“Prowling?” he repeated. “Is that what I was doing?”
“You have not answered my question.”
She felt his gaze travel over her in the darkness.
“Were you coming to my room?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t, not because it sounded accusatory, but because it didn’t. It sounded hopeful, and they both knew it.
The corners of his mouth curved.
“I wonder,” he said, and the lightness in his voice had an edge to it now. “Were you lying awake, hoping I would come to your room and make good on my promise? Is that what kept you wandering the halls tonight?”
“I was alarmed by the scream—”
“Before the scream, Juliana.”
The heat that flooded her cheeks was extraordinary. She was grateful for the darkness.
“You are a cad,” she said.
“And yet you were rather reluctant to remove yourself from my person just now.” His eyes gleamed. “One might draw certain conclusions from that.”
She scrambled to her feet with considerably less grace than she would have wished, her legs unsteady beneath her, and put a step of distance between them.
He came to his feet with that controlled, effortful ease she had learned to recognize, his jaw briefly set against whatever the movement cost him.
Then his posture was impeccable again, and she was left to wonder if she had imagined it.
“I will not let you evade my questions,” she said, pulling herself together. “I know what I heard. Someone screamed in that tower.”
“The house has a voice of its own,” he said.
“Timber and stone and a great deal of cold air. What sounds human is not always so.” He regarded her steadily.
“And if you truly believed there was a burglar, you would have been wiser to wake a footman than to charge down a dark corridor in your nightgown.”
“I did not charge,” she began.
“You did,” he said. “And you knocked me to the floor, and you were half a second from breaking the candlestick over my head. Which,” he added, with that insufferable lightness returning to his voice. “Suggests that a burglar would have fared considerably worse.”
She wanted to argue with this, but she could not quite bring herself to.
“That is entirely beside the point—”
He stepped forward, halving the distance between them, and suddenly the corridor felt very narrow, and he felt very large, and the cold air she had been shivering in moments ago was nowhere to be found.
“And what is the point?” he asked quietly.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
He took another step. Her back met the wall, and his arm came up beside her head, making it abundantly clear that leaving would require a decision she was not yet ready to make.
“What were you doing in this corridor?” she tried again, her voice far less steady than she would have liked.
He said nothing. Just looked at her, his eyes moving over her face with a slow, unhurried attention that made her feel thoroughly seen and thoroughly undone in equal measure.
“Cassian.” His name left her lips before she could stop it, and she watched something shift in his expression at the sound of it.
“Go back to your room,” he said. “And lock your door.”
The silence between them was unbearable. She was acutely, helplessly aware of every point where the air between their bodies had narrowed to almost nothing. Of the thin fabric of her nightgown. Of the fact that his eyes had dropped, just once, just briefly, to her mouth.
“I… You…”
His eyes dropped to her mouth.
“Tell me something, wife,” he murmured, leaning closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him against her skin. “If you are so determined to think the worst of me, so certain I am dangerous, why is it that you are not afraid right now?”
She had no answer. Or rather, she had one, and giving it to him was unthinkable.
He held her gaze for one long, charged moment. Then he said, very softly, “A cad, you called me.”
“You… You are,” she managed.
“Yes,” he agreed, pushing off the wall. “And yet, I am a cad you cannot stop thinking about.”
He walked away from her, unhurried, without looking back, and the darkness swallowed him as though he had never been there at all.
Juliana stood against the wall, her pulse loud in her ears, the cold plaster at her back the only solid thing she could account for.
Then she went back to her room.
She did not lock the door.