Chapter Fourteen
“You are humming again, miss.”
Lorraine’s mouth snapped shut. Jenny stood in the nursery doorway with a stack of freshly laundered linens, her round face arranged in an expression of poorly concealed delight.
“Am I?” Lorraine turned back to the slate upon which she had been writing vocabulary words and endeavoured to ignore the warmth rising in her cheeks. “I had not noticed.”
“You have done so all morning. A very pretty tune, too—what is it?”
“Nothing of consequence. A song I heard once.” She set down the chalk with more force than was strictly necessary and smoothed her skirts. “Has Thomas finished his luncheon?”
“Nearly. He is asking for you, miss. Wishes to show you a drawing of a fox. Lord Julian’s visit has left him quite taken with foxes.”
Lord Julian.
Five days gone, and the house remained altered by his absence. Not emptier, but changed. Charged. As though his departure had swept away the last barrier between herself and Dominic, and now the very air seemed to hum with everything they hadn’t done.
Five days since the night in the library.
Five days since she had held him while he broke, since her fingers had moved through his hair while he spoke of unsent letters and dreams that would not release him.
Five days since they had watched the dawn arrive together, side by side upon the settee, breathing in the fragile quiet of something new.
They had not spoken of it.
Not directly. Not in words. But in every other language—in glances that lingered too long, in the charged space between them in narrow corridors, in the way his voice lowered when he spoke her name—the conversation continued, relentless and inescapable.
Lorraine was losing her composure.
For several years, she had trained herself in the discipline of wanting nothing.
She had perfected the art of lowered eyes, measured steps, and thoughts confined within strict and sensible bounds.
She had been so very good at it—so accomplished in the practice of denial—that she had nearly persuaded herself the wanting had died.
It had not died. It had only slept. And now it was awake, ravenous, filling every quiet moment with thoughts of grey eyes, scarred hands, and the rough cadence of her name spoken in the dark.
She was humming.
She had not hummed since before Lydia’s scandal—before the disgrace, before she had locked away every light and frivolous part of herself behind a careful facade of competence and composure.
This is what he does to me, she thought. He makes me hum.
It was, she reflected, a singularly inadequate description for the undoing of one’s entire emotional architecture.
***
Dominic was in a very particular kind of hell.
A refined, exquisite torment reserved for men who had held the woman they desired in their arms through the night—and had been too shattered to act upon it.
He sat at his desk, staring at estate correspondence that might as well have been written in cypher, and replayed the same three memories in a relentless loop: the press of her lips against his knuckles; the steady rhythm of her heartbeat beneath his ear; the gentle passage of her fingers through his hair—so tender it had nearly undone him for reasons altogether separate from grief.
He had wept in her arms. Had broken utterly, in a manner he had denied himself since Spain. And she had not recoiled. Had not withdrawn. Had not regarded him with the pity he had dreaded for four years.
She had remained.
Had spoken words he could scarcely recall, yet still felt—imprinted somewhere beneath his skin.
And now he wanted her with a force that rendered his former loneliness almost trivial.
It was not merely physical—though the physical alone threatened to unmake him.
It was everything. The slight lift of her chin before she spoke something quietly defiant.
The faint scatter of freckles across her nose.
The ink upon her fingers. The sound of her laughter—not the polite, social version, but the true one, unguarded and bright.
He wanted to hear that laughter daily. Wanted to be its cause. Wanted to sit across from her at breakfast for the remainder of his days and watch the morning light catch in her hair, and know—simply know—that she had chosen him.
That he was not dreaming.
He shoved back from his desk and stood, pacing the study with the restless energy of a caged animal. His hands clenched and flexed at his sides. His jaw ached from the effort of keeping it locked.
‘When,’ she said. ‘Not if.’
***
The days that followed were a study in controlled torment.
They circled one another—drawn together and held apart by the opposing forces of desire and decorum. Rovewood Hall, once vast, seemed now to contract, every passage leading, inevitably, to the same conclusion: each other.
