Chapter Eight #2
Imogen could not sleep. She had tried for two hours, lying in the blue bedroom with the curtains open, the moonlight coming in through the tall windows and the silence of a country house settling around her.
It was the particular silence of old stone, old wood, servants who had gone to their quarters, guests who had gone to their chambers and a building that was finally, after a long evening of noise and performance, breathing on its own.
She put on her dressing gown over her night-rail, pulled her shawl over both, and she went downstairs to the library, on the theory that ducal libraries kept better hours than ducal beds and that a book might accomplish what two hours of ceiling-staring had not.
The library door was ajar. Lamplight spilled into the corridor, a thin warm line of it that told her someone else had beaten her to the books. She pushed the door open.
Ash was sitting in a leather chair beside the fireplace in his shirtsleeves, his coat and cravat discarded somewhere, his collar open, the white linen of his shirt loose against his throat.
A glass of brandy sat untouched at his elbow.
A book was open in his lap, but he was not reading it, and the not-reading was visible in the angle of his face and the distance in his eyes.
The particular look of a man who had opened a book to give his hands something to do while his mind was elsewhere.
He looked up when she came in. His eyes found her in the doorway, barefoot in her night-rail, dressing gown and her shawl, and something moved across his face that she had not seen before.
Something that was neither desire nor surprise but was closer to recognition, as if he had been waiting for her without knowing he was waiting and had only just realized what the waiting was for.
He did not stand. He gestured to the chair opposite his, a small movement of his hand that was neither formal nor casual but was simply an invitation, offered quietly.
She sat.
The library was warm and dim, the bookshelves rising to the ceiling on three walls, the spines of the books catching the lamplight in muted gold, green and burgundy.
The room smelled of leather and old paper, and it was the most comfortable room she had been in since arriving at Ravenhurst Park, because it was the only room that felt as if it belonged to someone.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
He turned the book so she could see the spine. Laclos. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. She raised her eyebrows.
“The Vicomte or the Marquise?” she asked.
“The Marquise. Always the Marquise. Valmont is merely dangerous. Merteuil is architecture.”
They fell into conversation, and the conversation was unlike any other she had ever had with a man at any hour of the day, because it was not a conversation about weather or society or any of the approved subjects that unmarried women were permitted to discuss with unmarried dukes.
It was a conversation about books. About Laclos, Crébillon and Marivaux and the precise moral calculus of fictional seduction.
About whether the Marquise de Merteuil’s destruction was justice or punishment and whether there was a difference.
About whether Valmont’s deathbed letter was a confession or a performance and whether a rake was capable of telling the difference between the two.
“The letter is genuine,” Ash said. “That is precisely what makes it unbearable. If it were a performance, the reader could dismiss it. Because it is genuine, the reader has to contend with the fact that a man who has spent the entire novel manipulating women is capable of a moment of real feeling, and the real feeling does not redeem him. It only makes the damage worse.”
“You have thought about this.”
“I have thought about rakes,” he said, and something shifted in his voice, a weight that had not been there a moment before, “more than I would like.”
She let the sentence sit and did not pursue it.
She watched his fingers turn the spine of the book in his lap, slowly, the same slow turn she had seen him give his father’s watch.
She filed the similarity without saying anything, because that would have meant admitting that she had been watching his hands more closely than she wanted to admit.
“Have you read Marivaux?” she asked.
“La Vie de Marianne. Twice.”
“And what did you think?”
“I thought the heroine was more intelligent than anyone in the novel deserved, and that the novel punished her for it. Marivaux considered the punishment a form of education, but I do not agree.”
“Most men do agree.”
“Most men have not been educated by a heroine,” he said, and looked at her, in the dim light of the library with no one watching.
The flush came once more, but she let it, because there was no audience to see it, and no reason to hide it.
He was well-read. She had expected that, because she had met few men who quoted Laclos in dim libraries past midnight who were not well-read, but the extent of it surprised her.
He had read all kinds of books, and he referred to them as people whose opinions mattered, whose company he kept, whose judgments he took seriously, and that was the thing that undid her.
She had spent four seasons surrounded by people who considered her reading a peculiarity, and here was a man who considered it a qualification.
