Chapter 17
Leonora got up at once.
“Then I’ll go down. It’s private. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first—”
His hand closed round her wrist.
It was the second time he had done that, and it was nothing like the first. There was no hurry in it. He simply wrapped his hand around her wrist as she went past him and held on, not looking at her.
Leonora stood perfectly still and felt her pulse fluttering against his thumb.
“Sit down,” Colin said.
She sat down in the sawdust in her butter-colored dress, not caring in the least. After a moment, he sat down next to her with his back against the wall.
There was not a lot of room. His thigh against hers from knee to hip, warm through their layers, and stayed there. Leonora looked very hard at the opposite wall and thought about the Corn Laws.
“Read the others first,” she suggested. “Leave the one you don’t want to read for last.”
“Is that what you’d do?”
“It’s what I have done every day of my life. Ask my mother about the letter from my aunt in Bath that I left on the mantel for nine days.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Then he opened the invitations.
“The opera. The races. An auction at the end of the month.” He looked up. “Three cards and a bill, and you have carried them up a rope ladder one-handed. Where are the rest?”
“On the hall table.”
“There were more.”
“There were seven,” Leonora said, keeping her eyes on the wall. “I refused three of them this morning, in my own hand, over your name.”
He turned his head to her. “You refused invitations on my behalf?” “Lady Ashwood’s ball, the Bellinghams’ ball, and a small dance at the Cottesloes’ which would have had three hundred people in it. I thought you’d rather be shot.”
“You thought correctly. Why?”
“Because I have watched you cross your own hall to avoid two maids and a footman. And because a ballroom means four hours of being looked at by people who have already decided what they think, and I could not find one good reason to make you stand in one so that the ton could congratulate itself on its tolerance.” She turned to him. “Was I wrong?”
Colin was looking at her with an expression she had not seen before and could not name.
“No,” he uttered.
“Good. So I brought you these three. The opera on Thursday week, the Thornbury races, and an auction at the end of the month. All of them are places where we can be seen together for two hours and leave, and all of them have the great advantage that everybody’s attention is meant to be pointed at something else. ”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I have thought about very little else since Saturday,” Leonora said, “which you would have known if you had been at the table in the morning.”
He let that stand.
“We’ll go to all three,” he decided. “They must see us together, and soon, or people will start gossiping again.”
“Then that’s settled.”
There was a bill from the corn chandler, which he set aside without reading. And under it, the letter.
He turned it over twice without opening it. Then he broke the seal and read it in silence.
Leonora watched the light flicker along the floorboards and did not look at the page, which was the hardest thing she had done all day.
“He isn’t coming back,” Colin murmured.
“Ever?”
“He says he thinks not. He says he’s bought a house outside Florence and that a friend of his has an interest in a vineyard and that he intends to be useful, which in my brother’s vocabulary is a word of very broad application.
” He turned the page over. “He says he knows what was left on my doorstep. He says he’s known since November. ”
Leonora put her hand over her mouth.
“He says, I can’t care for a wife and child, Brother. That’s not who I am. I’ll stay in Italy. I’m sorry.”
The tree creaked somewhere above them.
Colin folded the letter along its creases and tucked it inside his coat.
“You’re not angry with him,” Leonora said.
It was not a question, and he did not treat it as one.
“Do you ever get angry with your youngest sister?”
“Constantly. She pulls my hair and steals my dresses and reads my correspondence over my shoulder while pretending to look at the wallpaper.” She considered. “Last spring, she took my best gloves to a picnic and lost one in a river.”
Colin smiled.
Not the twitch at the corner of his mouth that came and went before anybody could put a name to it.
But an actual smile, wide and unguarded and startlingly young.
It went through Leonora like the first swallow of hot wine on a cold night.
Alas, it vanished in about two seconds. She would have paid a hefty sum to see it again.
“He’s twenty-one,” Colin said. “Our mother died birthing him. He has never once in his life been told no, which is my fault entirely.”
“That is not the same as forgiving him.”
