“It sounded far worse than that.” He stepped farther into the room.
The firelight now caught him fully, and she swallowed. He wore nothing but his drawers—no nightshirt, no nightcap, nothing but a thin layer of linen that covered him from low on his hips to his knees. And he was as well made as any woman could want—muscular chest, flat stomach, and very impressive calves. Not to mention arms that looked as if they could lift anything.
Or hold down anyone.
She shuddered. He wouldn’t hurt her. She couldn’t believe that he would. “I’m fine,” she whispered. “Truly I am.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m a bit chilly, is all. I dreamed of drowning.”
The sympathy on his face sliced right through her fear. “Do you want me to stay?” When she hesitated, afraid to say yes, but not wanting to be alone, he added, “I’ll sit right over there in that chair until you go back to sleep. If you’d like.”
“It hardly seems fair to you—”
“Don’t worry about that. I know how upsetting nightmares can be. I had a great many as a boy. And my mother would sit with me and rub my back until I could go to sleep.” He approached the bed slowly. “I’ll do the same for you, if you like.”
“Edwin—”
“Just rub your back. I promise. Nothing more.”
She let out a long breath. “That sounds lovely.”
His smile of pure relief tugged at her somewhere down deep, where she rarely let anyone in. So when he came to sit beside her on the bed, and urged her to turn onto her stomach, she willingly gave herself up to his hands.
As he began to knead her shoulders through her nightdress, she moaned. “Ohhh. That is wonderful.”
He rubbed her muscles expertly. “So, tell me about this nightmare. You were drowning?”
“Mmm,” she said, her fear of the dream already fading, “I’d rather put it from my mind. Tell me about your nightmares. Somehow I always imagined you as a stalwart little boy afraid of nothing. What did you dream about that frightened you?”
“Skeletons.”
She shifted her head to look up at him. “Skeletons? Truly?”
“Well, they started out as people when they came after me. But then the flesh would melt from their bones until they were nothing more than skeletons lumbering toward me with their bones creaking.” He shuddered.
“Good Lord, that’s a rather macabre dream for a little boy.”
“I suspect it started when I saw a puppet show at a fair, which featured a skeleton puppet dancing about the stage and scaring the audience. I dreamed of them for a few years after.”
“You poor thing!”
“Actually, it’s why I became interested in Father’s automatons. They scared me because they vaguely reminded me of my nightmares, so I deliberately started examining them, determined to get past my fear. Before long I became genuinely interested in figuring out how they worked. The more I knew, the more fascinated I got, and before long, the dreams stopped.”
“I do hope you’re not going to suggest that I try swimming in a dark lake in the middle of a forest to learn to get past my nightmare.”
He chuckled. “No. That doesn’t sound wise or safe.”
She relaxed against the pillow. “Good. Because I can’t swim.”
“Perhaps I’ll teach you sometime. Just not at a dark lake in the middle of the forest.”
“No,” she murmured, then yawned.
His motions grew slower, more soothing. “Better now?”
“Mmm. Much better.” Her eyes slid closed. “Tell me more about when you were a boy.”
He started into a story about his first time on a horse, normally a tale that she might find entertaining, but soon his words began to melt together into one long droning, and before long she fell asleep.
That night there were no more dreams of any kind. And when she woke the next morning, he was gone.
Sixteen
Days later, Edwin sat at the breakfast table early in the morning, scouring the Times for any evidence that Durand might have made good on his threats. So far there had been no whiff of that, thank God.
He drank some of his tea. Hard to believe that he and Clarissa had been married almost a week. After the night of the blood-curdling scream, after seeing the terror that leapt in her eyes when she first saw him enter her room, he thought it prudent to retreat from any overt physical advances until she was willing to reveal what made her so frightened.