Since the Surrender

by Julie Anne Long

  Just breathing now.

  There ought to be peace, and completion, satisfaction.

  But Rosalind had never felt wholly peaceful in Chase’s presence. She didn’t now.

  Despite the fact that her body still seemed boneless, warm and pliant as wax, and she remained upright only because he held her.

  The very fact of him demanded so much from her.

  She’d gotten her breathing under control and looked up. He was frowning a little, studying her. Then slowly he lowered her leg, slid his hands from her thighs. He hesitated.

  And his hands came up to her face.

  To her astonishment, he thumbed tears from beneath her eyes.

  Well, then. That would explain the haze of her vision.

  She was surprised and yet not surprised: he’d shaken her to the core, after all, and she was a woman, and had not given her life over to the practice of stoicism the way he did, the way men did.

  She gave a dismissive one-shouldered shrug. For some reason the corner of his mouth twitched up.

  And then he looked down at his hand, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger gently, slowly, together. Rubbing her tears into his skin.

  There followed a long moment of silence.

  “Well, there’s that done, then,” he whispered.

  She stared at him. Not precisely the words she would have chosen. Not remotely close to a declaration of love. But what had she expected? Of all the impossible things taking place this evening, she considered that loving him might turn out to be the most impossible.

  Love. She shied from the thought as though it had suddenly flown at her out of the dark.

  “Come,” he whispered next.

  And they crept out of the museum much the way they’d crept into it. And the journey out seemed to take an eternity and only seconds. Her body was still not her own. It was his. She felt him everywhere still, and she welcomed the silence and dark to unabashedly savor this, to hoard every sensation.

  And as they passed through the Italian room once again, Rosalind thought that she smelled the smoke of her dead husband’s cigar.

  She wondered if it was the smell of guilt or of absolution.

  As instructed, Chase’s driver, Phillips, arrived for them just an hour after they’d gone in—had it really been only an hour?—and they’d all but leaped into the carriage while it was still moving.

  And inside the beautifully sprung and maintained vehicle—which, Rosalind noted, still smelled a bit the way Liam had before he’d been cleaned—the distance between them was marked, as if each needed a distinct bubble in which to indulge their thoughts.

  To recover their equilibrium.

  It was as though they had exhausted conversation, she thought, after greedily, violently breaking a fast together. And indeed, she had broken a fast.

  “I’m sorry we found nothing.”

  He was thinking about his failure to find answers—he who always had answers—and not about her.

  She smiled a little, ruefully. “Did you…did you smell a cigar when you were in the museum?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “Why?”

  “I thought I smelled one the last time we were in. When no one was about.”

  Perhaps it really is just my conscience speaking to me, she thought.

  Chapter 18

  She was nearly nodding off in a haze of fatigue when the driver pulled the horses to a halt before her little red-doored house. Chase stepped down, then reached up for her hand to help her down, too.

  “Go ahead and light the lamps now, Phillips.” His voice was just above a murmur. “My thanks.”

  The driver climbed down to do just that, and in moments the carriage seemed to sprout glowing eyes. Chase reached up a hand for Rosalind, and—her body, deliciously aching, humming from being treated the way a woman’s body ought to be treated—she took his hand and stepped down.

  The sky was pearl gray. Dawn, she thought drowsily.

  “I should like to speak to you privately for just a moment, Rosalind. May I come inside?”

  So terribly formal, given that they had been climbing each other’s bodies just moments earlier.

  It felt odd to speak in a normal voice after the long hush of the evening.

  She was peculiarly relieved that he would be leaving. She wanted to be alone to review those shattering moments. To try to ascertain whether her curiosity had been satisfied. If the need had been sated. If it had been merely curiosity and need.

  And she was worried she would hear a reprise of his proposal.

  Perhaps his sense of honor demanded he issue one every time he touched her. She didn’t relish refusing him again.

  “Very well,” she said softly.

  Chase followed her inside.

  He stood and watched while for a few moments she busied herself with little domestic things. The fire had burned low; she poked it up, coaxing a bit more heat from the weary coals. She moved to light two lamps. The softly swelling circle of light they created was like the rising sun by contrast to their hour of unrelieved darkness and quiet.

  He waited quietly as she did all of this.

  And then she turned toward him and gave a start. He was standing very still, his face white, his mouth a tight line. Her heart lurched. She recognized pain when she saw it.

  “Chase, sit down,” she ordered quietly.

  She brought the old softly upholstered chair closer to him with one swift pull.

  He lowered himself into it and stretched out his leg, and she watched him quietly endure whatever pain he’d been left with in Belgium. They had done what they could, she knew, the battlefield surgeons. They had sewn up Charles Eversea with utilitarian hands and they hadn’t taken his leg. But they’d left him with this.

  She took the chair next to him. A moment later she tentatively laid her hands on his leg, offering him the warmth of her hands. As much for her sake as his own. She couldn’t bear the whiteness around his mouth.

  He peered out at her through lowered lids, his breathing a little unsteady. “Perhaps if you dug your fingers in just a little…”

  She dug in her fingers a little and kneaded the heavy muscle there.

  And after a few moment Chase exhaled, some of the whiteness around his mouth easing.

