William kicked a box over the trapdoor to hold it in place.
“You look like a harem girl with that over your mouth, so,” he said, his eyes tearing, his voice shaky with laughter.
“You look like a bandit,” retorted Gwen.
She was flying high on something, exhilarated down to her bones. She reached behind to tear off the makeshift kerchief, but the knot held firm.
William tugged his own bandanna free, dropping it on the floor. “Let me,” he said, and reached around her to untangle the knot. “Before you end up in some sultan’s harem.”
“I’d like to see one try,” Gwen tried to say, but the fabric got tangled in her lips.
His own lips quivering with laughter, William plucked it free.
“There,” he said, but he wasn’t laughing anymore, his eyes fixed on her lips, the fichu forgotten in his hand.
Gwen reached up and pulled his head across to hers. His hair was thick beneath her fingers, thick and springy, with the hint of a curl. It rasped against her hands as she twined her fingers through his hair, yanking him closer.
His arms closed tight around her, tipping her back, as he kissed her with a ferocity that matched her own, both of them caught up in the madness, her head still whirling, swirling with the dark rhythms of the room below, and something else besides, two weeks’ worth of frustrated desire, the memory of an accidental kiss in a moon-dark room in an inn in Bristol.
Only this time, she wasn’t an Indian goddess. This time, it was she he was kissing, urgently, desperately. No illusions, no mistaken identities.
Just . . . folly. Pure folly.
They broke apart, panting. She couldn’t see his face clearly in the moonlight, but she could tell his cheeks were flushed, his eyes glittering.
“This is absurd,” rasped Gwen. “Absurd.”
“I agree,” said William, breathing hard.
It was hard to say who grabbed whom. They lurched together like boulders rolling downhill, propelled by a force as strong as gravity. There was no finesse to it, no art. She could feel him tugging at the bodice of her dress, yanking at the buttons, pulling it down over her shoulders while she nibbled at an ear, the side of his neck, his shoulder, any skin she could reach.
He tugged her bodice down over her shoulder, his lips at her neck, her breast. Her head fell back, like the woman on the bier. She could feel her hair coming free from its pins, teasing her shoulder blades, tickling the bared skin of her back as she arched towards his teasing, sucking mouth, her hands in his hair, urging him on.
“Gwen—,” he groaned, bracing his hands on her waist, looking up at her with dazed blue eyes, as though he meant to say something more, something earnest and utterly, utterly wrong. “Gwen—”
No, no, no. A tiny bubble of panic rose and broke. He was going to spoil it all, spoil it with those sweet words that meant nothing at all. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to have to think. She didn’t want to have to resent him.
She put a hand over his mouth, silencing him. “No words,” she said urgently.
No words, no lies. Just body moving against body. She’d had enough lying protestations of love to last a lifetime. This, on the other hand, this was honest. This was nothing more than what it was, desire raw and simple.
She had earned it, hadn’t she? Years of being good, of being proper, of bodices buttoned up to her neck and caps over her hair. She’d had enough. This was for her, an atonement for all those years of atonement.
They didn’t bother with such niceties as removing their clothes. That would have taken too much time. Gwen could feel William tugging at her skirts, pushing them up, past her knees, her thighs, the fabric bunching around her waist. She wiggled to help him, backing up against a crate, just the right height to serve as a makeshift seat. Her hands went to the buttons of his breeches, unsteady enough that one button popped, and another stuck, sideways, before finally giving way.
“Gently,” he said, and there was laughter in his hoarse voice, laughter that worked on her like champagne, sending bubbles through her blood.
She tossed her hair back over her bare shoulders. She didn’t know when it had come loose, and she didn’t care. Her gown was hanging, half on, half off.
“Do you want it gentle?” she demanded.
It was a challenge, and they both knew it. He grinned, a reckless, piratical grin. Looking like that, he ought to have been marauding on the high seas, not a respectable former member of the East India Company’s army.
“Never say I don’t yield to a lady’s wishes. . . .”
Gwen linked her arms around his neck, one sleeve slithering down along her arm. She felt sultry and daring, a world removed from the prim spinster chaperone she had left behind downstairs.
She put her lips close to his ear as she locked her legs around his waist. “No words. Remember?”
And that was the last that either of them said for quite some time.
Chapter 16
Through the drunken, dancing throng they ran, Sir Magnifico holding tight to his lady’s hand. They tied scarves around their faces, but even so, the treacherous fumes of the poisoned smoke did their work, sending their senses swirling, as they battled the overwhelming urge to throw their morals to the winds and join the shouting revelers in the sensual movement of the dance.
—From The Convent of Orsino by A Lady
William came to his senses, if sense it could be called, sprawled on the floor of a storage room at the back of the Theatre Royal.
He rolled onto his back, blinking for a moment at the ceiling, as the remnants of what used to be his mind tried and failed to pull together what exactly had just happened. He hadn’t felt so dazed since he’d wound up on the wrong side of a rocket fusillade. His horse had bolted with him, shying and rearing in the midst of the flashing lights, the colors bursting all around him.
Compared to this, that had been bland.
