Chapter 4
Valeria left the table at the cheese course.
Sir Marcus had been telling her about his stables for twenty minutes.
The stables could hold forty horses. The stables had been redesigned by an architect from London.
The stables had won some kind of award that Valeria had not known existed and did not care about.
She said something about needing air. He stood when she stood.
Polite. Then he sat back down. She could have kissed him for sitting back down. She did not.
In the corridor, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
The evening had been long. Lord Barton spent the soup course apologizing for something he had done at a ball six years ago.
Mr. Ashworth read her a poem he had written that afternoon, which rhymed “grace” with “face” and “heart” with “art” and was so sincere it made her teeth hurt.
The young Viscount, whose name she still could not remember, had knocked over his wine twice and apologized both times to the tablecloth rather than to her.
And throughout all of it, Edward Langton sat at her right and said almost nothing. He ate. He drank water. He watched. Every so often, she would feel his attention shift to her and then away again, quickly, like someone checking a compass.
She did not like how acutely aware she was of him. She did not like that she could feel exactly where he was in the room without looking. She did not like any of it.
She went up to the guest wing. The corridor was dark.
Most of the candles had burned down, and the servants had not yet replaced them.
She could hear muffled sounds behind doors as she passed.
Someone was snoring. Someone else was having a conversation she could not make out. A thud, then laughter, then silence.
Mary had told her which room. Valeria asked about it while they were turning down beds.
“Where did we put the Duke of Welford?” she said casually, as though she were reviewing arrangements.
Mary answered with a straight face. Room twelve. End of the corridor. Away from the others, which was either Mary’s doing or a coincidence, and Mary did not deal in coincidences.
“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?” Mary asked, and the way she said it made it clear that she knew exactly why Valeria was asking and had decided not to comment.
“No. That will be all.”
Valeria stopped in front of his door.
Terrible idea, she knew that. A woman, alone, standing outside a man’s door at night. If someone saw her, the auction would be over. Everything she planned for a year, gone.
But he had dared her. And she could not let a dare sit.
Three years of being told where to go. If she wanted to walk through a door, she would walk through it.
She smoothed her dress and checked the corridor both ways. It was empty. The candles in the sconces were burning low, and the shadows were long. Somewhere downstairs, a door closed. The floorboards were cold through her stockings.
She had thought about this throughout supper.
While Sir Marcus talked about drainage. While Lord Barton made a complicated toast that went on so long, the wine grew warm.
While Mr. Ashworth read a poem that compared her eyes to the sea in winter, which was flattering but inaccurate, since the sea in winter was grey and her eyes were blue, and she was fairly sure he had recited the same poem to someone else because he stumbled over her name.
Through all of it, Edward sat beside her and said almost nothing and ate his food and drank his water, and his silence was louder than every other man’s conversation combined. She had been aware of him the entire time.
The warmth of his arm near hers. The way he held his knife, blade inward, out of habit. The way his eyes moved constantly, checking the room, the doors, the windows, as though he expected someone to burst through them at any moment.
Old habits. She recognized them. She had her own.
She knocked before she could change her mind.
“It’s open,” he called from inside.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside. If anyone had seen her cross that threshold, the ton would have had them married by morning. She realized a second later that she had also made a catastrophic miscalculation.
He was shirtless, just out of the bath. His dark hair was wet and pushed back. He was holding a towel in one hand. Trousers covered his muscular legs, but there was nothing on his upper body but skin and scars.
Scars everywhere. Pale lines across his torso, some thin, some rough and wide. One across his right shoulder that curved like a crescent moon. Another below his collarbone, small and round, the kind a bullet made going in.
His arms were heavy with muscle, the kind that developed by climbing walls and carrying wounded men and doing the hundred other things that spies apparently did with their bodies.
There was a scar along his left side, above the hip, pink and puckered.
Something had tried to open him up there. But he had resisted.
He was still standing. Still breathing. Still half smiling at her from across the room, as though this were perfectly normal, as though women walked into his bedroom at midnight every day of the week. And maybe they did, but she did not want to think about that.
Her mouth went dry. She had seen shirtless men before.
Stable hands in July. Laborers on the road.
But that was different. Those men were working, and they were not looking at her.
There was daylight and open air, and the context was entirely different from a bedroom at midnight, with a candle throwing warm light across the kind of body that did not come from leisure.
This was a body that had been used hard and put back together more than once. Every scar was a story she should not want to hear, but she did.
She turned around so fast that she nearly tripped.
Behind her, he laughed. Not polite. But real. Low and rough. It hit her like a punch to the gut. Her face was burning.
She was in a man’s bedroom, staring at the wall, and he was laughing at her.
“You came early,” he noted.
