The True Love Wedding Dress (19 page)

“Where is everyone?” Alex asked as he helped Lucy alight from the carriage under the porte cochere on the side of Hugh’s elegant townhouse. He then sent Owen to the stable to see to the horses.

“Oh, Hugh doesn’t keep much of a staff. Since he planned to spend the weekend with Great-aunt Sophie he probably let them have the night off.”

She fit the key into the lock and opened a door into the side foyer, turning up the gaslight inside and motioning for Alex to follow. He stepped in after her, cursing as he kicked off his ruined half boots, hopping first on one leg and then the other as he dragged off his soaking-wet socks. He dropped them with a splat to the tiled floor. “That’s better.”

“Now, where to find you something to wear . . .” she muttered, eyeing him. “I’m afraid Hugh’s shirts will be too tight and his trousers too short.”

“Believe me,” Alex said, lifting his muddy, dripping skirt, “I shall welcome anything you choose to offer with extreme gratitude.”

She grinned. “Right. Follow me.”

She led the way toward the front of the house and up the stairs to the first floor. At the top she paused and spent a few seconds rummaging in a shallow closet, then turned and tossed a towel to him. He caught it one-handed and began mopping his head and face as he trailed after her.

“In here.” She opened a door and reached inside, turning up the light. Alex moved past her into the center of what was clearly Hugh’s bedchamber. His personal effects covered the surface of a chest topped with a swivel mirror. A book lay open on the seat of the deep leather chair placed beside a small table that held a nearly empty decanter and glass on a silver tray. Across the room waited a neatly made bed next to a door leading into a small closet.

“You’ll find some clothing in there, I should think,” she said, aware of the silence of the house, the fact that they were quite, quite alone.

“Excellent.”

She smiled, looking around and finding her courage fading fast. It had seemed such a perfect idea in the carriage. After all, she wasn’t going to do anything she hadn’t been prepared to do two years ago. But now that she was here, and the moment at hand, she understood all too well that the man she’d wanted so desperately to share her life, her heart, and her body with two years ago was not this man.

This man had done and seen things she could only imagine. In many ways—in many
real
ways—he was a stranger. She couldn’t possibly seduce him. What had she been thinking?

She felt embarrassed and nervous and a little frightened at how close she’d come to making a disastrous decision.
Another
disastrous decision.

Besides, what if he’d refused her? And
of course
he would refuse her. He’d refused her two years ago, and then he had wanted her with all the urgency a virile and red-blooded young man desires a woman. Why would she think this cool-eyed warrior with his well-controlled temper—well, mostly well-controlled temper—would throw away his honor and moral integrity now?

Good God, the more she thought of it, the more insane she realized the impulse had been. Thank heavens she had come to her senses!

“I’ll just wait downstairs, shall I?” she said, smiling nervously, her hand on the door handle.

He continued rubbing at his hair. “Sorry. ’Fraid you can’t do that. I need you.”

“N-need me?”

He stopped rubbing his hair and turned his head to look at her sideways. “Yes. I’m afraid you’ll have to play lady’s maid for me. I’ve tried to undo these blasted buttons, but my hand . . . the damn fingers get stiff when they’re cold and . . . don’t work so well then.” His face closed with embarrassment, and he made a sharp, impatient gesture toward the row of pearl buttons beginning at his neck.

“Oh.” His right hand, she recalled, had become entangled in his livery during the frantic moments of a charge against enemy lines. Three fingers had been dislocated. She felt instantly ashamed of her nascent suspicions.

He only needed her to undo his buttons. She couldn’t refuse such a reasonable request—though there hadn’t been a lot of “request” about it, now that she thought of it. Still, she couldn’t refuse. It had been her suggestion that he come here and change. “All right.”

She eased tentatively into the room, her hands clasped uncertainly behind her back. She hadn’t touched him in two years. She recalled the last time vividly—the smoothness of his skin, the soft-crisp hair on his forearms . . .

“Whatever is the matter with you, Lucy?” He’d straightened and was regarding her with just a hint of impatience.

