Ambrose’s kisses and touches. She’d relived every moment and every sensation. The feeling of his large hand on her body and the wall of his chest beneath her palm. She wanted more of his kisses. She’d wanted to stand in that bookshop and lose herself in Lord Ambrose Talbot.
Tilly knew about what happened between a man and a woman but had believed she would never find out firsthand unless she decided to marry. But then, how could she do that, given her past? When Ambrose had kissed her, she had wanted more for the very first time and had felt her body stirring at the thought of it.
Which was now never going to happen, even if it could, because she was going to die here in this box.
Slowly the light went and the dark came, settling around her like a cloak. The temperature dropped to the point where she started shivering. Tilly tucked her hands beneath her arms and tried to make herself smaller. Every time she shifted, the wood would groan, and the sound was loud in the silence.
Her parents would know she’d not come home by now. Would they go to the Watch House? Visit The Iris? How would Ambrose and the Nightingales know if they were not contacted? Surely it would be days before that happened. Would one of them have a vision about her? Lord, she hoped so.
She would not survive days in here, cold and alone. Was that the plan? To leave her here to starve to death?
No!Someone was coming for her, she had to believe that.
Tilly forced herself to sing every song she remembered, her voice sounding like the rusty door hinge her father had once accused her of being. Thinking of him made her cry, so she pushed him aside and began reciting poetry. When she had spoken every word she knew out loud, she started again in French and tried not to focus on the panic waiting to pounce if she let it.
“They will not beat me,” she said aloud, and her voice came back to her from the wood on all sides, small and unconvincing. She said it again, louder. And then again. Until it felt like something she believed.
She didn’t know how long she’d been in here when the sound of footsteps reached her. Measured footsteps that told her whoever was coming was not in a hurry. Right then, it could be the devil himself who opened that lid, and she would be grateful.
The lock was opened, and then she had light. Blissful, agonizing golden light from a lamp the man held aloft. Her eyes burned in protest, and she turned her face away, blinking tears she refused to let fall. His face was covered below the eyes, and he was dressed entirely in black.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Get out,” he said in a gruff voice, utterly without feeling. “You can walk and do your business. Then you’re to get back in.”
“What is going to happen to me?”
He didn’t answer. Just reached in with a large hand and hauled her out by the arm as though she were a sack of grain.
“Ouch! Have a care, sir, you are hurting me.”
“I don’t much care.”
When her feet hit the floor, she nearly went down, her legs having forgotten what they were used for. She stomped them hard to drive out the numbness and shook out herhands until the pins and needles faded to something bearable.
Looking around her, Tilly saw the warehouse was vast and dark with shadows beyond the lamp’s reach.
“It is my hope,” she said carefully, her voice only shaking slightly, “that if you have people in your life whom you love, sir, you would pray they are never subjected to what you have done to me this day.”
She slapped her arms to warm them and moved in circles, keeping her eyes on the space around her, cataloguing everything. Crates. A door. The tracks it sat upon. The distance between her and freedom.
“But then, a man such as you likely has no one in his life.”
“I’ve a woman,” he said, sounding genuinely affronted.
“Then she has my sympathies,” Tilly snapped. Now that she was no longer in that small cramped space fighting her fears, some of her resilience had returned. “Because if she is wed to a monster like you, I can only imagine the hell she lives with.”
“I’m a good husband!”
“How can you be if you would treat a total stranger as you have treated me?”
“‘Ere, what’s all the noise?” These words were followed by another man, smaller than the first. He materialized out of the shadows with a lamp of his own. “You’ll alert someone we’re here if you keep that up.”
“She said I’m evil and my Bess has her sympathies having to put up with me.” He sounded genuinely wounded now, which Tilly found extraordinary considering the circumstances.
“Who bloody cares?” The second man had the lower half of his face covered too. He looked at Tilly with flat, dismissive eyes that were more frightening than the outrage of the other man. “Get her back in.”
“Are you another gutless coward who would harm innocent women, sir?” Tilly demanded.
