“How fortunate,” Dominic heard himself say. “Perhaps this one will last longer than a fortnight.”
He poured the whisky. Graves withdrew. And Dominic stood alone in his study as the grey October dawn crept through the windows, watching the amber liquid catch the light and endeavouring very hard not to think of brown eyes in a small, solemn face.
William’s eyes.
He drank.
He had watched her arrive.
Not from courtesy, not from duty, but by the accident of standing at the study window at the precise moment the hired carriage failed to deliver her to his door. Dominic had seen the driver’s argument with the groom—arms flung, gestures sharp with refusal—and had watched, with the detached curiosity of a man for whom nothing had felt novel in years, as a small figure in a dark cloak emerged from the coach and set out on foot up the drive, a handcart bumping behind her.
She had walked the full two miles in the rain.
He should have sent someone. Graves should have sent someone. Instead, he had stood at his window watching a woman he had never met push a handcart through the October mud, and when she had at last passed out of his sightline—her hood drawn, her back unbent—he had turned away with a feeling he did not care to name.
He did not go to greet her. He did not attend the small commotion at the door, the murmured exchange with Mrs Potter, the careful footsteps up the servants’ stairs. He poured a second whisky, and then a third, and did not admit—even to himself—that he was listening.
At midnight, he gave up and went to bed.
The dream came in fragments.
He was walking the corridors of Rovewood—not the Rovewood he knew, which was cold and empty and smelled of damp stone, but some other version of it, lamp-lit and warm, the kind of house he dimly remembered from childhood. He was searching for something. He did not know what. The corridors unfolded with the dream’s peculiar logic, one opening into another, and at the end of each he glimpsed, always, the edge of a grey skirt vanishing around a corner.
He turned into a room he had never seen. A library, perhaps. Firelight. A woman stood before the hearth with her back to him.
“You were walking in the rain,” he said—or dreamed he said, his voice distant even to himself. “You should have let someone meet you.”
“I managed.” Her voice was warm and low, pitched for an intimacy he had not earned. “I always manage.”
Turn around, he thought.Let me see you.
She did not turn. But she spoke again, and her voice was nearer now, as though the room itself had brought her to him. "Your Grace."
The word undid him. NotYour Graceas the servants said it—crisp, respectful, a barrier of rank—butYour Gracethe way a woman says a man's name when she has taken it apart and put it back together and made it belong to her.
His hand closed on her waist.
The dream compressed. He was not aware of deciding anything—was not aware of moving—but his palm was flat against the curve of her hip through the governess grey, and her back was against his chest, and she had tipped her head so that her hair—auburn, damp from rain, loosening from its pins—brushed against his jaw. She smelled of lavender and of something beneath it that was warmer, unfamiliar, and difficult to name.
He bent his head. His mouth found the line of her throat.
Stop, some distant part of him said, with the reflexive horror of four years of discipline.Stop. You don't know her. You haven't even—
The dream did not stop.
He was aware, in the way of dreams, of her dress giving way beneath his hands—not torn, not wrestled, simplyyielding, as though the fabric itself had decided that he had waited long enough. Of her breath catching. Of her turning, at last, in the circle of his arms, so that her hands came up to rest against his chest—not pushing him back, not pulling him closer, simply there, trembling faintly, as though she too could not quite believe it and did not want it to end.
He never saw her face. The dream denied him that. He saw her mouth—only her mouth, reddened and parted—and then her hand rising to his jaw, her thumb tracing the scar on his eyebrow with a tenderness that cracked his chest open like a struck bell.
"You're bleeding, Dominic."
No one had called him Dominic in four years.
His whole body surged toward her—hips, hands, mouth—and the dream broke over him in a hot white wave, and he came awake with a shout caught in his throat, sheets tangled, his body aching and shamed and furiously alive.
For a long moment he could not move. The whisky in his blood. The sweat on his skin. The damp warmth he had not felt since before Spain—since before hehad decided, deliberately and with full malice of forethought, that he did not deserve to feel it again.
A woman he had never met.
