Since the Surrender

by Julie Anne Long

  All she’d done for him, truly, was cause him grief, and between the two of them, they’d nearly shamed each other yet again.

  Her extremities were cold with fear despite the sultriness of the night. She couldn’t anticipate what he intended to do to her. Hers was a child’s temper compared to his.

  He’d gotten her through the ball crowd, and they were on the street now, wending through the great diverse clog of hackneys and carriages of all vintages and quality. His gloved fingers were not quite digging into her arm, but still, it was not entirely comfortable.

  “Where are your lodgings, Mrs. March? Are they close? Did you take a hackney here?”

  Why were they going there? Was he merely escorting her home?

  Hope and wild relief surged through her.

  “Three streets over. Across the square. I’ve a small—” She was surprised when she heard her voice. A thin, frayed thing.

  His anger and tension made it difficult to speak.

  “I’ve a house. Very close.”

  Chapter 9

  The walk was unpleasant, fast and silent.

  Gaslight newly installed in the district lit soft patches of cobblestone and left chessboards of darkness and light along the street. His arm was rigid; he was alert as a panther prepared to spring. His gait was only a trifle uneven. She half sensed he would welcome another attack, for at least he could spend some of his anger.

  She turned toward the house, got up the stairs, and her hand trembled. She fumbled endlessly with the key, and still his hand remained where it was, gripping her arm.

  She got the door open. She turned to him, with a naively hopeful, “Thank you, Captain Eversea. I bid you good—”

  He pulled her into the house, closed the door with a certain amount of feeling.

  And released her elbow at last.

  She rubbed at it while he whipped off his coat and hat and arranged them with swift neatness in a stack on the table where her mail and invitations would have collected, had anyone been about to collect mail or invitations for her.

  “Why,” he said, that soft-smoke voice far too reasonable, “the bloody hell are you wearing a pistol strapped to your thigh?”

  Something had happened to her lungs. They seemed disconnected from the rest of her body. She couldn’t breathe. Then again, she couldn’t think or speak, either.

  She could hear his breathing now, which could not bode well.

  “I will ask again: why are you wearing a pistol strapped to your thigh, Mrs. March?”

  “I—”

  Suddenly he was on his knees before her, and before she could gasp, his hands roughly yanked up her dress. He swiftly looped her garter with a finger and sliced it with a frighteningly sharp knife that seemed to come from nowhere. The silk gave like butter under its blade and came away in his fingers.

  He did the same with the other.

  The gun fell heavily into his hand.

  The tips of his fingers rested where the gun had been, on that satin, vulnerable skin between her legs. He left them there, her dress hiked to just above where her legs made a vee, parted just the width of the gun.

  She was terrified, shivering.

  And it was all she could do not to open her legs and invite him in, Oh please, please.

  He looked into her face, his hand still hot on her bare thigh. His fingers spread, savoring her skin, tormenting her. Teasing her. Frightening her.

  His eyes flared hotly at what he saw in her face. He dropped his eyes, steadying his own breath. And deliberately he slid his fingers down, down, away from her. Leaving a hot trail over her skin. Snagging briefly in her stockings.

  And then he yanked down her dress.

  And sat back in a chair.

  All done in seconds.

  She was speechless.

  And he said nothing at all.

  A moment passed while they both gathered composure. The breathing in the room seemed unnaturally loud.

  The fire was a wan thing, and she wished she could poke it up a bit, but she hesitated to move just yet.

  She could not have guessed what passed through his mind in that long stretch of wordlessness. Still, she did know when a tentative peace arrived, when the worst of his anger had ebbed. It was palpable.

  “Tea?” she suggested tentatively.

  His mouth quirked.

  She stood. In the tiny kitchen she filled a kettle and put it on to boil. The maid had left a fire burning low.

  When she returned to the sitting room, he was still studying the pistol. “Mathew’s,” he said.

  She found her voice. It emerged subdued. “Yes. It was Mathew’s. I intended it for protection.”

