Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Augusta woke to the distinct, mortifying sensation of having done something irrevocable.
Not that she regretted it.
Hudson’s mouth on her neck, his hands in her hair, the low, rough sound he had made when she—
She pressed a hand to her flushed cheek. Reverend Leighton would have declared her damned six times over and reached for his Bible.
She did not want to go.
The realization settled into her bones with the weight of certainty.
She had spent her entire life being shuffled from one unwanted situation to another.
And now, when she had finally found something she truly wished to keep, the machinery of respectable society was preparing to whisk her away again, as efficiently as a housekeeper disposing of a cracked teacup.
She shook her head, as though it would rid her of the memories of Hudson’s tongue doing things to her that no proper lady would allow. Her skin was alive with memories as she dressed, only to bump right into the very man occupying her thoughts as she left her bedchamber.
“Good morning,” he greeted. His voice was rough with sleep, which did unfortunate things to her composure.
“Good morning.” It took everything she had not to press her hands against her flaming cheeks.
“We need to talk,” Hudson said, just when she thought the silence would become unbearable.
“I suppose we do,” she agreed.
“I don’t wish to marry.” The statement came without preamble, delivered in the same tone a man might use to announce the weather. “It has nothing to do with you. You know my reasons.”
Augusta sighed, then looked away. “I do. I… I don’t wish to go to Scotland,” she admitted. The words emerged more steadily than she had expected. “I am… fairly happy here. I mean… with Cassie, of course.”
Hudson’s expression did not change. “What do you propose, then?”
“I could write to my sister,” she said slowly. “Ask her to come to London. Perhaps if she hears this request from me…”
Hudson was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was low, careful. “Write the letter. I’ll see that it’s sent.”
Relief washed over her, warm and startling. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He crossed the room in three strides, his movements fluid and controlled, and took her hand in his own.
His fingers were warm, callused, infinitely steady.
“We keep things as they are. You stay. You write to your sister. We…” He paused, and she watched the rare, fascinating struggle of a man attempting to articulate a feeling he had spent years perfecting the art of concealing. “We continue.”
It was not a declaration. It was not even particularly romantic. But the pressure of his hand around hers, the deliberate weight of his gaze, felt like a promise nonetheless.
“Very well,” Augusta said, and allowed herself the smallest of smiles. “We continue.”
The letter took shape over the course of the morning, drafted and redrafted at the escritoire in her chamber.
My dearest sister, she wrote, and then sat staring at the page for a full five minutes, the pen hovering above the paper.
What did one say to a half-sister one had never met? How did one explain the complicated geography of a life that had included a murderous father, pious guardians, a duke’s bedchamber, and the persistent, inconvenient hope of something better?
In the end, she settled for honesty. Brief, careful honesty, omitting the more scandalous particulars of her current situation but conveying the essential truth: she was in London, she wished to see her sister, and there were matters to discuss that could not be entrusted to ink and paper.
She sealed the letter with a drop of wax, pressing her thumb into the soft red pool with more force than strictly necessary.
The act felt ceremonial, weighted with significance.
A message cast into the uncertain waters of family history, requesting an audience with the only blood relation who might still claim her.
When she handed it to the footman, her hand was steady.
Something had shifted in the architecture of her life: a door opened, a wall dismantled, a new room added to the familiar blueprint of solitude.
She did not know what would come of it. She did not know if her sister would answer or what would become of this strange, tentative arrangement with Hudson.
But for the first time in longer than she could remember, the future felt less like a sentence and more like a question. And questions, Augusta had always believed, were considerably more interesting than answers.
The letter followed her, clung to her, even during Cassie’s lesson later that day.
“But if the mines are underground,” Cassie said, tapping her pencil against the map spread across the schoolroom table, “how do the miners know they’re still in England? Couldn’t they accidentally dig to France?”
“That would be an impressive feat of engineering,” Augusta replied, suppressing a smile. “The Channel is rather wider than your average tunnel.”
“Perhaps they could use a very long rope. To measure.” Cassie’s brow furrowed. “Or a compass! Do compasses work underground, Miss Norton?”
“I suspect the more pressing concern would be drowning, rather than nationality.” Augusta reached across the table to adjust the girl’s grip on her pencil. “But it’s an excellent question. Perhaps we might write to a mining engineer and inquire.”
Cassie’s face lit up. “Truly? You would let me?”
“I would insist on it. The pursuit of knowledge is never wasted, even when it involves improbable international tunneling.”
The morning unfolded in its comfortable rhythm. Geography gave way to French verbs, which Cassie attacked with the same fervor she brought to everything, her accent improving by increments that were visible mostly in the diminishing frequency with which Augusta winced.
Augusta caught sight of Hudson once, striding across the terrace with his steward, the two men deep in conversation.
He did not look up. She found herself watching the straight line of his back until it disappeared around the corner of the house and then returned to Cassie’s translation exercise with more attention than it strictly warranted.
The day progressed.
Luncheon was an uneventful affair, with Cassie chattering about her lessons and Augusta offering the appropriate responses, the empty chair at the head of the table a silent reminder of Hudson’s absence.
Estate business, the butler informed her when she inquired.
The Duke had been called away to one of the tenant farms. He would return for dinner.
And so the days dragged on, the letter dancing unceasingly at the back of her mind. With one exception to the rule, one that she had come to enjoy, to expect.
