Chapter Four #2
The corridor behind the music room was dim, lit by a single sconce at the far end, and it smelled of beeswax, old carpet and the particular musty warmth of a house that had been closed for most of the winter and opened hastily for the season.
The music was muffled behind the half-closed door, the soprano’s voice reduced to a distant insistent vibration that might have been beautiful if Imogen had been paying any attention to it.
She was not paying attention to it. She was paying attention to the man walking beside her, to the sound of his boots on the worn carpet, to the length of his stride, which he had shortened to match hers, and to the fact that his arm, the one nearest her, was held at his side with a tension that suggested he was thinking about touching her and had not yet decided whether to allow himself the indulgence.
She could see the tendons in his wrist above the edge of his glove.
The ratafia, she noticed, had not been mentioned again.
He had not turned toward the refreshment table and had not asked a footman.
The ratafia had been a pretext, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat between them in the dim corridor like a third person neither of them was willing to acknowledge.
The moment the corridor went quiet around them, she stopped walking, and he stopped beside her.
The sconce at the end of the hall threw his shadow long against the floor, and hers beside it, and the two shadows did not quite touch.
She could feel the heat of his body from where she stood, the warmth radiating through the small space between them, and she was suddenly, acutely aware of her own body in a manner that had nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with proximity.
“What do you want, Your Grace?”
He turned. His face in the low light was all angles, the scar at his mouth catching the sconce flame, his pale eyes darker in the dimness than they appeared in daylight.
“Be plain,” she said, and her voice was steady, but her hands at her sides were not. “I have read enough to know what a man like you wants from a woman like me, and I should rather we had it spoken aloud than acted upon by sleight of hand.”
Something changed in his expression. She had surprised him, and the surprise was genuine; it almost made her take the words back, because she had not expected to find real surprise on the face of a man who had spent eight seasons performing every emotion the ton had ever asked of him.
He kissed her instead of answering.
His hand came up to her jaw first, his gloved fingers settling along the line of her face, tilting her chin.
Then his mouth found hers, and the finding was not tentative.
It was a slow, deliberate arrival, his lips warm, the pressure of him steady and certain, and for one bright disorienting second the world narrowed to the place where his mouth met hers, and everything else fell away.
She pushed him back two full steps. His shoulders hit the corridor wall, his hand left her jaw, and for the briefest moment they stood apart, breathing, the muffled soprano still climbing somewhere behind the closed door.
Then she kissed him back.
She did not decide to do it. Her body and her hands decided, her fingers fisting in the lapels of his coat and pulling him forward.
She put her mouth on his before the sensible voice in the back of her mind could finish saying Hambridge.
His lips parted against hers, his tongue touched the corner of her mouth, and a sound left her that she had not known she was capable of making, small and involuntary and more honest than anything about the last four seasons had been.
His hand slid from her jaw to her throat, his gloved thumb tracing the line of her pulse, and then lower, his fingers finding the edge of her short stays where they met the muslin of her bodice, and then beneath, his hand slipping under the boning and cupping her through the thin fabric.
Her breast in his palm, the muslin between them, the heat of his hand through the cloth, and her breath caught against his mouth, went through her entire body like a note struck on a string she had not known she possessed.
She heard him make a sound. Low, unguarded, almost a word.
His thumb shifted against her nipple through the muslin, and she arched into his hand without meaning to, her teeth catching his lower lip, and the small sharp pull of it made him inhale.
The inhale was nothing like performance, nothing like eight seasons of practiced charm, nothing like anything she had read about in any book.
Because she had read about this. She had read about desire in French and English, and once, memorably, in a Latin text her uncle had failed to lock away properly.
She had read detailed descriptions of what happened when a man put his hands on a woman in a dark corridor, and she had believed, confidently, as only a well-read virgin could, that she understood it.
That reading was a form of preparation. That knowing the vocabulary was the same as knowing the language.
She had been wrong. Completely, devastatingly, bone-deep wrong.
No book had prepared her for his thumb moving across her nipple and making her entire body contract toward it.
No book had described the precise quality of the sound she made when his teeth grazed her jaw, or the warmth that pooled low in her stomach and spread downward until her legs did not entirely feel like her own.
No book had mentioned that a man’s mouth at the corner of her neck could make her think, clearly and without embarrassment, about what his mouth would feel like lower, at the hollow of her throat, at the place where her stays ended and her skin began, at the places she had read about in books and never once imagined allowing anyone to touch.
She pulled back. His hand was still beneath her stays, warm and unmoving against her breast, and her hands were still fisted in his lapels, and neither of them let go for a count of three slow breaths.
Then she released his coat and stepped back.
