‘And we can have it again.’
Her sister had been coolly contained for more of her life than she’d been wild. Kit felt her like a malignance, her cold fingers lodging themselves in her flesh. She had to look away. She saw her mother, lying back on the sofa as if sleeping, her body a tight fist.
‘Kit, please —’
She stood. ‘I wouldn’t go back, if we could.’
Lydia stood to face her. ‘How can you say that to me? You loved me then.’
‘And I had to wash your body with cold water for eight long hours when you had a fever, because there was no one to send for a physician, and no money to pay him if he could have come. If we had remained as we were, we would have become savages. There would have been no place for us. No books for Tom, no wit for you. I would not choose that.’
Lydia started, and Kit didn’t need to look behind her to know the men had entered with Jude; strong hands came around her shoulders, a solid heat at her back.
‘Do you want me to take you away?’ Jude murmured in her ear.
She shook her head, and couldn’t articulate even to herself how much it meant that he had offered.
Tom stood by the fire, Crispin at his side. Nobody spoke.
It scared her, the quiet of grown men and women who had no chatter left to exchange. Far more difficult to continue this conversation, with an audience. She knew, from Lydia’s face, that she must.
‘We had the father we had – and we’re amazing, considering. Every single one of us. No, I wouldn’t go back.’
Kit looked up to Tom, to the mute horror in his eyes. It was a pain they each contained so well, so long as they each pretended it did not exist.
‘I am proud of you. If we had it to do over, I would still work until I was too exhausted to stand. Because I wanted
better
for you.’
‘That’s enough,’ Lydia said, and swept out of the room, banging into the side of the table as she went.
Jude’s fingers dug hard into Kit’s shoulders – a warning, a reminder.
Kit pulled herself from his grasp and followed Lydia out the door.
‘Lydia,’ she called, and the hope her sister couldn’t quite conceal pierced her all the way through. ‘You’ll sleep in Ma’s old room tonight.’
Lydia’s hands pressed tight, shocked, into her stomach. She nodded once – a jerky, graceless movement. Then nodded again, and three more times. Then she turned forcibly away, walked into Ma’s old room and closed the door in Kit’s face.
‘What have you done?’ Tom said behind her. ‘My God, Kit, what did you say to her?’
Tom – her other, better half – reached out to her and Kit grasped his hand. She wished there were something Tom could say to undo this mess. But he couldn’t. A duke stood between them now, and could not be cut away.
Kit left Tom standing outside the parlour and climbed the stairs to her room. She sat in the window seat fully dressed.
And waited.
When he came he locked the door behind him and she said, ‘I don’t want to talk.’
He watched her for a long, dark moment, then walked to the dresser. The whole day had been a statement of intent – of his desire to kiss and touch and be close. But he sat at the dresser, unhurried, almost indifferent. As though Lydia had never come, and this was like any other night when Kit had unlaced him and forced herself not to stroke his perfect white skin.
Perhaps he was making it easier for both of them. Impossible to know, with Jude.
‘Undress me,’ he said.
She stood behind him, a hand-span away from him, and plucked the pins from his wig, one by one. She pulled it from his head and hung it carefully from the mirror frame. Then she pushed her hand through his thick black hair, across his scalp. It was a rough, needy touch, and his head rocked forward beneath it.
She stroked down his cheek, down his neck, and stepped into him so that his back was a hard line against her body. She curled over him and began to unhook the front of his dress; he dropped his head back against her shoulder.
On every breath that came from him, there was something uncontrolled. The hint of a moan. Something that made her own breath draw in harsh against her teeth.
But he lay quiescent in her arms. Surrendered. Vulnerable.
She pulled the dress away down his arms and let it fall over the stool, the skirts still trapped beneath him. She came to her knees, her arms around him as she untied the tapes of his hoops and petticoats, until they fell down around his hips, a profusion of material, and all that remained was his haughty form encased in a rigid corset.
She stood slowly, her lips drawing a shiver from the nape of his neck.
She ran her knuckles down the tight laces of the bodice, and her body seized with a feeling so dark that for a moment she couldn’t continue.
She looked over his shoulder into the mirror and saw his eyes blown wide with excitement and fear.
It was far, far too late for doubt.
She had already leapt off some great height with him, and could not wish for solid ground now.
She untied the bow of his laces and began to loosen them with practised tugs. His hands gripped the seat against the movement, and she wondered whether he felt, as she did, that she was breaking into something tender and unseen.
She lifted the bodice away from his body and pulled the chemise roughly down around his hips.
Then she knelt behind him, and traced the red lines pressed into his skin by the bodice and the material trapped beneath it.
She opened her hands against him, so that the whole surface of her palms and fingers could take in the sensation of his skin, finer and warmer than silk. The slim curve of his waist. His ribs. She leaned closer, helpless, her mouth open an inch from him. She felt how he shivered beneath her hands, how pleasure built between them and made him lower his head until his neck was a vulnerable curve that she had to capture in her palm.
