Chapter Five
“His Grace is not receiving visitors today, miss.”
Fiona regarded the footman—Thomas, she had learned, a young man with a perpetually anxious expression and ears that protruded in a manner almost endearing—and felt her jaw set.
“I am not a visitor. I am a houseguest.”
“Yes, miss. His Grace is not receiving houseguests either.”
“Then he is receiving no one at all?”
Thomas hesitated, plainly uncomfortable. “I only know he has given orders not to be disturbed.”
Three days. Three days since the training hall—since that devastating kiss, since Christian had looked at her as though hope itself had flickered to life in his dark eyes.
Three days of closed doors and deserted parlours and solitary meals sent to her chamber because His Grace was “otherwise engaged.”
He is avoiding me. The coward.
“Very well.” Fiona offered Thomas a composed smile, the sort ladies were taught to wear when they meant the opposite of what they appeared.
“Be so good as to inform His Grace that I shall take tea in the yellow parlour at four o’clock.
If he does not attend, I shall conclude he intends to remain secluded indefinitely—and I shall act accordingly. ”
Thomas blinked. “Act, miss?”
“Do not look so alarmed. I mean only that I shall cease waiting politely in corridors like an importunate petitioner.” She turned on her heel—her ankle now nearly mended, though a slight limp persisted—and moved down the passage with as much dignity as indignation would allow.
She was furious. She was hurt. And, most mortifying of all, she was ashamed—because she had kissed him back with everything in her, had called his mark beautiful, had offered something tender and perilously unguarded.
In return, he had vanished behind oak and authority, as though she were an inconvenience he could lock away.
This changes nothing, he had said. When the roads clear, you will leave.
Perhaps he had meant it. Perhaps, for him, the kiss had been nothing more than a lapse—a momentary crack in his restraint that he was now desperate to seal. Perhaps she had read promises into those burning eyes and unsteady hands that had never been intended.
Or perhaps he was simply afraid.
Fiona paused at a window overlooking the rain-soaked grounds. The worst of the storm had passed, leaving grey skies and sodden earth, but the roads remained impassable. She was trapped here for at least another week.
Another week of pretending she did not remember the taste of him. The heat of him. The way her name had sounded on his tongue—low and intent, as though it mattered more than it had any right to.
She pressed her forehead to the cold glass and allowed herself one small, quiet moment of despair.
Then she straightened, lifted her chin, and went to prepare for battle.
***
At four o’clock, Fiona sat in the yellow parlour in one of the gowns salvaged from the carriage wreck—her finest among them—a deep green muslin recovered, somewhat miraculously, from her scattered belongings and restored to order by the industrious maids of Thornwick.
Molly had declared the colour most becoming, insisting it lent uncommon brilliance to her eyes. Fiona could not disagree.
Her hair had been arranged in deliberate curls, her posture held to impeccable standards, her expression composed to the point of danger.
The tea service was set. The fire burned steadily. Everything spoke of civilised routine and proper companionship.
The clock struck the quarter hour. The half. The three-quarters.
He did not come.
Fiona set her cup down with a controlled click. Very well. If Christian Hale wished to retreat behind his title and his doors, she would simply have to flush him from his den.
She found him in the library.
It was a room she had not yet truly seen—vast and dim, lined with shelves that rose to the ceiling, their volumes bound in leather and time. Brass-railed ladders waited along the walls, and deep armchairs gathered near a fireplace large enough to swallow a man’s secrets whole.
Christian stood at one of the tall windows with his back to the room.
Whether he had not heard her or had chosen not to acknowledge her, she could not tell.
His hands were clasped behind him, shoulders rigid beneath his dark coat, his head bowed as though he were wrestling with something that gave no quarter.
“You did not come to tea.”
He turned quickly.
For an instant, she saw it—something unguarded in his face, hot and startling, gone as swiftly as it appeared. The familiar composure returned, like a door shut on a draft.
“Miss Hart. I was not aware we had an appointment.”
“I understand you were told I have taken tea in the yellow parlour these past three days, as you were accustomed to doing before then. I did not think a formal invitation was necessary.”
