Chapter Twenty-three
In the quiet confines of the guest room, Poppy stared at the door, knowing that he would soon walk through it. He would lie with her and share their bed for the night. And she wanted him so badly that her teeth ached as she clenched them.
The sounds she had heard coming from Mrs. Noble’s bedroom haunted her. At the time, it was all she could do not to barge in on the woman and pull her out of the bed by the roots of her hair. Now, she could only think of being in bed with Win and losing herself in his arms. She wanted to forget this night, forget what they faced. And she wanted to forget with him. Only him.
It did not matter that their last union had been a disaster. Her body remembered not his ultimate rejection but the feel of him sliding home and the look in his eyes when he took her. Her fingers still shook with need for him. Were other women like this? Did they quiver with want? Did they grow tetchy and achy from imagining stripping their husbands down and servicing them with their mouths before begging to be mounted?
Poppy blushed hotly as though someone might hear her thoughts. No one but Win knew how illicit her desires ran or that she—who was dominant in her work—liked to be dominated in bed because it made her feel feminine, wanted, needed. Oh, but Win knew. He could wind her up so tight that she all but snapped before he gave her release. Even when they were so very young and had no idea what they were doing, he’d made her want with a ferocity that blurred the lines between pleasure and pain. Just from touching him, from being touched by him. And he was going to enter the room at any moment.
Well then, he was to share a room with Poppy. That was easy enough. They had shared one for the past fourteen years. It was rote. Like old friends, they had a pattern, a way of moving in tandem when getting ready for bed. Poppy at the washbasin, brushing her teeth with quintessential vigor. Him following suit as she drifted to the dressing table to apply her face cream and then give her hair its hundred strokes. He’d put away his clothes and tell her an anecdote about the day. Simple. Easy.
He would not think on the times he took the brush from her and stroked the glorious silk of her hair until her neck bent just so in relaxation. Or how he’d quietly set the brush aside and let his hands slide along her cool skin, under her chemise, to cup those firm breasts, knead them until she bit her bottom lip and whimpered.
Hell.
Win stopped dithering in the corridor and slammed into their shared room with undue force. And found Poppy staring at him in question. He stared back. She’d already gotten ready for bed. A thick, lumpy dressing gown hugged her lithe frame, from just under her chin down to her white and narrow feet. Hardly tempting. He scowled all the same.
“I thought you’d be brushing your teeth or some such preparation.”
She flipped her long, demure braid over her shoulder. “No. You gave me more than ample time. The bathing room is all yours.”
Fine. He was glad of it. Half the time, she left tooth powder all over the sink, and he had to clean up after her.
His ablutions were quick and thankfully peaceful. Just as they’d been these past three months without her. He stopped and stared in the hanging mirror. Butherwell had been correct; the reflection was not pretty. Half a face belonged to a man with a stern countenance, the other half was a monster’s. Two-faced. In every sense.
“You, sir,” he muttered to his reflection, “are a lying nodcock who wants to shag his wife senseless.” He threw down his toothbrush, and it clattered around in the basin. “Only you are not going to ask for that. Are you?” The reflection’s scowl of discontent grew. “No, you are not. You haven’t yet sunk that low.” They’d already gone down that path, and look how well that turned out.
He raked his fingers through his hair, and keeping on his repressive yet extremely necessary smalls, went out to face Poppy. She looked him over in that cool way of hers, and he resisted the urge to shift his feet. Bloody woman always saw more than she ought to.
“Were you talking to yourself in the mirror?”
His lips pressed together. “If you have to ask, you must have heard me.” Christ, please say she did not hear the specifics. “So I’m going to assume the question is rhetorical.”
She rolled her eyes and began to unbutton her dressing gown. “Fine. I won’t ask you what you were muttering about.”
You could. It might be interesting. Say, Pop, fancy a quick shag for old time’s sake?
“I simply was trying to make conversation to ease this awkwardness,” she said.
“Commendable but futile.” He fluffed a pillow, and then another, punched it actually. “I don’t think there is any good way to ease—” His voice strangled to a halt as she shrugged out of the dressing gown. “You must be jesting.”
Her head lifted. “What?” She tossed the gown upon a chair back and frowned at him from across the bed. “Good lord, Win, don’t look at me like that. I’m perfectly respectable.”
“Respectable,” he repeated as if every muscle in his body weren’t quivering. As if right this moment his cock wasn’t rising. Shit. He sat at the edge of the bed before he betrayed the proof of his interest. Damn her eyes, but she was wearing his nightshirt. The very one she’d stolen from him so many years before.
