Wilhelm knocked over the empty bottle as he wiped tears from his eyes, and Sophia tried to catch her breath. He pulled out his necktie and loosened his collar. He opened a new bottle and deferred the bench to her, handing over a Schubert sonata, gesturing for her to play it. He sat reclined on the sofa behind the piano and chuckled when she played both parts with one hand, undisturbed, while the other hand lifted the bottle for a sip.
She retired when she tipped the bottle over, nearly splashing Wilhelm’s piano — he snatched the bottle with reflexes that did not belong to a tipsy or weary man. In fact, he seemed completely unaffected by the wine, browsing a text on Bach’s musical riddles. She joined him on the sofa, half primed for debate and half ready to drop asleep.
Astounding, the way music theory sounded so provoking coming from his lips. He kept saying inversion, tonic, modality, all words which posed his lips in a very kissable manner. His arm draped across her shoulders while his fingers toyed with her hair, altering her academic state of mind. She kept watching his throat move as he talked. In the weak candlelight she made out a brutal-looking scar bisecting his neck, as though he had narrowly escaped a hanging or a slit throat.
She followed the shadows where his opened shirt revealed his chest. Her fogged mind failed to register the alarming detail, opened shirt, and the fact that she must have been the one to unfasten the buttons.
He radiated warmth. Heat from his body toasted all along her side, separate from the heat stirring low in her loins and making her corset unbearably tight. She disentangled one hand and tugged clumsily at the laces, then hummed in relief when the pressure abated. She listened to the pleasant vibrations of Wilhelm’s lowered voice as she kicked off her starched petticoat. She pushed it under the sofa, finally comfortable, her head tucked under his jaw.
Her hazy brain registered dialogue about canon perpetuus. Was he not going out of his mind as she was? He said modulating spiral, brushing his lips on her temple, and she could stand it no longer. She turned and silenced his academic mouth with her own. Musky, smooth, berry wine flavored. The more she tasted, the more it stoked her appetite, so she framed his face with her hands to hold him captive, and indulged.
• • •
The sound of footsteps and voices in the hallway woke Sophia with a start. The room was shrouded in darkness, but it felt like morning. She huffed Oh! and Wilhelm startled awake. She raised herself up off his chest — wait, she had been lying on his chest? Her skin tingled with the shock of air after the burning warm contact of his skin.
She flushed with mortification as she attempted to right her dress. They sat upright on the sofa and exchanged looks of confusion. The empty bottles on the piano, the mess of strewn music and clothing; she wondered wordlessly what had happened in the night.
Wilhelm looked swashbuckling in the shadows and delectably rumpled. His tousled hair draped rakishly over his brow. His wrinkled shirt hanging from his shoulders might slide onto the floor at any moment.
“I don’t remember … ” Sophia trailed, confirming the truth with her fingertips pressed to her swollen lips. When her eyes darted to examine the state of her skirt, her head spun in protest with a dull ache.
“Oh!” she gasped as she finally registered the meaning of their scattering clothing on the floor: stockings, petticoat, garters! “Oh, no! We did not — ”
“No,” he interrupted, “Of course not. I am a gentleman.” He looked away, too polite to mention what they had done since she had obviously not been ladylike. “I don’t remember falling asleep either, or else I would have taken you up to your room. I apologize.”
Wilhelm rose and pulled his shirt over his shoulders, and she blinked as his shirttails covered the tell-tale bulge straining the front of his trousers. “Besides,” he added in a low husky voice, scowling down at her from under his eyebrows, “If I had not been a gentleman last night, you would have no trouble recalling it.”
She watched him gather her things and offer them to her. With a bow he left the room, and Sophia found herself heaving deep breaths that did little to calm her angry pulse. She could only run her fingertips over her lips and regret that she could not remember kissing Wilhelm, then despise herself for wanting to call him back and refresh her memory.
• • •
At breakfast, Martin came with the morning post, including a telegram for Wilhelm. Sophia watched him from across the table. His mouth pulled into a grim line and then he crumpled the paper and stood, excusing himself from the room.
