Free Sleeping Beauty by Judith Ivory

are you? This gaiety of yours, how much is real? How much is well-rehearsed pretense—a metaphorical black-iron gate with wild thorny roses defending where pointed pickets don’t suffice?
    What he blurted, though, was, “I would like to suggest we meet regularly. As man and woman. I am not poor. I have—”
    “Dr. Stoker. Please.” She lowered her eyes there in the dimness of the hallway. “I don’t walk the streets. I never have.”
    A misstep. James’s heart raced. He’d leaped somehow, somewhere to a horribly wrong conclusion. Yet he hadn’t. He couldn’t get his bearings. She was the classic confusion to the male mind: a woman who could drop terms like cock into a sentence while still holding on to a self-possessed—lady-like—poise. The lady. The whore—the word itself so beyond the pale of decorum, one never said it in public. Which left him somehow the idiot. He couldn’t form a coherent sentence, let alone an appropriate apology. “I’m so sorry,” he stammered, “mortified. I can’t tell you how—”
    She put her hand up over his mouth. Her small, cool hand. He quieted instantly.
    They stood there in the shadows of the hallway, with James breathing in the fragrance of her fingers. They were unperfumed. She smelled simply sweet, naturally so, the curve of her hand almost waxy in its smoothness, soft, moist—redolent of vanilla orchids, the sort that vined their way up through the canopies of treetops. He counted the heartbeats of the duration of her touch, her hand against his lips.
    When he could stand it no longer, he took hold of the back of her hand, pressing her palm to his mouth, kissing it.
    She let out a sound, consternation, went to pull back. He wrapped two fingers round her wrist. Her arm went rigid. She wet her lips, stared at him. With her hand cupped in his, hovering at his mouth, she shifted her weight, the shushy-silk of her dress rustling, echoing in the narrow corridor.
    He murmured, “You are sad, somehow. I want to help.”
    “That’s not why you came.”
    “No,” he admitted. “I came because you are the most lively, most interesting, cultured, lovely woman I have ever met. You please me a thousand ways. Tell me what to do, how to court you—”
    She laughed again, a light, slightly nervous sound. “Oh, you are dangerous. So honest and romantic”—more faintly anxious laughter—“and cheeky.”
    “What do you want?” he asked. “Tell me.”
    She bit her lips together, frowning up at him, her upturned regard lingering over his features in a way that made his whole body warm. She said, “You mean, What is my price?”
    “All right. What is your price?”
    She let out a burst, more edgy laughter, then stammered, “I, um—ah—” She blinked, shook her head. “I don’t have a price.” She extricated her hand, then couched her face in the shadows of the hall. She took a breath, then heaved air out in a long sigh. “Dr. Stoker—”
    “James,” he murmured.
    “James, then. Don’t judge me. I’ve made choices in my life. I would make them again. They were the right choices—”
    There was an unexpected sadness in her posture, to her words—an unveiled moment that drew him, held him. He murmured, “Choose me.”
    She shook her head vehemently. No, no, no; he had it all wrong somehow. She said, “Honestly, just for argument’s sake, I ask you: How? Can you imagine how you could begin to court”—she let out an indignant snort—“the Prince of Wales’s birthday present? Without causing yourself all manner of embarrassment, even injury to your career? Important people don’t like me—”
    “ I like you. And I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Moreover, those few people who did know would think me bold and worldly. If anything, debonair.” He laughed.
    “Oh, dear,” she said. She looked away, but hecaught a sideways glimpse of her expression—the slightest curve of a smile, amused and full of a cynicism he was perhaps not meant to see. “ That kind