Page 19 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Would he trace one warm fingertip down her spine?

She shivered at the imagining of it.

“I’ll give you time to settle in,” he said, the sudden gruffness of his voice somehow eliciting another shiver, which she chose to blame on the cooler air dancing across her skin.

“Th-thank you.”

He edged his way past the bed, managing neither to look at nor to touch her, and was beyond the curtain before she could muster the strength to speak another word.

What on earth ailed her? Had she been struck by a fever after a quarter-mile walk in a drizzling rain?

How otherwise to explain her own strange longing, that twinge of regret when he made no attempt to practice his secret rakish charms on her?

But of course, he had every reason not to trust her either. Not to reveal his true self. She was, at best, a burden to him. An annoyance. Even the comforts of a private coach were insufficient recompense for the added trouble of traveling with a woman who’d made it her mission to mock him. And now, even those modest comforts had been swept away, replaced by the discomforts of accommodations that didn’t deserve the name of inn.

She waited until she heard the latch of the outer door before she let her dress drop to the floor, then undid the ribbon of her shift and shed that as well, along with her shoes and stockings. One-handed, she wet a cloth, wrung it, and bathed as best she could, grateful for the steaming water, particularly in the absence of soap.

Once she had freshened herself, she opened her valise in search of a nightdress and discovered that her sketches were missing. By themselves, they were no great loss; she could hardly blame him for having thrown one of them, at least, into the fire. But the painting . . .

She began to rummage, employing both hands despite the discomfort, pushing aside linens, making a tangle of all her remaining possessions, until her fingertips found the familiar edge of a leather case in its usual place, beneath the valise’s false bottom. Relief shuddered from her in a sigh. Perhaps Lord Ryland didn’t even know it was there.

Carelessly, she stuffed the contents back into the bag on top of it, all but the nightdress, which she donned with a struggle. Afterward, she picked up her clothes from the floor, shook them out, and draped them over the crates to air and dry. The boots she tucked beneath the bed so that Lord Ryland might not trip over them when he returned.

Then she blew out the candle and crawled into the bed, hugging the chimney wall for what little warmth radiated from it. The mattress rustled beneath her, but the sheets were clean and the straw reasonably fresh. The barkeep’s sister must not have been gone long.

The quiet sounds around her—dripping eaves, the murmur of voices below—ought to have lulled her to sleep in a moment. She was exhausted. But she was also sore, and the laudanum was in Lord Ryland’s pocket. The steady patter of rain made her worry about the condition of the roads and how long they would be delayed here. And the fading conversations, as night wore on and patrons called out their farewells, only made her wonder when Lord Ryland would return.

At long last, she heard steps on the outer staircase and the creak of the door. Then the rattle of dishes, the clatter of someone washing up. The barkeep, her drowsy mind insisted. Surely not the earl.

She screwed shut her eyes all the same.

Then, moments later, footsteps—unbooted—crossed the floor in her direction. The fabric of the curtain whispered as it was drawn aside. And she was no longer alone.

She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly, to feign sleep. Her performance must have been convincing. Ryland spoke not a word to her as he washed in the water that remained, surely now not even tepid, and slid into bed beside her, his back to hers. She wondered how much of his clothing he had removed—and then chided herself for her curiosity.

She couldn’t possibly sleep like this, tense with cold and uncertainty, everything strange and improper and wrong.

But the heat of his body was welcome, softer and warmer certainly than the wall to her other side. The rhythm of his breath was unexpectedly soothing—she’d grown accustomed to being alone, but also to denying the loneliness she sometimes felt. Even the raindrops, which earlier had drummed out an ominous warning, threatening to strand them in this intolerable situation, dwindled down to nothing more than a gentle lullaby.

Incredibly, she slept.

When she awoke some hours later, she could have blamed her interrupted slumbers on the gray sunrise filtering around the curtain.

But she rather suspected the culprit was the aroused male pressed against her backside.

The sensation was not entirely outside her experience. When one moved through life as she had been driven to move, without the protections of parents, an elder brother, a governess, a chaperone, then one discovered that men—so-called gentlemen included—imagined themselves entitled to women’s figures, their scent, their smiles, their . . . attention. They groped in the guise of helpfulness, and rubbed themselves against unwitting and unwilling victims in crowded shops and passageways.

Such knowledge was surely unladylike. But Constantia had never claimed to be a lady.

She was not really surprised to awaken with the Earl of Ryland’s arms around her and his, his—organ nudging the small of her back. After all, he was a man—evidently, a virile one—and she had willingly shared a bed with him.

But she was still . . . unsettled.

Unsettled most of all by the discovery that she had no great desire to wriggle free.

For one thing, the morning air was cold, the quilt was thin, and he was warm.

For another, he was quite obviously still sound asleep—the weight of his arm and the steadiness of his breathing revealed as much. And even he ought not to be blamed for what his body did when he was not conscious of it.

For yet another, just as she had begun to think that the man in question might be . . . not entirely objectionable, she was now discovering that the sensation of his proximity was . . . not altogether unpleasant.

That realization spurred a sharp intake of breath, which for a moment only propelled them closer together. Without waking, he nestled closer still, cinching his arm tighter, drawing in a deeper breath that stirred the hair at her nape. And then a sleepy murmur, half sigh, half groan.

The sound made her stiffen. The sudden tautness of her body caused him to draw back a fraction. A momentary flex of his hand around her middle, as if in drowsy disbelief of the situation in which he found himself, or as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to let go. Then he stiffened, too—every bit of him that hadn’t been stiff already, that was—fumbled free of the linens, and shot from the bed like a bullet from a pistol. “Good God! I—I’m so—”

Holding her breath, she did not turn but listened to the frantic rustle of him gathering his clothes, the swish of the curtain, and finally, the slam of the door.

Leaving her to contemplate the possibility that, rather than linger another moment in bed with her, the man had rushed out into the cold, damp morning in nothing but his drawers.

Either she’d been wrong to suspect him of hidden roguery, or he despised Miss C. a great deal indeed.