A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) (15 page)

He might have unpinned her hair innocently enough, though. That would have been pleasant.

Lucy sighed, and set to taking the pins out herself. She took down her hair, plaited it, and changed her shift for a nightgown. Took a pillow from the bed and set it on the floor by the hearth along with two flannel nightrails from her trunk, the best she could do by way of blankets. Then she tapped at the door and crawled into bed, closing all the curtains save for one small gap to let her hear the door and follow Mr. Blackshear’s progress through the room.

Not that there was much to follow. His footsteps went to one candle and then another, the room growing darker with each stop. When only the faint glow of firelight remained, his boot-heels sounded on the hearth’s bricks.

She pulled the covers up to her chin, and up to her ears on either side. She missed the warming pan that always heated her bed at home, but she mustn’t complain, even to herself. Not when the Porters had put themselves out so much already, and not when Mr. Blackshear lay on the floor, with only makeshift covers, before a fire that must sooner or later go out.

* * *

Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed. He couldn’t even count the hours. He only knew the clock was mocking his sleeplessness just as the long-gone, keenly lamented fire had mocked his predicament of being shut up alone with Miss Sharp.

Andrew folded his arms and tucked his hands between biceps and ribs, that his fingers might not freeze and snap off. What an ignorant ass he’d been, supposing lustful temptation to be the great trial he’d face this night. He was so desperately tired, he’d occasionally drop into slumber for a minute or five at a time, only to be woken from the inside out by a cold that had penetrated all the way to his marrow.

His bones had turned to icicles. He couldn’t stop shaking. His ears felt brittle, and prone to shatter at a touch.

He took his somewhat-warmed hands out from under his sleeves, tugged up one of the flannel gowns serving as farcically inadequate blankets, and covered both ears, to thaw them. Thus he didn’t hear any rustling from the bed, nor the first few footfalls on carpet. Only when Miss Sharp spoke did he realize she was even awake, let alone standing but a few feet away.

“Mr. Blackshear, I cannot sleep for hearing your teeth chatter.”

“I assure you I don’t do it deliberately.” He didn’t even have the energy to be piqued. She exhausted him. The cold exhausted him. The hard floor exhausted him. This whole Yuletide misadventure, every bit of it, exhausted him.

“I mean I cannot sleep for knowing how miserable you are. Won’t you please come and sleep in the bed?”

For two seconds he allowed himself to imagine the soft mattress, the covers, the curtains, the warmth of another body in that space with his.

“What if tomorrow you undertake to do some service for the Porters—to chop them some firewood perhaps—and injure yourself because you’re impaired by exhaustion?”

A wisp of laughter rose in his chest, dissipating before it got out into air. She’d successfully used this same tactic to get him to remain in the room; why shouldn’t she try it again? “I thought the danger was my falling asleep and pitching face-first into the pudding. I didn’t realize things had grown so dire.”

She didn’t laugh. “Haven’t you sufficiently appeased decency in the hours you’ve already spent on the floor?” More rustles in the darkness as she came down to a crouch. “Think of my comfort if you won’t think of your own. How am I to sleep when I know how you suffer?”

“Don’t think of it as suffering.” He folded his arms again, this time to fortify his refusal. Mr. Porter’s nightshirt—his outermost layer of clothing—had gotten bunched on one side and he couldn’t seem to get it straightened. “It’s an inconvenient discomfort, merely. Not worth your losing any sleep.”

Her soft breaths laced the darkness as she apparently considered her next move. “You leave me no choice, then.” Another bout of rustling, and suddenly she lay on the floor beside him, arm against his, foot touching his boot, head on the same blasted pillow.

“For God’s sake, Miss Sharp.” He twisted away from her. “Are you completely incapable of taking
no
for an answer?”

“I’m incapable of watching you wrong yourself for no good reason.” Bold as could be, she wriggled herself across the few inches he’d opened up between them, and laid her arm against his again. “If you don’t come to bed, I’ll lie here in indecent proximity to you for the rest of the night.” By the last few words her teeth were chattering.

“Go back in the bed. You’ll freeze.” She wore only a nightgown and her feet must be bare.

