Homeless (Boundless #2)

In Wine and Wrath

Elizabeth woke beneath a man's arm.

White morning leaked through the shutter.

The blanket lay hot about her legs. A broad hand rested at her waist through the wrinkled linen of her chemise, heavy with the heedless intimacy of sleep — and before memory rose high enough to name any part of it her whole body had gone rigid, because if she drew one full breath, the man beside her might wake, and then she would have to be a woman who could speak after such a night.

The room returned in pieces. Vitoria. The inn.

Rough red wine from a ruined wineskin. A quarrel carried too far because neither of them had ever possessed the grace to leave the other the last word.

Silence after it, black and thick and drawing nearer instead of breaking.

His mouth. Her own astonishing want of sense.

The bed striking the wall. Her hand at the nape of his neck.

His name in her mouth, once with anger, once with something far worse.

She stared into the dim corner above the bed, where the plaster had cracked, as though it might tell her something her own judgement plainly could not.

The room held the leavings of two people who had disgraced themselves past any excuse worth the making.

Her gown in a heap by the chair. His shirt flung over one of her stockings.

One of her ribbons clear across the room and her stays half under the bed, God knew how.

She could almost have laughed at the sheer wreckage of it.

She did not. Laughing wanted breath, and she had none to spare with his arm lying where it lay.

Worst was the man himself. Weeks on the road had taught her more of him than any woman ought to know of a husband she meant to give back — the leather and horse and hard-used linen that clung to him after a day's travel, the clean severity he kept whenever water could be had, the heat of him after labour.

And now this last misery, that sleep sent him reaching for her blind and made him keep her once he found her.

A low ache moved through her, deep and without any delicacy at all. She drew herself in with the whole force she had, as if indignation might carry her back to yesterday. As if she could take it back.

No.

This had come of wine, and exhaustion, and Spain, and the infernal habit they had fallen into of running every quarrel too near the edge of a thing neither would say. By daylight, it would shrink to what it was. An error. A lapse. One night shut up and buried.

The arm across her waist tightened by a hair.

She stopped at the edge of a breath. He did not wake.

His hand only settled the more fully against her, broad and warm, the shape of it plain through the thin cloth gathered at her middle, and the thing it woke in her was so quick and so bodily that she could have wept with the injustice of it, that a sleeping man should have this of her and not even know.

She shut her eyes. That was worse. That gave her all of it back at once — his mouth at her throat, the roughness of his jaw, the grave care of his hands before care went out of them altogether, and the one look, the reckless one, when she had drawn him down to herself.

Her eyes opened.

She would not lie here and soften him. She would not lie here and be softened.

With the caution of a thief — and she had never in her life stood on worse ground from which to condemn one — she turned her head on the pillow.

He lay half toward her, one arm under the pillow, the other flung across her as though sleep had undone every severe rule he kept awake.

The sheet had gone to his hips. She had not meant to look, and looked anyway.

There was the white scar high on his shoulder, older than Spain, that she should never have had cause to see; a half-healed graze down his ribs from the barge-work at Estella that she had bound herself, ten nights ago, with her eyes not averted and her hands not quite steady.

The weeks had cut him lean. Sun had got at him past anything Hertfordshire would know him by, and his hair — too long, too disordered for a man of his tastes — had fallen across his temple and taken from his sleeping face the forbidding reserve that waking would hand straight back.

Without coat or cravat or boots or hauteur or one article of the armour in which he ordinarily met the world, he was only a man.

Exhausted. Formidable. Indecently handsome.

And near enough to undo her… twice over, if memory served. Which it did, in mortifying detail.

She turned her face to the ceiling so fast the pillow rustled under her cheek.

There was the true danger. The bed was ruin already and past prevention; the greater ruin lay in one look too many, one thing too warmly recalled.

She recalled a great deal too much as it stood — his patience where she had given him none, the way his anger changed once it burned clear of his pride, the devotion of his mouth, the astonishment that had crossed his face when the last of her went to pieces in his hands.

This would not do. She must get out of the bed.

Resolve came a good deal readier than execution.

The first attempt drew such complaint from her body that she was obliged to stop and lie still, and hate herself.

The second failed because the arm across her waist — a mere circumstance while she had only to endure it — turned barricade the instant she moved against it.

He was warm and heavy and wholly unconscious and more obstructive asleep than most men managed awake.

She took his wrist in both hands.

Warm skin. Dark hair under her palm. Bone and tendon and a good deal more strength than any sleeping man had business owning.

She knew that hand too well now. Its gentleness and its hesitation, its restraint over the starving weeks, and its wholly other character after midnight. She lifted it away with exquisite care.

A low, wordless sound came out of him, and he drew her back.

Every part of her rose in mutiny, and not the mutiny she wanted.

His face came to rest in the curve of her neck. His breath found the place below her ear. The rough of his jaw followed it, and out of some depth in her where reason had never governed half so well as she pretended, there rose, swift and appalling, an answer.

She could stay, she need only stay, it was already done and lawful and no worse for one more hour —

Oh, no. Indeed, no.

She wrenched free and was up and off the bed before soreness or conscience or the mattress could conspire any further against her.

The boards struck cold through her bare feet, and she was glad of it; cold was honest. Her chemise lay by the chair.

She dragged it over her head with hands nothing like as steady as they had been a day ago, while her body, treacherous end to end, went on insisting she remember every liberty she had let it take.

Her mouth knew. Her breasts knew. Her thighs knew.

None of the knowing improved a single thing.

A sound behind her stopped her cold, one arm still through the sleeve.

Only a long breath. A man asleep.

She found her petticoat and pulled it on, then rucked it up to her hips and sat on the edge of the bed to pull on her stockings, and kept her face to the window.

There was nothing to see but a grey line of morning through the warped shutter.

It was better than the alternative, which lay behind her, breathing.

Before he woke, she must be steady. Before he woke, she must have some language that could name the night and bury it in the one breath.

Before he woke, she must make herself fit to speak to the man at her back as though he had not, a few hours since, known her more nearly than any living creature ever had or — the thought arrived before she could stop it — ever would.

And there, shouldering at last to the front of everything, came the final indignity.

They had done this in wine and in wrath and in want and in plain folly; they had done it lawfully, before God and a Spanish priest, which somehow made it worse and not better; and whatever name she settled on to get herself through the morning, her own body was not going to agree to the lie.

Half dressed in the cold Spanish dawn, aching and ashamed and furious and far too alive to the warmth of the man behind her, she sat and waited for Fitzwilliam Darcy to wake, so that she might begin the impossible work of pretending the road in front of them was the same road it had been the day before.