Page 56 of The Captive
“Lock the door.” He’d managed the words, a growled order, not a polite request.
She set the razor aside, locked the door, then turned him gently by the shoulders to face the afternoon sun. “This won’t take long.”
It took forever, the slow, soft slide of the razor on his throat, over his cheeks and jaw, all around the contours of his mouth and above his lips. Gillian had a deft touch, soaping, scraping, scraping again, and she talked to him as she worked.
“I had to make my obeisance to the shops while I was in Town, though I kept my blacks on all the while. In summer’s heat, going about with a veil on isn’t practical, but people will surely talk if one doesn’t. Chin up, Mercia. Almost done, and I’ve brought you some scent that put me in mind of you.”
And then the ordeal was over too quickly, and Christian missed the feel of her hands, confident, gentle, sure and easy as she turned his jaw, slid the razor over his skin, and brushed his hair back from his face.
He clung to her voice while she patted something that smelled pleasantly of ginger and lemon onto his cheeks.
“You’re quite a handsome man under your plumage, you know. Helene used to lord it over me, which was her right, of course. Though your cheeks are pale, thanks to your beard.”
She brushed her hand over his cheeks, then down his neck, to his shoulders. Her touch was light, but in no wise tentative. She was…petting him, the way he’d pet Chessie, for his pleasure and for the horse’s.
“Look at yourself,” she said, turning him by the shoulders to face the mirror. “A ducal countenance, if ever I beheld one.”
She kept a hand on the middle of his bare back, and he mentally shuddered to think of the skin beneath her fingers. Ridged with a bizarre pattern of scars, Girard’s idea of a joke, to make living embroidery on his prisoner, hemming along bone and muscle in little pink puckered ridges that would fade but never leave Christian’s body or his awareness.
And yet, his countess touched him, casually, easily, proud of her handiwork with his whiskers.
“You’re still lean,” she said, “but coming along nicely. No wonder Helene was such a braggart, having a swain like you for her own.”
The hand on his back radiated warmth, steadied, supported, and reassured, as it brought life and heat to places inside him long lost to light.
To be touched with such kindness…
“I missed a spot,” she said, taking her hand away and reaching for the damp towel on the windowsill. She went after blood dried on the slope of his chest, a brown streak that came away easily enough and soiled the towel.
As she scrubbed at him, the sunlight caught all manner of highlights in her hair, from red to bronze to flax to…
He put his finger under her chin and turned her face up to the light.
“Gillian, how in the bloody hell did you get such a goddamned ugly bruise?”
***
His Grace was breathtakingly handsome, more so than when he’d been a younger man, more so than when Gilly had first confronted him up in London a few weeks ago. Without his beard she could see he’d lost the worst of his gaunt edge, put on some weight, and some…confidence. Maybe a lot of confidence.
But he was glaring at her ferociously, for all his finger traced her hairline gently.
“I bumped my head when we lost a wheel about two hours from here.” She stood close to him, and his body heat, clean and scented with the ginger and lemon aftershave, threatened to swamp her wits.
“You put ice on this?” His touch moved over her forehead slowly, then he sank all four fingers into her hair and feathered the pad of his thumb over her bruise.
She could not move, did not want to move. “Ice wasn’t on hand. We were in open country, and I would rather have spent the time completing our journey than pestering each coaching inn for some unlikely ice.”
He set his lips to her bruise. Gilly’s insides rose up and sighed when his arms slipped around her, for when, when had anybodyever, kissed a hurt of hers better?
“John Coachman will rue the day,” he said.
The duke brought her against him so Gilly’s cheek was pressed against the scarred flesh of his chest. They’d shared embraces before, but nothing like this. His fingers massaged her nape, his flat male nipple was directly in her line of sight, and she felt empty and hungry and mortified all at once.
But oh,feathers, he was holding her snug and secure against the warm, muscular planes of his body, with his freshly shaved scent teasing her nose, and the rise and fall of his breathing a lullaby to her common sense.
She opened her mouth and turned her face to his chest. Not a kiss, certainly not a nibble. She inhaled, trying to get nearer to his essence, and bundled in, closing her eyes to the half-naked sight of him. She’d been terrified in that coach, and she was terrified in a different way in Christian Severn’s embrace.
Later, she’d think. Now, all she wanted was tofeel. Feel him, feel them together, feel her body coming to life with all the terror and determination of a spirit first emerging into the world.
