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“That is exactly it, and I knew you would understand, even though you wouldn’t seem to be the sort of person who would.”
He knew what she meant. Simon the parliamentarian might have met his match in Diantha, but he was still Simon the parliamentarian. He was still guided by logic. No one—well almost no one—would expect him to be prattling on about knowledge acquired by mystical means.
“Perhaps you know me in a deeper way.” It was an arresting thought. He’d always thought Effie and Archie were the only people who truly knew him, but that wasn’t true anymore, was it? “There’s that word again—‘knowing.’ There are different kinds of knowing. I believe that. And I believe you are correct in your assessment that Lady Harcourt knows Archie in some essential way, even if she doesn’t recognize him visually, or isn’t able to summon the proper language to communicate with him, or the memories to place him temporally.”
“Some part of her can place him sentimentally, if not temporally.”
“Yes.”
“How lucky he is to have that,” she said. “I would never say that to him, for I understand that even as he is what I would consider fortunate, he has felt his mother’s decline as a terrible burden. It has been, objectively, a terrible burden.”
“Both things can be true.”
“Yes.”
Silence fell, but it wasn’t heavy. Her change of subject had done its work, subsuming Simon into the familiar, treasured rhythms of conversation with Diantha. She had shifted the mood by asking him what he was going to do when he got home. He was tempted to ask her the same, but he couldn’t. For one thing, the question was too close to asking her to tell him what Mr. Hill had on her. But it was also a fraught question in a deeper sense. He thought back to her saying that she missed going out. He had suggested she ask Archie for leave to go out for an ice or to a dance and she had agreed that he would certainly give it. He would let me out of my cage, she’d said.
What would returning home from Earls Trip be but going back in?
Even if this had been a working holiday for her, what he had once called a shadow holiday, it had represented a kind of freedom. Look at them now, seated by the fire in the gentlemen’s cave while someone else sat with Lady Harcourt.
“Simon,” she said, and something about the way she turned her head toward him, the light from the fire catching the planes of her face, made his breath catch. He had seen her these past few nights in varying degrees of dishevelment, but tonight she was fully dressed, wearing the same pale yellow gown she’d worn to dinner, and her hair was coiled into a tidy chignon.
He wanted to tangle his fingers in her hair and muss it up. He wanted to peel the dress from her and see her again. He wanted to touch her, the way she had clearly offered last night.
He wanted. Oh, he wanted so badly he thought he might die of it.
“I have come with a proposal,” she said, sliding across the settee and turning so she was right in front of him.
His mind flashed back to the last time she had come to him with a proposal.
“I would like for us to lie together tonight.”
Just like the last time, pandemonium broke out in Simon’s body, his mind—his whole self.
“Hear me out,” she said, but he didn’t want to do that, so he closed the distance between them and kissed her.
He was going to trust her. About everything, but also about this. If she wanted this, he did, too. He would silence the analytical voice in his head. She had called him upstanding, that night from a lifetime ago. This night, he was going to be something else.
He was going to do what he wanted because it was, apparently—astonishingly, miraculously—also what she wanted. He was going to do all the things he had just been thinking. He started with her hair, sliding his hands to the back of her head and searching for pins, or hardware of some kind, while keeping his mouth on hers. She was kissing him as ardently as he was her, sighing into his mouth in a way that made his prick come to attention.
He wasn’t having any luck with her hair. He broke their kiss and muttered, “God damn it,” even as she made a mew of protest. She reached up to help him, but he batted her hands away. He wanted to take her hair down himself.
“It’s one big pin,” she said against his mouth. “Find the rounded edge and pull straight out.” She turned in place on the settee, presenting her back to him, nestling close enough that her bottom was nudging his prick.
He fumbled with her hair, and once it was down, he realized what he really wanted was to see it falling over her bare shoulders, down her bare back. He was faced with a row of buttons down the back of her dress, so, happily, it was easy enough to make his desires reality.
His hands shook as he slipped the buttons through their holes. He made himself go slowly, to be more considered than he had been with her hair. He wouldn’t get to do this again, and damned if he wasn’t going to commit every moment of it to memory. He wanted to etch the experience of it—the experience of her—into his mind, so he could take it out and revisit it in the lonely days to come.
He couldn’t see her face, but he could tell by the way she was holding herself stiffly that she was not at ease. He brushed a hand down the side of her neck as he pulled the dress down one shoulder. Both neck and shoulder felt coiled with tension.
“Has the water helped the pain in your shoulders?” He should have asked earlier.
“Not particularly.”
He pulled the dress off the other shoulder, unlaced and set aside the half stays she wore, and untied her shift. Her dress and shift pooled around her waist, and he got what he’d been aiming for: a view of her hair tumbling down her bare back. Her spine curved slightly as it emerged from the dark curtain of hair, suggesting both strength and vulnerability.
He brushed the hair to one side and placed his hands over her shoulders, one on each side at the junction with her neck, and massaged.