“I was occupied.”
“You were avoiding me.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I do not avoid anything.”
“No?” Fiona stepped further into the room, and the door fell softly closed behind her. “Then what do you call three days of refusals? Courtesy?”
His gaze sharpened, and his voice went cold. “I call it prudence. What occurred in the training hall was an error. I allowed myself to forget what is proper—to forget the distance that must exist between us. I am correcting that.”
“By pretending I am not here?”
“By maintaining boundaries.”
“Boundaries.” The word left her like a blade drawn.
“You kissed me, Your Grace. You did not merely brush my hand in a dance. You pressed me against a wall and took liberties you have not the right to pretend you did not enjoy. Do not speak to me of boundaries as though I am the only one who crossed them.”
Colour rose in his cheeks—quick, unmistakable. The sight was both satisfying and cruel, and she hated that she felt either.
“That is precisely my point.” He turned away, back to the window, as if the landscape offered safer company than she did. “I forgot myself. I behaved in a manner unbecoming a gentleman, and I—”
“You felt something.”
Silence.
Fiona crossed the room until she stood behind him, close enough to see the tightness in his shoulders, the strain in the way he held himself as though refusing to move were the only form of control left to him.
“That is what troubles you,” she said softly. “Not that you kissed me. Not even that you touched me. But that you wished to. That you still do.” Her voice lowered, intimate despite herself. “That you cannot look at me without remembering.”
“Miss Hart.” His tone was taut, restrained to the point of pain. “I am asking you, as a gentleman, to leave.”
“And I am refusing, as a woman who is quite finished with being sent away.”
He turned.
She had prepared herself for anger, for hauteur, for that careful detachment he wore like armour. She had not prepared for the anguish in his eyes—bare and fierce, the look of a man fighting a battle he did not believe he could win.
“You do not understand,” he said, and the words sounded as though they cost him something. “You think this is about propriety—about society, convention, what is and is not done. It is not. It is about you.”
“Me?”
“You are—” He stopped, as though the truth choked him, then forced it through.
“You are the first person in my adult life who has looked at me without recoil. The first who has touched me as though I were something other than a monster to be endured. The first who has made me want—” His voice roughened.
“Want things I had long since convinced myself were not for me.”
“Then why—”
“Because I will ruin it.” His voice cracked, not theatrically, but like a man at the edge of something he cannot name.
“I will ruin you. I have spent eight-and-twenty years being told I am cursed, unwanted, unfit for decent company. I learned solitude because solitude is safe—because alone I cannot disappoint, cannot wound anyone, cannot watch the moment their kindness turns to pity… or worse.”
Fiona stared at him—this impossible, infuriating man who had carried her through a storm, kept vigil at her bedside, kissed her as though he had been starving, and now stood before her offering his deepest fear as though it were a law of nature.
“You are a coward,” she said.
His head lifted sharply, as though she had struck him.
“You heard me.” She stepped closer, driven by something fierce and reckless, something that would not be soothed by fine manners.
“Not because you are afraid—we are all afraid—but because you let fear decide everything. You have chosen loneliness and named it virtue. You have built walls around yourself and then called them protection.”
“You do not know—”
“I know what you have shown me.” Her voice sharpened, steadied.
“I know you carried me through rain and wind as though it cost you nothing, when it must have cost you a great deal. I know you sat by my bed through the night. I know you have been gentle when the world has offered you little but cruelty.” She was close enough now to see the quick pulse in his throat, the uneven breath he tried to master.
“I know the man who kissed me three days ago was not a beast. He was a man—lonely and frightened, yes, but good—who has been told lies about himself for so long he has begun to accept them as truth.”
“Miss Hart—”
“Do not.” She lifted a hand, though it trembled only slightly. “Do not ask me to leave. Do not tell me this was an error. And do not stand there and claim indifference when it is written plainly upon your face. I see you, Your Grace. I see what this costs you.”
He moved before she could draw another breath.
One instant, she stood her ground, flushed with indignation; the next, his hand struck the bookshelf beside her head, palm flat against the wood, effectively caging her between his arm and the rows of leather-bound volumes.
