Page 113 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
She searches my face. “I didn’t push you too hard? Take it too far?”
No.
No, Emily’s only sin was helping me commit my own.
I shake my head. “You didn’t take it too far. You didn’t . . . take liberties.”
“Then why—”
“I liked it too much,” I cut in. It’s impolite, I was raised never to be impolite—or at least to use impoliteness with a certain kind of sophistication if the weapon was called for—but I can’t help the way the truth spills out of me. “I love her, Emily. I didn’t think—I shouldn’t have liked it like that.”
Emily’s face softens. Even with the septum piercing and the black lipstick, she looks kind. Gentle. “It’s a physiological response, Delphine,” she says. “One you’ve been training yourself to have for a long time. It doesn’t make you culpable of anything.”
I’m already shaking my head. “I got up there with you. I knelt for you. I’m culpable.”
Emily takes a step forward. “Don’t flagellate yourself over this,” she chastens. “That’s our job. Anyway, Rebecca will understand completely when you explain it to her. Unless . . . ”
She’s so close now that I can count her eyelashes, that I can pick out the golden striations in her brown eyes.
“Unless what?” I whisper.
“Unless you want to do something you can’t explain.” And then she leans forward and kisses me.
The kiss is warm and assertive. In that way, it’s like kissing Rebecca.
But in every other way, it’s not.
Rebecca tastes like mint, and Emily tastes like coffee. Rebecca peppers her kisses with nips and bites, and Emily prefers to stroke inside my mouth with her tongue. Rebecca loves to grab and seize at me—my wrists, my hips, my hair—and Emily only runs her hands up my arms, as if she’s mapping me for future exploration.
I receive the kiss passively at first, utterly floored by it, but by the time my mind has caught up, my body is already racing ahead, responding to her lips and tongue with matching flickers and strokes, ready to deepen the kiss, ready to press against her.
It’s a nice kiss from a fit woman. But it’s not the woman I want kisses from, it’s not her, it’s not Rebecca. With a gasp, I tear away from Emily and stagger back, my fingers coming up to my lips.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I love her and I—I can’t do that.”
Emily reaches for me, she opens her mouth—now smeared with my own lipstick, pink over black—but I don’t wait to hear what she has to say. I can’t. I wheel around and go outside, where the evening light still hangs in a rosy shroud over the city and where I find one of the club’s footman outside.
“Hello, yes, so sorry to bother you. But could you get my things for me from inside? And help me call my car? I need to leave, and I can’t go back inside.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rebecca
Everything changed three years ago.
Everything and nothing at all.
When I heard the key turn in the lock that night, I was sitting in my flat with a glass of wine and another two hours of work to do before I could call it a day. Then, as it is now, only one other person had a key, so I didn’t bother getting up. It would be Auden, probably hungry or bored or wanting to gossip, too sober to entertain himself or too drunk to eat a kebab alone. I was used to his unannounced visits.
Which meant I was unprepared for whom I saw coming up the stairs. For the flaxen hair, and the doll face, and the curves right out of some Teutonic milkmaid fantasy.
Delphine Dansey.
Dislike surged instantly: she was everything that made me impatient. She was every vapid, moneyed, horse-owning girl that had nettled me at school. Every effete client too ridiculous and entitled to listen to the reality of soil composition and hill slopes and which climate conditions could support imported tropical plants.
Delphine was emblematic of the whole lot to me. Vain, superficial, callous, and callow. That she was beautiful only made it worse; that she was cheerful only made it worse than that. Everyone believed her to be some kind of perfect English rose, and only I knew the truth: she was a brat.
Luckily for Delphine, and even luckier for me, my thoughts move quickly. And so from the first glimpse of her golden hair to the sight of her face, I remembered she was Auden’s good friend, and I remembered what had happened to her last spring. I remembered the trial.
