by Jo Goodman
“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.
He ignored the frost in her voice. “You object to a social call? My business was with your uncles.”
“I’m busy, Mr. DeLong.”
Bode dropped into a chair on the other side of her desk. “I imagine you are. I heard that you haven’t been here for more than a week.”
She didn’t try to hide her surprise. “Who told you that?”
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s not important who told me. Are you well now?”
“I wasn’t unwell. I was . . . I was tired.” She didn’t know how else to explain the melancholia that had overwhelmed her after she’d spoken to Bram. She’d been listless, uninterested, and fatigued to the point that rising from her bed was a hardship. She’d forced herself to leave the house this morning. Suey Tsin’s hovering and hand-wringing were wearing. Her uncles’ frequent visits to her room clearly communicated the extent of their anxiety. Dr. Winter had been called the second day and left her with a bottle of foul-tasting bromide. The drops only made her sleepy.
“And now?” asked Bode.
“And now I’m not.” She forced a smile and inquired pleasantly, if insincerely, about his health.
“I’m well.”
“You’re wearing the eye patch.”
“The swelling’s gone, but the bruise is still colorful enough to frighten children. I’ll probably wear it another day or so.”
Comfort nodded and offered a thin smile because it seemed that she should. Moving behind her desk, she picked up a sheaf of papers that was lying on her chair and set it crosswise on another pile.
Bode’s gaze followed her. When she reached her chair, her legs folded under her a bit shakily, and she set her hands on the arms to give her support. Her features were drawn, her normally generous mouth compressed. The color in her face wasn’t in her cheeks but in the pale violet shadows under her eyes. She was short-tempered and miserable and doing a poor job of pretending that she wasn’t. He wondered about her nightmares, if they were still troubling her and how often she was having them, and then for no reason that he could easily identify, he was struck by the odd thought that she was grieving.
Comfort shuffled some papers on her desk and then neatly squared them. It was difficult to keep from fidgeting under Bode’s scrutiny. She had given considerable thought to calling on him since her conversation with Bram, but it had ended there, with thought alone. She began to consider that avoiding him was what she gained by remaining in bed.
The last time she’d been a coward, she’d found rocks where she could hide. That thought, more than Suey Tsin’s distress or her uncles’ concern, pushed her out of bed this morning.
Comfort inhaled heavily and pressed three fingers to her temple. She closed her eyes while she massaged the dull ache that threatened to become blinding pain.
“I was going to have a message delivered to your office,” she said. “I wanted to arrange a time when I could call on you or you could call on me.”
“Then it’s convenient that I’m here.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I may not be able to explain it very well.”
Intrigued, Bode merely raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Have you spoken to Bram since the opera?” she asked.
“No. Does he have something interesting to tell me?”
“We aren’t engaged.” The words seemed to lie on her lips like toad spit. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and waited for Bode to react. He didn’t. He remained maddeningly calm. “You heard me, didn’t you? Bram and I aren’t engaged.”
“I heard you,” he said. “Does my mother know?”
“Yes.” There was the briefest hesitation. “Bram promised he’d tell her.”
“Ah. That it explains it, then.”
Comfort had an urge to lay her arms on the desk and bury her head in them. “What did she say to you?”
“She told me the wedding would be a year from now. My birthday, in fact. The anniversary of Bram’s announcement.”
“She sounded very sure of that?”
He smiled. “This is Alexandra DeLong. Have you known her to ever sound less than sure about anything?”
Comfort hadn’t. “It’s not true,” she said. “I didn’t agree to that. Bram and I never discussed a wedding, never talked about a date.”
“She seemed to think you had.”
“I haven’t seen Bram since—” She stopped, counting back. “It’s been over a week. The day after I went to your office, I went to see Bram.”
“I’ve spoken to Alexandra since then. I couldn’t join her for dinner, but we had luncheon at Morton’s. She wanted to know what happened to you at Rigoletto.”
Comfort didn’t know what to say. She simply shook her head.
Bode grew concerned by her lapse into silence. Looking around for something he could give her to drink, he prompted, “You’re the one who broke off the engagement?”
“There never was an engagement.”
“What?” He thought he could appreciate something to drink.
“No engagement. Not ever. The announcement was a fraud. Your brother never proposed to me.”
Bode stared at her, his good eye narrowing. He watched Comfort press back in her chair as if he’d pinned her to it. “You didn’t say anything about it that night.”
“I know, and I regret it. I was too embarrassed. He surprised all of us with the announcement, including me. I didn’t know what to say or do.”
“So you went along with him.”
“Yes.”
“That evening, when I saw you and Bram together on the portico, was that what you were discussing so intently?”
She nodded. “I was angry. He wanted six months from me. He told me that at the end of that time I could break off the engagement in any manner I chose.”
“Six months.” He wished he had enough confidence in his brother’s scruples that he could object to what Comfort was telling him, but he believed her. “Why six months?”