He did not touch her—not quite—but his body was close enough that the heat of him pressed in from every side.
His face hovered inches from hers. His breath came unevenly. His eyes burned.
“You wish to know what I feel?” His voice had dropped, roughened into something dark and unguarded.
“I feel as though I stand upon the edge of a precipice, and you bid me step forward without knowing whether there is ground beneath my feet. I feel every hour spent in your company drawing me further from the careful solitude I have constructed—and I no longer know how to stop the descent. I feel that if I kiss you again—if I so much as touch you—I shall never find the strength to release you.”
Fiona’s heart thundered. She was acutely aware of him—of the clean scent of soap and sandalwood, of the restrained power in the arm braced beside her, of the dangerous proximity of his mouth.
“Then do not release me,” she whispered.
Whatever fragile restraint he clung to gave way.
His mouth crashed into hers. His free hand fisted in her hair, tilting her head back to deepen the kiss, and she moaned against his lips as her body arched into his.
This bore no resemblance to the kiss in the training hall. That had been awakening. This was ruin.
He kissed her as though starved—thorough, intent, almost reverent in its desperation. She answered in kind, her hands fisting in his coat, dragging him closer, heedless of crumpled linen and displaced cravat. The world narrowed to breath and heat and the fierce glide of his mouth against hers.
He pressed her more firmly against the shelves, one thick thigh sliding between hers in a way that made stars burst behind her eyes. His mouth traced a burning path down her throat, teeth grazing her pulse point, and she gasped his name like a plea.
“Fiona.” He groaned it against her skin, rough with need. “Fiona, I—”
He stilled.
She felt it the instant it happened—the sharp return of discipline. The way his body went rigid, not with desire but with restraint. His hand loosened in her hair. His thigh withdrew by a fraction.
He bowed his head, pressing his forehead briefly against her shoulder, breathing as though he had run a great distance. She could feel the tremor in him—the effort it cost to stop.
“I cannot,” he said hoarsely. “Not like this. Not driven by impulse and half-mad longing. You deserve more than to be taken in a moment of lost control against a bookshelf.”
“I am not concerned with deserving—”
“I am.” He lifted his head, and the look in his eyes stole the air from her lungs.
Desire still burned there, but it was tempered now by something deeper—something steadier.
“You have given me more in a week than I have received in a lifetime. You have looked at me as though I matter. The least I can offer in return is honour.”
“And if I do not want honour?” she asked, breathless and unsteady. “What if I merely want you?”
His eyes closed briefly, as though the question struck him somewhere perilously vulnerable. She watched the struggle play out across his features—want against conscience, fear against hope.
When he opened them again, desire had not vanished. It had been harnessed.
“Then you shall have me,” he said quietly. “When I can give you more than secrecy and stolen embraces. I have no wish to take what is freely given only to discover I was unfit to receive it.”
“You would not be taking,” she said, her voice unsteady but resolute. “I am not some fragile prize to be stolen. I am choosing.”
Something shifted in his expression at that—something humbled, almost awed.
“That,” he said softly, “is precisely why I must be certain.”
“Certain of what?”
“That I can offer you more than hunger.”
He stepped back then.
The loss of his warmth was immediate and almost painful. Fiona had to steady herself against the shelf, her pulse still racing, her lips tingling.
“I must go,” he said, his voice still roughened by what they had nearly done. “If I remain—”
“I know.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, as though committing the sight of her to memory.
Then he turned and crossed to the door.
His hand rested upon the frame. He did not look back when he spoke.
“Tomorrow. Four o’clock. The yellow parlour.”
“You will come?”
“I will.” A pause. “I find I am no longer capable of staying away.”
The door closed softly behind him.
Fiona remained where she was, leaning against the bookshelf, one hand pressed to her racing heart. A breathless, incredulous laugh escaped her—half triumph, half disbelief.
He was impossible. Exasperating. Quite possibly the most infuriatingly honour-bound man she had ever encountered.
And she was falling for him—completely, helplessly, without any sensible intention of stopping.
What was happening to her, she did not know.
Only that she did not wish it to end.