Sherry Thomas - His At Night

She recognized it because she’d seen it in the mirror so many times: a bleak, austere loneliness.

Her hands, which had been clutching at the sheets, moved up his arms. “I never pretended it was anyone but you.”

Now he was the one to close his eyes, to gasp and grimace. She followed his example, and felt and felt and felt. Tides of chaos rose and gathered. An implosion came upon her. She was still in the grips of its after-tremors when his control broke at last. He ground into her with enough force to launch an ocean liner. And bucked and shook as if in pain, exquisite, breathtaking pain.

She opened her eyes again to see him looking down upon her, the way he would a cursed treasure. He lifted a hand and traced her brow.

“Now you are mine,” he said softly.

She shivered.

* * *

Belatedly she saw the blood on his bandage. The wound had started to bleed again.

From his exertion.

“Your arm,” she said unsteadily.

He glanced at the dressing, then lowered himself and nipped her jaw. “If ever I can bring myself to leave you, my dear Lady Vere. Did you notice I forgot to withdraw? I didn’t either. I don’t think I could have had the fate of mankind hung in the balance.”

She flushed. Who was he? This was not the bumbling, blabbering man she married. His words were sharp as knives, his lovemaking as dangerous as Waterloo.

“Your arm,” she insisted, even as her cheeks scalded.

He sighed. “All right. Have it your way.”

“Close your eyes,” she said, once they’d separated. “Please.”

He sighed again and obliged. She threw on her nightshirt and cut strips from another petticoat. From his armoire she retrieved a clean handkerchief, spread it with the ointment, and made him sit up so that she could dress his arm properly.

“Cleanse yourself with a solution of sterile water and red wine vinegar,” he said as she tied the ends of the new bandaging. “You can buy what you need at a chemist’s shop called McGonagall’s, not far from Piccadilly Circus.”

She looked up at him, not understanding what he meant.

“You don’t want to procreate with a moron, do you?” he said amiably, but she did not miss his acerbic undertone.

The man she thought she knew would never have referred to himself as a moron. He’d been nothing if not consistent and fervent in his self-congratulations. Had it all been but an act then?

“Water and vinegar—is that what women do when they don’t wish to conceive?”

“Among other things.”

“You seem to know a great deal about such things.”

“I know enough,” he said, lying back down. “Hide everything under the bed and get me Eugene Needham in the morning. He has a practice on Euston Road. And he can see to the disposal of things.”

She pushed the bundle under his bed and turned off the lights. Then she stood in the center of the very dark room and tried to understand what had happened, to pinpoint the exact moment her husband had turned into this potent and slightly terrifying stranger.

“Go,” he said from the bed.

“Are you—are you still angry at me?”

“I’m angry at Fate. You are but a convenient substitute. Now go.”

She hurried out.

“What a lovely garden,” murmured Aunt Rachel.

Lord Vere’s house was backed by a private garden to which only the residents in the surrounding houses had access, a situation that was both fortuitous and uncommon in London, according to Mrs. Dilwyn.

Several elegant plane trees grew in this enclosure, their wide canopies thrust sixty feet in the air to offer fine shade to those who strolled the flagstone path that bisected a smoothly clipped lawn. A three-tiered Italian fountain burbled agreeably nearby.

Mrs. Dilwyn had advised a daily intake of fresh air. Elissande, who was determined to do the right thing by her aunt, had steeled herself for a long bout of wheedling persuasion in order to extract Aunt Rachel from her bed. To her surprise, Aunt Rachel had agreed immediately to be put into a simple blue day dress.

Elissande had helped her into a chair and then, a pair of impressively sized footmen had carried the chair, with Aunt Rachel in it, down to the garden.

A leaf floated down from the canopy above. Elissande caught it in her hand and showed it to Aunt Rachel.

Aunt Rachel stared reverently at the very ordinary leaf. “How beautiful,” she said.

Elissande’s reply was forgotten as a teardrop fell down Aunt Rachel’s face. She turned toward Elissande. “Thank you, Ellie.”

Panic engulfed Elissande. This shelter, this life, this green haven in the middle of London—the safety Aunt Rachel believed they’d found was as fleeting as a soap bubble.

For love, there is nothing I do not dare. Nothing.

Love was a petrifying word coming out of her uncle’s mouth. He was quite ready to wage hell’s own vengeance to regain his wife.

I fear something terrible might befall the handsome idiot you claim to love so much.

The handsome idiot who had claimed her thoroughly in the darkness before dawn.

Except he hadn’t been at all an idiot, had he? He’d been angry, discourteous, and his language had been downright appalling. But he hadn’t been stupid. He’d known very clearly what she’d done to him, which begged the question: Had he been, like her, pretending to be someone he wasn’t?

The thought was a hook through her heart, yanking it in unpredictable directions.

The golden glow of his skin. The electric pleasure of his teeth at her shoulder. The dark excitement of his flesh firmly embedded in hers.

But more than anything else, the raw power he exuded.

Take off your clothes.

She wanted him to say it again.

Her hand crept to her throat, her fingertip pressed into the vein that throbbed rapidly.

Was it possible—was it at all possible that she could come out of her most desperate choice with a man as clever as Odysseus who looked like Achilles and made love like Paris…?

And her uncle had threatened irreparable harm to him.

Only two days remained.

