Chapter 1 #2
She eased the pins out of the top and side, but as she began to remove the fabric, she felt a sudden, sharp tug at her hip.
“Oh!” she gasped, twisting instinctively. A stray pin had caught in the silk and pricked her skin. The more she tried to free herself, the worse it snagged, threatening to tear the delicate fabric and scrape her raw. “Ow!”
“Jules?” Fred must have heard her gasp. “Are you alright?”
“I’m afraid,” she whispered, half-mortified, half-laughing. “That I’m stuck. I guess I can’t undress myself after all. Madame Tremaux will be back in a—”
He was beside her before she’d finished that sentence, dipping his head behind the screen. “Are you—” he began but the words froze in his mouth.
The top half of the dress had fallen down, baring her chemise and corset to his eyes. She watched him lick his lips as his gaze dropped to her bosom. And she felt a surprising shot of heat, warming her from the inside out.
“I forgot,” she whispered, hearing that same breathy quality to her voice she’d had in the parlor room the night she’d cried over Thomas. The night Fred had held her. “That you are a deft hand with pins.”
He cleared his throat and took a step closer. “Hold still.”
Carefully, he bent close, his broad shoulders crowding her in the too small space. She could feel the warmth of him radiating at her side and the stir of his breath against the tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck. She squirmed when his fingers brushed her waist.
“Patience, dearheart,” he murmured, low and steady. “Or you’ll hurt yourself.”
He was so close she could see a tiny pale scar on his jaw she’d never noticed before. She wanted to raise her hand and press her fingertips against it.
His gloved thumb brushed her waist again as he eased the pin free. His touch was slow and gentle, and unbearably intimate. Her breath hitched. Her pulse thundered. She thought she might be visibly quaking.
She must have been because he noticed. His fingers brushed down the curve of her waist and he whispered, “Easy,” into her ear.
This must be how he addressed skittish horses. She wondered if they settled as quickly under his touch and calm voice as she did.
He pulled another offending pin out and dropped it behind him, one hand still steady on her waist. She heard the clink as the pin hit the floor and it reminded her to breathe.
He lifted the other hand so that it hovered just over her collarbone but then he paused, wavering for the first time. And she thought he was going to drop it again, thought he was going to walk away from her. Which was not….tenable.
“Fred,” she whispered to him. “Don’t go. Take off your gloves.”
She wanted to feel his skin on hers. She wanted something she could not decently name. Not now. Not in a semi-public space. Not while her whole body seemed to burn from the inside out.
He did as she directed, putting one gloved finger into his mouth and tugging so that the other hand stayed where it was. On her. Where it belonged.
“Touch me, please” she whispered when he’d pulled his hand free from that infernal glove.
His bare fingertips brushed lightly over her collarbone. That was all. Scarcely even a caress. Yet the world narrowed at once to the space between them, to the feel of his skin against hers.
Her nipples hardened beneath the linen of her chemise and she felt herself tremble. He tipped those blue eyes of his down to her and there was no mistaking the hunger she saw in them now. It was palpable, so intense as to be almost angry.
“If I took these fingers, Jules, and slipped them into your drawers, what would I find?”
His voice was low and his words were filthy, unlike anything she’d ever heard from him before.
“I want to know,” he said and lifted his fingers as if he might just put them there. “Would I find evidence of your desire for me? Would I find that you want me, Jules?”
“Yes.”
It was only the truth.
He pulled her in closer, so she was flush against his body. She could feel the hard length of him pressing against her. She arched into him, wanting to be closer, as close as she could get.
“And then what would you do?” she asked, her nearly bare breasts pressed into his body.
She might have kicked that gown off altogether and thrown herself at him had Madame Tremaux’s voice not called out, “Back in a moment, chérie! I have another customer to attend to.”
And then another voice cut through the quiet of the shop and the haze fogging her mind. “Madame Tremaux,” it said. “I am in need of a ball gown.”
It was a voice that was familiar to Julianna although she couldn’t quite place it. She glanced back at Fred only to find him frozen, a shocked, troubled expression on his face. “Fred? Are you ill?”
“No.”
But he stepped back from her and raked a hand through his hair. For one raw moment he looked like a lost child. Vulnerable and frightened and she didn’t understand the sudden turn in his demeanor. Nor the plummet in the temperature of the room.
