“Can you sleep now?” His voice was barely audible against her ear. He traced a finger along her hairline and on around her jaw, thumb pausing on the pressure point beneath her chin where her pulse was strongest.
“Perhaps.” A lie. She wouldn’t sleep, at least for some time. She had never been gifted with finding sleep with ease, least of all when her mind was crowded.
Willfully she suppressed recall of what had just taken place, instead looking towards the meeting tomorrow, of the tangible danger presented by Dubois.
He did not trust Nathaniel, and he had made that remark toher about her eyes... She would be face-to-face with Compton, whohadseen her sister, regardless of whether Thérèse truly was Lucy. And if ThérèsewasLucy...
That might come to nothing, she cautioned herself. Perhaps the eyes were just a very cruel coincidence. She must not hope for too much, even though this was more than she had truly dared believe she would find. If Thérèse was Lucy, that meant she now had a protector, that Lucy had not ended up in a brothel or worse.
She clung to that possibility as well. There were nuances to thedemimondethat she had truthfully never before considered. Conversations with Amélie had opened her eyes. But becoming part of that world was not a matter of survival for Lucy as it had been for Amélie. Lucy had loved a young man who had turned out to be not only feckless but immoral enough to hand her over to Compton.
That alone was a betrayal she could hardly fathom. As for what happened after Theodore Garnewood left Lucy... She shied now from considering the possibilities too closely.
Inevitably her thoughts returned to Le Repaire itself: Dubois’s veiled threats, his suggestion of thesalle écarlate.
What had followed afterwards, there. What had just happened, here. Nathaniel had cautioned her before, what it would be like, and she’d accepted it—no,wantedit. Even though she hadn’t entirely understood.
And she would do it again now that she did understand.
This time in Paris—no, extending back all the way to Brussels, when she had stayed to nurse the wounded rather than immediately returning home to her family. That was a bridge, perhaps. There was very much abefore, sharply delineated by Jamie’s death, and an unwritten future ahead as some entirely different woman with a vastly different life than she’d expected.
At present her sister’s fate, and the direction of her own life,rested in Nathaniel’s hands. She lay now in his arms, just at this moment safer than anywhere else she could envision, and yet the entirety of him was still a stranger to her.
Perhaps it was that. Perhaps the unreality of their situation was the foremost reason she’d taken Nathaniel as lover rather than despite it. It was assuredly impermanent no matter what came of finding Lucy or thwarting Compton’s future schemes, however everything resolved—or didn’t. Whatever she and Nathaniel might do with one another privately would not,couldnot, signify six months from now. One month, even. Had she sought that specifically, unknowingly?
What they’d just done was... extraordinary. She’d been nearly outside her body with animal desperation. Every nerve and sinew still sang now with recall of it. The depths of her own ravaging need had shocked her. How to reconcile it with her conception of herself?
She didn’t want to tonight; even if she tried, it would prove impossible while he held her, their nude bodies pressed together.
This was not love or anything like it. She would nonetheless have to make a reckoning with herself. Someday. Not tonight.
Chapter 18
She slept lightly, waking in the predawn black already poised on the edge of desire before conscious thought took purchase. Nathaniel’s breathing, too, shifted from sleep to an answering awareness. Unspeaking, their hands caressed, their mouths sought one another, bodies drifting towards bliss without the raw fever-dream quality of before.
“I took you, before,” he murmured at some point, settling her atop him. His hands shaped her hips, gentle and careful with her for all their strength.
“I’d say we had one another equally.” She was pleased with her admirably dry tone given she was presently made of liquid heat.
His chest under her hands vibrated soundlessly with amusement. She traced his lips with a thumb, searching for a smile. How often did he contain private entertainments, hidden away so that the world did not see them? The barest hint of his tongue against her, and she gave up the hunt.
One of his hands made a careful ascent from rib cage to breast and then back to her hip. “All the same—” he began to say and then, “Yes,” when she brought him inside her. He roseto meet her as she rolled her hips to take him deeper. She caught him, palm to palm. He curled his fingers through hers.
“Aye... Take your pleasure of me,” he whispered. The words pooled warm, deep within, a separate wave of pleasure unto themselves as she moved upon him. She rippled above him, around him.
Desire flowed, a river still but not the raging torrent of before. It was a lazy summer current, warm and unhurried, rather than the merciless force of the spring thaw; they were not at its mercy but directed it to their own desire.
The wealth of tenderness between them was all the more pronounced for the lack of it before. He was a man of fierce passions capable of infinite softness. It was enough to undo her utterly.
She found her pleasure, but his pleasure was hers too. She delighted in being the cause of his surrender, this man of limitless strength who let himself be undone by her. She gave herself over to it.
“Isobel . . .” His voice was hoarse with need.
She was on the brink of euphoria now herself. She gave him back his own name on a sigh. He surged up into her, and she held him fast with her thighs, bore him to the bed to ride out his surrender. She contracted around him, endless deep pulses until she could not tell where hers ended and his began. It was her surrender too, granted so willingly, all of it fathoms deep within her.
With this too, she would need a reckoning.
When next she woke, it was to muted light streaming through the window. The previous night’s wind had ceased and taken with it some of the clouds. As soon asconscious thought returned, so too did the memories from the night before. She was alone in bed, and the still air told her Nathaniel was not present. A careful glance confirmed it. The damson net gown of the night before was draped neatly on a chair, the revealing stays and stockings atop it and slippers tucked beneath.