“There was no particular reason that I could see. You know your brother. He thought it. He said it. In his mind it was done.” The recollection made Comfort shake her head. “I asked for six weeks. That was as long as I thought he could manage fidelity. Even a false engagement required certain standards of behavior, or at least I believed so.”
“He agreed?”
“To not trolling the Barbary Coast for women? Yes, he agreed. Whether or not he could have done it is no longer important. Bram and I decided our engagement would last eight weeks.” She turned her head slightly and looked away. There was a pencil lying precariously close to the edge of the desk. She nudged it back with her fingertips. “It doesn’t matter what Bram would or wouldn’t have done. I wasn’t able to keep my word thirteen days.” Bode’s silence had her turning back to him. His regard was contemplative. “What is it?”
He shrugged lightly. “I’m wondering how much our kiss might have factored in your decision.” Bode watched color rise from under her severely modest neckline and climb all the way to her hairline. “As much as all that.”
“Of all the arrogant, self-important, wrongheaded . . .” Comfort threw up her hands as words, specifically adjectives, failed her. She had to draw a deep breath and release it very slowly to clear her head. With considerably more calm, she said, “It had nothing at all to do with ending the farce.”
“It was a reasonable question,” he said. “You were the one who mentioned fidelity. Of course, you were concerned about Bram’s, not your own. You told me you went to see him the day after you visited me. Those events occurred so closely together there’s at least some possibility they’re related.”
“They’re related,” she said, “but not in the way you think. After you escorted me home, you went to the bank and spoke to my uncles. They heard enough from you to decide that I had to end the arrangement with Bram.”
“They knew ther
e was no engagement?”
“Yes. I told them the day after the party. It wasn’t something I was comfortable keeping from them.”
“Like your nightmares.”
She was barely able to keep from flinching. Sometimes talking with Bode was like wandering through nettles. “Yes,” she said. “Like my nightmares.”
“Did they threaten to tell Bram it was ended if you didn’t?”
“No.”
“Did they say they would make the truth public if you didn’t talk to Bram?”
“No.”
“Then they hardly compelled you to do it.”
“It felt as if I was compelled.”
“I’m sure. You don’t like to disappoint them.”
Comfort pressed her hand to her temple again and closed her eyes. “Stop it. Whatever it is that you’re doing, I beg that you’ll stop it.”
Bode fell silent. He watched the faint trembling of her lower lip until she sucked it in and bit down on it. A small vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows as she rubbed her temple. She didn’t open her eyes. He wondered if she was hoping he would be gone by the time she did.
Comfort never heard him move. It wasn’t until she felt the pencil sliding from the smooth twist in her hair that she knew he was standing beside her. His hands, large, warm, rough in their texture and infinitely gentle in their touch, cupped her elbows and lifted her. She laid her forehead against his shoulder as the chair behind her was pushed out of the way. He held her lightly, not an embrace at all, only support. She could have stepped to the side, but then she was turned and the desk was at her back.
She had a moment to wonder why she didn’t feel trapped, but no time to arrive at an answer. Bode’s fingers had slipped under her chin.
“Look at me,” he said. “I want to make it right. Tell me how I can make it right.”
Comfort shook her head as she lifted it. “I don’t know. It makes it sadder that I don’t know.” A wash of tears glazed her dark eyes but didn’t fall. “I did a foolish thing. Perhaps there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Do you want to marry Bram?”
She blinked. “What?”
Bode repeated the question.
“What are you saying? That you’d arrange it?”
“I wasn’t saying anything. I was asking. Do you want to marry my brother?”
Comfort shifted her weight. She felt his fingers tighten on her elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
She stared at him. There was a nuance of expectation in his tone that made her suddenly uncertain of his meaning. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to marry Bram.”
“But you’re still in love with him.”
Comfort didn’t know if it was a question or his opinion, and she couldn’t see past his remote expression to find the answer. “Do you know, Bram said the very same thing. I told him I wasn’t, but he didn’t believe me. I wonder if you do.”
“I could be persuaded.”
She smiled a bit unevenly. “Mmm. It’s complicated. According to my uncles, I’ve been deceiving myself, and I’m learning that finding my way through that is as challenging as negotiating a labyrinth. I thought I was in love with him, so perhaps I was. Perhaps thinking it is enough to make it true. I keep circling that, wondering how anyone knows the fact of love from the fiction of it. I wonder how I will know.”
“You’ve been giving it a lot of thought.”
“Lately.” Her uneven smile turned self-deprecating. “Too late.”
“What if it’s not?”
Her lips parted in anticipation of what she meant to say, but when there were no words, they remained parted as invitation of what she meant to do.
Chapter Eight
At the moment their lips touched, Comfort’s understanding of what a kiss could be was changed. The sudden jolt, that surge of something electric that prickled her skin and made her heart stutter, also lifted her onto the tips of her toes. She faltered, lost her balance, and reached behind her to grab the desk. That was when Bode grounded her, jerking her against him with enough force to absorb the crackling charge.
If it made him unsteady, she couldn’t tell. He didn’t yield to the press of her body. One hand palmed the nape of her neck, and the other supported her at the small of her back. Her hands climbed his arms to clutch his jacket at the shoulders. The sensation of falling was still with her, but falling into what?
