Page 105 of The Wolf Duke's Wife
The world simplified. He crossed the room and stood looking down at her. The lamplight gentled her face, rendering it soft and smooth. But there was fatigue there in the sudden crease of her forehead. He wanted to take from the world everything that had exhausted her and replace it with a hedgerow and an untroubled sky. She murmured his name again, and very faintly,
“Don’t…”
“I’m here,” he said, the way one says it to a child caught in a storm.
“I’m here.”
He sat on the edge of her bed and reached to smooth a lock of hair from her temple. She flinched, then softened again, the small muscles that betrayed distress unknotting one by one under his hand.
“Easy,” he said.
She breathed out, the sort of breath a person takes when they decide not to fight. His hand covered hers atop the coverlet. Her fingers were cool. He warmed them between his, not rubbing, only enclosing.
“I should have come sooner,” he whispered, “what have you done to me that I could not stay away?”
He had told himself that the necessary work lay in coin and law. It did. But it also lay here. She shifted again, a little restless, and he saw the startle rise like a bubble back through the calm. Before the thought could make itself a fear, he bent and spoke her name against her temple. He whispered into the small dark curl there that smelled of lavender and smoke. She stilled, her cheek turning to him, her nose nuzzling against his face.
He found he had closed his eyes, savoring the intimate touch. The trusting movement towards him. He kissed her softly, only the corner of her mouth. The deep line between her brows eased. The breath she took after that was deeper, not caught on thorns. He did not lift his head at once. He let his mouth rest for a heartbeat more. When he straightened, she had already slipped back down into a darker sleep.
“Idiot,” he said to himself, “hopeless, complete idiot.”
The kind of idiot who finds his enemy’s sister and then forgets his enemy entirely and falls…
He cut off his traitorous thoughts, unwilling to entertain a certain, forbidden word. There was a chair behind him. He did not use it.
I do not want to be apart from her. I do not want to be separated, to sit while she lies.
He slid a fraction back on the mattress and lay down on top of the coverlet. He meant to stay only long enough to be certain she would not wake gasping. He meant to keep the distance a dukein a rented house owed a woman he had not sworn to. He meant to be as careful as a man can be and still be present.
She turned in sleep as if the bed had tipped and gravity had redefined itself. One hand found his shirt without effort and claimed the linen, tightening to brush his chest. Tristan did not move. The other hand, groping, found his shoulder and settled at the seam where muscle met bone. She drifted closer in quiet increments until her brow rested beneath his chin and the small, human weight of her fit into him.
He stared at the ceiling and permitted his lungs to remember how to do their work. Every inch of him argued for stillness. If he moved, he would move badly. Instead, he would lie still. Even if it meant lying still all night without sleep. Better that and appreciate every second of her nestled against him than wake her.
She made a sound then of the sort an animal makes when it finds the place where it can burrow and be. If there had been a priest or a witness in the house, Tristan might have married her on the instant to make that sound legal. There was only the Roman bust in the corridor, and Hames keeping his counsel in the hall below.
“Go to sleep,” he told himself.
Sleep stayed away. His senses were too much alive. Too heightened. They clamored for attention within his perception. The smell of her. The soap she used at her evening ablutions. The lavender that was used in the laundering of her clothes and linen. The feel of her soft skin. The caress of silky hair. Withevery heartbeat, his body became more aware of the slim, female perfection that lay along the length of him.
The fire cracked now and then, and the curtains breathed as if the house had lungs. Outside, the square sent up a stray shout, a clatter, a drunkard’s song. In the next chamber, a clock that did not belong to him marked the hour with a tastefully muffled strike. He thought of the way Christine had said no to him on a lane and made it sound like “trust me”. He thought, very quietly, that he could not bear to set her aside.
By morning, I will have driven that thought back into darkness. I will not show it to anyone, least of all myself.
She breathed, and the slow, animal miracle of that movement soothed him more than brandy. He let his hand rest at the small of her back, a reassurance for his own pulse. When at last his eyes did slide shut, it was not the exhaustion of a man who had fought. It was the soft, treacherous surrender of one who had decided, against orders and against plan, that for one night the duty that mattered was to lie very still and let a woman sleep without fear.
Sometime toward morning, the rain forgot itself. The city gathered its skirts, wrung them out, and began, reluctantly, to consider dawn. In the grey before the grey, Christine stirred, the adjustment of a sleeper finding a better shape. Her hand flexed against his shirt and then went slack again. He had the wild urge to wake her and hear her say his name without the fog of dreams between them.
He must have slept then, for he woke to the whisper of the latch. He did not move. A shadow crossed the floor, paused, retreated.
Hames? No. Mrs. Cleat, likely, with the sense to recognize that some doors are better left for the day to open.
Christine shifted again and made that small satisfied sound. A smile, uninvited and unmanageable, tugged at his mouth. He lay there, in the house he had rented to be a sensible man, and let himself be an idiot for an hour more. When daylight did begin to climb the edges of the curtains, he told himself, sternly, that this was enough.
He would rise without waking her, go down, order coffee, slaughter whatever appointments the morning had intended for him, and see to the thing that had to be done. Find the sender of the rope that had tried to bind Christine’s hands.
She doesn’t need to know. As long as she is safe.
He lifted his hand from her back. She made a soft protest and burrowed closer. The sound reset his plans by an hour.