Somewhere between her third quiet correction and his fourth admission that she had read something he had not, he set the book down and looked at her across the dim space between their chairs.
His face was open in a way she had not seen it open before, not the careful openness of the morning room or the charged one of the conservatory but something quieter; something that looked less like seduction and more like a man discovering that the woman sitting across from him was interesting in a way that had nothing to do with her body and everything to do with her mind.
“What do you think of the Marquise’s final humiliation?” he asked. “The smallpox. The disfigurement. The flight.”
“It is cruel,” Imogen said. “But I think it is honest. Most novels lie about who pays for the games their characters play. That one does not.”
The words landed on the room. She watched them land on him, watched the recognition move across his face, and watched the sentence rearrange something behind his eyes that she could not name but could see clearly in the sudden stillness of his expression.
He was thinking about something she was not privy to, and the thinking changed the color of his silence.
It darkened it, weighted it, turned it into something that felt less like comfortable quiet and more like a man standing at the edge of a confession he was not ready to make.
He rose, and she rose with him, because the conversation had been building toward something that sitting down could not contain.
They were standing now, close, and she was looking at his collar and his shirt because looking at them was easier than looking at his face, which was doing something she was not equipped to interpret.
His mouth suddenly moved to her throat, not her lips.
He pressed a warm, deliberate kiss on the spot with the freckle.
There was nothing between his lips and her skin, and the touch sent a shiver through her, running from her throat down to her chest, her hips, and into her legs until her knees felt unsteady.
His hand found the front of her dressing gown, parted the fabric, and found the neckline of her night-rail beneath.
His fingers slipped inside, beneath the cotton, beneath the loosened stays she wore to bed, and then his hand was on her breast. Bare skin against bare skin, his palm warm and slightly rough, his thumb finding the peak of her nipple and circling it slowly.
The sensation was so different from the corridor and the conservatory, so much more immediate and more devastating without the muslin and the silk between them, that she heard herself make a sound she had never heard before: low, broken and helpless, which filled the library.
She put her hand against his wrist, but she did not push him away or draw him closer.
She held him there, her fingers wrapped around the bones of his wrist, feeling his pulse hammer beneath her grip.
His hand was still on her breast, his mouth still at her throat, and the holding was its own statement; neither permission nor refusal but something between; a pause in which everything that had been building between them since the potted palm stood perfectly still and waited.
He stopped.
She heard his breathing change, the ragged edge of it, smooth into something more controlled, and his hand withdrew from her night-rail, slowly. His fingertips trailed across her skin as they left, and the trailing was an apology, a reluctance and a promise all at once.
His forehead dropped to hers. The same gesture from the conservatory, his breath warm on her mouth, their bodies close enough that she could feel the heat of him through his shirt and the hard line of his arousal against her hip through the dressing gown.
He was trembling, not with cold, but with the effort of holding himself still.
“I have forgotten how to do this without performance,” he said, and his voice was quiet, raw and more honest than anything she had heard from him. “I am trying to remember. I need a moment.”
He turned away, pressed his hand against the bookshelf behind him and stood there with his back to her.
His shoulders rose and fell with the effort of breathing, his head bowed, and she understood, watching him, that the stopping was not rejection but the opposite.
The effort of stopping was a man who had spent eight years taking what he wanted, but had now decided, for the first time, that taking was not the same as earning and he wanted to earn this.
She left the library in silence. She climbed the stairs to the blue bedroom, closed the door and leaned against it. She pressed her palm flat against her breast where his hand had been, the skin still warm, his touch still printed there, and stood in the dark for a long time.
Neither of them slept. She knew this the way she knew it in the conservatory, without evidence and without confirmation, because the night had a quality to it that sleep could not touch.
I have forgotten how to do this without performance.
She lay in the dark and turned the sentence over and over, and each time she turned it she found something new underneath.
It was a layer of meaning she had not reached before, and the deepest layer, the one she reached just before dawn, was that he was not performing with her.
He had stopped performing. The rake mask, the ducal charm, the eight seasons of practiced indifference, all of it had come off in the library when he turned his back to her and asked for a moment.
What was underneath was a man who did not know how to want someone without the mask, and the not-knowing was terrifying him, but that terror was the most human thing she had ever seen.