Chapter 23 #2
“A syllogism,” I said, smiling at his astonishment. “Fashionable garments closely fit the body; your suspect was a dandy; ergo, your suspect’s knife reveals that he planned to sneak into the house on the night in question.”
“Brilliant,” he murmured.
I colored. The gleam in his eyes made me feel unsettled, but when he sank a hand into my hair and captured my mouth, I stopped thinking. An aching sensation burst over my skin and spread throughout my body.
“We should stop,” I gasped, after we’d been kissing for what felt like hours.
His groan was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life: low and desperate and breathless, as if it pained him to move away from me.
We emerged into the icy cold just in time to encounter Sophonisba, her ermine cloak trailing on the bricks.
“Happy returns of the day, Miss Ainsworth,” Godric said, as calm as if he hadn’t set my body on fire with a groan, the one still reverberating in my bones.
She startled, turned toward us, and raised a glove. “Merry Christmas.”
I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. The woman had demanded that young boys in her care be whipped, even if she hadn’t outright demanded the poker. I credited that to my husband; I could imagine Burnsby snatching it up in a rage.
What’s more, she had tried to put Peony in the stewpot.
“Will your concert tonight include German or French?” Godric asked.
Sophonisba cast him an unnerved glance. “Lord Burnsby has selected three of his favorite hymns, all in English.”
(Inward groan: “A Virgin Unspotted” was sure to make an appearance.)
“You’re singing the soprano part, I assume?” Godric said. “As you did when you sang at the Théatre National de la rue de la Loi?”
“Yes.”
“Yet no hymns are sung there,” Godric said, smiling the way a wolf might—all teeth.
“I am an opera singer,” she said haughtily.
“Were you in Paris in the 1770s?” he asked. “In 1774, perhaps? Your portrait is dated 1776. Batoni is Italian, but you did say that you had performed in Paris before Rome.”
“From 1768,” she said shortly. With that she scurried off in the direction of Burnsby’s chamber.
“Why on earth did you ask those questions?” I asked. “No wonder she described you as a snapping turtle. Snap! Snap! Snap!”
“I wanted to know exactly when she was singing in Paris. She wasn’t performing at the Théatre National, because it didn’t open until the early ’90s. Burnsby must have met her there in ’74 or ’75.”
“I wonder how he enticed her to return, given she was supposedly a renowned singer?” We turned a corner of the colonnade.
“If she was famous, she wouldn’t claim to have sung at the nonexistent Théatre National,” Godric pointed out.
“Why did you want to know the year she was in Paris?”
He shrugged. “Just curious. That snow would make a perfect angel.” He nodded toward the quadrangle, which was covered by snow as white as the icing on an expensive fairy cake made with sugar, not honey.
Tess would be displeased if I returned to the room soaked. But I wanted to see that expression on Godric’s face again, the one I saw last time I made an angel.
I toppled backward, creating wings that feathered above my head as I strained every finger to make them as large as possible.
Godric’s eyes laughed at my enthusiasm—until I spread my legs to create my angel’s flowing skirts. Once, twice, a third time, trying to make the skirts wider than humanly possible. Instead of feeling cold and wet, my legs felt aching and tender—because of his expression.
The ruddy streak in his cheeks and the stifled sound in his throat weren’t the result of the wind or chilly air.
The sheen in his heavy-lidded, dark green eyes?
The way he shifted from one leg to another, his gloved hands clenching as if stopping himself from snatching me up, as if I were a fairy cake?
“Is your angel finished?” he asked, his voice hoarse and broken.
I grinned at him, shameless. “One more sweep of her skirts, just to make sure.”
My cheeks were blazing as I arched my back, but I banished embarrassment by watching his face, registering the way he stared at me. The way his breath caught in his throat. The greed and surprised happiness in his face.
The desire flashing between us should have melted the snow, but instead, he reached down and caught my waist, lifting me into the air so that my angel kept every feather.
He held me tightly before my feet touched the ground, so tightly that I felt a stiff shape against my waist. Something like what I’d seen in his breeches, once.
Or twice. When I caught him staring at me in the library, for example.
He groaned and set me on my feet so suddenly that my teeth jarred.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Bloody hell.”
“You’re sorry?”
“A lady might be offended to feel evidence of desire.”
“I forgive you,” I said, solemn and laughing at once. I leaned in and whispered, “Someday we’ll make an angel together.” I turned to look at my angel. Her fingers were perfectly feathered, and her skirts fluttered where my boots had turned out.
His expression overwhelmed me: the gratitude and . . . whatever other emotions were there. “I’d better go,” I said. And then I waved, as if we’d just met, and dashed to the door of my room.
The moment I walked in, Tess grabbed me, scolded me for getting my mantua wet, and rushed me into a bath scented with almond oil and flecks of gold. “To give your skin luster,” she reported.
Clearly the competition would cover every aspect of a femme de chambre’s responsibilities.
Tess was drawing her brush through my hair for the hundredth time before I realized that Godric had deliberately distracted me by proposing the snow angel. He hadn’t wanted me to ask about Sophonisba’s stay in Paris.
Yet I doubted he would raise the subject without a good reason.
Puzzle as I might, I couldn’t imagine why it mattered when Sophonisba sang opera in Paris.