“What’s happened?” she asked as his expression shuttered and he turned without a word, leaving her standing there alone.
Madame Tremaux appeared a moment later, her arms full of fabric. “My apologies, ma chère. I had a surprise visit from another Dorsetshire lady. The Baroness Van Austerleigh. Perhaps you are acquainted?”
“Only by reputation,” Julianna said, peering out from behind the velvet screen.
Fred was gone but there was another set of eyes on her. Those of the Baroness, that doyenne of Dorsetshire Society who had been Fred’s company the night of the carriage accident. She hated the woman on sight.
“Lady Chester,” the Baroness said, with cold blue eyes that were nothing like Fred’s. “What a pleasure it is to finally be acquainted.”
As if Julianna had come from some exotic locale and not lived a stone’s throw away in Dorset her entire life. But she inclined her head toward the Baroness anyway. She knew she didn’t have a reason to be rude. It wasn’t this woman’s fault that her memory had provoked Fred into leaving.
“Likewise,” she said, her gaze flicking once more to the empty chair where Fred had been moments before.
“And where did Chester run away to? I haven’t seen that boy in an age.”
Julianna reverted her attention to the Baroness then, unease prickling her spine. That boy?
“He’s gone out.” Julianna turned away. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Hell and damnation,” Fred growled to himself as he sat in the carriage.
He felt like he had whiplash. One moment he was trying to calm the rock hard cockstand he had and not ravage his wife in public and the next that voice had cut through his memories, dousing him in an icy shock.
The Baroness Van Austerleigh was in London.
She was as beautiful as he recalled. A decade older, as was he, but she wore it exquisitely.
Her hair—darkened now from the pale gold he remembered—was dressed beneath a hat trimmed in feathers and a day gown that had been immaculate.
Exquisitely tailored to flatter her figure.
His stomach had recoiled on sight.
And he’d fled. Left Julianna alone inside the shop without a word.
Christ. He should explain himself but he didn’t quite know how.
Julianna was happy here, in London. For the first time since—well, since he didn’t know when because he’d been gone from her life for a decade, hadn’t he?
And the reason for that absence had just walked through the modiste’s door.
No, he wasn’t going to ruin Julianna’s happiness with more of that old tale.
Not now, when the vise of guilt and fear and anger that had held her so tightly for so long seemed to be easing.
The past was the past. And whatever had happened between himself and the Baroness had happened too long ago to bother recounting.
He clenched his jaw and fixed his gaze on the opposite corner of the carriage, as if staring at the upholstery would somehow rid him of his former choices. And when that didn’t work he dug his short nails into his palm until he made himself hurt. Good. He wanted that pain. Deserved it.
“Damnation,” he muttered, dragging in a harsh breath. Trying to settle his whipsawing emotions before his wife returned.
And then, as if he’d somehow called her, she came out of Tremaux’s and was climbing up into the carriage with him.
Her dark eyes met his. They were luminous in the shifting light, liquid pools of unplumbed depths.
And worse—much worse—there was something in them that looked a great deal like passion.
Fred’s heart slammed against his ribs. He found himself jerking back, his chest constricting again. He really couldn’t breathe.
“Fred?” Suddenly Julianna was beside him, his hand clasped tightly in hers and she was murmuring, “It’s alright.” And, “Just breathe, Fred, breathe.”
The carriage had started to move again and all he could do was sit there, his lungs heaving as he tried to get the air he needed into them. Sweat dampening his shirt beneath his waistcoat. Every muscle in his body clenched tight.
The carriage jolted over a rut and Julianna pointed at something outside—a pair of street performers with juggling knives. “Look at that,” she whispered to him.
He did and it eased that damned constricted feeling in his chest ever so slightly. “Talk to me, Jules,” he said. “Just talk to me, please.”
So she did. She narrated their entire trip through London as she saw it.
Marveling at the crowds and carriages jockeying for space on the crowded streets.
At the children who darted among legs and the horses that pranced.
At everything and nothing at once until the coiled tension within him began to relax, bit by bit.
By the time the carriage slowed to a stop he could breathe again.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Simpson’s-in-the-Strand,” he said, allowing his lungs the pleasure of a full inhale and exhale. “London is finally coming around to the idea of dining outside one’s home. It was a favorite pastime in Paris and I thought you’d enjoy it.”
“I’m certain I will,” she said.