Page 47

He could still feel her palm on the ruined left side of his jaw, fingers finding the web of his injuries, and not flinching. He had leaned into that touch. He had wanted to. Wanting was the obscenity. An undead man did not get to reach for warm things. He had told himself so all night, and last night the telling had failed in a single unforced kiss.

He got up. The chair complained. His left shoulder pulled tight as he crossed to the washstand. He made himself stand in front of the looking glass.

He was good at not seeing himself in the looking glass. A man could shave by feel. He had learned that on campaign, fingers finding the line of the jaw in the dark, no lantern, no time. No valet now. No one laying out his linen. No one peeling him out of a coat. Stiles had learned not to stare. The looking glass was for other men.

This morning he planted himself square and peered into it anyway. Took his collar in his fingers. Gave the order, the way he had once given orders to a company that still answered.

Look at it. Look at what kissed her.

He shrugged out the coat and unwound the cravat. The linen came away from his throat with a reluctance that belonged to him, not to the cloth. He pulled off the waistcoat and then the shirt. Cool air found the seams climbing his left side.

The scarring started faint along the left side of his jaw. Pale. Candlelight and a high collar could almost pretend it was not there … a trick of shadow, a bad shave, nothing a drawing room needed to comment on. It did not stay faint. Below the collarbone it turned to patchwork. A thick seam ran from the point of his left shoulder down across his chest, crossed by others, stitch-marks climbing every ridge like county borders on a map. A map of a dead man’s wounds. The flesh between was puckered and shining. Still angry at the edges, weeks on. Someone had sewn him with terrible impatience. Someone had bent over this chest in a cellar in France with a needle and sewn him shut in order to jolt him with electricity.

Last night, with her mouth still warming against his and her fingers on the very seams the looking glass was showing him, he had not thought about these wounds at all. That was the danger. She made the facts of his recent death recede. She made him forget, for the length of a kiss, that the mouth she had answered belonged to a monstrous creature that had been cold under a pile of corpses.

He stared until staring became an act and not an accident. The left eye, paler, later than its fellow, regarded him from the glass with that same half-beat lag. He did not remember the color of his own eyes before Waterloo. He remembered her thumb, as if she might have mapped his entire face if he had let the kiss go on.

He had not let it go on. He had left her at the table with the fallen cards. That much, at least, he had done like a gentleman and not like a panicked green lieutenant.

The park light strengthened a degree. Somewhere below, a grate was being raked. Soon she would wake to the same gray morning and the memory of his mouth and she would come down to breakfast with some joke prepared and find him buttoned to the throat again, as if the fire had never been lit.

He pulled the shirt back on and tied the tapes. His fingers were not quite firm. He tied the cravat up to the jaw, until the faint start of the seam disappeared and only the soldier’s face remained above the linen except for the faint web climbing up to the temple.

Presentable. A living baron. And a responsible husband who had kissed his wife in the drawing room and would not, if he were wise, do it again.

He put on a new coat, closed it to the last button, and went down to meet the day he had made with his inadvisable weakness the night before.

He went over it the way he used to inspect a company. Boots. Kit. Powder. Feet. Seam. Seam. Seam. All present and accounted for.

Then the eye.

The right one was his. Mother’s blue. Edward’s blue. The left sat under a lid that no longer strictly obeyed orders. Drooping a little. At ease while the rest of him stood to attention. And the color was wrong. Not by much. A stranger would need good light and a long look to catch it. She had been catching it for days. He had felt her studying it across the whist table, light as a pickpocket’s hand, and last night she had stared straight into both mismatched eyes from inches away and had not flinched.

Seams. Sutures. A borrowed shade watching out of his own face. He was an unnatural creature a storm had jolted off a slab, and last night that creature had put its mouth on a living woman.

Worse. It had wanted her. Wanted was too small a word. He had felt her warmth come into him where she touched him. Heat into cold stone. Every undead inch of him had risen toward it the way a drowning man rises toward air.

No. Say it properly, Captain.

He had come within a breath of letting the wanting win. One more second and he would have unbuttoned her bodice. He would have carried her up the stairs to the wedding night he had sworn she would never have inflicted on her, and he would have put these hands on her warm, living skin.

He raised them. Large. Cool.

And she would have seen all of it. Even if she had not screamed. Even if that gambler’s nerve of hers had held. It would not change what the act was. An unholy thing reaching out of its grave for a warm woman. Taking what the dead were not entitled to take. She was carrying his brother’s child besides. Life twice over. And he had nearly … nearly …

Defilement. That was the word he had been marching around all night.

The decision, when he finally let himself make it, came almost as a relief. It had the clean lines of an order. She had his name. His roof. His protection. The child was safe and claimed. Nothing she was owed required his hands, his mouth, or his company at a card table. Distance, then. Effective immediately. He had withdrawn from worse ground than this.

He continued down the stairs to carry the order out.

The breakfast room was lit with morning light. Beyond the windows the park was green and dripping. His mother was already at the table with her chocolate and a fan of opened letters. Lady Clarke sat opposite, upright, holding herself as if she were saving what strength she had for the rest of the day.

“—and Mrs. Peale writes that she has nursed for a viscountess, Genevieve, a viscountess, so I hardly see how the Lincolnshire woman can compare. Damian!” His mother’s hands flew up. “There you are. You will be glad to hear my headache is entirely gone. Vanished quite away in the night. Was that not fortunate?”

“Very,” Damian replied dryly.

“Genevieve’s too. Both at once. Extraordinary.” Not one muscle in his mother’s face admitted a thing. Lady Clarke applied herself to her toast. There might have been the ghost of a wince.