  “Protection.” He said this flatly. “Protection.” His head came up; he stared at her incredulously. “What if it fired while you were dancing a quadrille, ricocheted off the punch bowl, severed the chain above the chandelier, which then fell and crushed the cream of London society?”

  It was certainly one possible scenario.

  “‘Cream’ is a subjective term, wouldn’t you say?”

  Two blue marble eyes stared at her.

  “I didn’t intend to quadrille, as I wasn’t precisely invited to the ball.”

  So she wouldn’t be able to charm him this evening. The eyes continued boring into her.

  “Weren’t you?” he said dryly. “I suppose that means you weren’t invited upstairs for brandy and cigars with the gentlemen, then, either.”

  “What if your damned ever-present boot pistol shot off your foot during a vigorous…”

  Oh, bloody hell.

  She was about to say “quadrille,” but his quadrille days were likely behind him for good.

  Her eyes squeezed closed. When she was a child, she’d had a beautiful Spanish shawl, a bit tattered, handed down from girl to girl in the family by an aunt. She used to pretend its shimmery folds could make her invisible.

  She rather longed for that shawl now.

  She opened her eyes, as she would need to do that at some time anyway.

  He was watching her, and damned if he didn’t look amused. “Damned’?” he repeated softly.

  She felt herself blushing again.

  “A vigorous what, Mrs. March?” That low voice dragged over her senses like a silk scarf. Unfair. Unfair. “What do you imagine I do vigorously, these days?”

  He had a talent, a positive diabolical skill, for knowing when she was uncomfortable and then fanning her discomfort into something approaching excruciating.

  Because now she was picturing precisely what she was certain he would do vigorously and well. She imagined she could still feel five hot places left behind by the press of his fingers on the inside of her thighs. She imagined the slide of his long, warm fingers inside her. Her skin pulsed as if he were touching it still.

  If he hadn’t found her pistol, she might have…he might have…they might have…

  Well, she might have slept better this evening than she had in years.

  She was suddenly terribly afraid of how quickly she’d capitulated, how quickly her sense had surrendered to sensuality. It unnerved her to think that anyone could have that sort of control over her.

  He was watching her closely. Eyes as darkly fascinated as though he’d watched everything she’d just imagined take place right before his eyes.

  “Should the pistol have accidentally fired, likely it would have killed me before it killed anyone else,” she reassured him. An attempt at lightness.

  The light instantly abandoned his eyes. “Yes.”

  Less a word than a hiss issued between clenched teeth. As if a slow child had finally arrived at the proper solution to a problem.

  Ah, so it mattered to him whether she inadvertently killed herself.

  “But the pistol was locked—”

  “I knew that straight away when I touched it, yes.” Dryly ironic.

  While I was touching you, were the unspoken words.

  “I know how to load it, how to fire it, how to sho
ot well, Captain Ev—”

  “For God’s sake! My hand has been up your—” He shook his head roughly. “You know my name is Chase. Please use it.”

  Far be it for her to argue a fine point. She’d clearly demonstrated she wasn’t prim enough to object to that sort of informality.

  “Very well. Chase. I’m a very good shot. I haven’t been sheltered. I’m not…fragile. I am not so foolish about weapons. I understand what they’re for. I thought it unwise to leave home without it, and I needed to put it somewhere. I could hardly put it in my bodice or my reticule. It’s quite a seriously good and solid pistol.”

  “But why bring it at all? Why were you spying on him? Did you intend to threaten him for information? Kinkade? Did you intend to brandish it in the ballroom and make accusations?”

  “No! Do you really think I’m that…. stupid and reckless?”

  Silence.

  Oh.

  The last time he’d saved her from her own recklessness could have ruined his career; it nearly had. It had changed both of their lives forever.

  And even now, the pain of that moment, the shame of it, his doubts about her character, and yes, the blame, flickered in his eyes.