“Nothing,” she denied. She could be as impersonal as he. It was just a row of buttons, after all. “Face me.”

He obliged, presenting her with an extremely wide pair of shoulders well above her eye level and an extremely long row of buttons. There had to be more than a hundred of them, marching down from his strong throat over his equally strong chest. This was going to take some time. She wiggled her fingers experimentally.

“Well?” he said.

“Yes. Right.” Gingerly she reached up and brushed the damp black hair away from the band collar. A single curl coiled around her finger as she worked, as though willing her to remember what it had felt like to comb her fingers through the rest of those thick black locks.

She did. She shouldn’t. It hurt too much.

She glanced up. His eyes were half closed and relaxed, his expression thoughtful and interested. The only sound was the rain lashing against the window as she struggled with the little buttons. She bit her lip, trying to think of something to say while performing this far too intimate task. “It’s a pity about the dress, really.”

“Excuse me?”

“The dress. It’s amazing. You should see how fine the stitches are on each of these tiny lace-covered eyelet buttons. The craftsmanship is exquisite.”

“I’m sorry I’ve ruined it.”

“Yes,” she said, feeling a little wistful, her fingers moving down to the second, then the third and fourth buttons. “I wonder what the bride was like.”

“She must have been a bloody Amazon.”

“I wonder if she was beautiful.”

“Not if she was as flat-chested and broad-shouldered as the way it fits me suggests she was.”

She laughed and looked up, meeting his amused gaze. “Haven’t you a single romantic bone in your body?”

His eyes seemed to smile, but there was gravity in their smoky depths, too. And memories. Memories she did not share. “One learns to be pragmatic.”

“Where,” she asked softly, unbuttoning more of the little buttons. “In Russia? How does it help?”

He didn’t answer at once. Then, “It helps compartmentalize your emotions, set aside your anger or your fear or your sorrow to deal with later, when there is time and opportunity.”

Her fingers stilled. “And did you . . . find a compartment for me?”

“You?” he laughed. “You got an entire room, my dear.”

“And did you ever find the time or opportunity to deal with me?”

“Good God, no,” he answered in honest amusement. “I locked the door and threw away the key.”

She flushed and went back to work on the buttons. So that was that, then.

She still had a place in his heart, all right—in its dungeon. For long minutes she worked unbuttoning him from the dress until she had finally managed to undo the top six inches. But then the buttons started getting all caught in the lace overdress, and in annoyance she peeled the fabric back.

Her breath caught in her throat.

She’d found the end of the scar that started on his cheek and followed his jaw, disappearing beneath the collar. It angled across the base of his neck to the top of his pectoral muscle.

Without realizing it, she reached up and brushed her fingers gently across the pale rope of scar tissue. “Dear Lord, Alex, how did you survive this?” she whispered.

His whole body tensed at her touch, his shoulders pulling back as if he were a marionette jerked to attention by unseen strings. She barely noticed. All she could think of was how close he’d come to death, how close she had come to losing him forever. With infinite tenderness, she traced the scar, as though by doing so she could somehow erase it, erase the pain it must have caused, and the war it had occurred in.

“It happened in Balaklava,” he said stiffly.

“During the Charge of Heavy Brigade.” She nodded. Her fingers returned to the buttons, and now they flew from their eyelets as though by magic. The lace fell away, revealing the smooth, sculptured muscles of his chest, the dark, silky hair that grew across the dense surface, the curving ramparts of his ribs. She found another mark, not a scar but a knot beneath the flesh low on his side.

“Sevastopol,” she whispered, touching it reverently. “You fell from your horse and broke three ribs. One hasn’t healed properly.”

He didn’t answer. He had gone very still.

She reached up and stripped the material from his shoulders, letting the dress drop into the puddle of water at his feet. She needed to see it all now, the visual evidence of how near to death he’d marched, all the wounds, the scars, the mementos of war, the evidence of a life barely saved.

“Sevastopol,” she murmured again as she found the crescent-shaped mark on his left triceps where a bayonet had pierced his uniform. She edged closer, fingers trailing lightly, testingly, on his torso, her gaze searching for the . . . there, on his left breast beside his arm, a dime-sized puckered piece of flesh. A pistol shot, fired from too far away to do more than “be an annoyance.”

