Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The night was moonless, the darkness heavy and thick.
Minerva lay first on one side, then the other, finally rolling to her back, her thoughts tangled.
The kiss. She could think of nothing else, and she could not find the discipline to press it down and hold it there.
It lived in her hands, her lips, her throat, in the way her breath grew shallow and fast as she lay between the sheets and let herself recall the power of his body flush with hers, the way her breasts had felt full and heavy, the way a jolt had shot low in her belly—
She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.
This was not useful.
Since that day she had sat in Mr. Granger’s office and understood that both her decisions and her future were her own, she had told herself that the choice not to marry meant the choice not to want.
That the two were united, twined, inseparable.
That by deciding against marriage she had decided against all marriage entailed, including the sensations and emotions that had happened in the parlor this afternoon.
Lying here in the dark with the kiss still thrumming in her blood, she could see that she had been wrong.
Wanting Dashiell Penrose was not the same as marrying him.
Not the same. Not intertwined. Marriage with its legal transfers and loss of control and a husband’s authority over her income and property and person was what she rejected.
But wanting him, it seemed, was not something she could decide.
She had treated the two as one and failed to notice the conflation.
With a sigh, she threw back the covers and rose, the boards cold beneath her feet.
She found her wrapper and lit a candle, the flame small and steady as she cupped her hand around it and stood, listening to the house settle and the wind sigh in the eaves.
Since her arrival, she had grown accustomed to these sounds; they were like old friends now.
Opening the bedroom door, she paused in the threshold, then stepped out, the candle throwing a small circle of light that moved with her, leaving everything beyond in smothering darkness. The door to the third room was closed.
Almost did she make her way downstairs, but as her fingers settled on the banister, she paused.
From behind the closed door came the creak of the floorboards. A footstep, slow, deliberate, familiar. She had turned away each time she heard it before. Perhaps turning away was a mistake.
After making her way across the landing, she stopped before the door, her pulse kicking up a notch.
For a long moment, she only stood there, listening.
Outside, the sea moved against the base of the cliff, the pounding of the waves steady and muted.
Her fingers drifted to the pendant, warm to her touch.
Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.
The cold arrived at once, swirling around her ankles, climbing her legs, settling in sinew and bone.
Darkness and shadow swallowed the room, the furniture appearing as black shapes, angles harsh and stark.
The candle flame bent sideways, pulled toward the small writing desk in the corner with its inkwell and its quill, left as though someone had only just stepped away.
Something was in the room. She could not see it but she did not doubt the certainty that settled in her, heavy and cold.
It was not the Occupant. The malevolence of that entity, vast and ancient, was absent here. And it was not the brothers, whose presence she knew from the cliff path, their ragged fury and the tether between them.
This was something else, something… She groped for a way to describe what she sensed, what she felt.
Whatever was in this room was not vast or indifferent or malicious.
It was smaller and more benign than that.
And the pendant was warm against her skin, warm but not hot.
Recognition rather than warning, she thought.
She was not in danger from whatever was here.
The presence did not press toward her or attempt to influence her. It simply inhabited the space.
“I know you are here,” she whispered, the words barely more than a breath.
The cold did not ease. The darkness did not shift. The candle flame neither swelled nor guttered. There was no specific change in the room, nothing she could pinpoint or name.
And yet, she knew it heard her.
She turned and went back the way she had come, then pulled the door closed behind her. On the other side, a single footstep made a floorboard creak.
Kitty and Nessa were working in the garden the following afternoon, so Minerva slipped out alone, glad for the solitude, a moment to arrange her thoughts and catalogue her emotions. Last night she had dreamed again of the waves, the cliff. And Dashiell Penrose.
The wind had shifted by the time she reached the edge of the headland, coming in low and steady, no longer sharp with the bite of morning. Below, the sea rolled in long, deliberate swells, crashing against the rocks.
At a slow pace she followed the path as it curved along the cliff, narrow in places, the long grass bending beneath the wind. She kept a careful distance from the edge, though her gaze returned again and again to the edge of the precipice and the restless water below.
