Chapter 14
Fourteen
Nell woke before dawn, as she always did, but this morning was different. This morning, she hadn’t slept at all.
Every time she closed her eyes, the ghost of his weight returned.
She could still feel the phantom pressure of his hands at her waist and how he made her tremble with pleasure.
When sleep finally teased the edges of her mind, his commands would echo back—low, desperate, and jagged—shattering her resolve.
She’d find herself tangled in the sheets, legs pressed tight to stem the ache, biting the pillow to swallow a name she wasn’t supposed to say.
She was sore in places she’d forgotten could ache. Her lips felt tender, her thighs ached where he’d knelt between them, and when she pressed her fingers to her neck in the grey pre-dawn light, she could feel the raised welts where his teeth had marked her skin.
The yellow dress hung on the wardrobe door where Martha had placed it last night.
Its cheerful colour seemed to mock her in the dimness; she couldn’t look at it.
She couldn’t think about what she’d done while wearing it, what she’d let him do, or what she’d wanted him to do.
She turned her back on it and dragged herself out of bed, her legs unsteady beneath her.
Her whole body felt like it belonged to someone else.
The kitchen was cold and dark, and she welcomed it. She welcomed the familiar rhythm of lighting the ovens, of measuring flour and salt and yeast, and of pushing and folding the dough until her arms ached and her mind went blessedly blank.
Push, fold, turn. Push, fold, turn.
But her hands remembered different things now. They remembered the texture of his hair between her fingers, the heat of his mouth on her core, and the strokes of tongue as he made her come undone.
The children were still asleep upstairs, along with Martha, and the house was quiet in that heavy way that came before dawn.
It was a time when the world held its breath and waited for the sun.
Nell was alone with her thoughts—it was dangerous territory, the most dangerous territory she knew. What had she done? What was she doing?
The shop bell rang. It was too early for customers, as the sun was barely cresting the horizon, and Nell’s hands stilled in the dough, her heart lurching against her ribs.
Daphne stood in the doorway, her face set in hard lines and her arms crossed tight over her chest. She wore her cloak still fastened at the throat, like she’d thrown it on and come straight here without bothering to properly dress.
“We need to talk.” Daphne’s voice was flat and brooked no argument as she tightened her jaw.
Nell’s stomach dropped through the floor. She wiped her floury hands on her apron, her fingers trembling against the coarse fabric. “Daphne, I—” She stopped, the words dying in her throat.
“Not here.” Daphne jerked her chin toward the back of the shop, her expression hard and unyielding. “The storeroom. Now.”
The storeroom was where Dominic had first kissed her.
He’d pressed her back against the shelves and pleasured her with his fingers that had left her shaking.
The irony was not lost on Nell as she followed Daphne through the kitchen, for her legs felt wooden beneath her, and her pulse hammered against her windpipe.
Daphne closed the door behind them and turned to face her, her dark eyes sharp in the dim light filtering through the small window. “I am not stupid, Nell.” She stood with her back to the door, her frame blocking the only exit.
Nell pressed her back against a shelf of flour sacks, putting distance between them. Her hands gripped the rough burlap for support. “I never said you were.” The response was a mere breath of sound, barely audible over the hum of the shop.
“Both of you were missing from that garden party.” Daphne ticked the points off on her fingers, her tone low but intense.
“Both of you came back flushed and out of breath. Your dress sitting crooked on your shoulders, though his lip bleeding that time at the shop—don’t think I forgot that.
And Martha couldn’t find either of you in that maze, no matter how hard she looked. ”
Nell remained silent, her throat too tight for words as she stared at her friend.
“And the way he looks at you.” Daphne’s posture slackened, some of the anger draining away to reveal the raw worry beneath. She uncrossed her arms slowly. “Like you are the only person in the room. Like everyone else might as well be furniture.”
Still Nell held her peace, trying to remain steady.
“Tell me I am wrong.” Daphne stepped closer, her stare boring into Nell’s face for any sign of a denial. “Look me in the eye and tell me nothing happened in that maze.”
Nell opened her mouth to lie. She wanted to protect herself, to protect her children, and to maintain the careful fiction that she was a respectable widow. She should never do something so foolish as to let a viscount put his hands on her in a hidden alcove. The words wouldn’t come.
“I don’t know what is happening.” The confession spilled out of her.
Her composure fractured, and she let her hands fall uselessly to her sides.
“I don’t… I cannot explain it. I hate him.
I do. He called me nothing, while he humiliated me in front of the whole village, while he is arrogant and reckless and everything I should despise.
But when he is near me—” She paused, her breath hitching.
“You forget to hate him.” Daphne finished the thought quietly, her shoulders dropping.
Nell didn’t answer. She just nodded.
Daphne let the silence sit. She uncrossed her arms, reached over, and squeezed Nell’s hand once — hard — before letting go.
“He is a viscount, Nell.” Daphne’s head tilted as she studied her friend’s face. “With a title, an estate, and a family that will have opinions about who he brings home.”
Nell’s fingers curled around the edge of the shelf. “I know what he is.”
“And you are a widow.” Daphne held up a hand before Nell could interrupt, ticking off each word like beads on a string. “A widow with two children. Running a bakery in a village where the grandest thing is the church steeple. You think his family will welcome that with open arms?”
Nell said nothing. Her jaw tightened.
“Then there’s the money.” Daphne leaned against the opposite shelf, arms crossing again. “You count pennies, Nell. He’s never had to count anything in his life. That kind of difference — it doesn’t just disappear because two people fancy each other.”
“I am not some fool who thinks —” Nell started.
“And he is younger than you.” Daphne cut her off, not unkindly, her dark eyes steady on Nell’s. “Nearly six years younger. The ton will count every single one of those years, and they will not be generous about it.”
