Catherine could not sleep. It had all gone terribly wrong. She lay in her bed and enumerated the ways that circumstance had conspired against her.
First, Roger. To be confronted by him after so many years had been a blow. Because to see him was to be reminded of how she had been with him. How she could so easily be that way again with James.
And James himself. His eyes, his hair, his body—all of him, really—and the licking flames of desire that he ignited even as she struggled to maintain herself as the respectable Widow Lovelock.
These two men. The only two men who made her so wild she feared she might be lost forever. Who made her feel so apart from her normal self that she had to label her intemperate behavior as something other than herself, as her lust demon.
When it was really just her. Her uncontrollable and shameful appetite.
Finally, that contemptible painting. Which brought her back to the girl she had been with Roger and the woman she might be with James.
Yes, she had to escape. Go back to London. Retreat in order to muster her composure. Find a way clear to marrying Sir Francis. A way clear to the safety she needed.
Her door—the door she had thought was locked—opened.
“Who’s there?” she called out. The door closed.
“Shhhhh,” a voice hushed her. A rustle. The smell of roses. “Cath.” A voice rasping with desire. A voice that had seduced her hundreds of times in the past. Now, a voice only associated with the pain of misplaced love, unfulfilled desire, and her own failings.
She fumbled at her bedside table and was able to find a match and light a candle.
Siddons stood not three feet from her bed in only a shirt and breeches.
“Catherine,” he breathed. “You are as beautiful as ever.”
“That’s a lie, Roger. Neither of us are as we used to be. We have grown old. I am an old, respectable woman, and you need to leave my bedchamber.”
Siddons took a step closer to the bed.
“Or what? Or you will scream and bring the entire household into this room to see that you, an old, respectable woman, the possible intended of Sir Francis, were entertaining a gentleman in your bedchamber?”
“There’s no gentleman in this room.”
He laughed softly and took another step closer. “At least, we can agree on that. I am no gentleman.” He reached out and cupped her closest breast through her nightdress. “And you are no lady. We should share a bed one more time. Let me make you moan again, Cath, like I used to.” He ran his thumb over her nipple, and Catherine hated herself for the involuntary stiffening of that same nipple and the spasm of her torso that followed.
There was a moment just after her body betrayed her with its tremble of lust, with Roger’s thumb still on her hardened peak, when she was tempted to lie back, pull up her nightdress, and let him ravish her. Hadn’t she ached for months to be touched in just such a way? Not by him, true, but she knew James would never touch her that way again, as he had in the alley. That dream must be put to death.
“Suck on my finger, Cath.” Roger put the forefinger of his other hand in her mouth.
Oh. Oh. She remembered the vile degradation then. His misuse of her. His violence. When she had wanted love. She remembered why she looked like a hunted creature in the portrait that hung in the gallery of this house. And it had gone on for years.
She considered biting his finger but did not want any part of him inside her. Instead, she reached up and grabbed his wrist with one hand and pulled his finger from her mouth with the other and began to bend the finger backward, intending to break it, to dislocate it, something.
He gasped in pain and let go of her breast and made a fist, preparing to strike her just as there was a fumbling and a commotion and the door to her bedchamber crashed open and a body came flying in.
“Ho, ho, ho.” Someone caught Siddons’ raised arm. “This seems quite unwise. No fisticuffs in the bedchamber. Tut, tut, tut. Something—or someone—might get broken. We can’t,” he hiccoughed, “have that, can we?” And he laughed.
It was James, stumbling drunk.
Siddons tried to pull his arm away but James kept hold of it. Catherine continued to bend back the forefinger of his other hand.
“Ow, ow, ow, let go of me, Cath. And you, too, Cavendish, you fool.”
“Ah, Misshis Lovelock,” James said, grinning, “I seem to be in the wrong bedchamber, don’t I? How shtoopid of me. And Mishtah Siddons appears to have made the same mistake, too, hasn’t he? Two of us idiots at the same time. But perhaps if Mishtah Siddons promises to leave your room without any fuss, you’ll let go of his finger, hmmm?”
“I thought I might break it off and keep it as a piece of licking candy. Seeing how he stuck it in my mouth and wanted me to suck it,” Catherine said evenly.
“Mishtah Shtiddens!” James said in a shocked tone. “How crude.” He giggled. “I suppose you’re lucky it’s not the little finger, eh? Get it? Or your sugar shtick?” He laughed and then stopped and looked puzzled. “Wait, those mean the same thing, don’t they?” He sat down on the bed, still holding Siddons’ arm.
