The Proposition, page 26
Clemency opened and closed her mouth, speechless. That Lady Veitch would intervene on her behalf in such a spectacular way, she could not fathom. She wondered if it could all be attributed to her conversation with Adeline over that suitor’s letter, or if indeed Lady Veitch’s pride did not allow her to be befuddled by someone like Boyle. Perhaps knowing she might have lost her daughter to such a man had inspired her to this extreme action.
“We must not let such men win,” Lady Veitch said in closing, offering Clemency a broad smile topped with twinkling eyes. “Even your Miss Taylor would agree with me there, I think.”
“Most ardently,” Clemency whispered, astonished. “Most ardently. But I can never repay this kindness, Lady Veitch, and certainly the cost of besting Boyle was great indeed.”
“ ’Twas money well spent,” the old woman replied lightly. She unfurled her parasol again and made a long arc to return to the gravel path and her daughters. “And the most adventure I have experienced in an age. I suspect, Miss Fry, there is another man somewhere more deserving of your affection?”
Lady Veitch grinned as she continued her grand, deliberate parade through the garden. Distantly, from the direction of the church, bells rang out.
“There is, y-yes,” Clemency stammered.
“There now.” Lady Veitch chuckled and waved off a spray of dust and grass as Clemency raced by. “All is not well, but all is well enough.”
26
Most vividly she would remember the flashing halo of light around his silhouette as he came riding toward her, up the lane leading to Claridge. She knew him from his shape, his height, the slant of his shoulders, and the tilt of his hat. She knew him as a moth recognizes flame, as a tree knows sunlight and bends innately toward it, seeking and seeking, and then rewarded with indelible warmth.
She had hardly made it ten paces out of the garden when she saw the dust rising from the hell-bent rider. Then came a spray of gravel as he pulled up the reins short and his horse veered and stamped, prancing in a circle before coming to a halt. With the light in her eyes, Clemency could only see the outline of his suit as he leapt down to the ground, and his hat as he swept it off and tossed it aside.
Somehow her feet carried her forward, and she kept going, and at last they met and she felt his arms lift her, hold her, encircle her…
“The bells,” he murmured into her quickly unspooling hair. Audric kissed her cheek, her temple, the corner of her lips. “I heard the bells. Tell me, Clemency, tell me you are not married to him.”
He set her back on the ground, and Clemency slid partly away with a ragged laugh. “He is not here, Audric. He’s gone. Gone. Imprisoned. All of his secrets go with him, and I am blessedly free.”
Audric stared at her, then steadied her by the shoulders, staring down into her eyes with his particular ferocity. “But how? I have heard nothing of this….”
“Lady Veitch,” she said simply. “Boyle tried to toy with her daughter and paid for it with his freedom. She has met with Ede and spent dearly to silence him, and I can never repay her for it.” Clemency hooked her arms around his neck and pulled him close. “Oh, you must know I never wanted to marry him! I could not say a thing without risking Delphine’s secret, and my own sister’s love for Mrs. Chilvers. He would have ruined them both, even if I so much as wrote you! I would never—but of course—you must believe me. You must.”
“With all my heart I believe you,” Audric replied, smoothing her hair back and leaning down to kiss her once more, and on the lips. “I suspected you might be acting out of affection for my family, but I had no inkling of your sister’s predicament. That you would hold my sister’s happiness above your own…but of course you do not know! She has taken matters into her own hands on that score. Against my advice she has admitted to the entire business with Boyle. What happens next I cannot say.”
“She is brave,” Clemency murmured. “So unspeakably brave. But that she should be forced into this position! And by the man who caused all of her pain!”
“She made the choice. I think she has found her peace and now she does not fear him or the whispers, and I can do nothing but try to protect her from the worst of it.” Audric sighed. He shook his head and then pressed his face to hers, a pained gasp escaping his throat. “But what of your family? Do they know about Boyle?”
Clemency gestured to the house behind her, where an explosion of flowers still waited to celebrate someone’s nuptials.
“They are all waiting. Waiting for a groom that will not come and a bride who loves another.”
Audric dragged his fingers through her red-gold hair, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he chewed his lip and then nodded his head once. “Then shall we send up to the house for Delphine and Ralston? There could still be a wedding in the church today.”
“But all of your plans! All of your anger and your vengeance, what becomes of it?” Clemency asked, holding desperately to the lapel of his jacket.
“It is all forgotten. The hunt is over, and we have played our part.”
“Yet—”
“Listen to me, Clemency—we lived well and loved each other, and lost track of time and revenge. Perhaps this is the unexpected reward.” Audric drew back, clasping both of his large hands over her small, warm, shaking ones. “Delphine has found her peace and let me find mine. He cannot harm us any longer, that I was not responsible for his end is meaningless beside the…the joy, the unbelievable relief and joy I feel in this moment. Damn it all, so that I can try to be better for you. To know I have you.”
It didn’t seem possible, that in one moment she could be so full of dread and fear, and in the next overcome with perfect happiness. “Joy, yes! Joy. But do we deserve it? Haven’t we been wicked? Planning and plotting as we were?”