  A bit of the interesting tension ebbed, and a sense of bittersweet crept in. And she wondered if they ever would mention it, or if it would lie between them forever.

  She was chastened.

  “I promise you, I would never do anything so rash. I have no wish to do violence to myself, to the cream of London society, or to Mr. Kinkade. My God, Chase. Lucy is at stake. I only wished for a chance to speak to Kinkade, since I’ve failed to speak to him so far. Since he’s refused to speak to me so far. My intent in carrying the pistol was to protect myself.”

  “At a ball? What are you afraid of?” he demanded. “Rosalind?” he said, his voice harder, when she didn’t answer him.

  It sounded like a warning.

  She inhaled and stood, watching him carefully.

  She moved over to the humidor and lifted out the two letters. They both smelled faintly of cigar now, which meant they smelled faintly of her former husband. She hesitated to hand them to Chase, because doubtless he would remember it, too.

  Ultimately, she did hand them to him.

  “I received this one yesterday. It was waiting for me when I returned home from the museum. The first one arrived a week earlier.”

  He read them, silently.

  “They’re silly, really,” she added quickly. “Quite deliberately ambiguous. I don’t know why anyone would think they would frighten me. If someone truly wanted to do harm to me, I imagine they would simply go right ahead and harm me.”

  They of course had frightened her, since she’d strapped a pistol to her thigh with garters before she went out in public.

  She watched his face. Nothing about his expression reflected that he thought they were silly. It in fact grew stonier the longer he looked at those two short sentences.

  Which both assuaged her fear and did not.

  “They were written by the same person,” he finally said. “The handwriting is masculine, if I had to guess. Same paper used each time.”

  He rustled it between his fingers. His voice was abstracted. There was a pause.

  “Cowards,” he said musingly, “who hope to frighten a woman this way, should be shot.”

  “Hence my pistol.”

  It was meant to be a jest.

  He didn’t laugh.

  He looked up at her. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.” A ghost of a mischievous smile. Which faded as their eyes met.

  “That one arrived shortly after I began inquiring about Lucy. The other arrived yesterday. They’re very noncommittal as threatening letters go, aren’t they?”

  “In a way that makes them more sinister.”

  He’d just said aloud what she hadn’t wanted to.

  And then he was quiet, lost in thought, willing those letters to impart greater meaning to him.

  The teakettle began to whistle, which made her jump.

  She bustled over to it. The sequence of the familiar task soothed her: she unlocked the caddy and spooned rich-as-turned-earth China black tea into the pot—bone china, delicate but not fussy, a single brilliant red rose painted in the center of it. She poured boiling water over the tea leaves. Watching the lovely fortifying blackness stain the water was meditative; it drew her back to other times she’d shared tea with Chase and her husband in Belgium. A time that, on the surface, seemed more peaceful. But she knew Chase took his tea without sugar or cream; she remembered this still. And she knew this because she’d once silently hoarded the homeliest of details about him as though they were guineas. For that reason, the time in Belgium had, in truth, been as peaceful as a polite stroll over planks lain over lava.

  Thankfully, she wasn’t that girl anymore.

  She arranged the pot and two cups on a tray and carried them to where he sat, apparently still musing, and settled the tea and cups down with a pleasantly domestic chink of porcelain on the small table between them.

  She poured for them.

  Chase looked at the tray. His head swiveled to his cup. But he didn’t pick it up. He seemed riveted.

  She took a sip of her own tea.

  “We ought to marry,” he said firmly.

  She choked, and tea sprayed everywhere.

  She spent the next few seconds coughing inelegantly from shock.

  Water poured hotly from her eyes. Chase shifted forward, clearly poised to leap into action should he need to take the precaution of giving her a good thump on the back. His hand came up in preparation for it. She waved a No, no, I’m quite all right arm at him.

  And she was all right after a moment.

  After a long moment.

  Though she needed to sniff, and wipe at her eyes, and she was certain there were blotches all over her face, and she hoped she hadn’t stained her borrowed gown.

