Do not grow attached,she reminded herself.Three months. Temporary.
But Thomas’s hand had been so cold. And his voice, when he spoke of the kestrel frozen in the sky, had held such fragile wonder.
And somewhere within these walls, a man who had once gathered flowers for the housekeeper walked alone with his ghosts.
This is dangerous,Lorraine thought.This is foolish. This is precisely the sort of situation you cannot afford.
She kept climbing anyway.
***
Sleep did not come easily.
Lorraine had expected exhaustion to claim her the moment her head touched the pillow—she had been cold, and long-traveled, and unsettled by too much new information—but her small blue room refused to deliver the oblivion she had earned. She lay under the counterpane in her plain cotton nightgown, the fire banked low, the wind murmuring against the window, and she thought, against every instinct of professional self-preservation, about the Duke of Ravenswood.
Not Thomas. Thomas she had already considered—had already begun to plan for, lesson by lesson, small mercy by small mercy. Thomas she knew how to hold.
It was his guardian who would not let her sleep.
She thought about the way he had sat behind his desk that morning—framed and rigid, performing ducal authority like a man reciting lines in a play he had forgotten the end of. She thought about his hand rising to his scarred brow when she had pressed him about Thomas's temperament, the small unconscious tell of a man who believed himself unreadable and was entirely readable to anyone who had learned, as she had learned, to watch. She thought about the whisky decanter on the sideboard at nine in the morning.
She thought about his hands.
She had not meant to notice his hands. She had been attending, at the time, to the professional content of the interview—salary, duties, the boundaries of her authority over the boy—and she had schooled her gaze downward in the manner a governess was taught to school it. Downward had meant the desk. The desk had meant his hands.
Long fingers. Scarred in places—perhaps from the war, or something earlier. A boyhood injury, perhaps.
You are a fool, she told herself, staring at the dark ceiling.You are a twenty-six-year-old fool lying in your employer's house cataloguing your employer's hands. You have not done this since you were nineteen.
She turned onto her side. She closed her eyes with the firmness of a woman commanding a recalcitrant child to sleep.
The dream, when it finally came, disobeyed her as thoroughly as any child ever had.
She was in his library. She had not been in his library yet—had only passed its door, had only glimpsed, through the gap, leather spines and a carpet worn by the passage of generations—but in the dream the room was vivid and particular, firelit, smelling of woodsmoke and the faint dry perfume of old books. She was standing before the hearth. Someone was behind her.
She did not turn. The dream did not require her to turn. She knew, with the absolute knowing of dreams, who it was.
A hand came to rest at her waist.
The touch was slight. Through the layers of her dress and shift, she ought not to have felt anything at all—and yet she felt it everywhere, down the length of her spine, into the soles of her feet, up into her scalp. Her breath caught in a way her waking body had forbidden for years.
"Miss Weston." His voice, low and scraped—not the cold ducal voice of the study but something underneath it, something she had suspected was there and had not let herself consider. "You should go back to your room."
I know, she thought. She did not say it. Dream-Lorraine did not say anything sensible.
His other hand came up. It traced the column of her throat—the lightest brush, a fingertip only—and settled beneath her jaw to turn her face toward him. She turned. She saw grey eyes, storm-dark in the firelight, and the scar through his brow, and the mouth she had spent the interview trying not to look at directly.
His mouth came down on hers.
The dream abandoned narrative then. It gave her, instead, sensation—the unfamiliar pressure of another person's body against the front of hers, the warmth of his hand sliding from her throat down the line of her bodice, the astonishing, indecent heat that pooled low in her belly and spread outward as though her body, denied for three years, had at last been given permission to remember what wanting felt like. She was pressed back against something—a wall, a bookshelf, his arms, she did not know—and his mouth was at her throat, and her dress was loosening in ways dresses did not loosen under a governess's careful daytime control, and she was making a sound in her throat that she had never in her life made aloud.
He has not even called you Lorraine, some faint rational fragment protested.
"Lorraine," he said, against her skin.
The dream broke her open.
She came apart with an intensity she had not known her body was capable of—had not known, perhaps, that any body was capable of—and she woke with a small shocked cry muffled against her own pillow, her nightgown twisted around her thighs, her heart racketing against her ribs as though she had been running.
