Chapter 6
The nerve of him! But he was right. The corset was digging into her ribs, and the wet muslin felt like ice against her skin.
She stared at his back. She had not asked him to turn around. He just did it.
She stared at his broad shoulders. His shirt was so soaked that she could see the lines and sinews across his back.
She looked away. Gordon would not have turned around. He would have watched.
Corset first.
She got to work on the laces, fingers stiff. She cursed and pulled at the wet laces until her corset came loose enough for her to breathe. She left it on, pulled the shawl around herself, and sat down.
In. Out. God, she had not breathed properly since the storm hit. Maybe longer than that. Maybe she had not breathed properly in three years.
“Are you decent?” he asked.
“Decent enough,” she said, pulling the shawl tighter.
“Meaning?” He was still facing the garden.
“Meaning my corset is loose, and my dress is ruined, and I look like I crawled out of a pond, but nothing is showing that shouldn’t be.”
“Good enough for me.” But he still did not turn. “Here.” He held out his coat behind him. “Take it.”
“I don’t need your coat,” she protested, teeth chattering.
“You’re shivering so hard I can hear yer teeth chattering from here. Take the coat, Duchess.”
She took it. It was enormous and warm. The sleeves slid past her fingers. She pressed her face into the collar before catching herself.
Woodsmoke.
He turned around and saw her in his coat.
“Not a word,” she warned, pointing at his face.
“Wasn’t going to say anything, Duchess.”
“Your mouth was doing something.”
“It does that. I’ve been told I have an expressive mouth.”
“By whom?”
“A woman in Florence who was trying to get me killed. But she meant it as a compliment.”
“Did she succeed? In getting you killed?”
“Clearly not,” he said, dry as chalk.
“Pity,” she quipped.
He laughed. Short. Real.
She had not expected that sound from him. It transformed his whole face. The hard lines softened. His eyes crinkled.
For a second, he looked like a man who had not spent a decade doing what spies did for a living. But then the laugh was gone, and he was himself again. Still, she had seen it.
She filed it away with the turned back and the coat and the rest of the evidence she was collecting against her better judgment.
He was in shirtsleeves now. The linen was wet, and it clung to him, but she was not looking at that. Rather, she was looking at the rain. The rain was very interesting. Very wet.
“You’re staring at the rain,” he noted, stretching one arm along the railing.
“It’s very interesting,” she said, not looking at him.
“It’s water falling from the sky.”
“Yes, well, I find that fascinating.”
He did not say anything else, but the corner of his mouth twitched. She wanted to hit him.
“I like a game,” he said. “Want to play something while we wait?”
“What sort of game?”
“Riddles.” He leaned back. “I ask one, ye ask one. The first person who can’t answer owes the other an honest answer to any question. No lies.”
“Fine. I go first.” She thought for a moment. “What has a river but no water?”
“A desert.”
It took him ten seconds.
“What has all four walls facing south?” he asked.
“A house at the North Pole.” She did not even pause. “Too easy,” she added, shaking her head.
“Harder, then.” He cocked his head. “What has cities but no houses, forests but no trees, and water but no fish?”
She frowned. “A map. What disappears the moment you say its name?”
“Silence,” he said.
“I would have gotten there.”She pulled the coat tighter. “And I would have gotten it faster if it were mine to answer.”
“Doubt that.”
“Three years of silence. I know it well enough.”
He fell quiet at that. Not the awkward quiet of someone who did not know what to say, but the respectful quiet of someone who knew exactly what she meant and was choosing not to push.
She appreciated that more than she could express. Gordon would have pushed. He would have asked her to explain, and then he would have used the explanation against her later.
“Your turn,” she said, because the silence was growing heavy and she needed it lighter before it settled into something she could not manage.
She had spent three years in heavy silences. She knew how much they weighed. She knew how they pressed in from the sides until the room felt small.
This was not that kind of silence. This was the kind that ensued when someone understood you. And that was worse in its own way, because understanding was harder to defend against than cruelty.
Edward seemed to know it too. He straightened up and cleared his throat.
They traded a few more questions. He asked her about a thing that had hands but could not clap. A clock. She asked him about a thing you could catch but could not throw. A cold. He got that one wrong on purpose. She could tell because he paused for too long, and his eyes gave him away.
“You let me win that one,” she accused.
“I did not.”
“You did. Your face changes when you are thinking. It goes still. When you already know the answer, your eyebrow moves first.”
He stared at her. “Ye noticed that.”
“I notice everything. Gordon taught me that. Pay attention or pay the price.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “That’s a harsh way to learn.”
“It’s an effective one.”
“Hm.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Ye have been asking me things for the past hour.”
“Something real. How did you get that name? The Hound.”
He went quiet. Now it wasn’t the comfortable kind of quiet. She had touched something.
“That,” he said after a moment, “is a story for another day.”
“You owe me an honest answer. Those were the rules.”
“I owe ye an honest answer to a riddle. That is not a riddle. That is a confession.” He looked her right in the eye. “Ask me again when ye know me better. I will tell ye then.”
She studied his face. He meant it. She let it go.
After that, they stopped keeping score.
“Tell me about the places you have been,” she demanded. “The real stories, not the ones they tell in clubs.”
