“I’m sorry but it’s true.”
“And what if mental damage caused by Dryden surfaces at a later day? What if a situation that you cannot yet conceive—my God, there are so many situations about which an innocent like you cannot conceive—triggers some memory that you have long hidden, something that will rise up and haunt you?”
“There is always that danger, I suppose,” she conceded, “but this has not been my experience. It’s been years, Stoker, and now I rarely think of Dryden.”
“Except every day when you investigate him. We are here tonight because of Sir Dryden.”
“Yes, but the investigation is meant to get rid of him so that I can return home.”
“How will he haunt you after that?”
“Not at all, I hope!”
“There is a toughness about you, Sabine, but you are not invincible.”
“Perhaps, but I am also not a victim,” she shot back. “When you delivered me to London after our wedding, I went over and over what had happened in my mind. I walked the city from one end to the other, and while I walked, I reckoned with my father’s death and my mother’s decline and how Dryden took advantage of it all. I looked at each episode from every angle. Was I culpable?No. Could I have handled his aggression differently? Perhaps, but I was doing the best I could at the time. Would he have killed me if you hadn’t come? Possibly.”
“A conviction of treason is too good for him,” Stoker mumbled.
Sabine pressed on, “But you did come, and I made the incredibly reckless and risky decision to leave home with a stranger rather than remain with a known tyrant. Perhaps that decision saved you and me both, and what luck. But I have not buried or disregarded my memories of Dryden. You must trust me when I say that I have reckoned with it and moved on. It was the long walks, I think. When my meanderings turned from angry thoughts and tearful resentment to writing and drawing, the healing began.”
“Of course it did,” he sighed. “You’re so... practical.”
“Oh yes, I’m so very practical,” she said, but the words came out almost like a purr.
She had settled on a window seat and was running her fingers through her hair, settling it over her shoulder in a shiny cascade of black. She glanced at him and raised a suggestive eyebrow. She said no more, but her message was clear. How practical had it been to make love—here, now? How practical had it been to find themselves shut up in a room while revelers danced downstairs? And yet she claimed it was exactly what she wanted. Stoker looked at the tussled bed, her torn dress.Could she actually want this?
“I just don’t know why,” Sabine sighed, “all of this must be so painfully tragic. I’ve told you in no uncertain terms that I am unharmed. Stop telling me how I’m meant to feel, when I could not be clearer about what I want, and when and how.”
“What about what I want?” he gritted out.
“Stoker,” she said, her voice weary.
“What?”
“Tell me what you want. I’m waiting. Tell me.”
He sucked in a breath, wholly unprepared to name anything he wanted—not from her, not from anyone. He’d learned long ago that what he wanted did not matter so much as keeping ahead of what he did not want. And he did not want to hurt her, or frighten her, or lose her.
“Wait, let me guess,” she said, sliding from the window. “You want to buy me a diamond ring in exchange for our lovemaking. You want to be my chaste bosom friend and never allude to or repeat what just happened. You want to leave Belgravia and buy a villa in Portugal and sail away.”
He wanted none of those things—unless they were what she wanted. But she did not like him to assume what she wanted. He lit on the last suggestion and said, “The attempt on my life has cast a stain on the notion of living in Portugal,” he said.
She frowned. “Well. You cannot live in Portugal because someone tried to kill you. And you cannot make love to your wife because—”
“Don’t say it, Sabine,” he said tiredly. “Whatever it was, don’t say it. You cannot possibly know. I don’t want you to know.” He stooped to pick up her shoe.
She huffed out a breath and dropped her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I fantasized about this moment since... well, since our first kiss, and no part of the fantasy was to convince you afterward that nocrimehad been committed. You are only trying to protect me. I know this. But I have told you on more than one occasion that you may not decide thingsfor me.If I tell you I am displeased, you may believe it. If I tell you I want more, wilder, harder—”
His head snapped up.
She shrugged. “Then you may be certain that more, wilder, harder is what I want.”
He walked to the bed and dropped the shoes. He sat, holding his head in his hands.
“The question of what you want,” she said, crossing to him, “is valid and perhaps what remains unanswered. If you have no desire to toss me down and have your way with me, I cannot compel you to do it.”
He laughed a miserable laugh, squeezing handfuls of hair in his hands. It was, of course, theonlything he wanted. But he could not bring himself to say the words. He’d spent a lifetime trying never to admit it. She was asking him to undo years of restraint. His notion of himself as a—well, if not a gentleman, then a decent man, was so very imbedded in the idea that restraint was the thing that separated him from his mother’s lovers and the men from whom he’d stolen away countless abused girls.
