Chapter 5 - West
Five
West
I’m no stranger to the odd creaks and moans the manor house makes as it settles through the night.
What with the ocean wind constantly battering the windows, the tapping pipes and creaking floors, the ticking clocks, and the soft, exhaled breeze between rooms, this building is never truly silent. Not even when I’m the only soul awake.
But I also know the sound a floorboard makes when shifting under a person’s body weight, and my hind brain recognizes when there’s another human nearby.
Unseen but undeniable. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle to attention, and I pause in scribbling my notes on the Iceland expedition to collect rare mosses.
Nothing. No words, no sounds of shifting clothing, not even another person’s breath.
Christ. It’s past midnight, there’s a vicious headache stabbing my left eye, and I don’t have the time or energy for this nonsense.
“Who’s out there?” I call.
But of course, on some deeper, sedimentary layer of my brain, I already know who will push the door open and enter the study.
I’ve been hyper aware of Madeleine Price and her presence since the minute she set foot on my island, and tonight is no different.
When she cracks the door open and peers inside, her cheeks flushed with nerves, there’s not a single cell in my body that is surprised.
“Madeleine,” I rasp.
She blushes harder. “It’s Maddy, actually.”
I jerk my head toward the center of the room, irrationally muddled by the idea of calling this young woman by a nickname. It’s the name she uses with everyone, surely, and yet it feels so intimate. “Come in, then. You’re letting the warm air escape.”
Madeleine—Maddy—clears her throat and slips into the study, closing the door carefully behind her.
For a moment, I can only look at her and blink.
It’s surreal enough to have this late night visitor, when I’ve never had company here after midnight before.
Hearing her move around outside the room, seeing her poke her pretty face around the door frame—these things already have a certain dreamlike quality. Can I be sure she’s real?
But as I get an unobstructed view of my most troublesome housemaid, that surreal feeling tips over to the absurd.
She’s dressed like someone who just raided a lost property box, in black sweatpants, an over-sized men’s red sweater, and a pale blue knitted scarf.
The ends of her sweatpants are tucked into the sort of chunky hiking socks that we used to wear on our winter expeditions.
Her caramel hair is swept up in a messy topknot.
She looks ridiculous. My mouth twitches, a trapped laugh bubbling in my chest.
“I made you these.” Maddy thrusts a plate of cookies in my direction, though she’s still standing all the way over by the door. “Mrs Ainslie said you missed dinner.”
My stomach growls right on cue, as though agreeing with my bad-tempered cook. It’s loud enough that Maddy clearly hears it, and now her mouth tugs up on one corner as she fights a laugh too.
As though I’m ridiculous.
Perhaps I am.
Honestly, look at the pair of us. On paper, Madeleine Price and I have absolutely nothing in common—not our upbringing, our education, our careers, our personalities—and yet here we are, staring at each other across this fire-lit study, trying not to laugh at how nonsensical the other is. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.
Leaning back in my desk chair, I beckon Maddy over. Suddenly, my shoulders are loose and my chest feels light. The headache from earlier has dulled to a vague throb, and I feel expansive. Genial.
After all, what harm could a few baked goods do?
“They’re still warm,” Maddy says, setting the plate carefully on one of the few patches of my desk which is not already strewn with papers. “Would you like coffee with them? Hot chocolate? Milk? I could run back to the kitchen—”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Though the sweet, buttery scent of cookies should be evidence that this is truly happening, some part of me thinks that if Maddy leaves this room, she’ll disappear. Melt back into the shadows that she sprang from.
I don’t want that. Not yet.
The fire crackles in the grate across the room, dancing across the stack of logs I lit an hour or so ago.
Maddy glances over her shoulder, like she’s only just noticed where all the heat and light are coming from.
While she’s turned away, my gaze swoops over the sliver of her throat bared by her scarf. Her smooth cheekbone.
“Do you always work this late?” she asks.
My eyes hold hers when Maddy turns back.
“Often, yes.”
“What are you working on?”
