Free The Sinner by Madeline Hunter Page B

diffused light of that big mirror . . .
    The water sounds stopped.
    The servant emerged, curtsied, and departed.
    After some movement, the bedchamber grew silent.
    He checked his pocket watch. He would wait a solid half hour. That should do it.
    He entered the study and perused McLean’s library. Almost entirely the predictable classics, but not completely. He spied his friend’s greatest prize, the only known surviving copy of
I Modi
, the series of erotic engravings by the Renaissance artist Raimondi. He flipped through the graphic images of sexual positions.
    All of which were out of the question tonight.
    Just as well. Changing that part of their arrangement would alter everything about it, and he certainly did not want that.
    The half hour up, he entered the bedchamber. A candle burned on a table beside the bed, and the mirror spread its pale golden light, dimly showing Fleur’s hair streaming down over the satin coverlet. She slept on her back. Her thick dark lashes feathered against her cheek.
    He went to the dressing room and pulled off his clothes and put on the nightshirt that his recently rehired valet had sensibly packed. Trying not to wake her, he eased onto the bed.
    He settled on his back and watched her in the mirror. She looked so peaceful and beautiful. He had never seen her hair down before. It flowed in thick waves over hands that were clasped atop the sheets on her stomach.
    Her lashes flickered and her lids rose. They looked at each other in the reflection. A body’s width separated them on the bed and they both lay almost rigidly beneath the mirror’s moving light.
    “I did not mean to wake you.”
    “I was not sleeping yet.” She glanced down the bed. “This is a little strange.”
    “Yes.”
    “But not unpleasantly so.”
    “No, not unpleasantly so.”
    She looked at him again in the reflection. “Thank you for marrying me.”
    He had no idea what to say to that.
    She closed her eyes. Her clasping hands relaxed and fell to her sides. He sensed her getting drowsy, but she looked up again. Her brow puckered into a thoughtful frown.
    “Dante. This mirror. You don’t suppose . . . It is a scandalous thought to have, but could it be that he put it there so that . . .” A blush deepened the rosy glow of her cheeks.
    He reached over and patted her hand. “Most likely it was just to help his reading.”
    Her small hand turned under his. He left his atop it, enjoying the sensation of palm on palm. He reined in the impulse to roll toward her and make the connection one of mouth on mouth and body on body. There was a simple, pure affection in their handholding, and he enjoyed it more than he expected, but his blood wanted more.
    “Good night,” she muttered sleepily.
    “Good night, pretty flower.”

chapter
6

    M y aunt Ophelia owned this property,” Fleur explained while the carriage followed a little lane through rolling Durham farmland. In the distance behind them a slow cart lumbered, carrying a few servants that she had hired at the nearby village.
    “Her husband had died in the war, and her sister had disappeared, so she made my mother, her half-sister, her sole heir. It came to me through my mother.”
    “You have an aunt who disappeared?”
    “Aunt Peg was not mentally sound. She was forever childish. Aunt Ophelia had her live in a little house within sight of the main one, with a servant who cared for her. Then one day she wandered off on her own and didn’t come back.”
    She was talking too much, trying to fill the silence. Dante had been very quiet this morning, as if sharing that bed had made him uncomfortable with her. His manner had pulled back from yesterday’s easy friendship.
    “She was never found?” he said.
    “Gregory and the men of the county searched for days, but to no avail. Ten years later her bones were found in a ravine miles away. She must have fallen and perished there.”
    “Farthingstone was your aunt’s friend? Is that how he met your