Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The Nightingale’s private office sat in near-darkness, the single lamp on the desk casting more shadow than light.
Hudson had dismissed his staff an hour ago, sent Slater home with orders to return at dawn, and now sat alone with a decanter of brandy and a temper he couldn’t seem to leash.
His fingers drummed on the polished wood, and his thoughts kept circling the same impossible point.
The morning room, Augusta’s fingers brushing his at breakfast. The hot-air balloon, her body pressed against his as the basket swayed.
She lived under his roof. She was in his care. And God help him, he wanted her with a passion that made his entire body ache.
The door opened without a knock. Hudson didn’t look up. Only one man in London treated the Duke of Oakhart’s private sanctum as an extension of his own drawing room.
James dropped into the chair across from the desk with the easy confidence Hudson had grown used to. He took one look at Hudson’s face, and his grin sharpened.
“I wanted to ask you what you thought of the balloon exhibition. But let me rethink that. How was the rest of your day?”
Hudson scoffed and shook his head. “Fine.”
“Just fine?” James grabbed a glass and poured himself some brandy before he took a long sip, his eyes gleaming with delight. “Do tell me more.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
James leaned forward. “Ah. So I imagined the electricity crackling between the two of you as much as I imagined the pair of you following young Cassandra and me side by side. How was the rest of the evening? Did you finally realize that the governess was a woman and make the most of the opportunity?”
“No,” Hudson sneered. “Nothing like that happened. We went home, she read a story to Cassie, and we went to bed. Our respective beds,” he emphasized before James could make an assumption he would enjoy far too much.
“Hmm.”
The clock on the mantel ticked. Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed.
James swirled his glass. “Hot-air balloon. Ice cream. Reading a bedtime story. None of that sounds like a problem.”
“It isn’t.”
“Your face disagrees.”
Hudson set his glass down with enough force to make the brandy slosh. “You’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
James set his glass down. “Give in to it, for God’s sake. You’re a man. Denying yourself is making you insufferable.”
“I do not have the faintest idea what you are talking about.”
James snorted. “Yes, you do. Do not think for a minute that I did not notice the way you looked at her. Or the way she looked at you. There’s a fire there, my friend, and there’s only one way to, ah, quench it.”
“I can’t do that.” Hudson stood, moved to the window, and stared out at the darkened courtyard. “She’s in my employ. Under my protection. I won’t ruin her.”
“Then marry her.”
Hudson turned. “What?”
James raised an eyebrow. “Marry her. Plenty of marriages have been built on far less. Cassie adores her. You clearly do too, though you’d rather boil yourself in oil than admit it. And the rest is,” he waved a hand, “irrelevant.”
“The rest isn’t irrelevant,” Hudson said. “She’s a disgraced lady through no fault of her own. She came to me with nothing but her skills and her honesty. I won’t take advantage of that.”
“Taking advantage,” James argued, “would be dismissing her once you’d had your fill. Marrying her, that’s called honoring your intentions. Or do you plan to deny those, too?”
Hudson turned back to the window. The courtyard was empty, the carriages all parked away for the night, the cobblestones slick with dew. “Cassie must be settled and launched into Society first. Before I turn my attention to my own future.”
James snorted. “Cassie is not even twelve. That means you’re proposing to wait, what, five or six years?
During which time the woman who makes your jaw clench like you’re being fitted for a skull cap will be living under your roof.
” He paused, letting the implications sink in.
“If you can neither marry her nor claim her, then for God’s sake, find yourself another woman. At least as a distraction.”
Hudson didn’t respond immediately. His reflection in the glass pane stared back at him: dark-eyed, tense, the face of a man who had built his life around control and was watching it slip through his fingers like water.
He turned around, crossed back to the desk, lifted his glass and finished the brandy in one swallow, then set it down with deliberate care.
He nodded once.
James’s grin widened. He stood, clapping Hudson on the shoulder with the casual ease of a man who had solved a particularly satisfying puzzle.
“Good man. I’d suggest Madame Reverte’s, off Curzon Street.
Discreet. Thorough. And she keeps very good cognac.
” He moved toward the door. “Though I warn you, it won’t fix what’s actually broken. ”
“Go home, James.”
“Good luck,” James called, already pulling the door open. “Though I suspect you won’t need it. Women have a remarkable ability to tell when a man’s thinking about another woman.”
The door swung shut behind him.
The office settled back into its particular quiet: the creak of the chair as Hudson resumed his seat, the soft guttering of the lamp, the distant sounds of the building settling for the night.
Hudson stared at the empty decanter, then at his own reflection in the darkened window.
The woman who makes your jaw clench…
He reached for the map in his desk drawer, the one with the coast of Scotland outlined in his own hand, the small village of Kinloch circled in ink now gone black with handling.
Somewhere to the north, Miss Olivia Booth was waiting for word of a sister who didn’t know where to find her.
He’d promised to look. He’d promised to keep her safe. And he’d promised himself, the day he’d pulled her from the Nightingale’s auction floor, that she would leave his house exactly as she had entered it: whole, unharmed, untouched.
He closed the drawer.
The clock struck one.
The narrow Mayfair side street was more an alley than a thoroughfare, a slim passage of cobblestones between two rows of unmarked doors. Hudson’s boots made no sound on the wet stone as he walked, his collar turned high against the night air.
