“Fernando told me. I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he murmured, his fingers rubbing my tense neck muscles. For the first time since New Haven, I let myself relax.
“I missed you, too.” My heart was too full to let me to say more.
But Matthew didn’t want more words. The next thing I knew I was airborne, cradled in his arms with my feet dangling.
Upstairs, Matthew put me in the leafy surrounds of the bed we’d slept in so many lifetimes ago in the Blackfriars. Silently he undressed me, examining every inch of exposed flesh as though he had been given an unexpected glimpse of something rare and precious. He was utterly silent as he did so, letting his eyes and the gentleness of his touch speak for him.
Over the course of the next few hours, Matthew reclaimed me, his fingers erasing every trace of the other creatures I’d been in contact with since he departed. At some point he let me undress him, his body responding to mine with gratifying speed. Dr. Sharp had been absolutely clear on the risks associated with any contraction of my uterine muscles, however. There would be no release of sexual tension for me, but just because I had to deny my body’s needs, that didn’t mean Matthew did, too. When I reached for him, however, he stilled my hand and kissed me deeply.
Together, Matthew said without a word. Together, or not at all.
“Don’t tell me you can’t find him, Fernando,” Matthew said, not even trying to sound reasonable. He was in the kitchen of Clairmont House, scrambling eggs and making toast. Diana was upstairs resting, unaware of the conference taking place on the lower ground floor.
“I still think we should ask Jack,” Fernando said. “He could help us narrow down the options, at least.”
“No. I don’t want him involved.” Matthew turned to Marcus. “Is Phoebe all right?”
“It was too close for comfort, Matthew,” Marcus said grimly. “I know you don’t approve of Phoebe’s becoming a vampire, but—”
“You have my blessing,” Matthew interrupted. “Just choose someone who will do it properly.”
“Thank you. I already have.” Marcus hesitated. “Jack has been asking to see Diana.”
“Send him over this evening.” Matthew flipped the eggs onto a plate. “Tell him to bring the cradles.
Around seven. We’ll be expecting him.”
“I’ll tell him,” Marcus said. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Matthew said. “Someone must be feeding Benjamin information. Since you can’t find Benjamin, you can look for him—or her.”
“And then?” Fernando asked.
“Bring them to me,” Matthew replied as he left the room.
We remained locked alone in the house for three days, twined together, talking little, never separated for more than the few moments when Matthew went downstairs to make me something to eat or to accept a meal dropped off by the Connaught’s staff. The hotel had apparently worked out a food-for-wine scheme with Matthew. Several cases of 1961 Château Latour left the house in exchange for exquisite morsels of food, such as hard-boiled quail eggs in a nest of seaweed and delicate ravioli filled with tender cèpes that the chef assured Mathew had been flown in from France only that morning.
On the second day, Matthew and I trusted ourselves to talk, and similarly tiny mouthfuls of words were offered up and digested alongside the delicacies from a few streets away. He reported on Jack’s efforts at self-governance in the thick of Marcus’s sprawling brood. Matthew spoke with great admiration of Marcus’s deft handling of his children and grandchildren, all of whom had names worthy of characters in a nineteenth-century penny dreadful. And, reluctantly, Matthew told me of his struggles not only his with blood rage but with his desire to be at my side.
“I would have gone mad without the pictures,” he confessed, spooned up against my back with his long, cold nose buried in my neck. “The images of where we’d lived, or the flowers in the garden, or your toes on the edge of the bath kept my sanity from slipping entirely.”
I shared my own tale with a slowness worthy of a vampire, gauging Matthew’s reactions so that I could take a break when necessary and let him absorb what I’d experienced in London and Oxford.
There was finding Timothy and the missing page, as well as meeting up with Amira and being back at the Old Lodge. I showed Matthew my purple finger and shared the goddess’s proclamation that to possess the Book of Life I would have to give up something I