Trial by Desire

by Courtney Milan

  They sparkled with deceptive friendliness.

  “No,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t look at me. Look at yourself.”

  Her hair was so light it was almost colorless. Her skin seemed wan; her dress fitted to her form, bound and corseted and drawn in on itself, as if she were so insubstantial that she needed whalebone to prop her up. She looked like a dainty, breakable lady.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Ned said quietly. “But I think it’s high time I look again.” His hand came up; she could see it in the reflection, before the callus of his thumb swept alongside her face. “First, there’s the line of your jaw. A perfect curve, held high. It’s one triumphant, resolute sweep. This line—” his finger traced it back again, and the hairs on Kate’s arm stood up “—this line says you are a woman who will brook no nonsense. I believe I have discovered that before.”

  Kate swallowed. In the mirror her neck contracted.

  His hand slid down that smooth expanse of skin.

  “Then there are your shoulders.” His thumb spread along her collarbone. “I have never seen them bowed by fear or drawn together in weariness. You carry your shoulders high, and no matter the weight that is set upon them, you do not falter.” His voice dropped.

  As he spoke, his hand traveled down her spine. She could feel the heat of him through the layers of muslin and whalebone as that hand traversed the curve of her back. When he reached her waist, he slid his hand around her front to grasp her own. His fingers entwined with hers, briefly; then he turned her hand palm up, in his.

  “I’ve heard,” he said dryly, “that fortune-tellers can see your future in the palm of your hand. What do you suppose I see in yours?”

  Her hand was dwarfed by his, her fingers seeming wan next to his. The color of his hands made her think of long days aboard ship, of adventurous treks with strange beasts cavorting nearby and strong men with sharp cutlasses. She could feel the heat of him, as if all the sun absorbed in that golden brown skin were emanating from him now.

  Next to him…

  “I look small,” she said. And fragile. The kind of woman to be set to side, for fear that she would shatter. That was all anyone had even seen in her.

  “I think you look delicate,” he corrected. “Delicate and indomitable, all at once. I see no tremor in your hands, Kate, no fear, no smallness of character.”

  “But I—”

  “And when I look into your eyes,” he said, “I think you are as implacable as an archangel.”

  He closed his hand around hers; her fingers curled into a loose fist, cradled in his. “Your feelings,” he said, “are your own. And if you hold them tight to your chest, nobody need ever see beneath the surface.”

  As he spoke, he leaned into her. His words brushed her skin in little puffs of breath.

  “Nobody need see a thing. But I want to,” he breathed.

  She turned her head to look up into his eyes. And that, assuredly, was a mistake, because if her stomach had been in knots before, the knot clenched into a tangle of Gordian proportions when she looked in his face. She could not have unraveled herself from his gaze, and when she tried—when she glanced away—her eyes alighted upon his lips. Strong and smooth, powerful and gentle.

  It left her with the most curious fluttering feeling in her belly. Not that he was going to kiss her—but that he had already done so. Her lips already burned with the impression that his words had left on her. Her skin flamed with the possibility of his nearness. And no matter how practical she told herself to be, rational thought fled before his words.

  When Kate parted her lips and stood on her tiptoes, turning in his embrace, it seemed she was merely bringing the words he had spoken to their physical conclusion.

  She kissed him, not because she wanted to bring him to his knees, but because he had lifted her off hers. She tasted him, and he tasted of salt and man and the power that the right woman could wield in the right place. And he kissed her back, giving no quarter.

  He pulled away. “No, Kate,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to intimidate you. I don’t want you to fear me. I want to look at you and finally see what I’ve been missing these long years. You’re a damned Valkyrie.”

  He turned her back to the mirror. Kate felt almost on the edge of tears.

  She didn’t want this—didn’t want her secret dreams to come true, didn’t want to hope again. But it was too late. She was already yearning for this. She was already yearning for him.

  “It’s not quite true. I am afraid,” she stated baldly. “If I were a Valkyrie, I would not be. I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “In the stories,” he said, his voice a dark rasp against her skin, “the heroine always slays the dragon and lops off his head. The villagers rejoice and build a bonfire, and darkness never again falls on the land.”

  She could feel his hands at her side, warm and powerful. “But those,” Ned continued, “are only fairy stories. In reality…”

  He smiled at her in the mirror, a lopsided smile. There was something faintly wicked about that expression, as if he were about to impart to her a great secret, one that had been closely guarded by a centuries-old society. She swayed unwittingly against him.

  “In reality,” he whispered, “the dragons never die, and the big sword-wielding buffoons in unwieldy armor cannot slay them. Real heroes tame their dragons. Your fear, my—” He cut himself off, and that sad half smile burst into an incandescent grin. If she had not been awake to the flitting expressions that passed his face, she wouldn’t have noticed the suddenness of the change.

  “Your what?” she prompted.

  “I went to China to slay dragons. Instead, I tamed them.”

  “I thought you went to China to examine the Blakely holdings in the East India Company, to see if the rumors you had heard were true.”

  He shrugged, and in that instant she remembered what he’d said. Your feelings are yours. And what were his feelings in all of this?

