"Go to your bride." He waved me toward the door with the imperious ease of a man who had been giving orders his whole life and had no intention of stopping. "And Constantine." I turned. "Be worthy of her."
I left him smiling.
My mother was in the hallway, and she touched my face briefly when she saw me, the gesture she'd been making since I was a boy, her palm against my jaw for just a moment. "Go," she said softly. "I'll look after him."
I kissed her cheek and went.
Cecelia was in the dining room when I came back downstairs, helping the staff clear the table with the same naturalness with which she did everything domestic, talking easily with Maria, who was looking at her with the expression the entire household had been wearing since she arrived, which was the expression of people who had decided something important and were keeping it to themselves. I stood in the doorway and watched her fora moment and thought that my father was right, that I was only beginning to understand what I had, and that beginning to understand it felt like standing at the edge of something very large.
She looked up and saw me and said something to Maria that made the older woman laugh and then she came toward me, and I held out my hand and she put hers in it without hesitating, the way she'd been doing small things without hesitating since the library last night, and I thought that whatever she said about not being frightened I knew she was and I knew she was choosing not to let it make her decisions, which was one of the bravest things I'd ever watched anyone do.
"I should call Jacob," she said as we walked. "To let him know I'm all right."
"Not yet." I kept my voice gentle because I understood the impulse and hated having to counter it. "If they trace you to a job he becomes another breach." I felt her hand tighten slightly in mine. "I'm sorry."
"No. You're right." She was quiet for a moment.
We turned right at the top of the stairs instead of left, toward our wing of the house, and the hallway was quiet around us, just the sound of our footsteps and the distant settling of the old house around us. I opened the door to our room and she went in ahead of me and stopped in the middle of it and looked around with the expression she wore when she was taking something in properly.
"It really is like its own apartment," she said.
"The whole wing is ours." I closed the door and the sound of the house behind us softened to nothing. "Three other bedrooms if we need them."
She turned to look at me, and the particular quality of the look told me she had stopped thinking about the room. The lamp on the nightstand threw warm light across the space betweenus and she was still in my mother's dress with her hair coming properly loose now, that dark piece along her jaw joined by others, and she was looking at me the way she'd looked at me across the dinner table when she thought I wasn't watching, which was to say with an honesty she hadn't quite decided to act on yet.
I crossed the room to her and she stayed where she was and watched me come, and when I reached her I brought my hand up to her face and she turned into it slightly, the smallest movement, involuntary, and I thought about five days of careful distance and decided I was done with careful.
I kissed her properly this time. Not the altar version, not even the library version. This was everything I'd been keeping at the correct operational distance for five days and she felt it immediately and kissed me back with something that matched it, her hands coming up to my chest and then around my neck, and I pulled her closer and thought that my father had made the right call about the necklace because I wasn't going to let this woman leave.
When we finally broke apart she was breathing the way I was breathing and her eyes when she opened them were very dark and very close. "The buttons," she said, a little unsteadily, and turned around.
I took my time with the buttons.
Each one deliberate, unhurried, my fingers working down her spine while she stood with her back to me and her hair swept over one shoulder, and I could feel the tension in her, not fear exactly, something more like the particular aliveness of a person standing at the edge of something they've decided to walk into. When the last button gave way I spread the dress open with both hands and ran my palms slowly up her back, feeling her skin warm under my touch, and she made a sound that was barelyaudible and I decided that hearing that sound as many times as possible tonight was my primary objective.
The dress pooled on the floor and she turned to face me and let me look at her, which took a courage I recognized and intended to honor. The lamplight was warm and generous and she was more beautiful than I had words for, so I didn't reach for words. I reached for her instead.
She came to me easily, her hands at my tie and then my buttons, her fingers more certain than I'd expected, and I helped her with my shirt and walked her back toward the bed with my mouth on her jaw, the curve of her neck, the soft place below her ear that made her head tip back and her breath catch in a way that went straight through me.
"Constantine." My name in her mouth like that, half breath, made everything else in the world completely irrelevant.
I laid her back against the pillows and looked at her properly, all of her, in the warm light, and the way she looked back at me was completely open in a way I understood had cost her something. This woman had spent twenty-two years keeping herself carefully defended, had crossed an ocean alone and built walls around every soft thing inside her because soft things got used in the world she'd come from, and she was choosing right now, deliberately and with full awareness, to put all of it down.
That undid me more than anything else could have.
I brought my mouth to her collarbone, her shoulder, the swell of her breast, and felt her fingers thread into my hair when I took her nipple between my lips and heard the sound she made, low and unguarded, entirely genuine. I worked my way down her body slowly, tasting her skin, learning what made her breathe harder and what made her say my name and what made her grip the sheets with both hands and arch into me.
When I settled between her thighs she made a sound that was different from the others, something smaller and moreuncertain, and I looked up at her and found her watching me with an expression that was still open but had something new in it, something that looked very much like the particular vulnerability of someone about to say something they weren't sure how to say.
"Con." Her voice was quiet.
"Yeah."
She pressed her lips together briefly. "I haven't done this before." She held my gaze steadily when she said it, which was exactly like her, refusing to look away from the thing that made her most exposed. "I wanted you to know."
I stayed where I was and looked at her for a moment, at this woman who had just handed me something she couldn't take back, and felt the full weight of what she'd given me settle somewhere permanent.
"Thank you for telling me," I said, because it was the right thing and because I meant it completely.
