Chapter 11
The fire had burned low.
Alistair stood at the hearth of the ducal bedchamber, one forearm braced against the carved stone mantelpiece, watching the last of the coals pulse orange and surrender to gray.
He had not thought to ring for a servant to build it up again.
The room was cold enough that his breath misted faintly when he exhaled, and the deep green velvet curtains drawn about the four-poster stirred in some unseen draft from the diamond-paned windows at his back.
A November wind in March, or so it felt, in this tower room that had absorbed centuries of Yorkshire winters into its bones.
I do not know why I am still awake.
That was a lie, of course. He was perfectly aware of why he stood here listening to the rain, which had resumed its assault on the glass sometime after supper, a relentless drumming the moors received without complaint.
His ledgers sat open on the worktable where he had abandoned them an hour ago, untrimmed quills beside them, along with a half-composed letter to Franklin regarding the Hollingford shipment schedule.
He had read the same column of figures four times over and retained none of them.
He was waiting.
The realization settled over him with mild irritation, because Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not wait for anyone.
He scheduled. He directed. He arrived and departed on his own terms, and other people arranged themselves accordingly.
He had run a mill on those principles since before he had fully grown into his boots, and he saw no compelling argument to revise the approach now.
And yet here he stood at half past eleven, watching the coals die.
He had spoken low, leaned close, and offered his invitation so that only Josephine could hear him, having waited for the scrape of chairs and the chatter of his cousins as they drifted in twos through the door.
He would dearly love a visit from her before the night was over.
A careless admission, offered with rather more honesty than strategy, which was unlike him.
Josephine had said nothing in return, only lifted those gray eyes to his and then looked away, and he had been unable to determine from that single glance whether she intended to visit.
Perhaps she would not. Perhaps she was wiser than he, and she lay already abed in the Duchess’s Wing, sensibly asleep, leaving him to contemplate the folly of his own suggestion in solitude.
He was entertaining this very thought when the knock came, so tentative, so nearly swallowed by the rain, that he almost missed it.
Alistair crossed the room in three strides and drew back the door.
She stood in the passage with a single taper, the flame cupped in her free hand against the draft.
She wore a dressing gown of pale gray silk, the very color of her eyes in certain lights, and her honey-blonde hair had been unbraided, hanging loose across one shoulder in a manner she had clearly intended for his observation, judging by the color that crept into her cheeks the moment the light reached his face.
She looked very young. She looked, he thought, with a jolt of emotion he was not prepared to name, rather magnificent.
Neither of them spoke. He stepped back. She came in.
He relieved her of the candle and set it on the mantelpiece, and when he turned, she was standing utterly still in the center of the room, her hands folded before her with the composed bearing she maintained even now, even here, in the cold small hours with her hair unbound.
That composure. He had been studying it for days, cataloging it like he cataloged the mill’s mechanisms, identifying each point of tension and each place where the workings were more fragile than they appeared.
He crossed to her slowly, giving her every opportunity to reconsider, watching her watch him approach.
Her gray eyes were unwavering, a fine tension in the line of her jaw, her chin lifted with that characteristic dignity that would not desert her even when, he suspected, she wished it would.
He raised a hand and touched her jaw. Her skin was cold from the passage, and he turned his palm to cup her face fully, warming it, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone in a single slow pass.
She did not move. Her eyes searched his with the focused attention she brought to everything, as though she were still deciding, still weighing, and then her gaze shifted …
not surrender exactly, but the release of a question she had been holding too long.
She exhaled. A long, careful exhale, as though she had been holding herself rigid for some time and had only now remembered she did not have to.
He drew her in by the jaw and kissed her, not with the urgency that had ambushed him in the library, but slowly, deliberately, the way a man kissed a woman when he had been thinking about it for the better part of an evening and intended to do it properly.
Her mouth was warm and tasted faintly of chamomile.
There was a moment, just a moment, of the same tentative uncertainty he had felt in her before, her lips still under his as though she were remembering how this was done, and then her hands found the lapels of his dressing gown, not pulling him closer, simply holding on, as though she required something to grip while the world rearranged itself beneath her feet.
He understood that sensation entirely. He was experiencing it himself.
His hands moved to her hair. He had been thinking about her hair since the library …
how it had come half-loose at the nape and he had noticed, resisting the specific and inconvenient urge to pull every pin from it.
He gathered the silky weight of it now, drawing it back from her face, feeling the full length of it run through his fingers, and she made a small sound against his mouth at the sensation that was not quite protest and not quite permission but somewhere between the two and considerably more interesting than either.
He drew back enough to look at her. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips parted, the careful serenity she wore like a second skin already beginning to loosen at its seams. He used the moment purposefully studying her in the manner he studied a problem worth solving.
The faint flush high on her cheekbones, the rapid pulse at her throat, the unconscious tightening of her fingers around his lapels as though she intended to hold her ground and her hands had their own separate agenda.
“You are cold,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed, and the single syllable carried a quality that had nothing to do with temperature.
He reached past her and drew back the heavy velvet bed-curtain, and she turned and sat on the edge of the bed without being directed to.
He fed the fire first. Not from any virtue but because he wanted to see her, and the coals were dying.
He crouched at the hearth and built it up with the efficient economy of a man who had kept himself in cold lodgings before true luxury became a familiar country, and when the flames caught and threw their amber light across the room, he turned to find her watching him with an expression he had not seen on her before, attentive and unguarded and quietly intent, as though his crouching at a hearth to lay a fire had told her something she had not previously known.
He held her gaze for a moment across the room, the fire warm at his back, and something passed between them that had no name and required none.
He rose and came to her.
He had suspected from the first afternoon in the drawing room that she contained contradictions.
Those calm gray eyes above a pulse she could not quite control; the relaxed set of her mouth and the rapid flutter at her throat that betrayed what the mouth refused to.
The suspicion had done nothing to prepare him for the reality, and he found, as he looked at her now sitting straight-backed at the edge of his bed with her hands folded even here, even in this, that he was entirely and specifically absorbed by the prospect of watching that composure dissolve.
Not out of cruelty. Out of something considerably more ungoverned than that, the fixation of a man who has spent days cataloging every place where the armor showed its seams and has, at last, been given leave to press upon them.
What followed was not hurried. Alistair was not, in any aspect of his professional or personal life, a man who rushed.
He had learned early that the difference between mastery and ruin lay in patience, the willingness to slow when instinct screamed to hurry, to study the mechanism before forcing it, to see what was truly before him rather than what he wished to find.
He brought all of that same deliberate care to her now.
The dressing gown was fastened by a simple silk sash at her waist. He took the ends between thumb and forefinger and drew them apart with exquisite slowness, watching her face the entire time.
The silk parted smoothly, disclosing beneath it the fine lawn of her night-shift, through which the outline of her form was already discernible, taut with anticipation.
She met his gaze with that steady gray directness he had come to regard with something perilously close to reverence, though the quick rise and fall of the pulse at the hollow of her throat betrayed how rapidly her poise was being dismantled.
He had one paramount reason for restraint, and it remained ever present in his mind even as desire tightened its coil within him.
She carried a child. His hands would not be careless with her, nor with the life she bore.
He kept that knowledge close and let it govern the pace of everything.
If he were a true gentleman, he would wait until she delivered her babe …
but waiting that long to touch her? That was an impossibility.