“I did not come because you told me to,” she said to the wall. “I came because I have something to say.”
“Then say it. You can turn around. I won’t bite.”
She turned. Fixed her eyes on his face. Only his face. She was not going to look at his chest. Not the scar from his collarbone to his ribs. Not the dark hair below his navel.
She looked at all of it, then back at his face. He was smirking.
“I will not allow any man to order me around again,” she asserted in a steady voice. A miracle. Truly a miracle. “If that is your plan, then leave. The cruelest man in London could not win what I have planned.”
“The cruelest man in London,” he repeated. “Is that what they call me?”
“Among other things,” she managed.
“And yet ye’re standing in my chambers. Alone. At night.” He did not move toward her. “If ye truly believed that, Duchess, ye would not be here.”
She opened her mouth and closed it. “Perhaps I am tired of being afraid.”
The smirk left his face.
“If you’re suggesting I leave after an open invitation,” he said quietly, “that’s rejection. And not wise. Not with the ton watching.”
“I am not suggesting you leave. I am suggesting you understand who you are dealing with.”
“A woman who has survived three years with a man who did not deserve her. I understand that perfectly.”
She went still. That was not what she had expected him to say.
She had expected him to talk about himself, about his reputation, about the things he had done.
Instead, he had talked about her. About what she had survived.
And the fact that he had called it survival instead of marriage told her something about him that all the rumors could not.
“How do you know that?” she asked. “About Gordon?”
“I know things, Duchess. It’s what I do.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now. But I will tell you this: any man who starves his wife to control her is not a man at all. He’s a coward. And cowards bore me.”
Her jaw tightened. She did not know if she wanted to slap him or thank him. Probably both.
“But ye’re not ready for my proposal yet, so go back to yer room, Duchess. The games start tomorrow.”
“You’re dismissing me?”
“I’m advising ye,” he corrected, his voice softening.
“And if I do not take your advice?”
“Then ye’ll still be standing in my bedroom at midnight, which I don’t think is what ye planned.”
“You have no idea what I planned.”
“I think ye planned to come in here and put me in my place and walk away feeling like ye’d won something. Am I wrong?”
She opened her mouth to retort, but her voice failed her. He was not wrong.
“Goodnight, Duchess.”
She held his gaze for three heartbeats. Then she walked to the door, back straight, shoulders squared.
At the threshold, she paused. Looked over her shoulder. Ran her gaze over him one last time. Slowly. Shamelessly. From his bare feet to his wet hair.
His expression shifted.
“See you at the games, then,” she said, one hand on the handle.
“May the best man win.”
She closed the door, leaned back against it, and pressed both hands to her face.
“What the hell is happening to me?” she whispered.
She could hear him on the other side. The floorboards creaking. A glass clinking. A drawer slamming. He was right there, with only inches of oak between them.
Gordon had been predictable, cruel in ways she could learn and brace for. No surprises. She knew his moods. She knew what he would do. When he was angry, he went quiet. When he was planning something, he smiled. When he wanted to punish her, he talked about the weather.
She had learned all of that in the first six months and spent the next two and a half years using it to stay alive.
She did not know what the Hound wanted. He was not angry, and he was not smiling, and he was not talking about the weather.
He was standing in his bedroom, smelling like soap and looking at her with an expression she could not read, and her curiosity was worse than her fear.
Much worse. Fear, she knew how to handle. Curiosity was new.
She pushed off the door and walked to her chambers.
Chin up. Pace steady. She passed a maid on the stairs and nodded as though nothing had happened, as though she had not just been standing in a man’s bedroom watching candlelight dance across his ribs, as though her heart were not hammering so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
The maid curtsied. “Good evening, Your Grace.”
“Good evening.” Normal voice. Steady hands. Valeria was getting very good at pretending.
She closed her bedroom door. Sat on the bed. Let out the breath she had been holding since she knocked on his door.
The room was quiet. Her room. Her bed. Her choice to come and go. She reminded herself of that. She could leave whenever she wanted. She could lock the door from the inside. Nobody was trapping her here.
She would not think about his scars. She would not think about his laugh.
She would not think about the candlelight on his skin or the way his voice dropped when he said, I know that feeling, or the look on his face when she ran her eyes over him at the door.
She would not think about the scar on his shoulder or the one below his collarbone or the dark strip of hair below his navel. She would not think about any of it.
Until she thought about all of it.
She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the fact that for the first time in three years she had walked into a man’s bedroom of her own free will and walked out again whenever she chose, and nobody had locked the door behind her.
She could go back if she wanted to. She could stay in her room if she wanted to. The choice was hers.
That was new. That was everything.
She did not sleep for a very long time. But she was not afraid. And that, she thought, counted for something.