“I do.”
“I did not say otherwise.”
“Your face is saying otherwise.”
“My face is six months pregnant and doing its best.”
Valeria left. She walked up the stairs too fast, her ruined shoes squelching on the marble. She did not look back, because looking back would mean seeing Caroline’s knowing face, and she could not handle that right now. She could handle a storm and a maze and a kiss and a killer and a gazebo, but she could not handle her little sister smiling at her like that.
She closed her bedroom door and went to sit on the bed. The room was quiet. Her room. Her bed. Her choice to come and go as she pleased.
She pressed both hands to her cheeks. They were still burning.
She kicked off her ruined shoes and then peeled off her wet stockings. Her dress was beyond saving. She would give it to Mary in the morning, and Mary would either work a miracle or use it for rags. Either way, Valeria would never look at it again without thinking about the rain and the garden wall and Edward’s taste.
She washed her face, changed into her nightshift, then got into bed. The sheets were cool and clean, and the pillow smelled of lavender. She lay on her back and stared at the canopy, unable to sleep.
She thought about the kiss. She replayed it from the beginning. The stone wall against her back. Cold seeping through the wet fabric. His hand sliding up the back of her neck. Fingers tangling in her wet hair, tilting up her face. The first touch of his mouth against hers, firm and certain and warm. The shock of it. Not pain. Not fear. Just surprise that this was what it felt like, this thing she had read about in novels and imagined in the dark and assumed she would never experience because Gordon had taken everything from her, including the possibility of being touched by someone she chose.
She had pulled him closer. She remembered that clearly. Her hands on his coat, fingers gripping the wet wool, pulling himin. She had not planned that. Her body had done it of its own accord, as though it knew what it wanted before her mind had caught up. And the sound he had made when she pulled him closer, low in his throat… she had felt that sound in places she did not have words for.
Her mind drifted to the almost-kiss in the gazebo. His thumb hovering over the corner of her mouth. The heat of his fingers before they touched her skin. Her lips parting. The want, physical and immediate and impossible to deny, that had flooded through her like warm water when his thumb almost grazed her mouth.
And then the way he stopped. No demand for an explanation. Just distance, immediate and absolute, as though her push had triggered something within him, some deeply embedded response that said,She said stop,andstopwas the only word that mattered.
Gordon would not have stopped.
The thought came unbidden and cold. She pushed it away. She did not want to think about Gordon right now. She did not want to compare him to Edward. But the comparison existed, whether she wanted it or not.
Gordon would not have stopped. He would have pushed back. He would have reminded her that she was his wife and that wives had duties and that her resistance was an inconvenience, a character flaw, a problem to be solved with pressure and silence and the withholding of food.
Edward stopped. Every time. Without question. Without making her feel guilty for asking.
That single fact, that one simple act of basic decency, was worth more to her than every grand gesture every man in that dining hall could have made.
She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow.
For three years, she had trained herself to feel nothing. It was the only defense she had. Nothing could not be used against her. Nothing could not be taken away. If she did not want, she could not be punished for wanting. If she did not hope, she could not be crushed when hope was denied.
Edward had undone three years of careful nothing in a single afternoon.
She groaned and whispered a word she had learned from John and would never say in public. Then she rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
A soft knock sounded at the door. It was Mary, with warm milk and a knowing look.
“You missed supper, Your Grace.”
“I was not hungry.”
“You are always hungry. You have been hungry for three years.” Mary set the cup on the nightstand. “Drink it. And stop thinking so loudly. I can hear you from the corridor.”
Valeria took the milk. It was warm in her hands. “Mary.”
“Your Grace?”
“Have you ever been kissed?”
Mary’s expression did not falter. “That is not a question I answer for duchesses, Your Grace.”