She straightened her bodice with fingers that trembled only slightly, because she had been composing her face for four seasons and she was not going to stop now, even if the composition was harder than it had ever been and the flush that she could feel climbing her throat was going to betray her regardless.
He was looking at her. His mouth was slightly open, his breathing visible, one glove creased where her grip had bent the leather, and there was something in his face she had not seen before.
Not calculation. Not charm. Something closer to bewilderment, as if he had walked into the corridor expecting one thing and had found another entirely and was not yet certain what to do about it.
She said nothing. She just turned and walked back toward the music room with her gown half-righted, her eyes bright and the taste of him still on her lips, still on the corner of her mouth where his tongue had touched her, but she did not look back.
She heard him breathe once behind her, heavy and uneven, and then she was through the door and back in the music room.
The soprano was finishing, the audience was beginning to applaud, Aunt Margery was blinking awake in the fourth row and the world was reassembling itself around her as if the corridor had never happened, as if her bodice had never been disturbed, as if the humming between her thighs were not still there, persistent and warm and entirely unwelcome in a room full of gilt chairs and polite applause.
She sat down in an empty chair near the wall, folded her hands and breathed.
The soprano took her bow. The room rustled with the particular sound of an audience that had been sitting too long and was ready for refreshment.
Imogen was not ready for refreshment. Imogen was not ready for anything at all.
She was sitting in a gilt chair with her hands folded, her bodice straightened and the taste of a duke still on her mouth.
The taste was not going away, her body was not calming down, and the pulse between her legs, the one that had started when his thumb found her nipple, was still going, low and steady and humiliating in its persistence.
She pressed her knees together under her skirt and pressed her gloved hands flat against her thighs. She tried to think about anything at all that was not the memory of his hand beneath her stays and the sound he had made when she bit his lip.
It did not work. None of it worked. Her body had made a decision in that corridor that her mind had not been consulted about, and the decision was still echoing through her, warm, insistent and impossible to reason with.
She sat in the gilt chair, breathed, composed her face and tried not to think about the fact that she had kissed the Duke of Ravenhurst in a dark corridor and had meant it, every second of it, every breath and every sound and every shameless arch of her body into his hand.
Three minutes later Ash returned to the music room through the same corridor door.
His face was composed. His coat was straight.
His gloved hand, the one that had been beneath her stays, was resting at his side as if it had never touched anything more interesting than a banister.
But she was watching him, and she saw what the rest of the room did not see: the slight tension in his jaw, his breathing still not entirely even, the almost imperceptible adjustment he made to the front of his coat as he crossed the threshold.
He was not as composed as he appeared. The knowledge that he was affected, that his body was carrying the corridor the same way hers was, did something complicated and dangerous to the feeling between her legs, but she looked away before her face could betray her.
From across the room, a man she recognized but could not immediately name, one of Ash’s friends, fair-haired and smiling as if the smile were designed to be observed, leaned toward Ash and murmured something close to his ear.
Ash’s face did not change. He said two words she could not hear, and the fair-haired man laughed, briefly and sharply, and something about the laugh made her stomach tighten.
Not jealousy. Not suspicion. Something smaller and less identifiable, a cold thread pulling through the warmth the corridor had left behind, as if the laugh had a texture she could not quite read and did not trust.
Ash turned away from the fair-haired man and found Imogen’s eyes across the music room and held them for one long second before the crowd moved between them and the contact broke.
In that second, she saw something in his face that looked, if she was reading it correctly, and she was no longer certain she was reading anything correctly, like apology.
Or regret. Or the beginning of something he had not yet decided to feel.
She rode home with Aunt Margery dozing beside her and Cassie chattering about the soprano, the dinner and a Mr. Forsythe who had complimented her programme and who had, according to Cassie, very fine calves and an understanding of Handel that bordered on the spiritual.
Imogen listened to none of it. She sat in the dark corner of the carriage with her gloves pulled high, her hands clasped in her lap and the place beneath her stays where his palm had rested still warm, still humming, still making itself known despite every effort she was making to ignore it.
She thought about what Bethany had said.
Beautiful sons, broken hearts, and rakes.
She thought about the flush that had climbed her throat during the morning call, the country dance and the corridor, and how each time the flush had gone deeper and lasted longer and become harder to hide.
She thought about the sound she had made when his tongue touched the corner of her mouth, small and involuntary but honest, and how the honesty of it terrified her more than anything else.
Because honesty was a thing she had been rationing for four seasons and she had just spent an entire reserve of it in a dim corridor with a man she was not sure she could trust.
The books had not prepared her. None of them had.
She was beginning to suspect that nothing could.