  “Better,” he murmured. “My thanks.”

  She slid her hand away from him. In the moment, they both seemed to have retreated into themselves, abashed at this intimacy that seemed somehow more intimate than lovemaking.

  “Do you know, Rosalind…” He stopped, considering what he was about to say. “I felt no pain when I left my cousin’s company last evening.”

  She might as well give up anticipating what this man was about to say next. She hadn’t gotten it right yet.

  “You…drank with the vicar?” Seems as though Chase drank with everyone these days.

  “It wasn’t meant as a euphemism. I wasn’t offered a drink other than tea. The man hadn’t even a brandy decanter visible anywhere in the room.” Chase made this sound like the height of incivility. “I spoke with him, enjoyed his company as much as I could the company of someone who is related distantly by blood but is still a stranger. And literally—for a moment—I felt no pain at all when I left.”

  He was trying to tell her something important, something he had no real words for.

  But suddenly her mind froze on his last words and her stomach tightened. “Are you in pain…all the time?”

  She was careful to keep her tone as easy and neutrally investigative as a surgeon’s. But she could feel the precise aching contours of her heart in her chest.

  When did his pain become her pain?

  She shied away from this thought.

  There was a hesitation, which she disliked.

  “Not all of the time.” Said wryly enough for her to believe him, and she eased out the breath she realized she’d been holding. “It varies. From…” He paused and shook his head sharply once, an eloquent substitute for the word “unbearable
.” “…to hardly present. But this was different. It was as if…as if it had never even been at all. It was gone.” For some reason he sounded grim. “And I assure you there’s a significant difference.”

  He was not a fanciful man. He was not one to idly interpret something as a religious experience. She felt as disoriented as he must have felt.

  “Did he…touch you?”

  “Yes.” He said it with dark amusement.

  She didn’t know what to say. She shared in his wonderment and skepticism. She, like he, wasn’t given over to fancy.

  “It wasn’t a laying on of hands, or anything of the sort. Just a hand clasp as I went to leave. I turned around, was about four steps toward the door when I noticed that…well, when I noticed. I confess I was thunderstruck. I turned and looked back at him…He looked frightened. It might have been a trick of the light, but somehow I don’t think so. But I think he knew what I felt. Which was…nothing at all.”

  This was entirely beyond anything in Rosalind’s experience, and clearly beyond anything in Chase’s, too. She imagined it wreaked havoc with his sense of what was possible and what was not. His sense of the absolute.

  “Did you like him?” she asked.

  “He’s well-spoken. Will be popular with the ladies of the village. I anticipate they’ll be flinging themselves at him in very genteel and strategic ways via dinners and village fairs and the like. He’ll be fat from all the suppers he’s invited to. The pews will groan under the sheer capacity of the Sunday audiences. Genevieve will swoon.”

  “Handsome?”

  “Yes,” he said, with the matter-of-fact confidence of a man who knew his own appeal was matchless.

  “Charming?”

  “He’ll do.”

  She smiled. “Did you like him?”

  “I suppose I did. He is a relative, on my mother’s side.” He paused. “I hope I was imagining it. For his sake.”

  She knew he hoped he was imagining it for his own sake.

  “Do you really think he can…”

  “I have no idea what to think.” And he said it so conclusively that she knew he dreaded thinking any one person could take away his pain, because thinking this possible would haunt anyone who lived with lingering pain.

  It did seem an awfully immense power—the power to heal. And a humbling one. Possibly, strangely, a dangerous one, too. Surely it wasn’t true. Perhaps Chase had simply entirely lost himself in conversation to the vicar; perhaps, somehow, miraculously, he’d forgotten the pain entirely.

  “But it’s interesting. Some of us walk about with the burden of old wounds. What must it be like to have the burden of…healing? If that is indeed the case?”

  “I think in a way we all walk about with the burden of old wounds. And in some ways, we all possess the power to heal them.” She said this carefully.

  His head came up sharply.

  He stared at her through narrowed eyes.

  Not a stupid man. He knew an oblique reference to their indiscretion of years ago when he heard one. Obliquely was apparently the only way they would ever discuss it.

  “I know, Rosalind, that you think I’m rigid and unyielding and so forth. No, don’t protest.”

  She hadn’t been going to. Which made him smile, though there was little humor in the smile.

  “But it’s necessary in times of war. Lives hinge on order, discipline, and certainty, and unwavering decisions. Weakness, poor judgment, in that context is unforgivable, especially when you possess the choice not to be weak. Especially when lives—countries—depend on the soundness, the consistency, of your judgment.”

  “Sometimes we’re not able to choose not to be weak. Weakness chooses us. And everyone has a different definition of weakness.”

  He snorted. There was a silence.

  “You’re not at war anymore, Chase.” Quite softly.

  He looked at her hard a moment longer. Then sighed. It could have been exasperation. Or fatigue. Or anything, really.

  “It seems the Montmorency rarely has many visitors at all,” he said.

  A subject change, is what it was.

  “I saw only three people there the day I first visited,” she said. “And one of them was you.”

