The Spinster's Scandalous Affair
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Sophia James
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Prologue
He came towards the bed, his gaze on hers, the night-time casting shadow across his eyes and sending long planes of angle to his cheeks.
Beautiful.
His beauty had always soothed her, made her relax into the moment, made it easier and simpler. Made it right.
She moved as his finger touched her lip, tracing the line in a gentle caress, feeling him there, understanding his presence, knowing that he only meant to keep her safe. He did not speak and she was glad of it as their fingers entwined, softly and without duress. She leant into him, skin on skin, close and sheathed against the chill.
He didn’t kiss her—he never did—but his mouth brushed across the fragile skin on her neck.
She did not pull away. She did not open her eyes either to find the light. Rather, she ran her tongue across the warmth of him, tasting...salt and muskiness, the flavour of a man in moonlight.
Different from usual.
She stilled because this was another set of rules, a new game that was more dangerous than the one before, and if he smiled he hid it from her, mirth caught in the corners of his mouth, ever hungry for what came next...
The clock on the mantel chimed four loud, discordant noises which altered her truths. Her body tensed and memory returned, the chills of a nightmare taking over from the fluid realm of dreams.
‘No?’
A question lingered within the meaning.
‘No.’ She repeated it again, but he was gone already, away from her dreams, like Aladdin in the bottle, eliminated to a netherworld far from this one.
Sweat beaded under her arms and in the creases of her breasts, like a warning as shaking fingers came to her lips to feel the flesh there. Shame. Even a wasteland held signposts and hers were here with force.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
‘Please God, help me.’
The plea formed even as she meant it not to, a pitiful appeal to a deity who would have far better things to do. Help me what? Help me to forget? Help me to remember? Help me to understand that I am not as other woman are and never will be?
She reached for the blanket beside her and draped it across her shoulders before standing and walking to the window. It was cold outside, a flurry of rain blurring the light from a lamp tied to its place at the far end of the pathway. A winter city and no warmth in sight. She felt frost on the air even through the glass and shivered.
Her leg ached and she stretched, trying to relieve the pain. The cold made it worse, the bone in her lower leg having been badly mended and now letting her know it.
The sum of all her parts was lessening with each successive year, she thought then. Almost thirty-one and the hopes of something different fading with the passing months.
Her stepmother’s snores vibrated through the thin wall between them, a constant cacophony of sound, the cough with which the older woman was afflicted worsening her constitution.
With care she traced her initials into the condensation on the glass and surrounded it by the shape of a heart. ED. The letters dripped away to a misshapen nothingness, much like she herself was doing, though this time the thought made her smile.
Her imagination had always got the better of her, always raced on to places that should not exist, but this night-time dream had been a recurrent one for years now, the face of shadowed beauty dear and trusted, a dream so far removed from reality that it felt safe.
She tried to bring him back in wakefulness—a lover who was circumspect and polite and who answered her bidding exactly—but she failed.
Tonight, however, her actions had been surprising. Usually there was a quiet embrace and a soft caress. This new sensuality was worrying for she could not understand the intent. Would it happen again? The church bells of Westminster pealed into the night, marking the next quarter.
Only those whose souls were bothered were up at this time, the dawn creeping closer, the world about to wake.
She wished she might return to her bed and sleep but knew that she couldn’t, every fibre in her body thrumming with a feeling that was altered.
A barren and ageing spinster who’d had her chance and failed at it. She knew there wouldn’t be another.
