Chapter 9
Caroline was waiting for her.
Valeria had barely made it through the sitting room door before her sister was on her, hands cupping her face, turning her head left and right, checking for cuts and bruises, anything that might justify the state she was in.
Her hair was still damp. Her dress was ruined.
She smelled of rain and woodsmoke and warmth from being held against Edward’s chest.
“I am fine,” she said, for the third time.
“You are not fine. You are soaking wet. You have been gone for hours, and nobody knew where you were.” Caroline pressed both hands to her belly. The baby was clearly very active in there. She winced and straightened carefully. “How on earth did you end up with the Hound?”
“He found me in the maze. Nobody else came.”
“Nobody?”
“Not one.” Valeria sat down and pulled the blanket Caroline offered around her shoulders. “It rained. He carried me to the gazebo, and we waited it out.”
Caroline looked at her. She had their mother’s eyes. Dark and steady and capable of seeing through walls.
Valeria had always envied that about her.
Caroline was the youngest of the five Hughes children and somehow the most perceptive of all of them.
She noticed things that other people missed.
She noticed when John was lying about where he had been the night before.
She noticed when Evan was angry but pretending not to be.
She noticed when their father was worried and trying to hide it behind his newspaper and his smoking pipe.
She noticed the exact shade of red Valeria’s neck turned when she was embarrassed and could distinguish it from the red that came from the cold.
She was noticing now. Valeria could feel Caroline’s gaze trailing over her face like fingers, reading her, cataloging the flush in her cheeks and the brightness in her eyes and the way she was not looking directly at her, which was always a tell.
Valeria had never been able to lie to her sister. Not once. Not even about small things. Caroline had a talent for seeing through people that would have made her an excellent spy if the Crown had recruited pregnant women with opinions about tablecloths.
“And?” Caroline prompted.
“And nothing. We talked, then he brought me back.”
“You talked.”
“Yes.”
“For hours.”
“The storm was long.”
“Valeria.” Caroline leaned forward. Or tried to.
Her belly got in the way. She put one hand on it and frowned at it as though it had personally offended her, which it probably had, given that it had been making her uncomfortable for six months and showed no signs of stopping.
“I have known you since the day I was born. You are blushing.”
“I am cold.”
“You are blushing. Your neck is red. Your ears are red. You have not looked me in the eye since you sat down.” Caroline folded her arms on top of her belly. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Then why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a woman who has been kissed in a rainstorm.”
Valeria opened her mouth. Closed it. The silence lasted too long.
Caroline’s eyebrows flew up. “Oh, Valeria.”
“It was not in the gazebo. It was after. On the path. And it was brief. It will not happen again.”
“Was it good?”
“Caroline!”
“Was it?”
Valeria pressed both hands to her face. Through her fingers, she said, “I have nothing to compare it to.”
Caroline fell quiet. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck nine.
Outside, the wind had died, and the rain had stopped, and the gardens were dripping in the dark.
The house smelled of wet stone and beeswax and the beef stew the cook had made for supper, which Valeria had missed entirely because she had been sitting in a gazebo playing riddles with a killer.
“He was your first kiss,” Caroline concluded softly.
Valeria lowered her hands. “Gordon kissed my forehead at the wedding. That was all.”
“That was not a kiss. That was a formality.” Caroline reached over and took her hand. Her fingers were warm and paint-stained and strong. “Was the Hound gentle?”
Valeria thought about the stone wall against her back.
His hand in her hair. The sound he made when she pulled him closer.
His mouth, hot and certain. The way he had kissed her as though he had been thinking about it for days and had finally run out of reasons not to.
And the way he had stopped. The instant she had pushed him back.
One motion. Hands gone. A full step back. Space between them before she had even finished the thought. No anger. No argument. No guilt. Just distance, immediate and complete, offered without being asked.
“He stopped when I asked him to,” Valeria murmured. “Immediately. Without question.”
Caroline squeezed her hand. She did not say anything for a moment.
She was thinking. Valeria could see it in her eyes, the careful consideration of a woman who had her own complicated history with men and marriage, and who knew that the wrong word right now could close a door that had just begun to open.
Then her expression shifted. The softness disappeared, only to be replaced by a sharper look. She looked at Valeria the way a woman looked when she had figured out what she was seeing and was about to say it out loud, whether the other person wanted to hear it or not.
“Sounds to me like you are too defensive of your precious husband-to-be,” Caroline drawled.
“Do not be ridiculous!” Valeria huffed.
