In the Dark with the Duke by Caldwell Christi

Author:Caldwell, Christi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542021265
Publisher: Montlake
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Following Peterloo, when Lila had returned home, carried in by servants and deposited in the confines of her four-poster bed, she’d lain on her back and simply stared at the garish pink wallpaper that adorned her walls.

In the immediate aftermath, amidst the silence and solitariness, of all there’d been to think on . . . she’d reflected upon . . . her hands.

Given how very close she’d come to losing her life, and because of it, never again seeing her family, her hands had been the oddest of things to dwell on.

More specifically, she had pondered how much she’d failed to properly appreciate her hands when they’d been whole. She’d not thought about what gifts they were capable of . . . the chords they could pluck into hauntingly beautiful medleys. She’d failed to appreciate the feel of her older sister’s hand twined with hers, their perfectly formed digits perfectly interlocked.

Nor had she understood that hands were, in fact, the carriers of memories. Each protuberance and bend contained within their imperfect lines remembered horrors.

She’d come to dislike her fingers.

Nay, in all honesty, she despised them.

Oh, they weren’t her only scars. She bore the bayonet’s mark upon her leg, and the ragged line left by a spur down the middle of her forehead. But she could avoid mirrors and forget that her face had been transformed. And the ugly mark upon her leg could be hidden under skirts and chemises—or, as she’d recently learned, by trousers.

After she dressed each day, she was spared from staring at and remembering all the ways she was broken and all the nightmares she carried.

But her fingers she couldn’t hide. Even the leather gloves she donned curved about those bent fingers, reminding her when she didn’t need to be.

And the whole of her now small world noticed, too: her mother and brother, who could not bring themselves to look at the twisted digits. And Sylvia had gone out of her way to pretend that she didn’t see them.

Seated at the pianoforte in her sister’s music room, Lila studied them now, seeing in them new memories.

Those she’d made this day with Hugh.

Lifting them close to better inspect them in the dim lighting, she scrunched her brow.

They remained the same slightly crooked digits they’d been that morn, but today, she’d used them differently, freely. She’d used them to learn and defend herself, and then after, she’d stroked Hugh Savage with these same broken fingers. And he’d not been at all repulsed.

Today, for the first time in the whole of her life, in his arms, she’d felt . . . beautiful.

Not almost beautiful.

But rather, Hugh had helped Lila see that for all the ways in which her body and mind were scarred, she was still very much a woman.

And he’d desired her.

In his apartments, in his rooms, she’d learned what it was to be desired.

Her body heated, not with embarrassment for her boldness but from desire that stirred to life inside her once more at the memory of that morning.

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