THE FIRST KISS
Lucian spent three days discovering that avoiding a woman in one's own house required an absurd amount of strategy.
He did not, in fact, avoid Theodora Ashworth successfully.
He merely arranged his failures with greater care.
On Saturday he left the breakfast room before she arrived and remained out on the estate until dusk, walking boundary walls with Roth in weather cold enough to discourage reflection. On Sunday he attended church in Ashford by long habit and returned by the side drive rather than the main approach, only to find her in the library window as Tempest crossed the lower lawn, head bent over a ledger with the thin autumn light lying across her dark hair. On Monday he spent the afternoon with estate accounts in his study and learned, to his disgust, that the scratch of her pen in the library two corridors away had become more distracting in absence than in proximity.
This, he told himself, was what came of naming things too late.
He had allowed admiration to become dependence before he called it by any honest word. Allowed companionship to become appetite. Allowed one spoken Christian name in the library to ring through him for three full nights as if it had altered the structure of the house itself.
Lucian had kissed women before. He was not a green youth to be unmade by a glance or a near-touch. But those women had belonged to another life, to ballrooms and cavalry leave and the brittle negotiations of a marriage that had never warmed into ease. What stood between him and Thea now was not mere desire, though desire was there in dangerous abundance. It was the far worse thing: wanting to be known by her, and wanting her still after she knew him.
No sensible man built a future upon that sort of hunger.
By Tuesday evening the house had decided, with its usual malice, to defeat sense entirely.
The first frost of the season silvered the lawns at dusk. By the time dinner ended, the windows of Greymont Hall had become black mirrors, reflecting candlelight and faces and little else. Mrs. Holloway had retired after pressing mulled wine upon them both with suspicious innocence. Roth had vanished into whatever private arithmetic sustained stewards after dark. Even Lottie's laughter had faded below stairs.
Lucian ought to have gone to his study.
Instead he followed Thea to the library on the excuse that he wanted a volume of Donne.
The excuse, infuriatingly, was not even false. He had been thinking all day of a line from one of the Songs and Sonnets, though whether because the poem suited his mood or because his mood had already become a poem's fault he could not have said.
The library received them with familiar grace: fire banked low but warm, lamps lit at intervals, the upper galleries already surrendered to shadow. Thea had left her work arranged in careful order earlier that afternoon, but now she moved with less professional determination and more the air of someone seeking refuge in a beloved room.
She set her candle by the desk and glanced toward him.
"You are haunting me with remarkable persistence for a man attempting avoidance."
Lucian closed the door behind them. "Is that what I was attempting?"
"Unless you have developed a sudden passion for disappearing at breakfast, I should think so."
He moved to the poetry shelves rather than answer. "Your observational habits grow increasingly tyrannical."
"Only where the evidence is obvious." She took off her gloves one finger at a time, then laid them on the desk beside an open ledger. "Have I offended you beyond repair? If so, I should like to know whether to blame the village gossip or the use of your Christian name."
Lucian found the Donne volume without looking for it. His hand remained on the spine.
"Neither," he said.
"Ah. Then I must invent some third crime."
He turned. She stood half in lamplight, half in shadow, her expression composed but not unreadable. The last few days had placed strain upon them both; he saw it now in the slight stillness of her mouth, the alertness beneath her wit.
"Thea," he said, and the answering flicker in her face nearly undid him, "you did nothing wrong."
Silence moved between them at the sound of her name in his voice.
Then, quietly: "No?"
"No." He drew out the book and crossed toward the fire. "I behaved like a coward, which is a separate matter."
Her brows rose. "That is unexpectedly frank."
"Do not grow accustomed to it."
"Too late, I fear. You have already been honest with me several times. It sets a dangerous precedent."
Lucian sat in the chair nearest the hearth and opened the Donne, though he did not yet look at the page. Thea remained where she was a moment longer, studying him, then came at last to the chair opposite.
"Which poem?" she asked.