Nell pressed her back harder against the shelf.
The thoughts she’d been avoiding all night crashed over her — each one landing heavier than the last. Widow.
Common. Poor. Older. Mother of two. She’d known all of it, every impossible obstacle, since the moment his hand had lingered on hers a breath too long.
She simply hadn’t let herself line them up in a row like this, where she couldn’t look away.
“I am not saying anything you haven’t already thought.” Daphne’s expression softened, and she reached out and took Nell’s hands between her own. “I just want you to be careful. He can walk away from this and lose nothing. You can’t.”
Careful. The word echoed in the small space, bouncing off the flour sacks and sugar barrels.
“He called you nothing once.” Daphne spoke softly, her thumb rubbing across Nell’s knuckles with a rhythmic, grounding pressure. “At the festival. In front of Mrs. Pemberton and Sir Richard and anyone else who was listening. Because someone asked about you and he panicked.”
Nell drew a shuddering breath, her throat aching as she stared at a stray dusting of flour on the floorboards. “I remember.”
“I am not saying he meant it.” Daphne shrugged, her hands tightening their hold on Nell’s fingers. “But he said it. Without thinking. Without considering how it would make you feel. He panicked, and he was cruel.”
Reckless, Nell thought. She looked away, her gaze snagging on the heavy iron scales.
He’d panicked and lashed out because he didn’t know how else to handle the heft of his station.
What else might he say without thinking?
What else might he do on impulse when the pressure of the ton became too much?
“Just be careful.” Daphne squeezed her hands once more. “You have children to think about. You don’t want to end up as his… mistress.”
She went silent, letting the drag of the word hang between them. She didn’t have to say more.
Nell’s mind was already spinning, cataloging every objection and every obstacle that made this union a madness.
This could destroy the life she’d built so carefully from the ruins of her marriage.
She was thirty-four years old, six years his senior, a widow with two children and flour permanently embedded under her fingernails.
The ton would never accept her. They would call her a fortune hunter, a scheming widow who had trapped a young lord with common charms and a baker’s body.
They would whisper behind their fans and laugh behind their hands.
Eventually, inevitably, Dominic would hear them, and he would start to wonder if they were right.
“I will.” Nell managed the words through a throat gone tight, returning the squeeze of Daphne’s hands. “I will be careful.”
Daphne pulled her into a hug, a quick and fierce embrace of sharp elbows and protective love. Then she moved toward the door, slipping out of the storeroom to open the shop and leaving Nell alone with the ghost of his hands on her skin.
This had to stop. Whatever madness had seized them both, it had to end before it destroyed them.
The morning slipped past her familiar routines.
Lily came downstairs in her nightgown, as she chattered about the library at Bramwell Park. “He had a first edition of Udolpho, Mama. And Lord Westmore promised I could come back to see it again.”
“Can we, Mama?” Lily tugged at Nell’s stained apron, her eyes appearing enormous behind her smudged lenses. “Can we go back? He said I could hold it again if I was careful, and I was very careful, was I not?”
Nell busied herself with the bread, keeping her face turned away as she kneaded the dough with unnecessary force. “We shall see, sweetheart.”
Oliver was quieter than usual when he appeared, but there was a lightness to him that Nell hadn’t seen in months.
There was a softness around his eyes and a looseness in his shoulders that had long been absent.
He ate his breakfast without his usual sullen silence, looking up with a spark of eagerness when Lily mentioned the lake.
“There are pike in that lake.” Oliver spoke casually, pushing eggs around his plate the way the information were a mere trifle. “Big ones. Lord Westmore showed me where they hide.”
Nell’s hands stilled on the dough, her heart tightening at the boyish hope in his tone.
Martha appeared in the kitchen doorway, her dark eyes moving over Nell’s face with quiet assessment.
She said nothing, she rarely did, but her silence spoke volumes.
Nell knew the woman had understood everything at Bramwell Park and had drawn her own conclusions about the missing viscount, the flushed baker, and the crooked yellow dress.
The shop opened at eight, and customers came and went in the usual morning rush.
Mrs. Potts requested her weekly order of seed cakes.
Old Mr. Thornton fumbled for coins to pay for his daily loaf, but the vicar’s wife sent her maid for scones to serve at a ladies’ meeting.
Nell smiled and served and made change, her hands moving through the familiar motions while her mind churned.
Mid-morning brought Mrs. Potts, her neighbor from the haberdashery next door, bustling through the door.
“The usual, dear.” Mrs. Potts set her coins on the counter, her eyes bright with the gleam of someone holding a secret. “And did you ever catch that nice doctor?”
Nell paused in the act of wrapping the loaf, her brow furrowing as she looked up. “The Doctor came?”
“Yes, Dr. Hartley.” Mrs. Potts leaned across the counter, delighted to be the bearer of news. “He came by yesterday afternoon while you were out. Stood at your door for ages, poor man, knocking and waiting and knocking again. I told him you had gone to Bramwell Park for tea with Lady Philippa.”
Nell’s heart stuttered, and she gripped the edge of the wooden counter until her knuckles turned white.
“He came twice.” Mrs. Potts nodded vigorously, her bonnet ribbons bouncing with the movement. “Once around two o’clock, then again near four. Seemed quite determined to see you.”
Nell finished wrapping the loaf and handed it across the counter, her movements stiff and mechanical. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you do.” Mrs. Potts tucked the bread into her basket and patted Nell’s hand with a fleeting touch. “Lovely man, that doctor. Very respectable. And handsome, too, in that steady sort of way.”
She bustled out, the bell chiming behind her. Nell stared at the closed door with a hollow feeling in her chest—and Edmund had come to see her. Twice. While she’d been at Bramwell Park, letting another man put his hands on her body.