A Lily Among Thorns(27)

Chocolate seemed like the absolute best thing that could happen just then, so she followed him without demur. Handing her a chipped earthenware mug with “A Present from Swansea” painted on the side, he rummaged through his equipment. After a short search he lined up a battered crucible, a glass bowl, and a small, crinkled paper sack on the edge of the table.

“You’re making the chocolate in that? Have you washed it?”

Solomon gave her an exasperated look. “This is my chocolate-making equipment. I don’t use it for experiments. It’s safe.” He soon had a merry flame lit under the crucible. Serena relaxed a little in the light—that is, until Solomon said, “What were you dreaming about?”

She stared at him.

“Talking about it will make you feel better.”

Was he mad? “I assure you, I’m quite recovered already. Besides, there’s nothing you can do.”

“I can listen.”

Serena didn’t answer.

Solomon’s broad back was to her as he poured water into the crucible and the glass bowl. “After Elijah died,” he said in conversational tones, “I used to dream nearly every night that I saw him die. Over and over, and I felt it. The bullet would hit him in the chest, and the pain—sometimes he would fall off his horse, and I could feel my neck snap.” He paused. “In some ways that was better than the nights I dreamed he was back and it was all a mistake.”

Good Lord. “And did telling someone that make you feel better?” she asked harshly. “Did it make it go away?”

He set the bowl into the crucible’s mouth to make a small double boiler. “No, it didn’t make it go away. It will never go away. But—I do feel better now, actually.” He glanced over his shoulder with a rueful chuckle. Now. He believed that a trouble shared was a trouble halved and yet he hadn’t told anyone either, hadn’t had anyone to tell. He’d waited for nearly two years, only to tell her. Of all the people he could have chosen—people who might have known what to say, people who might not have kicked him out of their hotels the evening before for no good reason—he’d chosen her, and telling her had made him feel better.

She wanted to go to him—but he didn’t want that. He had told her what he wanted: he wanted her nightmare. “All right.” She sat down on the edge of his bed. He sat on his workbench and watched her. She fixed her eyes on the mug. “René came to take me off to Bedlam. Only I knew somehow that it wouldn’t be Bedlam, it would be Mme Deveraux’s house, but when I said so they all looked at me if I were raving. And then they dragged me out the front door, and they were turning everyone out into the street. All the staff, and it was cold, and they locked the front doors shut and put up a big ‘Closed’ placard. I couldn’t stop them, they wouldn’t listen to me and I couldn’t—I couldn’t do a damn thing.”

She could barely get the words out, they felt so intimate and shameful.

He sat down on the bed beside her with a thump. “That isn’t going to happen,” he told her.

“Why?” she demanded. “Because you won’t let it?”

He smiled at her. “No. Because you won’t.”

Which was stupid. She didn’t have a damn clue how to stop René. But Solomon saying it made her feel better anyway. Her authority, her control—it was all smoke and mirrors, but it hadn’t stopped working yet. He still believed in it.

He reached over and tugged one of her pigtails. “Maybe—” He got up and began measuring cocoa powder into the hot water with a spoon. “Maybe you should take Sacreval up on his offer to buy the place.”

She had thought about that too, lying in bed staring at the ceiling in the cold cowardly early morning, but it wasn’t just her blind panic at losing the Arms that stopped her. “Yes, and when I’ve used the money to buy a new establishment, perhaps he’ll decide he wants that one, too. As long as he’s alive and has a copy of those marriage lines, I’m beaten.”

He stirred the chocolate slowly. “Serena, can I ask you a question?”

“All right,” she said warily.

“Where did you get that robe? It’s not anyone in London that I recognize.”

Before she knew it she was smiling—a real, happy smile. It felt disturbingly unfamiliar on her face. “One thing I love about you, Solomon, is your predictability.” He watched her inquiringly through his blush, and finally she looked at her mug and told him the truth. “I made it myself.”