Chapter 19
The house had settled into its evening quiet by the time the last of the candles in the drawing room were extinguished.
The girls had been ushered to their rooms by Clara, with her soft capability and the understanding that the day had been long enough for everyone.
Before departing, she had looked at Josephine across the threshold with an expression that communicated everything and required nothing spoken aloud.
The fires in the corridors had burned low.
The moors, dark beyond every window, gave no quarter to the lingering light.
Josephine stood at the window of the duchess’s sitting room in the traveling gown she had been married in, the plain gold band warm against her finger.
She had been standing there for some minutes, not thinking, not not thinking.
The day had accumulated in her in layers, and she was allowing it to settle, the way sediment does when the water finally stops moving.
She heard him in the corridor before she saw him. Not the heavy steps she had spent a year dreading, but the placid, deliberate footfall of a man who moved through space as though he had considered it and decided it was his to cross. He paused at the open door, and she turned.
Alistair stood in the doorway with his coat still on, though he had removed his cravat at some point in the hours since dinner, and the absence of it lent him a different quality than she had yet observed.
Less the duke, more simply the man. The firelight from behind her reached him at an angle and caught the auburn in his hair, and she thought, not for the first time and not with any great surprise, that he was very handsome when he was not attempting to be.
Which was always, because he never attempted it.
He did not speak immediately. He was looking at her the way he did when he was taking account of something, and she had learned in the few days of their acquaintance that this meant he was about to say something that required saying.
“Josephine.” He kept his voice low, as though the house were already asleep and he was unwilling to disturb it. “There is a matter I wished to raise.” A pause. “A question, more precisely.”
She waited.
“I would like you to move to my chambers tonight.” The words were quiet and entirely without ceremony, as though he had turned the matter over a sufficient number of times and concluded that directness was the only approach worth taking.
“I want you close. If it is agreeable to you.” He held her gaze without shifting.
“I want to wake in the morning and have the first thing I see be you.”
The room was very still.
She was certain she had heard him correctly. And yet.
“Move? To the—” She stopped. Began again. “The ducal chambers.”
“Yes.”
She did not know, exactly, what she had expected of the wedding night.
She had not permitted herself many expectations, having been comprehensively schooled by her first marriage in the cost of them.
She had supposed that whatever occurred would occur on territory that was already hers, the duchess’s rooms, the familiar blue drapes and the worn carpet and the narrow bed she had occupied this past year or more, which was at least her own in the sense that it had only ever been hers.
She had not imagined being asked. She had not imagined being asked with that word, close, as though proximity to her were something he had decided he wanted, not for propriety or convenience or the pragmatic business of producing an heir, but simply because he wanted it.
Because waking to find her there was worth experiencing.
She was astonished. She was, she realized, moved entirely beyond the careful system of composed expectations she had constructed over the course of a year to protect herself from hoping for too much.
“Yes,” she said, when she trusted her voice. “It is quite agreeable to me.”
His face altered fractionally. Not relief. She did not think he had admitted the possibility of the alternative. More a settling, a confirmation of something already decided, the expression of a man who has cast and found the ground firm.
“Good.” He offered her his arm. “Then let us go.”
She had only entered the ducal chambers twice, when Alistair had invited her, and the night she had the audacity to wait for him.
In a year of residence at Fortunestone Hall, she had passed the door in the south tower wing a hundred times.
She had navigated every other corridor, had learned the complaints of every drafty stair, could have walked the route from the kitchen garden to the west library in the dark.
But the ducal chambers had been Jerome’s, and Jerome had come to her if he came at all, and the question of what lay beyond that door had occupied perhaps a single incurious moment before ceasing to matter.
When she had last visited, she had been distracted by the responsibility of the babe growing in her womb, and the girls who needed her help, and Clara who needed her protection, so she had not taken much stock of her surroundings.
Now the room received her with the atmosphere of a chamber that had been claimed rather than inhabited.
Swept clean of its previous occupant and made functional by a man who did not require comfort so much as order.
The massive hearth was lit, the fire well-established and throwing substantial warmth across the stone flags.
The four-poster bed with its deep green velvet hangings rose against the far wall, high and formal, built for a grander century, and yet the rest of the room was almost aggressively functional.
A worktable against the wall bore ledgers and correspondence in organized stacks.
The night table held two worn books, their spines creased with the marks of long use.
There were no ornaments on the mantel, save for a small framed miniature she could not yet see clearly, and the faintest trace in the air of cedar and wool and black tea was distinctly his.
She crossed toward the hearth, and the miniature resolved itself as she drew closer. A man and a woman, painted in the small careful style of the previous generation, standing together with the ease of people who were deeply connected. The woman had Alistair’s deep red hair. The man had his jaw.
“Your parents,” she said.
“Yes.” He had followed her and stood a few feet behind. “My mother painted it herself, when I was small. She is quite accomplished.”
Josephine studied the small painted faces and felt the warmth of the fire and thought about what it meant that this was here, kept and kept carefully, beside the bed of a man who otherwise owned nothing she would have described as sentimental. She thought it meant a great deal.
* * *
He watched her move, reveling in the moment. That was what Josephine did. She made his whirling thoughts slow down so he could breathe and enjoy the success he had built, rather than race ahead to the next challenge, the next obstacle, just … the next.
She had gone to the miniature with her serene purposefulness. She was a woman who paid genuine attention to what she looked at and did not merely perform looking.
He thought, watching her profile in the firelight, that she was one of the most singularly composed people he had ever encountered, and that it was not the composure of a woman who felt nothing.
It was the composure of a woman who had felt everything and found, despite it, a way to remain standing.
The distinction was not subtle, if one was paying attention, and he planned to pay attention for a lifetime.
She turned from the miniature and found his eyes, and the expression in hers was open, unguarded. It carried something that was not quite uncertainty but was adjacent to it, reaching into his chest to gently squeeze his heart.
He crossed the room to her and lifted his hand and touched her face, the line of her jaw, very lightly.
“You are tired,” he said.
“Not very,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment longer. Her eyes were the color of a winter morning, clear and patient and lit from within by a sentiment he recognized because it reflected what he felt himself and had not yet found the language adequate to describe it.
He had been told, in his life, by people whose judgment he generally respected, that he was a man of action rather than feeling.
He had accepted this characterization as accurate, because it was, in most respects, convenient.
He was revising it now. Because he had found someone who made him feel. Deeply. Thoroughly. Infinitely.
* * *
Alistair lowered his head and kissed her.
There was nothing cautious in it. His mouth found hers with the same directness that defined every other part of him.
No tentative brush of lips; no polite preliminaries.
He claimed her as though he had been waiting years rather than days, and Josephine made a soft, startled sound against his mouth before kissing him back with equal hunger.
Her hands rose to frame his jaw, fingers threading into the short auburn waves at his temples as she pulled him closer.
He tasted of coffee, warm and rich, with something deeper underneath.
An essence both male and vital that made her head spin.
The careful architecture of her composure, the serene mask she had worn for so long, fractured under the onslaught of his mouth.
He kissed her until her breath grew unstable, until the world narrowed to the slide of his tongue against hers and the low rumble of approval that vibrated from his chest into hers.