As it was on a particular night, she had read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word of it when the knock came.
Hudson entered without waiting for a response, which was so typical of him that she could not even summon the energy to be affronted.
“Good evening,” she said, marking her place with a finger. “To what do I owe the honor?”
He crossed the room in that fluid, unhurried way of his and settled into the chair opposite hers, stretching out his long legs before him.
“Cassie mentioned you’re teaching her about mining,” he said simply.
“Among other things. She’s concerned about the territorial implications of underground excavation. I believe she’s drafting a letter to the Board of Trade as we speak.”
“Good. The government could use the exercise.”
They talked. It was the most remarkable thing about these nighttime visits, how easily conversation flowed once the barriers of daylight propriety had been set aside.
At some point, the distance between his chair and hers evaporated. His hand found hers. His thumb traced the line of her knuckles with a deliberation that made her breath catch. And then he was kissing her, and the conversation was effectively concluded for the evening.
It was different each time. That was the thing Augusta had not expected.
The variety of it, the way each encounter seemed to uncover some new territory between them.
Tonight, his kisses were slow, almost thoughtful, his hands cradling her face with a gentleness that contradicted everything she knew about his customary approach to the world.
She wound her fingers into his hair and felt him shudder against her, a reaction so visceral and unguarded that it sent a thrill through her that had nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with the power of reducing him to a state of coherent desire.
They moved to the bed because beds existed for a reason, and that reason was apparently the configuration of limbs and intentions currently underway. His weight above her, the solid heat of him through the thin fabric of her nightgown, his mouth on her throat…
Augusta arched into him with an abandon that would have scandalized every drawing room in Mayfair and found she could not bring herself to care. His hand slid up her thigh, beneath the hem of her gown, and the sound she made was not one she had ever produced in the presence of another human being.
It was Hudson who stopped. His hand stilled. His forehead pressed against hers, his breathing ragged, and she felt the effort it cost him, the sheer, physical discipline of restraint.
“We can’t,” he said, his voice rough. “Not… not entirely. Not without consequences neither of us is prepared for.”
She knew he was right. The arithmetic was painfully simple: pleasure now, potential disaster later. It was the responsible choice. The adult choice.
It was also, Augusta reflected as she lay beneath him with her heart hammering and her body thrumming with frustrated want, spectacularly inconvenient.
“Very well,” she said, and was absurdly proud of how steady her voice emerged.
Hudson pressed another languorous kiss to her throat. “That is not to say that we cannot do other things.”
And then his fingers moved from caressing her thighs to slipping inside her, and she gasped, clutching at his hair as he started moving them gently.
“Hud—Hudson!”
His lips found her throat again, the spot that had her turning into a puddle of warmth. “Let go for me, Augusta. Let me hear you.”
Her moans reached a wanton height she did not know existed as he pumped his fingers inside her, pressing against that sensitive spot.
Three nights later, she found him in the library.
He was sitting in the window seat, a book open on his lap, though she strongly suspected he had not turned a page in some time.
The room was lit by a single lamp, casting long shadows across the shelves of leather-bound volumes that had probably cost more than the Leightons’ entire cottage.
“You’re lurking,” she observed, closing the door behind her.
“I’m reading.”
“Poorly. That book has been open to the same page for at least twenty minutes. I’ve been watching from the hallway.”
He looked up at her, and whatever he saw—the loose hair, the bare feet, the robe tied hastily over her nightgown—softened his expression into something that made her stomach perform a maneuver that would have impressed the Royal Navy.
“Come here.”
She went.
The window seat was narrow. They ended up pressed together from shoulder to knee, his arm wrapped around her, her head fitting into the crook of his neck as though it had been designed for precisely that purpose.
“Tell me about the book,” she requested, leaning into his warmth.
“It’s called Mediations, by Marcus Aurelius,” he muttered, his chest vibrating as he spoke. “Control what you can control.” His hand slid up and down her arm slowly. “Do not allow challenging people to disturb your peace.” His hand moved to her shoulder, kneading it gently. “Life is short.”
Next, his hand found the nape of her neck beneath her hair. His fingers traced the line of her spine through the thin fabric of her robe, and she shivered. Hudson moved to stand between her knees, and she slid her hands into his hair.
They had developed a vocabulary of stops and pauses, a language of restraint that was becoming as familiar as the desire that preceded it.
His hand slid beneath her robe, his fingers finding the hem of her nightgown and pushing it up past her hips.
She gasped as his mouth followed, and her hand fisted in his hair, holding him there as her hips rose to meet him.
The window seat creaked beneath them, and she muffled the sounds of her pleasure with her sleeve, her whole body shaking with the effort of containing something that did not want to be contained.
It continued as such, and these were the only moments when Augusta was not plagued by the other thing that she could not rid herself of.
She had written to her sister. The letter had been sent. There had been no reply.
She tried not to think about what that might mean. Tried instead to focus fully on the present, to be here, in this house, with this unlikely configuration of people who had somehow become the closest thing to family she had known in years.
It was not perfect. It was not even entirely secure. But it was something. Something warm and real and hers in a way that nothing in her life had been for a very long time.
And if Hudson’s hand found hers under the dinner table when Cassie wasn’t looking, or if she caught him watching her across the schoolroom with an expression she could not interpret…
Some questions, she had decided, were better lived than answered.