  “Does it matter why I went?” he asked. And he must have intended the question rhetorically, because before she could answer, he continued. “I can’t change the past. All I can do, Kate, is try to make up for it. And that means that if you still flinch from me—if the memory of the pain I’ve caused you is still too strong—I won’t get angry. You deserve my patience.”

  “And where will you be?” Kate’s voice shook. “All this time, while you’re waiting in patience for me to trust you. Where will you be?”

  “Where will I be?” She could feel his breath whispered against her. “I’ll be right where I should have been this whole time. When you think your castle walls will fall, I will shore them up. When you are afraid you cannot stand, I will hold you upright. I ought never have left. And when you understand that you need do nothing but lean…”

  His hands clasped her waist, strong and gentle, holding her up without restraining her. She might have leaned back then.

  She didn’t.

  “When you lean,” he whispered into her ear, “this time, I will catch you.”

  Oh, she was as dangerously vulnerable as ever, and as like to fall against him.

  And that she believed him, that she believed he would be there to catch her, believed that this time he wouldn’t leave her…that, perhaps, was the greatest danger of all.

  THAT, NED DECIDED after Kate left, had been idiotic.

  It hadn’t been idiotic to look at her. It hadn’t been stupid to pledge himself to her. And the kiss had been every kind of clever, even if it had been her idea to begin with.

  No, the foolishness had been when he’d forgotten himself so far as to let that admission slide off his tongue.

  Your fear, my—

  He’d cut himself off, not out of intelligence, but for want of an adequate word. He’d been saved by his lack of vocabulary, not any sense of propriety or self-preservation. Her fear, his… What was it, then, that dark thing that belonged to him? He thought of it more as that moment, sun striking metal, with him fee
ling bereft of every other option. He carried it with him even now. Not anything she needed to know about.

  Foolishness might have done. Stupidity, as well. But neither of those words captured the height and breadth of the beast that Ned had tamed. And neither conveyed the sheer darkness that resided in him. It was foolish. It was stupid. But then, he’d learned that if he held the leash on his own reactions tightly, they could do him no harm. It was his own private madness, his own hidden dragon. Kate had single-handedly stymied the Earl of Harcroft. She would never trust Ned if she knew the extent of the beast he’d kept hidden from her. She had no idea how useless he had once been. But he would prove to every one of them that it didn’t matter any longer.

  But so long as he remained in control, nobody else would ever need to learn about it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT WAS AN ODD little evening, Kate thought after her maid had undressed her and left her to her own bed.

  With Lord and Lady Blakely departed, Berkswift seemed even emptier than it had when Kate had the manor to herself. Perhaps it was because Kate was the only lady in residence, and she had spent the remainder of the evening in isolation. Perhaps she felt alone because she knew that for one night longer, Harcroft was still in her home, and he had spent the last hours before retiring browbeating Ned with the details of his irrelevant search.

  Perhaps it was because Kate could still feel her husband’s hands about her waist, his fingers hot against the base of her spine. Perhaps it was because, even through the soft wool of her dressing gown, she could feel the heat of his breath on her neck.

  This time, he had said, I will catch you.

  No mere gentlemanly politeness, that; she’d heard the ring of truth as he spoke, the hoarse acceptance in the timbre of his voice. It had been real, every last scrap of it.

  Every scrap? No. There was one last scrap remaining, and it was jagged enough to slice through that nascent trust.

  She had no notion what he would do if she told him the truth about Lady Harcroft. If Ned knew that Kate was the cause of his hours of search, would he still look at her with that same light in his eyes?

  Maybe he would take her side. Support her. Congratulate her ingenuity.

  Kate sighed. Be practical.

  No. The practical answer was that he would shrink from her. That he would turn Louisa over to her husband. That he would shake his head at her, and the dragon-tamer would disappear. Because for all the apparent kindness of his words, his actions bespoke a rather different sort of trust.

  It was night, and Kate was alone. Again. After all that heated talk this afternoon of trust, their marriage was still a mere token of what it could have been. Kisses—and no more. The absence left her hollow, as if she’d been burned to a shell by some dark fire.

  And as to that last little thing, she was still as much a coward as ever.

  Because this afternoon, as he’d held her, she had stood still and unmoving under his touch, content to simply soak in the feel of his hands against her. She’d been as passive as a lily-of-the-valley, tracking the path of the sun across the sky.

  With time, all ink faded. If she did nothing, this memory—like the ink on their marriage license—would eventually bleach into nothingness. All that support, all his help—all that controlled anguish she’d felt in his hands on her—and still, he wasn’t coming to her.

  Perhaps it was because of that controlled anguish that he wasn’t coming.

  Everything Kate knew about the marital act, she had gleaned from her own limited experience, years prior, and the whispered discussions conducted among married ladies—which tended toward metaphor. Sly innuendo to Harcroft notwithstanding, she imagined she had a pretty good grasp of the process—from both the male and the female point of view.

  Men, she had been told, required fairly regular release. They obtained this either through their wives, or through access to mistresses. Without that…well, the consequences hadn’t been spelled out to her, but any time the matter came up, every lady had nodded in concert. If there was one thing the ladies of the ton had agreed upon, it was that consequences attached under such unfortunate circumstances. And for the men, they were Exceedingly Dire.