Lorraine caught him watching her during Thomas’s morning lesson. She had been guiding the boy’s hand across the slate, demonstrating the careful strokes of penmanship, when she looked up to find Dominic in the doorway—not concealed, not hesitant, but entirely still, his gaze fixed upon her hands.
Not her face. Her hands.
The way her fingers curved about the chalk. The precision of their movement.
He lifted his eyes and met hers, and the heat in them sent something sharp and immediate through her.
She dropped the chalk.
Thomas looked up. “Miss Weston?”
“Clumsy of me.” Her voice was breathless. She bent to retrieve it, and when she straightened, Dominic was gone.
Their next encounter occurred in the corridor beyond the music room.
She carried a stack of books from the nursery to the library; he approached from the opposite direction. The passage was narrow—too narrow to pass without acknowledgement, without the unavoidable closeness of shared space.
They halted.
The books pressed between them like a barrier.
“Miss Weston.” His voice was low, controlled—restraint drawn tight over something far less so.
“Your Grace.”
“You carry too much.”
“I manage.”
“Allow me.”
“That is not necessary—”
He reached for the uppermost volume. His fingers brushed hers, and the contact—brief, entirely accidental—sent a jolt through her that stole her breath.
They both stilled.
The corridor lay empty. Afternoon light slanted through the windows in long, golden lines. She could see the pulse at his throat—quick, unsteady. His eyes had darkened, the grey reduced to a narrow ring.
“Lorraine.” Her name, roughened in his mouth.
“Dominic.”
The air between them thickened, as though it had taken on substance. She could feel the warmth of him even through the books, could catch the faint scent of sandalwood and something deeper beneath it—clean, warm, unmistakably his.
A door opened somewhere beyond. Footsteps approached.
A maid rounded the corner, halted, and stared.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace—”
Dominic stepped back at once. The moment shattered.
“Carry on,” he said, his tone perfectly composed, perfectly ducal—as though nothing at all had transpired.
He moved past her without another word.
Lorraine remained where she stood, clutching her books, her pulse hammering so violently she felt it in her teeth.
***
The breaking point came three nights later.
Dominic had been sitting in his study, failing to read, failing to think about anything except the way she had caught her breath in that corridor—the small, sharp intake of air, like a woman touching something unexpectedly hot.
He had heard that sound in his dreams every night since.
Had imagined, in graphic and increasingly desperate detail, what other sounds she might make under different circumstances.
He was very near to losing his mind.
It was past midnight when he abandoned the pretence of work and made his way to the library. He told himself he required a book. He told himself he did not hope to find her there.
He was not convincing.
She was there.
Of course she was.
As though some invisible thread connected them, drawing them both to the same room at the same hour, night after night, bound by a gravity neither could resist.
She looked up as he entered—and this time she did not feign surprise.
She did not reach for her slippers, nor adjust her shawl, nor perform any of the small proprieties that had marked their earlier encounters.
She simply looked at him, her blue-green eyes dark in the firelight, her lips faintly parted, her body very still.
Waiting.
“I knew you would come,” she said softly.
“I could not stay away.” He crossed the room, each step measured, inevitable. “I have tried. For days. Each night I tell myself I will remain upstairs like a rational man and leave you in peace.”
“I do not want peace.” Her voice was low, steady, certain. “I have not wanted it since the night of the storm.”
He stopped before her chair. Looked down at her—at the auburn hair falling loose about her shoulders, at the delicate curve of her throat where her pulse beat quick and visible, at the way the firelight rendered her in gold and shadow.
“Tell me what you want.” His voice was scarcely his own—hoarse, stripped of restraint, all discipline abandoned.
“Tell me, Lorraine. Because I am standing here attempting to do what is right, attempting to be the man you deserve, and I cannot—” His hands flexed at his sides.
“I cannot think. I cannot draw breath when you are this near. Tell me what you want, and I will give it to you. Whatever it is.”
