Chapter Twenty-Three
The flat was in a nicer part of Brighton than Libba had anticipated. It was one of three, stacked atop each other in a neat set of rows, each with a vine-embraced trellis balcony extending from the front-facing window.
Jasper’s was the one at the top.
He did not let go of her hand as they entered the building, nor as they climbed the stairs.
He also did not speak a word the entire time.
He only released her once they had reached his door so he could fish in his trousers for the key, a motion that brought Libba’s attention back to that particular garment and its contents with worrying alacrity.
The inside was neat, if sparse, she noted, as the door swung open.
The interior felt summarily masculine. Spartan and maritime in theme. She stepped into the first room, arranged for sitting and reading, and blinked rapidly as her vision fell on a large corkboard behind his sofa.
It was covered, covered with flyers and programs. Old ones, from before she’d gone to London.
Some were hand-drawn. Some featured the crooked, spiky scrawl of her own hand.
Her shows. Fifteen years of Starling family showcases in the summer pavilions of Brighton.
Even Rhys’s illusionist events featured here, tacked between and behind the larger pieces.
She took a step closer. There were newspaper cuttings too. An advertisement for Ruby’s perfumes. Malcolm’s rise to junior banker in London. Hattie’s tenure as a translator in the winter palace of Russia.
He had collected souvenirs from her shows. In the left-hand corner was a fresh, crisp flyer with red ink for Pygmalion and next to it, tattered and yellowed with age, a childish stamping print that read The Marvelous Human Abacus.
Most remarkable of all was that Jasper seemed unconcerned with her noticing that particular piece of decoration. He gave it not a single second glance, closing the door behind her and flicking the lock into place.
She reached out, her hand shaking, and pushed the curling edges of the Human Abacus flyer smooth.
She could hear her own voice as a child, somewhere in the back of her mind. As Bess. As Lizzie. As Eliza.
She could see her brother and Jasper, all of twelve, flicking a red hat at a target the day Willa Selwyn had approached her on the beach.
“Careful,” he said softly, his voice so low and smooth that it was a wonder it could startle her. “It’s brittle.”
“It should be under glass,” she responded absently. “It’s a miracle that it hasn’t flaked to dust by now.”
He chuckled. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“What is …?” she started, turning toward him. Her breath caught at the way he was leaning against the door, his arms crossed, one leg propped up behind him, watching her with a soft smile. “Why?”
“Receipts,” he said, shrugging. “I can’t throw them out.”
She gave a shaky laugh, dropping her hands to her sides. “I never do, either. I keep them in a box, though. Mine don’t go back quite so far.”
He shrugged. “It’s an old habit. Raised in a counting house, you become something of a magpie, I suppose. I like looking at them. At all of you.”
“All of us,” she said, quirking a brow and glancing back at the board.
It was three-quarters devoted to her own plays.
To her things, exclusively. The other Starling wards simply garnished the cracks.
“I see. Has … erm …” She paused, curling her fingers through the ties at the front of her dress. “Has Malcolm seen this?”
Jasper nodded, pushing off the door to stride over to where she stood, his heat and scent radiating off him as he took a stance at her shoulder.
“He mailed me these,” he said, gesturing at a few of the flyers from the Seven Dials playhouse.
“From London. He wrote me often and he knew I liked having them.”
“I didn’t,” she said, frowning, her eyes flickering shut as she inhaled him. “Write you.”
“No,” he agreed. “You didn’t.”
She turned, her breath held, and tilted her eyes up to meet his. “‘Better than you’ve always imagined.’ That’s what you said this morning.”
His easy smile flickered, a shadow passing over his face. His hand came up, hovering just short of touching her cheek. “I said a lot of stupid things this morning, Lib.”
“Stupid doesn’t mean false,” she said, searching his face, that familiar, safe face. “Had you always imagined it? What I taste like?”
He grimaced, a short, flashing thing, his hand collapsing on her shoulder. “Not intentionally,” he said, giving his head a short shake. “But yes, I suppose I must have.”
“Because you imagine all women?” she pressed, her eyes following the path of his hand. “Because it’s just animal nature?”
His hand flexed, his thumb tracing her collarbone. “I don’t know.”
“My tatty, pink robe,” she said, her voice sticking and fluttering in her throat. “That stupid hair wrap. Why would they make you lose your mind?”