For a moment, all he could see was Poppy, naked and wriggling against him in bed on their wedding night. Win took a bracing breath. That damned nightshirt. She’d worn it almost every night of their marriage. But he didn’t think she’d be so heartless as to wear it now. It was his shirt.
“That thing is so old and worn it has holes in it,” he said through his teeth. Inconvenient holes that showed glimpses of things he could not have.
Her hands went to her hips. “It’s comfortable.”
“It’s a rag.” A nearly transparent one at that. Sweet mother of… What was a negligee compared to seeing one’s wife draped in one’s own, very thin and very revealing, nightshirt? Hells bells, it would almost be better if she were naked. He fisted the sheet. Maybe he ought to ask for a comparison just to be sure.
“You’re being ridiculous.” She tossed the covers back and flopped onto her side of the bed. “And hurtful.”
Her slim arm whipped out from under the covers to lower the lamp, and the room plunged into darkness. He sighed and got under the covers, gritting his teeth at the stiffness in his lower extremity and the way his body hummed with awareness of her. But the tight way in which she huddled on the far side of the bed cut through his skin. Damn it; how was it that her pain affected him so much more than his own? It was like a hand pressing on his chest, making his flesh crawl with shame. Because he had caused it.
He drew a deep breath through his nose as he lay like a lump of coal on his side of the bed. “I did not mean to be hurtful.”
Silence greeted him. Then her small voice broke it. “I love this shirt.”
Hell. Win squeezed his eyes closed, even though it was dark as pitch. “I know.”
Her response was a decidedly feminine sniff that communicated both a grudging acknowledgment and made it clear that his effort wasn’t enough. Well, he rather doubted she’d appreciate his other method of apology. Win closed his eyes and prayed for sleep, for his cock to go to sleep, rather. But no, it lay, a heavy, nagging weight against his belly, pushing against the strings of his smalls in a valiant attempt to get free. Architecture. That was soothing. Sleep often took him when he made a mental tour of London’s architectural wonders.
Westminster Palace, The Clock Tower, Tower of London, Cleopatra’s Needle. Christ, stop thinking of erect monuments.
Poppy made an abrupt, irritated move, disrupting his musings and unfortunately aggravating his current situation when her bottom hit his hip. Gritting his teeth, he risked a glance. The hunched shape of her shoulders were outlined in the darkness. Her head lay significantly lower than his. Again she shifted. A covert sort of move she employed when she did not want him to notice. Ridiculous, as he was always aware of her. He wondered how long she would go on pretending she wasn’t vastly uncomfortable. Forever, it would seem. So very Poppy.
Wanting to smile and wanting even more to roll over and push himself into her until they were both exhausted, he gave in and did the safe, less pleasurable thing. He smiled and lifted the pillow from under his head.
“Here.” He handed it to her. She stared at the thing as if it were a rat, and he sighed. “Take it. I know you don’t like the pillow you have.”
“It’s too flat,” she said after a moment.
“Yes, I know.” She preferred a plump pillow. Always had.
His throat closed, and he turned away, pounding the flatter pillow he took in exchange into a reasonable lump. “Now will you stop wiggling about and go to sleep?”
He felt her settle and then heard a little sigh of relief. Well good. At least one of them was comfortable.
Body aching and head resting upon a woeful pillow, he chased sleep once more.
St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace—
“Win?”
He cracked open one eye. “Yes?”
A faint touch landed on the sheet at his back. And then it was gone. Her whisper drifted over him. “Are you sorry you did it?”
Again came that tender ache within the region of his bruised and battered heart. He gripped the pillow as he willed himself not to turn. “Sorry?” But he knew what she meant. Only it hurt too much to answer.
The sheets moved as she shifted. “Sorry that you gave up so much. For me?”
Ah gods, he couldn’t… White spots danced before his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut. “No.” Winston cleared his throat. “I am only sorry that I did not know the whole of you.”
The desire to let her secrets spill forth rushed through Poppy, but the familiar tug of repression caught her. Never speak. You lead a double life. Remember this always. She’d followed the instructions to the letter, even when it tore at her soul. Even when her sisters suffered and her husband turned away from her. The SOS was her other half, sometimes the greater part of her. To what end? If she let it, the SOS would take her happiness away and leave her empty.
“I was eighteen when I took over my mother’s position.”
Win’s voice came at her through the dark. “The year we met.”
She sighed. “Yes. The day we met, actually.”