My chest thuds. When was the last time another person took an interest in my work, beyond distant academics on the mainland and beyond? When was the last time someone asked me in person, their flesh and blood in the same room as mine, our lungs sharing the same air?
It knocks me sideways. My throat sticks, and I have to cough to clear it before I can speak.
“These are expedition notes from a trip we took to Iceland about twelve years ago, in search of rare mosses. I went on many scientific expeditions across the globe before…”
A sharp ache lances through my thigh beneath the desk. Maddy’s eyes drop down too, like she can see my ruined limb through the wood.
“Well. When I was younger,” I finish awkwardly.
“But I was never very diligent about writing up extensive notes for publication. I shared our findings, yes, with the research community, but in terms of writing everything up properly… for full books rather than articles… I always put that off for another day.”
“I do that with my laundry,” Maddy teases softly, turning to perch on the edge of the desk. She plucks one of her own cookies off the plate and takes a large bite, her teeth sinking into the golden disc. A few crumbs drop onto my papers, but for once, I really don’t mind.
“Yes. My procrastination was rather more dire than that, but I suppose it’s ultimately the same impulse.” My smile feels strange on my face. Alien. I’m not sure whether I’m forcing the expression without really feeling it, or whether it’s been so long since I smiled that the muscles have stiffened.
“My friends and colleagues—the others on those trips—sometimes pushed me to write everything up, to publish properly, but I always told them there would be time for that once we were too old to risk our necks in the wilderness. In the meantime, we had the world to see.”
Of course, those friends never grew old. And now here I am, alone with my notes and sketches and samples, trying to wade through years and years of put-off work, desperate to have it all mean something. Working myself ragged in their memory.
It’s like Maddy senses the drop in my mood. She nudges the plate of cookies toward me with the tip of one finger and, huffing out a breath, I pluck a warm cookie from the top of the pile.
My stomach growls again, loud and defiant, as I take my first bite. My body rebuking me for turning away Mrs Ainslie’s dinner tray, no doubt. But as the sweet, buttery, and subtly spiced flavor spreads across my tongue, I can’t help but be glad that I turned away that food earlier.
This is delicious.
Heaven-sent.
And…
“Cinnamon,” I say thickly after swallowing my first bite. Maddy smirks, holding my gaze, and heat surges across my skin beneath my clothes. My abs tense, and my hand trembles slightly where it holds the rest of the cookie aloft.
Cinnamon.
Is this…? Does she…?
“They’re good.” I finish the cookie in two more bites, chewing carefully, mind whirring as I shift in my desk chair.
There’s probably nothing deeper going on.
No silent flirtatious message. This is an innocent gesture from an employee to her boss, to make up for a clumsy interaction earlier today. That’s all.
“So you don’t mind the taste of cinnamon,” Maddy murmurs, the firelight catching on burnished strands of her hair. Her eyes are big as they watch me, tracking each bob of my throat as I swallow. “Just the smell.”
My head shakes, and Christ, she must hear my chest thundering now. Even with the wind rattling the windows and the hiss of the fire, Maddy must hear the ragged thump of my heart.
“I like the smell too,” I grit out. “A little too much, perhaps. It’s distracting.”
A slow smile spreads across Maddy’s face, pleased and mischievous.
“It’s my soap, by the way. Cinnamon soap.”
“Huh,” I say, like a prize idiot.
And I’ve handed this woman power over me, even more power than she already held, but as Maddy hops down and rounds the desk toward me, I can’t bring myself to regret it.
“I’d like to read these someday.” Maddy pauses at my side, peering down at the jumble of papers. “Once you’ve put them in some kind of order.”
“Ah, yes. Alright.” It’s so hard to think straight with her standing so close to me. Close enough to feel her body heat tickling my right side. “Do you—are you interested in mosses?”
“Nope.” Maddy pops the ‘p’, grinning down at me. My chest tightens. “But I’d be interested in stories of you hunting down mosses. And lichens. And ferns and flowers and trees and whatever other plants you’ve taken a fancy to.”