She thought she’d initiated the kiss, but perhaps not. He owned it. His mouth plundered hers. He took her lips, her tongue, her breath. The hot suck of his mouth held her fast even as his hold on her eased. Restless, she rose on tiptoe again. Everywhere she was soft, he was not. Her small breasts flattened against his chest, and her heart fluttered like a caged wild bird. She accustomed herself to the slant of his mouth, the rhythm and pulse of his tongue, and although she answered in kind, the kiss still belonged to him.
He claimed her with forays along the ridge of her teeth and the soft, wet underside of her lip. He sucked in her bottom lip, worried it between his teeth, salved it with the sweep of his tongue. Between bites, he savored her. Tasting. Tormenting her with the slow, deliberate savaging of her senses.
His kiss was a drug. It made her breathing quicken and her womb contract. Her breasts swelled. Her fingers tingled. She craved more. Always more.
When he drew back, she felt abandoned, bereft, and then his mouth returned to hers. The slant was different, the shape of his mouth—was that a smile?—changed when it touched her lips. She had no sense that he was amused. What she sensed was hunger.
She responded to that. Her hands moved from his shoulders to his neck. She cradled his head. Her fingertips ruffled and tugged the silky strands of hair at his nape. He said something, but the words were flattened and indistinguishable against her lips, and what she heard and felt was a murmur that chased a shiver all the way down her spine.
Something hit the floor hard. The thump startled her. She would have reared back, but there was no place to go. Another thud. This time she realized it was the stack of ledgers that was falling. She removed one hand from Bode’s neck and began searching blindly behind her to find what remained of the stack and pull it away from the edge.
Her fingers had just curled around the spine of one book when Bode’s hand closed over her wrist. Instead of helping draw the ledgers in, he directed her hand to nudge them away. They hovered precariously while her fingers scrabbled to catch them. His push was stronger than her pull, and the last three books slid to the floor. Their landing was softened by the ones that had fallen before.
Comfort reared back her head, breaking off the kiss. She had just enough time to suck in a breath. What she meant to say to him was lost as his mouth returned to hers. She heard the whisper and rustle of papers sliding across the desk, the odd skittering sound of rolling pencils, and the flutter of documents as they floated to the floor. Her fingers closed about the crystal paperweight, but he took it from her, afraid perhaps that she meant to bludgeon him with it. She tensed, expecting to hear it crash, but nothing like that happened. She didn’t know what he did with it. A moment later, she didn’t care.
Bode palmed her hips, lifted her, and set her down on top of the desk. She became the paperweight for those few things that hadn’t been cleared away. She laid her hands over his when they came to rest on her knees. His fingers curled around the fabric of her gown anyway, gathering it by inches, raising her hem above the laced tops of her leather boots.
His mouth was humid. Hot. There was a hint of anise on his breath, and the scent of soap lingered on his skin. She had an urge to touch his face, to lay a palm against his cheek, perhaps cup his clean-shaven jaw. It would be like holding the kiss.
Before she could surrender to the temptation, Bode’s hands shifted from her knees to her hips. He inched her backward and stepped between her legs. It was the first time she realized her hem was level with her knees.
Startled, Comfort tore her mouth
away and turned her head, tucking her chin into her shoulder. His lips touched the exposed cord in her neck. He followed the line to the hollow behind her ear. She put up a hand to push him away, but her fingertips offered no real resistance. He kissed them.
A shiver tripped lightly down her spine. Her breath caught. He teased her earlobe with the tip of his tongue and then whispered something rough and hot against her ear. She didn’t know what he said. The warmth of his breath tickling her skin was what mattered.
His mouth brushed her cheek, her temple, and for a moment rested against her forehead. One hand slid deeply into her dark hair, loosening the combs and removing a pencil. She made a grab at them before they clattered to the desk, and her hair unfolded over the back of his hand like a bolt of Japanese silk. He twisted one of the cascading waves around his fingers and tugged, directing her head toward him again and her mouth exactly where he wanted it.
Her mouth, her splendidly formed and inviting mouth, was damp, faintly swollen, and rose petal pink. He could see the tip of her tongue where she pressed it against her teeth. It made his breathing quicken and his nostrils flare. He bent his head and rubbed his lips against hers. Her mouth opened. He pressed his entry, deepening the kiss. They shared a single breath, and when it wasn’t enough, he tore away and buried his face in her neck.
She moaned softly as he sipped her skin. The sound of it stirred him. That first taste only whet his appetite. She made him afraid. She always had.
In his eyes she was both temptress and innocent, and for as long as he’d known her, the scales had mostly favored the latter. But they were shifting, shifting quickly, and the balance was precarious at best. She was on the precipice of understanding the change. He could feel it in the advance and retreat of her responses, the way she opened to his mouth and closed to his hands.
She was dangerously curious. Wanting, but not certain what she wanted.
And he couldn’t be sure that she wanted it from him.
His little brother cast a very long shadow.