Page 16 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

She turned. He was on the stairs behind her. And there was nothing in his face she recognised. Not the insolent gardener. Not the man who’d watched her across the kitchen. This was someone else entirely, and the sight of him stopped the breath in her chest.

He took her by the arm and hauled her towards the stairs.

“Let go of me.”

“You were told to stay out of here.”

“You forget yourself. I am the mistress here.” She wrenched against his grip and did not get free. “I will not be dragged by the arm like a disobedient hound.”

He did not answer. His grip tightened and he pulled her up the stairs and down the passage, and by the time they reached the corridor she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, that this was not the man she’d been living with.

He pressed her against the wall, his chest to her back. His hand released her arm and his palm settled flat against the wall beside her head. She could feel the length of him against her, hard, unmistakable.

“Kit—”

“Quiet.” He said it against her hair. It was barely a sound. Then, his mouth close to her ear: “You should leave this house. Tonight. Take your trunk and go back to London. Do not come back until I send for you.”

She tried to turn. He held her there.

“Why? What is down there?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you go.”

“I am not leaving my own house because a gardener tells me to.”

His breath had changed. Quicker, shallow. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her back, and something in her own body was answering it, a heat low in her belly that had no right to be there, not now, not with his hand on the wall and his voice in her ear and the smell of the cellar still on her skin.

She felt the slickness between her legs and was horrified. His actions were contemptible. Her body’s treachery was worse.

Hugh had never made her feel this. Not once in six years of marriage. Not the faintest tremor, not the smallest stir. And now this man, this ape who dragged her by the arm and pressed her to walls and told her to leave her own house, had woken something in her she had not known was sleeping.

She spun and slapped him hard enough that his head turned with it.

He looked at her. The expression on his face she had not expected to see. It looked like grief.

He turned and walked away. His footsteps echoed down the passage. She heard them stop. Then, after a long moment, continue.

Audrey pressed her back against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the cold floor, her legs stretched before her, her palm still stinging from the slap. Her heart was hammering. The warmth of his body was still pressed into her spine like a brand.

She sat there for a long time. She was furious. She was shaking. And she was, God help her, aroused, and the shame of it burned hotter than the fury.

Hugh had come to her on their wedding night and every night after for a month, and then twice a week, and then not at all, and she had felt nothing each time but the weight of him and the ceiling above her and the quiet certainty that whatever other women felt, she was not made for it. He had told her as much. Useless, he’d whispered, climbing off her, and she’d believed him, because what else could explain the nothing?

Now the wrong man had pressed himself against her and her body had answered like a door flung open in a storm, and she did not know what to do with that, and she was not going to think about it, and she was certainly not going to sit on this floor and remember the heat of his breath on her neck.

She got to her feet. She smoothed her skirt. She went to the kitchen and made tea and drank it standing at the window, watching the yard, and thought about the Wicked Widow’s rules.

Chapter eight

What Fell

Audrey

She had not seen him all day yesterday. By design. It was not difficult. He had been out since dawn, returning only after dark, his boots on the flagstones below her room and then silence. She had not gone down. He had not come up.

Today there had been no sign of him at all. It was past midnight and she did not know if he had come home. Her home. She turned the word over and it felt less solid than it had a week ago. He was likely with someone who could warm his bed. A girl in the village. A woman at the inn. Hugh had kept mistresses in three parishes, and she had known about every one of them and grieved none of them. The nights he spent elsewhere had been the most peaceful of her marriage.

She tossed and turned. The ache had sharpened since her arrival, her body in open rebellion against the hauling and scrubbing and climbing she had forced upon it. She tried to quiet her mind with the list. Thirteen of forty-six repairs completed. The remaining thirty-three seemed to multiply each time she counted them. Thinking about it only made things worse.