He turned the volume toward her. "The Good-Morrow."
Her gaze dropped to the page, and when it lifted again there was unmistakable amusement in it. "You choose subtle reading for a winter evening."
"I chose what was nearest to hand."
"Among the metaphysicals? How convenient." She leaned forward and took the book before he could object. "If we are to be blatant, let us be at least scholarly about it."
Lucian should have stopped her. He knew that even before she began to read. But there was something about the room, the late hour, the frost beyond the glass, and the fact that he had already lost the sensible field days ago. He let her.
Thea's voice, when she read, was lower than it became in company—clear, intimate, and without performance.
"I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?"
Lucian watched her mouth form the words.
That was the beginning of the end.
It should not have been possible, for a man of his years, to be undone by a poem he had known since Oxford and a woman sitting by his fire. Yet each line seemed to narrow the room, stripping away the decorative barriers of speech and custom until there remained only the dangerous simplicity of attention.
She read the second stanza more softly, as though something in the verse itself required gentleness.
"Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, / Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown…"
When she stopped, the fire cracked once in the grate and settled.
Lucian had forgotten to breathe properly.
Thea lifted her eyes from the page and found him watching her.
He did not look away.
A flush touched her cheeks, though whether from firelight or from the direction of his thoughts he could not know.
"Well?" she asked, and her voice had altered too, taking on that dangerous quiet he had come to recognize. "Have I improved Donne or ruined him?"
"You are staring," she added when he still did not answer.
The words might have been playful. They were not entirely.
Lucian set one hand flat on the arm of his chair.
"I know," he said.
The truth of it entered the room like another body.
Thea went very still.
There were, he understood with perfect clarity, several possible futures in the next five seconds. In one, he said something dry and bookish and broke the spell. In another, he stood and left before honor had further occasion to test itself. In a third—and this was the one toward which every instinct in him was inclining—he crossed the rug between them and found out whether the tension that had haunted every room of the Hall these past weeks had substance enough to burn.
He rose.
Thea did not.
She remained seated, the Donne volume open in her lap, one hand resting lightly on the page. Only her breathing changed.
Lucian took one step, then another, and stopped before her chair.
"Tell me to stop," he said.
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the book.
"Do you want to?"
The question, so characteristic of her, almost made him smile. Even here she demanded precision.
"No," he said.
She searched his face as though weighing not only the word but the man who spoke it. Then, with visible care: "Neither do I."
That should have been enough.
It was too much.
Lucian reached down and took the book from her lap, setting it aside on the table without once breaking her gaze. His hand came back to her—not to seize, not to compel, but to offer. When she placed her fingers in his, he drew her gently to her feet.
They stood very close now.
Close enough that her scent reached him—lavender soap, paper, a little smoke from the fire. Close enough that he could see the pulse at the base of her throat and the slight tremor she was trying, with her usual determination, to conceal.
"Thea," he said.
"Yes."
It was barely more than breath.
His hand lifted to her face, the touch he had denied himself in the portrait gallery weeks before. He set his fingertips against her cheek with a care that bordered on reverence. She closed her eyes for one small instant and turned into the contact before opening them again.
That surrender—small, chosen, unmistakable—destroyed the last of his restraint.
Lucian bent and kissed her.
The first touch was gentle, almost uncertain. Not because he doubted the wanting, but because after so much tension the reality felt perilously fragile, as though too much force might break the moment outright.
Thea made a soft sound against his mouth that contained surprise and relief in equal measure.
Then she kissed him back.
Everything changed.
The careful beginning vanished beneath the simple fact of mutual hunger. Lucian's free hand came to her waist, drawing her nearer until there was no room for uncertainty between them. Thea's fingers found the front of his coat, then rose higher, one hand coming to his shoulder, the other to his face with a hesitation so brief it scarcely existed. Her thumb brushed the scar along his cheekbone.
He felt that touch like absolution and torment both.
