Chapter Twenty #2
The endearment finished what the rhythm had begun.
The pleasure that had been climbing tipped and poured, and she crested with a long low cry that filled the small stone room, her body tightening around him in deep rolling pulses that gripped the length of him in a rhythm older and more honest than any she had set on purpose.
She rode the whole length of it without stopping, pressing down hard against his thumb and the thick base of him, wringing the waves brighter and longer, refusing to let a single one of them pass without taking everything it carried.
The sight of her undid him as much as the grip did.
She was golden, wrecked and entirely present; her face open in a way the duchess never allowed, the cataloguer never risked, and the sheer vulnerability of her pleasure above him, given to him on purpose, in daylight, hauled him to the edge before her pulses had finished their work.
“Giselle. I am...” He could not finish the sentence because she clenched around him one final time, deliberate, a woman who had learned overnight what that particular grip did to the last of his composure, and the composure went.
He followed her with his hands hard at her hips, pulling her down flush against him as his own climax tore loose, and she rode him through it, taking every shudder.
She folded down onto his chest at the end of it, boneless, both of them slick and breathless and laughing at nothing in the early light.
They lay tangled while their breathing settled towards home, her ear over his heart, his hand making its slow road up and down her spine.
“Tell me a thing about mornings,” she said. “You have had three and forty years of them. I have had one. I find my scholarship wanting.”
“I can tell you everything about mornings. Mornings are the hours the discretion trade does its accounting. Who saw what, who must be paid, what must be burned. I have hated mornings my whole life, professionally and at leisure.” His hand stopped at the small of her back and stayed.
“Until the current specimen. The current specimen is the finest in the recorded history of the form, and I am including several famous sunrises I was paid to ride away from.”
“The monograph,” she said into his neck, “will require extensive further study.”
“Years of it. Decades. The field is in its infancy.” He wrapped both arms around her and held on, and for a moment, the war did not exist, and he let the moment be the size it wanted to be. “I love you. Daylight version. No darkness to hide in, no battle to excuse it. Entered in the record.”
“Witnessed,” she said softly. “Entirely.”
***
The war came back a little later, the way wars do, with the saddling of a horse.
“The invitation to Vale, the register, and back by dusk.” He checked the carbine’s load, set it by her hand and made himself say the rest level.
“Bar the door. You are Mrs Norris if any soul comes up that lane, and there is no reason any soul should. Tomorrow, we walk into their room together. Today, stay filed, my love, one last day.”
“One last day. Go, before I unfile myself and come with you.”
“You would too.”
“I would be on the second horse before you cleared the lane. I am restraining myself out of strategy, not obedience, and you would do well to remember the difference tomorrow when you are tempted to manage me in front of Vale.”
“I would not dream of managing you in front of Vale. I intend to sit beside you in perfect silence while you take that room apart, and to look like a man who knew it would happen, which I will be.” He kissed her at the door the way men kiss before wars, thorough and brief. “Bar it behind me.”
***
Vale’s chambers received the invitation from his own gloved hand, a perfectly proper request that the eminent solicitor examine and authenticate a vestry settlement of the eleventh of June.
“Is there an answer expected, Your Grace?” the clerk asked, holding the thing like the ordinary paper it was dressed as.
“No answer. Mr Vale will know what is required of him on reading it. Tell him the Duke of Calder calls it a matter of authentication, and that I have every confidence in his eye. He has the finest eye for a forgery in England.” Royce smiled the old court smile, the one that had ended better men’s breakfasts.
“Quote me exactly. He will value the compliment.”
The clerk repeated it back, word-perfect and politely baffled, a man repeating a sentence he was glad not to understand, and Royce left the building lighter by one letter and heavier by everything it had set in motion. He rode for St Anselm’s with the morning still high.
The church stood small and soot-darkened in its city yard, and the curate who brought out the register was young and earnest and had no notion he was handling a kingdom.
“The eleventh of June,” the curate said, turning the great leaves. “Here. Westmere, by licence. The lady signs Helena Linfield. Both witnesses present. A quiet wedding, by the look of the entry, and a fair hand on the licence.”
“I will want the certified extract. Today, while I wait, and I will pay for the haste.” Royce set three guineas on the vestry table and kept his voice in the dry register while everything under it stood at attention.
“That page is worth more than this church, and there are men who would burn the church to be rid of the page. Has anyone else asked after it?”
“You are the second,” the curate said, and went on copying with terrible unconcern. “To ask after that page.”
“The second.” The churchyard sparrows went on shouting. “Tell me the first.”