CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Ceci
In daylight, he was different. Less composed.
More human. The severity remained. It was in the bones of him.
Yet sleep softened the edges. His hair had gone loose at the front.
The scar at his temple looked paler in the morning light.
There were lines at the corners of his eyes that spoke more to experience than age, and she liked them so much it was ridiculous.
He touched her face once, with the backs of his fingers. Ceci had not expected how much that would move her.
“What is it?”
She hesitated.
The deeper shock was not that she had let a man into her bed. It was how swiftly her loneliness recognized the fact and reached toward it like something starving. She had forgotten, or tried to, that company could enter the body as relief before it ever became pleasure.
Then, because it was him and because that had already become reason enough to tell the truth, she said, “You’re the first.”
His expression changed at once.
“The first what?”
“The first man,” she said. “Since my divorce.”
Understanding moved through his face, followed almost immediately by something more tender and more dangerous. He drew her a little closer under the blanket.
“I see.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, though without much force. “Not really. You can’t.”
“No,” he said. “Only enough to know I ought to be honored and terrified in equal measure.”
That startled a real laugh from her.
“You are very smug for a man half asleep.”
“I’m fully awake now.”
She believed him.
His hand slipped down her back, slow and warm.
The memory of the night rose in her body at once, sharp enough that she pressed her thighs together on instinct.
Duncan’s. gaze dropped for the briefest instant, then returned to her face with something heated and private in it. The room seemed to tighten around them.
Archie flickered through her mind then. Quick.
Bright. Unfinished. Not guilt exactly, though some adjacent species of discomfort.
Duncan in bed with her, all this new intimacy warming the sheets between them, and somewhere beneath it still the clear, living pull she felt toward Archie too. That had not vanished in the night.
Nothing had simplified.
The truth of it made her pulse skip, and perhaps something of that crossed her face because Duncan’s expression gentled.
Wanting both men should have frightened her more than it did.
What unsettled her was the hunger underneath it, the old loneliness rising so quickly, as if it had been waiting for permission.
For months after the divorce, she had slept diagonally in a bed that felt too large and congratulated herself on independence as if it were a cure.
She had gone to work, answered emails, bought her own groceries, built a life no one could call dramatic, and all the while, some quieter part of her had been starving.
Desire was only the first thing her body understood.
The rest came after, quieter and more dangerous.
Duncan made room for her thoughts as if they mattered before they solved anything.
Archie made delight feel serious, made laughter feel like a hand held out in the dark.
With both of them near, the loneliness she had learned to live around began to feel less inevitable.
“You’ve gone away from me,” he said.
“Briefly.”
His hand stilled at the small of her back. “Would you like honesty?”
Ceci gave him a look. “When have you ever waited for permission?”
The faintest smile touched his mouth.
“I know that what happened last night did not erase Archie from this house,” he said. “Or from either of us.”
She held his gaze.
The relief that moved through her then was so strong it felt almost like grief.
“No,” she said.
“No.” His thumb moved once against her waist. “I am not asking it to.”
For a second, she could not speak. It was the sort of generosity she had not expected from any man, much less one who had spent so much of his life learning how carefully desire must be managed.
It was honesty. A refusal to pretend that one truth canceled another because it would make the rest of the morning easier. Ceci leaned forward and kissed him.
He answered her with immediate warmth, one hand rising to the back of her neck, his mouth still soft from sleep and all the more devastating for it.
The kiss deepened almost at once. She felt the change in him, the low quickening of his breath, the way his body answered hers before either of them had made any useful decision about the hour.
When he drew back, it was only because someone knocked at the bedroom door.
Both of them froze.
Ceci shut her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Duncan exhaled once, somewhere between resignation and amusement. The knock came again. More practical this time.
“Miss Bishop?” Margaret’s voice carried neatly through the wood. “Are you awake, dear?”
Ceci looked at Duncan in horror. His mouth tightened visibly as he fought a smile.
The traitor.
She slid out of bed with all the care of a woman escaping a crime scene and snatched up her dressing gown from the chair. Duncan was already reaching for his shirt.