Audric kissed her again gently, and then not gently, and Clemency forgot all about words like deserve.
“Perhaps.” Audric smiled, his lips still pressed to hers. “And if so, then let us be wicked together.”
She did not have to remember the warmth of his embrace or the comforting strength of his arms—those sensations had never left her, though she had walled herself off from the memory. There was a remembrance sunk deep inside her of every dark hair on his fingers, every scar, every rough callus. There was a remembrance of his frank green eyes and the black waves of his hair, the dimples carved through his cheeks, the serious lips that now seemed so suddenly prone to smiling.
Her face fell for a moment. “But marriage…I had resolved never to consider it again.”
Audric sighed, his smile collapsing. “Ah. That.”
Clemency chewed her lower lip fiercely, worried that the desperation of the moment was leading her into a hasty decision. Yes, the church was decorated for a wedding, but she could still be the master of her fate. A few wasted buntings were nothing when compared to her lasting happiness. Marriage or solitude? When she glanced at Audric’s face, the thought of being without him opened a hopeless pit in her stomach.
“Marriage is a compromise,” she said slowly. “But we are clever enough to bend it to our needs. Delphine and Honora, they may need our protection to have the lives they deserve, and if we vow to embrace them as family and support them no matter what challenges they might face, then marriage is a compromise I am willing to make.”
His eyes lightened, his smile returning. “That is an easy vow to make, almost as easy as the one I hope to make to you when—if—we are married.”
Clemency had thought him a hard, impenetrable man, but something in him had softened, a sweet blurring around the edges of the gruff stranger who had approached her those weeks ago at the Pickfords’ assembly. The man before her, enveloping her hands, hardly seemed like the same person, or maybe the light had shifted and she was no longer looking at him in the dark.
“The suspense, Clemency, is terrible.” Audric laughed and scrunched up his eyes. “Have pity.”
She looked again at the house and the flowers, then turned toward him with a crooked grin. “Then I have a proposition for you, sir, if you will hear it.”
* * *
—
“Despite all your insisting, I knew this day would come.”
Clemency wanted to roll her eyes at her sister but could not. After all Honora knew her best.
“What gave me away?” she asked, staying very still while her sister waited beside her outside the church door. Soon they would go in. She heard the restless shuffling and whispering of those inside the tall, dusty stone structure. There was no doubt quite a bit of story-swapping and confusion, given the last-minute change of grooms.
“You always had your nose in a book, and books are full of dreams,” Honora replied. Smiling gently, she reached up and fixed a flower that had come loose in Clemency’s hair. “Love is a dream, fleeting and precious, best in the moment, and mourned when it is gone.”
“And your dream of love?” Clemency turned, her own impending happiness momentarily forgotten. Clutching Honora’s hand, she waited until her dear older sister looked into her eyes. “Mrs. Chilvers…”
Honora tried to tug her hand away.
“It is all right, Nora. I know how it is between you. How it truly is.”
“What must you think of me?” Honora whispered.
“Only the best, as I always have and always will. Whatever money must be spent to free her of her husband’s debts it will be yours.”
“And Mr. Ferrand would help us this way?”
“I know he will understand,” Clemency assured her.
A far-off smile spread across her sister’s face. “Then she can give up those regrettable pursuits and find a better use for her talents. I want to trust her. I want to forgive her. Do you?”
Clemency nodded. “Time will show her true character. And she will have money now, so if indeed she is your true love’s desire, then we are both becoming rich women.”
Honora scrunched up her nose, pressing two fingers hard to her forehead. “That is not funny, dearest.”
“It is a little funny.”
“Only because all has ended this way,” Honora reminded her. “I still feel the edges of a shadow about us.”
“That will pass,” Clemency promised. “All has not ended. Your life, whether it be with Mrs. Chilvers or another woman—”
“Sister—”
“Or another woman, will be a safe and happy one. I will not rest until you have all that you deserve, for you were always the sweetest of us. William is a fool, I am a tyrant, but you are all softness and light.”
Honora embraced her, and she felt warm tears against her cheek. Both of their tears.
“Softness and light,” Nora repeated, sighing. She stood back and held Clemency at arm’s length, admiring her in her wedding finery. “That is what I wish for you. This love you have with Mr. Ferrand, it began in darkness. But here…” She glanced up and closed her eyes, a rainbow of light cascading down from a stained-glass window bathing her in a divine richness of colors. “Here you are, coming together in the sunshine.”
“Then let us go in.”
The doors opened and her mother was already weeping, of course. Audric waited for her at the end of a flower-strewn path. She had never seen him look so shy, his hand tucked in front of his waist, his posture confident yet his eyes boyishly darting.
I am sure enough for the both of us.
Honora departed, scurrying up the aisle to be with their family. Tansy clapped her hands like a child under the bemused gaze of Lady Veitch and her constantly flurrying fan. Even Mr. Fry shed a dignified tear into his handkerchief.
Clemency let Audric’s green eyes be her guide. She walked herself toward them, not to give herself away, but to accept all he was willing to give.
