Page 45 of Baron Bolt

“Then their cards shall play.” Ophelia was already gathering, shuffling, the pack riffling alive in her hands. “We will deal the invalids in and play their hands for them, and they may consider it a mercy, because I will play Lady Archer’s cards far better than she does. Cut, my lord.”

He cut. She dealt four hands into their accustomed places.

And the game that followed was, she thought it even as it was happening and marveled at it a little, the best of her marriage.

The fire settled and glowed. The rain kept its soft country time against the glass. The empty chairs retained their hands, and their hands behaved considerably better than their owners. The score crept her way, penny by penny, in her neat pencil column. Somewhere in the third hand she caught herself doing the one-handed cut, her father’s cut, the cards turning over her fingers without her permission. She glanced up and found one thick brown eyebrow raised at her across the table.

“My father,” she murmured, by way of confession.

“I begin to suspect your father of a great many improprieties.”

“You have no idea.” She swept a trick that had cost him something and set it by her elbow. “He could shuffle one-handed, deal with either, and make a card arrive anywhere in the house he liked. He maintained, quite seriously, he would have said it to a bishop, that the queen of hearts was in love with him and followed him from room to room. I found her under my pillow when I was six. In the butter dish. Inside my prayer book once, at church, right at the Confession.” The memory arrived warm. She let it. “And he never once, in his whole life, did a trick at play. Tricks were for the nursery and the drawing room. The table was played straight, always. He used to say the cards forgive a great deal, but never disrespect.”

Damian had listened the way he did everything. Entirely. His eyes stayed on her over his cards. Now he stared down at his hand and laid upon her winning heart, because she had forced it from him, because he had no other, the queen.

“I have held that lady twice this evening,” he said, to his cards, perfectly grave. “Both times you have taken her from me directly. I conclude she is not in love with me.”

It caught her mid-laugh. She was still half in the church pew with the queen of hearts pressed at the Confession, and the two laughs collided and became one with no manners in it at all. She was breathless and warm to the ears and reaching across the little table to gather the trick, the queen face-up on top of it.

And he had not leaned back.

He always leaned back. For two weeks they had run a silent, ceaseless, mutually chaperoned retreat. He leaned away when she leaned in. She found the window when he stood too near. One of them always coughed, or spoke of the hour, or recollected something urgent in another room. A hundred tiny rescues, offered for one another with perfect courtesy. She was close enough now to see the candle-flame standing in both his mismatched eyes. Close enough that the next rescue was due. Overdue.

Neither of them reached for it.

She stared up into the mismatched blue she had been cataloging for days from her careful, rationed distance. The left lid heavy. The left iris that half-tone paler, rinsed, strange. The eyes of the scarred and buttoned nobleman. She searched herself for a flinch, the scholar’s cool inch of distance she had been holding herself to.

It was not there.

There was no flinch. Worse, there was tenderness.

Ophelia blinked in astonishment.

The last of the rubber lay between them, unfinished. His hand still rested on the edge of the table, long fingers quiet on the green baize, and she could smell the beeswax and the faint clean starch of him underneath the fire. He was closer than the game required. She had not noticed him closing the space. Or she had noticed, and had let it happen, which was worse.

She was never able to say, afterward. Not that night. Not ever. Which of them crossed the last few inches. It did not matter then, and it never would.

His mouth was cool. That was the first fact of it, arriving with the queer clarity facts have when the rest of the mind has stopped working. Cool as spring water. Cool as the shaded side of the house in summer. Dry at first, almost chaste, the careful press of someone who had not done this in a very long time and was not certain he was allowed to do it now. She felt his lower lip, the faint catch of scar tissue at the left corner where it climbed toward his jaw, and then, slowly, not cool. Warmth came up in him like a fire catching in a cold hearth, patient, real, working outward from some banked place he had not meant her to find.

She made a tiny sound she would not have recognized as her own. Not a protest. Not quite a plea.

Somewhere in the middle of that warming the table became impossible. They were standing. She never knew how. A chair complaining behind her. Cards sighing off the table’s edge to the carpet, a soft rain of pasteboard, the king of hearts landing face-up by her hem. His hand had come to rest at her back, very large and very careful, spread between her shoulder blades as if she were made of something he had been ordered not to break. Through silk and stays she felt the heat of that palm like a brand he was trying not to set. She laid her own palm along his jaw, the left side, the scarred side, thumb finding the ridge where the flesh had been drawn and mended, and felt him stop.

All of him.

Breath. Pulse. The minute shift of muscle under her hand. He went still the way a horse went still when it decided whether to bolt or stand, and for one stretched, glittering second she thought she had ruined it. She did not take the hand away. She had not come this far across the table to pretend the scar was not there.

He did not pull away.

Instead, he leaned into it, the whole granite length of him, and the kiss gentled and deepened and gentled again, as if they had both privately decided that the mothers’ headaches could be relied upon until morning. His mouth opened on hers. Not hungry. Not yet. Asking. She answered before she had time to assemble a better plan, and the taste of him arrived all at once. Tea, a trace of the brandy he had not quite finished, and underneath that something cleaner, rain on wool, the cold he carried in from the park. Her fingers slid from the scar into the dark hair above his collar, shorter than fashion, still a soldier’s cut, and his breath left him against her lip in a sound so low it might have been her name if he had let it become one.

The careful hand at her back gathered a fold of her gown and did not tear it. Held. His other hand found the side of her throat, thumb resting in the hollow there with a reverence that left her knees remarkably unreliable.

She felt the faint rasp of his jaw when the angle changed, the living heat of his mouth taking a more certain claim, and heat of her own answered it, unbidden, climbing from someplace she had kept off the books.

She had thought she understood desire. She had been kissed. Edward had been kind. This was not that. This was the slow, disastrous recognition that she wanted him to put his mouth on her again, and again, and that she would stand here in the wreck of a card game until the fire died if he would only keep doing it.

His chest was a fortress under her other hand. Wool, buttons, that starched cravat tied higher than any man in the county. She could feel him through it anyway … the hard plane of him, the sure hammer of his heart, the way he leaned a fraction into her palm. She parted her lips for him a second time, surer now, and his tongue met hers with a restraint so severe it was almost tenderness. Almost. There was hunger under the care. She felt it. She answered that too.