Chapter 17
Seventeen
It had all gone terribly wrong. Catherine sighed into the darkness and turned over in her bed and enumerated the ways circumstance had conspired against her.
First, Roger. To be confronted by him after so many years was a blow. Because to see him was to be reminded of how she had been with him and how she could so easily be that way again with James.
And James himself. His eyes, his hair, his body—all of him, really—and the desire he ignited even as she struggled to maintain herself as the proper Widow Lovelock.
These two men. One from her past, one in the present. These two men, who made her so wild that she feared she might be lost forever, who made her feel so apart from her normal self that she resorted to imagining a demon. When it was really just her and her own uncontrollable and shameful appetites.
Finally, that contemptible painting. Which brought her back to the girl she had been with Roger and the woman she might be with James.
She had to leave. Go back to London. Retreat in order to rebuild her composure. Find a way clear to marrying Sir Francis so she could have the safe haven she needed.
Her door—the door she had thought was locked—opened.
“Who’s there?” she called out. The door closed.
“Shhhhh.” A rustle. The smell of roses. “Cath.” A voice rasping with desire. A voice that had seduced her hundreds of times in the past. Now, a voice only associated with the pain of misplaced love, unfulfilled desire, and her own failings.
She fumbled at her bedside table and lit a candle. Roger Siddons stood not three feet from her. He wore only a shirt and breeches.
“Catherine,” he said. “You are as beautiful as ever.”
“That’s a lie. Neither of us are as we used to be. We have grown old. I am an old, respectable woman, and you must leave my bedchamber.”
Siddons took a step closer to the bed. “Or what? Or you will scream and bring the entire household into this room to see that you, an old, respectable woman, the intended of Sir Francis, were entertaining a gentleman in your bedchamber?”
“There’s no gentleman here.”
He laughed softly and took another step closer.
“At least we can agree on that. I am no gentleman.” He reached out and cupped her breast through her nightdress.
“And you are no lady. We should share a bed one more time. Let me make you moan again, Cath, like I used to.” He ran his thumb over her nipple, and Catherine hated herself for the involuntary stiffening of that same nipple and the spasm of her trunk that followed.
There was a moment just after her body betrayed her with its tremble of lust, with Roger’s thumb still on her hardened peak, when she was tempted to lie back, pull up her nightdress, and let him ravish her.
Hadn’t she ached for months to be touched in just such a way?
Not by him, true, but she knew James would never touch her that way. That dream must be put to death.
“Suck on my finger, Cath.” Roger put the forefinger of his other hand in her mouth.
Oh, now she remembered the vile degradation. His misuse of her. His violence when she had wanted love. She remembered why she looked like a hunted creature in the portrait that hung in the gallery of this house.
She considered biting his finger but did not want any part of him inside her. Instead, she reached up and grabbed his wrist with one hand and pulled his finger from her mouth with the other and began to bend the finger backward, intending to break it.
He gasped in pain and let go of her breast and made a fist with his free hand and was poised to strike her just as the door to her bedchamber crashed open and a body came flying in.
“Ho, ho, ho.” James caught Siddons’ raised arm. “This seems quite unwise. No fisticuffs in the bedchamber. Tut, tut, tut. Something—or someone—might get broken. We can’t,” he hiccoughed, “have that, can we?” He laughed.
Siddons tried to pull his arm away, but James kept hold of it. Catherine continued to bend back the forefinger of Siddons’ other hand.
“Let go of me, Cath. And you, too, Cavendish, you fool.”
“Ah, Mrs. Lovelock,” James said, grinning, “I seem to be in the wrong bedchamber. How stupid of me. And Mr. Siddons appears to have made the same mistake, hasn’t he?
Two of us idiots at the same time. But perhaps if Mr. Siddons promises to leave your room without any fuss, you’ll let go of his finger, hmmm? ”
“I thought I might break it off and keep it as a piece of licking candy. Seeing how he stuck it in my mouth and wanted me to suck it,” Catherine said evenly.
“Mr. Stiddens!” James said in a shocked tone.
“How crude.” He giggled. “I suppose you’re lucky it’s not the little finger, eh?
Get it? Or your sugar stick?” He laughed and then stopped and looked puzzled.
