Page 28 of Courting Elizabeth

She raised her head abruptly.

“You will not come to my chamber?”

The question contained relief, but also an anxiety that immediately awakened my desire to reassure her.

I approached without touching her.

“My apartments adjoin yours. The door can be locked from your side. I will not enter unless you open it or invite me.”

“And if I do not yet know whether I wish to open it?”

“Then it will remain closed.”

She gazed at me, unable to conceal her surprise.

“Without discussion?”

“On this point, none.”

“Yet you seemed disposed to negotiate on almost everything during our engagement.”

“I have learned that certain victories cost too much for the one who wins them.”

The word victory displeased me as soon as it was spoken. Elizabeth was neither an adversary nor land that my name permitted me to claim.

I extended my hand.

“May I?”

She placed her fingers in mine.

I slowly removed her glove, finger by finger. Her breathing changed. The bare skin of her palm appeared at last, delicate and warm beneath mine.

I raised it to my lips.

The contact stirred in me a hunger so violent that my entire body tensed. Elizabeth saw it. Her pupils dilated.

“Do not doubt my desire,” I murmured.

Color rose to her cheeks.

“I did not know if your restraint meant…”

She stopped.

“It means only that I prefer to wait for a choice you will not doubt tomorrow.”

Her fingers closed slightly around mine.

“I had not imagined you patient.”

“Neither had I.”

A smile touched her mouth.

That smile gave me more hope than I yet wished to allow myself.

We supped in the small drawing room. The conversation remained cautious at first, then Elizabeth began to comment on the portraits she had glimpsed on the staircase. She decided that one of my ancestors looked as though he condemned the entire existence of the family and that another certainly concealed a passion for pastries.