A Lily Among Thorns (9 page)

“Good. I don’t know how qualified our regent is to direct national politics, but he’s an excellent gourmand. Probably one of my few former patrons who’s wholeheartedly pleased with my change in professions.” She dipped her spoon in his bowl. Somehow, it seemed like an incredibly intimate act. Her cheeks heated.
It’s just the ovens
.

His eyes widened. “You mean you—you
slept
with the Prince Regent?”

The pleasant heat faded. Not this again. “I did.”

He chewed at his lower lip. “Can I ask you something? I wouldn’t, but I’ve always wanted to know—”

“Certainly,” she said coolly. “But I shan’t promise to answer it.”

“Does he use French holes?”

She stared at him. She hated to admit that Solomon knew of a perversion of which
she
had never heard, but there was nothing for it. “French holes?”

“On his corset,” Solomon said impatiently. “You know—most use ordinary buttonholes, but some use a sort of eyelet made of ivory or bone. You can lace them tighter that way.”

She blinked. Then she bit the back of her hand, shaking with
silent, helpless laughter. “I never noticed,” she admitted, when she could speak again.

He sniffed scornfully, but his eyes were warm.

She realized she was still holding her spoon, full of almond-pear filling. She put it in her mouth, and her eyes widened. “Oh.”

He smiled at her. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he said in a low, warm voice, and she immediately pictured him saying the same thing in quite another context.

She eyed him suspiciously. Had he
meant
that to sound indecent? He blinked innocently at her, and she decided that he had. “It’ll do,” she said. “Did you know that Sir Percy Blakeney is angling to be sent to France as a spy?”

“No!” Solomon’s whole face lit up with glee.

The prince’s eyes popped. “I say, Dewington, these are your Mrs. Jones’s pear-almond tartlets! I’ve been trying to buy the recipe from her for decades! What did you pay, Lady Serena?”

The look of dawning horror on Dewington’s face as he realized exactly how that recipe had made its way into Serena’s kitchen would be forever precious to her. “Not a farthing, Your Highness,” she said.

“Then how—no one knows the recipe but Dewington’s cook!”

Serena met Dewington’s eyes. The man was fidgeting in his seat and twitching slightly. She smiled slowly. “I think Mrs. Jones must have confided the recipe to Lord Dewington’s sister.” All eyes turned to Dewington, who gritted his teeth manfully. His wife looked ready to sink into the floor.

“Good Lord!” Sir Percy exclaimed. “Your nevvy’s working in the kitchens!”

Lord Petersham shook his head. “There but for the grace of God go I. Will Hathaway was my Latin tutor too, and my sister would have run off with him in a trice if he’d asked her. Handsome devil. Heard the boy looks just like him.”

“He has my sister’s eyes,” Dewington said. No one seemed to quite know what to say to that.

Ordinarily, Serena would have entered the day’s earnings and expenses in the books before bed, but she was exhausted. Ordinarily, she would have taken the back stairs to the first floor to avoid running into guests in the hallway, but—“she was exhausted” wouldn’t wash as a reason for that, would it?

She would have done the books before bed, and she would have taken the back stairs, only Solomon was heading for the public rooms and the main staircase right now (it didn’t seem to have occurred to him that the back way was faster from the kitchens), and she had fallen into step with him without thinking about it—without wanting to think about it. She compromised by not speaking and going over the night’s numbers in her head, instead. The silence felt oddly companionable, and yet oddly charged.

Outside his room, he stopped. She could have kept walking, but instead she stopped with him. “Thank you for your help today,” she said, meaning to sound businesslike and sounding grateful instead.

He smiled and ducked his head. “You’re welcome.” Was it her imagination, or was his low, rough voice a little lower and rougher than usual? He raised his head and met her eyes, and she thought that yes, it must have been, because he was giving her a low, rough look.

That doesn’t even make sense
, she thought.
A look can’t be low and rough
. And then it didn’t matter, because he was leaning in to kiss her.

She took a step backward, and he missed. But instead of giving up, as she wanted—expected—feared—he gave her a reproachful look and tried again. His lips brushed against hers softly, gently, as if it were her first time. It wasn’t her first time. It was her thousandth time, her millionth, and she had never, in her whole life, felt anything like this. She felt as if she were a neat
page in a ledger and he’d spilled ink across her. She could feel it spreading over her skin, soaking in, making her messy and vivid and irrevocably destroyed.

He gasped against her mouth (when had they opened their mouths? the world tasted like almonds and pears) and put his hands on her hips, turning them so they fell against the door to his room. She could feel the carved wood against her back with more immediacy than she’d felt anything in ages. Someone could see them, a guest could walk by and see them. She cared about that. She should care about that.

But she was paralyzed by desire and the sudden bloom of color across her blankness; she could only tremble and kiss him back. When he leaned his weight on her it felt as if they were melting into each other like sugar and water caramelizing in a double boiler, slow and delicious. His chest was heaving against hers. Her breasts strained against her corset when she breathed, too. She wanted him to touch them, but he didn’t. He just pressed against her, his hands resting on her hips, and kissed her as if that was all he wanted, as if he could do it forever. As if it were her first time.

But it
wasn’t
her first time. He should know that. Why didn’t he know that? She was a whore and she wanted more from him than kisses, and when he realized that—he wouldn’t kiss her like this anymore. He was giving her this, and that meant he could take it away. He was in control, now. He nipped at her lower lip, and she made a needy, surprised little sound, like a damned
kitten.
She froze, mortified.

But if Serena had learned one thing in the last six years, it was that when you were threatened, usually the best thing to do was go on the attack. She wrenched herself away. “Someone will see us.”