Was it possible to die of pleasure just from this?
His breath caught like something strung up on a hook.
He stepped out of the petticoats and went to stand by the bed in his white lawn drawers. For a long time he stood, the line of his body a retraction of intimacy.
She knelt on the floor, alone and exposed in her frustration. She slid herself upright against the wall and watched the tension leave him, slowly.
He turned.
He lounged against the bedpost and watched her. He was just as he’d been the first time she saw him – more graceful than other men. So beautiful she couldn’t breathe. He watched her in silence, as he’d watched her then. But she knew him now, a little. She’d seen the worst of him, and the best.
She opened her mouth.
‘Don’t speak,’ he said. ‘Do not say a single word. Take off your shoes. And just look at you, the way you kick them off, the unmannered, unapologetic force of you. Now unbutton your dress.’
She had never heard his voice so dark.
When the buttons all down the front of her dress were unfastened, he reached out one cool finger and traced her skin, across the loose neck of her shift. Nipple to nipple, a light, almost indifferent touch.
‘Jude,’ she said. ‘Jude.’
‘Don’t speak,’ he said, and leaned back, displaying himself to her.
She’d had enough of looking – she’d done nothing else for weeks.
She gathered him in to her and pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss to his chest, utterly undone by the taste of him, by the fast, animal beat of his heart. He gasped, and she felt it through his ribcage. She hadn’t thought desire would sound that way.
Then he splayed her arm wide open, her knuckles mashed into the wallpaper, his palm flat against hers. His other hand closed around the front of her neck so if she tried to come away from the wall she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
She remembered suddenly, vividly, what had happened last time this man let go.
‘Let me touch you,’ she said, and his hand around her neck tried to stop the words from being spoken.
‘Let me —’
His hand covered her mouth, and he bit her neck until she tried to cry out through his fingers. The crush of teeth and lips was almost unbearable. He pushed harder.
‘There is such a pain to wanting you, Katherine, only you. I want to push you until I break you, so that I can find out just how strong you are. I want to pry you open, until I can run whatever is warm and red and vital in you through my fingers. You make me a danger. You should not be this close.’
She wanted to tell him to shut up, but his fingers were plastered all over her mouth. She tried to shake him loose, and couldn’t.
She plunged her free hand into his hair.
He was gone from her – all of him, sudden and startling.
‘Now pull up your skirts,’ he said, ‘so that I can see that white piece of skin where I have already touched you. God, if you had any idea how you look – parting your legs because I asked you to. How your neck, and the thrust of your spine, speak desire. For me. For this. No, don’t speak.’
Her dress and petticoat were trembling, were crushed in her fingers. She closed her eyes, and pressed her toes into the floorboards.
‘Lift your skirts higher. Let me look.’
She gathered the material up into her hands, and she was still fully dressed except for that fleshy, exposed part of her. He made a sound that was terrifying to her. She opened her eyes.
He looked up from beneath his dark lashes, and he was slowly spooling himself out, and soon he would not be able to stop.
She did not want him to stop.
She could have reached out and touched him. The worn material of her dress filled up, spilled over, her hands.
His fingers came to her lips, brushed from one corner to the other, soft and hypnotic. Then something changed in his eyes, and her breath caught, and he forced two fingers into her mouth.
‘No, don’t move,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to speak, not with my fingers filling your mouth. Fuck, Katherine, the way you feel.’
There was no resisting the invitation of his words, his voice, to take him in. To taste him, his skin against her tongue, to press her teeth into his fine fingers and mark him.
He took his fingers away. Her mouth stayed gaping with want, her trembling legs exposed to the night air, to his gaze. His hair tumbled over his forehead, into his left eye. He watched her as though to see the effect of himself on her, and he was almost all the way gone, and his fingers were wet with her spit.
He brought them to his mouth – two fingers closed together – and licked the full length. It was not delicate, and it was not polite, and the inside of his mouth was a dark, shocking pink.
‘Open up,’ he said, and pushed his fingers into her.
Her whole body rearranged itself around the alien pressure of a part of him so deep in her. Head fallen loose in pleasure, his collarbones hard against the heels of her hands, the material of her dress surrounding his arm like the curtain fallen against a dusty stage floor.
She felt the cold edge of his signet ring and his knuckles pressed a slow bruise into the flesh between her legs.
Then his fingers were moving in her, and it wasn’t articulate, like a stroke across her hand would be. It was deeply, inwardly felt. She gripped his forearm, around the flex of his muscles.
She was suspended between his fingers and his mouth, pulled perfectly taught.
And her mind told her, drowned in her body’s ecstasy, that something was not right.
‘Jude.’
His mouth’s slow exploration of her skin ceased. His fingers did something inside her that made her mouth open wide, and made words impossible. The hot pull of her body began.
