Page 31 of A Night of Secret Surrender
Was it only this once that Celeste meant to bed him? She had not uttered a word. That worried him. Sitting up, he leaned against the wall and pushed the sheet away, looking at his body just as she might have regarded it.
Had she enjoyed such lust?
She was pacing now, he could hear the footfalls as they wandered to and fro in the other room. Softening his breath, he sat very still, wishing morning would come and he could dress and they could thrash out what to do about...everything. The quiet turn of paper alerted him to the fact that she was reading the book Lian had given her.
A journal, he thought, for in the second he had held it he had seen the name of the edge on the spine.
August Fournier.
Her father’s thoughts. That would not be easy reading. August had been a man ill at peace with his world or with his place in it. He wished Celeste would wander in to talk with him, to discuss such ramblings. But she did not, the candle blown out after half an hour and the dark descending.
He made himself think about the morrow, the routes they might travel, the dangers they could encounter. Part of him wanted to turn east on exiting the city simply because it was the last direction anyone would look for him. But he had more contacts in the west and south and he knew he would need them. He also had a good deal of money now and Lian’s help would make the passage from Paris so much safer.
He wished they were already out of the city and away on the rural roads. It was easier to hide in the country than it ever would be in a town filled with soldiers. Easier to be alone with Celeste, too, but he pushed that consideration back.
A sniff alerted him to something not being quite right. Then another one came, muffled by cloth. She was crying. He hoped it was the book that had incited such strong emotion and not the regret of lying with him.
After a few moments, the sound stopped altogether and then there was only silence.
* * *
I am at my wits’ end to know what to do about Mary Elizabeth. I think she is mad and her mother knows this, too, for she watches her daughter like a hawk.
Last week she tried to kill us. She fed us meat that was laced with a poison and it was only after a few bites that the Dowager dashed away the plates so that they crashed upon the floor, tablecloth and all.
We were sick for days with a fever and Mary Elizabeth was locked in the West Wing and attended to by a series of physicians.
She tried to kill us again this morning on the rooftop of Langley...
Celeste closed the journal. She remembered this. Her mother shoving them hard from behind with a large piece of wood so they slipped down on to the icy tiles and slid a good ten yards before fetching up against a gutter post that protruded upwards. When she had looked back, her mama was gone and she and her papa had finally found purchase to crawl their way back to safety.
She’d visited Summer in the early afternoon of that same day, offering her body to the only true friend she had ever had, in gratitude and in shock. The white and blue garter she’d worn had been a symbol of all that she would forfeit in the gesture: marriage, domesticity, a future. She’d held on to him like a lifeline in a shifting sea and felt in such sacrifice the first stirrings of grace.
Long gone now, of course, such decency and mercy. She was everything these days that her mother had cursed her to be, half-dead and coldly detached. Broken save for this night in Summer’s arms.
That thought had her biting down on her bottom lip, gnawing at the shock of it. She’d begun to feel again in the deep thrust of his returned ardour, in the warmth of his skin and in the goodness of his soul. He’d leached out some of her coldness and replaced it with hope. Stupid, foolish, inane, nonsensical hope. The misguided desire for a second chance or another destiny that could never come to fruition for people like her.
When Summer had offered her marriage and the protection of his name, as they had both regained their breath after that first time in the barn at Langley, she’d laughed at him. She was tainted with the brush of her mother’s madness and not even marriage to Summer would save her from that. It could never have worked between them—demons and angels, after all, were a poor mix.
She’d wished her mother dead then and had returned to the house to find that she had killed herself, the windows being cloaked with dark fabric and the faces of the servants sombre.
She and her father had left Langley early the following morning, running for the English coast and France with all the haste of travellers who had chaos snapping at their heels.
And now here she was again, dancing in the arms of passion and trying to believe it could be more. Until the wedding ring had caught the light of the moon and slashed away any kind of a future.
The saint and the sinner.
There was a truth to the phrase that caught at her last vestige of honour and shattered it into pieces.
Lust required no invested emotion. She saw it merely as a physical process, a necessary action to soothe the mind and the body. Animals did it. Insects, too.
She shut the journal with a thud, wiped her eyes and lay down to sleep. No more. She must expect only the scraps of intimacy and be happy with it.
She was Brigitte Guerin, murderer, whore and thief, and a woman with the sort of past that meant she could never be more than a ghost on the very edge of a proper society.
Grinding her teeth together, she prayed that she would not dream tonight of the blood of her father’s death or of her own shame, so when the touch of Summer Shayborne came into her mind she smiled and relaxed into the warmth of memory. Take this little comfort, she thought, and savour it. Take tonight as a gift, the last joy of intimacy before she walked into the empty wasteland of her future.
Chapter Five