Aunt Louisa watched after him with a frown and turned the page of the newspaper. She gasped in horror and muttered, “Oh, by all that is holy!” She stood and tossed the paper to Sophia, who took one look and felt the blood drain from her face.
It was bad; she had been caught. Or had she?
Apparently she and Wilhelm warranted an entire quarter-page of the society column; and that was only the cartoon. Sophia scanned the article, searching for the words, Duncombe or Chauncey. None. She had been dubbed Mysterious Mistress — that she could abide. The writer primarily concerned herself with the dubious Lord Devon’s previous aversion to women.
Unpalatable, but she had to study the cartoon. How accurately had the artist captured her face? Fairly, but not particularly well. The rendition of her gown looked a sort of ancient stola with a scandalous décolletage. That was bad enough, but the hands in the picture, exploiting the closed dance position, looked worse. Her left hand groped his tightly-clad rear and grasped at an open bag stuffed with money in his pocket. Her right hand holding shears to the locks of hair at the nape of Wilhelm’s neck made it clear she was being rendered as the biblical Delilah. Clever, really.
Lord Devon had been drawn in a monk’s robe with gentleman’s trousers, puckering exaggerated lips for a kiss and leaning to ogle her larger-than-life bosom which she certainly didn’t own one-fourth the mass of in reality. His left hand grasped a giant bottle of splashing liquor. Most offensive: the officer’s rapier swinging from Wilhelm’s belt, captured mid-motion in a conspicuously phallic position. Oh, mercy.
“Has he seen this?” Sophia whispered to Aunt Louisa.
“I assume so; he had the paper first.” Aunt Louisa fanned herself, scowling a death sentence at Sophia.
She excused herself to go look for Lord Devon. She found him in his office, hunched over his desk, writing a mile a minute while Martin scurried around the room. She knocked on the half-open door and both men startled, looking guilty.
“A word, my lord?” she cued when they both stared, at a loss.
“One moment.” He scribbled a few more lines, handed the paper to Martin, who rushed out of the room with only a slight nod in her direction. Wilhelm tucked others papers into the desk, then rose to meet her. Suspicious — what was going on here?
“I want to apologize, Wilhelm, but I hardly know what to say.”
“Apologize for what?”
Good heavens. Did he mean to drag it out of her? She simply wasn’t in the mood. “Can you just accept a general apology, and I shall be on my way?”
He looked surprised. “Where do you think you are going?”
“That lovely article in the paper is not only embarrassing; it puts both you and me in danger.” She took a step back, resisting the urge to rest her hands on his arm and lean against his side. Too natural — she had nearly done it without thinking. “Do be so kind as to lend me the use of a carriage, just to the Torquay station. Oh, and if anyone inquires, I went to France. Better yet, say you don’t know — ”
He silenced her with a kiss, his mouth covering hers in gentle strokes. She was too startled to protest, then too overcome with the instant shot of pleasure to break away. Fire! A rush of desire stole her breath. Made her toes curl. Marble-smooth, wicked lips teased her with a fervor that savored of violence yet held a shocking intimacy and skill she had not expected.
Sophia dropped her head back and gasped, wishing she could assemble a coherent thought. She should be resisting. Instead, she wa
s overwhelmed with his unspoken implications: He wrestled to catch her mouth with his and she imagined his arms locked around her as he rolled her over his bed. A slow slide against her bottom lip and a languid brush with the tip of his tongue, and she saw moonless nights outdoors under a fountain. He delved deeply as though he was dying of thirst, and she imagined precisely what she ought not, and in the music room on that sofa behind the piano, of all places!
Wilhelm caged her in with his shoulders and pushed her back to the door. One arm slid around her waist to pull her against him, and his other hand gripped behind her neck, the better to hold her in place while he ravished her mouth.
