Chapter 38
“Ihave something to say,” Colin announced. “I have been rehearsing it since Sunday, but I am going to say it badly.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I kept you at arm’s length.” He was looking at the floor.
“You know why. I have told you why in a room upstairs, with my hand on a mantelpiece, and I meant every word of it at the time. I thought that if I let myself love you the way he loved her, it would come out of me the same way in the end, because it is the only love I have ever watched close enough to learn. I thought it was in my blood. I thought I was carrying it around the way a man carries an illness, and that the decent course—the only decent one—was to keep it away from you and Katherine.”
“I know.”
“Let me finish, or I will not manage it.” He drew in a breath.
“Then you came into this house and lit it up. You fed my tenants in the hall, you opened my mother’s gallery, and you learned the name of every servant within two days, which I have never done in thirty years.
You made Katherine laugh. You wrote me a note about a ditch. ”
His hands closed and opened. “And this morning you went to your mother’s without asking me, and I sat on the floor of the drawing room with the child and understood that I had spent five weeks protecting you from a man who was never going to appear, and that in the meantime I had done every single thing to you that I was frightened of doing.
I made you unhappy. On purpose. With my own hands and the best intentions in England. ”
“Colin—”
“I am not finished. This is the part I have been preparing.” He turned to face her.
“I have loved you since the lake. Since you threw your arms around me on your father’s lawn with water in my boots, and I stood there like a post because I had no idea where to put my hands.
I have known it for a month. I let you go on thinking it was an arrangement—I even let your brother think it; I said it plainly to him at the opera—and that is the worst thing I have ever done to anybody. I am asking you to forgive it.”
Leonora could not speak at all.
“I have nothing to offer you that you do not already have,” Colin exhaled.
“You have the house and the name and the child. There is nothing left in my possession except the thing I have been holding back, and it is yours. It has been yours since a lake in June, and I am sorry it has taken me until now to put it on the table.”
The candles flickered along the beam.
“Say something,” he urged. “Anything. You may hit me.”
“You lit a path,” Leonora said.
“What?”
“Across the lawn. Six lamps. You went out into the dark and lit six lamps so that I could find my way to you, and you were never going to mention it. I stood at the window and watched you do it, and I knew.” She was crying and laughing at once and made no attempt to stop either.
“You cannot say anything, Colin. You are the worst speaker in England. But you have never once in five weeks told me a lie. I have loved you since the lake as well, and I have been holding it in both hands for a month because I thought that if I said it out loud, you would put yourself out of the room.”
“I am not going anywhere.”
“No,” Leonora sniffed. “You are not.”
Then she cupped his ruined face in both hands and kissed him.
He kissed her back the way he did everything, without hurrying and without asking, and Leonora discovered that after five weeks of being handed things at the table, she was not in the least interested in being patient.
She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and he came, and somehow she ended up on her back on his coat, with her hair in the sawdust and a great many candles flickering overhead.
“Wait.”
He stopped instantly, and she nearly hit him for it.
“Not that sort of wait,” Leonora clarified. “Take that off.”
“Which—”
“The shirt, Colin. You have had my skirts round my waist twice in daylight and I have not seen so much as your forearms, and I have been extremely patient about it, and I am done being patient.”
He sat back on his heels and pulled his shirt over his head.
And Leonora, who had written eight hundred pages about men coming up out of the surf, propped herself up on her elbows in her black nightgown and looked at her husband properly for the first time.
He was built like the work he did.
She had known his shoulders were broad because she had had her hands on them through a shirt, and she had not understood the half of it.
The muscle across his chest was flat and hard and moved when he breathed.
There was more of it down his sides and across his stomach than a duke had any business owning, and his forearms were the forearms of a man who had spent fifteen years with a chisel in his hand and had never once asked anybody to hold the other end.
There were marks on him too. A white seam across one forearm and another on his side, the small ordinary damage of a man who had worked alone for fifteen years with nobody to be careful for.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Duchess—”
“You have been keeping that in a cupboard for five weeks.”
Colin let out a laugh he clearly had not authorized.
“Come here,” she demanded.
He came.
The black gauze went the way it had been made to go, off one shoulder and then the other and then out from under her entirely. Leonora lay back on his coat in the light of forty candles and let him look at her. She found, to her surprise, that she was not shy in the least.
“You are not saying anything,” she remarked.
“No.”
“You can say something.”
“I am doing arithmetic about how much of the next hour I intend to spend on each part of you, and it is not coming out, because there is not enough time.”
Then he set about it.
He was, as ever, unhurried, and this time the unhurriedness undid her almost at once, because now she knew exactly what it meant.
He started at her ankle, which made her laugh, and the laugh went out of her by degrees as he came up. Her calf. The hollow at the back of her knee, which he had found in this room a month ago and had plainly filed away, because his lips lingered on it until her leg had started quivering.
He slowly kissed his way up the inside of her thigh, both hands stroking her now, one spread flat to hold her still. Until he came to the soft juncture between her thigh and hip, where he nipped her lightly. Leonora let out a moan that echoed off the ceiling.
“You did that on purpose.”
“I did.”
“You have been saving that.”
“For five weeks.”
He put his mouth where he had put it in June.
She was ready for it this time, but it made no difference whatsoever.
Her hand went into his hair and curled. She fisted the other in his coat and pulled it half out from under her shoulder.
Colin stopped long enough to murmur something against her hip that she did not catch, and then did not stop again for a long while.
She could feel the boards under the coat and the sawdust in her hair and the candlelight going red through her closed eyelids as her pleasure built, and he knew it. He drove her right up to the peak and then pulled away.
“Colin.”
“Not yet.”
“I will never forgive you.”
“You will,” he said, and moved up her body.
He trailed his palm over her hip and waist, reading her like grain. His fingers traced her ribs one at a time, before brushing the underside of her breasts. He lowered his mouth to her breast and closed it over her nipple, and her back bowed off the boards.
“Oh.”
He did it again.
“Oh.”
“That is something I have thought about at four in the morning for five weeks,” Colin purred against her, “and I should like it noted.”
He lingered a long while at the hollow of her throat, where he had discovered on a table in front of a fire it could reduce her to a moaning mess.
He put his hand between her legs while he was doing it, and she was so far gone by then that she said something out loud that she would remember for the rest of her life.
Then he was over her, and she pressed both hands flat against his chest and pushed him back four inches.
“My turn.”
“Duchess.”
“You have had five weeks of thinking about it at four in the morning,” Leonora said, getting a hand flat on his chest and pushing until he sat back on his heels and then went down on his elbows on the coat, “and I have had five weeks of a shut door, and you are going to stay exactly where you are for one minute.”
He lay still for one minute.
She put her hands on him properly for the first time: his shoulders; his muscular chest; the silvery scar on his forearm, which she stopped at and pressed her lips to.
Down over his ribs and the scar on his side.
She had no notion what she was doing and did it anyway, and discovered with enormous satisfaction exactly what happened to a man’s breath when she did it right.
“Leonora.”
“Mm.”
“That is a minute.”
“It is not.”
“It is a minute,” Colin insisted, his voice rough. “I am a man of thirty who has waited fifteen years and five weeks, and I am asking you very politely.”
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“I have wanted this since our wedding night.”
“I know.”
“You do not know. I have wanted it since our wedding night, and I said no, and I have thought about that every single night since, up and down, both ways. I still think I was right, and I have hated being right the entire time.”
“You were right,” he said against her collarbone.
“Say that again.”
“You were right. I would not have understood a word of it that night, but I understand it now.” He looked into her eyes. “Are you certain?”
“I am going to strike you.”
“Are you certain, Leonora?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Now, please.”