“No. It is not.” He folded the letter along its own creases.
“He got a woman with child and left the country, and she has lost her daughter over it and he has lost nothing at all, and I will not pretend to you that the two of them come out even. I am angry with him. I have been angry with him since January and I expect to go on being angry with him for years.”
“Then why did you smile?”
“Because I am also the man who made him,” said Colin.
“I taught him at six years old that there would always be somebody behind him with a bank draft, and he learned it, and he has never had one single reason to learn anything else. I can be angry with him and know whose doing it is at the same time. They are not in competition.”
“He left his daughter on your doorstep.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“And you deserve a happy life too. Or does that only apply to Walfords who are somewhere else?”
“Not many killers do,” Colin muttered.
Leonora went cold from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say a thing like that in that voice, as though you were telling me the time.”
“Oh, come now, Duchess.” He was not looking at her.
“Don’t pretend you haven’t heard the stories.
Your friends were telling them to each other before you ever wrote that letter.
A single growl, and grown men run. He killed his father and bought his way out of it.
” He turned his head to her. “You must have heard them in a drawing room with your feet on a fender.”
“I heard them,” Leonora admitted. “But I didn’t believe them.”
“You should have.”
“They’re rumors. People say what they like about a man who never comes out of his house; it’s the only way they can go on having opinions about him—”
“I am responsible for my father’s death.”
The treehouse went very quiet.
Leonora looked at him. He was sitting against the wall with his knee against hers and the letter from his brother in his coat and his one blue eye on the middle distance, and he had said it in the flat unhurried voice of a man reading out a price.
She had heard him do it once before, in a corridor, on the night they met. She knew the trick now, and knowing it did not make it hurt any less.
He does this, she thought. He hands me the worst thing he can find and waits to see whether it works.
It is meant to make me leave.
He does this. He hands me the worst thing he can find, like a man throwing a coat over a fire.
She lifted her hand and reached toward the black silk eyepatch. He turned his face away so fast that her hand closed on air. She let it fall to her lap.
“Did it happen to you that day?” she asked quietly.
Colin got up. There was not enough room in the treehouse to pace, but he did it anyway, three steps and turn, three steps and turn, with his fists opening and closing.
“Time’s up, Duchess. Go down.”
“No.”
He stopped in front of her. “Go. Down.”
“And if I don’t?” Leonora challenged, scrambling to her feet.
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“Perhaps not. But I know exactly what you’re doing.”
“Ah, do enlighten me.”
“You’re hiding.” She had started now, and she could not have stopped for money.
“From the world, from your tenants, from your own gallery, from me, from a six-month-old baby who has done nothing to you. You sit in a treehouse from four in the morning, and you send down word that nobody is to disturb you and you call it your nature. But it isn’t your nature.
It’s a habit, and you’ve kept it up for fifteen years because—”
“Because what?” His voice sharpened. “Go on. What do you think you know about me? What story have you invented to make me look less like a beast?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leonora scoffed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have come.”
She turned for the ladder, and he caught her arm.
“No,” he said. “If you’re going to be a hellion, you must finish what you’ve started. Tell me.”
So she told him.
“You cannot vanish for two days and then call yourself part of this family. You cannot let your housekeeper explain the rules of your own house to your wife over the toast. You cannot stand in a gallery and tell me to ask you anything and then walk out of the room the moment I do.” Her voice was shaky, but she pushed through it.
“And you cannot tell me you’ll come and claim what’s yours at the end of a week and then not spare me a single glance in the days between, as though I were a debt falling due.
That is all of it. That is what I think about you. ”
The silence afterward was thick.
“You think,” Colin said slowly, “that I need to spend time with you to make you burn for me.”
“I think—”
“Such little faith, wife.”
Then he pulled her in and kissed her.
It was nothing like their first kiss.
That had been a question, held out and waited on. This kiss was an answer, and it arrived with two days of silence behind it.
Leonora’s back hit the wall, and his hand slid behind her head to keep it from knocking against the boards.
