Page 38

Damian closed his eyes briefly. The tub, of course. The man could no more leave a full bath standing overnight than sleep in his boots. Stiles had fetched the footmen and come back to supervise the⁠—

The knock came again. Soft. Almost tentative, which was not like Stiles at all.

He crossed the room and pulled the door open, already speaking. “I told you to leave⁠—”

It was not Stiles.

Ophelia stood in the dim corridor with a candlestick in one hand and a shawl clutched at her breast with the other, still in her evening gown, curls escaping their pins, her chin lifted at the angle of a soldier who has volunteered for something and is now regretting the impulse.

“… it,” Damian finished, uselessly.

“Good evening, Damian.” Her voice was low, pitched for a sleeping house. “I am aware this is highly improper.”

He was aware of a great many things at once. His hair dripping down his collar. The corridor behind her empty. His hand had gone of its own accord to the banyan’s throat and gripped it shut. And her eyes had left his face.

They moved quickly. He had been trained to read quick movement. Along the line of his shoulders, where the wool pulled taut. Down, briefly, to the fist at his collar. Back up over the breadth of him. His damp hair. His bare throat above his knuckles. Color came into her cheeks that had not been there a moment ago. Her breath went shallow. The candle flame wavered as though her hand had.

A slow, enormous turn in his chest. Heat under the seams. A man could almost imagine it. The way her gaze had traveled. The way she was not looking at his scars at all, but at the size of him. The width. The height. A man could almost believe that she …

Rubbish.

He barred the thought as one barred a magazine door in a burning fort. She was a gently bred girl standing three feet from a great scarred creature in a state of undress. Of course her color was up. That was alarm. Nothing looked at what he was with an appetite.

“Ophelia.” He angled his left side out of her candle’s reach, an old habit now, done before he knew he did it. “Is something wrong? Your mother⁠—”

“Everyone is perfectly well.” She said it fast, as if to be past it. “I could not get a word with you all evening. Every time I approached, your mama remembered another cousin who must be written to, and my mama remembered another great-aunt, and then it was candles and good nights. I decided I would rather knock on your door like a scandal than lie awake having failed.”

Despite everything, his mouth wanted to bend. She had gambled on his door. Of course she had. The woman gambled on everything.

“You have a word for me, then?”

“A request.” Her chin came up another degree. “Walk out with me tomorrow. In the morning, early. The park, the meadows. I do not care where, so long as it is out of doors and away from the house.”

He studied her. The candle made a gold halo around her hair. “That is all?”

“That is all.” A beat. “You may bring a battalion of chaperons if you feel yourself in danger.”

The bend at his mouth got worse. He put it down and consulted, out of iron habit, the ledger of duty, and found for once that duty and desire had the gall to agree. A married couple ought to be seen together. A married couple ought to be able to speak. Sound reasons, and he did not believe a single one of them, and he heard himself answer anyway, clipped as an order of march.

“Seven o’clock. The east door. Wear stout boots. The meadows will be wet.”

The change in her was instant and total. Her shoulders dropped an inch. The breath went out of her in a rush. Her whole face opened like a window. “Thank you,” she said, with a fervor wildly out of proportion to a walk, and then, catching herself, laughing a little at herself, “Forgive me. You cannot know what you have agreed to rescue me from. I have been sitting between our mothers since four o’clock. There is a dispute regarding lace, Damian. Brussels or Honiton. It has fronts. It has casualties. If I am made to hear the words Honiton lace one more time before breakfast, I will not answer for my actions.”

And it escaped him. He did not plan it. He never planned them. They went off in him like the laugh had at the card table, from some magazine he had thought flooded years ago.

“I have stood against Bonaparte’s artillery,” Damian said gravely. “I would not face those two across a tea tray without the entire British cavalry in reserve.”

She laughed.

It burst out of her before she could catch it. A bright, unguarded crack of delight, far too loud for the corridor. She clapped her free hand over her mouth, eyes going wide above it, shoulders shaking, the candle flame lurching. The sound went into Damian like a bayonet under the ribs. Straight through the wool and the seams and whatever was underneath them. His breath actually stopped. She was peering at him over her own hand, eyes brimming with it, and no one … no one … had looked at him like that since his brother had lain dying in the bedchamber behind him.

“You made a joke,” she accused, when she had mastered herself, her voice still trembling with it. “Twice now. And each time you look as astonished as I felt.” She lowered her hand. Her smile softened into something that was worse, far worse, than the laugh. “Do you know, Damian, I begin to think I shall not mind being married to you at all.”

And there it was.

The warmth went through him first, before he could stop it. A great homesick rush of it. Hartleigh from the French roads. Green meadows. Soft rain. Want. And hard on its heels, right behind it where it always waited, came the cellar of death and madness.

Because he liked her. That was the simple ruinous fact of it. He liked her nerve and her card-sharp’s eyes and her pink lips and her laugh, and an unholy thing stitched together in a distant farmhouse had no business liking anyone.