A box scraped against the floor as Gwen braced herself against it, hoisting herself to her feet. Her dress was off her shoulders, her hair tumbling down her back. Her headdress had got lost somewhere; her petticoat straggled down below her hem. She looked wonderful.
William could have gone on lying there on the floor indefinitely—it was surprisingly comfortable for a floor—but since his position put him rather at a disadvantage, he hauled himself up to a sitting position.
Gwen was pacing around the room, searching for a lost slipper. He didn’t remember removing her slippers, but they must have been kicked off somewhere along the way. He did remember her stockings, the luxurious silk of them, and the even softer bare skin above.
“Ha!” said Gwen, and pounced on the slipper, jamming her foot into it with an air of triumph.
Shouldn’t there be—well, some cuddling? Some postcoital discussion? “Come back to the floor” didn’t have quite the same ring as “Come back to bed.”
On the floor . . . and on that crate . . . and against that piece of scenery propped against the wall . . .
To be fair, it was a matter of dispute as to who had been ravishing whom, but William couldn’t help but feel as though some sort of grand gesture or reparations were called for. He just couldn’t figure out what. He’d little experience with affairs of any sort, much less the sort that resulted in lying on the floor of a theatre storeroom in a confused mess of scattered clothing. He had no idea what the protocol might be.
He spotted Gwen’s other slipper lying on the floor and leaned over to snag it. “Here,” he said, offering it up to her. “It’s not made of glass, but it will fit you just the same.”
She looked him up and down. “You might want to button up your breeches before we go.”
The words felt like a slap in the face.
Doing up the offending buttons, William rose slowly to his feet with the aid of the crate. “I don’t know what to say.”
Gwen tugged at the shoulders of her dress, yanking the fabric back into place. “That must be a first.” She looked at him fi
ercely. “If you say that you’re sorry, I’ll slap you.”
“Is that what I’m meant to say? It would be a lie.”
She took a step back, giving him a warning look. “Don’t think you can hoodwink me with honeyed words.” She twisted her arms behind her, trying to reach the buttons at the back of her dress. “It won’t work.”
“Do you think I would be such a fool as that?” he said, which in retrospect, wasn’t the brightest question, given the way they had both been behaving. He went to help her with her buttons, gently moving her hands away and pulling the two sides of fabric together. “I know you better than that.”
And, oh, how much better he now knew her. William pushed the thought away. It wasn’t the time to think of that.
“Hmph,” said Gwen, but she moved her hair out of his way, twisting it up so that the long strands wouldn’t tangle in the fastenings. It had been a long time since he’d helped a lady do up a dress, an English dress, that was. He remembered helping to lace Maria into the ridiculous fashions to which English ladies clung, even in the tropical heat, the stomacher, the panniers.
There was no mistaking this for then, Gwen for Maria. Maria had been a good head shorter than he; he used to have to bend to reach the laces. Gwen, her back uncompromisingly straight, was only a few inches shy of his height. Soft tendrils of dark hair dusted the nape of her neck, smelling faintly floral.
There were only six buttons from the high waist of her dress to her nape. It was short work sliding them back into their place, not nearly enough time to settle his confused thoughts.
“There,” he said, stepping back.
Gwen turned slowly, her hair tumbling back down her shoulders, black threaded with silver. Her hair reached nearly to her waist, thick and wild. A bit of a purple feather clung to one side.
William plucked it out for her, solemnly offering it to her.
“Thank you,” she said regally, a patchwork empress in a disordered gown. “That was most diverting. But you needn’t think it’s going to happen again.”
She looked different with her hair down, framing and softening her face. Different, and yet strangely familiar. Pieces of a fever dream floated through his drug-fuddled brain, the memory of a woman in a long white gown, her dark hair falling down over her shoulders.
William took a step forward, his eyes intent on her face. “That night in Bristol—it wasn’t a dream, was it? I kissed you.”
“What has that to do with anything?” Avoiding his eyes, Gwen began bundling her hair back up, skewering it in place with pins. “You kissed the woman in your dream.”
He could hear the tinkling water of the fountain, the flap of the bird’s wings, the sound of a sitar. He had woken with the blurred image of a white gown and long black hair. For the first time, he saw the woman’s face clearly. It was that of the woman standing in front of him, so assiduously pretending he didn’t exist.
“You were the woman in my dream.”
Shrugging, Gwen turned away. “Be that as it may.”
What was that supposed to mean? William would make a fair bet that she didn’t know either.
Gwen fished up her crumped fichu and shoved it, without grace, into the neckline of her dress. She was Miss Meadows again, buttoned and pinned, her back as straight as her stays. “I should be getting back.”
William hastily shoved his shirt down into his breeches, buttoning his jacket over the wreckage of his evening attire. “I’ll see you home.”
“There’s no need.”
“There’s every need.” He wasn’t letting her walk back alone, not at this time of night, and not looking as she looked now. For all her hasty repairs, she still had the look of a woman who had been quite thoroughly ravished. “It’s been quite some time since we parted from the others. That carriage won’t be there anymore.”
“It’s not a long walk,” she said, with a fine show of indifference.
“No, but every walk feels shorter when there’s another to share it.”
