Chapter 24
The bedroom was quiet and the evening was long and the children were asleep and Erin lay on the bed with her head on the pillow and listened to the sound of water running in the bathroom.
It was the first evening in over a week that had felt like evening, not like the space between one crisis and the next, not like the dark hours when the control room hummed and the phones rang and sleep was something that happened accidentally in stolen minutes on camp beds and car seats.
This was evening. Actual evening. The windows were open and the summer air drifted in carrying the smell of the gardens: cut grass and jasmine and the faint, sweet scent of the honeysuckle that grew along the south wall.
The bedroom was warm and soft and lamplit and the sheets were clean and the duvet was turned down and the house was still.
She could hear Alexandra in the shower. The rush of water against tile, the particular acoustics of their bathroom, the way the sound bounced off the stone walls and the glass screen and created a white noise that was specific to this room, to this house, to the private space they'd carved inside the public institution they inhabited.
Years of lying in this bed while Alexandra showered, the evening routine so deeply ingrained that her body relaxed to it the way it relaxed to nothing else.
She thought about the first time. Not the first time they'd had sex, although she certainly had fond memories of that after a night out disguised in soho.
The sound she'd made when Erin's hand had found her hip. The way Alex had put her hand down her pants, touched herself and then put her fingers in Erin’s mouth, the taste of her desire so potent the Erin had no longer been able to avoid the thing that was building between them.
The look in her eyes afterward, dazed and bright and completely, recklessly happy, that had told Erin, with a certainty she'd never experienced before, that this was not a passing thing.
This was the thing. The thing her life had been pointing toward since before she'd known to look for it.
Not that first time. The other first time, the first time she'd lain in this bed, in this room, in the castle, and heard Alexandra in the shower and known that this was her home.
It had been three weeks after the wedding.
The castle staff had been formal and slightly bewildered, adjusting to the presence of a former protection officer in the Queen's private quarters.
The bed had seemed enormous. The room had seemed designed for someone more important than her.
The portraits on the walls had watched with the impassive gaze of ancestors who were waiting to see if this interloper deserved to be here.
And then Alexandra had come out of the bathroom in a towel, her hair wet, her feet bare on the stone floor, and had smiled at her and said Move over, Sergeant Kennedy, and the room had stopped being the Queen's bedroom and had become theirs.
She thought about other times. The night after Erin had come out of hospital, when Alexandra had held her so tightly that her bullet wound had ached and she hadn't said a word because being held was worth more than breathing.
The night after the children were born, the three of them, early, high risk, and Florence- impossibly small, and Erin standing by the incubators at two in the morning watching them breathe and knowing, with a certainty that had remade her at a molecular level, that she would die for any of them without a second thought.
Many years now. Many years of this woman, this room, this life.
And the last eight days had nearly taken all of it.
The distance between them, the silence on the phone, the I have to go that had meant I can't let you see me fall apart, the wall she'd built between herself and the woman who loved her, had been the most frightening part of the whole ordeal.
Not the kidnapping itself, not the empty house at Latimer's, not even the long nights when the worst-case scenarios had played behind her eyelids like films she couldn't turn off.
The distance. The feeling that the crisis was not just threatening Florence but threatening them, the foundation, the core, the thing that had started in that first day when Erin had taken the job protecting Princess Alexandra and grown into a marriage and a family and a life she would fight the entire world to keep.
She would not let that happen again. She would not build walls between herself and Alexandra. Not ever again.
The bathroom door opened.
Alexandra stood in the doorway. Wrapped in a white towel, her hair damp against her shoulders, her skin flushed from the heat of the water, her bare feet on the stone floor.
The lamp on the nightstand caught the droplets of water on her collarbones and turned them to gold, and the towel was wrapped loosely around her body, not tucked tight the way she normally wore it but held in one hand at her chest, the fabric parting at her thigh, showing the long line of her leg from hip to ankle.
She was looking at Erin. Not the exhausted, worried look of the past week.
Not the measured, regal look of the Queen managing a crisis.
She was looking at Erin the way she'd looked at her that night they got back from their secret outing to Soho years ago, direct, certain, her blue eyes carrying an invitation that was not a question.
"You're staring," Alexandra said.
"You're worth staring at."
"I've just had a shower. I'm dripping on the floor. My hair's a mess."
"Your hair's always a mess after a shower. I've always liked it."
Alexandra smiled. The smile was slow and deliberate and it changed her face the way sunrise changed a landscape: gradually, then all at once.
She walked toward the bed, and the towel shifted with each step, and Erin watched the movement of her body beneath the white cotton and the warmth that had been building in her chest all day, the steady, quiet warmth of relief and gratitude and love, began to spread lower, becoming something hotter and more specific.
"Do you remember the first time?" Alexandra said. She stopped at the edge of the bed. One hand held the towel. The other rested on the mattress beside Erin's hip, and Erin could see the pulse beating in her wrist, quick and visible beneath the pale skin.
“On the window seat.” Erin knew exactly what she was talking about.
“I’d dragged you round Soho in disguise with no back up. And flirted with you all night.”
“Then I had to punch that homophobic guy.”
“Then we ran away and kissed in that doorway.”
“Then you took me home and wouldn’t stop seducing me till I went down on you on the window seat!”
Alex laughed. The sound was warm and bright and private, a laugh that existed only in this room, between these walls, for this audience of one. She leaned down and her hair fell forward, damp and cool against Erin's face, and her lips brushed Erin's ear. "I might have."
Then she dropped the towel.
It fell in a soft heap at her feet and she stood there in the lamplight, and Erin's breath left her body.
Not because she hadn't seen Alexandra naked a thousand times, she had, in every light, in every mood, in every stage of their lives together.
But because tonight the sight of her carried the weight of everything they'd survived in the last eight days.
Every hour of fear, every moment of distance, every whispered promise in the dark.
Alexandra's body was familiar and beloved and mapped in Erin's memory like a country she'd explored for two decades, and the sight of it now, offered freely, the towel dropped like a wall coming down, made Erin's pulse hammer against her ribs.
"Come here," Erin said. Her voice was low. Quiet. The voice she used when the wanting was too big for volume.
Alexandra climbed onto the bed. She straddled Erin's hips, her knees on either side of Erin's waist, her hands on Erin's shoulders, her body warm from the shower and smelling of the soap she'd used, the jasmine and cedar soap that had been in their bathroom since the first year of their marriage, the smell that was, for Erin, the smell of home.
She looked down at Erin with those blue eyes and her hair fell around them like a curtain and the world contracted to the space between their bodies.
Erin sat up. Her hands found Alexandra's waist, the curve of her hips, the warmth radiating from her shower-flushed skin.
She pulled Alexandra closer until their chests pressed together, breasts against breasts, the contact sending a jolt of heat through Erin's body that pooled low in her belly and demanded more.
She kissed her. Not gently. Not carefully.
She kissed her the way she'd wanted to kiss her for eight days: deeply, thoroughly, with her hand in Alexandra's hair and her tongue against Alexandra's tongue and the taste of her filling Erin's mouth like water after drought.
Alexandra made a sound against her lips. Low. Involuntary. The sound she made when she stopped thinking and started feeling, and it went through Erin like electricity, a current that ran down her spine and settled between her hips.
Erin turned them, one hand on Alexandra's waist, one on the small of her back, pivoting their bodies until Alexandra was beneath her and Erin was above, her weight braced on her forearms, her dark hair falling around Alexandra's face.
She looked down at her wife in the lamplight and the vulnerability of her — the bare skin, the damp hair, the blue eyes that were wide and dark and wanting — made something savage and tender rise in Erin's chest simultaneously.