Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
“Hold still.” The modiste circled Nell like a hawk assessing prey, her pins bristling between her lips as she tugged the measuring tape taut across Nell’s shoulder. “You keep fidgeting, and I cannot work.”
“I am not fidgeting.” Nell shifted her weight on the small platform, making the cream silk whisper against her legs as she tried to find a comfortable stance. “I am breathing. There’s a difference.”
“You are fidgeting.” Philippa didn’t look up from her embroidery in the corner, her needle flashing silver in the afternoon light as it pierced the fabric. “You’ve been doing it since Madame Dupont arrived. Stand still and let the woman work.”
The modiste, a sharp-eyed Frenchwoman who had arrived from London with three trunks of fabric and opinions about everything, made a sound of agreement. She jabbed another pin into the bodice. Nell flinched, sucking air through her teeth as the point grazed her skin.
“The dress is too fine.” Nell touched the silk draped across her body, half-pinned and half-flowing.
She ran a cautious finger over the seed pearls scattered across the fabric like stars fallen from heaven.
“I will ruin it before I reach the altar. I shall spill something, trip on the hem, or set it on fire somehow.”
“You won’t.” Dominic’s voice came from the doorway, low and certain.
Nell’s head turned on its own, the movement nearly dislodging a pin.
He leaned against the frame with that particular lazy grace he possessed, arms crossed over his broad chest. He watched her with an expression that made heat bloom beneath her skin.
His glacial eyes traveled slowly down her body, over the silk and the pearls and the curves the modiste kept muttering about accentuating rather than hiding.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Nell pressed one hand to her flushed cheek, her words coming out breathless as she caught his eye. “It’s bad luck. Seeing the dress before the wedding.”
“I am not looking at the dress.” His gaze lifted to meet hers, dark and hungry and utterly unapologetic as he straightened his posture. “I am looking at you.”
“Lord Westmore.” Madame Dupont straightened to her full height, the pins clicking between her teeth like the bones of small animals. “This is most irregular. The bride’s gown is not meant for the groom’s eyes until the ceremony.”
“I own the house.” He didn’t move from the doorway, nor did he shift his attention from Nell even for a second. “I will be irregular if I please.”
Philippa sighed, her embroidery hoop dropping to her lap with a soft thump that echoed in the quiet room. “Dominic, really. Some traditions exist for a reason. You will jinx the whole affair.”
“I don’t believe in jinxes.” He pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room in three long strides that ate up the distance between them.
He stopped at the edge of the platform. For once, they were nearly the same height, with her standing on the raised surface and him on the floor below. “I believe in her.”
“You are impossible.” Nell shook her head, but she was smiling. She felt her heart doing complicated things behind her ribs.
“You love it.” He reached up and tucked a stray strand of dark hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering at her temple with a tender touch. “You are beautiful. You know that?”
“The dress is beautiful.” She caught his wrist, intending to push him away, but her fingers simply rested there against the steady beat of his pulse.
“The dress is fabric and thread.” His thumb brushed across her cheekbone, feather-light, tracing the line of her jaw. “You are the one who makes it worth looking at.”
Madame Dupont threw up her hands with a torrent of French that Nell suspected was not complimentary, the movement causing a few pins to scatter from her lips to the floor. Philippa laughed, soft and fond. She looked like a woman who had long since given up trying to control her nephew’s whims.
“One week.” Dominic cupped her face in both hands, his piercing eyes boring into hers with an intensity that made the rest of the room fade. “One week and you will be mine.”
“I am already yours.” The words slipped out before she could catch them, tumbling free like birds escaping a cage. She felt her cheeks flush at her own boldness.
His eyes darkened, the grey turning nearly black, and his grip on her face tightened just slightly. “Say that again when we are alone.”
“Dominic...” She barely got his name out before his mouth covered hers.
He kissed her, quick and fierce and entirely inappropriate given their audience. Nell heard Madame Dupont's scandalized gasp and Philippa's knowing chuckle—his mouth was warm and demanding, tasting of tea and wanting. When he pulled back, his grin was wicked as sin.
“One week.” He stepped away and straightened his coat, nodding to the modiste with perfect aristocratic courtesy as though he hadn't just kissed his betrothed senseless. “Make her something magnificent, Madame. Spare no expense. I want the ton to weep when they see her.”
Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor. He left Nell flushed and breathless on her little platform with pins poking her ribs and her lips still tingling from his touch.
“That man.” Philippa shook her head, setting aside her embroidery with a rueful smile. “He has no sense of propriety whatsoever. Never has. Even as a boy, he simply took what he wanted and damn the consequences.”
“No.” Nell touched her mouth, feeling the ghost of his kiss. Her fingers trembled slightly as she looked toward the empty doorway. “He doesn’t.”
She was smiling and found she couldn’t seem to stop.
The kitchen of the shop smelled of cinnamon and yeast, with late afternoon light slanting golden through the windows. Nell stood at the worktable, her hands buried in dough, and she watched her son from the corner of her eye.
Oliver sat at the smaller table by the hearth, whittling something she couldn’t quite make out.
His knife moved in careful strokes, shaving curls of wood that drifted to the floor like pale snow.
He’d been quiet all afternoon. He was quieter than usual, which was saying something for a boy who measured his words like a miser counting coins.
Lily had already bounced off to practice her flower girl walk for what must have been the hundredth time. This left mother and son alone with the bread and the silence.
“The wedding is in a week.” Nell maintained a steady, rhythmic motion as she worked the dough, her eyes pinned to the worktable. She pressed, folded, and turned the heavy mass with practiced ease. “Philippa says everything is arranged. The church, the breakfast afterward, the flowers...”
“I know.” Oliver didn’t look up from his whittling, his knife biting deeper into the wood.
“Lord Westmore’s friend Alistair will stand up with him as his witness.” She hesitated, watching the tension gather in her son’s shoulders like storm clouds. “We haven’t discussed who might… That’s, I wanted to ask if you...”
“I will do it.” The words scraped out, catching in his throat with that unpredictable, jagged quality that had begun to plague him as he hovered between boy and man. His knife stilled against the wood, and he finally looked up at her.
Nell’s hands stopped deep in the dough. “Do what?” She searched his face, her pulse quickening at his sudden, heavy gravity.
“Walk you down the aisle.” He didn’t look at her, his jaw set in a hard, pale line as his eyes fixed on the half-carved shape in his hands. “Give you away. Someone should do it. Since there’s no one else.” He shaved a long sliver of wood from the block, the movement jerky and uncoordinated.
The words landed in her chest like stones dropped in still water, rippling outward through places she kept carefully guarded.
“Oliver.” She moved around the table to stand beside him. “Look at me.”
He obeyed with a slow, reluctant turn of his head. His eyes were bright, shimmering with a vulnerability he was fighting with everything he had.
“You don’t have to.” She crouched until they were eye-to-eye, one hand resting on his knee.
“I want to.” His expression hardened into a stubborn mask she recognized from her own mirror.
He gripped the whittling knife until his knuckles turned a bloodless white.
“Someone should do it. Walk you down the aisle. Give you to someone who...” The words fractured, and he jerked his head away, blinking back the moisture. “Someone should.”
“Oh, love.” She reached out, her hand finding the tension coiled beneath his threadbare shirt.
He stiffened at her touch, a reflexive flinch before he allowed himself to lean, just an inch, into her warmth. Then his shoulders finally dropped.
“You don’t have to be the man of the house anymore.” She kept her words low, rubbing small circles against the ridge of his spine. “You don’t have to take care of me. That’s not your job. It never should have been.”
“Someone had to.” The defence was fierce, snapping through the quiet of the kitchen.
He jabbed his knife into the tabletop, the blade sticking upright and quivering.
“There was no one else. It was just us, and you were — you were always tired, Mama. Always working. And sometimes you would get this look, like something far away was hurting you, and I didn’t know what it was but I knew I had to make sure nothing hurt you here. ”
Her heart cracked clean down the middle.
This boy. Her boy. He had never known Gabriel, never lived through the worst of it, but he had grown up in the long shadow of it.
He had read the bruises that were already gone by the time he was born — not on her skin, but in the way she startled at a slammed door, in the way she checked the locks twice every night, in the hollow behind her smile when she thought no one was watching.
He had appointed himself her protector without ever understanding what he was guarding her from.