She cast him a look of undiluted scorn. “Do you really think to sway me with platitudes?”
“Do you really think I’d leave you to make your own way back at this time of the night?” William countered. He tried to make a joke of it. “If you’d your parasol with you it would be a different matter, but since you haven’t . . .”
“Don’t you dare start feeling obliged to me.” Gwen slapped the remains of her turban back on her head. “We had a satisfactory romp; that’s all. Nothing more.”
It shouldn’t have hurt that much, but it did. “What about friendship, then? I’d thought we had that.”
She looked at him with guarded, watchful eyes. Not for the first time, she reminded him of an animal at bay, ready to strike out for its own protection. “Does the one necessarily preclude the other?”
William spoke as honestly as he knew how. “It does if you won’t allow me to show you the basic solicitude I would a friend.”
Gwen stalked in front of him towards the door. “Fine words, Colonel.”
William caught her hand, bringing her to a halt. “No,” he said firmly. “You’ll not shut me away like that. I’ve been William to you this past fortnight.”
She breathed in deeply through her nose. “Those were—extraordinary circumstances.”
“And this isn’t?”
A glimmer of humor showed in her eyes. “Think highly of yourself, do you?”
William couldn’t help but grin. “Those weren’t moans of boredom I was hearing.”
Her cheeks flushed a rosy pink. “One rule,” she said forbiddingly, holding up a hand to silence him. “If I go with you, we don’t discuss this—this—”
“Night of incredible pleasure?”
“Anomalous interlude,” she finished crushingly. “We go on as we were.”
“Sure, and that’s a lot of syllables for something that never happened.”
Gwen marched outside into the crisp night air. “Take it or leave it,” she said.
He’d have been more likely to argue if he’d had any idea what he wanted to argue for. He was left grasping at a blank. On a rational level he knew that she’d the right of it, that this wasn’t the time or the place to enter into a courtship, if courtship it could be called when one started with the bedding and went from there to the wooing. He’d come to England for his children, not for amorous intrigue, and a fine mess he’d made of it already.
And, yet, to close that door and pretend nothing had happened sat ill with him. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been looking for it or that this wasn’t the time; it had happened, and it was a cad’s trick to pretend it away.
Which left him . . . nowhere.
“If that’s what you want,” he said, not liking it, but not knowing what else to say.
“It’s what makes sense,” she said, and her lips clamped down quite firmly on whatever else she might have said.
For several minutes, they walked in silence, taking the less traveled byways and side streets to avoid being seen. William snuck a glance at his companion. Her profile was uncompromising, her expression brooding. Having no desire to have a fan cracked over his pate, William kept his pace and held his tongue. What was there to say, even if he had the courage to say it? His tongue was tied by his own conflicting emotions.
In silence, they made their way towards the river, to the bridge that would take them back to the genteel environs of Laura Place, where he could deposit Gwen again with her friends and return to his own lonely cot at the White Hart Inn.
The river lay silent in the moonlight, but the torches from the bridge sparked mirrored bursts of flame from the water below, swaying and dancing in the current, like the undulating revelers in the cavern below the opera house.
“It was all that ridiculous drug, anyway,” Gwen burst out. “We were under the influence.”
Was that what she had been thinking about all this while? William opened his mouth to agree and then closed it again. Drugged they might have been, and by so
mething more than opium, but he hadn’t been under the influence of the drug an hour earlier, in the corridor of the theatre, nor yet in Bristol. It might be more comfortable to pretend otherwise, but it would be a lie, and his spirit rebelled at the thought of such subterfuge.
Gwen looked at him challengingly. “Weren’t we?”
William picked his way across the cobbles, choosing his words carefully. “It’s true, that is, and there’s no denying it.” He looked up from his careful perusal of his feet, into Gwen’s turbulent eyes. “But I can’t deny that I was wanting to have my way with you long before we went down into that cave.”
He’d caught her off guard; he could see it in the way her mouth dropped open, in the confusion that chased across her face in the moonlight.
She hid it with a loud sniff. “Am I meant to be flattered by that? I doubt you’ve met a woman you haven’t fancied.”
William bristled. “What’s that meant to mean?”
“Nothing.” Not meeting his eyes, she made a broad gesture with her fan. “Just that you seem to have cut a broad swath through the female population.”
He stopped her with his hands on her shoulders, out of the lights of the streetlamps, where no one could see them. “Do you really think me such a libertine as that?”
She shrugged, turning her face away. “What does it matter?”
It mattered because . . . well, just because. “Sure, in my youth I took advantage of what was offered me—and it wasn’t as much as you might have thought!—but once I met my Maria, all that was over.”
“Then why do you have children by how many other mothers?”
“Two,” he said, and the words seemed to scald his tongue. Old wrongs never really went away. “Only two. My Maria’s been gone twenty-five years now. Would you have had me remain celibate all that time?”
Her eyes had a cold glitter in the moonlight. “A good thing for you, then, that I’m too old to present you with another bastard. I’d hate to ruin your numbers.”
He felt as though he’d had a bayonet run straight through the gut—it burned that badly. “Do you really think I’d get you with child and walk away?”