“All of them,” I tell her honestly, pushing my chair back and spinning to face my housemaid like a man in a trance.
Maybe I am. Or maybe this is a dream after all, and Madeleine Price is sleeping sweetly in her attic bedroom while I toss and turn wherever I’ve crashed into unconsciousness this time. “I like them all.”
“Greedy,” she murmurs, settling onto my lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I let her. Of course I fucking do.
Her warmth, her weight, the way her arms loop around my neck—it’s all sensory overload after years and years of white static. When was the last time I was touched? Even by a friend; a platonic hug?
I can’t get enough. My arms snake around her waist, hitching her tight to my front, and Maddy’s breathy little laugh goes directly to my cock.
“I thought you hated me,” Maddy says.
My head shake is slow. Stupid. See, this is why I lost my mind over the lingering atoms of her scent—because this woman takes a sledgehammer to my IQ.
That fact has irritated me all month, but with Maddy perched on my lap, her fingertips carding through the short hair at the base of my skull, I can’t summon that ire.
All I can do is inhale deeply through my nose, and try to commit every detail of this maybe-dream to memory.
When Maddy leans in and kisses me softly, plump lips grazing against mine—my rib cage cracks open. I’m wrecked. It’s all I can do to hold her tight against my chest and kiss her back, tender and cautious, my shoulders bunched with tension, waiting all the while for the other shoe to drop.
For her to slap me and leap out of my arms, railing against lecherous employers.
For her to lean back, wrinkle her nose, and give a disappointed shrug.
For her to burst into giggles against my lips, making it clear that this was all some silly prank.
Instead, Maddy tilts her head and sighs, parting her lips and sweeping her tongue against mine.
My fingertips dig into her back, burrowing into the loose knit of her sweater, and I’m breathing harder now, panting with barely restrained desire.
I’m harder than granite beneath her ass, and Maddy knows, because she keeps squirming against the rigid line of my cock.
Her fingers play with the buttons of my waistcoat, like she’s considering flicking them open.
“Perhaps,” I force out between kisses, each word an Olympic effort, “we should leave it there for tonight. I don’t entirely… trust myself.”
Maddy’s smile slants against my mouth, and she nips my bottom lip.
“With what, your lordship?”
“With you.” My hands roam up and down Maddy’s sides, thrilling at the nip of her waist and the flare of her hips. There’s a bombshell of a body hidden under these clothes. “If we keep on like this… I don’t trust myself to be a gentleman.”
My hips rock up unbidden, punctuating my words, and Maddy’s delighted laugh echoes through the study. Over her shoulder, the fire has banked lower, the logs crumbling to ash.
“Would that be so wrong?”
Yes. No.
But I’m not certain yet whether this is real or a dream, and if it’s all a fevered nighttime hallucination, I’d rather not come in my sheets like a teenager.
Besides, it’s late. Maddy came here primarily out of guilt. If we’re ever going to do that, I’d like for her to at least sleep on it first. Come to her decision with a clear head. That’s what a gentleman would require, correct?
So it’s settled.
“Come to me again tomorrow.” It comes out clipped, like an order, but thankfully Maddy takes no offense.
She leans back on my lap, arms looped around my neck once again, and when my thigh spasms in pain, thankfully she doesn’t seem to notice.
“If you still want this after a proper night’s sleep, find me again. ”
“But you’re so good at hiding from me.” Maddy flicks me gently on the nose, and I startle like a cat. She laughs, throaty and sweet.
“I won’t hide,” I promise. As if I could, after this. It will take every ounce of my self control not to go to her, prowling after her through these halls like a wild animal. “Now go to sleep.”
My hand swats her ass, and Maddy squeaks happily before finally hopping out of my lap. She swipes another cookie, then sashays to the study door, her hips swaying in her ridiculous outfit. The clothes don’t matter. It works for me.
“Sweet dreams, your lordship.” Maddy winks from the doorway as she pulls the door closed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hope so.
For the sake of my sanity… I hope so.