“Perfectly awake,” she called, perhaps a touch too brightly.
“Shall I bring your breakfast to the library in half an hour?”
The library.
Ceci turned and found Duncan watching her over the top button he was fastening. The library came back first. Leopold’s papers. The gate. Voss. The world crashed back in with Margaret’s knock and a breakfast tray.
“Yes,” Ceci said. “That would be lovely.”
“Very good.”
Margaret’s footsteps retreated.
Ceci stood motionless until they had quite faded. Then she looked back at Duncan. He was dressed enough now to be decent and indecent in equal measure, shirt open at the throat, hair still disordered, feet bare on the rug. The sight made her want unhelpful things.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he echoed.
She laughed under her breath and reached for the rest of her clothes. “Out. Before I am discovered and have to fling myself off the battlements.”
“I doubt that would improve matters.”
“No, but it would be memorable.”
He came to her then, fully buttoned now but still very much Duncan of the night before, and touched her face once more.
“We will go through Leopold’s papers,” he said. “We will see Archie. We will behave, at least in public, like sensible adults.”
“That sounds grim.”
Ceci looked up at him. “And afterward?”
His eyes darkened.
“Afterward,” he said, “I make no promises at all.”
He left by the side door connecting to the passage, which apparently existed for the convenience of old houses and very compromised gentlemen.
Ceci bathed and dressed in a rush that was uselessly flustered for a woman who had already done the compromising and survived it beautifully.
By the time she reached the library, Duncan was there and composed, which she privately considered an outrage.
The room smelled of coffee, toast, and paper dust warmed by the morning fire.
A tray had been set out on the side table.
Duncan stood near the cabinet beneath the western shelves, a stack of tied paper and two leather-bound volumes already waiting on the large center table. He looked up as she entered.
There was nothing in his face that any servant could have called improper. There was rather too much in his eyes for her peace of mind. Ceci crossed to the breakfast tray first out of sheer self-defense.
“If you look at me like that over marmalade,” she said, “I shall lose all respect from this century.”
Duncan poured her coffee. “You lost it yesterday.”
“Fair.”
She took the cup from him, letting her fingers brush his on purpose. His expression did not change. His hand tightened almost imperceptibly around the coffee pot. That was when Archie came in.
He did not knock. Archie never knocked at Hawarden. He entered the library with morning in his face and mischief half assembled already on his mouth, carrying gloves in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other. Then he saw them properly.
It happened quickly. So quickly another person might have missed it.
The way his gaze took in Duncan at the head of the table.
Ceci with coffee in hand and an expression she had not yet managed back into normal use.
The atmosphere of the room. The slight over composure in Duncan. The slight overbrightness in her.
Archie stopped.
“Good morning,” he said.
Ceci did her best. “Morning.”
Archie looked at Duncan.
Duncan looked back.
For once, Archie did not smile fast enough.
The pain reached his face first, quick, and unguarded, before he could dress it in wit.
Duncan watched him understand the thing neither of them had quite said aloud: this was no longer flirtation, no longer possibility, no longer a game they could pretend had no consequences. He covered it almost at once.
“Well,” Archie said lightly, setting down the paper. “One does rather hate to be right before breakfast.”
Ceci nearly choked on her coffee. Duncan, curse him, only said, “Do sit down.”
Archie laughed, but there was effort in it now, and because Ceci had spent the night learning tenderness in one form, she recognized it more readily in another.
He knew.
Details may have been lacking. But it was enough.
She still wanted him. That was the harsh, living truth, sitting there at the breakfast table with three cups and layered feelings.
Wanting Duncan hadn’t freed her from Archie.
Wanting Archie didn’t diminish the reality of what had happened with Duncan in the night.
In less than a week, she had become a woman of very little simplicity.
Archie sat. Took the coffee Duncan poured him. Looked at the tied bundle on the table.
“So,” he said. “Leopold.”
“Yes,” Duncan replied.
The shift into work came as relief. At first, relief was all it gave them.