CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Ceci
The first sound had come from the wardrobe.
Ceci had been sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair down and the brush idle in her hand, trying to persuade her body that sleep was possible.
The room had cooled around her. Firelight in the grate had thinned to a dim orange hush.
Her pulse, however, had refused every instruction.
Then something tapped once from inside the wardrobe.
She went still.
A second tap followed.
Soft. Patient. Almost polite.
Ceci stood, the brush slipping from her hand to the quilt. The room held its breath with her.
Then Duncan knocked.
“Ceci?”
Relief moved through her so quickly it felt almost like fear.
“I’m here.”
She should have stayed where she was. She should have called through the door and made him explain himself from the corridor like a sensible woman in a borrowed nightdress. Instead, she crossed the room and opened it.
Duncan stood in the corridor with one hand braced against the doorframe, his face stripped of every polite arrangement he usually wore. For a second, neither of them spoke.
His gaze went past her at once, not to her hair, not to the nightdress, not to the bare line of her throat, though she saw the effort it cost him. He looked into the room like a man expecting to find an intruder.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You heard it?”
The words sent a cold line down her spine.
“The wardrobe,” she said. “Twice.”
His jaw tightened.
“May I come in?”
The question, absurdly careful in the middle of everything, nearly undid her.
“Yes.”
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, though he did not turn the key. That mattered. She noticed that it mattered. The room seemed smaller with him in it. Warmer and more dangerous at once. Duncan crossed to the wardrobe and opened it with one hand.
Nothing came out.
Inside, Grace’s dresses hung in a neat, silent row. Lavender sachets rested between the folds, sweet and domestic, beneath the faint damp smell of stone. Ceci wrapped her arms around herself.
“There’s water by the door,” he said.
“I know.”
“It was in the corridor too.”
That should have frightened her more than it did. Instead, the worst part was the restraint in his voice, the way he kept folding concern into usefulness because usefulness was the only shape he trusted himself to offer.
He crouched, touched two fingers to the wet line near the wardrobe, then brought them briefly to his thumb. His expression did not change.
“Cold,” he said.
“Everything about this place is cold when it wants to be.”
His eyes lifted to hers. The room held still around them. Ceci realized then that she was shaking just enough that her arms tightened against her ribs, and her breath kept catching before she could make it smooth.
Duncan rose.
“You should not sleep in here alone tonight.”
The sentence moved through her with a force that had very little to do with safety.
“That sounds like an order.”
“It is a recommendation.”
“Duncan.”
His name changed the air between them.
He stopped.
She had not meant to say it that way. Or perhaps she had, and only the rest of her was still pretending. He looked at her hair first this time. Loose over her shoulders. Then at her face. Then away, as if the look had been a trespass he was trying to correct after the damage was already done.
“You are frightened,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I will send Margaret.”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. His eyes returned to hers.
Ceci swallowed.
“I don’t want Margaret.”
Understanding reached him slowly enough that she saw the exact moment he began resisting it.
“Ceci.”
“I know.”
“No, I do not think you do.”
That irritated her. The irritation helped. It gave her something to stand on besides fear.
“I am very tired of men deciding I cannot know what I want. “His expression changed.
“I have never thought you confused.”
“Good.”
“But I have thought you vulnerable.”
“I am.” Her voice shook once, and she hated that. “I am vulnerable, and I am frightened, but that does not make me incapable.”
He went very still.
The fire shifted in the grate, throwing gold across the side of his face. He looked almost severe in that light, except for his eyes, which had given him away completely.
“I can sit by the fire,” he said.
“That is not what I asked.”
The silence after that felt like a door opening.
Duncan took one step toward her, then stopped with space still between them.
Always space. Always restraint. Always the careful mercy of a man who had made a discipline of denying himself what he wanted.
Ceci stepped into the space before he could retreat into it. He drew in a breath.
She touched his waistcoat first, barely more than her fingertips against the dark fabric. His body answered before the rest of him did, a small tightening beneath her hand, contained and unmistakable.
“Tell me to stop,” she said.
His voice came low.
“I will not lie to you.”
“That was not what I asked.”
“No,” he said. “Do not stop.”
The words went through her like heat. She rose onto her toes and kissed him. For one impossible second, he did not move. Then his hand came to her jaw, careful even now, and the care in it made her ache. He kissed her back as if he had reached the end of an argument he had been losing for days.
The room remained unchanged.
The wet line by the wardrobe, the cold corridor, the impossible tapping from the dark, all of it remained.
None of it had gone away. But Duncan’s mouth was warm, and his hand was steady, and Ceci was so tired of being afraid alone that when he drew back just far enough to look at her, she followed him. His thumb moved once along her cheek.
“This is a terrible idea,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered. “You keep saying that as if it helps.”
Then she kissed him again. After that, restraint became something they kept reaching for and losing. Duncan’s hand came to her jaw, then her throat, then stopped there as if even now he required proof that she wanted him to continue. Ceci gave it to him by pulling him closer.
His mouth changed. So did hers. The carefulness did not vanish, exactly. It broke open into something warmer, less defensible, and far more honest.
He backed her toward the bed by degrees, pausing each time she caught at his coat or his shirt or the hard line of his shoulder beneath her palm.
The room gathered around them in fragments.
Firelight. Damp stone. Lavender. The small cold gleam of water near the wardrobe.
The soft complaint of the floorboards beneath his shoes. The danger had not gone.
Neither had the wanting.
At the edge of the bed, he stopped.
“Ceci.”
“If you ask me again whether I am sure, I may become violent.”
