Chapter 21 Stepping Into the Light
STEPPING INTO THE LIGHT
Diana was waiting by the window in only her shift when Temple burst into their bedchamber.
“You’re late,” she said. “You were supposed to arrive a quarter hour ago to help me dress.”
He was certainly not dressed for the ball.
The forge still clung to him, ash lining his face and dying his dark hair a black only seen at midnight on a moonless night.
He wore only trousers and shirtsleeves, which had been rolled to bare his forearms. This no civilized baron ready to waltz across a ballroom.
He was hewn from the earth and beautiful for it.
But it would take forever to clean him up, and they would be late.
“Apologies.” Temple kissed her cheek and picked up her corset. He shook it open and held it out, playing the part of a lady’s maid. “I was tracking down Mr. Squires. Good thing I did, too. He had news of your cousin. News I think will make you less nervous about tonight.”
“Oh?”
Lacing up the back of her corset, he said, “Your cousin is out of town.”
“What? Why?”
“No idea.”
She tied her petticoats. “Hand me the bustle?” He did, and she tied that on, then stepped into her gown. “That means he will not be in attendance tonight.” She exhaled, her body almost collapsing from the loss of weight that had long been sitting on her shoulders. “That does make me feel better.”
He secured the hooks up her back, and she fastened a belt made of the same dark blue as her gown around her waist.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Like you need stockings. And shoes.”
“Oh!”
She put them on through laughter, swatting her husband’s hands away as he helped her tie the ribbons beneath her knees. She felt so light, like a champagne bubble rising to the top of golden liquid, like a flower feeling sun for the first time after days of rain.
“I might miss playing your maid,” Temple said when they were done. “Tomorrow I’ll bring my cook back, and I’ll advertise for however many maids you need, a housekeeper.”
Tonight everything changed.
“Are you nervous?” he asked before splashing water on his face at the wash basin and scrubbing the forge away.
“A bit. Not as much. Not anymore.”
He grinned and shrugged out of his shirt and vest, and she tried not to let the sight of her husband’s well-chiseled chest distract her. Impossible. Before he could put a clean shirt on, she pressed her palms against his abdomen, kissed the little dip at the center of his collarbone.
It wasn’t enough. For her or him. With the gentlest touch, he lifted her chin and opened her mouth, her soul, with a searing kiss that left her nerves in ashes. She could do anything with him.
He rested his forehead against hers with a wolfish grin. “Let me dress, little queen, or we won’t be going at all.”
“I do not wish to risk the king’s wrath.” She pushed him toward the dressing room then styled her hair as best she could.
She was studying her reflection in the cheval glass when he returned, dressed in stark black and white, hair pushed away from his face, tamed into a coal-black cloud she wanted to sink her fingers into.
Later. Now, they must stake their place in society.
She must begin her work for the man who’d given so much to her.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, tugging on a curl.
“I’ll do.”
“I’m not used to seeing you in such finery. Everything about you is usually so… simple. Clean. Much more alchemist than transcendent.”
“We must do our best to fit in tonight, and since I cannot glamour myself into an elaborate gown, this must suffice.” In fact, it did quite well. Huge puff sleeves and a wide open neck, skirts big and bouncy. The silk moved like water, its blue color shifting as light rolled across it.
“Are you sure you have not glamoured it?”
“Not a bit. Lady Guinevere knows an excellent dressmaker who uses potions to dye her fabric.” She straightened his cravat. “You are terribly handsome. Are you sure someone has not glamoured you?”
He snorted. “I’d like to see them try.” He took her hands, kissed the backs of them. “This will be difficult, even without your cousin in attendance. The night we met, I was escaping an onslaught of whispers, unwanted nicknames, sneers… I do not like the idea of all that directed at you.”
Neither did she. Invisibility had become a habit. No more. “I am not worried about them so much as I am worried about you snarling at everyone.” She picked up her reticule and fan and tapped his shoulder with the latter.
He gave her a look that brought her body to life, and one more kiss that made her legs weak, then he swept her downstairs and into the waiting carriage beneath a storm-gray sky.
“No snarling. No matter how much I want to.” But his voice was hard, and they rode the entire way to Grosvenor Square in silence.
