Page 46 of Baron Bolt

A log settled in the grate. Rain went on against the dark glass. The house, for once, kept its own counsel.

When it ended she was against his chest, her forehead somewhere in the region of that starched fortress of a cravat, breathing him in as her chest heaved. His heart was going under her ear. Going quickly, she noted, with a gambler’s satisfaction. Quickly as her own. She felt him bend his head. Felt the words arrive in her hair, low, wry, and warmer than she had ever heard him.

“We ought to have played two-handed more often.”

Then his hands came to her shoulders, and he set her back from him. Gently. The way he had set down the card table, without a sound. The air where he had been was cold at once. She felt the loss of him like a lamp blown out. He gazed at her for a moment with those unmatched eyes, and whatever was in his face was already being buttoned away, but not fast enough. She saw it go. Want. And behind the want, the old flinch, the thing that lived under the high collar and had nothing to do with her at all.

“Goodnight, Ophelia.”

And then he went. He did not hurry, because he never hurried, but he went. The door closed behind him with a soft click, and Ophelia stood alone in the wreck of the game.

Cards on the carpet. Cards on the table. The king of hearts still staring up from the hem of her gown. The mothers’ letters stacked on the sideboard. The fire burning down. The rain drumming against the dark glass. Her mouth felt swollen, and sweet, and her heart was hitting her ribs like a fist banging on a door. She and Edward had enjoyed their time together, but it was nothing to this. A single kiss had shaken her to her toes.

She lifted her fingers to her own lips, absurdly, as if to keep the fact of him there. Cool, then warm. The scar under her palm. The sound he had made that might have been her name. She had not imagined it. The wall of a gentleman had kissed her back, and he had wanted to. She had felt that want in his mouth and in the careful hold at her spine, and she would not let him button it back into the coat and call the game finished.

She had had rules. Play the cards you are dealt and no others. Keep the surface fair. And never, never, whatever the table offered, stake the heart. Hearts were the one suit she did not play.

Every soul she had ever leaned upon had moved. Her father, who taught her to stand, had sailed for the Americas and left the table without so much as pushing in his chair.

Edward, poor reasonable Edward, who liked her and whom she had liked, had been carried off before the church could catch them up.

Luck itself, that oldest friend of the family, had turned on the turn of a single wager. Everything moved.

Ophelia sat down slowly at the abandoned card table and let herself understand it.

She was in love with him. With Damian. Scarred, stern, cool-fingered. The wall of stone.

Everything in her life had moved eventually.

Damian did not.

And tonight she had leaned with everything she had, and the wall had warmed.

Everything lay within reach at once. She could feel it, spread before her like the best deal of her life. The marriage could be real. The child was safe, and claimed, and would be born at Hartleigh with two doting grandmothers already at war over its milk. And the wall had kissed her back.

She gathered the fallen cards because her hands needed an occupation, and because a pack left on a carpet was a slovenly way to end a rubber. The king of hearts went back into the deck last. She squared the edges the way her father had taught her, tap, tap, and held the pack against her still-trembling mouth for a moment she would never admit to anyone.

“Goodnight,” she told the closed door, very quietly, as if the name he had spent deserved an answer. “Damian.”

The queen of hearts lay face-up on the carpet, where his hand had let it fall.

Ophelia leaned down and picked her up, and turned her over in her fingers the way her father used to, and smiled at her painted, knowing face.

“Not in love with you,” she told the empty room. “I should not wager on that, my lord.”

CHAPTER 11

He had not slept.

The bed sat behind him unused. Coverlet still smooth. Parade-ground neat. Gray light was leaking up over the park, slow and thin, the color of pewter left out in the sun, and he had spent the whole night in the chair by the cold hearth, boots on, coat on, listening to the house tick and settle around the people sleeping in it. Down the corridor, his wife slept too.

His wife.

The word still arrived with a half-second of disbelief, as if the register at Hartleigh church had been a trick of the light. He had married her so Edward’s child would have a name and a roof. That had been the whole of the contract he allowed himself. Last night he had broken it at a card table like some green lieutenant who had never seen a battlefield.

And she had kissed him back.

That was the part that would not stop chattering. Not the fact of his mouth on hers. Her answering. The little sound she had made that was not protest. The warmth coming up in him against his will.