Page 83 of Baron Bolt

Ophelia looked at him. The look lasted. Then she reached out and squared the edge of his dealt cards with one fingertip. Small. Habit. Tidying the table before she played.

“Do you know what my life has been, these two years?” she said. “Everything moved. Everything. My father taught me that a cool head and a good hand will always land, and then his stake went bad and he was on a ship before I could so much as talk to him. Edward was a reasonable man and a reasonable match, and an accident put him in the ground. My name. My prospects. The floor itself. All of it moving, all the time, like playing cards on the deck of a ship being tossed in a storm. And then there was you.” Her chin came up. “You, who kept a deathbed promise it would have cost you nothing to break. You, who stood between me and ruin and never once asked to be thanked for it, or even noticed for it. Every single time I leaned, and I leaned, Damian, I leaned harder than I ever let you see, you were exactly where you had been the day before. Do you understand what that is worth, to a gambler’s daughter, to find a gentleman as constant as you?”

“Ophelia—”

“I am not finished. You have been waiting for me to see a monster, so let me report what I have actually seen.” She inhaled, and reached out a hand to cover his. “A man who is kind to his impossible mother. A man who guards a green ensign’s life with his own. A man who makes a joke perhaps once a fortnight, and when he does, it is so unexpected that I cannot help but laugh like a giddy schoolgirl. There has never been a monster when I looked at you. And I have looked. There has only ever been a true gentleman.”

The clock on the mantel said little. His heart had no business beating, but it made a considerable noise all the same.

She stood. She drew the pins from her hair one by one and set them on the table by the lamp. Gold came down around her shoulders. She looked down at him with her father’s nerve and her own mouth curving.

“Move over, husband. I have been cold all night.”

“You will be colder,” he said. “I run cooler than I used to.”

“Then we shall have to manage something. Pull back the bed curtains.”

Pull back the bed curtains. She wanted to see.

He drew back the sheet. She came into his bed. He had bolted a door between them every night of his married life. Now he pulled his wife in against him with both arms, as a man, because she had asked him to. He buried his face in her silken hair and breathed. Only that, for a while. Her hair and the weight of her. The warm press of her breasts through thin lawn. The vibrant heat of her rounded belly against his.

Then her hands began to travel, and she asked about him.

Her fingertips found the seam along his collarbone first. A thin, pale ridge, almost tidy compared with the rest of him.

“This?”

“Canister shot.”

She kissed it. Unhurried. Thorough. Not a peck of pity, but the sort of attention a woman gave to something precious to her. Her mouth was open. Soft. Wet. His breath went to pieces on the first press of it. Heat followed the path of her lips, and the old cellar-cold under his skin began to warm. She lingered there long enough that he felt the press of her tongue against the ridge, and his cock, trapped between them, thickened in a slow heavy pulse he could not hide. Perhaps he was not as dead as he had once believed.

The long ridge across his chest came next, ladder-marked, the one he had never let daylight touch. He felt her pause there, mapping it with the pad of one finger before she asked.

“And this?”

“The gun itself, I think. I was close.”

Another kiss, at the worst of it, where the stitching had puckered and never quite recovered itself. He shut his eyes. He could not have predicted the way her mouth made the scar feel like skin again. She kissed along the whole ladder of it, one press after another, until his nipple tightened under the near pass of her lips and a sound tore out of him, low and helpless. Against her hip he was fully hard now. She would feel it. He did not pull away.

The broad wreck of his left shoulder.

“This one?”

“I have no idea,” he said, and the old black humor came up in him and, for once, met company instead of silence. “I was dead for that part.”

She laughed. Horrified. Helpless. Her forehead dropped against his sternum, and the laugh undid him more completely than the kisses had. It shook through her into him. He had spent all this time learning how to be a body that did not ask for anything. The sound of her amusement against his ruined chest exposed him to everything he had yearned for these past few weeks.

Then her palm slid up his throat, along the faint scarring at his jaw, and her thumb came to rest at the outer corner of his left eye. She stopped there. He went still. He had known she would find it. He had not known she would linger.

“I have studied this eye across many hands of whist,” she said, low. “You think it gives you away. It is my favorite thing in your face.”

“It is wrong,” he protested. “The color.”

“It is the one part of you that never learned to lie to me. When you looked at me and pretended you felt nothing, the right eye held the line beautifully. This one.” She kissed the scarred corner of it, barely there. A breath more than a kiss. “This one watched me deal, and wanted.”

There was nothing to say to that so he stopped trying.

Her hands went where they pleased after that. Everywhere they went, warmth followed. That was the part he could not get past, lying in the lamplight while his wife mapped every inch the anatomist had sewn. The cellar-cold that had lived under his skin gave way before her palms. Heat came up along his ribs, his chest, low across his belly, as if she were lighting lamps down the corridors of a shut house, room by room. When her hand crossed his stomach the muscles jumped. When her knuckles grazed the linen over his cock he hissed through his teeth and she paused, only a heartbeat, and then her palm settled over him, learning the thick heat of him through cloth, the heat, the way he kicked against her hand. She did not take that hand away. When she found the new wound at his side her touch gentled and her eyes came up, asking.