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“Come,” Aidan said. “Let’s get you home.”
For once, she felt no outrage at being ordered about. She walked through the evening with snow swirling through her vision and felt she was drifting through clouds. They moved toward the alley, avoiding the front door.
Once they were in her kitchen, he locked the alley door and took her cloak.
She looked blankly toward the stove. “I should heat some water. . . .”
“No.” And when he turned her toward the stairs, she went blindly, numbly. The same numbness cradled her as he unlaced her dress and loosened her corset.
“I did it,” she whispered, her voice reed thin.
“Did what?”
“I told my father the truth about us. That’s why he sent me away. And that’s why he told you I was dead.”
“No.” His fingers worked along her spine, freeing her from the awful constraint. “He would never have lied to all of England just to keep the second son of a baron away from his daughter. I’ve been thinking about it. Hell, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
When the corset finally let loose its grip, Kate drew a glorious breath that steadied and soothed her all at once.
“Your father has always been arrogant and proud. He loves nothing better than expounding on his bloodline and complaining that England has lost its respect for tradition. How could he then admit that he’d sent his daughter to the East to marry a stranger with no bloodline to speak of? Can you imagine him explaining that to his friends at the club? He welcomes a foreign stranger into his family, all for the sake of filthy lucre?”
She supposed he was right, but she was too bone-weary to take it in.
When she was down to her shift, Aidan lifted her and took her to her bed. She went with no objection, holding on to his neck when he bent to throw back the bedcover, curling into a tight ball when he laid her down.
He left her and returned within moments to wash her tear-streaked face with a handkerchief dipped in cold water.
When he was done, she closed her eyes and turned away from him.
“I’ll leave,” he said, and suddenly Kate’s mind cleared. She didn’t want him to leave. Not at all.
“Stay,” she whispered to the wall. Mi
raculously, he heard her.
The scrape of his boots halted. She felt his eyes on her, but she felt no nervousness.
“I’ll sleep in the parlor,” he offered.
“No. Stay here. In my bed.”
Silence again. And then she heard the sounds of cloth against cloth. The same noises of the forest in Ceylon, oddly. The shushing sound of leaf brushing leaf in a steady breeze. The room went dark. When Aidan lay down with her, his trousers touched her legs, but his arm was bare when he curled it over her.
He leaned close and pressed a kiss to the skin just below her ear. She felt as free as one of the birds in the jungle forest, flying high above the grasping green leaves.
Whispering against her neck, he urged her not to worry.
And so she wouldn’t. Not tonight.
Chapter 14
Kate stuck her head back into the bedroom and just as quickly withdrew. He was still asleep, sheets tangled around his trouser legs.
She’d already dressed in a panicked rush in the parlor and gone downstairs to brew coffee. Now she didn’t know what to do. Her hands shook, her muscles ached with a trembling need to flee. She paced to the window and stared out at the mist. And then she laughed.
Aidan was in her room. Aidan was in her bed. The knowledge filled her up with a raw heat that felt like sunshine. Like the merciless sunshine in Ceylon, except this was a heat she welcomed. She hadn’t felt anything like it since . . . since she’d been a girl. Since she’d loved Aidan.
But she wasn’t a foolish young girl now, and this wasn’t love. It was desire. Hope. It was living instead of existing. Ceylon had changed her, but it hadn’t pulled her soul clean from her body as she’d feared.
