Page 58 of The Duke
Her cheek rested on a satin surface. It was warm and gently rising and falling, rising and falling. She felt very quiet. In the room, some labour was being undertaken, badly. Grunts, shuffling movement, a sharp thwack and a curse. A hissed, “Be quiet,” from somewhere above. “You’ll wake her.” Above, but near.
Beneath her ear, a heart was beating. Slow, steady. A warm burr. She curled closer to it. She breathed with it. All her skin hurt, but the heartbeat had a sedative effect.
She was safe and warm; held. She was being held. She recognised who held her, a presence that had been with her for a long time.
It was enough to keep her quiet.
She turned liquid. She writhed and wrestled and sought escape; her skin was slippery; she could no more be held than a pat of butter inside a fist.
“Celine, you have to stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”
She escaped.
“Celine.”
Over the side of the ship and down. Down. Down.
Until all the light went out of the world and it was.
—Still.
She was alone.
She… thought she was alone.
For a long time, it had seemed she was alone. Nothing could survive so deep in the ocean where there was no light.
But just as she felt she was passing from this deep and lonely darkness into a darkness more complete, the water moved before her, an immense figure turning. It looked down with eerie, pearlescent eyes, its hair moving with the current, and said, “You do not have leave to die.”
She gaped and panted. Just as well for the fish in the bucket to wish for more time!
The figure came closer, and now it cast its eerie light over more of the world; she could see her own hands, her own feet, her stomach and pubis. They hurt, and they were so dear, and they werehers.
“You don’t get to leave me, Celine.” The voice moved through her.
She hurt worse and she welcomed it. She became aware of pressure, of her body being tightly held.
Stinging kisses on her brow, on her cheeks, then a growling, unmistakeable command: “Solive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Celine woke feeling quiet and heavy. The sheets were clean, tucked crisply over her, as though she hadn’t moved in hours. She stared up into the canopy, a delicate blue over which white patterns had been drawn by an exacting hand: floral curlicues within stern rectangles; ladies carrying amphoras; circles and starbursts and sheaths of wheat strung on ribbon. Lamps glowed softly about the room in their scrolled fixtures.
After what might have been a minute or an hour, she turned her head to the left.
The duke had a warm hold of her hand and was slumped over it on the bed, her face turned away from Celine. Her hair was messy, sticking up at all angles, like the moon had broken on the floor and been swept into a pile. She wore no coat, and her creased shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows, exposing muscled forearms. She seemed to take up most of the bed.
Celine felt a quiet shock.
She had seen the duke less than perfectly starched and pressed only once, and that had been an energetic, carnal shedding of clothes, not this quiet exhaustion. There was something about the duke’s unkempt hair that made Celine feel very odd.
Pieces of their last—Where were you—encounter fell in on her suddenly—when we couldn’t even afford to move her body and the gentlemen kept—like fragments of a dream, or another life. Surely that hadn’t been her, shrieking at the duke like a fishwife, crying in the hallway like a snotty child?
You left me.
She cringed with embarrassment, but where that deep, poisonous resentment had been, nothing remained. Perhaps because she had slept long and well. Perhaps because, in saying the words, she had pulled out the splinter that hurt her.
The duke hadn’t killed Bastien. The duke hadn’t starved her countrymen into a violent revolution. The duke had never misrepresented her intentions: She had told Celine she wouldn’t take her to England.
