could I not have?’
‘Easily,’ she answered back, years of coping alone a burden she was more than used to. ‘I thought the carriage was going to run me over.’
‘As it did your hat?’
‘You saw it?’
‘Felt it.’
‘Could the person who did it come back here tonight?’
‘No.’ She liked his certainty, liked the way he did not even waver. A man who would protect her against everything.
‘Will you kiss me?’ Hardly even a question.
‘Could you stop me?’ His was not either.
‘I want to forget everything else save what is here, now, between us.’
‘Flesh?’ This time he ran his finger across her breast, easily distinguished under silk.
‘And blood,’ she answered, her tongue drawing a single wet trail through the stain on the skin of his hand.
‘I would not wish to hurt you.’
‘You will hurt me more if you do not come…’
‘Inside of you?’ No longer careful or limiting, the obvious stated, a balm to fright and hate and hurt.
In reply she held his finger to her lips and sucked in, the small noise thrilling and daring in a way that she had never been before.
Frankwell frowning at any enjoyment, the ghost of need always replaced by hurt.
Never again, she thought. Her body ached with the want of him, the air on her skin orange-glowed from the fire and the scars of her past disappearing into shadow, feeling and hot hard passion.
‘Call me Taris,’ he said. ‘Call me by my name.’
She wrote it on the back of his hand, in the wet of her tongue, and saw the way the hairs rose on his arm and the breath in his throat just stopped.
One second and then two. Suspended in time and place before beginning again, neither will in it nor choice.
A small touch here, a longer caress there. The music between them was heard in breaths and heartbeats and sighs.
Their music. A symphony. To life. To living. To danger. No past or future. Just now. Risking it all.
Beatrice wished the world might stop.
‘Love me, Beatrice?’ Barely his voice.
She laughed as she peeled back her nightgown before taking his fingers and placing them on to the warmth.
Chapter Twelve
She was sick into the china basin kept beneath her bed and then sick again as Taris stirred.
Swallowing, she could hardly hide her embarrassment. Such a far cry from last night’s loving and the first rays of dawn slanting through the gap in the curtains at her window.
Her stomach heaved again and she held back her hair, the sweat of exertion marking her skin with a glistening dew. She noticed that the grazes on her arms this morning had crusted, the first scabs of healing formed across open wounds.
Breathing heavily, she shut her eyes, shut everything out whilst she tried to find an equilibrium, the nausea receding as quickly as it had come and leaving a tiredness that was all encompassing.
‘Has this happened before?’ he asked when she turned towards him.
‘It has,’ she replied, wishing that she could have hidden it. Perhaps she was dying? Perhaps this was a sickness that had no cure, the exhaustion that accompanied the early-morning routine just another symptom of its severity. Frankwell had vomited often in the mornings in the last months of his life.
Taris didn’t look happy at all. ‘Hell,’ he said, pulling the length of his hair back off his face. Naked, the muscles of his chest stood out along the contours of his hard brownness. ‘Hell,’ he repeated when she did not say a thing.
Rallying, she tried to make light of her suppositions. ‘I am certain it must be something I am eating and—’
He interrupted her. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘And you were close?’
Bea didn’t understand the meaning of such a topic change. ‘Very.’
His silence unnerved her.
‘Well, perhaps not as close as we had been when I was younger, but—’
‘I want you to come with me to Falder. I am repairing there today and Emerald and Asher will arrive later in the afternoon.’
‘I don’t understand?’
‘You need to be away from London.’
‘Because you feel that I might have another accident?’
His laugh was unexpected. ‘There are other reasons I have for asking this of you, but I would rather not discuss them here and now.’
Beatrice could not guess at what the ‘other reasons’ might be, but the fright yesterday had made her wary of being in the vicinity of a lot of people, and Falder with its isolated safeness appealed.
‘I should not wish to be a nuisance.’
‘The castle has one hundred and twenty-seven rooms! You would hardly be in the way and with Emerald and my mother as chaperons there could be no whisper of a scandal.’
Correct and careful! She wished he might have said that he wanted her to come, that he wanted to protect her, that the night they had just spent together had been the most wonderful in his life and that now he desired something more lasting…
But when she turned again he was pulling on his clothes with a haste that said he wanted to be gone.
‘Bates will return with the carriage in the midmorning and men will be sent to help with the lifting of any luggage. I am presuming that you will bring your maid with you.’
‘I am hardly an invalid and my luggage will not be heavy.’
‘No.’ He said this so angrily that she looked up at him in surprise. ‘You are not to lift anything, you understand? And do not go outside for any reason at all.’
Orders. Rules. Directives. Control.
Drawing in a breath, Bea turned away, the image of her late husband’s bluster and tyranny coming to mind.
Perhaps that was what happened with men. They took your body and wanted your mind as well. To own and
