Charlotte Ellis #2
We move toward the bed with the particular negotiated choreography of two people who have been thinking about this long enough to have opinions.
He learns what I want faster than anyone has.
He pays attention with his whole body, adjusting, checking, asking without words and listening to the answers I give without them.
When I pull him closer he understands that I mean now, not later, not eventually, but now, and he obliges with a focused precision that undoes me from the inside out.
His mouth on my collarbone. My throat. The curve of my breast. He moves like someone who has decided that thoroughness is its own form of desire, and I decide it is, I agree completely, I make sounds into the dark of his bedroom that I will think about for weeks after in the very early mornings when I am alone and the light is wrong.
I pull him back up to my mouth. His weight settles against me and I feel the specific quality of his wanting, the heat and certainty of it, and I reach for him with a directness that makes him groan against my neck in a way I am going to want to hear again.
“Charlotte.” My name in his voice like that is a thing I could live inside.
“Yes,” I say. “I know. Yes.”
When he moves into me it is slow and careful and he keeps his eyes open and watches my face and I watch his and something passes between us that I do not have language for.
Not yet. Something that has been building since a cold January afternoon in a library full of books, since the first time he looked at me with that problem-solving attention and I felt understood in a way that made no sense and every sense simultaneously.
He begins to move and I stop thinking in sentences.
What I have instead: his hands, the particular grip of them, the way they learn the shape of me like architecture, like something to be memorized for later reference.
His mouth when he finds what he is looking for and the sound I make in response that I will deny later.
The steady focused quality of his attention that has been undoing me since the second week of January and is now completing what it started.
The way he says my name when the control he is so careful about finally slips, just slightly, just enough, and he presses his face into my hair and holds me like he has been waiting for somewhere to hold on to.
I come apart in pieces. Slowly. Thoroughly. In the way that the best things happen when they have been worth waiting for.
He follows, breathing my name against my throat, and the careful measured quality of Alexander Ashford fractures open completely, briefly, and I am the only person on earth who has ever been in this room to witness it.
Afterwards, he pulls me against his side and I listen to his heartbeat slow and something in my chest settles into a place it has not occupied before.
He is warm. He does not speak, which is correct.
The London dark presses soft against the window and somewhere in the house a clock strikes two and neither of us moves.
His hand finds my hair. Stays there.
I close my eyes.
I wake to his heartbeat under my ear and his arm heavy across my waist and the terrifying thought that I do not want to leave.
The room is grey with predawn light. London traffic has started up outside, the distant hum of a city that never fully sleeps. Alexander is still asleep, his breathing deep and even, and I have approximately three minutes to figure out what I am supposed to do now.
I lift my head carefully. His arm tightens reflexively, pulling me closer, and something in my chest cracks open at the unconscious possessiveness of it. Even asleep, he is keeping me here.
His eyes open. For a moment, he looks confused, like he is not sure if I am real. Then his expression clears and he reaches up to push my hair back from my face.
"You stayed."
"I stayed."
"I was not certain you would."
I trace a pattern on his chest with my fingertip, not meeting his eyes. "I was not certain I would either."
He catches my hand and brings it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to my palm. The gesture is so tender that I feel it in my teeth.
"I need to tell you something," he says.
"Can it wait?"
"No." He sits up slowly, keeping my hand in his.
The sheet pools at his waist, and I try not to look at the way the grey light catches his shoulders, the planes of his chest, the scar on his left side I noticed last night but did not ask about.
"Sebastian put his card in your kit bag the first day he came here.
I knew he did. I found it in the hallway after you left. "
"I know." I pull my hand gently from his. "Mrs Hartley told me you found it."
"You knew?"
"I knew you knew. I was waiting to see what you would do with the information."
He exhales. "What I did was nothing. I thought if I ignored it, it would not matter. I was trying to protect you from having to deal with him directly."
"And how did that work out?"
"Poorly." His mouth quirks. "As you may have noticed."
I sit up, pulling the sheet with me. The morning air is cool on my shoulders. "Tell me the rest of it. All of it. About Sebastian and the codicil and why Fairfax Holdings has been calling you."
He goes still in the way that means something is costing him. Then he starts talking.
He tells me about the procedural inheritance query Sebastian filed with the estate's trustees.
He tells me about the codicil and how it was inserted into his father's will eighteen months before his father died, creating an ambiguity in the residence clause that Sebastian is now exploiting.
He tells me about Gerald Prentiss, the solicitor who drafted it, and Prentiss's eleven-year relationship with Lady Evelyn Ashford.
"Sebastian's mother," I say.
"My stepmother." His voice is flat. "She was not kind to my mother while my mother was alive. She has not been kind to me since my mother died. But I did not think she would go this far."
I process this. "So Sebastian is using a legal loophole that his own mother created."
"He does not know that. Not yet." Alexander runs a hand through his hair. "He thinks the codicil is a legitimate weapon. He does not know his mother engineered it."
"How do you know he does not know?"
"Because if he knew, he would not be using it. Sebastian wants what I have, but he is not cruel. Not like that. Finding out his mother used him as a tool to undermine me would destroy him."
I reach for his hand. "And that matters to you."
"He is my brother." He says it simply, like it explains everything. Maybe it does.
The light is changing outside the window.
Morning is coming properly now, the grey giving way to pale gold.
I think about the van parked in the service courtyard with my transport crates still in the back.
I think about Jess waiting for me in Oxford.
I think about the life I had two weeks ago, before I walked through the wrong entrance of Ashford House and met a man in a grey sweater who knew more about light than I expected.
"I should go."
"I know."
"I have to get back to Oxford. I have conditioning to do, and Jess will have questions, and there is a wedding consultation at noon that I cannot miss."
"I know."
I look at him. He is watching me with that particular stillness he has, the one that means everything important is happening underneath. "But I will come back."
Something shifts in his face. Not hope exactly. Something more like relief. "When?"
"Soon." I lean forward and kiss him, soft and brief. "After I figure out what I am going to tell Jess about why I did not come home last night."
"Tell her you were reviewing the commission deliverables."
"She will not believe that."
"No." His mouth curves. "But it will give her something to tease you about."
I get out of bed and find my dress crumpled on the floor where it landed sometime in the small hours. It is wrinkled beyond saving, and I will have to wear my backup jeans from the van. I do not care.
He watches me dress. The weight of his attention is tangible, warm, not uncomfortable.
"Charlotte."
I turn.
"I need you to know something." He is still sitting in the bed, the sheets tangled around his waist, and he looks nothing like the Earl of Bodington.
He looks like a man who has just shared something fragile and is waiting to see if it survives.
"I do not yet know who drafted the arrangement that left the ambiguity open.
I told you about Prentiss, and I told you about my stepmother, but I do not have proof. Not yet."
"But you think someone in your family does."
"Yes." His jaw tightens. "And I am going to find out."
I cross back to the bed and put my hand on his cheek. His stubble rasps against my palm. "Then we will find out together."
His hand comes up to cover mine. "We?"
"We."