Chapter 11
The fire had burned low.
Alistair stood at the library hearth, one forearm braced against the carved stone mantel, watching the last of the coals pulse orange and give themselves over to gray.
He had not thought to ring for a servant to build it back up.
The room held a chill sharp enough that his breath misted faintly when he exhaled, and rain struck the tall windows behind him in fitful, angry gusts.
A November wind wore March’s calendar, or so it felt, in a room that had absorbed centuries of Yorkshire winters into its stones.
I do not know why I am still awake.
A lie, and he knew it for one. He was perfectly aware of why he stood here listening to the rain, which had taken up its assault on the glass again sometime after supper, relentless and thorough in the way the moors seemed to expect and never complain of.
His ledgers sat open on the desk where he had abandoned them an hour past, quills untrimmed beside them, along with a half-finished letter to Franklin about the Hollingford shipment schedule.
He had read the same column of figures four times over and retained not one of them.
He was waiting.
The realization settled over him with mild irritation, because Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not wait on anyone.
He scheduled. He directed. He arrived and departed on his own terms and let other men arrange themselves around that fact.
He had run a mill by those principles since before he had properly grown into his own boots, and he saw no cause to revise the approach now.
And yet here he stood past eleven o’clock, watching coals die in a library grate.
Amid the scrape of chairs and his cousins’ departing chatter, he had bent close to Josephine and had asked her to meet him in the library, whenever she was ready.
No hurry. A plain enough invitation, though his intention had felt rather less so.
Josephine had said nothing in return. Only lifted those gray eyes to his, then looked away, and he had not been able to read from that single glance whether she meant to come at all.
Perhaps she would not. Perhaps she had more sense than he did and lay already abed in the Duchess’s Wing, sensibly asleep, leaving him to sit alone with the folly of his own suggestion.
He was turning this thought over when the knock came, so tentative, so nearly swallowed by the rain, that he almost missed it entirely.
Alistair crossed the room in three strides and drew back the door.
She stood in the corridor with a single taper, the flame cupped against the draft in her free hand.
A dressing gown of pale gray silk wrapped her, near enough the color of her own eyes to startle him, and her honey-blonde hair had already come unbound for the night, spilling loose over one shoulder.
Color rose in her cheeks, as though she had only just remembered how she must look, arriving at his door in such a state.
She looked very young. She looked, he thought, with a jolt of feeling he was not prepared to put a name to, rather magnificent.
Neither of them spoke. He stepped back. She came in.
He relieved her of the candle and set it on the mantel, and when he turned back, she stood at the center of the room, quite still, her hands folded before her with that same calm bearing she carried everywhere, even now, even here, at this late hour with her hair loose about her shoulders.
That calm. He had been studying it for days now, cataloging it the way he cataloged the mill’s mechanisms, marking each point of tension and each place where the workings ran more fragile than they let on.
He crossed to her slowly, giving her every chance to reconsider, watching her watch him come.
Her gray eyes did not waver from his, a fine tension drawn along the line of her jaw, her chin lifted with that same stubborn dignity that would not desert her.
He raised a hand and touched her jaw. Her skin had gone cold from the corridor, and he turned his palm to cup her face fully, warming it, his thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone in one slow pass.
She did not move. Her eyes searched his as though still deciding, still weighing, and then the tension in her gaze eased,.
Not surrender exactly, but the release of a question she had been carrying.
She let out her breath. A long, careful exhale.
He drew her in by the jaw and kissed her, not with the urgency that had ambushed him before, when neither of them had meant for it to happen, but slowly and deliberately. He had spent the better part of the evening thinking of little else, and this time he meant to do it properly.
Her mouth was warm, and tasted faintly of chamomile. Her hands found the lapels of his dressing gown, not pulling him closer, only holding on, as though she needed something to grip while the world rearranged itself beneath her.
He understood that sensation entirely. He was living it himself.
His hands moved into her hair. He had been thinking of her hair since that first evening, how it had slipped half-loose at her nape and he had noticed, and resisted the wholly inconvenient urge to pull every pin free himself.
He gathered its weight now, drawing it back from her face, feeling the whole silken length of it slide through his fingers, and she made a muffled sound against his mouth, not quite protest and not quite invitation, but something between the two, and considerably more interesting than either.
He drew back far enough to look at her properly. Her eyes had gone half-closed, her lips parted, the careful calm she wore like a second skin already loosening at its seams.
“We should stop.”
Her eyes opened fully. For one unguarded instant, disappointment crossed her face before she mastered it.
“Should we?” she asked.
The quiet reluctance in the question delighted him more than it had any right to.
“Only until Sunday.”
Color rose into her cheeks, but she did not look away. “Sunday is not so very far away.”
For the first time since the title had descended upon him, Alistair discovered one undeniable advantage to being Duke of Oxley.
He drew the blanket from the back of his reading chair and settled it about her shoulders, then guided her toward the low settee before the hearth.
Once she sat, he crouched to build up the fire, not from any particular virtue, but because the dying coals gave too little light to see her clearly.
When the flames caught and threw their amber glow across the room, he found her watching him in amazement, as though the simple act had revealed a side of him she had not expected.
He held her gaze across the room, the fire warm at his back.
For a moment, neither of them looked away.
He rose and came to sit beside her.
Josephine glanced at him from beneath her lashes. “Did we not just agree that Sunday is not so very far away?”
“Did we?” Alistair gathered her gently against his side. “It has begun to feel rather farther than it did a moment ago.”
She settled against him with an ease that undid him more thoroughly than any practiced seduction could have done, her head resting beneath his shoulder as though the place had been made for her. He pressed his lips to her temple, then to the fine line of her cheekbone.
“I thought you said we should stop,” she murmured.
He paused with his mouth near hers. “One more kiss.”
She trembled against him and it almost undid him. She nodded softly, the corners of her mouth softening. “I suppose one more may be permitted.”
He kissed her again, without haste, holding himself to the promise he had made. She answered him without reserve, and for a little while the rain, the fire, and Sunday itself seemed very far away.
When at last they drew apart, both of them a little breathless, she sat back against his arm with her eyes bright and her breath uneven, and her face had changed.
She no longer had the carefully arranged expression she wore for the world.
In its place was a flushed vulnerability that made him want to protect whatever confidence she was gathering.
“Alistair?”
“Yes?”
Her gaze dropped to the hand resting in her lap. “Do you truly wish for Sunday?”
He stared at her, scarcely believing the question. “I find myself resenting every hour that stands between us and it.”
Color deepened across her cheeks, but she forced herself to meet his eyes. “And you find me … pleasing?”
“Josephine.” He touched her cheek, astonished that she could still doubt it. “I find you beautiful. I have wanted to kiss you from the first moment I met you. Waiting until Sunday may prove the sternest test of restraint I have yet faced.”
Her lips parted. For a moment she only searched his face, as though expecting to discover kindness offered in place of truth. Whatever she found there left her eyes shining.
“I had no notion,” she said at last, her voice quite stripped of its usual reserve. “I had believed … I had concluded that the fault lay with me.”
He understood her meaning at once. A cold, flat anger moved through him, not toward her, never toward her, but toward a man who had taken a young wife into his house and left her persuaded her own nature was wanting, rather than admit his own want of care.
The anger settled low and hot, banked coals for a long burn, and he found himself profoundly glad he had never stood face to face with Uncle Jerome. He had inherited the man’s title, his debts, and his widow. Of the three, only Josephine was worth the keeping.
“The fault was never yours,” he said.
She turned her head against his shoulder to gaze up at him. “No,” she agreed after a moment, the single word carrying the weight of a belief long held finally set down. “I begin to see that it was not.”