Chapter Seven #2
He did not come to her that night until very late, and when he came, it was with a branch of candles and the air of a man performing a duty he had set himself.
She had been sitting up in the great blue room he had given her, her hair down and brushed out over the shoulders of her nightgown, a book she had not read open on her knee, and at his knock she had said come in before she had thought how she would look when he did.
“The locks,” he said from the doorway. “I told you I would check them nightly until I know the house. I will check them and go. That is the whole of why I am here.”
“I am aware of why you are here. You wrote it down.” She watched him cross to the window and try the catch, and then check the second window, and stand a moment with his back to her, arranging himself before he turned.
“You may look at me, Your Grace. I am decently covered, and you are my husband by an hour. A look is not in any of the clauses.”
He turned and looked at her. The candlelight had got into the loose fall of her brown hair and the open collar of the nightgown, and whatever he had meant his face to do, it did not do.
The want came up plain in him and stayed, no more hidden than his scars were hidden, because hiding was a thing he had decided not to do with her.
“You are looking at me,” she said, lower than she had meant to, “the way you looked at me across the table the first morning. As though I were a sum that had come out wrong.”
“You are a sum that has come out wrong. You come out wrong every time I do the arithmetic, and I have stopped trusting the arithmetic and started trusting the answer.” He had not moved from the window.
The careful distance held, and the holding of it showed on him now, a discipline with a price.
“I am going to wish you good night, and I am going to ask you to lock this door when I have gone.”
“Against the house.”
“Against the house. Against Veyr. Against whoever walks the corridors of a place I do not yet trust.” He drew breath before he gave her the rest. “And against me, Giselle. Lock it against me most of all, because I made you a promise, and a locked door will help me keep it on the nights my honour is tired, and you say come in before you have considered what you are inviting.”
“You could simply not come to the door at all.”
“I could. I find I would rather not be the sort of man who keeps his honour by avoiding the test of it. He and I are not on speaking terms.”
“You are a very strange husband, Your Grace.”
“I am the only one you have.” He crossed to the door, and at the threshold, he paused. “Good night, Duchess. Turn the key the moment I am through it.”
“And if I forget?”
“You will not forget. You are the most deliberate person I have ever stood in a room with, and you decided to lock it before I had finished asking.” The dryness had gone out of his voice and left something plainer behind. “Lock it, Giselle. Please.”
He went, and the door closed behind him.
She sat for a long moment in the candlelight with the unread book sliding off her knee before rising, crossing the cold floor and turning the key; the small definite sound of it loud in the great quiet room.
She stood with her hand on the turned key and her forehead nearly against the wood, listening to his step go away down the corridor and not return.
Then she lifted her fingers to the open collar of her nightgown, to the bare place above her collarbone where his gaze had rested and stayed. She pressed her palm to it and found it warm.
Her night was restless because her sleep was full of dreams, and in one of her dreams, the key had done the opposite of what a key is for.
The door stood open in the dark that was her bedchamber and the library at once, shelves climbing into shadow, the air thick with beeswax and the cold-and-ink scent that was only ever his.
He was already inside the room, already past the threshold, looking at her as he had in the doorway with the candle between them and the whole of his restraint laid out for her to admire.
“You did not lock it,” he said.
“No, I did not.”
“You should have listened to me.” The mattress took his weight, and the careful inch he had kept between them all day was gone, given up like a held breath, and the heat of him reached her through the thin cotton of the nightgown before the rest of him did.
“I have been patient since the morning you scolded my filing. I find patience does not survive a locked door, Giselle, and you have left this one standing open.”
“I did not leave it open. It opened on its own.”
“Doors do not open on their own. Someone wants them open, and someone is lying about wanting.” His hand came to her jaw, slow, with the deliberation he brought to anything that mattered, his thumb tracing the line beneath her ear. “Tell me which of us is the liar.”
“You are. You are always the liar. I told you that the first afternoon, and you confirmed it.”
“Then I am lying now when I tell you I came only to check the locks.” His mouth hung a breath from the corner of hers, and the warmth of the words landed on her lower lip and stayed.
Her hands had risen to push him off and arrived instead at the back of his neck, her fingers in the short hair at his nape, holding him where he was.
She was drawing him nearer, and the contradiction of her own two hands undid her more thoroughly than the mouth could have.
She had spent her waking life keeping men at a careful inch, but now here was her body in the dark spending the inch all at once and asking for less.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against her skin, close enough now that his lips moved at her throat as he spoke, “and I will go back through the door. You will hear my step go down the corridor, and in the morning, we shall be reasonable about it.”
“Do not.”
“Do not stop, or do not go?”
“Both. Neither. You are the one who reads me. Read me and stop asking.”
“I read you very well.” His mouth found the place at the base of her throat where her pulse knocked hard enough for both of them to hear.
“I have read you since the first afternoon, and what I read kept me standing on the far side of every room you were in, counting the reasons it would be wrong to cross it.” His hand slid down the column of her neck and came to rest at the open collar of her nightgown, his fingers just inside the cloth, the backs of his knuckles against the flushed skin above her breast. “You should not have let me run out of reasons to stay away.”
“I did not let you. You spent them on your own.”
“And you gave me nothing to put in their place. That was unkind.” He slipped the nightgown from her shoulder, the linen whispering against her skin as it fell.
Cool air met the warmth of his breath on the newly bared curve above her breast, and the contrast rippled through her, settling low in her abdomen.
“You walked into my library and scolded me for my shelving and put your hands inside my ribs, and you were never once kind enough to be ordinary about it.”
“I am ordinary.”
“You are the least ordinary thing that has ever happened to me, and I include the bullet.” He pressed his mouth to the swell of her breast where the nightgown had slipped, and the heat of it bloomed outward through her like a hand laid flat to water, spreading in widening rings from the point of contact.
She arched before the choice reached her, her spine lifting towards a touch he had already, deliberately, softened.
“There. That is not ordinary. An ordinary woman does not arch her whole back for one kiss laid half an inch below the collarbone.”
“An ordinary man does not narrate what he is doing while he does it.”
“I am not ordinary either. We have established this. Hold still.”
“I will not hold still. You have no clause for that.”
“I have a clause for everything. You wrote them.” He drew the nightgown lower until she was bare to the waist. Cool air brushed her skin, tightening her nipples before his mouth found one at last. Warm and unhurried, he lingered there, and the contrast between the chill and his heat drew from her a sound unlike any she had ever made while awake; something beyond language, beyond anything she could have captured on an index card.
“That,” he said, his mouth still against her, the words moving through the sensitive flesh, “is the sound I have been imagining since you tore your petticoat in the dark. I intend to learn every variation of it before the night is out, but you are welcome to stop me at any point. I will not believe you, but you are welcome to try.”
“You are insufferable.”
“I am thorough. You complained about my lack of thoroughness only this afternoon, as I recall, and I am a man who takes correction.” He moved to her other breast and his tongue circled the tight centre slowly, then flattened against it, then circled again, and her hands in his hair tightened past anything she would have allowed herself awake.
He drew the nightgown down the length of her thigh with the patience of a man undoing a clasp he intended to remember, his palm following the bare skin ahead of the cloth so that the cool of the linen sliding away and the warmth of his hand reaching forward arrived at each inch of her in turn, a slow wave of contrast running hip to knee.
She parted her legs before his hand asked it of her, which was, in the quiet arithmetic of surrender, a larger concession than all five of her written terms.