27
It had never occurred to Clemency that a wedding could be such a breathless thing. Indeed, from the moment she slid into her crisp, new gown and tucked flowers into the ribbons woven through her hair until they trotted away from the church in the carriage hastily brought down by Ralston, she could scarcely remember taking a single full breath. It was with that same reedy, light-headed, and gauzy brain that she climbed the steps of Beswick, entered the great house, and found herself alone again with Audric Ferrand. Her husband.
Her husband.
Though they had stood together unchaperoned many times, Clemency now plunged headlong into terra incognita, aware all of a sudden, in a way she had never been before, of Audric’s body. She stood in the cavernous and generously frescoed bedroom, awaiting a maid she did not have, at a moment when she did not want one. Yet she had no earthly idea what to do with her hands. The dogs, Talos and Argus, slumbered by the foot of the bed. The house creaked and settled. The fire crackled.
I should have read tawdrier novels.
Audric, for his part, did not seem nearly as out of sorts with the idea of them being alone in a context far different than any they had experienced before. He went purposefully to the hearth, where a fire had been lit. The room itself was far too large for ten people, let alone two, yet it housed a single opulent bed, ornate in a way that made Clemency think he had nothing to do with choosing the furnishings for Beswick. A pair of naked, playful cherubs pointed fingers at each other on the carved and lustrous bedframe.
She felt acutely aware of the bed too.
Tugging his cravat free, Audric leaned near the fire and picked up his monologue where it had trailed off while they had climbed their way to this room and this, for Clemency, meaningful aloneness.
“My sister and Ralston. I can hardly believe it, but then, I’m certain you noticed. I am always the last to know these things.”
“They do seem to share quite the profusion of glances,” Clemency replied, finding something to do with her hands by skipping them along the edge of the bedframe. Her forefinger landed on a rotund cherub bottom and she quickly pulled it away.
This was patently ridiculous. Wasn’t she a full-grown woman and he a full-grown man? She was a full-grown married woman. And had she not imagined them alone more than once, in all manner of wicked configurations that were not encouraged or described by the books she read? Yet her heart raced—his body and her own had never seemed so vital or so alive; she could practically hear the blood thrumming in her veins. She watched his pulse jump in his throat, coated gold by the fire, and realized with fading shame that she wanted to kiss—no, lick—that spot in particular.
Audric shed more clothes, and she discovered that she sincerely liked the way the fire sculpted his body, exaggerating hollows and angles she had never glimpsed before. With her gown still very much on, he came to her, and she reached out with fluttering hands to trace the broad plain of his chest, covered in coarse black and gray hair. A thread of fire tied itself to where her thumb brushed across his warm skin, a thread that ignited a path through her chest and belly, and startled her when it came to rest between her thighs.
“I think I am afraid,” she whispered.
“There is nothing to fear,” Audric told her. He took her hand and their fingers knitted together. “You may trust me as you trust a friend. Are we not friends?”
“We are,” she said and smiled. “You are my dearest friend.”
“Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections,” Audric quoted, half-solemn and half-grinning, “because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.”
“Mary Wollstonecraft, impressive,” Clemency murmured, chuckling. “Sir, I am seduced. Or maybe convinced.”
His smile remained, but in it she detected something wolfish and hungry. If there was more laughter to be had, it was swallowed and silenced by his lips descending, capturing hers, unexpectedly obliterating her fear. She felt the broad, intimidating strength of him just there beneath her hands, inviting now, and tempting.
Bethany Taylor had failed to mention the benefits of marriage in this regard, and Clemency, perhaps sheepishly, felt possessive of the heat and blood and bone that now felt hers. Hers forever, hers to explore and cherish and know. Truly know. Miss Taylor warned that marriage diminished a woman, and maybe that was so, maybe that ugly surprise was yet to come, but so far Clemency only felt like more of herself, expansive and growing, a plant tended and watered with affection. If this was imprisonment, Audric made her feel strangely free.
Free.
Her gown was in his hands, flying over her head in one instant and cast onto the floor in the next. Neither of them had time to make sense of the tangle of her corset laces, not while locked in a frenzy of kisses, not while navigating around the end of the bed to the middle, and then the soft, giving mattress.
She had not anticipated wanting to cry out, and to cry, and to gasp so much—was that normal? There did not seem to be time to stop and ask. Each new foray of his hands up her bare legs or across her shoulders taught her a new hunger—to devour, to sate, to taste, to remember the new richness on the air, a scent she hadn’t known before, of their mingled perspiration and the wet trails of saliva left by seeking, wanting mouths. There was a certain music to this new activity that she had not expected but now relished—the sighs of open lips startled that way by pleasure, of smacking, of rustling fabric and nails scratching down heated skin.
At last Clemency found herself trapped beneath him, feeling the full weight of his body as it came to rest between her legs. The hearth fire blazed in Audric’s eyes, and he pulled her red-gold hair free of its ribbons, letting it spill fully over her shoulders. He craned forward and raked his fingers through her hair, the bite of his fingernails against her scalp a near undoing.
