Chapter Twenty-Two
Lorraine’s embroidery lay neglected in her lap.
She had taken it up to occupy her hands, but the needle had stilled long ago. She stared instead into the fire, watching the flames blur and reform, as though they might yield some answer if she looked long enough.
Four weeks.
Perhaps five. Perhaps six, if she were very fortunate—and very selfish—and willing to pray for foul weather in the Indian Ocean.
She was willing.
She had discovered, in the weeks since the letter’s arrival, that she was willing to do a great many things she would once have considered beneath her—bargain with fate, count days on her fingers like a child awaiting Christmas, lie awake calculating distances across oceans as though arithmetic alone might slow the passage of time.
So this is what desperation looks like on a sensible woman, she thought. Embroidery and nautical arithmetic.
The door opened.
Dominic entered, still in his riding clothes, the cold clinging to him like a second skin.
His hair was disordered by the wind, his cheeks roughened by it.
He had been out since dawn—riding the moors with a ferocity that had begun to concern the grooms and unsettle the horses, the restless exertion of a man attempting to outrun something that could not be outrun.
He stopped when he saw her.
His gaze—those pale, piercing eyes she had watched shift, over these past months, from ice to fire and back again—moved over her face with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
“You have been counting again,” he said.
“I have not.”
“You have. You get a line between your brows.” He crossed to the sideboard, poured himself coffee, and did not drink it. “How many?”
“Four weeks. Possibly five.”
The number landed between them like a stone.
***
Four weeks.
He carried the number with him through the morning like a wound—through Thomas’s geography lesson, which he now attended daily; through the estate correspondence he could no longer pretend to care about; through luncheon, where he sat opposite Lorraine and Thomas and watched them laugh at something Jenny had said, and felt the simultaneous, irreconcilable urges to fix every detail in memory and to look away before the looking undid him.
Four weeks until Thomas left. Four weeks until Lorraine had no reason to remain. Four weeks until this house returned to what it had been before—a mausoleum dressed in comfort.
He had promised to find a way. He had meant it. And in the weeks since, he had written to his solicitor, consulted a barrister in York, and pursued every legal avenue by which a guardian might contest the removal of a ward to blood relatives.
The answer, delivered with brisk civility, was that he could not.
The Hardings were Thomas’s grandparents—his nearest kin.
Their claim was unquestionable. Dominic’s authority extended only so far as their absence.
The law did not recognise love. It did not care that Thomas painted kestrels, or wore his father’s compass, or called Rovewood home.
It cared for lineage—and Dominic’s was irrelevant.
He had not told Lorraine.
He would. He was merely—postponing.
Coward, said the voice in his head that sounded very much like hers. You are postponing because telling her means admitting you have failed.
After luncheon, Thomas went upstairs with Jenny. Lorraine withdrew to the library. Dominic returned to his study, stared at the crooked kestrel upon the wall, and felt the hours slipping through his fingers.
At half past nine, when the house had settled into its quiet, he went to her.
Not to his own chambers to wait, as had become their custom. To her.
He knocked once—and entered.
***
He was standing in her doorway, and he looked wrecked.
Not distant. Not composed. The careful mask she had come to recognise was gone. His cravat was missing, his waistcoat unfastened, his hair disordered as though he had dragged his hands through it one time too many. His eyes were dark—not with desire alone, but with something deeper. Less contained.
“Dominic.” She rose at once. “What—”
“I need you.”
Nothing guarded in it. No preamble. No attempt at control.
She crossed the room without hesitation and took his face between her hands.
“Then have me.”
He kissed her as though the world were ending.
There was no gentleness in it, no measured exploration—only urgency. A man attempting to outrun time by refusing to waste a single moment of it.
She met him with equal fervour. Her fingers tangled in his hair, drawing him closer. Her back met the door, and she welcomed it—the solid certainty of something unyielding behind her, of him before her, of heat and closeness and the fierce refusal to let this slip away unmarked.
This is what four weeks feels like, she thought. This is what borrowed time tastes like.
“Hurry,” she breathed. “Dominic—”
He lifted her, and she wrapped herself around him as he carried her to the bed. They fell together, the narrow frame protesting faintly beneath them, wholly unequal to the urgency it was asked to contain.
His hands moved with intent—less careful than before, but no less knowing. He traced the lines he had already learned, as though committing them anew, as though memory might preserve what time threatened to take.
“I cannot lose you,” he said against her throat, the words roughened by strain. “Lorraine—I have tried to find a way, but there is none—the law—”
“Not now.” She drew him back to her, steady despite the tremor in her breath. “Tell me tomorrow. Tonight—stay.”
He made a sound—half-groan, half-sob—and kissed her so deeply she forgot where her body ended and his began.
She was golden in the candlelight.
He had seen her like this before—unclothed, flushed, her hair loose and wild across the pillow—but tonight the sight struck him with a force that bordered on violence.
Because tonight he saw her through the lens of loss.
Every shadow sharpened by the knowledge that there were only so many nights left, and he was spending them, and there was no way to slow time except to fill each moment so completely that it could not pass unfelt.
He kissed the hollow of her throat, where her pulse raced. Her collarbone. The soft curve of her breast. When his mouth closed over her, she arched from the mattress, her fingers threading through his hair, a broken sound escaping her as his teeth grazed the sensitive peak.
Remember this, he told himself. The way she tastes. The way she sounds. The exact shade of pink that spreads across her chest when you touch her here—and here—and here.
Remember everything. Because you may not be allowed to keep it.
He moved lower with an attention that was part reverence, part desperation.