He looked at her sideways. “Vienna,” he began. “There’s a church with a gold roof. The whole thing. Top to bottom.”
“I fell off a horse into a duck pond when I was twelve,” she revealed. “Refused to ride again for a week.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Caroline’s wedding,” she added. “November. Bridget put dried lavender in her hair because nothing else was in season. The vicar was sneezing so hard he could barely finish the vows. The whole church smelled like a wardrobe.”
“Constantinople,” he said. “There’s a market where you can buy a dagger, a parrot, and a forged letter from the Pope.”
“Did you buy one?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Didn’t need the letter.”
“And the parrot?”
“Tempting. I’d teach it to insult people in Turkish.”
“Why Turkish?”
“Saves me the trouble of doing it myself.”
“When I was twelve,” she said, “John dared me to climb the big oak. I got stuck at the top. The stable boy had to bring a ladder. My father stood at the bottom and said, I am not angry, I am disappointed, and John shouted down, You are both, Father, and so is the tree.”
She was smiling before she knew it.
“Three men cornered me in a port city once,” he admitted. “Alley. Middle of the night.”
“What did you do?”
“Pretended to be a priest.”
“That worked?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I looked very disappointed in them. And I quoted scripture. Badly, but they didn’t know that.”
“What scripture?”
“Made it up on the spot. Something about the wrath of the lamb. They bought it.”
“The wrath of the lamb?”
“Revelation, more or less.”
“That is not from Revelation.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I read the Bible cover to cover during my second winter at Thornhill. There was nothing else in the house Gordon hadn’t locked up.”
He looked at her sideways. “Did you like it?”
“Some parts. Ecclesiastes. The bit about there being a time for everything.”
“A time to kill, a time to heal.”
“A time to keep silence,” she said, “and a time to speak.”
The rain drummed on the roof. Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was not an uncomfortable silence this time. It was the kind that ensued when two people had accidentally said something true and needed a moment to recover from it.
Valeria laughed. Real. Too loud. She covered her mouth.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Don’t be.” He was looking at the rain. His ears were red.
The rain was thinning. She could see the hedges again.
“Your turn,” she prompted. “You owe me an honest answer.”
“Ask,” he said, leaning back.
“Why are you doing this? The auction. You could have any lady in England. Why come here and play games for the hand of a widow you have never met?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Because ye are choosing, not being chosen. I have never seen a woman do that before.”
“That is not an answer. That is flattery.”
“It is both.” He looked at her. “Would ye pick me, Duchess?”
“If you promise not to touch me.”
“If that’s what ye want, Duchess.”
She could feel his breath. They were sitting close. She did not remember moving closer. Neither did he, probably. These things just happened. Gravity or stupidity or something in between.
“I don’t know what I want,” she murmured.
She had not meant to say that out loud. The words came out of somewhere deep and honest, and she could not take them back.
She had spent three years knowing exactly what she wanted: to get out.
Now she was out, and the wanting had not stopped.
It had just changed shape. She wanted things she could not name yet, things she was not sure she was allowed to want, things that made her chest tighten when she sat too close to a man in a gazebo while the rain eased.
“That’s all right,” he assured her. “Ye’ve got time. Nobody is rushing ye, least of all me.”
She looked at his hands. They were resting on his knees. Scarred knuckles. Long fingers. Steady. She had spent three years being afraid of a man’s hands. If she were to believe the ton, these hands had killed people. But she was not afraid of them.
She did not know what that said about her.
His hand came up slowly. His fingers reached for her jaw. She felt the heat of them before they touched her, close enough that the fine hairs on her skin stood up.
Her breath caught. Her whole body went still, not from fear, but from want. She did not pull away. She did not move at all. She waited.
He stopped an inch from her skin. His thumb hovered over the corner of her mouth. She could feel the warmth of it. Her lips parted, and she hated herself for it.
He pulled his hand back. Sat away from her. His jaw was tight. His fist closed on his knee.
She saw what it cost him. It had cost her, too. The place where his fingers almost touched her face burned like a brand.
“We should go back,” he said, voice rough. “The rain’s stopped.”
“Has it?”
It had. The garden was dripping, and the pale sky was peeking through the hedges.
They stood up, but did not look at each other.
She took off his coat. It was warm from her body now and smelled like her, which she did not think about, and he hopefully would not think about. She held it out. He took it. Their fingers did not touch.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the coat. And for the riddles. And for turning around without being asked.”
He looked at her. “You don’t need to thank a man for basic decency.”
“You would be surprised how rarely I have encountered it.”
Something crossed his face at that. Not pity. She would have hated pity. It was something harder. Anger, maybe, directed at a man who was already dead and could not be punished further.
He put on his coat. She wondered if it was still warm from her body. If he could smell the lavender. He did not say anything. His face gave nothing away.
“Anytime, Duchess,” he said.
“I did not say there would be a next time.”
“You didn’t say there wouldn’t.”
“You are very confident for a man who let me win a riddle about a map.”
“I did not let you win.”
“You paused too long.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
She walked out of the gazebo first. The gravel was wet under her shoes. The air smelled clean and green and new. She heard him follow behind her, his footsteps heavier than hers, steady as always.