She flipped her long, demure braid over her shoulder. “No. You gave me more than ample time. The bathing room is all yours.”
Fine. He was glad of it. Half the time, she left tooth powder all over the sink, and he had to clean up after her.
His ablutions were quick and thankfully peaceful. Just as they’d been these past three months without her. He stopped and stared in the hanging mirror. Butherwell had been correct; the reflection was not pretty. Half a face belonged to a man with a stern countenance, the other half was a monster’s. Two-faced. In every sense.
“You, sir,” he muttered to his reflection, “are a lying nodcock who wants to shag his wife senseless.” He threw down his toothbrush, and it clattered around in the basin. “Only you are not going to ask for that. Are you?” The reflection’s scowl of discontent grew. “No, you are not. You haven’t yet sunk that low.” They’d already gone down that path, and look how well that turned out.
He raked his fingers through his hair, and keeping on his repressive yet extremely necessary smalls, went out to face Poppy. She looked him over in that cool way of hers, and he resisted the urge to shift his feet. Bloody woman always saw more than she ought to.
“Were you talking to yourself in the mirror?”
His lips pressed together. “If you have to ask, you must have heard me.” Christ, please say she did not hear the specifics. “So I’m going to assume the question is rhetorical.”
She rolled her eyes and began to unbutton her dressing gown. “Fine. I won’t ask you what you were muttering about.”
You could. It might be interesting. Say, Pop, fancy a quick shag for old time’s sake?
“I simply was trying to make conversation to ease this awkwardness,” she said.
“Commendable but futile.” He fluffed a pillow, and then another, punched it actually. “I don’t think there is any good way to ease—” His voice strangled to a halt as she shrugged out of the dressing gown. “You must be jesting.”
Her head lifted. “What?” She tossed the gown upon a chair back and frowned at him from across the bed. “Good lord, Win, don’t look at me like that. I’m perfectly respectable.”
“Respectable,” he repeated as if every muscle in his body weren’t quivering. As if right this moment his c*ck wasn’t rising. Shit. He sat at the edge of the bed before he betrayed the proof of his interest. Damn her eyes, but she was wearing his nightshirt. The very one she’d stolen from him so many years before.
For a moment, all he could see was Poppy, na**d and wriggling against him in bed on their wedding night. Win took a bracing breath. That damned nightshirt. She’d worn it almost every night of their marriage. But he didn’t think she’d be so heartless as to wear it now. It was his shirt.
“That thing is so old and worn it has holes in it,” he said through his teeth. Inconvenient holes that showed glimpses of things he could not have.
Her hands went to her hips. “It’s comfortable.”
“It’s a rag.” A nearly transparent one at that. Sweet mother of… What was a negligee compared to seeing one’s wife draped in one’s own, very thin and very revealing, nightshirt? Hells bells, it would almost be better if she were na**d. He fisted the sheet. Maybe he ought to ask for a comparison just to be sure.
“You’re being ridiculous.” She tossed the covers back and flopped onto her side of the bed. “And hurtful.”
Her slim arm whipped out from under the covers to lower the lamp, and the room plunged into darkness. He sighed and got under the covers, gritting his teeth at the stiffness in his lower extremity and the way his body hummed with awareness of her. But the tight way in which she huddled on the far side of the bed cut through his skin. Damn it; how was it that her pain affected him so much more than his own? It was like a hand pressing on his chest, making his flesh crawl with shame. Because he had caused it.
He drew a deep breath through his nose as he lay like a lump of coal on his side of the bed. “I did not mean to be hurtful.”
Silence greeted him. Then her small voice broke it. “I love this shirt.”
Hell. Win squeezed his eyes closed, even though it was dark as pitch. “I know.”
Her response was a decidedly feminine sniff that communicated both a grudging acknowledgment and made it clear that his effort wasn’t enough. Well, he rather doubted she’d appreciate his other method of apology. Win closed his eyes and prayed for sleep, for his c*ck to go to sleep, rather. But no, it lay, a heavy, nagging weight against his belly, pushing against the strings of his smalls in a valiant attempt to get free. Architecture. That was soothing. Sleep often took him when he made a mental tour of London’s architectural wonders.
Westminster Palace, The Clock Tower, Tower of London, Cleopatra’s Needle. Christ, stop thinking of erect monuments.
