Undressed with the Marquess (Lost Lords of London #3) - Caldwell, Christi Page 0,41
the hall with his long legs unfurled and a leather book in hand, Dare had set himself up. From over the top of that tome, he looked at her. “Temperance.”
She dampened her lips and briefly considered retreating back into her room. Briefly.
“Dare.” And before she thought better of it, she settled herself onto the floor across from him. At some point, he’d switched the clothes he’d ridden in for a new set of garments. These dark ones were just as fine and flawless. With a book on his lap, he may as well have been a nobleman seated in his office and not a gentleman sitting on the floor of a public resting house.
They sat in companionable silence for a long while, with Dare reading and her stitching fabric into the beginnings of a small throw.
“Unable to sleep still, are you?” he asked, closing his book.
She paused, the tip of her needle piercing the line she sewed, and then made herself drag it through.
Still . . . the assumption was that she’d remained the same all these years later, and she didn’t want to remind him that she’d changed . . . in so many ways. It was, simply put, easier to let him to that conjecture.
“I was unable to sleep,” she allowed. Drawing her knees up close to her chest, she made a makeshift table of her legs, taking some of the strain from her arms.
“London?”
Temperance stared intently down at her work. “Yes.” Why must he continue to remind her of all the ways in which they’d known everything there was to know about one another? So much so that they needn’t even speak in complete sentences to know what the other spoke of.
“You won’t see him,” he said quietly.
Ironically, it was the first time that her unease didn’t stem from fear of that monster.
“He doesn’t leave the Rookeries, Temperance,” he continued on with that same incorrect supposition. “He’s become an even bigger drunkard in his old age. He’ll drown himself in his spirits.”
Unless she’d seen a body upon which to spit, Temperance would never believe anything but that the Devil still walked amongst them. “It’s not Abaddon I’m”—fearful of—“uneasy about, Dare.” Except, mayhap in large part it was. Mayhap she’d just not acknowledged as much until Dare had forced her to. Temperance, however, would be damned if she let him be the root of her fears. Not again. There was nothing he could do that would hurt worse than the pain he’d already brought her.
Dare had always been entirely too confident where her ruthless sire was concerned. And there had been another time when she’d let herself believe in Dare, too. She’d made the mistake of thinking her father had forgotten about her. And that mistake had proven fatal. Tears pricked her lashes, and she gave thanks for the shroud of darkness that shielded those useless drops. She frantically dragged her needle through her fabrics. No good came from crying. If there had, she’d have been healed in those immediate days when she’d birthed and lost her babe. She shoved the needle through the fabric and stabbed the pad of her thumb.
Her breath hissed from her teeth as she dropped her stitchery.
He scooted across the hall. “Here.”
It was those tones, those blasted gentle, tender ones, that sent a single tear falling. And then another.
Burying her head in her shoulder, she angrily swiped back the moisture from her cheeks. “It’s fine,” she said tightly.
Except he reached for her hand anyway, and tugging a crisp white, embroidered kerchief from his jacket, he pressed it lightly against her wound. “It isn’t awful,” Dare agreed, his head bent over their joined palms.
She stared at the tiny crimson drop as it expanded into a larger, distorted blob. Her stomach revolted. A soundless moan worked its way up her throat.
Just look away, and you needn’t see . . . You needn’t remember blood upon your person from another time.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she blocked out the sight of it. Except, different remembrances of that sanguine substance had already taken root.
Slick and sleek, so dark it was nearly black. So much of it.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
“There,” Dare was saying, and just that one quiet word, spoken in his always-assuring tone, pulled her from the fog of the past.
He glanced up.
Temperance drew her hand back and cradled the injured digit close. As she spoke, she directed the words at the makeshift bandage Dare had arranged from his kerchief. “This world isn’t mine.”