“It does!” She leapt to her feet, her hands fisting at her hips. “It matters because I have slept in the same chamber as you for two months and had no idea. If, that is, you have them often. Do you?”
“Bollocks.”
“You do.”
He wouldn’t look at her.
“Howoften?” Less a question, more a demand. “Every night?”
“No.” His gaze flew to her, then, brow furrowed, frustration chiseled onto his thinned lips.
“Every few nights?”
His shoulders sagged, and he looked away from her again. “Sometimes that often.” She’d won. But a hollow victory. As his body softened, hers did too, and she sat once more beside him, encouraged him on with silence. His hands made hammer fists on his thighs, and she covered them with her own hands, stroked fingers through the mountains of his knuckles. “It was shooting. The scent of gunpowder. It gets stuck in the nose. Then stuck in the mind.” His gaze swung to the moon. “So I dreamt of it tonight. I did not wish to wake you.”
She snorted. “That’s meant to sound like you’re being quite the conscientious fellow, but it’s something else entirely, I think.”
“What do you mean?” A snap in his voice, a frost.
“You did not wish to wake me for yourself, not for me.”
“That’s not?—”
“Entirelytrue. Oh, I’m aware you’re conscientious to a fault, unless you’re warning a lady away from you with naughty words.”
Even in the light of the yellow moon she could see his cheeks flaming red, and she gave into impulse, kissed his cheek because a blushing bull in the moonlight demanded it, truly. She had no choice. In fact, she kissed it again, draped her arms around his neck, and pulled herself up onto his lap.
“But mostly you do not want others to worry about you. Because you do not wish to bring them sorrow? Or because you do not wish to suffer their pity? Perhaps both. You’re hiding, same as I was. But London is not your dark closet—youare.”
“Bollocks.” But his arms wrapped tight around her, and he rested his cheek on the top of her head.
“I wish you would worry me. I will not pay you pity for it.”
He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “You won’t, will you.”
“Never.” Because, perhaps, this was the way to pay him back for saving her. She could be the one person allowed to worry for him, to care for him, to see his nightmares and fight them when they came.
She stroked a line down his chest with a single fingertip, learning the weft and warp of the rumpled linen shirt he wore to bed, all the way down his taut torso until she found the warm wool of the loose breeches he wore every night. She settled her hand at the warm crook of his bent hip, squeezed the thick, muscular thigh.
Silence told her everything—he would not speak further. He was a tough bough to bend. And those risked breaking if she pushed too hard. Not her desire, that. To break a lovely bit of wood so full of potential always seemed a crime. And he… Lord Atlas Bromley… he seemed the loveliest.
She swallowed, choosing each word carefully. “Would you like to speak of it? The nightmare? Sometimes it helps to reveal the fear that made it. Sometimes you can laugh at it, take away its power.”
“Ha.” A soft yet hard bark. “Difficult to do when it’s more memory than dream.”
“You do not have to tell me about it,” she said, squeezing his thigh again. “But it would not hurt me to hear about it. Should you ever wish.”
“I don’t wish. Not tonight.”
Nottonight. A victory, that. It implied some other night might bear witness to spilled secrets. Not that they had many more nights to discuss, well, anything.
“I seek”—his arms loosened around her, and his breath tickled her hair—“merely to forget.”
She pushed off his chest. “Play for me, then?”
“Play …?”
“The pianoforte. We will not wake the others. You’ve chosen your bedchamber like a hermit chooses his cave—away from all signs of humanity.” And now she knew why, didn’t she. He didn’t want anyone to hear him when he woke in the middle of the night. “Play for me. Please?”