She rose.
Slowly.
The book slipped from her lap and fell to the floor, unnoticed. She came to stand before him—slight, resolute, incandescent—and lifted her face to his.
“You,” she said. “I want you.”
Something in him gave way. Or perhaps something long fractured settled, at last, into place.
He lifted his hand to her face. His fingers trembled as they traced the line of her jaw—the first deliberate touch, chosen, unambiguous.
Her skin was soft, warm beneath his calloused hand.
She leaned into it, her eyes drifting closed, and the sound she made—a quiet breath, half surrender, half summons—sent a sharp, unsteady heat through him.
“Lorraine.” He cupped her face in both hands, tilting it upward. Her eyes opened, and he saw himself reflected there—saw not the man he had been, but the one he was becoming beneath her gaze.
He bent toward her.
She rose to meet him.
Their breath mingled. He could feel the warmth of her lips, a whisper from his own. Could feel the faint tremor in her body, answering the one in his. The fire murmured behind them. The wind pressed softly at the windows.
The distance between them vanished—to the span of a heartbeat, a breath—
A scream shattered the silence.
High. Terrified. From above.
Thomas.
They broke apart at once. The world rushed back—cold air, hard edges, the reality of a house that held a child who needed them.
“Thomas.” Lorraine was already moving, gathering her shawl, crossing the room. Her expression shifted in an instant—from desire to urgency, the governess reasserting herself over the woman.
“Go,” Dominic said. “I will follow.”
She was gone before he finished speaking.
He stood alone in the library, breath unsteady, his hands still curved as though they held her face. The memory of her warmth lingered in his palms. The near-touch of her lips haunted his mouth.
So close. So impossibly, unbearably close.
He followed her.
Of course he did.
***
Thomas sat upright in his bed, tangled in the bedclothes, crying with the broken, breathless sobs of a child dragged unwilling from nightmare.
Lorraine was already beside him—had gathered him close, her voice low and steady as she murmured the familiar assurances: You are safe. I am here. I am not leaving.
Dominic paused in the doorway. The old instinct rose—the urge to remain apart, to observe, to let her manage what he had long believed beyond him.
He set it aside.
He crossed the room and sat upon the edge of the bed. Thomas looked up through his tears, startled, and Dominic reached out, placing a careful hand upon the boy’s head.
“I am here as well,” he said, his voice rough. “You are safe, Thomas. We are both here.”
Thomas’s face crumpled anew—not with fear this time, but with something deeper. Relief, perhaps. Or the simple, overwhelming recognition of presence long hoped for.
He reached for Dominic with one arm, while the other remained fast about Lorraine’s neck.
And so they stayed—the three of them, tangled together in the narrow bed, holding fast.
Lorraine’s gaze met Dominic’s over Thomas’s fair head. In the dim light, her eyes were luminous, filled with all that had nearly been spoken, nearly done.
Soon, his said.
Soon, hers returned.
Thomas’s breathing steadied. His grip slackened as sleep reclaimed him. Still, neither Dominic nor Lorraine moved at once.
When at last they eased him back against the pillows and stepped into the corridor, the chill of approaching dawn brushed Lorraine’s bare arms. Without thought, Dominic shrugged off his dressing gown and set it about her shoulders. It swallowed her slight frame, still warm from him.
She drew it close and looked up.
“We should—”
“I know.”
“Tomorrow—”
“Yes.”
They did not move.
The corridor stretched silent in either direction. His hand came to rest at her waist—not urgent, not claiming, merely there, warm through the fabric. A touch that promised and restrained in equal measure.
“Soon,” he murmured. The word was roughened with want, weighted with all that had been left unfinished.
She covered his hand with hers. Held it there—one breath, two, three.
“Soon,” she echoed.
Then she turned and walked toward her room, his dressing gown trailing behind her like a shadow of him, and Dominic watched her go with the certain knowledge that soon had become the most important word in the English language.