As if in rebellion against that, she placed another slice of holiday cake onto her plate. “By the way, Ash, did you come to see me about something?”
His heart stuttered.
He; Mrs. Watson; Holmes; her sister, Miss Olivia Holmes; and Miss Olivia’s beau, Mr. Stephen Marbleton, had lately returned from a fortnight in France, during which they’d burgled a tightly guarded château of some of its most closely held secrets. Much had happened that night. He’d always had the presentiment that repercussions would be felt far into the future, but for Mr. Marbleton the consequences had already been unkind.
Lord Ingram had learned of the younger man’s forced departure this morning, as he’d been about to travel with his children to the Derbyshire countryside. Their original plan would have seen them change trains in London and continue on their journey, but the news had careened into him like a runaway carriage.
Mr. Marbleton had been so full of hopes and hopeful plans. Come spring he’d wanted all of them to go on another trip together, this time to warm, sunny Andalusia, a holiday that would have been delightful for everyone involved, but especially so for Miss Olivia, who loved warm, sunny places almost as much as she loved her rare bouts of freedom, away from her neglectful yet limiting parents.
And now, in the blink of an eye, Mr. Marbleton had become a prisoner, not behind bars, but fettered and held captive all the same.
Lord Ingram understood the chaos and unpredictability of life. But this time, faced with a fresh reminder that disruption was the very nature of the universe, his thoughts had instantly turned to Holmes.
She already knew that he loved her—he’d never said so to her, but she’d been seated beside him when he’d made that confession to a pair of policemen. And she already knew, too, that in some distant, hypothetical future, with all obstacles and complexities magically removed from their lives, he would be happy for them to . . . spend more time together?
They’d been too oblique. They’d spoken of going together to Andalusia and other southerly, beautiful places, perhaps all the way to the fabled hill stations of the subcontinent, but they’d never specified exactly what they’d meant.
Perhaps the oblique and unspecified had been all that they’d needed.
Perhaps that had been all that they’d been capable of.
But this morning as he’d read her letter about Mr. Marbleton again and again, growing more chilled with every paragraph, he had been filled with an urgent need to see her—and to turn all the lovely, insubstantial metaphors into something concrete.
“Yes, I did come to see you,” he said in answer to her question.
She looked at him expectantly, her eyes at once limpid and fathomless. She must know what he had come to say, and yet, he found that he did not.
Not exactly.
It was not the first time he’d placed himself before a woman, his heart on his sleeve. The previous time, when he’d offered his hand in marriage to the then Miss Alexandra Greville, though his fervor had been sincere and his idealism real, he had nevertheless seen his love as a gift, a great and precious blessing upon his penniless future wife.
Who had instead experienced it as a great and unwanted yoke.
He would not do the same to Holmes, to blanket her, even if it was with love, when she preferred to be without encumbrances. Was there not something she desired that he could give her?
Ah, but from the very beginning, she’d always been clear about what she wanted from him.
Which he had been too proud—and too afraid—to give. Because . . . what if it was the only thing she would ever want from him?
But today, under her steady blue gaze—today he wasn’t so proud. Or so afraid.
So today he set down his whisky, rose from his chair, and went to her. Today he braced a hand on the back of her chair and set his other hand against her soft, full cheek. And today, he dipped his head and took her lips in his.
Four
The first time Charlotte Holmes had kissed Lord Ingram, she’d been thirteen and he fifteen—and she’d blackmailed him into it by threatening to lure a horde of unruly children to the ruins of a Roman villa that he had been in the middle of excavating.
She remembered very little of the kiss itself. For a girl who possessed near-perfect recall, that had been a grand anomaly, as if for the duration of the kiss, her brain had suffered some sort of catastrophic mechanical failure.
She did remember the faint whiff of Turkish tobacco that clung to him. She did remember the stare he gave her afterward, his expression opaque and unfriendly. And she did remember watching him march away, his strides long and swift, while her fingertips prickled with remnant heat and electricity.
A dozen years passed before they kissed for the second time this past summer. Their circumstances had changed greatly, as had they as people, yet exactly the same thing had happened. She had emerged from that kiss, too, as if from a daze, aware only that she was holding on to him, her cheek against the lapel of his coat, his heartbeat drumming in synchrony with her own.
Much again had happened in the months since, most notably that they had slept together. Not as an ignition of long-suppressed desires—though she suspected they’d had enough of those to set a dozen beds on fire—but as a measure calculated to create a certain impression, while dealing with a dangerous adversary.
Thankfully, as driven by ulterior motives as those two bouts of physical intimacy had been, she remembered them very well. The very correct, very straitlaced Lord Ingram had been as depraved in bed as she could have hoped for—and she had hoped for a great deal, having had long years to contemplate, in theory, all manner of debauchery and indecency.
Present-day Lord Ingram leaned down toward her.
The faint scar by his temple that he had acquired after a trip abroad two years ago. The gleam of the tiny antique coin that adorned his favorite stickpin. The beginning of stubble on a jaw that had been closely shaven that morning.
Heat.
Pressure.
Incitement.
He straightened.
She panted, as if she’d just finished a session of canne de combat training. Her face felt hot. The soles of her feet tingled. And still she could only recall bits and pieces of the kiss—the texture of his hair between her fingers, the slight roughness of wool under her other hand, the slide of the tip of his tongue across the inside of her upper lip—as if she’d dreamt of it and most of the dream had evaporated upon waking up.
Silence.
Not a fraught silence, full of undertow and that asphyxiated feeling in the chest. Nor an easy, relaxed silence. More as if . . . as if they were two travelers who found themselves in a place not marked on any map, and were looking about for their bearings.
“So this is what you came to see me for,” she murmured. “Does it have something to do with Mr. Stephen Marbleton’s involuntary return to Château Vaudrieu?”