Chapter Ten #2
She thought about what Bethany had said on the gravel.
He is going to leave a mark on you. Be sure you are willing to wear it.
The mark was already there. She could feel it, not on her skin but underneath it, in the place where his hand had rested, his mouth had pressed, and his heartbeat had hammered against her fingers.
It was not a bruise and not a scar but something else, something deeper and more permanent, and she was beginning to suspect that willing was no longer the relevant question, because the mark had arrived without her permission and was not going to leave on request.
***
It was mid-afternoon, and she was crossing the corridor outside the breakfast room on her way to the library when she heard laughter through the half-open door.
Male laughter, several voices, the wager set assembled over late coffee and toast, and she would have walked past without stopping except that one of the laughs was Devlin’s.
His laugh was a sound that carried no warmth and left nothing behind, and something in the register of it made her slow her steps.
“Caught in the rain,” Devlin was saying, and the amusement in his voice was thick and pointed. “Our dear Ravenhurst, caught in the rain. Is that what we are calling it now? I must update my vocabulary.”
There was laughter from the table, then Rourke’s voice, something she could not make out and more laughter.
“He is smitten,” Devlin said, and the word smitten landed on the room in a way that made it sound clinical rather than romantic, a diagnosis rather than a description.
“Utterly and completely smitten, and I confess I did not think it possible. Our Ravenhurst, the man who has been bored by every beauty in London for eight years, brought to his knees by a girl who reads novels behind potted palms. It is almost poetic.”
She heard a chair scrape. Devlin’s voice dropped lower, and she could not hear the next sentence, only the tone of it, and the tone was not amused. The tone was considering and calculating. The sound of a man who was watching a game change and was deciding how to change with it.
She walked past the door and carried the strange feeling she had to the library. She sat in the chair Ash had occupied two nights ago and opened a book, but she did not read. She thought about the word smitten and the way Devlin had used it, which had not been kind.
She thought about what else Devlin had said, the parts she could not quite hear, the lowered voice, the change in tone.
The word smitten was the surface of something, and beneath the surface was something else, something colder and more deliberate, but she could not identify it because she did not have enough information.
That was itself a kind of warning, because a man who lowered his voice when speaking about a duke and a woman was a man who understood that what he was saying would not survive being spoken aloud.
***
She dressed for dinner, and she sat through four courses without speaking to Devlin and without looking at Ash, because looking at Ash at the dinner table after the cottage would have produced a reaction on her face that the entire table would have been able to read.
She was not ready for the table to read her face, not yet, not while Devlin’s lowered voice was still sitting in her stomach alongside a cold feeling.
The combination of the two was producing a sensation she could only describe as the beginning of fear, though she did not yet know what she was afraid of.
***
After eleven that night, she went to the balcony off the east wing.
She could not sleep. The blue bedroom was too warm, the curtains too heavy, the bed too large, and the memory of the cottage too close.
She put on her dressing gown and went to the balcony for air; the night was clear, warm and full of stars, and the grounds below were silver and black in the moonlight.
She stood at the railing and breathed and tried to think about anything other than what it had felt like to sleep against his chest and wake up with his arm around her waist.
“You cannot sleep either.”
He was standing at the far end of the balcony, leaning against the stone railing, his shirt open at the throat, his coat absent, his hair pushed back from his forehead, and the moonlight was doing something to his face that seemed to be stripping away the performance and leaving the man underneath.
“I have not been able to sleep properly since the conservatory,” she said, and the honesty of it surprised her, because she had not planned to say it, but she had said it, and it was an admission she had not made to anyone, not even Bethany.
It sat between them on the balcony like a door she had opened without checking what was on the other side.
“Nor have I,” he said.
Three quiet sentences about not being able to sleep, and the three sentences were not about sleep. They were about the space between their rooms, the ache of it and the way the ache had become a permanent resident of her body, living in her stomach and her thighs.
He crossed the balcony and stopped close enough that she could smell the soap on his skin and the faint remnant of the brandy he had drunk after dinner.
His hand came up and found her throat, his fingers settling against the side of her neck, his thumb at the hollow where her pulse was hammering.
The touch was gentle and deliberate, and made her entire body go still.
Her dressing gown was slipping. The left shoulder had loosened when she leaned against the railing, and the fabric was sliding down her arm, exposing the thin strap of her night-rail and the bare skin of her shoulder.
She did not adjust it, because adjusting it would have required her to lift her hand and lifting her hand would have meant moving it away from his chest, where it had come to rest without her deciding to put it there.
His thumb moved against her pulse. Her hand moved against his skin, her fingers tracing the edge of his collarbone where the shirt fell open, the line of muscle beneath, the faint roughness of the hair on his chest, and the touching was slow and exploratory and unbearably intimate.
Two people learning each other’s bodies in the dark with the house asleep around them, no one watching and nothing between them but the thin cotton of her night-rail and the open linen of his shirt.
He leaned down. His mouth found the place where her dressing gown had slipped, the bare curve of her shoulder, and he pressed his lips there, warm and lingering.
The contact spread through her body like wine, slow and dangerous, and her hand tightened on his chest, and she heard her own breathing go uneven in a way she could not control.
He pulled back, dropped his hand from her throat and stepped away. The same pattern, the same deliberate withdrawal, the same visible effort of a man forcing himself to stop.
“Good night, Miss Goodall,” he said, and his voice was controlled, but his hands at his sides were not controlled at all, and the contradiction between his voice and his hands said more than any words could have.
“Good night, Your Grace.”
He turned and walked the length of the balcony toward the far door, and she watched him go, his shoulders straight, his stride even, his hands still clenched, but before he reached the door he paused for a moment, very briefly, as if he were going to turn back.
He did not turn back, the door closed behind him, and she stood on the balcony alone with the moonlight, the stars and the warmth of his lips still on her shoulder.
She stayed on the balcony for a long time after he left.
The grounds below were quiet, the house behind her was dark, and her body was humming.
The same persistent hum that was getting louder and more insistent with each encounter, and each encounter ended the same way: with him stopping and her standing alone in the aftermath, trying to breathe.
His behaviour was doing something to her that she could not entirely articulate, something that lived between frustration, tenderness and bewilderment, because she did not understand why he kept stopping.
She understood only that the stopping mattered to him, and that the mattering was connected to something he had not told her, and that secret was the last wall between them.
She went back to her bedchamber, but she could not sleep. All she could think of was that the wall between them was getting thinner, and she could almost see through it, but what she could see looked like fear.