Page 51 of Those Fatal Flowers

“Thomas will be looking for me.” Cora guides my hand away from her mouth before dropping it at my side. “Let’s go back.”

I have never hated Thomas more than I do in this moment. Raidne, our brilliant haruspex, will soon dig her fingers through his entrails, and oh, how I’ll relish it.

At the head table, Mistress Bailie clinks a fork against her glass. Her daffodil hair is twisted into an elaborate bun on the top of her head, encircled in a crown of holly berries. Everyone’s attention turns to her except for Thomas’s, which finds its way to me. His stare makes my mouth run dry.

“Please, friends, find a seat,” Agnes begins, motioning to the tables around the room. The most food I’ve seen since arriving here is distributed generously across each—apples spiced with cinnamon, cheeses, nuts, and even a few roasted birds and pies. People sit in the chairs closest to them, paying no mind to rank. During Yule, the traditional class separations don’t apply. Will and I settle in beside Margery and Jeremie. I reach for her hand and squeeze it gently. The toddler giggles up at me from underneath a head of blond curls, the perfect cherub for the season. Despite my better judgment, the boy is growing on me.

“I know we’re all preparing for a very rationed winter, but we’ve worked hard these past few days to prepare this beautiful feast. Tonight, let’s enjoy the fruits of our labors as we celebrate the birth of our Lord!” Mistress Bailie concludes her speech with an exaggerated curtsy, and then everyone tears into their food.

“We’veworked very hard?” I raise an eyebrow to Margery, and she laughs. Mistress Bailie hasn’t so much as lifted a spoon, let alone helped prepare a meal.

The other women’s work is a huge success, a stark departure from the last few weeks of hardtack and gruel. I let each bite sit in my mouth, savoring the decadence of the meats, the richness of the cheeses, and I wash the food down with large sips of mulled wine. I’m drunk halfway through supper.

Too late, it occurs to me that I should be embarrassed, but when I look around, everyone is equally intoxicated. It’s almost pleasant until I catch sight of Thomas whispering something into Cora’s ear. Whatever he says makes color rise along her throat, and she pushes at his chest gently, turning a flushed face demurely away from him.

Thomas grins.

Will sees it, too. Perhaps it’s the drink, perhaps it’s thedesperate need to feel something, anything, else, but he rests a warm palm on my leg beneath the table. My head snaps to face him, but he continues his meal with his free hand, engaged in a conversation with a man on his left. I can feel the heat of his fingers, even through my various layers of skirts. I know my cheeks must be turning scarlet.

Would it be so wrong to feel something other than guilt and loss for one night?

I could brush his hand away. Instinct tells me that if I did, he’d never touch me again. But there’s something far more intoxicating than the wine in letting it remain. A power, however small, I haven’t felt for centuries.

Memories of Cora’s breath on the back of my neck, of her fingers lacing me into my gown, rush forward, and I choose this: I won’t turn Will away. They have the same intense green eyes, the same night-black curls. Cora leads Thomas to the dance floor, and Will is here, extending an invitation. Is he not the safest way to be close to her? My punishment would be mild for lying with my betrothed—I’d hang if they discover it’s his sister I ache for.

When he finally shifts his focus back to me, those sparkling jade eyes officially ask the question. Behind him, Cora throws back her head and laughs at Thomas as he lifts her by the hips off the floor in sync with the music’s tempo.

I accept.

When we escape into the night again, I don’t have time to process the chill before Will presses me against the meetinghouse wall, his hands slipping beneath my cloak to find my hips. This is the second time I’ve found myself pinned in this shadowed corner, but I relish it now. Here, under the curtainof night, it’s easy to pretend it’s not Will’s fingers that press into the silk, not his soft curls in my hands.

But his lips are soft as they brush against mine, more of a question than a kiss, so tentative that I fear he might break away. Where would that leave me? Without this distraction, there’s nothing to keep my mind from wandering to Thomas’s hands on Cora, to how she tossed back her head with delight and put the low cut of her gown on full display for him.

My fingers tighten their hold on his locks and my lips answer his, banishing the possibility of a night spent yearning for another promised woman. The kiss is slow, deep but gentle, exactly the kind that two people each thinking of someone else might share. It’s not enough. I want, I need, to feel the pleasant warmth beneath my skin burst into flames.

“Like you mean it,” I whisper into his ear, my teeth grazing along the lobe. “Like I’m him.”

Will stills against me, and a painful moment passes where neither of us speaks.

“I’m sorry, I—” The words have barely left my mouth when he kisses me again, and this time, it’s a wave crashing against the shore. The hesitation has vanished, replaced by hunger—what else to call the way his tongue parts my lips to taste me, the way his grip on my hips tightens? He presses the entirety of his weight into me, and the delicate silk of my gown snags against the meetinghouse’s rough wooden walls, but I don’t care. In this moment I’ll let him consume every part of me, even my feelings for his sister, if it means she can’t haunt me tonight.

When he parts my legs with his knee, I gasp against his mouth, reveling in how easy it is to trick the body into trading one ache for another. And unlike the longing I feel for Cora, this thirst can be quenched.

“Take me home.” I barely recognize the sound of my voice, thick with longing.

Without a word, Will lifts me from the ground to spin me around. I can’t help it—I laugh, tilting my head up to the skyto catch falling snowflakes on my tongue. The hood of mycloak falls back to my shoulders, but the shock of air onmy neck feels incredible against the heat that radiates across my skin. When our eyes meet again, he pulls me in close once more and steals the snowflakes from my mouth.

There it is. The fire.

When we reach her—his—home, he pushes the door open so forcefully that the cottage shakes around us. My fingers find the clasp of my cloak before I cross inside, and as soon as the door clicks shut behind me, I drop the garment to the floor. It lies there unceremoniously, all the bed we need.

The room is dark but warm, the only light cast from the hearth’s fire. It crackles gently, ready for another log, but thatwill have to wait until we’re done. In its low glow, I linger on his similar features—the curve of his lashes, the gentle slope of his nose—as we close the space between us once more.

Our lips meet, and our fingers pull frantically at the strings of each other’s clothes with little success. But then Will breaks the kiss to spin me away from him, making use of the firelight to unlace the back of my gown. I close my eyes, trying to pretend it’s Cora who stands behind me now, but Will’s touch isn’t as delicate. The gown falls to the floor with a sigh, and then I’m before him in only my shift, hair still pinned beneath a simple white coif.

“Are you sure about this, my lady?”

His kindness catches me by surprise—I don’t want it, not now, when every moment our bodies lose contact is a moment when thoughts of Cora and Thomas threaten to slip in.One of my fingers finds his lips to quiet him, while the other hand moves to the band of his trousers.

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