* * *

Needham came, rebandaged Vere’s arm, and left with both the packet of letters Vere had taken from Palliser and the bundle of bloodied clothes under Vere’s bed. All without a single word. Good old Needham.

By the middle of the afternoon Vere was able to get up from his bed without immediately wanting to put a rifle to his head and pull the trigger. He rang for tea and toast.

When the knock came at his door, however, the person who entered was his wife, a smile on her face.

“How are you, Penny?”

No, not the person he wanted to see, not when the only thing he could remember of his predawn hours at home was his desperate release into her very willing body. He could deduce that she must have helped him with his wound, and that he must have instructed her to get Needham, but how had they gone from an activity as distinctly uncarnal as dressing a gunshot injury to the sort of untrammeled coupling the memories of which came near to making him blush?

Well, there was nothing to do but to brazen it out.

“Oh, hullo, my dear. And don’t you look ever fresh and charming.”

Her dress was white, a pure and demure backdrop for her guileless smile. The skirt of the dress, fashionably narrow, clung rather ferociously to her hips before dropping in a more seemly column to the floor.

“You are sure you feel well enough to eat?”

“Quite. I’m famished.”

She clapped her hands. A maid came in and set down a tray of tea, bobbed a curtsy, and left.

His wife poured. “How is your arm?”

“Hurts.”

“And your head?”

“Hurts. But better.” He drank thirstily of the tea she offered, making sure to spill some on his dressing gown. “Do you know what happened to me? My arm, that is. My head always hurts after too much whiskey.”

“It was rum you drank,” she corrected him. “And you said a hansom cab driver shot you.”

That was stupid of him. He should never have mentioned a gun. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I can hardly stand rum.”

She poured herself a cup of tea. “Where were you last night?” she said softly, with wifely interest. “And what were you doing out so late?”

She’d come to interrogate him.

“I can’t quite remember.”

Very deliberately she stirred in her cream and sugar. “You don’t remember being shot at?”

Well, this would not do. He was much better on the offensive. “Well, you should know firsthand the deleterious effect the consumption of alcoholic beverages has on the retention of memory.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can you recall anything from our wedding night?”

Her stirring stopped. “Of course I remember…some things.”

“You told me my lips dripped beeswax. No one had ever told me before that my lips dripped beeswax.”

To her credit, she raised her teacup and drank without choking. “Do you mean honeycomb?”

“Pardon?”

“Honeycomb, not beeswax.”

“Right, that’s what I said. Honeycomb. ‘Honey and milk are under thy tongue,’ you told me, ‘and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of…’ Hmm, let me think, what was it? Sinai? Syria? Damascus?”

“Lebanon,” she said.

“Exactly. And of course, once we disrobed you”—he sighed in exaggerated contentment—“you were far better to look at than even the lady in the Delacroix your father stole. Do you suppose we could have you pose like that for Freddie? And not for a minuscule canvas either—life-size, I insist—and can we hang it in the dining room?”

“That would border on public indecency.”

Her smile was beginning to assume that over-brightness he’d come to know so intimately. Good, he must be doing something right.

“Dash it. Would have been grand fun showing you off to my friends. How they would slobber over you.”

He made moon eyes at her.

“Now, now, Penny,” she said, her voice just the slightest bit tight. “We mustn’t rub our good fortune in our friends’ faces.”

Happier, he ate four slices of toast. When he was finished, she said, “Dr. Needham told me your dressing should be changed in the afternoon, and again in the evening before bed. So shall we?”

He rolled up the sleeve of his dressing gown. She examined his wound and changed the bandaging. As he rolled down his sleeve, she stopped him and asked, “What are these?”

Her fingers pointed to a series of small half-moon marks just above his elbow.

“Look like nail marks to me.”

“Did the cabdriver get his hand on you too?”

“Hmm, they seem more like they have been left by a woman. In the heat of passion, you see. She grabs on to the man’s arms and her fingers dig into his sinews.” He smiled at her. “Have you been taking advantage of me while I was mentally incapacitated, Lady Vere?”

She flushed. “It was you who wished it, sir.”

“Was it? My, could have been disastrous, you know. When a man is that drunk, sometimes he can’t get it up. And sometimes he can’t finish it off.”

She touched her throat. “Well, you didn’t have any problem on either account.”

He preened. “That is a testament to your charm, my lady. Although I must say, if we keep going at it like this, the family size will be increasing very soon.”

A thought that rather petrified him.

“Do you wish to increase the family size?” she asked, as if it were an afterthought.

“Well, of course, what man doesn’t? For God and country,” he said, as he scanned the letters that had come with his tea and toast.

When he looked up again, she wore the oddest expression. He immediately worried he’d said something that had given his act away, but he could not think what.

“Oh, look, Freddie invites us for tea this afternoon at the Savoy Hotel. Shall we go then?”

“Yes,” she said, with a smile he’d never quite seen before. “Do let us go.”

* * *

The terrace at the Savoy Hotel commanded a panoramic view of the Thames, with Cleopatra’s Needle thrusting skyward just beyond the hotel’s gardens. A steady traffic of steamships and barges traversed the water lanes. The sky was clear by London standards, but nevertheless seemed dirt-smudged to Elissande, who had yet to grow accustomed to the great metropolis’s perpetually tainted air.