This Wicked Gift (Carhart 0.5)

She picked up her cloak and shook it out. It flared about her shoulders and then fell, obscuring in thick wool the figure he had seen in such heartbreaking detail mere minutes before. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps one day you’ll figure it out.”


And like that, she slipped past him. He listened, unmoving, as she stepped down the stairs and out of his life.

CHAPTER THREE

T WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Lavinia slowly climbed the stairs to the family rooms above the lending library. She ached all over, a vital, restless throb that twinged in every muscle.

“Lavinia?” Her father’s weak call came from across the way. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Papa.” She took off her cloak and hung it on a peg by the door. Half boots followed. “I went out on a…constitutional after service. I’ll freshen up and join you shortly.”

She ducked into her own room.

As far as the basics went, her small chamber was not so different from William’s. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture plain and simple, and almost identical to his: washstand, bed, chair and a chest of drawers. Lavinia crossed to the other side of the room and poured water from a pitcher into the basin. As she washed, she examined her reflection in the mirror.

She knew what she was supposed to see. This was the face of a girl who’d been ruined. A woman of easy virtue.

The face that peeked back at her looked exactly the same as the one she’d seen in the mirror this morning. There was no giant proclamation writ across her forehead, denouncing her as unchaste. Her eyes did not glow a diabolical red. They weren’t even demonically pink. And her body still felt as though it belonged to her—sore, yes, and tingling in ways that she’d never before experienced—but still hers. Perhaps more so.

He didn’t love her.

Well. So? The reckless infatuation she’d felt hours before had been transmuted into something far more complex and…and cobwebby. She wasn’t sure if the emotion that lodged deep in her gut was love. It felt more like longing. Maybe it had always been longing. In the year since he’d first started coming to their library, he’d looked at her. Until recently, however, he’d always looked away.

It had been an unpleasant surprise when he’d put his proposition to her so baldly—and so badly. But it hadn’t taken her long to understand why he’d chosen to approach her in such a fundamentally uncouth manner. She’d realized with an unbearable certainty that he was deeply unhappy.

In generalities, her room was not so different from William’s. But the specifics…There were nineteen years of memories stored in this room. A blue knit shawl, a gift from her father, draped over one side of her chest of drawers. A lopsided painting of daisies, a present James had given her two years ago, hung next to the mirror. A pine box on her nightstand contained all of Lavinia’s jewelry—a gold chain and her late mother’s wedding ring. These were not mere things, of course; they were memories, physical embodiments of the nineteen years that Lavinia had lived. They were proof that people loved her. Her brother had similar items in his room—a stone he’d picked up years ago on the beach in Brighton, the pearl pendant he’d inherited from his mother, to one day give his wife, and the penknife Lavinia had scrimped to buy him.

Where did William keep his memories? There had been nothing—not so much as a pressed flower—in his quarters. Not a single physical item indicated that he passed through life in contact with others. He must hold his memories entirely inside him.

It seemed a dreadfully lonesome place to keep them.

Things had emotional heft. Lavinia did not imagine a man avoided all mementos because he had been blessed with an inordinate number of good memories. That William had felt compelled to resort to blackmail, when she’d been so giddily inclined to him, said rather more about the light in which he saw himself than how he saw her. For all the harshness of his words, he’d touched her as if he worshipped her. He’d caressed her and held her and brought her to a pleasure that still had her limbs trembling. He might claim to have had no notion of love, but he’d not approached her as if her touches were credits on a balance sheet.

“Vinny?” James swung her door open without so much as a knock.

Luckily, the same absorption that led James to ignore Lavinia’s privacy meant he did not notice her dress was overwrinkled. He did not look in her eyes and see the telltale glow that lit them.

“Vinny,” he said again, “have you taken care of my note yet? Because I could—I mean, I should help.”

And how could she answer? She hadn’t taken care of his note. But James wouldn’t have to worry about the matter ever again. As for William…

Lavinia pasted a false smile across her lips. “You have nothing to worry about,” she said. “It’s all taken care of. He’s all taken care of.”