“You are wise to be wary of the drop.”
She did not startle. She had sensed him there before he spoke.
She turned to find Dashiell standing a short distance away, the hem of his black coat stirring in the wind. Her attention dropped to his lips, full and firm, and she could not help the heat that climbed her throat at the memory of how they felt pressed against her own.
“You seem to have a habit of appearing without invitation,” she said, making her tone tart, though in truth, she found herself strangely pleased to see him here.
His gaze flicked to the cliff edge. “You walk too close.”
Her first instinct was to snap at him, to point out that it was none of his concern where she walked or stood. But though his tone was cool, she sensed that the warning came from genuine concern.
“I am quite aware of where I stand,” she said softly.
“That has not always proven sufficient.”
He had said similar things to her in the past. Now, given all she had experienced, the admonition landed in a different way.
She had not discussed the cliff path attack with him—attack was the only word she could summon to even remotely describe it—had not shared the horror of it, but it lay there, a serpent beneath the still lake of her mind.
She had stood on this path and her feet had walked her toward the edge while every part of her mind had screamed for retreat.
There had been an entity, an otherness, dark and foreign and malevolent, inhabiting the space where her will should have been.
She looked at the drop now, at the long fall to the rocks and the sea, and she did not feel the pull she had felt that day, the compulsion to walk forward to her doom. The path was just a path, the pendant cool against her skin.
For a long moment, neither spoke, the crash of the waves filling the silence.
Then Dashiell offered his arm. “Walk with me.”
Not a request, a command. Yet she found herself inexplicably loathe to decline. She took his arm and he positioned himself between her and the drop.
When he said nothing, she offered, “The weather is fine.”
“Yes.”
Some moments passed and she tried again. “I am told the summers here are kinder than the winters. I confess I cannot imagine this wind as anything other than what it is.”
“Yes.” He slanted her a sidelong glance then went back to staring straight ahead.
“Well,” she said after a long moment. “If we are to have a conversation, you will need to offer more than perfunctory replies.”
The corners of his lips quirked, not quite a smile. “You find me lacking?”
“I find you…economical,” she said.
“A useful trait.”
“At times.” She shook her head. “At others, it is evasive.”
He stopped and faced her. “You wish me to be less so?”
“I wish to understand the man who appoints himself guardian of cliff paths.”
“I have done no such thing.”
“No?” she asked. “You appear at unexpected intervals. You issue commands and expect all and sundry to obey. You do not ask. You… decide.”
He huffed a low laugh, the sound weaving through her. “And yet, you took my arm.”
The words slipped between them, quiet and deliberate, making her acutely aware of the strength of his arm beneath her hand, the solid line of him at her side, the scents of wool and bergamot and citrus. She sucked in a sharp breath.
“Perhaps,” she said, recovering, “I wished to see what you would do next.”
“Have I disappointed you?”
“Not yet.”
Silence fell once more and they resumed walking, her skirts brushing his leg. The wind shifted, pulling strands of hair free of her pins and whipping them across her cheeks.
“Tell me something real,” he said.
She considered refusing, not from dishonesty but from the habits formed over three years where she had learned that revealing herself had a cost, one that was not always worth paying.
But she had already peeled back layers of her armor, revealing some of her truths, and found that she liked the way he looked at her when she did.
“I count things,” she said, staring straight ahead, offering her secrets though he had not earned them. Or perhaps he had earned them by offering his own. “Coins. Stitches. The number of seconds it takes to inhale. Exhale. The steps between the kitchen and the door.”
His stride did not falter, but something in him shifted, the tightening of his muscles subtle but unmistakeable.
“The steps between the kitchen and the door,” he said at length.
“Fourteen,” she said. “Sixteen if I take the longer way around the table.”
“I know that counting,” he said, and she thought he chose his words with care. Not I understand or I have done the same.
She took a slow breath then cut him a glance through her lashes. “Do you still?” she asked. “Count?”