He blinked at her, his eyes dark in the dim corridor. His lips were wet and parted. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

She smiled, slow and full of promise. “Open your door.”

He swallowed. “Y—yes. I—” He fumbled in his pocket for his key, and just like that, she was on top again. She could do this. She could kiss him and still be herself, still be in control. It took him three tries to get the key in the lock.

The door swung open, and bright light danced and leapt onto the hallway carpet. She smelled smoke even before she pushed past him into the room and saw. The great carved mantelpiece was on fire.

The flames had not yet reached very high. It wouldn’t be a disaster if she acted quickly. But Solomon had made her soft and open, and terror swept right in. She was rooted to the spot. It was Solomon who rushed to the water jug and found it empty.

“I filled it this afternoon!” He glanced once around the room and then, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “Sorry, Uncle Hathaway,” he grabbed a stylish greatcoat off the bed, knelt down, and smothered the flames.

Now Serena could move again. She strode to the hearth and whisked away what remained of a very fine coat. She coughed helplessly, tears springing to her eyes at the smoke. An overturned candlestick, a puddle of hot wax, the ashes of some stray kindling from the fire that had been set for Solomon to light when he returned, and the charred underside of a carved crescent moon were all she could see through the afterimage of the flames. She turned a furious face on him. “You left a candle burning?” she rasped.

“Of course not. Someone set that up! I
never
leave a candle burning. A chemist learns soon enough to be very careful with fire or he finds his house in ashes!”

Her eyes turned to Solomon’s worktable, covered with mysterious jars, beakers, and bags. He was dangerous. She had known it, and here was the proof. “You mean there are things there that could blow up the Arms?”

Getting to his feet, Solomon rolled his eyes. “Not in their
current state. Besides, I make dyes, not gunpowder. But when I was a student—”

She barely heard him. All she could see or hear was the Arms engulfed in flame. The Arms, gone. He had almost caused it, and it didn’t even give him pause. Her life had been built so painstakingly; it was fragile, and he couldn’t seem to realize it. He just went his merry way, charming her and kissing her and
almost burning her home to the ground
—“That’s it,” she told him. “Get out. Just—just go. First thing in the morning, you
and
your infernal chemicals!”

He gaped at her. “What?”

He sounded so incredulous, as if he knew how much she wanted him. As if he knew how much she already regretted her words. It goaded her on. “You heard me.”

He frowned at her. “Serena, if this is about the kiss—I didn’t expect that either, I didn’t expect it to be so—”

“Boring?” she said cruelly, and went through the connecting door and slammed it.

Solomon stood there, trying to figure out what had just happened. He’d thought everything had been going so well.

Too well, maybe. He’d pushed her too far, thrown her off-balance with the kiss. Maybe he should have given up when she’d backed away, that first moment. But that was what he liked about her, how she fought everything. How she’d been crushed so many times and she just kept going, kept clawing her way forward.

He’d let so many things pass in his life, told himself they didn’t matter, that it was useless to fight, and she treated everything as if it was a pitched battle—one she could
win
. She fought her father and Sacreval and still managed to find energy for Lord Smollett and a customer who pinched a waitress. He’d wanted to kiss her so badly, and when she’d backed away he’d thought,
Of course you’re fighting this, too,
and something in him had refused to give up this time.

And he’d won—he’d felt like he’d won, anyway, felt such a thrill of victory and joy and wanted to make her feel it, too. He had made her feel it. He remembered how she’d kissed him back, how she’d let him hold her, and the little disbelieving yearning sound she’d made. She had sounded so surprised that she could feel good, and he’d felt such a startling, aching tenderness—he’d never felt
anything
like that before. Then she’d stiffened as if caught in a shameful weakness, and somehow that had only made the tenderness worse.

That was the problem, though. She fought her own pleasure just as she fought everything else; she didn’t seem to know how to stop fighting. And then the fire had frightened her, and she’d panicked, and now it was too late for her to retreat from her ultimatum.

If he was going to talk her out of it, he was going to have to be very, very careful. He narrowed his eyes, thinking. A show of compliance would probably help. Kicking the remains of his coat out of the way, he headed down the stairs to ask Antoine to save him some crates to pack his belongings in.

He was awakened by muffled cries of pain from the room next door. He lay there for a moment, disoriented, and then Serena said, very distinctly, “No!”

He was at the door in seconds, uselessly rattling the knob. Locked. He dashed to his worktable. In too much of a hurry for finesse, he grabbed the beaker of hydrochloric acid and tipped a healthy amount down the keyhole, covering his nose and mouth with one hand to avoid breathing in noxious fumes. The lock mechanism and most of the face of the keyhole sizzled and dissolved. Hastily capping the beaker and setting it back on the table, he turned the now unresisting doorknob and burst through the door.

To Solomon’s surprise, the only occupant of the room was Serena—fast asleep. Her fists were clenched and her face was set in lines of determination and fear as she threw herself from side to side, straining against invisible bonds. “No! No, damn you!”

Solomon took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Serena, wake up!” he said as loudly as he dared. “Wake up, you’re all right!”

Serena jolted awake. It hadn’t just been a dream, then—someone was holding her shoulders, restraining her. She bolted upright and punched him squarely in the stomach. “Let me go, you son of a bitch!” she hissed, and went for the pistol in her bedside drawer.

Solomon held up the hand that wasn’t clutching his stomach and shook his head frantically. Oh. She was awake. That had been a dream. Right. She took a deep breath and abandoned the drawer. “Solomon? What the devil are you doing here?”

He pointed to his throat.

“Did I wind you? My humblest apologies. I imagine you have some perfectly innocent reason for having broken into my room in the dead of night?”