He was silent, as if he too were remembering that day upon the platform. She wondered what the memory held for him. For her, it had been both the best and worst day of her life. Every step down the long, cold train platform had been a struggle to pull herself together, to remind herself who and what she was. And then he was there, as if forming from the mist. It had been such a shock to see the handsome young man walking beside her, looking at her as if she had just become his whole world. She’d thought she was dreaming.
“What were you doing at the station?” He laughed shortly, as if disgusted with himself. “Do you know, I never even thought to ask you.” Another choppy laugh filled the air. “I was too stunned with lust to think on anything more than keeping you with me.”
Her breath hitched, and she struggled to find another. “And I thought you were the most handsome madman I’d ever seen.”
His voice rolled over her like fog. “Mad for you.”
God, the things he could do to her. Just a few words and it was all she could do not to fling herself at him. She cleared her throat. “I’d just been appointed Mother. Lena fulfilled the duty while I completed my training. Actually, I thought she might keep the position, but she’s never liked the role.” Lena had always been strange in that regard, preferring to be a guardian of the SOS, rather than the leader of it. Poppy settled further into her pillow and continued her story. “There is an SOS tunnel exit at the station, and I’d used it to leave the ceremony.”
“You were eighteen years old.” The shock in his voice was strong. “And they appointed you head of an entire organization?”
“I’d been training for the position since I was six.” Pride prickled along her skin and she fought to tamp it down. “I am the seventh generation of first daughters to carry out the duty. My family, along with another, founded the SOS.”
Letting out her secrets filled her with utter weariness, but it felt easier to say them in the dark. “In the early days, we were simply called the Regulators. It was actually when we began to work in conjunction with the King and the Prime Minister that we became more formally organized and called ourselves the Society for the Suppression of Supernaturals.”
She shifted a bit, sinking further into the plump pillow. “That was in my great-grandmother’s time, though I can honestly say I’ve no fondness for the newer name as it stirred up trouble with certain supernatural factions.”
“Because it made them sound like a problem to suppress,” Win said with a decisive clip to his voice.
“Yes. At any rate,” she said, “the SOS has always been my life. You do not understand the will of Mary Margaret Ellis. Every day was a new lesson. Every day a reminder.” Poppy adopted the implacable tone of her mother. “Do not let the world know. Do not reveal your true purpose to anyone. Not even to family. Especially not to family.”
“She had to suspect that your sisters had talents of their own.”
“Oh, she knew. And she did not like it. Daisy was her little lamb, her sunshine. And Miranda was her rose, a delicate flower to be protected. She was adamant that neither of them be tainted by her dark world.”
“And you?” Win’s voice was tight.
A wobbly smile pulled at her lips as she blinked up at the dark ceiling. “I was the competent one. I never cried, nor fussed.”
“Which meant that you should live a life in darkness?” He made a noise of annoyance. “I never thought I would say this, but I think I prefer your father.”
Poppy could not help but smile a little. Even so, she needed him to understand. “She believed in me.” Poppy sighed. “And yes, at times it hurt that she did not seek to protect me as she did my sisters. But Win…” She licked her lips. Inside, she trembled. “I liked being useful. I liked what I was doing. I still do.”
The bed creaked when he rolled onto his back, their shoulders touching as he did. “He beat me. My father.”
She grew still. Enough to hear the roaring of her blood in her ears. How could it be? He never cowered, always stood so tall and proud. And yet shadows had always dwelled within his eyes at odd times. “Win—”
“I never told you,” he said over her, his voice strong yet brittle, as if he were forcing himself to speak, “because I was ashamed of the way…” His arm brushed over hers as he shrugged, “Well, you can guess. I was weak when I ought to have been strong.”
She tried to swallow and failed. “For how long, Win?”
“As long as I have memory.” In the dark, she could make out the lines of his profile as he stared up at the ceiling. “Too long.”
She wanted to kill his father. Her hand shook as she rested it on his forearm. He did not shrug her off, nor did he turn to her. “That is why I made the bargain with Jones.” His smoky voice was a living thing between them, making her heart bleed for him. “When I met you, I woke to life. You saw me for who I was. And in return, I wanted to live again. You gave my life flavor, color, texture, and I found myself willing to do anything to keep that.”
She moved to embrace him, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “Don’t.” His body was rigid. “Not now. Not because of what I said.”
“But—”
His voice grew emphatic, stern in that way of his that brooked no argument. “When I take you to bed, Poppy Ann, it will not be under the auspices of sentimentality.” He turned his head and, in the dark, she could see his eyes looking at her with clear, direct heat. “It will be because you’re wound up so tight with need that you fear you will break if you don’t have me.” He moved an inch closer, and his warm breath gusted over her neck. “And then we will be in perfect accord, sweeting.”