Page 28 of How to Ruin a Duke
“Yes, those are really the words.That’s why I had to stop singing it to you the day we met.”
“You were too shy?”
“Not at all.I thoughtyoumight be,” she teased, and he couldn’t letthatstand, of course.He had to tickle her, to take her in his arms and kiss her up and down her neck until she squirmed free, laughing.
“Have you played your horn since that day?”she asked.
He hadn’t.He hadn’t even opened its case.He’d shoved it under the bed of his rented room, a room that cost four shillings a week, with extra for meals.He was living on savings, telling himself he was working at Fairweather’s for Howard, to earn money for Howard.
But really, he was here for himself.After years of work, he was playing: changing the shop window, flirting with Rowena, taming the hedgehog.He was playacting at a life that didn’t belong to him.
I want it, he thought.I want her.“Sing some more,” he said, dodging her question.“Please.”
Rowena obliged.
“Therefore be kind, diddle diddle
While here we lie,
And you will love, diddle diddle
My hedgehog and I.”
Simon looked at her with skepticism.“Arethosereally the words?”
She blinked, all innocence.“They might as well be.”
Love again.It belonged here in this room.It belonged with her, to her; it was a part of her.Simon felt like an outsider, with nothing but a child’s memory of love.He wanted to be worthy of more, but he didn’t know how.
But he could be kind.He could hold her, lie there with her to keep her warm.To bring her, he hoped, the joy she’d asked for.
Now that he’d met her, it seemed he was ruined for a life without music or joy.And both lay beside him, for as long as he dared grasp them.
When Rowena awokein the morning, Simon was gone, but signs of him remained.The air in her room held his scent, a whisper of soap and bergamot.The mattress and pillow retained, faintly, the shape of his form.
And then there was her memory, which held every second of their conversation, their lovemaking, their embraces, their laughter.
He’d made her feel beautiful.Capable.Successful.What a gift it was, to know that she had only to grasp and what she wanted could be hers.
What a gift he’d given her, to draw pleasure from a body that had sometimes brought her annoyance and shame.To find joy in the way she was built, in the Rowena-ness of her.
Whatever he’d done in the past, whoever he’d been, he was a good man now, doing good things.
She bit her lip.He was an honest man, too, and he had always told her he was planning to move along.She mustn’t try to keep him, no matter how good it felt to have him at her side.
Oh hell.She was falling in love with him, wasn’t she?Perhaps she had even completed the process.
She would have to pretend she hadn’t.That she’d involved only her body, not her heart, because Simon was clearly the property of his own past.A large part of him had never left the village in which he’d been apprenticed, and that same part had never moved beyond the day his friend had been injured.
Well.After all the help Simon had given her, she could help him in return.Sliding bare from her bed, she retrieved her lap desk and tied a robe about her.Settling into the indentation Simon had left in her mattress, she assembled paper, ink, quill, thoughts.
And then she inscribed a brief letter to the Howard family in…what was the name of the village?Something near Wolverhampton, with a flowery sort of name.Market Thistleton, that was it.She kept her letter short, knowing they’d have to pay to receive it.She said only that she represented Simon Thorn, that he missed them and would like to make contact again.
Had he told her that?No.But it was true nonetheless.A man didn’t always have to use words to say what he meant.Especially not a man with eyes like Simon’s, which had told her the first time they met that he liked to look at her.
That he liked her.Full stop.
She was tumbling beyondliketo a place she hadn’t intended to be, a place where she didn’t want to be without him.A place where she wanted to heal his heart so that he could give it to her.