The most bizarre argument of her life took place, she trying to squirm away in effort to voice her objections, and he trumping them all with his patient, sensual kissing. How had she ever believed him an amateur? He stole her breath, melted her urgency, and she fell into a pattern with him that felt like dancing, and she guessed they had developed this understanding last night on the music room sofa. No other explanation existed for the perfect harmony, the blissful lazy-jubilant exchange that made her feel as though they were longtime lovers.
What was happening to her? She felt her control dissolve, knowing she had not lost it but deliberately buried it. Wilhelm did not play by the rules; a man should not kiss like that, as though he could read her mind. As though he meant to express permanent, meaningful devotion. She was utterly lost. A small voice warned she would be sorry if she surrendered to a man, but it was weak, and his mouth on hers burned hot, made her feel as though she was soaring.
Once she had been subdued like a boneless swooning drunkard, panting most unladylike for breath, he pulled back and ordered, “Stay. Please. Trust me to take care of you.”
“No, Wilhelm, I can’t.”
“Wait one week. If you still fear for your safety, I will take you to the railway station myself.” He kissed her cheek, then her temple. “Say, ‘Yes, Wilhelm. Whatever you judge best.’” He mocked her soprano voice and her slight French-influenced accent, and she had to smile. “Don’t run away. Not today.”
Shameful, but he had thoroughly seduced her, and she knew this show of passion was more a calculated manipulation than heartfelt. That alone posed a serious danger.
But why not wait? If no threat came, then she could linger a while. No denying she wanted to stay. Even though she would never have allowed such a risk before, she found herself saying, “Very well, Wilhelm.”
She returned to her room to find a small mountain of telegrams — no, only three, but all from Mr. Cox. She tore them open, scanning the lines for the news she dreaded. He merely sent his reprimands, along the lines of What in bloody hell were you thinking. Stop. Suggest you go to your mother in Versailles. Stop. Heaven help you both. Perhaps she had caused her undoing in one fell swoop.
Sophia sat atop her traveling case long into the night, warring with either packing it or letting it remain a fixture. She could ask Mr. Cox to monitor the movement of the bounty hunters before deciding to flee Rougemont. She would never have taken such a risk before. That she even considered staying proved what a dangerous hold Wilhelm had on her.
Chapter 13
Why Sophia’s Unmentionables Go Missing
Silent screams, rolling eyes, swollen purple lips. Some convulsed, others simply dropped limp. A few wore an odd expression of relief. For most, a tragic sense of surprise. No man truly believes he is mortal until his last breath, as he stares death in the face. Wilhelm knew the face of each ghost. He could not forget. For them, he was the face of death.
This time they wouldn’t die, spraying fountains of black blood even after he killed them again and again. The repetition became its own torture, over and over, until he became the cold, soulless creature more familiar to himself.
But then he ripped his knife across the throat of his enemy — it revealed its face as her. The scream tearing from his throat crossed every realm between heaven and hell. Her eyes stared wide with shocked betrayal, her body spasmed, she gasped futilely as her throat poured opaque red, real blood. He scrambled in vain to hold the wound on her neck shut, willing it all to be a dream, damning himself to the darkest pit of hell —
“Wilhelm,” her strained voice sounded inside his ear. “Let go. You are hurting me.”
He blinked, twice, and there was no sticky blood coating his arms, no ear-splitting screams from impaled horses or smoke burning his nose. He smelled peaches and cloves and fresh cotton. Not his imagination. Sophia was here, outlined in weak lamplight and leaning over him in bed, her unbound hair falling over her shoulders onto his chest.
At once he came to his senses and dropped his hands as though her skin had scorched him. All the air sucked out of the room, and an unwelcome messenger in the back of his mind announced ominously, You hurt her. You bastard.
Moments later the sound of her coughing was music to his ears. He lay frozen, unwilling to spook her by moving his hands, despising himself too much to try and comfort her.
Then she astounded him. She dropped her head onto his chest and reached her arms around his neck. “I am so sorry, Wil.”
Sorry?
He still waited for her to shrink in terror. Surely he had just conjured her own demons, with his hands cruelly grasping her neck? He could not fathom how easily he might have killed her. It required little effort to crush a windpipe even one-handed, and he had snapped many far stockier necks than hers before the victim made a sound.