The establishment he sought had no sign above the lintel. It probably needed none. Yet a single lamp glowed in the downstairs window, its light a dull orange behind the thick curtains.
He paused, listening to the distant sounds of the city at night: a carriage on the main street, a drunk singing somewhere beyond the square, the soft hush of rain beginning to fall.
He rapped his knuckles against the door. It opened immediately, as though someone had been waiting on the other side. The woman who greeted him was neither young nor old. Her hair was pulled back in a simple updo, her dress unadorned but clearly expensive.
“Good evening,” she said, without surprise or recognition in her tone. “This way, if you please.”
She led him up a short flight of stairs to a corridor where the carpet muffled their steps. The walls were papered in a pattern of small, tasteful flowers, nothing like the gaudy excess he had expected.
At the far end, she opened a door with a key from her pocket and stood aside.
“The green room tonight,” she said. “I’ll send Marie straightaway.”
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
The room was small but well-appointed: a canopied bed with burgundy hangings, the counterpane turned down to reveal crisp white sheets.
A low fire burned in the grate, just enough to take the edge off the night’s chill.
A dressing table stood against the far wall, its mirror reflecting the candlelight from the single lamp beside the bed.
A bottle of brandy and two glasses waited on a small table near the hearth.
Hudson shrugged out of his greatcoat and hung it on the stand near the door. His fingers found the small scar on his left side and pressed, the small pain a counterpoint to the hollowness in his chest.
The door opened.
The woman who entered was pretty; there was no denying that. Dark hair fell loose past her shoulders, and her face was arranged in an expression of interested welcome. She wore a silk wrapper of deep green, already loose at the shoulders, her bare feet peeping from beneath the hem.
She smiled at Hudson.
“Good evening,” she greeted, her voice low. “It’s a pleasure.”
She moved toward him without hesitation, her fingers sliding up to his shoulders and then his chest, her touch unhurried and professional. Her hands were cool against the warmth of his skin through the fine wool.
“Would you like me to help you with your shirt?” she asked, already working the buttons loose. “Or perhaps you’d prefer to keep it on for a while?”
Hudson stood still and let her work. Her fingers moved to his cravat, loosening the careful folds, her palm pressing flat against his shirt where it opened at the throat.
She smelled of roses and clean linen, a scent deliberately chosen to be inoffensive. Her eyes were watching his face, cataloging his responses, adjusting her approach to what she found there.
“You seem,” she murmured, leaning closer, “like you’ve had a difficult day. Perhaps I can help with that.”
She slid one hand beneath his shirt, her touch light against his ribs. Her other hand rested against his chest, fingers splayed, and then moved slowly.
This was a woman who knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Her fingers found the fall of his trousers and pressed there, warm and certain.
Nothing.
Hudson stood very still. The fire crackled in the grate. Somewhere in the room, a candle guttered.
His eyes stayed open, fixed on the middle distance, on the burgundy hangings of the bed, on nothing.
On Augusta’s chin lifted in the corridor that afternoon, mud on her skirts, refusing to apologize.
The sound of her laugh, bright, unguarded, gone almost before it arrived.
The way Cassie’s face opened like a window when Augusta walked into a room.
Marie leaned in, her lips brushing the line of his jaw.
Hudson caught her wrist, his grip firm but not bruising. Then he released her and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This was a mistake.” He reached into his coat, produced a generous fold of banknotes, and set them on the dressing table. “For your time.”
She watched him, neither offended nor surprised.
He supposed that she had seen this before.
Men who came with the best intentions, only to find themselves thinking of their wives or mistresses or the particular curve of another woman’s smile.
Men who paid for the fantasy and couldn’t bring themselves to accept it when it stood before them, warm and willing and not who they wanted.
“Will you have some brandy before you go?” she asked, already reaching for the decanter.
Hudson shook his head. “I won’t trouble you further.”
He straightened his cravat in the mirror, a habit rather than a necessity. He would walk out, step into his carriage, and go home without seeing anyone who would notice a duke’s dishevelment. He picked up his coat from the stand, shrugged it on, and reached for the doorknob.
“Sir.” Marie’s voice stopped him. “The next time… sometimes it helps to talk first. About why you’ve come.”
Hudson turned. She was watching him with the calm assessment of a woman who made her living reading the desires men tried to hide, even from themselves.
“There won’t be a next time,” he said.
She smirked. “They all say that.”
He stepped into the corridor, and the door closed behind him with the same soft click that had marked his arrival.
The madam was waiting at the foot of the stairs, her expression carefully neutral. “Will you be needing anything else tonight, sir?”
“No.” Hudson reached for his hat. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
Outside, the cold air hit his face like a slap. The rain had stopped, but the cobblestones still gleamed wet under the single lamp at the alley’s end.
Hudson’s breath clouded before him, white in the darkness. He stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, and looked up at the narrow strip of night sky visible between the buildings.
No distraction was going to work. No woman, no drink, no amount of distance between himself and Oakhart House would erase the memory of Augusta’s hand in his or the devastating rightness of her body pressed against his chest as the balloon swayed above London.
Hudson turned and walked toward the carriage waiting at the end of the alley, his footsteps echoing against the wet stone.
Behind him, the lamp in the upstairs window went out.