Twenty-one
It’s midnight,” Gideon said softly, his breath ruffling the hair on Charis’s crown and disturbing her from her warm half doze.
They shared the settle before the blazing parlor fire. She curled into him, one arm loosely around his waist, one resting across his chest. Her palm lay flat over his heart. She loved to feel its steady beating, as though she connected directly to his life force.
“Do you want to go to bed?” she asked huskily, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. This physical closeness still seemed a precious miracle. She never took it for granted.
His sleepy laugh was a deep rumble under her hand, and the arm he draped around her tightened. “I always want to go to bed.”
After so many days of unbridled debauchery, a girl should lose the ability to blush. Nonetheless, heat rose in her cheeks. “You’re insatiable.”
“At least where you’re concerned.” He raised her hand from his chest and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. She couldn’t help shivering with response.
Over recent days, she’d watched the strain fade from Gideon’s features. He looked younger, less haunted. Perhaps because when not making passionate love to her, he’d slept. Deep, undisturbed rest that she guessed he hadn’t enjoyed for years. His dangerous life had worn him down long before he fell into the Nawab’s clutches.
But while he smiled more often and more willingly, shadows lingered in his eyes. With a pang of sorrow, she realized they probably always would.
Since the night Gideon had shown her the pleasure a man and woman could find together, they’d rarely left their rooms. Sometimes Charis forgot the outside world with its demands and dangers existed. There had been no sign of Felix or Hubert and no warning about trouble at Penrhyn. The hotel servants tidied and brought meals or bathwater. The rest of her modish new wardrobe arrived. Gideon summoned a notary and set out legal safeguards against her stepbrothers. Her fortune was now officially his, at least until the end of June, when it reverted to her.
She’d hoped the change in Gideon would extend to an easier relationship with humanity. So far, she had witnessed no such merciful amnesty. To her sorrow, Gideon’s immediate tension was visible whenever strangers set foot in this private kingdom. Her brief optimism that she’d found a remedy to his affliction faded further every time she saw him pale and recoil from other people.
He wasn’t cured. Not by a long way. She fervently thanked heaven every day that he could touch her. But so far, his recovery advanced no further than that.
She knew when she looked into his eyes that he believed it never would.
That wasn’t the only trouble nicking at the skein of sensual delight entwining her. For all its myriad pleasures, her new life was hollow at its center. The unspoken pain bit most at moments of purest happiness. Like now.
Gideon told her she was beautiful. He told her how much he wanted her. She had no doubts he desired her with endless hunger. But even when she felt they united into one being, words of love never escaped her husband’s lips. She knew him well enough to interpret his silence as deliberate.
Nor did he mention his plans for when they left Jersey. It was as though these weeks they shared now existed outside time.
Coward that she was, she let him get away with avoiding the subject. She’d exhausted her store of courage standing up to him after their marriage. Now she was terrified that too many awkward questions would shatter their delicate bliss. Perhaps because with every day, the threat of leaving him plowed deeper furrows in her heart. She couldn’t bear to hear him say he still meant them to separate. Although his silence on the matter indicated he hadn’t relinquished his original scheme.
Her arm firmed around his waist as she laid an unspoken claim, defying his right to forsake her. But the words insisting he tell her what he intended crammed in her throat.
“Charis, it’s midnight,” he said with greater emphasis, then glanced at the clock. “Five past.”
His unusual obsession with the time pierced her troubled reflections. She looked up in puzzlement. “Is that important?”
He kissed her quickly on the mouth. “You’ve lost track of the days, haven’t you?”
“Lost track…” Perplexed, she blinked at him. Hard to marshal coherent thought when his kisses sent her spinning into dazzling Elysium.
His lips curved in the tender smile that always made her poor ador
ing heart somersault. “It’s the first of March. Happy birthday, my darling.”
Her birthday…
Stiffening, she drew away. She forced her befuddled mind to calculate back. So difficult to count paradise in minutes and hours. She’d barely been aware whether it was day or night. Gideon lit her life like the sun. She needed no other fire in her heavens.
“You have possession of your fortune.” She couldn’t define his tone. He didn’t sound particularly triumphant. He kissed her again, more gently this time. “We won, Charis.”
They’d vanquished her stepbrothers. She was safe. Relief filtered through her. And fear that now the threat passed, everything would change between her and Gideon.
She forced herself to speak though she knew he wouldn’t want to hear what she said. “Because of you.” She swallowed and continued in a voice that vibrated with emotion. “I owe you everything.”
“I don’t want your gratitude.” His expression hardened, and he sat up. His arm slid away from her. Worse, his emotional withdrawal was unmistakable as frost in the air.