“I imagine I will. Think how terrible you’ll feel. You’ll probably never enjoy Christmas again. It will always remind you of the year you let a poor girl freeze to death because your notions of propriety meant more to you than her life.” Her arm shivered against his.

He swore. Not out loud. In his head, though, he loosed a long, thorough, gratifying stream of invective.

Then he was ready to speak. “On the contrary, I’m bound to remember this as the year a heathen with no sense of decorum manipulated me to within an inch of my life and left my self-respect in tatters.” He sat up. “You stay on your own pillow, and keep all your limbs on your side of the bed.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll turn my back to you as well. You won’t even know I’m there.” She was scrambling to her feet as she spoke, clearly eager to get under the covers and out of the cold.

He followed her to the bed and wrested off his boots. He was disgusted with himself and with her. He was. But his muscles and frigid bones were fairly screaming out for the comfort of that mattress and those covers. And when his clumsy cold fingers finally got the nightshirt sorted out and his jacket off, and he slid down into the sheets, disgust trickled away under a deluge of sheer fleshly gratitude.

All that fretting for nothing: now that he was here, he hadn’t the energy for even a spark of bothersome lust. He gave himself up to warmth and softness, and within two minutes he was sound asleep.

* * *

Even his dreams were innocent, at first. His sleep-drunk, warmth-wrapped brain took all the bliss of the mattress and sheets, and shaped it into visions of sweet sensory pleasure.

He dreamed of lying in a fragrant meadow on a summer afternoon. Of sprawling on a parlor sofa while some unseen person played the pianoforte, its
notes shimmering through him like falling stars. Of swimming among clouds, warm and pleasingly substantial clouds that buoyed him like saltwater and gratified every inch of his skin.

Probably it was inevitable that the gratification should come to center on certain inches of skin in particular.

Possibly inevitable too that the clouds should give way to long limbs that tangled with his; hands tracing ardently over the muscles of his back; eyes laughing up at him; a mouth shaped for sin.

And hair. Rivers and rivers of midnight hair a man could drown in, and be nothing but grateful for his fate.

“Mr. Blackshear,” whispered the woman to whom all these virtues belonged.

He laughed. “Surely this is no occasion for the formality of surnames,” he said, or tried to say, but his tongue was dream-thickened and the building pleasure trifled with his breath. Things were moving along very quickly of a sudden.

No matter. She understood. “Andrew,” she said, and he couldn’t help noting the lack of fervor in her voice; the lack of ravenous, desperate surrender. She wasn’t nearly as far along as he was, and he might not have it in him to slow down and help her as a lover ought to do.

“Don’t worry.” Every word was a struggle now. “I’ll see to you afterward. I know what to do.” Spend any time among men, at a university, for example, and you couldn’t help overhearing such information. He’d always felt a little guilty for remaining in the room when those discussions started, but now he’d be glad of his knowledge.

“Almost there,” he assured her through gritted teeth, and he closed his eyes and bound his arms round her and gave himself up entirely to his body’s dictates; to the rhythm and the hot wet friction and the deliciously sinful misrule of it all.

Did she say his name again?—it didn’t matter. Sight and sound were nothing to him now: all that mattered were the waves and lightning-bolts of sensation dashing from the surface of his skin all through and round his innards, faster and faster until there was no faster to go, and the whole world stilled into gleaming rapture, time’s passage marked only by the pulsing of his release.

All too soon the dream began to recede, slipping through his fingers no matter how hard he clutched, and taking with it his chance to bring pleasure to the woman who’d said his name.

Her, he clutched at hardest of all. Perhaps in consequence, she was the last bit of the dream to dissolve.

Or… not dissolve. She kept a curious solidity even as all else shifted about him: he was on his side, it seemed, his cheek on a pillow, and there was clothing of some sort, which there had not been in the dream. And still it somehow felt as though he had an armful of feminine softness, clutched close enough that his ribs pressed into her with every ragged breath.

Horror pooled in even before understanding flooded him; before he blinked his eyes open to see the back of a dark-haired head mere inches away.

He swore, and yanked his arm from her, scrambling as far away as the bed would allow. “What did I do?” In blind panic he fumbled his hands over his clothing. “My God, Lucy, what did I do?” He was fully clothed, breeches all buttoned. He couldn’t have actually violated her, thank God.

