Then he was gone, disappearing into the crowd with the fluid grace of a predator melting into shadows, leaving her standing alone at the threshold between darkness and light.
She touched her fingers to her lips, still able to taste him, still feeling the ghost of his touch between her thighs.
Tomorrow, they would be back to Ashmere. Tomorrow, he had promised, they would finish this.
Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter Eighteen
“You’ve been staring at that egg for three minutes.”
Cressida blinked.
The egg in question sat in its porcelain cup, entirely unmolested, perfectly intact. She had not, in fact, noticed it at all. Her attention had been occupied by the fact that Theodore sat across from her at the breakfast table, which was a novelty sufficient to derail most ordinary cognitive function.
After the ball, they’d promptly returned to Ashmere Castle and went to sleep.
“I was considering it,” she said.
“Considering it, hm?” he repeated, his tone dry, though the corner of his mouth moved in a way she had learned to interpret as humor he didn’t quite want her to see. “Is thisa customary ritual in the Whitaker household, or a peculiarity you’ve developed independently?”
“Deliberation before action is a virtue.” She reached for the egg. “You might try it sometime.”
He picked up his coffee. “I’ve been told I’m maddeningly deliberate.”
“By whom?”
“Whitebrook. Though it was less flattering in his phrasing.”
She laughed before she could think better of it, and the sound seemed to catch him off guard. His eyes lifted from his cup to her face, and she saw the warmth moving through brown pools before he looked away again, taking a measured sip of his coffee.
She had seen that look before—last night, in the darkened parlor, in the moment just before he had stopped pretending he didn’t want her. She had felt his mouth on her throat, his hands learning her with a thoroughness that had left her incapable of rational thought, and he had looked at her precisely as he was looking at her now, before the mask slipped back into place.
The memory arrived with inconvenient physical specificity, and she occupied herself firmly with her egg.
Outside, Ashmere’s grounds lay bathed in the gold of the morning. Light that slanted through the tall windows and caughtthe silver of the breakfast service, the ivory of the tablecloth, the scattered pages of the newspaper Theodore had abandoned when she had taken her seat. That small detail hadn’t escaped her. He had set the paper down when she arrived. He had not picked it up again.
It was a morning of small mercies, and Cressida was determined to be grateful for each one.
The journey back from London last night had been its own particular torment. Theodore had handed her into the carriage, his gloved fingers lingering beneath hers a beat longer than the gesture required, and she had spent the better part of two hours in the dark opposite him, acutely aware of every inch of distance between them.
Her body had still been humming. She could still feel the touch of his hands, the devastation of his mouth, the rough command ofgive it to mespoken against her lips as though her compliance were the only thing in the world that mattered to him. She had sat very straight and looked out the window at nothing and told herself to behave.
He had not touched her again. But once, when the carriage hit a rough stretch of road last night, and her hand slid from her lap, his boot had found hers in the dark—a brief, deliberate pressure—and he had not moved it away.
Now, in the ordinary light of breakfast, she found it easier to breathe.
“Do you add milk to your tea?”
She glanced up. He had moved the milk jug closer to her side of the table, setting it within reach.
“Yes. Thank you.”
A pause followed, during which he buttered his toast with the unhurried attention of a man who apparently had opinions about the even distribution of butter.
“I imagine the gardens will be passable this morning,” he said, without looking up. “If you wanted air.”
“Are you suggesting a walk?”