  Silence fell.

  He didn’t apologize. But why should he? He hadn’t known that a proposal would make her choke.

  He’d gone unnaturally still. He actually seemed to be waiting for her to reply.

  “I…well, I suppose I…I beg your pardon? We ought to…marry?”

  A hesitation. “Yes.”

  She stared at him. Something moved in his eyes, something she couldn’t quite read. Had he surprised himself?

  He held perfectly still.

  “Each…other?” She was thunderstruck.

  “Yes.”

  His inflection—or lack thereof—was maddening. She hadn’t the faintest idea what to think, or what he was thinking.

  Stupefied silence on her part ensued. Inscrutable silence on his part ensued.

  Her face began to itch a little; coughing had shaken her coiffure irrevocably loose and tea had glued a few stray hairs to her cheek. She brushed absently at her face.

  “Why?”

  Another brief hesitation. “I daresay you didn’t dislike what happened in Kinkade’s library,” he began. The unspoken being: and what happened between us so many years ago.

  Oh. Oh, God. Her face was so lividly hot she wouldn’t have been surprised if fragrant steam spiraled from it.

  Unthinkably ungentlemanly.

  And quite true.

  Appallingly, he wasn’t finished. Apparently her scarlet face was answer enough to his first question—no, she hadn’t “disliked” it—like, dislike, what pallid words from the usually absolute Captain Eversea, and for how she felt about what happened in the library.

  “And I shall need to marry at some time.”

  She stared at him, and suppressed a startled laugh. Only Captain Eversea would issue a proposal as though it was an order. A solution to a particular problem. But which problem? Was he proposing to her out of a sense of honor—because she’d tempted him into sliding his hands up her thighs and he’d succumbed and would clearly have succumbed to much, much more and would have partaken happily? Out of a need to protect her honor? Out of honorably re
solving whatever had happened between them in the past?

  She said it delicately, as though handing him something aflame: “Chase…is this about what happened between us in…Belgium?”

  “No.” Flatly, immediately said. Accompanied by a warning flicker in his eyes and that familiar sensation that she’d run headlong into a wall.

  Ah. So they weren’t to talk about that, then.

  She stared at him. This was a man of absolutes, and there was nothing more absolute than marriage. And he invariably felt the need to make things…right.

  But…everything seemed wrong, suddenly. Where to begin?

  “What on earth makes you think we’d suit, Chase?”

  Ah, well. Apparently she wouldn’t begin diplomatically.

  He did stir a little, restlessly. He took in an audible breath.

  “I cannot imagine who could possibly suit me, if ‘suiting’ you means ‘shares my pursuits and temperament.’ I’m far too difficult and set in my ways. I’m not certain ‘suitability’ is grounds enough for marriage anyhow—for how well does anyone truly know anyone they marry? I suspect we should suit in some ways and not in others.”

  The “some ways” were quite obvious to the two of them.

  She was stunned to hear it recited so honestly and baldly. Then again, this was quite like him, too.

  She stared at him. He stared back, evenly, that fascinating face maddeningly impossible to read. And even as her sense of romance, such as it was, felt mortally wounded, her body, even now, responded: with a prickling in the nipple area, a tingle at the back of her neck, a hum between her legs, as though it were offering up helpful suggestions to her as to where Captain Eversea should touch her next.

  She felt a pressure rising in her chest. Incredulous hilarity? An urge to flee?

  Swelling disappointment she recognized.

  Because with his even-voiced suggestion Captain Eversea was shredding to bits the vestiges of tortured romance that had clung to her memories of him. She’d been denied that sort of thing as a girl; she’d spent sleepless nights wondering whether they ought to buy coal to heat the house or buy a fish for stew, since heating and eating were both luxuries. Poverty and practicality had dictated she marry a wealthy infatuated colonel the instant the offer was made. But it wasn’t as though she’d ever truly envisioned a happily-ever-after with Captain Charles Eversea. And yet…