For that matter, she doubted she was looking as fresh and rosy as the eighteen-year-old or so daughter of an earl. She hadn’t slept much, either. All the exercise she’d been getting at night had helped her sleep, apparently.
When she wasn’t riding or being ridden by a duke, it seemed she worried about her future.
Mainly she’d lain awake with an ache so resonant it was a shock she didn’t at all times hum sorrowfully, like a woodwind.
She pulled out the chair slowly and settled in.
He had not prepared her station. There was, in fact, nothing of his usual crisp air of taking everything in hand.
He looked as though he’d fought a battle with himself and lost.
He looked the way she’d never before seen him. Almost defeated.
“I am glad to see you,” he said finally. His voice was a bit raspy. As if they might be the first words he’d said out loud to a human today.
“That is kind of you to say.”
She stubbornly refused to return the sentiment in kind.
Her soul still felt sore sitting here before him. Like an empty socket, with the wind whistling through it.
She wanted him to know that she would prevail, no matter what.
“Has your . . . health improved?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said quietly. “It was my testa,” she added. She pointed. Well, her head was partially involved. She was not going to be a diva and point to her heart. She was English, not Italian.
“Ah. Did you speak to Mr. Delacorte about remedies?”
“He gave me a powder. I hesitated to try it, as he said it both cured headaches and sometimes caused visions.”
“Ah, but you like dreams, Miss Wylde.”
She hesitated.
Her throat felt tight. “Not always,” she said.
He said nothing. He’d clearly been miserable. Which in truth gave her no pleasure.
“Would you like me to leave you to your work, Your Grace?”
“No,” he said so sharply she blinked.
He took a breath. “That is . . . please stay. We’ll have a lesson.”
He retrieved a sheet of foolscap for her and laid a quill next to it.
After that, neither one of them moved or said anything. She wished she had prepared something specific, something witty and urbane or acerbic, to say. Something a more sophisticated, jaded woman might say. Something like, How do you say, “Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, Your Grace,” in Italian?
He cleared his throat. “I thought of an Italian phrase you might wish to know, Miss Wylde.”
Her heart lurched.
“It’s . . . Non credere ai pettegolezzi. Il pettegolezzo non è vero.”
She knew vero. Truth.
He took a breath. “Don’t believe the gossip. The gossip isn’t true.”
She stared at him. She could feel her breathing deepening and quickening.
She was not going to cry. She willed herself not to do it.
She saw the increasing light in her own face reflected in his own. But there was something she needed to know. Something she needed to hear him say aloud.
“But one day it will be,” she said. Carefully. Evenly.
The silence was long.
“It . . . seems likely,” he said finally, just as carefully. Very gently. His voice was still hoarse.
She held herself very still, to prevent the pain, which seemed to congregate at the very center of her, from touching any other part of her.
“But if it seems to the ton that I’ve disappeared, it’s because I find . . .” He paused, and turned toward the window again. He pressed his lips together, then turned back to look at her and said gingerly, as though he were picking his way through unstable, unfamiliar terrain, “. . . that I do not want to be anywhere other than here. I . . . I cannot imagine wanting to be anywhere other than here.”
She said nothing.
She just breathed.
Breathed the beautiful air in which those words had been uttered.
They were not a declaration.
She could not expect one.
But she knew, for now, they would do.
He drew what felt like his first full breath in two days when he saw the flash of her slippers at the door, which he opened immediately.
He took the candle gently from her, and closed the door behind her. He settled the candle on the table.
And then he reached for her, and she reached for him.
Arms folded around each other tightly, they merely held one another. He laid his cheek against the top of her head. He breathed in her hair.
She laid her cheek against his heart. She savored its thump against her skin.
It went on for a good long time, and seemed infinitely more dangerous and scandalous than immediate nudity.
The nudity happened soon enough.
Clothes were soon shed like shackles, and the tender ferocity and utter simplicity of what followed—a pounce, some deeply satisfying grappling, a swift and thorough drilling—left them both stunned and sated. Dumbstruck by their luck.
This need between them simply did not abate. It seemed to regenerate into something hungrier and more profound each time. The pleasure greater. The connection deeper. The terrain of each other’s bodies more familiar, yet more richly exciting.
She lay alongside him, stroking the hair from his eyes, which were closed.
“My son came to The Grand Palace on the Thames to visit,” he murmured. Her gentle hand across his forehead was bliss.
“Oh my. Did he? How lovely!”
When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Or was it?”
“Mmm . . . lovely, on the whole,” he said.
“How does he fare?”
“He would like me to spend a few days in Sussex with him and his wife. His wife’s birthday is Sunday.”
They both knew what this meant.
She was quiet. “You must go. If he came to you to ask, it means a good deal to him.”
She knew, because he’d told her, in the meandering conversations between bouts of lovemaking, how much he regretted the time he hadn’t spent with his son.
“It means . . . I shall be leaving for Sussex the day before you leave for Paris. I . . . I thought I would be here when you left.”
“I know. You’ll miss the Night of the Nightingale,” she said wistfully.
Tell me not to go, he silently willed her.
But what would he do then if she’d said it?
He could not leave his son again. He simply wanted to be yearned for, he supposed.
“At any rate, given that we’ve sold almost no tickets, the crowd will be comprised of just the people who live here, their friends, and the drunk man who leans against the building now and again. I expect he’ll enjoy it, though,” she added. Amused. Resigned. Wistful.
He was quiet. He felt that familiar, sizzling fury at the injustice of it, of people who would deprive themselves—and in so doing, likely others, through their influence—of the elevating beauty of her voice for the nasty, unifying thrill of shunning someone. It was more about a bullying wielding of power than any outraged sense of morality. And it was also cowardice. He suspected that she, in her learning of lessons the hard way and making different choices, was ultimately more moral than that privileged lot.
“I wish it were otherwise.” He meant almost literally everything.
“I’ve sung to smaller crowds before. I shan’t mind that part, really. It’s just that I wanted it to be splendid, as they’ve been so very kind to me here. I’m a little embarrassed. I hoped to earn a good deal of money for the ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames. And I do wish I’d have a string quartet. They won’t play for me, you see. The musicians at the theater.”