The kiss deepened with astonishing speed. Years of solitude and restraint met the answering force of her own loneliness, and the result was less polished than inevitable. He tasted wine and tea and the faint sweetness of breath just drawn. Her body fit against his as if they had been solving the same problem from opposite sides and had finally, disastrously, reached the center.
When she tilted her face and pressed closer, Lucian's control frayed all at once.
He broke the kiss.
Not by much. Their foreheads nearly touched. His hand remained at her waist. But the separation felt abrupt enough that she drew a breath as if he had deprived her of something necessary.
Her eyes were wide and dark.
For one terrible second he nearly forgot why he had stopped.
Then conscience arrived, as late and unwelcome as always.
"This is unwise," he said.
Thea stared at him. "You choose an interesting moment to discover prudence."
Despite the sharpness of the words, her voice shook. So did his own when he answered.
"I am your employer."
"At present."
"You are dependent upon this house. Upon me." The fact tasted bitter, not because it was untrue but because it made the moment suddenly harder to bear. "You had nowhere else to go when you came here. I cannot pretend that does not matter."
Her expression changed from startled to incredulous, then to anger bright enough to set the room alight.
"You think I kissed you because I require room and board?"
"I think power distorts choice," Lucian said, and heard the harshness in it. Not toward her. Toward himself. "I think men in my position have lied to themselves for centuries about what women freely choose when survival is in the room with them."
"Do not put me among centuries of women merely because it is convenient for your scruples." She stepped back from him then, and the loss of her warmth felt immediate and punishing. "I am not a frightened debutante and you are not Lord Pemberton."
"No. But I have authority over your life here."
"And if you had kissed me without asking, or pressed me after refusal, that would matter. If you had used that authority to corner me, that would matter. But you did not." Her color was high now, her eyes blazing. "You asked if I wished you to stop. I answered. I chose to stand here. I chose to kiss you."
Lucian wanted, absurdly, to argue and to drag her back into his arms in the same breath.
"Thea—"
"No." She lifted one hand, a gesture both furious and shaking. "You do not get to decide my motives for me because your honor has bad timing."
The justice of the blow landed cleanly.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, she had turned away a step, pressing one hand to her mouth as though the lingering heat of the kiss accused them both.
"You are right," he said quietly. "About that at least."
She let out a breath that sounded suspiciously unlike victory.
The fire shifted in the grate. Somewhere high in the Hall a board creaked. The ordinary sounds of the house returned with almost obscene normalcy.
Lucian forced himself to speak plainly while plain speech was still possible.
"I want you," he said. The words seemed to darken the room merely by existing. "That is not in doubt. But wanting you does not absolve me of caution. If there is the least shadow of coercion in this, I would rather burn alone than touch it."
Thea turned back slowly.
Her anger had not faded. It had simply grown more complex. Hurt moved beneath it now, and unwilling understanding.
"You are a very difficult man to desire," she said.
Against all reason, the remark nearly broke him into laughter.
"I know."
"Do you?" Her mouth trembled once, then steadied. "Because from where I stand, you seem determined to save me from things I have not asked to escape."
He had no answer fit for that.
At length she lowered her hand and looked directly at him once more. The steadiness of it humbled him.
"I will not pretend the imbalance between us does not exist," she said. "I have lived too long among other people's rules for that. But neither will I let you reduce me to helplessness because it suits your fear. If you kiss me again, Lucian Greymont, let it be because you believe me capable of consent as well as desire."
His name in her mouth, joined now to challenge rather than wonder, struck every weak point he possessed.
He took a step back instead.
Not because he wanted distance. Because he no longer trusted himself to maintain any if he remained where he was.
"Good night, Miss Ashworth," he said.
The title cost him.
Her face closed by a fraction at the sound of it.
"Good night, Your Grace."
He left before honor, desire, or madness could suggest one more word.
The corridor beyond the library felt colder than the night warranted.
Lucian walked its length like a man pursued.