His fingers didn’t cradle her skull the way they had in the music room last week. Their skin didn’t meet, anywhere, the way their palms had met when he told her the reason he’d seduced Lady Marmotte.
He’s holding me the way he held her
, she thought, just at the moment she started to come.
She opened her eyes in shock, felt her body’s tight pulse around his fingers, saw that he had disengaged himself entirely. For a moment she was back in that hallway, looking into Lord Marmotte’s music room.
She cried out – not the cry of a lover.
‘Let me go,’ she said, and her voice sounded drenched in pleasure, so at first he misunderstood. She kept her eyes on his, and did not look at the line of his lips, as sharp as the side of a blade.
She knew it, the moment he understood.
And then he stepped away with a small, ironic smile and a bow.
‘You bastard,’ she said, shaking uncontrollably. ‘You utter bastard. Don’t you dare ever’ – the weight of it hit her anew, a winding blow –’ever do that to me again.’
He was all cold remove, all duke. He looked perfectly at ease, almost naked, one long leg thrown over the other where he lounged on her bed. He looked at her as a scientist might at two particularly volatile chemicals he’d just mixed – or like a boy at a fly whose wings he’d just removed.
‘Not the usual reaction to pleasure,’ he said, and smiled his courtesan’s smile. ‘But then you don’t have the full complement of feminine feeling, do you?’
The enormity of it lit some dangerous, well-hidden part of her on fire.
She was silent, because this one time she could wait him out. She would not move or speak – not until dust lay thick over her, if that was what it took – until he met her eyes.
And then he met her eyes, and she saw the battle in him. She watched as it slid from him – that vicious, inhuman poise – and she knew, because she would not look away, how desperately he wished he could be only that shell, and nothing more.
His arms came around his torso in a now familiar gesture.
‘I’m so sorry, Katherine. I should be p-put down.’
And because he had chosen to be exposed, when his instinct was to be cruel, she chose to wrap her violence in tenderness.
Katherine said nothing in reply – just stood in full, magnificent rage. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, the tips curled around her dark nipples. It spilled down her back, a full coarse pelt. She was long, lean, golden. When she pulled her dress off over her head, he was made to watch how her muscles moved – her thighs, her belly, her shoulders. Dark hair over her sex, under her arms, her eyes on fire.
She reached one hand towards him, in a gesture he didn’t understand. It made him feel as though he hadn’t a single place left on this earth to run to.
‘I will make you feel something true,’ she swore, and she touched him.
His skin knew the touch of her rough hands, came to painful life beneath them. It was so quick this time, the knowledge that he would break apart. She made him give up every one of his body’s secrets – would not let him go for even a moment. When he closed his eyes she said, ‘Keep them open. Stay here with me. You’re not allowed to leave.’
She learned that rubbing the base of his spine in rough, languorous strokes made him weak, so that he made crude, needy sounds and grabbed on to her. She learned that he could never have enough kisses from her – he couldn’t stop speaking, couldn’t stop trying to invent new ways to tell her how her mouth devastated him, and
please come back now, kiss me again, Katherine, again
. She learned to stroke him from stomach to chest, so that he rose against her hand like a cat.
He fought her when she kissed the hard, humid length of him, and she looked directly up at him, still burning, and said, ‘Enough.’
She took him wholly into her mouth. She used her tongue on him like she was licking his heart. His fingernails drew blood.
She learned to enter him, so that when he came he rose up into her mouth and his chest drew the arcing, suspended pain of letting go.
His sleep was discordant, frenzied. He was exhausted, so deeply gone. And then he was awake because his body was too restless for sleep, and he pressed his forehead against hers, watched the gleam of her open eyes, but said nothing. She said nothing. Their hands wrapped around each other’s arms, her legs drew up against his stomach, curled inside the embrace of his legs. Later, he pushed her away, half asleep, and sought desperately for space, so that he could breathe. It began to rain and he came awake to listen. It raged and stormed about the Manor. Katherine reached for his hand. His fingers curled around hers, and he snuggled deeper into the covers, warm and dry and animal.
Kit opened her eyes and saw a silver candlestick, drowned in fat spills of wax. She closed her eyes again and tried to stretch her body without waking him. She was turned away from him and they weren’t touching, but she was well aware – even in sleep she had not forgotten – that he lay there with her.
Her muscles ached a little, the way they would after a day’s hard labour. The small, inadequate stretches she dared did nothing more than wake her body to its discomfort. She could imagine the bliss of stretching full out – the languor that would pour through her. She uncurled. Rolled very carefully over, and let the shock of him land quietly in her.
He lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, one arm tucked under the pillow and the other flung out over the side of the bed. She lay very still as the things she’d done last night came at her, and she tried to absorb them, and tried not to flinch when they made her feel raw.