In the small space between them on the bench, Diana and Temple clasped hands. Lifelines of strength, of courage.
And when he helped her out of the carriage, he kissed her knuckles, swatted at her giant sleeve when it poked his cheek, and looped her arm through his. “Together.”
“Together.”
They were late, and their hosts had already started the dancing, so they were able to slip inside without fuss. The entry hall was vast with soaring ceilings and floating candles. The gently bouncing light above glinted off gold-and-diamond chandeliers. A breathtaking spectacle. An illusion.
Temple stopped in the hall and whispered near her ear, “I asked the king to procure several invitations to tonight’s event for me.
So you would have friends around you.” He nodded across the space, toward the double doors that led into the ballroom.
A couple waited to once side. Nico she knew, but the woman on his arm she did not. “Part of your entourage has arrived.”
“Ah! There you are.” Nico raised a hand and dragged the woman across the hall. When he reached them, he smacked Temple on the back, and all but pushed his wife in front of Diana. “Here she is. The indomitable Lady Bowen.”
Lady Bowen blew a strand of honey-blond hair out of her rolling eyes and dropped a curtsy. When they were not rolling, her eyes were kind. As her husband almost bounced with boundless energy, she stayed steady and calm. “I am delighted to meet you, Lady Knightly. How is your dog?”
Asking about a woman’s dog a sure way to win her heart. Diana’s glowed. “Merlin is very well. Thank you. And thank you for supplying the chicken that helped bring him to me.”
“You are welcome. I never participated in hijinks until I married. And now I cannot stop.”
Her husband, standing behind her, stooped low. “And you love it.”
Lady Bowen blushed prettily and said, “The king has not yet arrived. They are saying he will not. They are not saying he is ill, but…”
He was ill. Temple had told her as much. “He told Temple to bring me to Clarence House in the morning. I had hoped that might mean we could forgo tonight’s drama.”
“No such luck,” Temple said. He squeezed Diana’s shoulder. “Stay with Nico and Jane. I’ve a surprise for you.” He disappeared back toward the entrance.
In the other direction, music trembled in the air, thrown by the well-tuned strings of a quartet.
“Are you nervous?” Jane asked.
The laugh Diana gave was, and she could not snatch it back, though she wished she could.
If she could not be calm, she could at least appear calm.
“Everyone keeps asking that.” And Temple’s friends did not even know her secret.
“But I do not see why I should be nervous. Secret marriages happen every day.” Yes, if she continued to tell herself she was nothing extraordinary and neither was her situation, she would believe it, and her nerves would disappear like the last snow before spring.
Nico raised a single brow. Jane raised a single brow.
No pretending, then. Excellent. She gave another nervous laugh. “Well, not every day, but it’s not unheard of.”
Nico nodded. “True. But it is more that your cousin, your former betrothed, has been telling the world you’re ill in the country. But here you are—the picture of health. And married to someone other than him.”
“People will be wondering about you, watching you,” Jane said. “You’ll be the center of attention, and not necessarily the good kind.”
“Perhaps I am nervous, then.” She popped open the fan hanging around her wrist in a vain effort to cool herself off.
“We’ve not helped, I see,” Jane said. “But look. Your husband has brought even more allies.” She pointed behind Diana with her own fan.
Diana turned, and there he was, striding toward her across black-and-white marble, the overhead light of gold-and-diamond chandeliers glinting in his hair.
He was taller than the crowd he pushed through, wider.
An Atlas who could hold the entire world on his broad shoulders.
She’d seen him in the shadowed library, in the darkness behind a curtain, in the sun pouring across a rooftop, in the evening shadows growing through Finsbury Square.
She’d seen him tousled in their bedchamber and merry by the Nickleby House fire.
He was always large and imposing, no matter where he was, but in those other places, he fit—a strapping oak growing in the middle of an ancient forest.
Here though, with the marble and the gold and the diamond, he did not belong.
He dominated.
She knew now why they gave him that cursed nickname. It was to cut him down, to tame him, to shame him and control him.
Because he was no king’s lapdog.
He was an Alchemist King, the master of hearth fires, and his stormy steel gaze was locked on her, the curve of his sumptuous lips tilting up. For her. The people at his side—Sybil and their father—for her.