  His head went up sharply. “Who were the others?” he demanded. “It wasn’t a Tuesday, so they were not the cleaning staff. MacGregor said the cleaning staff came in only on Tuesdays. Did you recognize any of them?”

  “No one I knew. And one—well, to be honest, I still think I imagined him. I thought I saw a man dressed like King Henry VIII. Wearing stuffed hose and a great hat. Scurrying through that room with the…the big bed.”

  Chase said nothing for a moment. He frowned at her, his eyes wry. She could virtually hear the whir of his thoughts.

  “And the other?”

  “The other was a strange little craftsman, a puppeteer, who was messing about with that hideous marionette.”

  Chase went very still.

  Frighteningly still.

  And then slowly he began to lean forward, as if urging her words on. Or tipping out of his chair.

  She eyed him nervously

  “Go on,” he commanded oddly.

  “He’d noticed I was looking at the Rubinetto. He asked why; I told him it reminded me of my sister. He told me the painting reminded him of his daughter. He also said…he didn’t like it.”

  Chase remained frozen at a lean. His eyes were ablaze with a peculiar triumph.

  “Rosalind?”

  His voice was so strange that her heart stuttered.

  A pause, during which she began to worry about his health and sanity.

  “I should like to take you to a puppet show tomorrow morning. If the weather is fine.”

  Again, she never would have guessed what he was about to say.

  “Very well,” she agreed. With a certain amount of relief.

  He leaned back in his chair. He spread his own big hand over his leg, soothing it.

  “And so the pain has returned?” It was less a question than something to say.

  “I can’t feel it at all when I make love.”

  And just like that her face all but went up in flame.

  She stared at him, thunderstruck. Bloody man was so very direct and so very good at ambushing her.

  He watched her, his face rueful. Softly, in that smoke voice of his, he said, evenly: “Perhaps we can be lovers until I leave for India.”

  He was a planner, was Captain Eversea. Always wanted to know what would happen next.

  “I…” It was a stammer.

  Lovers. What would this entail? It sounded so sophisticated. Would she need peignoirs? Would she need to enlist her modiste, Madame Marceau’s, assistance in preparing for this?

  Tonight had seemed…necessary to both of them, inevitable. A culmination and a release. She didn’t know how to think beyond it, but she needed to do it out of his presence.

  And she wanted to think about Lucy. She ought to think about Lucy.

  “You’re entitled to pleasure, Rosalind,” he said quietly. His voice so soft. “Even in the midst of duty. And I promise…I can give you extraordinary pleasure. It would be my honor.”

  Her turn to jerk her head up. He, once again, had sussed out the run of her thoughts. But not quite all of them.

  She bit her lip and looked down at her knees for an instant.

  Then looked up at him, a plea in her eyes. Willing him to understand what she couldn’t articulate.

  He gave a shake of his head, absolving her of the need to answer.

  And stabbing his walking stick into the floor, he drove himself to a stand with a grace that belied he’d ever known pain at all.

  She knew better.

  “We will find Lucy,” he said firmly.

  “I know we will.”

  She wanted to trust in his certainty, and she knew he needed to hear it from her.

  “Thank you for this evening,” he said.

  She knew he meant, Thank you for making
shameless love against a three hundred year old bureau with me.

  Again, his voice was so formal.

  The kiss was not. He leaned down toward her. Their lips merely touched, lingered softly: it was a chaste kiss.

  In seconds it had turned her blood into molten honey.

  He leaned his forehead against hers briefly. Closed his eyes. And so did she.

  And a moment later he drew in a breath and sighed it out softly.

  Then backed away from her, his face once again tense and expressionless.

  “Dream about it, Rosalind,” he said softly.

  Then he bowed a good-night.

  The next day, Chase fetched Liam from his cousin’s boardinghouse in the Eversea carriage, which had been scrubbed and aired and left to dry in the mews overnight.

  “I saw yer,” Liam said slyly. “Last night.”

  “Saw me what?” Chase said.

  “Kissin’ Mrs. March.”

  When would he have…?

  “In ’er ’ouse. Afore you left. Afore Cousin Adam came to take me to his house for the night.”

  Cheeky bugger. He must have been up after he’d put him down to sleep. “I wasn’t kissing Mrs. March.” He hadn’t, then.

  “You wanted to.”

  He’d wanted to do much, much more to Mrs. March, and then, sweet merciful God, so he had in the museum. He’d never known such shredding pleasure in his entire life, and he still wasn’t certain it hadn’t been a mistake. Still, it was worth whatever it cost him in sleep and memories for the rest of his life, or so he told himself. Whether or not he ever took her again.

  But he knew precisely where he wanted to take her next, and he knew where she wanted to be taken. He knew how he wanted to make love to her.

  And he would take her again, at least one more time before he left, because he was all but certain he knew what Rosalind March wanted better than she did.

  And she wanted him. At least in her bed.

  “You shouldn’t spy, Liam.”

  “I should spy only when ye tell me to, is what you mean.”

  “You should spy only when I pay you to.”

  Liam laughed, amused with himself and with Chase, which was much better than how he was the day before. The reason was that he’d transferred his faith and hopes in finding his sister to Chase, and the child’s cheerful mood brought home to Chase the enormity of his responsibility to find her for him.