The blush climbed her neck again, hot and immediate and impossible to hide. She could feel it spreading down to her chest and up to her temples, and she wanted nothing more than for the floor to open and swallow her.
“Are you done?” she snapped, before rising to her feet. “I am tired. I want to sleep.”
“Of course you do.”
“I do.”
“I did not say otherwise.”
“Your face is saying otherwise.”
“My face is six months pregnant and doing its best.”
Valeria left. She walked up the stairs too fast, her ruined shoes squelching on the marble.
She did not look back, because looking back would mean seeing Caroline’s knowing face, and she could not handle that right now.
She could handle a storm and a maze and a kiss and a killer and a gazebo, but she could not handle her little sister smiling at her like that.
She closed her bedroom door and went to sit on the bed. The room was quiet. Her room. Her bed. Her choice to come and go as she pleased.
She pressed both hands to her cheeks. They were still burning.
She kicked off her ruined shoes and then peeled off her wet stockings.
Her dress was beyond saving. She would give it to Mary in the morning, and Mary would either work a miracle or use it for rags.
Either way, Valeria would never look at it again without thinking about the rain and the garden wall and Edward’s taste.
She washed her face, changed into her nightshift, then got into bed. The sheets were cool and clean, and the pillow smelled of lavender. She lay on her back and stared at the canopy, unable to sleep.
She thought about the kiss. She replayed it from the beginning.
The stone wall against her back. Cold seeping through the wet fabric.
His hand sliding up the back of her neck.
Fingers tangling in her wet hair, tilting up her face.
The first touch of his mouth against hers, firm and certain and warm.
The shock of it. Not pain. Not fear. Just surprise that this was what it felt like, this thing she had read about in novels and imagined in the dark and assumed she would never experience because Gordon had taken everything from her, including the possibility of being touched by someone she chose.
She had pulled him closer. She remembered that clearly.
Her hands on his coat, fingers gripping the wet wool, pulling him in.
She had not planned that. Her body had done it of its own accord, as though it knew what it wanted before her mind had caught up.
And the sound he had made when she pulled him closer, low in his throat…
she had felt that sound in places she did not have words for.
Her mind drifted to the almost-kiss in the gazebo.
His thumb hovering over the corner of her mouth.
The heat of his fingers before they touched her skin.
Her lips parting. The want, physical and immediate and impossible to deny, that had flooded through her like warm water when his thumb almost grazed her mouth.
And then the way he stopped. No demand for an explanation. Just distance, immediate and absolute, as though her push had triggered something within him, some deeply embedded response that said, She said stop, and stop was the only word that mattered.
Gordon would not have stopped.
The thought came unbidden and cold. She pushed it away. She did not want to think about Gordon right now. She did not want to compare him to Edward. But the comparison existed, whether she wanted it or not.
Gordon would not have stopped. He would have pushed back. He would have reminded her that she was his wife and that wives had duties and that her resistance was an inconvenience, a character flaw, a problem to be solved with pressure and silence and the withholding of food.
Edward stopped. Every time. Without question. Without making her feel guilty for asking.
That single fact, that one simple act of basic decency, was worth more to her than every grand gesture every man in that dining hall could have made.
She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow.
For three years, she had trained herself to feel nothing. It was the only defense she had. Nothing could not be used against her. Nothing could not be taken away. If she did not want, she could not be punished for wanting. If she did not hope, she could not be crushed when hope was denied.
Edward had undone three years of careful nothing in a single afternoon.
She groaned and whispered a word she had learned from John and would never say in public. Then she rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
A soft knock sounded at the door. It was Mary, with warm milk and a knowing look.
“You missed supper, Your Grace.”
“I was not hungry.”
“You are always hungry. You have been hungry for three years.” Mary set the cup on the nightstand. “Drink it. And stop thinking so loudly. I can hear you from the corridor.”
Valeria took the milk. It was warm in her hands. “Mary.”
“Your Grace?”
“Have you ever been kissed?”
Mary’s expression did not falter. “That is not a question I answer for duchesses, Your Grace.”
“That means yes.”
“That means drink your milk, love. You need sleep more than you need answers tonight.”
Mary watched her finish it, took the cup, and squeezed her hand once before straightening.
“You did well today. Whatever happens with that man, you did well.” The door clicked shut behind her.
Valeria lay in the dark, with the taste of warm milk on her tongue and the memory of Edward’s lips on hers.
I am going to marry a man I have known for three days. And I cannot wait.
The thought terrified her. She held onto it anyway.