Chapter Sixteen #2
“Tell me to go on or tell me to stop,” he managed.
“But it must be you who tells me. I have nothing left that steers.” But he changed his mind just as quickly as he had lost it.
“Not here,” he said roughly. “Say it with me, because in a moment I will not be able to say it alone. Not in this house. Not on a floor in the dark with his man at the gate and your mother’s ghost in the boards, with one ear listening for the watch to change.
When it happens, and it is going to happen, it will not be a thing we stole in his shadow.
It will be in our own house, with the doors locked because we locked them and not because we are hiding, and I will have the whole night and no saddlebag and no lantern to ration, and you will not have to be quiet.
” His breath dragged once before the rest would come.
“You deserve a first time that no part of him touches. I am asking you to help me give it to you because my discipline is spent, Giselle. You have the rest of it in your two hands.”
She lay under him in the coin of light, hair down, eyes enormous, and then she laughed, soft, ragged and real, the most dangerous sound in the county. “You are rationing the lantern and yourself on the same arithmetic.”
“It is the only arithmetic I have left.”
“Then I will keep the books from here. I am better at them.” Her thumb traced the scar at his jaw once, deliberate, a cataloguer marking a volume as hers. “Item. One duke, used, dented, in want of repair. Claimed.”
“You are inventorying me on your mother’s floor.”
“I am securing the collection before transport. It is standard practice. How do you mean to get us home by the commission?” she asked against his chest. “Truthfully. No comfort.”
“Truthfully. We ride the lanes to the Aylesford crossroad and take the main road from there in the morning crowd, where two more riders are nothing. We are in London by early afternoon, you sleep, and the day after you walk into Vale’s chambers rested, with the proof lodged somewhere none of them can reach and a husband who knows every man in that room by his worst secret. ”
“You make it sound nearly easy.”
“It is nearly easy. Nearly is where all my trouble has ever lived.”
“Then we agree, and you may stop white-knuckling my mother’s parlour floor.
” She drew his hand up from the floorboard and set it, deliberately, over her heart, which was going like a horse at a gallop.
“Feel that. That is not stopping. That is waiting. There is a difference, you taught me so yourself, in a doorway, in another life.”
“I taught you too well. I am being defeated by my own curriculum.”
“Regularly, and it will continue. When we are home, in our own house, with the doors locked because we locked them. You have the terms accepted without negotiation. My solicitor would despair of me.” She pulled his mouth down and kissed him once more, brief and scorching.
“Do not make me wait long. I have no talent for it. I asked you once not to make me ask twice, and I am telling you now, the third asking will not be polite.”
“Noted in the record.” He sat up and drew her up with him.
He held her against his chest in the small light with her back to him, his chin at her hair, and the packet within reach of both of them.
“Ten minutes until the watch turns if I guess correctly. Stay here. Just here. I have held a great many things in seventeen years, and none of them ever once held back.”
“I am holding the packet as well. You are embracing the evidence.”
“I am embracing the whole case,” he said. “Every part of it I intend to keep.”
They crossed the valley floor when the watch changed, two shadows below the hedge line with the truth in a saddlebag.
“Clear,” he said at the treeline. “Breathe again.”
“I never stopped.”
“You held it from the gate to the stream. I counted.” They were a mile into the dark before either spoke beyond that.
“At home,” he said, “in daylight, at a table. We open it together.”
“Together. And then Veyr learns what my mother kept, in front of a commission he built to bury it, which has a shape I admire. He dug the grave, so we will hold the funeral. I have only to decide what gets buried in it.”
“There is my duchess. Two hours of housebreaking and she is planning obsequies.”
Her voice came light across the cold air, and then it changed, the cataloguer arriving back on duty all at once. “Royce. The knots.”
“What about the knots?”
“My mother sealed every knot. I counted the seals when I lifted it, and there were five; it is habit; I count everything.” The hoofbeats filled three full seconds before she finished, and the cold of it reached him before the words did.
“I see now that four of the knots are tied the same way, but there is one that looks different. Someone has had it open, Royce. Someone found it before us, and read what they wanted, tied it back wrong, and left it under the board for us to find.”
***
They retired that night, resolved to consider the matter afresh in the clear light of morning, trusting that a night’s rest would lend greater clarity to their thoughts.
However, before saying goodnight in the library of their house, they kissed again, and it was a kiss full of desire.
He had stopped them. He remembered the exact cost of it, her whisper that she could not tell whether she was forgiving him or only wanting him.
He had taken his hands from her and stepped back into the cold air of the library, because the first time he had her, he would not have her wondering whether the wanting was strategy.
He had gone up to his own room and lain down a disciplined man.
His sleeping mind though, kept no such discipline, answered to no such scruple, and gave her back to him the moment his guard went down.
In the dream, she had not let him stop.
They were in the library still, the candle guttering, the locked doors holding, but the careful inch was gone, her hands were at his shirt, and she was pressing him back into the deep chair by the cold hearth with a determination he had no will left to resist. The dream held the stubborn set of her mouth and the way she did everything as though correcting a careless man’s filing, and it gave her to him exactly so, brisk, certain and entirely without mercy.
“You do not get to decide when I have endured enough,” she said, the same words she had thrown at him in the waking, only now she was unfastening him as she said them, her fingers working his fall with the same unhurried precision she gave a damaged binding.
“You do not get to be noble to me while I am wanting. Sit down, Your Grace, and let me have what you keep deciding I am too good to be given.”
“Giselle.”
“That is not an argument. That is only my name, and you say it when you have run out of arguments, I have noticed.” She freed him from the breeches and took the hard length of his manhood into her ink-stained hand, and the first stroke of her drew a sound out of him that he would never have permitted himself to make awake: low, wrecked and stripped of every register he had ever hidden behind.
“There. You are not stone after all. I had begun to wonder.”
“You had not begun to wonder. You have known since the carriage.”
“I have known since the day with the bandage, and I have been patient about it, which is more than you deserve.” She worked him slowly, her thumb tracing the swollen ridge beneath the head on every upstroke, and the friction of her ink-roughened palm against the sensitive underside sent his hips lifting off the chair to chase her grip.
“You are not patient at all, it seems. All that restraint, and underneath it, you are as greedy as any man who ever scolded a footman. I find I prefer you greedy. The noble version of you is exhausting.”
“The noble version of me is the only one who keeps his hands to himself.” His voice had gone to gravel, and he watched his own discipline come apart under the steady ruin of her hand. “You are dismantling him. I am warning you about what stands behind him.”
“Warn me, then. I have survived everything else in this house. I can survive you.”
The warning broke the last of it.
He moved before the thought arrived, his hands closing around her wrists and pulling them up and away from his lap in one motion that brought her off balance and across his thighs.
She drew a breath that was half surprise and half something darker, and before she could spend it, he had turned them both, rising out of the chair and putting her back against the library table with his body.
His hands held her wrists at the level of her waist, pinned lightly, to hold her but not to hurt, and the holding was the point.
“You wanted the ungoverned version,” he said against her mouth. “You have him now, but he does not ask permission. He takes turns.”
“Then take one.”
“I intend to take a great many.” He gathered both her wrists into one hand, the span of his fingers wide enough to hold them, and his free hand went to the laces at her bodice and pulled.
The linen parted, the stays beneath loosened, and he drew the whole of it down to her waist with none of the patience the waking man would have shown, baring the pale swell of her breasts to the candlelight in one long motion that left her gasping under his hands.
“You have ruined my laces.”