“I will be fine, Wilhelm. Only a little faint. It will pass.” He was trembling hysterically; it probably frightened her, but no chance could he control it until his heart quit hammering against his ribs.
His voice held all the charm of a rusty hinge, “I damn near killed you.”
“You let go when I asked.”
He wanted her away. He squirmed miserably, but she missed the hint. And he sure as hell wouldn’t tell her outright she was torturing him. Only a sick man could be aroused at a moment like this. He really was a bloody bastard.
“I thought I could help you. It was foolish. Too often I hear you disturbed at night, Wilhelm, and it grieves me you cannot rest. What is it that haunts you?” Her fingers moved in his hair, scraping slowly along his scalp. As pathetic as Fritz when she scratched his ears; Wilhelm’s eyes slid closed and he leaned shamefully into her hand.
“Ghosts and demons.”
She demanded nothing more of him. It made no sense, but now all he could think about was her; the calm rise and fall of her breath, her fragile warm frame covering his, the heavenly feel of her hands tousling his hair. In turn she let him run his fingers through her hair, and he found the smooth texture soothing. A pure sensation, free from the ugliness of his memories. He immersed himself in the task of warming each glossy lock with his hands. No better smell in all the world than the perfumed fruity scent mingled with spice soap in her hair. It was long; his fingers combed down the length and brushed the small of her back at the ends.
It defied reason that she should be his siren by day but guardian angel by night. Praenuntius pacis.
“What?”
Oh. He had said it aloud. “Harbinger of peace,” he answered the angel voice. His own voice sounded groggy. He could not possibly be drowsy.
A throaty chuckle, a sound he adored. “Wilhelm, go to sleep.”
He woke the next morning with her scent infused in the bedsheets and deep in his skin where her head had lain. It puzzled him to see late morning light fighting its way through a gap in the curtains. He never slept past dawn. He seldom slept soundly. Yet she had put him to sleep, and it had knocked him out cold.
He rolled out of bed, forgetting he wore only his drawers, and went straight for the controversial door linking his and her apartments. He knew she would be out. He searched her room frantically and shouted in triumph as he found it in a laundry bag near the hallway door: that cream-colored lace nightgown that smelled so intensely of her.
He stole it.
Wilhelm returned
to his room in time to scandalize the poor chambermaid. He covered his groin with the nightgown and barked, “Don’t change the sheets! Leave them!” Words he had never in his life uttered before.
The maid regarded him as though he was Cerberus, and he shooed her out of the room, lifting the lacy fabric to his nose again, reassuring himself with the heavenly scent. A foolish smile curled his lips.
He quelled the dark voice in the back of his mind warning, You are certifiable, Old Wil. He hardly minded. He was darkness and she light, yet the shred of hope gave him dangerous ideas, all of them beginning with Perhaps … .
He was right. The next several nights he finally spent alone in his own mind. He woke in the morning with his last memory lying down to sleep, so long as he kept her nightgown folded under his pillow where he could breathe in her scent. It calmed him, grounded him, and for a man who dreaded the night for nearly a decade, it was no small miracle.
• • •
Sophia was out of sorts. Half of her lingerie had gone missing from the laundry; stockings, a chemise, her nightgown, even a pair of drawers, heaven forbid. This morning the Cavendish girls had responded to her lesson on long division with all the panache of a cold worm. Mr. Cox had sent another wire containing a vague warning about confusing activity he observed of her father’s investigators, which she could do nothing about except worry.
She might have managed those annoyances with some grace if not for the pains in her abdomen. They returned with a vengeance, after only two weeks since the last episode. Since she was reportedly barren, according the best doctors in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, could she not at least escape the unpleasant burdens of reproduction? Short of surgical dissection or electrical shock treatment — no, apparently. Adenomyoma, a very scientific-sounding term to equate “tormented, dysfunctional female.”
Moriah Densley Page 11