Say Yes to the Marquess(60)
“Rafe, that was—”
“Clio, we can’t—”
“Miss Whitmore?” A knock sounded at the door. “Miss Whitmore, did you need help with your gown?”
Anna.
“Drat drat drat,” she muttered.
Rafe’s choice of words was decidedly less genteel.
“Just a moment,” Clio called out. She shimmied, then stepped out of the pool of gown and petticoats at her feet. She took Rafe by the hand. “Quickly. This way.”
He resisted. “You can’t mean to hide me. I’m too big. I won’t fit in the wardrobe or behind the drapes.”
“You’ll fit here.” She found a little notch in the paneled wall and slid it open. “This way. Hurry.”
He stepped into the secret room, looking around its single slice of window and kneeling bench. “What is this?”
“It’s an oratory. A private chapel for the mistress of the house to withdraw and reflect.” She nodded at the other side. “There’s a similar door that leads into my sitting room.”
“You’d never know it was even here.” He tilted his head to admire the ceiling. “This castle truly is something.”
“I told you as much.” Smiling, she moved to slide the panel shut.
“Wait.” He put his hand in the gap, holding the panel open. “So are you, Clio. You’re truly something. Never doubt it.”
He withdrew his hand, and the door slid shut.
Chapter Fourteen
We must discuss the ice sculptures,” Daphne said later that evening.
“Must we?”
The three Whitmore sisters had gathered in Clio’s sitting room to dress for dinner. Just like the times when they were younger. Phoebe sat at the dressing table while Clio brushed out her hair. Daphne lay on her side, draped across Clio’s bed. With one hand, she flipped the pages of a ladies’ magazine, and with the other she plucked raspberries from a bowl.
Despite Phoebe’s trouble in the village and Daphne’s insulting trick with the too-small gowns, Clio needed her sisters close this evening. She couldn’t explain it except to think that sometimes the devil you knew was easier to face than the devil who’d pressed you to a bedpost and rolled your nipple under his thumb.
“I was thinking perhaps a sculpted pair of famous lovers,” Daphne suggested. “What about Romeo and Juliet?”
“That ended badly,” Phoebe said. “One poisoned, one died by dagger.”
“Cleopatra and Marc Antony?”
“Even worse. One snakebite, one sword.”
“Lancelot and Guinevere, then.”
“He died a hermit. She became a nun.”
Daphne sighed, exasperated. “You ruin everything.”
“So I’m beginning to understand.” Phoebe handed Clio a hairpin. “But this time, it’s not my fault. Forbidden love affairs never turn out well in stories.”
Clio held her tongue as she twisted her sister’s dark hair into a simple chignon.
Phoebe was right. Nothing good would come of this . . . this whatever it was between her and Rafe. She couldn’t precisely call it a love affair. The word love had never been uttered, and they hadn’t done anything so irreversible that it couldn’t be brushed aside.
But she didn’t want to brush it aside.
She wanted to clutch it tight and never let go. The way he’d held her so tenderly . . . The security and exhilaration she felt in his embrace . . . She wanted that. She wanted more. She wanted him to be thinking about her just as often as she thought about him.
Which was, to estimate it roughly, with each and every breath.
He had to sign those papers, without delay. He simply must. To ease her conscience, if nothing else. Piers might not have treated her with any particular tenderness, and perhaps their engagement was a mere formality—but it had to be wrong to drop your frock for one man while still officially betrothed to another.
“If you want famous lovers, there’s always Ulysses and Penelope,” Phoebe suggested. “She stayed faithful for twenty years while her husband traveled the world to return to her.”
“Swans,” Clio blurted out, desperate to change the subject from long-suffering, faithful women. “Aren’t these ice sculptures usually swans?”
“Yes, but everyone has swans,” Daphne said. “They’re supposed to be romantic because they mate for life.”
In the mirrored reflection, Phoebe arched one slender eyebrow. “So do vultures, wolves, and African termites. I haven’t seen any ice sculptures of them.”
Clio was about to remark that a termite mound sounded like just the thing, but there was a knock at the bedchamber door.