Poppy made an abrupt, irritated move, disrupting his musings and unfortunately aggravating his current situation when her bottom hit his hip. Gritting his teeth, he risked a glance. The hunched shape of her shoulders were outlined in the darkness. Her head lay significantly lower than his. Again she shifted. A covert sort of move she employed when she did not want him to notice. Ridiculous, as he was always aware of her. He wondered how long she would go on pretending she wasn’t vastly uncomfortable. Forever, it would seem. So very Poppy.
Wanting to smile and wanting even more to roll over and push himself into her until they were both exhausted, he gave in and did the safe, less pleasurable thing. He smiled and lifted the pillow from under his head.
“Here.” He handed it to her. She stared at the thing as if it were a rat, and he sighed. “Take it. I know you don’t like the pillow you have.”
“It’s too flat,” she said after a moment.
“Yes, I know.” She preferred a plump pillow. Always had.
His throat closed, and he turned away, pounding the flatter pillow he took in exchange into a reasonable lump. “Now will you stop wiggling about and go to sleep?”
He felt her settle and then heard a little sigh of relief. Well good. At least one of them was comfortable.
Body aching and head resting upon a woeful pillow, he chased sleep once more.
St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace—
“Win?”
He cracked open one eye. “Yes?”
A faint touch landed on the sheet at his back. And then it was gone. Her whisper drifted over him. “Are you sorry you did it?”
Again came that tender ache within the region of his bruised and battered heart. He gripped the pillow as he willed himself not to turn. “Sorry?” But he knew what she meant. Only it hurt too much to answer.
The sheets moved as she shifted. “Sorry that you gave up so much. For me?”
Ah gods, he couldn’t… White spots danced before his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut. “No.” Winston cleared his throat. “I am only sorry that I did not know the whole of you.”
The desire to let her secrets spill forth rushed through Poppy, but the familiar tug of repression caught her. Never speak. You lead a double life. Remember this always. She’d followed the instructions to the letter, even when it tore at her soul. Even when her sisters suffered and her husband turned away from her. The SOS was her other half, sometimes the greater part of her. To what end? If she let it, the SOS would take her happiness away and leave her empty.
“I was eighteen when I took over my mother’s position.”
Win’s voice came at her through the dark. “The year we met.”
She sighed. “Yes. The day we met, actually.”
He was silent, as if he too were remembering that day upon the platform. She wondered what the memory held for him. For her, it had been both the best and worst day of her life. Every step down the long, cold train platform had been a struggle to pull herself together, to remind herself who and what she was. And then he was there, as if forming from the mist. It had been such a shock to see the handsome young man walking beside her, looking at her as if she had just become his whole world. She’d thought she was dreaming.
“What were you doing at the station?” He laughed shortly, as if disgusted with himself. “Do you know, I never even thought to ask you.” Another choppy laugh filled the air. “I was too stunned with lust to think on anything more than keeping you with me.”
Her breath hitched, and she struggled to find another. “And I thought you were the most handsome madman I’d ever seen.”
His voice rolled over her like fog. “Mad for you.”
God, the things he could do to her. Just a few words and it was all she could do not to fling herself at him. She cleared her throat. “I’d just been appointed Mother. Lena fulfilled the duty while I completed my training. Actually, I thought she might keep the position, but she’s never liked the role.” Lena had always been strange in that regard, preferring to be a guardian of the SOS, rather than the leader of it. Poppy settled further into her pillow and continued her story. “There is an SOS tunnel exit at the station, and I’d used it to leave the ceremony.”
“You were eighteen years old.” The shock in his voice was strong. “And they appointed you head of an entire organization?”
“I’d been training for the position since I was six.” Pride prickled along her skin and she fought to tamp it down. “I am the seventh generation of first daughters to carry out the duty. My family, along with another, founded the SOS.”
Letting out her secrets filled her with utter weariness, but it felt easier to say them in the dark. “In the early days, we were simply called the Regulators. It was actually when we began to work in conjunction with the King and the Prime Minister that we became more formally organized and called ourselves the Society for the Suppression of Supernaturals.”
She shifted a bit, sinking further into the plump pillow. “That was in my great-grandmother’s time, though I can honestly say I’ve no fondness for the newer name as it stirred up trouble with certain supernatural factions.”