“Wait, those mean the same thing, don’t they?
” He sat down on the bed, still holding Siddons’ arm.
“Let me go, both of you,” Siddons seethed and struggled.
“Shall we let go on the count of three, Mrs. Lovelock? One, two, three.”
Against her better judgment, Catherine let go of Siddons’ wrist and finger just as James let go of his arm, and Siddons, who had been pulling against both of them, stumbled backwards and almost fell.
“Good night, Mr. Shittens,” James said and collapsed back onto the bed. “Upsidaisy.”
“You’ll pay for this, Cath,” Siddons said as he backed out the door, nursing his injured finger in his other hand.
She got up from the bed and crossed to the door in her nightdress and bare feet.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m rich, Roger.”
She closed the door and pushed a chair up against it, wedging the chair’s back under the handle. Obviously, the lock on the door was of no use.
She walked back to her bed. James lay across the foot of it, face up, eyes closed, his legs hanging off the side, feet almost touching the floor. He was fully dressed in his boots and tailcoat and cravat and plainly had not yet been to bed.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Lovelock?” he said with his eyes still closed.
“I’m fine, my lord. And yourself?”
He kept his eyes closed but fluttered one hand in the air. “Oh, I’m five sheets in the wind, quite as usual.”
“Not three sheets?” Catherine found her dressing gown on the chair next to the bed and put it on.
“Why settle for three when you can have five?” He rolled onto his side and opened one eye and peered at her. “I say, that fellow is a nasty piece of work, what?”
“Yes,” Catherine said. “And I do wonder at your mistaking my room for yours when your bedchamber is all the way over in the other wing.”
He closed his open eye, rolled onto his back again, and groaned. “Yes, I’m such a fool, aren’t I? Would you mind if I just lay here for a minute?”
“Lord Daventry, I am grateful for your help, but you must—”
“I’m awfully dizzy and I’ll just . . . lie here . . . in case that dreadful man comes back . . . just for a minute. I’ll be your guard dog . . . woof, woof.”
Catherine was reminded of the mastiff in the body of a whippet and masquerading as a Maltese.
“Lord Daventry—”
But it was too late. His breathing had become deep and even and sonorous.
“Lord Daventry!”
But he could not be awoken.
In time, Catherine slid off his boots. She found an extra blanket and placed it over him. She got into the bed herself, curling into a small ball at the head of the bed so she would not kick him as he sprawled across the foot.
She wondered at his slurred speech and his sleeping so heavily.
Because when she had bent over him to cover him against the cold, she had come quite close to his face.
His breath had been clean and sweet, with no trace of alcohol on it.
Just as it had been at Madame Beauchamp’s.
And as it had been in the alley last night, when he had tasted of apple.
Drunk. Yet without alcohol on his breath. As mystifying as the man himself.
James had no plan when he burst into the room.
He had been lolling in a wing chair set in a cozy nook down the corridor when he saw Roger Siddons go into Catherine’s bedchamber.
James felt sure there had been no invitation issued to Mr. Siddons.
Or was that merely wishful thinking inspired by jealousy?
No matter. When he saw Siddons’ upraised fist, he immediately assumed a dense state of inebriation as he had found absurdity was the best way to subdue violence.
He was quite pleased by how calm Catherine had been as she held on to the vile man’s finger.
And once Siddons had turned tail and quit the room, she continued to be possessed of a perfect equanimity.
But James had no intention of leaving her bedchamber, just yet.
There was evil in this house. His place was here, and he wasn’t at all tired.
In fact, he felt profoundly awake, lying on her bed with her scent in the air, the soft sounds of her putting on her dressing gown.
And so he pretended to doze as he had successfully many times before.
James was surprised to feel his legs raised into the air and his boots drawn off. A blanket over him and a sense she was near. The movement of the bed as she got into it herself. He turned his head away from her so he could open his eyes and look at the embers of the fire.
He was still awake an hour later when his hand was caressed. He turned his head slowly and saw she had moved herself parallel to him in her sleep and was facing him, her eyes shut.
“Catherine?” he whispered and closed his hand over hers.
“Um,” she said. “Jamie.”
She smiled a little in her sleep and withdrew her hand from his grasp. Then her face went slack, her smile melted away, and she said no more.