Chapter 29 #2
He took a step toward her. “Instead of his hands, I saw hers. My mother’s hands.
Her long fingers, the way she sat at that piano—back straight, she always said it was mechanics rather than manners, that you breathe better upright.
The way she tilted her head when a piece went right.
” His voice did not break. He had determined it was not going to break.
“I played three notes and I remembered her, and she was not the way she died. She was herself.”
Annabelle’s eyes had filled. She did not look away.
“You were right,” he said. “You have been right about this from the beginning, and I knew it, and I did what I have always done with things I know and cannot bear to act on: I argued with you instead.” He took another step.
“I have spent years telling myself that distance was responsible. That if I did not love anyone too much, I would not have to be afraid of what I might inherit from him. That I was protecting you from whatever I might do with a feeling I hadn’t learned to carry safely.
” He stopped. “It was not protection. It was fear wearing the clothes of restraint, and I let it govern everything.”
She was very still, her arms at her sides, her eyes holding his.
“Pushing you away was the worst thing I have done in recent memory,” he said. “And I have done a number of things I am not proud of.”
Her breath went out through her nose. The corner of her mouth moved in the way it did when she was fighting something back.
“You brought warmth into this house,” he said.
“James laughs differently than he did before you came. He talks differently. He walked into that music room today and sat down at that piano bench without hesitation, and that is not something I gave him.” He held her gaze.
“When you are absent, this house is colder. I am colder. I do not know when I last wanted something for myself rather than in the management of obligation, and then you came, and I wanted everything, and I had no idea what to do with that.”
She was not going to speak until he finished. He could see it in her—the deliberate decision to hear all of it.
“I want a family,” he said. “I want what James deserves, which is a home rather than a well-run house. I want to be better than what I have been, and I have spent a long time believing that wanting things for myself was a luxury I had forfeited.” He was close to her now—close enough to see her clearly, the brightness in her eyes, the set of her mouth.
“I love you. I have been in love with you for long enough that I cannot locate where it began. I am not telling you this as a bid for anything. I am telling you because I have been silent about it in every way that mattered, and I am done.”
She held him in her gaze for a moment. Then she said, “You hurt me.” Her voice was even. True.
“I know,” he said.
“You saw what I felt and you kept choosing to step away from it. Every time. As though my loving you was a problem you were managing.” The line between her brows deepened. “I have never felt lonelier than in this house, loving you.”
“I know that,” he said. “I am sorry. I am sorry for all of it.”
“If you mean this—” She stopped. Started again. “If you are truly ready to let me in. Not in the ways you can manage or the ways you’ve calculated are safe. All the way in.”
“Yes,” he said. “All the way.”
She looked at him the way she looked at things that required real reading, the particular directness of her that never hedged. Whatever she found, something in her face resolved.
“I love you,” she said. “I have tried extremely hard not to. It did not help at all.”
He crossed to her and kissed her.
It was not careful. He was done with careful—careful had cost him months and whatever interim of her patience it had consumed—and he kissed her with his whole attention committed, his hands coming up to her face. She kissed him back at the same register, both hands gripping the lapels of his coat.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. She looked back, her face two inches from his, and the nearness of it required a different kind of seeing than ordinary distance. Then she kissed him again, and his arms went around her, and he stopped looking and started learning.
Her hands moved from his coat to his waist. She walked him backward, step by step, until his shoulders met the wall beside the window, and he let her, and brought his hands up through the layers of her dress and felt the shape of her beneath them.
He reached for the pins in her hair and worked them free, setting them on the side table by feel. When the last pin came out, and her hair came down, he ran his hand through it once, unhurried, and she tipped her head back against his palm.
She was at his cravat. The knot gave on the second try, and the cloth came away, and her hands moved to the buttons of his waistcoat with the focus she brought to things she wanted done correctly.
“Are you certain?” he asked, too eager, too desperate, too wanton to make it a proper question.
She stopped with her fingers at the third button, looking up at him. “Are you asking me or yourself?”
He considered it before his lips curved. “Both.”
“I’m certain.” She held his gaze. “Are you?”
“Yes,” he said.
She went back to the buttons.
He reached behind her and found the fastenings at the back of her dress, the hooks at the neck, the laces beneath, learning them in the dark of his fingers.
When the dress was loose, she shrugged it from her shoulders, and he helped it past her hips, and the petticoat went with it, and then she was in her stays in the low afternoon light, and he was in his shirt, and she looked at him without performing anything about it.
He reached for the laces of her stays.
“I can manage,” she said.
“I know.” He held her gaze. “Let me.”
He worked the laces down slowly. When the stays came loose, she drew a breath that was deeper than any she had taken in the last hour, and he understood what the constraint had been doing to her all day without her showing it. He set the stays on the chair and turned back.
She reached for the hem of his shirt and drew it up. He lifted his arms, and she pulled them over his head, and then she paused.
She was looking at his chest. Both hands still at his sides where she had gripped the fabric, her eyes moving over him with the same careful attention she gave things that mattered to her. He stood under it.
She spread her hands flat against him and felt his heartbeat, and her eyes came up to his.
“It’s fast,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
She leaned forward and pressed her mouth against his sternum, briefly, and he put his hand in her hair.
They moved to the bed with the last of their clothing coming away between them, slightly graceless, the way first times are when neither person is performing ease.
Annabelle lay on her back, and Dominic lay beside her, and they looked at each other in the remaining light, close enough that ordinary sight didn’t serve, that seeing required slowing down.
He moved over her.
He was careful, at first, because she was the one woman he couldn’t afford to be so careless with, and this moment was the most complicated thing he had ever wanted. He started at the inside of her knee.
The soft give of her inner thigh under his mouth, and she let her knee fall outward, and he moved upward by degrees, deliberate, nowhere to be. She watched him do it with her lower lip pressed between her teeth.
“I’ve been—” She stopped. Not completing it. He looked up at her from where he was, and she looked back at him and said, “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He got his hand between her thighs and found her wet and warm, and she pressed her hips up into his hand without apology. He moved his thumb, and she made a short, sharp sound.
“There,” she gasped, her voice coming out high, sultry.
It set his blood on fire, so he stayed there.