Chapter Three #3
She had not meant to notice his hands. She had been attending, at the time, to the professional content of the interview—salary, duties, the boundaries of her authority over the boy—and she had schooled her gaze downward in the manner a governess was taught to school it.
Downward had meant the desk. The desk had meant his hands.
Long fingers. Scarred in places—perhaps from the war, or something earlier. A boyhood injury, perhaps.
You are a fool, she told herself, staring at the dark ceiling. You are a twenty-six-year-old fool lying in your employer's house cataloguing your employer's hands. You have not done this since you were nineteen.
She turned onto her side. She closed her eyes with the firmness of a woman commanding a recalcitrant child to sleep.
The dream, when it finally came, disobeyed her as thoroughly as any child ever had.
She was in his library. She had not been in his library yet—had only passed its door, had only glimpsed, through the gap, leather spines and a carpet worn by the passage of generations—but in the dream the room was vivid and particular, firelit, smelling of woodsmoke and the faint dry perfume of old books.
She was standing before the hearth. Someone was behind her.
She did not turn. The dream did not require her to turn. She knew, with the absolute knowing of dreams, who it was.
A hand came to rest at her waist.
The touch was slight. Through the layers of her dress and shift, she ought not to have felt anything at all—and yet she felt it everywhere, down the length of her spine, into the soles of her feet, up into her scalp. Her breath caught in a way her waking body had forbidden for years.
"Miss Weston." His voice, low and scraped—not the cold ducal voice of the study but something underneath it, something she had suspected was there and had not let herself consider. "You should go back to your room."
I know, she thought. She did not say it. Dream-Lorraine did not say anything sensible.
His other hand came up. It traced the column of her throat—the lightest brush, a fingertip only—and settled beneath her jaw to turn her face toward him.
She turned. She saw grey eyes, storm-dark in the firelight, and the scar through his brow, and the mouth she had spent the interview trying not to look at directly.
His mouth came down on hers.
The dream abandoned narrative then. It gave her, instead, sensation—the unfamiliar pressure of another person's body against the front of hers, the warmth of his hand sliding from her throat down the line of her bodice, the astonishing, indecent heat that pooled low in her belly and spread outward as though her body, denied for three years, had at last been given permission to remember what wanting felt like.
She was pressed back against something—a wall, a bookshelf, his arms, she did not know—and his mouth was at her throat, and her dress was loosening in ways dresses did not loosen under a governess's careful daytime control, and she was making a sound in her throat that she had never in her life made aloud.
He has not even called you Lorraine, some faint rational fragment protested.
"Lorraine," he said, against her skin.
The dream broke her open.
She came apart with an intensity she had not known her body was capable of—had not known, perhaps, that any body was capable of—and she woke with a small shocked cry muffled against her own pillow, her nightgown twisted around her thighs, her heart racketing against her ribs as though she had been running.
For a long moment she lay perfectly still. The fire had gone to embers. The wind was still at the windows. The house slept around her, vast and indifferent.
She pressed both hands flat over her face.
"No," she whispered, into her palms. "No. No. No."
The protest was useless. Her body, flushed and throbbing and shamelessly warm, was not persuaded.
Neither, if she were honest, was her mind.
The dream had been vivid in a way dreams were not supposed to be—had felt less like invention than recognition, as though her sleeping self had seen something her waking self was too disciplined to name, and had shown it to her with the clinical thoroughness of a physician presenting a diagnosis.
She had known the man for a single morning.
She had exchanged perhaps fifty words with him, most of them professional.
And her body had already decided.
Lorraine sat up in the dark. She pulled the counterpane around her shoulders, drew her knees to her chest, and stared at the shuttered window with the dry-eyed horror of a woman who had spent three years building a fortress and now, distinctly, heard the first stone fall.
She did not sleep again that night. She sat in the narrow blue room until the grey light came in at the edges of the shutters, and she listened to the rain, and she composed a lecture for herself of such withering thoroughness that a less determined woman would have resigned by breakfast.
Lorraine did not resign. Lorraine had survived worse than her own body.
She would survive this too.
Probably.