The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,56

private rooms where the gentry held their masquerades. Diamonds flashed on a debutante’s wrist as she toyed with the ties of her mask and leaned close to whisper a secret into the ear of a giggling, glittering companion.

Flood tugged her down to be heard above the crowd. “Have you ever been to a masquerade?” she asked.

Agatha shook her head. “It’s expensive, and I have no genius for disguise,” she replied.

“What?”

Agatha leaned closer.

Flood tilted her head obligingly.

Agatha’s lips could almost—just almost—brush the edge of Flood’s ear. “I have no—” she began to repeat, but got no farther, as a laughing body bumped into her from behind.

She staggered forward, taking Penelope Flood with her.

Flood’s gasp of surprise spurred Agatha into action. Her hands came up automatically, catching Flood by the elbows and steadying them both against the press of bodies in the darkness.

It took her a moment to realize they’d stopped moving. Agatha’s face was buried in Flood’s hair, curls sweeping her eyelids and cheeks and tickling her nose. Flood’s hands were clutching Agatha’s shoulders, and she huffed out a little laugh, her chest rising and falling as the sound echoed through her body and into Agatha’s.

Agatha turned her head, brushing her lips against Flood’s temple. It was not a kiss. It was a wordless worry, a touch seeking reassurance. It had nothing to do with how sweet Flood felt to hold, or how good she smelled: bergamot and violets. “Are you alright?”

“I am now.” Agatha felt more than heard Flood’s sigh as Penelope tilted her head up with a smile. Her eyes flickered with torchlight, and her cheeks were rosy with excitement. Agatha felt the earth spin away ever farther beneath her—

The diamond-decked debutante laughed again, and the spell was broken.

Agatha dropped her hands and stepped away, tugging at her cuffs, smoothing her dress, face flaming in a way not even the champagne could explain.

Flood blinked, and shook her head. “Perhaps it’s time we went home,” she said.

Agatha nodded, and they left the pleasure gardens behind.

Now they lay in Agatha’s bed, wrapped in darkness deep as velvet—and Agatha couldn’t sleep.

Penelope had no such trouble. She had all but passed out as soon as her head touched the pillow and was now snoring softly, a homely, intimate sound that made Agatha’s heart ache and her fingers twist in the sheets to keep from reaching out.

Strange to hear another person breathing in this room again. Dangerously tempting to have someone so close. The single hardest part of widowhood for Agatha had been learning to sleep singly: no one to steal warmth or blankets from, no one to talk to in that sweet, safe time between getting into bed and slipping into slumber. No one to simply be there, whenever Agatha woke up on the wrong side of midnight from some half-remembered dream. The loneliness of the bed she’d once shared with Thomas had felt like an insult to her very soul, and she had never really grown resigned to it.

But now that emptiness was filled with the round, cozy form of Penelope Flood, sailor’s wife and beekeeper and Agatha’s dearest friend.

Her presence reshaped the bed’s intimate geography: the extra dip of the mattress, the unwonted tension in the blankets, the ebb and flow of the currents in the very air around them. Agatha’s eyelids grew heavy, and the looming prospect of unconsciousness kicked up her heart into a sudden panic.

What if she fell asleep, and let down her guard, and they woke up entwined? Her arms around Flood’s waist, one of the other woman’s thighs sliding between her own? Warm breath and tangled hair and thin sheets and soft skin . . .

She could all but hear her friend’s teasing snort. Been that long since someone shared your bed, has it, Griffin?

And Agatha would have to pretend to laugh, and let Flood go, and feel weak and desperate and pitiful. Flood might have asked for secrets, earlier in the evening—but only as a game, a brief diversion. A good few fucks, she’d said, and that was fine for some, but it was not a game Agatha was suited for, especially not with people she wanted to keep as friends. She had too great a tendency to devotion.

Even when that devotion wasn’t wanted.

So Agatha rolled onto her belly, tucked her hands firmly underneath her chest, turned her face to the wall, and prayed for a sleep like death.

Chapter Twelve

The sermons were wrong. Hell wasn’t fire and brimstone. Hell was a dress of soft white