His smile came back then, a small huff of laughter, but he didn’t meet her eye again. “Don’t remind me.”
She took a step closer to him, her body brushing against his. “You didn’t lose your mind when I wore the Xandine dresses. When my hair was down my back. Surely, that is more tempting.”
“Xandine,” he replied with a quirk of his lips, finally looking at her again, his tilted, golden eyes flicking up to crash into hers. “I can manage Xandine. Libba is my problem. And there is not a thread of costuming in your night things, not a single protective shield or act.”
She hesitated, an incredulous burst of air escaping her chest. “I do not need a costume to shield or act.”
“But you weren’t, that night,” he replied immediately. “And you weren’t this morning. And you aren’t. Right now.”
She felt a frown tugging at her lips, a discomfort with that idea scattering across her skin. “How do you know?”
“I know,” he said. “Anyone who knows you can tell.”
“And you know me?” she said, forcing her throat to swallow, forcing her lungs to breathe. “Even after I left? Even after I did not write?”
He nodded, a slow, careful motion, his eyes locked on hers. “Yes.”
“Well,” she said, frowning fully now. “Shit.”
Her remark got a flash of his teeth, a grin that pulled his freckles taut across his nose, that sparkled in those eyes. “It is shit,” he agreed, chuckling. “It’s killing me, you know.”
“Because you want to …?”
“Ayup.” He ducked his head down, his hands coming up to cup her cheeks as he claimed her lips against his own, firm and sweet and urgent.
She clasped his wrists immediately in her palms, anchoring herself against his grip. This was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? What she had been expecting. What’d she’d known would happen the instant she’d taken his hand back at the Odalisque.
It awoke her, pore by pore, cell by cell, just as it had this morning against the wall at the EIC office. The feel of his breath, hot against her face, the little sounds of relief he made as he angled her face toward him and deepened his taste of her.
She met the tip of his tongue with her own. She reveled in her own distress at how good it tasted, her fingers sliding up the sleeves of his jacket, along his forearms and to his elbows, clinging and tugging and impatient for more.
She got the fabric off his shoulders, got it far enough that he pulled slightly back from her, assisting her in shrugging it off and tossing it across the room before his fingers slid back around the column of her neck and pulled her back again.
She wanted his chest.
She wanted what she’d seen that night in the parlor, glinting and broad and dotted with the kiss of the sun.
She slid her hands over the breadth of his shirt, tracing its outline through the fabric as she pressed closer, as she let herself be tasted, half-feral with the urge to begin ripping at the linen, severing the hems and lines entirely until she had what she was after.
He stopped touching her only to assist in her task, fingers sliding off her throat to meet her own over his heart, tugging free the ties at his collar, jerking the fabric up from where it had been anchored in the waistband of his trousers.
Oh, his trousers. Her eyes fell there next, her hands following, sliding around the muscled dip of his hips and over the curving muscle of his backside that had so hypnotized her on the staircase today.
He made a strangled, shocked noise, his shirt half off as she squeezed. When he fought the remainder of the fabric away, his expression had gone as dark and reflective as a piece of black glass, his ribs heaving as he dragged air into his lungs, staring down at her in something like disbelief.
“Did you just grab my arse?” he managed, his voice hissing through his teeth.
“No,” she lied, and she did it again, getting something between a groan and a chuckle from his throat.
He swept an arm down behind her knees and pulled her up against his bare chest, ignoring her squeak of shock as he turned and made his way down an unlit hall.
He supported her with one flexing arm while the other dug itself into the laces at the front of her dress, jerking them free of their individual and carefully knotted bows as he walked.
He kicked a door open, dipping his head down to kiss her again as he pulled the fabric of her bodice apart and folded himself forward as he placed her in the center of a large, starchy bed.
She noted, in a bit of a daze, that it appeared freshly turned down, the sheets new and still stiff with soap and the sunshine of a drying line.
She turned her head, attempting to take in more of his room as he jerked her dress down over her hips, pulling it free of her body to reveal the dove-gray chemise underneath, somehow both crazed with urgency and managing not to rip the delicate fabric.
She lifted her hips to assist him and rolled onto her stomach, presenting the ties at the back of her half-stays to his fingers, which he attacked immediately once the dress had been defeated and tossed away.