“Let me go, both of you,” Siddons seethed.
“Shall we let go on the count of three, Misshis Lovelock? One, two, three.”
Catherine, against her better judgment, let go of Siddons’ wrist and finger just as James let go of his arm, and Siddons, who had been pulling against both of them, stumbled backward and almost fell.
“Good night, Mishtah Shittens,” James said and collapsed back onto the bed. “Upsidaisy.”
“You’ll pay for this, Cath,” Siddons said as he backed out the door, nursing his injured finger in his other hand.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m rich, Roger.” She got up from the bed and crossed to the door in her nightdress and bare feet. She closed the door and pushed a chair up against it, wedging the chair under the handle. Obviously, the lock on the door was of no use.
She walked back to her bed. James was lying across the foot, face up, eyes closed, his legs hanging off the side, feet almost touching the floor. He was fully dressed in his boots and tailcoat and cravat and plainly had not been to bed yet.
“Are you all right, Misshis Lovelock?” he said with his eyes still closed.
“I’m fine, my lord. And yourself?”
He kept his eyes closed but fluttered one hand in the air. “Oh, I’m five sheets in the wind, quite as usual.”
“Not three sheets?” Catherine found her dressing gown on the chair next to the bed and put it on.
“I say why settle for three when you can have five?” He rolled onto his side and opened one eye and peered at her. “I say, that fellow is a nasty piece of work, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Catherine said. “And I do wonder at your mistaking my room for yours when your room is all the way over in the other wing.”
He closed his eyes, rolled back onto his back, and groaned. “Yes, I’m such a fool, aren’t I? Would you mind if I just lay here for a minute?”
“Lord Daventry, I am grateful for your help but you must see that—”
“I’m awfully dizzy and I’ll just . . . lie here . . . in case that dreadful man comes back . . . just for a minute. I’ll be your guard dog . . . woof, woof.”
Catherine was reminded of the mastiff in the body of a whippet and masquerading as a Maltese.
“Lord Daventry—”
But it was too late. His breathing had become deep and even and sonorous.
“Lord Daventry!”
But he could not be awoken.
In time, Catherine slid off his boots. She found an extra blanket and placed it over him. She then got into the bed herself, curling into a small ball at the head of the bed so that she would not kick him as he sprawled across the foot.
She wondered at his slurred speech and his sleeping so heavily. Because when she had leaned over him to cover him against the cold, she had come quite close to his face. His breath had been clean and sweet, with no trace of alcohol on it. Just as it had been at Madame Beauchamp’s. And as it had been in the alley last night, when he had tasted of apple.
Drunk. Yet without alcohol on his breath.
Peculiar.
James had had no plan when he had burst into the room. He had been lurking in a wing chair set in a nook down the hall when he had seen Roger Siddons go into Catherine’s bedchamber. James felt sure that there had been no invitation issued to Mr. Siddons. Or was that merely wishful thinking created by his jealousy?
No matter. When he had gotten into the room and seen Siddons’ upraised hand, he had immediately defaulted to a dense state of inebriation as he had found that was often the best way to defuse violence. He had been quite pleased by how calm Catherine had been as she held on to the vile man’s finger and wrist. And once Siddons had left, she had continued to be possessed of a perfect equanimity.
As he lay on the foot of her bed, he realized he had no intention of leaving her bedchamber just yet. There was evil in this house. His place was here. He wasn’t at all tired. In fact, he felt profoundly awake, here in her room, with her scent in the air, the soft sounds of her putting on her dressing gown. And so he simulated sleep as he had successfully done so many times before.
He was surprised to feel first his right leg and then his left one raised into the air and his boots drawn off. How gently and skillfully she did it. A blanket over him and a sense she was near. The movement of the bed as she got into it herself. He turned his head away from her so he could open his eyes and look at the embers of the fire.
And he was still awake an hour later when his hand that had been closest to her, his hand that lay palm up on the bed, was suddenly caressed by hers. He turned his head slowly and saw she had moved herself parallel to him in her sleep and was facing him. Her eyes were shut.
“Catherine?” he whispered and closed his hand over hers.
“Ummh,” she said. “Jamie.” She smiled a little in her sleep and withdrew her hand from his grasp. And then her face went slack and she said no more.
