Page 26 of Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match
“It seems you know me well.” Will thought about that for a minute, rubbing the sponge along her arm. “How you can know me when I do not know myself is a mystery.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I knowwhatyou are. You are good. And you make me want to be good.” She raised a hand and touched his jaw, seeking his attention. Under her wet fingertip, she felt his pulse tick faster. “I thought of you, I waited for you, and I knew you’d come for me. You saved me.” She didn’t want a sponge all over, she wanted his hand. Was it the whiskey in her stomach? The fading terror? The wet cling of fabric, all over her body, tangling up her legs like vines? “I wish you’d kiss me again.”
“I know what you want,” Will said evenly. “You do not hide it. Your eyes tell me everything, all the time.”
“I cannot hide much right now.” Through the wet cloth, every freckle on her body was visible. “I have seen so much of you. I should let you see me. ’Tis only fair.”
He did look at her body now, with such male admiration she felt her cheeks grow warm. “If our positions had been reversed, and I was making my dream woman, there is nothing I would replace or change about you, Angelika.”
A fine compliment, but also a gentle rebuke. “Victor insisted on reassembling you. I’d been reading a lot of anatomy books, and whilst I said I’d have you as you were, he convinced me some improvements could be made.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is this your way of explaining I had a small cock?”
“You had a perfectly good cock, and everything else was lovely, too, but spoiled Miss Frankenstein went hunting around like a child in a toy chest to see if she could improve on perfection. I only thought of the musculature, not the spirit inside. And I want you to know that if I could go back in time, I would not change a thing about you, either.”
“Even my hands, with a wedding ring?”
He’d known all along? “I was mad with jealousy. I had found my dream man, with a face that stopped my heart, and he possibly belonged to another? I know it was wrong to lie to you, but I want you to know this: She didn’t love you like I do. She didn’t try to bring you back.”
“Not everybody has your resources or intellect,” Will reminded her with quiet censure, not acknowledging her love declaration. “People love in different ways. Just because a wife with no scientific knowledge doesn’t beat back death doesn’t mean she is less caring.”
“You’re in my world now, and it does mean that. Why aren’t you more surprised to be married?”
“You’re just confirming something I have suspected. How else could I resist?” He gestured wryly in her direction.
“You’ve always known deep down that you belong to another. It’s why you feel unfaithful. Pass me that soap bar, please.” She pointed to the basin stand. The change of subject would head off the swell of bad emotion inside. “When Lizzie and I dragged Victor to Paris, we found this tiny soap store tucked into a laneway. They supplied Marie Antoinette.”
“If it was good enough for the queen of France, and Princess Angelika, it’s fine for nameless, nobody Will,” he said, fetching it. “I shudder to imagine the cost.”
“I have never smelled anything as divine as your soap.” She cupped the cake in her hands and inhaled deeply. “I can smell you all around the house. I chose this scent for you, long before I ever saw you.”
“That’s why I am finding it hard to trust you now. If your first attempt at a husband had worked, you would have given him your favorite soap.”
Angelika tried to picture it. “I’m quite sure I would not.” But shehadbeen infatuated many times before with total strangers.
He was patient. “I cannot know that it is me you love when you do not know me. I understand why you didn’t tell me at first about the ring. But it changes things, and I now have to investigate new threads tying me to my old life. My death may have been a catastrophe for my family.” He hesitated, then made an admission. “It made me sick to think of myself as your fourth. I want to kiss you again, too. But these thoughts are chased by the idea that I am not free to make a new choice. I may have children who depended on me, and now they might be stealing to survive.”
Emotion swelled inside her because he was a very good man indeed.
She spilled the truth.
“Your ring has an engraving, but we were too careless toeven look at it. There, now you know everything. All of my terrible wrongdoings and lies. You were found by the worst person.” She laid her head down on her folded arms and shivered as he cupped water across her shoulders. “We will follow that ring to the ends of the earth, and with it I hope you can unlock your entire past. Your family, your wife... You will go home to them.”
She added some salt tears to the bathwater.
“I probably will. But don’t worry yourself tonight. Lie back.” When she did, he pillowed her head on his forearm. “My poor love, you have had such burdens, being so lonely up on this hill,” he said with total understanding, and her tears came in earnest. After keeping these details from him, she’d expected a scolding, but now he just carefully washed her face, cleansing her tears like he couldn’t bear them. “You were good to confess the full truth, and more so, I never had to press. You give me everything, at every chance you get. I love my new boots, by the way.”
“I’m so glad.” She reveled in his touch as he stroked the sponge across her face.
“This is what you did for me on that first night. I was in the most unspeakable pain, right through my bones. It was the way you washed my face that made me want to keep living. Who would think a sponge and warm water could be so soothing?”
She tried to lighten her tone. “The sponge is from the store in Paris, too. Only the best for you.”
He wouldn’t allow her to sidestep her emotion. “I felt how much you cared for me.”
Maybe he was asking her to feel that now, too, so she closed her eyes, and it felt real. He was tracing and stroking the sponge across her brow, cheeks, lips, neck. Over and over.
This was forever love, till death parted them.
