Page 74 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Some sound came out of me that was very nearly a laugh.

"He has been in my house. In my brother's study. In Claire's home. How, I do not know. He has been inside every arrangement anyone has made about me since the river. You did not build that, and you cannot unbuild it by hating yourself."

She was close enough now that I had to look down at her.

"But I will tell you what did stand between him and me this afternoon. I did not go up my own steps. I did not take it to my room and put the bolt on and sit with it in the dark, which is what I have done with every frightening thing that has ever happened to me. I came here. To you."

Her chin came up.

"Be angry at the correct man. Today, tomorrow, the next day. But not you. Never you."

I do not know which of us moved first.

Her hands came up. Mine were already at her face. And then I was kissing her, and it was not the kiss I had rehearsed through three weeks of well-governed nights. It was a man letting go of a rope he had been holding since June.

Her fingers went into my hair and closed, and she made a sound against my mouth that took the last of my reason out at the knees. I had her back against the bookcase, a shelf of the Annual Register going over behind her, and neither of us cared what it cost. Her hands were at my collar. My mouth was at the corner of her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear, and then her throat—bare, for once, the wretched high necks abandoned for July—and she tipped her head back and gave it to me, her pulse going hard beneath my lips.

I got her name out once, somewhere against her collarbone, and after that language was of no further use to either of us. My hand found the small of her back and the length of her spine and the place where her gown gave way to skin, and she pressed herself into me with an unschooled, unhesitating want that I will carry to my grave. She was not being carried anywhere. She was coming with me. Trembling.

And it was that—her wanting it, plainly and out loud—that put the knife in.

I was kissing a frightened woman and calling it love. And that was what finally made me stop.

I took my hands off her and stepped back, and the cold arrived because she was no longer in my arms. I walked away to stand by my desk with my back to her.

"Go home, Rosalynd."

Behind me came the small, precise sounds of a woman putting herself to rights. A hook. A breath drawn and held and let go. I looked at my own blotter and waited for the door.

But the door did not go.

She came round in front of me instead. I braced for the slap and would have been glad of it. But she lifted her hand and laid it along my cheek, then ran her thumb once across my mouth.

“Escort me home."

Of course she would ask that of me.

Milford was at the foot of the stairs with my hat and the flawless blank face of a man who intended to remember none of it. We crossed the square arm in arm. Neither of us said a word. It was the least awkward silence of my life.

Honeycutt was at the top of the Rosehaven steps before we reached the bottom of them. He took in her disordered hair and my ungloved hand at her elbow and made of it whatever he made of it. I turned her toward me at her own door.

"You will not be guarded from across the square again. Never again from a distance. They will be right here by your railings." I caressed her cheek. "Wherever you go, I go, or a man I would trust with my own life goes. You have my word on it."

She did not answer at once. Then she took my hand and held it for a moment against her ribs, where I could feel her heart going.

I knew exactly what she was giving me.

"Goodnight, Steele." And then the door closed softly behind her.

My coat carried the maddening scent of her the whole way home. I did not sleep that night. But for the first time since June, I did not want to.

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

A Gown Fitting

The appointment had been made three weeks earlier, when the largest calamity in our lives had been the length of Madame Delacroix’s waiting list.