Her ribs—where she was ticklish and tried to hide it.
Her navel. The soft, vulnerable skin of her inner thigh, where her breath caught and her hips shifted restlessly, her hand finding the back of his head and urging him closer.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t tease. Not tonight.”
He did not tease.
He settled between her thighs and gave her his mouth with a hunger that left no room for patience or artistry—just the urgent, consuming need to feel her come apart against his tongue, to hear the sounds she made when she stopped being careful, to taste the evidence of her wanting and know that whatever else the world took from him, this—this—was real.
She crested with his name on her lips, her hand fisted in the sheets, her back bowed like a drawn bow. He held her through it, hands gripping her hips, mouth relentless, drawing it out until she was shaking and spent and pulling at his shoulders with fingers that could not find their grip.
“Come here,” she breathed. “Come here—I need—”
He rose over her, bracing himself on shaking arms. He looked down at her—flushed, luminous, undone—and something in his chest gave way.
Then he moved into her in one slow, devastating stroke.
The sound that left him was not a sound he recognised. It came from somewhere below language, below thought—a raw, animal acknowledgement of being inside the woman he loved while the clock ticked and the ship sailed and the world conspired to tear them apart.
“Look at me,” Lorraine whispered.
He did.
Her eyes—storm-dark, deeper than he had ever seen them—held his with a ferocity equal to the way her body held him.
“I’m here,” she said. “Right here. Don’t go anywhere else.”
I’m not, he thought—and began to move.
Over the weeks, she had learned the different versions of him.
The careful one—precise, attentive, cataloguing every response.
The rare, lighter one—unexpected, disarming.
The one that came after difficult days—when need sharpened into intensity, when he held her as though she might dissolve if he loosened his grip.
Tonight was none of those.
Tonight was something else.
He moved with a desperation that turned every motion into defiance. His forehead pressed to hers. His breath came harsh and uneven, swallowed by her answering kisses. His hands—scarred, steady despite their tremor—held her as though he might anchor her to him by sheer force of will.
“Harder,” she said, because she needed it—needed the urgency, the undeniable reality of it. “Dominic—”
He obeyed.
The rhythm deepened, sharpened, until the world narrowed again—to breath, to heat, to the relentless insistence of presence. She held him just as fiercely, drawing him closer, refusing distance, refusing gentleness.
“I love you,” he said, the words rough, broken, absolute. “I love you. I do not care what it costs. I do not care if it is impossible. I am not letting this go.”
The words—spoken in the dark, between gasps, while his body moved inside hers—undid her completely.
She came with a cry that she buried in his shoulder, her nails scoring his back, her body clenching around him with a force that pulled him over the edge after her.
He buried himself deep, shuddering, her name torn from his chest like something essential being surrendered.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the too-narrow bed, their breathing slowly evening, their skin cooling in the candlelit air.
Lorraine’s head rested upon his chest. Her fingers traced idle, absent patterns across his skin—circles, spirals, the shapes of words she did not speak aloud.
He held her with one arm, his other hand moving slowly through her hair, and tried not to think about how many more times he would be allowed this.
He failed. He always failed at not thinking.
“I spoke to a barrister,” he said quietly. “In York. About Thomas.”
Her fingers stilled.
“The law favours the Hardings. They are blood. I am not.” He stared at the ceiling. “I have no legal claim.”
Silence followed. Long enough that he braced himself for it—for anger, disappointment, grief.
“Then we shall find something that is not legal.” Lorraine’s voice was calm. Measured. The voice of a woman who had endured three years of quiet ruin and refused to be governed by it. “We shall speak to them when they arrive. We shall show them what Thomas needs.”
“And if they do not listen?”
“Then we shall try again. And harder.” She pushed herself up slightly and looked down at him, her hair falling forward to frame their faces. “You stormed a fortified city at Badajoz. You can manage a conversation with two grandparents.”
Despite everything—the ticking clock, the dead end, the certainty that the coming weeks would test them both—he laughed.
“You are formidable,” he said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Mrs Whitmore once called me relentless. I chose to take it as praise.”
He drew her down and kissed her—softly this time, unhurried, as though time were not already slipping through their fingers. As though this were not one of a finite number, but simply one of many yet to come.
“Again,” Lorraine murmured against his mouth.
“Again?”
“I am not done with you yet.” She shifted closer, and his breath caught despite himself. “We have four weeks. I do not intend to waste a single night.”
This woman, he thought, as she pushed him onto his back and climbed over him, her thighs bracketing his hips, her hair falling around them like a curtain against the world. This impossible, magnificent, terrifying woman.
She settled over him slowly—deliberately—holding his gaze as she drew him into her, inch by measured inch, until they were fully joined and she rested against him, both of them trembling with the effort of stillness.
“This is mine,” she said quietly, her voice steady even as her body was not, her movements beginning in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
“You are mine. Whatever happens. Whatever the law says. Whatever the Hardings decide.” She bent her head and pressed her lips to the scar at his brow.
“I chose you. I am choosing you. And I will go on choosing you—until you tell me to stop.”
“I will never tell you to stop.”
“Then don’t.”
She moved again, and his hands closed at her waist, and the world beyond the candlelit room—the ship, the clock, the law, the future—fell away, leaving only this: the woman above him, moving with him, choosing him, refusing to release her hold.
They did not sleep until nearly dawn.
And when they did, it was tangled together in the narrow governess’s bed, his arms locked around her, her face pressed against his chest, both of them holding fast as though morning itself might try to take what the night had given.
It would. In time.
But not yet.