His breath broke into something very near a laugh.
“I was going to ask whether you wanted me to lock the door.”
“Oh.”
The fact that he had thought of that, and had still left the choice to her, made something inside her loosen.
“Yes,” she said.
He crossed the room, turned the key, and came back changed by the decision. The last distance between them felt shorter than before and far more dangerous. She reached for him first.
Coat. Waistcoat. Shirt. The old grammar of buttons and breath. His hands were steady until hers found his skin, and then they were not. That small betrayal of control did more to undo her than any practiced seduction could have done.
He stood before her half-dressed in the firelight, no longer severe, no longer safely contained, and Ceci felt a bright, reckless tenderness move through the want.
“There you are,” she whispered.
His eyes darkened.
“I am afraid so.”
She took his hand and drew him down with her.
The bed shifted beneath their weight. His body came over hers, warm and solid and trembling with the effort of holding back.
Her nightdress tangled between them. His mouth found her shoulder, her throat, the place below her ear that made her grip his back and forget every sensible thing she had ever believed about caution. He did not hurry her.
That only made it worse.
He learned her by attention. By breath. By the way she arched when his hand found her hip. By the sound she made when his mouth returned to hers and she opened under him, not because she had been persuaded, but because she was tired of refusing herself the comfort of wanting without apology.
“Tell me,” he said against her mouth. She knew what he meant. She answered with his name.
That was enough.
When he finally moved into her, he did it slowly enough that she felt the last of his restraint tremble through him.
The sensation took the air from her lungs.
She clutched at him, startled by the fullness of it, by the intimacy, by the terrible sweetness of having chosen this and still being overwhelmed by the choosing.
Duncan went utterly still.
“Ceci?”
She opened her eyes.
His face above hers was stripped bare. Want, fear, tenderness, all of it too visible to survive daylight unchanged.
“I’m here,” she said.
The words struck both of them. His forehead lowered to hers.
Then he moved.
The first movement broke from her a sound she did not recognize.
The second made him answer it. After that, the room lost its edges.
There was breath and heat, the drag of linen, the weight of him, the steady pressure of his hand beneath her back as if he could keep her from being taken by anything but this.
Ceci had expected desire to feel like hunger. This felt like shelter catching fire.
He kissed her when she shook. He said her name when she came apart.
She held him through the moment his control finally failed, felt his whole body shudder against her, and understood with a strange, piercing clarity that he had not simply wanted her.
He had trusted her with the ruin of him.
For a long while afterward, neither of them spoke.
He remained over her, careful even in exhaustion, until she made a small sound of protest and pulled him closer instead of letting him retreat. Only then did he let his weight settle by degrees, his face buried against the curve of her neck, his breath uneven on her skin.
The room returned slowly.
The faint orange of the grate. The lavender in her hair. The old damp smell near the wardrobe. The impossible water drying at the edge of the rug.
Duncan shifted to one side but did not go far. His arm came across her waist, protective without quite meaning to be. She covered his hand with hers and kept it there.
“Tell me to leave now,” he whispered. She turned her head and kissed his palm.
“No.”
The answer settled him more than sleep would have. He drew her back against him, and for the first time since she had come through the gate, Ceci let herself be held without planning how to survive the moment after. Sleep came in pieces after that.
A drifting doze. The slow wakefulness of feeling him shift and draw her back against him.
A kiss pressed into her shoulder when he thought she was asleep.
Her own hand finding him in the darkness just to reassure herself he had not vanished.
When morning came, it arrived pale and gentle through the curtains.
Ceci woke, warm from throat to ankle and momentarily disoriented by the weight behind her.
Then Duncan’s arm tightened around her waist. Memory returned all at once.
And with it came the quiet, undeniable knowledge that one threshold had closed behind her in the night, and another had opened.
Duncan was the first man she had taken into her bed since the end of her marriage.
Archie still lived, warm and unfinished, somewhere inside her wanting.
Morning had not simplified anything. It had only made the truth harder to ignore.
She closed her eyes.
Well.
His mouth brushed the back of her neck.
“You’re awake.”
“So are you.”
“Regrettably.”
That made her smile into the pillow. She turned carefully in his arms. The daylight softened him.
Without the coat and collar and command of his posture, he looked more human than she had ever seen him.
Older, too, in a way that made him dearer.
The scar at his temple. The faint wear at the corners of his eyes.
The morning roughness in his voice and jaw.
His hand moved over her bare hip beneath the blanket as if it belonged there.
“Good morning, Captain Duncan.”
His mouth curved.
“Good morning,” he said. Then, after the smallest pause, “Ceci.”
The sound of her name, still warm from sleep, nearly made her pull him down and start all over again. Instead, she only looked at him.
Whatever lived between them had changed shape in the night. It had not become safer. It had become real in a way that neither of them could pretend out of existence.
Outside the bed, the world still waited with all its ugliness intact.
Voss. Hart. Leopold’s papers. The gate on the hill.
Fascism sharpening its knives in grand rooms. Inside it, for one suspended morning moment, there was only this.
Duncan touched her face with two fingers, tracing the line of her cheek as if reacquainting himself with proof.
“We should get up,” he said.
“We should.”
Neither of them moved.
That, more than anything, made her laugh. He smiled then, fully this time, and she thought with a rush of foolish pleasure that she would cross a good many centuries for the sight of that smile in morning light.
Then his hand slid to the back of her neck, and he kissed her again, slow, and deep and at odds with any serious intention of leaving the bed soon. Ceci gave herself over to it gladly.