“Better than a mean drunk,” he offered.
Her head was heavy despite his warm hands holding it. She squinted at him. “Are you one of those? A mean one?”
He gave her a wide smile, and her belly flipped at the sight of his broken tooth. “I’m always mean,” he said. “You know that.”
She desired a mean man, then. It made no sense.
“I’m not feeling too well,” she said thickly.
She sat on the bed, and Lucian was on his knees before her and unlaced her boots. She sighed and wiggled her toes, and then she felt ill again and lay down.
“I’ll loosen your clothes, all right?”
“Please.”
He turned her to and fro, unfastening and unbuttoning her, the front of her dress, the clasps of her skirts, the ties of the gauzy petticoat. He made quick work of her stockings, the touch of his fingertips against the sensitive backs of her knees fleeting as he untied the bows supporting the elastics. He must have done this many times, she thought as she felt the deft tugs and subsequent loosening of her front-lacing corset around her belly and ribs. But with other women. A sob racked her when he pulled the corset from beneath her.
“Here, now,” Lucian said gruffly. “It’ll be all right.”
“Will it, though?” Tears had streaked down her cheeks and soaked her hair, and the wet strands clung to the sides of her neck.
“Aye.” He tucked the blanket around her shoulders.
“I don’t know what has come over me,” she said. “The wedding was wonderful. I was so happy.”
“You’ve had a rough time of it lately,” he replied. Then he left, and returned with the washbowl from the side chamber. He put it on the floor next to the bed. “If you’re ill, try not to miss.”
“Oh,” she groaned. “I’m dying.”
A glint of teeth. “No,” he said. “But tomorrow morning, you’ll probably wish you were dead.”
Alarmed, she tried to raise her head. “What do you mean?”
He was holding her face again, his thumbs brushing beneath her eyes. “Rest now.”
Her eyes closed. She was half-asleep when she felt his lips press softly against her forehead. “What spell have you put on me?” he murmured.
She was spiraling, upward or downward, impossible to say.
He cooled off outside the inn, his eyes on the shadowed outlines of the valley before him, thinking if he were in the habit of smoking, he’d be lighting a cigarette now. His hands were shaking slightly, and it couldn’t be from the one Scotch he’d had. Flickering light and the sounds of drunken revelry spilled through the inn’s dining room windows behind him, compelling his mind to replay how Harriet had mingled among the miners, laughing, carefree, exerting an electrifying bodily pull on him. They made an uneasy picture, his old life and the new one in the same frame, but for a moment there she had danced on the edges of both worlds as though one could do just that: belong neither fully here nor there but right in between.
The noise rose, and a couple stumbled outside through the side door. “… he’s quite all right, isn’t he?” someone slurred in Scots.
“Too soon to tell,” came a female voice, “but I do like how he’s besotted with his wife.”
“I like how he didn’t rip Fraser’s bollocks off for him putting his paws on the wife …”
Besotted.
“Mrs. Blackstone will publish Fraser’s novel …”
Besotted. That’s what it was, then, the trembling hands, the restlessness, the heat in his veins. How could she not affect him? His cold bed was now warm and his usually fractured sleep calm. His solitary hours were filled with her clever, womanly scented presence. He rose in the mornings with an unfamiliar lightness in his chest, and the only thing that had changed about his routine was … her. It was high time to bring his attraction to his wife to its natural conclusion before he went soft in the head. Had he been a more philosophical man, he’d have wondered whether that would indeed be the conclusion, or the beginning of something rather more complicated.
Chapter 26
I shall never drink again, she thought as she crept along the path toward the village, not a single wee dram. The sunlight that brightened the valley shone right through to the back of her skull, hurting her. Holding her parasol was exhausting, though sipping a pint of salty broth for breakfast as Lucian had suggested in his morning note had much improved her. Lucian. I shall never be drunk like a sailor in front of my husband again …