Chapter 30
Thirty
Tristan’s carriage took the last turn into Portman Square, wheels grinding softly, horse breath a white thread in the damp air.
The square lay almost still, save for a watchman’s staff ticking the hour somewhere beyond the plane trees and the mutter of distant wheels along the Marylebone Road.
Canterbury House stood with its neighbors shoulder to shoulder, clean, correct, and anonymous.
He had rented the place without sentiment—the same way he ordered a new plough.
It was a thing needed, then acquired. Christine would require a base in town while she bullied London into providing lanterns and ribbon and every other frippery a county ball pretended not to need.
He would present her with keys; she would present him with lists, and somewhere in between they would both find… contentment?
That had been the plan. The plan had not, foolishly, accounted for the thrum under his breastbone that had begun the moment she left Duskwood and had not ceased since.
The carriage halted. Rain tapped the roof as if requesting entry.
He stepped down, the square’s stones slick beneath his boots, and handed his hat to the footman who had sprinted ahead to knock.
The door opened at once on a square hall smelling faintly of coal smoke.
“Your Grace,” said the butler, Hames, tidy as a ruled line, “we did not look for you before morning. I regret there is no fire in the small study.”
“I do not require one.” Tristan shrugged out of his travelling coat. “Lady Christine?”
“Retired an hour ago, Your Grace.” Hames managed to make “retired” sound like what a queen did to armies. “Miss Waldron also retired. Mrs. Cleat waits below stairs if you have orders for breakfast.”
“Not now.” Tristan’s gaze slid past the man to the staircase, where the light from a single lamp pooled and then yielded to shadow. “Did she dine?”
“In her chamber. She and Miss Waldron returned at six. The lady looked…fatigued.”
A butler who had served dukes learned to tint words. Fatigued meant worn thin and pretending not to be.
“From the shops?” he asked lightly.
Hames inclined his head.
Tristan crossed the hall. He had not known until he reached the first step that he had intended to go up.
He did not care to be governed by impulses.
He was, nevertheless, governed by one now.
On the landing, he paused. The city’s hum came up through the walls.
A soft, ceaseless breathing. A million lives stacked together.
Duskwood had its own sounds—owls, branches, the distant clap of a gate—but London made a different kind of night. It did not sleep; it negotiated.
A carpet runner swallowed his footfalls. He passed the door to the little morning room he had ordered furnished for Christine’s letters. The house smelled faintly of lavender now. At the end of the corridor, a lamp burned low in a niche. Beside it, the door to Christine’s chamber.
He had not intended to stop there. His own room lay beyond.
She sleeps. There is no reason to go inside.
But he had travelled from his ledgers and accounts at Duskwood because he could not stay away from her.
I will check that she sleeps safely, satisfy my eyes.
He would then go down to the dark study and sit with a ledger until the numbers lulled him into a species of sleep.
He stood at the door and heard her breathe.
It was a small sound, steady and human, and it undid hours of discipline as quietly as steam melts frost. He pushed the door with the back of his knuckles. It gave.
Beyond, the room was a soft cave of lamplight and banked coals, of pale curtains drawn against wet panes.
The air smelled of rain and the faint residue of rosewater.
She lay on her side with her back to the door, the coverlet drawn up to the narrow of her waist, dark hair in a loosened coil that had escaped pins and law both.
Her walking stick stood like a sentry by the bedpost. A book lay open on the chair beside the bed, facedown, a ribbon like a tongue peeking from its spine.
On the small table, a cup of tea had gone cold.
He did not step across the threshold. He leaned his shoulder against the jamb and listened.
The rain ticked. The coals hissed. Her breath went in and out, and in between the breaths, an occasional word, not quite formed.
I ought to go. Only fools stand in doorways and make wishes.
He stayed.
“Fool,” he told himself.
She murmured again, two syllables, not words.
He watched the subtle shift of her shoulders and thought of the last time he had seen them, braced and stubborn when she had refused to ride back to Duskwood after the men on the lane.
A picture rose, ugly, of her wrist in a stranger’s grip.
He caught himself on the doorframe and breathed through the old, familiar, angry urge.
The urge of the wolf: protect one’s own and defeat all intruders.
“Tristan,” she said, distinct this time, and turned a fraction on the pillow.
The world simplified. He crossed the room and stood looking down at her.
The lamplight gentled her face, rendering it soft and smooth.
But there was fatigue there in the sudden crease of her forehead.
He wanted to take from the world everything that had exhausted her and replace it with a hedgerow and an untroubled sky.
She murmured his name again, and very faintly,
“Don’t…”
“I’m here,” he said, the way one says it to a child caught in a storm.
“I’m here.”
He sat on the edge of her bed and reached to smooth a lock of hair from her temple. She flinched, then softened again, the small muscles that betrayed distress unknotting one by one under his hand.
“Easy,” he said.
She breathed out, the sort of breath a person takes when they decide not to fight. His hand covered hers atop the coverlet. Her fingers were cool. He warmed them between his, not rubbing, only enclosing.