“Inkerman,” she murmured, blinking away the brilliance suddenly threatening her vision. Without conscious volition, she leaned forward, brushing a fleeting kiss across the ruined flesh as though she could somehow soothe the old wound and heal it anew. He inhaled sharply.

And these were only the ones she knew about. There were other marks, too, though all fainter and smaller. Marks that would eventually fade away as though they had never been. But she would remember. Every single one.

She looked up and found him looking down into her eyes, his dark brows drawn together at the bridge of his nose.

“How do you . . .” He shook his head. “You read the dispatches.”

“No,” she said. “Your mother. She let me read your letters.”

“She never told me.”

“I made her promise not to. When you were over there I didn’t want you . . . I didn’t want to distract you. After you returned and you never came . . .” She tried to smile. “I believe I have already mentioned my overabundance of pride?”

“I didn’t know.”

This time she managed the smile. “It’s all right.”

“No.” Abruptly, she became aware of his half-naked state. “It’s not all right.”

His chest gleamed in the saffron light of the gas globe, rising and falling deeply with each breath he took. The whorls of dark hair covering it thickened into a dark line that followed a riverbed between the muscles flanking either side of his flat belly and disappeared beneath the waistband of his trousers. She looked down. Even his feet, long and naked, were masculine.

She fell back a step, but he reached out and caught her by the upper arms, his touch gentle but firm, his eyes questioning and compelling. “It hasn’t been right for two years.”

“Alex.”

“Lucy. All you ever said to me was yes. Don’t start saying no now.”

“All you ever said to me was no.”

He lifted one hand, sweeping the hair back from her temple, and in doing so releasing a cascade of glittering pins and combs. The heavy mass of auburn hair fell about her shoulders. A small sound of pleasure rumbled from his throat. “Never again.”

His fingers curled around, cupping the back of her head, holding her still. Slowly he pulled her to him, crushing the crinoline skirt between them as he looked down into her face. His pale gray eyes glittered with the unspoken question, his face stark and hungry in the shadows.

She hesitated for a heartbeat, no more, and then she was pulling his head down and he was crushing her in his embrace, his mouth falling hungrily on hers. There was nothing of gentleness or sweet lassitude in his ardency. Hunger, rampant and ungovernable, exploded between them, seeking an outlet for all the weeks and months of denial.

His kisses were rough, wanton, his tongue sweeping inside her mouth, plundering and fierce, a little brutal, a little punishing. Mouths melded together, he reached between them, wrenching at the tabs and ribbons holding her crinoline in place, finally pulling the last of the bands free. The crinoline slipped from her waist and held, imprisoned between their bodies. With a harsh sound, he caught her as her knees buckled, lifting her lightly as she shed the heavy crinoline and skirts like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. He straightened, his gaze scouring the room.

“Not here.” He strode out of the bedroom and down the hall, stopping at the next door. “Whose?”

“Mine,” she managed to breathe.

He did not answer. He kicked the door open with his bare foot and backed into the room, his gaze scouring the shadowed interior. The curtains were drawn back from the huge single window on the far wall, letting in the soft, diffuse light from the street-lamp outside. Rain sparkled and shimmered as it fell against the panes. The bed was pristine and virginal-looking in the semidarkness, the counterpane cool and white, the pillow smooth and unmarked. In the corner stood a folding screen behind which he could make out a water pitcher and basin.

Without a word, he bent and ripped the coverlet away. The wooden slats beneath the mattress creaked as his knee sank into it. He eased her onto the bed and leaned over her, bridging her body on straight arms as he looked down.

There was nothing familiar in his expression. No sweet, fevered frustration, nothing tested and tender. His expression was certain, unfaltering, resolute.

“I dreamt of this. Of you,” he murmured, his gaze moving over her like a caress, making her flush. “Some of the other men found ease in the beds of the camp followers or some women in the towns we passed through. But I . . . I would rather have had what my imagination could conjure than any poor substitute of flesh and bone.”