  Fever? Perhaps. Excruciating pain? Probably. Irrational behavior? Well, that would explain a great deal about gentlemen.

  Ned had claimed that he’d honored their wedding vows. That assertion had seemed simply inconceivable to her at the time, given what she’d been told by her friends. But if he was telling the truth, he was suffering. It would, perhaps, underscore the fundamental irrationality that had kept him from visiting her bed, when she was obviously willing to do her duty.

  Yes. Irrational behavior, resulting from deprivation, would explain a great deal about her husband—and so many other men.

  Besides, if she offered him relief from that one condition, perhaps he would not judge her so harshly when he discovered what she had been doing.

  Before her mind could go over the reasons why she didn’t dare do it, she stood and walked to her chest of drawers. Long ago, her maid had brought that night rail to Berkswift. That one—the one she’d planned to use when their marriage was young and innocent. It was nothing but flimsy silk and ribbons. Better yet, it spoke what she wanted without her ever having to say anything aloud. Near-nakedness spoke louder than words.

  She took off the modest nightdress her maid had left for her and slipped the silk gown over her shoulders, her hands trembling slightly as she fastened it in front. Even with the fire burning in her room, she felt a chill in the air.

  The temperature wouldn’t matter much longer.

  She walked briskly to the door connecting their rooms and threw it open. She was struck by a blast of cold air. Her skin pebbled and she felt her nipples contract in protest.

  For some reason, he had built no fire in his room.

  A branch of candles on a chest of drawers cast a pale and unforgiving light. The wood posters of his bed threw ominous shadows at her. Her eyes adjusted to the light as she brought her arms about her for what little warmth they would give—and she saw Ned.

  He was seated on the edge of his bed. His mouth had fallen open in surprise.

  And—oh, God, Kate stopped breathing again—he was naked. Completely, utterly, gloriously naked in all this cold air. The light painted his skin bronze all over—as if he were a cold, hard statue of a god, frozen in place, instead of a man made of warm flesh and blood.

  But what flesh. She sighed in appreciation. What had seemed an imposing breadth of shoulders when covered in wet linen was an impossible expanse of chest, hard and corded. The muscles of his arms were tensed and contracted, almost as if he were in pain.

  Almost? The way he looked at her, his lips caught in a surprised half grimace, he must have felt a great deal of pain. It could not have been even a second before her gaze dropped from his lightly furred chest to his navel. It might as well have been an eternity, though, for the blankness that enveloped her mind.

  Her husband was not only naked; he was erect. And his hand was clasped around his member.

  Luckily, she did not say the first idiotic thing that popped into her mind. Unluckily for her, she did say the second. “Ned. It’s really cold in here.”

  “Ah.” His voice seemed casually companionable, in sharp juxtaposition to the muscled rigor of his body. “Kate. This is not the most convenient time to talk.”

  No? Her mouth went completely dry, and she was bereft of speech. He was touching himself—there—and oh, God, they’d had marital relations before, but so long ago, and always in the dark. She’d never even seen him. She just had the memory of her hands, her flesh; the feel of him inside her; the flash of his skin illuminated in moonlight. That feeling of want, never quite satisfied, and hidden behind the necessity of procreation.

  On those long-ago nights, he’d never even lit a candle.

  What a crying shame that had been. She stepped inside his room and pulled the door shut behind her. It was even cold
er than she’d believed. One hard swallow, and she banished the dryness in her throat. “On the contrary.” She was unable to take her eyes off him. “This is very convenient. I didn’t come here to talk.”

  He let out a shaky breath, a puff of white in the chilled room. His eyes slipped down her form. “Oh? I—I suppose I can see that.”

  That—and by the way his eyes lingered, a great deal else. Marriage wasn’t a matter of love, but of bringing together families and estates and producing children. Intercourse could be enjoyable, just as it was enjoyable when she touched herself. But it was not a matter for easy discourse. Despite whispered conversations with the other married ladies, all of that practicality had left her damnably bereft of improper vocabulary. Her husband stared at her, frozen in the act of…the act of… Kate’s internal lexicon, built up of proper words used by proper women, deserted her on this point. Even among married women, lurid discussions were composed of circumspect euphemism. One offered comfort to one’s husband, or perhaps one engaged in intercourse. Their discourse ranged to washing women and carrots precisely because proper ladies didn’t use those other words.

  Whatever those other words might have been.

  It seemed simply criminal to Kate that she’d learned one hundred words to describe the weather in French, and not one that would encompass the stroke of a man’s hand down his own penis.

  But she didn’t need a dictionary to instinctively grasp the import of what he’d been doing. She certainly didn’t need a primer to comprehend that jealous desire that rose up inside her. Whatever the word for it, she had caught him in the act of doing to himself every improper thing Kate longed to do to him. She swallowed back hysterical, inappropriate laughter.

  “Didn’t you think to build a fire before…um…before?”

  “Before I what?”

  “You know.” Kate gestured helplessly, her hands inscribing a wide circle.