She should have stopped it. She thought about stopping it for perhaps a second and a half, before his mouth left hers and trailed down her throat, muddling her mind.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmured against her collarbone.
“No.”
“Say it, and I’ll stop.”
“I know you will.” She grabbed a fistful of his hair and could feel her breathing growing ragged. “That’s the problem, Your Grace. You keep doing exactly as I say, and it is making it extremely hard to keep refusing you.”
He laughed.
It was the first time she had ever heard it, low and surprised and entirely against her skin. She would remember it longer than anything else about that afternoon.
Then he went down on his knees in front of her.
Leonora looked down at the top of his dark head, at the hands gathering the butter-colored muslin, and understood what was being asked. She had one clear moment to consider it as a gently reared woman.
“Your Grace, that isn’t—”
“You said you would not lie with me.” He looked up. In the dim light, his eye was almost gray. “I’m not asking you to lie with me, Duchess. I’m asking you to stand exactly where you are and let me do something you’ll think about all the way through the opera.”
“That is a wicked thing to say.”
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
He said it again, slower, and she shivered. Then he stopped talking altogether, and the world contracted to the size of a treehouse in a garden.
He began at her ankle. That was the part she never forgot afterward.
A man the whole of England called a beast took his time kissing her ankle, her calf, the soft hollow behind her knee, pushing the butter-colored muslin up ahead of his hands an inch at a time and watching her face the whole way as though it were what he had come up here for.
“Put your hand on the beam.”
“Why?”
“Because in a moment, you’ll want something to hold onto, and I would rather it were not the doorframe. There’s a nail in it.”
She put her hand on the beam.
His palms slid up the outside of her thighs and around to the back of them and took her weight, which was as well, because her knees had weakened. His mouth followed his hands up her thigh, lightly nipping her halfway.
Leonora heard a sound come out of her mouth that she had never made in her life.
“That was you,” Colin said.
“It was not.”
Then he put her leg over his shoulder.
“Colin.”
“I have you. Hold the beam.”
“Colin, somebody will—”
“Nobody comes into this garden,” he said, against the inside of her thigh, “and if they did, they would have to climb thirty feet of rope to reach us, and I should hear them at the second rung.”
“That is not a comfort.”
“It was not offered as one.”
And then he put his mouth on her, and after that it was not possible to think as a gently reared woman at all.
She had written eight hundred pages in a hidden drawer, and there was not a line in any of them that came near it.
He was thorough. That was the word she landed on afterward and could never improve.
He worked out inside a minute what made her breath catch and went back to it and did it again, and when her hips came up off the boards he simply followed and did not stop.
His free hand spread flat and warm against her belly, holding her still whenever she moved too much—which she did repeatedly, without permission from herself.
And there was his steadiness, which undid her worst of all.
He stayed at it the way he stayed at a chisel line: unhurried, entirely absorbed, without one thought in his head of stopping until the job was finished.
When she reached down and grabbed a fistful of his hair, he made a sound against her that she felt travel the whole length of her spine.
“Don’t stop.”
He did not stop.
The pleasure built the way weather built—from nothing and then out of proportion. Her thighs began to shake and could not be persuaded otherwise, and she was distantly appalled to hear herself begging, in a treehouse, at four in the afternoon, in a voice she had never used on any human being.
Somewhere in the middle, she stopped being frightened and began to reach for her peak.
“Colin!” she cried out as climax broke over her.
Afterward, there was sunlight on the floorboards and sawdust everywhere. Her legs were shaking, and his forehead rested against her hip while she came back into her body once inch at a time.
Then he stood up and straightened her skirts, unhurried, exactly as he did everything, before stepping back.
His face had shuttered.
It was not coldness. Leonora had seen his coldness and could have picked it out of a crowd.
This was something else. She had said his Christian name, twice, in a voice she had not known she owned, and he had heard it, and he was standing four feet away putting a lid on whatever it had done to him.
“Colin,” she murmured.
He turned away and picked up the rasp that did not need picking up.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We should go back.”