“Are you comparing love to imprisonment, Mr. Markham?”
Something stirred in his eyes.
“For some, perhaps.” He reached across the low table between us and grasped my wrist. His fingertips were surprisingly rough for a gentleman, but the feeling of them against the thin skin of my wrist left me agitated somehow, as if he had trailed hot coals across my flesh instead of his fingers.
“Here,” he said quietly, “I have your wrist captured in my hand. You cannot move it unless I let you, you cannot touch it unless I let you. Complete confinement. But…” His fingertips made light circles—swirls, eddies—around my wrist, skipping lightly over the pale blue veins and the delicate tendons, drifting from my palm to the edge of my sleeve. He slowly unbuttoned the buttons of my sleeve, sliding it up past my elbow. Gooseflesh rose on my arms, on my neck, even on my breasts under the thin wool of my dress. It felt so close to being undressed, to being exposed.
His fingers continued their work all while he stared intently at me. “And how does this constraint feel now, Miss Leavold? If I allowed you to withdraw your wrist now, would you?”
“No,” I said, my breathing coming faster. “I would not.”
He bent low, as if to study my wrist, except his mouth was so near my skin, and then I was suddenly aware of my pulse pounding, of my lips parting, of the flush that was spreading on my face.
“Your dinner, sir,” Mrs. Brightmore said, entering the room. The handsome servant wheeled a tray behind her, and the covered silver dishes and glassware rattled as he rolled it across the thick carpet to the armchair where his master sat. Mr. Markham didn’t let go of my wrist at first—I tugged and he arched an eyebrow and I tugged again and he finally let it drop.
Relief thrummed through me. And disappointment.
“Is there anything else, sir?” the housekeeper inquired. Her words dropped like acid, singeing the air as they fell.
Mr. Markham ignored her, staring at me instead. She left after a minute, her quick footsteps and irritated manner making her feelings clear.Why does she hate me so much?
The servant winked at me before he left.
Mr. Markham opened his mouth to speak again, and then shut it, his eyes alighting on something behind me.
“Are you hungry, Miss Leavold?”
I wasn’t, strangely. I felt too agitated to eat.
“I am not.”
He rubbed at his forehead. “Then you should go to bed,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I told you not tosirme, at least not now. Get to bed. The hour is too late for young women to be about. Even those accustomed to keeping their own hours.”
I dearly wanted to protest. I never retired before midnight at home. But I reminded myself thathomehad been sold to satisfy my brother’s grasping creditors. Markham Hall was my home now. I would do well to make myself pleasing to my cousin’s widower, no matter how much I inwardly thrashed against it.
But perhaps I would grow used to it. What had he said?Strictures and bindings that become pleasurable…
I unconsciously touched my wrist. “Goodnight, Mr. Markham.”
He didn’t answer, and it wasn’t until I lay in bed, watching the candlelight flicker on the ceiling, that I remembered what had been directly behind me in the parlor. The painting of my cousin Violet.
His dead wife.
When I arose, I dressed myself in a gown of pale green lawn, a dress I’d always liked because it set off my olive-tinged skin and dark eyes. I was no beauty like Violet—yet properly attired, I was passable. My hair was thick and glossy and as dark as the darkest woods shipped in from India and Africa. My jaw and cheekbones were fine enough, although marred by my nose, which was slightly bumped in the middle, as my brother’s had been. And my eyes were rather too large, I felt, too large and too well-rimmed by my eyelashes. For better or for worse, the darkness of my eyes and the cast of my skin—gifts from my Welsh mother—barred me from being truly considered beautiful in the pale, rosy manner of most English girls.
I went downstairs for a quiet breakfast—toast and eggs by myself in the dining room, the early morning light slanting in through the single small window. Markham Hall was brighter during the day, but it would never be an airy place. Something of a medieval gloom clung to the corners and crannies, even in the face of oncoming sunshine.
I liked it quite a lot, actually.
“Mr. Markham left for business in Scarborough early this morning,” Mrs. Brightmore informed me as curtly as possible. “I have no idea when he’ll be back, so you’d best not plan on his company today.”
“As we discussed last night, I shall find myself more than capable of coping on my own.” Around her, politeness came only with a struggle. I resisted the temptation to demand the source of her ire with me—likely she would deny it and then resent me all the more. Better to let her fester in whatever imagined disadvantage I had put her at, while I continued on unfettered by her rancor.
After breakfast, I decided on a stroll around the grounds. Despite the melancholy air of the shadowed hall, the grounds in full summertime were wondrous, green and fresh and dappled with sunlight. I made my way past the small garden and stables and into the woods themselves, following a winding path that eventually opened into a wide pasture.