“I should have come sooner,” he whispered, “what have you done to me that I could not stay away?”
He had told himself that the necessary work lay in coin and law.
It did. But it also lay here. She shifted again, a little restless, and he saw the startle rise like a bubble back through the calm.
Before the thought could make itself a fear, he bent and spoke her name against her temple.
He whispered into the small dark curl there that smelled of lavender and smoke.
She stilled, her cheek turning to him, her nose nuzzling against his face.
He found he had closed his eyes, savoring the intimate touch.
The trusting movement towards him. He kissed her softly, only the corner of her mouth.
The deep line between her brows eased. The breath she took after that was deeper, not caught on thorns.
He did not lift his head at once. He let his mouth rest for a heartbeat more.
When he straightened, she had already slipped back down into a darker sleep.
“Idiot,” he said to himself, “hopeless, complete idiot.”
The kind of idiot who finds his enemy’s sister and then forgets his enemy entirely and falls…
He cut off his traitorous thoughts, unwilling to entertain a certain, forbidden word. There was a chair behind him. He did not use it.
I do not want to be apart from her. I do not want to be separated, to sit while she lies.
He slid a fraction back on the mattress and lay down on top of the coverlet.
He meant to stay only long enough to be certain she would not wake gasping.
He meant to keep the distance a duke in a rented house owed a woman he had not sworn to.
He meant to be as careful as a man can be and still be present.
She turned in sleep as if the bed had tipped and gravity had redefined itself.
One hand found his shirt without effort and claimed the linen, tightening to brush his chest. Tristan did not move.
The other hand, groping, found his shoulder and settled at the seam where muscle met bone.
She drifted closer in quiet increments until her brow rested beneath his chin and the small, human weight of her fit into him.
He stared at the ceiling and permitted his lungs to remember how to do their work.
Every inch of him argued for stillness. If he moved, he would move badly.
Instead, he would lie still. Even if it meant lying still all night without sleep.
Better that and appreciate every second of her nestled against him than wake her.
She made a sound then of the sort an animal makes when it finds the place where it can burrow and be.
If there had been a priest or a witness in the house, Tristan might have married her on the instant to make that sound legal.
There was only the Roman bust in the corridor, and Hames keeping his counsel in the hall below.
“Go to sleep,” he told himself.
Sleep stayed away. His senses were too much alive.
Too heightened. They clamored for attention within his perception.
The smell of her. The soap she used at her evening ablutions.
The lavender that was used in the laundering of her clothes and linen.
The feel of her soft skin. The caress of silky hair.
With every heartbeat, his body became more aware of the slim, female perfection that lay along the length of him.
The fire cracked now and then, and the curtains breathed as if the house had lungs.
Outside, the square sent up a stray shout, a clatter, a drunkard’s song.
In the next chamber, a clock that did not belong to him marked the hour with a tastefully muffled strike.
He thought of the way Christine had said no to him on a lane and made it sound like “trust me”.
He thought, very quietly, that he could not bear to set her aside.
By morning, I will have driven that thought back into darkness. I will not show it to anyone, least of all myself.
She breathed, and the slow, animal miracle of that movement soothed him more than brandy.
He let his hand rest at the small of her back, a reassurance for his own pulse.
When at last his eyes did slide shut, it was not the exhaustion of a man who had fought.
It was the soft, treacherous surrender of one who had decided, against orders and against plan, that for one night the duty that mattered was to lie very still and let a woman sleep without fear.
Sometime toward morning, the rain forgot itself.
The city gathered its skirts, wrung them out, and began, reluctantly, to consider dawn.
In the grey before the grey, Christine stirred, the adjustment of a sleeper finding a better shape.
Her hand flexed against his shirt and then went slack again.
He had the wild urge to wake her and hear her say his name without the fog of dreams between them.
He must have slept then, for he woke to the whisper of the latch. He did not move. A shadow crossed the floor, paused, retreated.
Hames? No. Mrs. Cleat, likely, with the sense to recognize that some doors are better left for the day to open.
Christine shifted again and made that small satisfied sound.
A smile, uninvited and unmanageable, tugged at his mouth.
He lay there, in the house he had rented to be a sensible man, and let himself be an idiot for an hour more.
When daylight did begin to climb the edges of the curtains, he told himself, sternly, that this was enough.
He would rise without waking her, go down, order coffee, slaughter whatever appointments the morning had intended for him, and see to the thing that had to be done. Find the sender of the rope that had tried to bind Christine’s hands.
She doesn’t need to know. As long as she is safe.
He lifted his hand from her back. She made a soft protest and burrowed closer. The sound reset his plans by an hour.
“Idiot,” he said again, and kissed her hair where it curved over her ear, a benediction he had no right to give. She did not wake. The rain had taught London patience. So he lay and kept her, just for now. Just for another moment, and another, while the wolf’s watchfulness eased in her presence.
While the city acknowledged the morning.
While he drifted into sleep.