A Lily Among Thorns(91)

Solomon vomited chocolate into his basin. He wanted more than anything else in the world to talk to Serena. But she’d looked so scared, so trapped. He’d told her he wasn’t asking her for anything. He couldn’t go running to her now.

Besides, even though he thought he understood, he was angry. Angry that he’d told her he loved her and she’d all but chewed off her own arm to get away. He gargled water until he could no longer taste the tainted acidic sweetness on his tongue.

Serena opened her eyes. Sunlight was streaming cheerily in through her window. She groaned and glanced at the clock. Quarter to eight. She sat bolt upright. How had she slept so late? Why had Sophy let her? She swung her legs over the side of the bed—and froze mid-stretch, paralyzed by the soft sound of water lapping against a metal hipbath.

Solomon was taking a bath.

Just a few inches of oak away.

Naked.

Hellfire and damnation. She had worked to avoid exactly this eventuality. It hadn’t been difficult, precisely, because he usually rose at seven, and she rose at five. But she had made sure to know that when he had water brought up for his bath it was invariably at half-past seven, and had taken pains never to be in her room before the tub was carried back down the stairs and the water thrown in the rear courtyard. It was bad enough that she herself struggled to be perfectly silent as she took her own baths, so that she would not wake him, so that he would not come through the door that no longer locked and find her naked. It was bad enough that every inch of her skin burned at the knowledge that he could.

She did not want to listen to the faint lap of water against a metal tub in the next room, or hear a splash and picture Solomon pouring water over his shoulders and arms or, God forbid, lathering his chest, or brushing wet hair back from his forehead—

Memories flooded her, memories of Solomon’s hands on her breasts and Solomon’s mouth on her skin, of his darkened hazel eyes fixed on her face. Memories of him inside her. Memories of feeling so intimately connected to Solomon that being separated from him by the space of an inch would have killed her.

With the memories came the panic. Sheer, overpowering, throat-closing fear at the strength of her own emotions. She was drowning in him.

Moving in desperate haste and equally desperate silence, Serena washed her face and neck and ran a comb through her hair. She heard the rush of water when Solomon stood, and she heard the creaking of the floor when he stepped out of the tub. She dressed with trembling hands, putting on her short corset and a gown that buttoned in the front so she wouldn’t need help.

She slipped out of her room and hurried down the hallway, but she was too late. As she passed Solomon’s door, it opened.

Serena stopped and turned to look. She stood there, rooted to the spot.

His pale hair was wet, and he was running one hand through it. The indigo stain on his finger that she’d noticed the night before had faded to a faint powder blue.

He was back in the Arms livery. He looked as delicious as the Italian sweets they’d ordered for the Brendans’ Venetian breakfast. And he was staring at her every bit as hungrily as she was staring at him.

He said he loved me. All I have to do is say I’m sorry, and he’d let me— She couldn’t form a coherent thought. Her tongue was cloven to the roof of her mouth.

Solomon watched her, his eyes gold in the morning light. “Good morning,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

His eyes narrowed. “I still love you,” he said evenly. Then he brushed past her and went down the hall. Her heart pounded in rhythm with his boot heels on the stairs.





Chapter 22


The beginning of the Brendans’ party, René reflected, was hideously different from the beginning of the Pursleighs’. Not that he had been precisely at ease on that occasion, either, but now poor Elijah could not even look at him. The boy didn’t look at his brother either, and Solomon was keeping his eyes studiously on the middle distance. René, seeing the circles under Elijah’s eyes, would have liked to wring Solomon’s puritanical little neck. The pair were both fidgeting like mad, and René didn’t dare speak to either, even to give a simple order, for fear of provoking a confrontation.

It seemed like years, but was probably only twenty minutes, before he judged he might safely leave the kitchen to its own devices and supervise the arrangement of the tables in the courtyard. He escaped outside with a sense of profound relief.

So it was with a doubly sinking feeling that he realized they might have left the Italian pastries at the Arms. There is no point going to see. Even if you find that you have, Hampstead is too far from London to retrieve them in time, he told himself hopefully. But there was no help for it. He turned back to the house.