Not by scandal. Not even by temptation, though temptation kept exact pace. By the far more intolerable knowledge that the kiss had not been an error of imagination. It had been real, mutual, incandescent, and worse than either hope or fear because it offered both at once.
In the portrait gallery he stopped, because apparently this house had a taste for cruel symmetry.
The ancestral faces looked down with their usual collection of certainties. Men who had mistaken command for character. Women painted into composure. His father's mouth retained its painted sneer. Marianne's eyes still held that distant sadness the artist had been too honest to flatter away. Catherine, in her wedding portrait, remained forever poised on the threshold of a life neither she nor Lucian had known how to inhabit.
He looked longest at her.
"I am trying," he said aloud before he could stop himself.
Trying at what he could not have defined. Not to repeat one history in the name of escaping another. Not to use tenderness as a pretext for selfishness. Not to become a man who took what was offered without first asking whether the offering had been shaped by need.
But he was also, and more helplessly than he liked, trying not to return to the library that instant and kiss Thea again until speech became impossible.
Somewhere behind him in the corridor Lady Margaret's cane tapped once against the floor.
He did not turn. "You keep very inconvenient hours."
"So do you," she said, coming to stand beside him. Her sharp old eyes moved from Catherine's portrait to his face and, with brutal efficiency, missed nothing. "Ah," she said softly. "At last."
"Do not begin."
"My dear boy, I have not begun. You, however, plainly have." She studied him another moment. "And from the look of you, you've also managed to make a muddle of it."
Lucian let out a long breath. "I stopped."
"Of course you did. You are your mother's son in all the most inconvenient ways." Her mouth twitched. "Was she furious?"
He thought of Thea's blazing eyes, her hand lifted in righteous fury, the tremor beneath her anger.
"Yes."
"Good." Lady Margaret nodded once, apparently satisfied. "Then she is sensible. Try not to lose her through excessive virtue. It is a very tiresome masculine habit."
She moved on before he could answer.
Lucian stood among the dead a little longer, then went to his study and did not light the extra candles. One lamp was enough. More would only have made the room seem larger, and he had no need of more space in which to think.
He sat at the desk and stared at a blank sheet of paper until the ink dried on the nib.
He could still feel her mouth under his. Still feel the deliberate press of her hand against his face. Still hear the terrible justice of her voice: *I chose to kiss you.*
Yes.
That was precisely the problem.
Because some selfish part of him, hearing it, wanted to stop being honorable at once.
In the east wing, Thea did not sleep either.
Had he known it, Lucian might have found some comfort in the symmetry. More likely he would have found only fresh torment.
She sat by the small grate in her room long after midnight, her hair unpinned and falling dark over her shoulders, replaying the kiss with a scholar's useless precision and a woman's mortifying honesty. She had wanted it. More than wanted it. Met it. Answered it.
And then he had stopped as if honor were a knife he kept perpetually at his own throat.
It was maddening.
It was also, infuriatingly, one of the reasons she could not wholly regret any of it.
Lord Pemberton had never once mistaken her will for a thing worth consulting. Men like him took desire as license, power as confirmation. Lucian, on the contrary, had interrupted his own happiness to interrogate the moral architecture of a kiss.
It was noble. It was absurd. It made her want to throw books at him and then kiss him again in the debris.
When at last she rose to go to bed, she paused at the desk where her notes lay waiting for tomorrow's work.
The volume of Donne she had not returned still sat where he had left it upon the small side table in the library. She could see it in memory as clearly as if the room were before her now.
She wondered whether he had taken it with him after all.
She hoped not.
Some part of the night, some witness of it, ought to remain where it happened.
Outside, frost tightened over the moor. Greymont Hall kept its old watch, wakeful and silent by turns.
And in two separate wings of the house, neither of its most restless inhabitants found any peace in the knowledge that the first barrier had been crossed at last.
The kiss had changed everything.
Whether it had changed anything for the better remained a question for morning.
Get new chapters in your inbox. Choose your series: