Free This Wicked Gift by Courtney Milan

name on his lips. He stood, four feet away
from her, his form barely visible through the fog. She jumped down from her
uncomfortable perch on the windowsill, and would have run into his arms—but
he’d crossed them in a most forbidding manner. Instead, she walked slowly
toward him, her heart pounding.
    “You must be freezing.” His words reeked
of disapproval. “Thank God I couldn’t sleep again. Thank God you didn’t meet
anyone on your way over. If you were my—”
    She had come close enough that she saw the
scowl flit over his face at that. He shut his mouth and turned away, walking
into the house.
    She followed. “If I were your   wife, ”
she threw at his retreating back, “I wouldn’t need to risk all this fog just to
see you on a morning.”
    He didn’t respond. But he left the door
open, and she went after him. This time, he had not climbed the stairs to his
bedchamber. He was headed down a narrow cramped hall into the back of the
house. Lavinia sighed and closed the door behind her.
    She was not his wife. She was not even
anything to him so clean and uncomplicated as his
sweetheart. She was the woman who’d made his life miserable. Still, she
followed him down the hall. The narrow passage gave way to a tiny kitchen in
the back of the house. Without looking at her, he pulled a chair out from under
a narrow, wooden table and placed it directly by the hearth. She sat; he stoked
the fire and then placed a kettle on the grate.
    For a long while he only stared into the
orange ribbons that arched away from the flames. The dancing light painted his
profile in glimmering yellow. His lips pressed together. His eyes were hooded.
Then he shook his head and stabbed the coals with a poker. Bright sparks flew.
    “If you were my wife,” he finally said,
“this moment would be a luxury—enough coal of a morning to heat the room.”
    He shook his head, set the poker down and
turned away. William moved about the tiny room with the efficiency of a man
used to dealing for himself. He set   out
a pot and cups, and then turned back to her. “If you were my wife, you’d take
your bread without butter. You would mend your gloves three, four, five times
over, until the material became more darn than fabric. And when the babes came,
we’d have to remove from even these tiny and insupportable quarters into a part
of London that is even less safe than this address. We’d have no other way to
support a family.”
    “When the babes came?” Those words sent a
happy thrill through her.
    He turned to contemplate the fire again.
“I am not such a fool as to imagine they wouldn’t. Lavinia,
if you were my wife, the babes would come. And come. And come. I
couldn’t keep my hands off you. I pray one is not already on the way.”
    It was not her fog-dampened cloak that
left her chilled. He spoke of putting his hands on her as if she were one more bitter sip from a cup that was already starkly devoid
of happiness.
    “It would be worth it,” she said quietly. “The gloves. The bread. It would be
worth it to me for the touch of your hands alone.”
    “Is that why you came here this morning?”
He spoke in tones equally low to hers. “Did you come here so that I would touch
you?”
    Yes.   Or she’d come to
touch him—to see if she could salvage the moment when he’d thought himself
dishonored. He’d said once he had no notion of love. She’d wanted to show him.
    “Did you come thinking I would kiss your
lips? That I would undo the ties of your cloak and let my hands slide down your
skin?”
    Her body heard, and it answered. The heat
of the fire flickered against her neck; she imagined its warm touch was his
hands. She imagined his hands tracing down her cheek; his hands cupping the
curve of her bodice and warming her breasts; his hands coaxing her nipples into
hard points. She ached in tune with his every word. Her breath grew fast.
    He knelt on the floor in front of her, one
knee on the ground. With that frozen,