“Nothing. You were asleep. It doesn’t matter.” Even with the bed’s curtained darkness preventing any good view of her, he could tell she’d stayed on her side, facing away. Her voice, small and taut and higher-pitched than was her wont, dashed his last slim hope that he’d managed to contain the dream in his skull and keep it from animating any part of his body.

God. What must she have thought? He
had
violated her with his actions. Even if he hadn’t put himself inside her,
violation
was the word for what he’d done. “You were awake,” he choked out.
For how long?
“Why didn’t you…”

Wake me,
he’d meant to say, but oh, Lord, she’d tried, hadn’t she? That was why he’d heard her say his name.

“I didn’t know what to do.” Her words zipped round the curtained space like arrows, every one finding its way to his vitals. “I knew you were asleep, and I knew you’d be embarrassed.”

Embarrassed
didn’t come close. He felt as if his skin had all been peeled away, exposing him to the world—to himself—as nothing but a lot of seething ugly bodily impulses. “You oughtn’t to have worried about that. You ought to have kicked me. For God’s sake, you ought to have driven an elbow into me, or—” He heard himself, and stopped. “I’m sorry. It’s not your responsibility to prevent my wrong behavior. It’s mine. I should never have got into this bed.”

“It wasn’t… I know you didn’t…” She took a great breath, audible through the darkness. “I have that kind of dream sometimes too, and so I understood—”

“Please. Stop. Please don’t speak of this. It’s not proper for me to know any such thing about you.”
Proper.
What right had he to speak of
proper,
ever again? He dragged his hands over his face, the rasp of two-day whiskers sounding like the very voice of dissipation. “I’ll write to your father. As soon as I’ve—” No, not
as soon as I’ve got dressed,
because he already was. In the same shirt and breeches and hose he’d put on before leaving Cambridgeshire two mornings ago—all of it wilted, and the shirttail now sodden with the consequences of his wanton dream. “As soon as I’ve found ink and paper and a pen, I’ll write to him.”

“
Why?
” She was so aghast, she rolled over to face him. “Surely you don’t mean to tell him what happened!”

“I mean to tell him that we plan to marry.” He hauled the curtain open and sat up on the edge of the bed. The room was too dark for him to see his boots but he’d left them somewhere hereabouts. “In the interest of decency, I’ll spare him from knowing the details.”

The covers rustled and the mattress creaked as she pushed herself up to sit against the headboard. “The details are the only reason anyone could force us to marry. If we keep the knowledge to ourselves, there’s no need.”

“I beg your pardon, there’s every need.” He bent over, feeling about on the floor for his boots. “I don’t care if no one else in the world knows that I compromised you.
I
know. And I know what a gentleman must do, once he’s compromised a lady.”

“It’s not fair.” Her voice wavered under a queer mixed weight of obstinacy and panic. “It’s not right that we should have to throw away our futures because of something you didn’t mean to do, and I didn’t do at all.”

He found a boot and started pulling it on, though where he was to go, with the house still sleeping, he hadn’t the first idea.

Never mind. Busying himself with his boots gave him a moment to absorb the unexpected sting of hearing her equate marriage to him with the throwing-away of her future.

“Lucy, you cannot go through life expecting to argue your way out of every consequence. And extenuating circumstances can only extenuate so far. Would it matter whether I was asleep, or what I’d intended, if I’d yanked up your skirts and violated your person?” He hadn’t meant to be quite so coarse or vehement, but
throw away our futures
still stung.

“That would be different. You’d have ruined me for marriage to any other man in that case. I’d have no choice but to marry you.”

Those were the terms on which she’d marry him, then: only if she had no other choice.

Well, who could blame her? He’d hardly made a good advertisement for himself as a husband this night. What woman would want a man so carnally incontinent she might wake to find him disgracing himself against her without permission, rote and heedless as a dog exercising its lusts on some blameless bystander’s leg?

He scooped up his other boot and pulled it on. “If that is what you wish,” he said, and he hated the brittle, affronted voice in which he said it. It wasn’t as though he would even have asked her to marry him if he hadn’t felt duty-bound. He scarcely knew her, and most of what he knew suggested they’d be a bad match indeed.