Page 55 of The Captive Duke
“You were lost in thought,” she said, crossing the room sedately. “You did not hear me knock.” Still she didn’t look at the brutality mapped on his chest, arms, and torso, didn’t look anywhere but into his eyes. “I should have knocked louder, I’m sure.”
She stood before him, a little green bottle in one hand, and reached up a finger to his collarbone.
“You’re bleeding, you wretched man. Why…?” But as she dropped her gaze, she took in the accoutrements of his task.
“You were seeing to your toilette,” she said, relief in her eyes. “You’ll let me help you.”
Her voice pushed back the worst of the shadows in his mind. He passed her the razor, relieved when she took it from his hand.
“Shall you sit, Mercia? You are too tall for me to attend you properly when you stand.” She brought a dressing stool over to the window and stood back, arms crossed as if his height were a minor transgression for which sitting was the prescribed penance.
“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 inno 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 anybodyeverkissed a hurt of hers better?
