The Hellion's Waltz Page 12

  Maddie sat next to Sophie and made herself agreeable to everyone—asking Robbie what he was reading, helping the twins tease one another, answering a volley of questions from Freddie with a patience that Sophie could never have sustained. “Do you weave in a factory?”

  “No, I have a loom at home.”

  “Have you ever worked in a factory?”

  “For a little while.”

  “Did people get injured?”

  Sophie was aghast. “Freddie!”

  “What’s the worst injury you ever saw?”

  Mr. Roseingrave set down his silverware. “Frederick, you will save that topic for after dinner. Or never.”

  Maddie’s eyes narrowed, and her voice turned slightly sinister. “Instead of a factory story, I know of a particularly gory murder. I’ll save it for dessert,” she both threatened and promised.

  Freddie grinned. Robbie rolled his eyes with all the native aloofness of his sixteen years, but Sophie knew he’d find a way to listen if he could.

  “Miss Crewe designs her own Jacquard patterns,” she said firmly, scrabbling for a safe change of subject.

  “Really?” Mr. Roseingrave’s ears perked up at the start of any mechanical talk. “I should be interested to see how that works . . . Do you think it would be possible to weave music notation into silk?”

  “If I could read it, it would,” Maddie said with a laugh.

  “Sophie could teach you that,” Mr. Roseingrave said with a sidelong smile at his daughter. “She’s already teaching one young lady how to play. Her first pupil in Carrisford—the first of many more to come, we hope.”

  Mr. Roseingrave went on: “You seem clever, Miss Crewe—I’m sure instructing you how to read music would be a trifle. You wouldn’t have to worry about the fingering, for instance.”

  Sophie choked on a bite of potatoes.

  Maddie’s expression stayed innocent. “Your daughter has a great talent for making people pay attention, sir. I think it’s safe to say I’d learn anything Sophie wishes to teach me.”

  It was just shy of innuendo—or it would have been, if Sophie hadn’t caught the eye of her mother, sitting serenely at the foot of the table and watching her daughter and Maddie quite closely.

  Mrs. Roseingrave winked.

  Maddie caught that wink. She flashed Sophie a gaze pert with accusation before smoothing out her features again.

  “Your parents are far too knowing,” Maddie grumbled.

  “My parents,” Sophie countered, “have five children. I think we’re long past pretending they don’t know what goes on in a bed.”

  It was late. The wind was a knife that sliced through clothing. But nothing in the dark and the cold made Sophie feel half as exposed as the memory of Maddie saying: Your daughter has a great talent for making people pay attention.

  It couldn’t be true. Yes, Maddie had promised never to lie to her—but what was the distinction between flattery and a lie? Sophie didn’t command attention: she was quiet, small, and round. A natural blender into backgrounds. If she’d been a line in an orchestra score she’d have been the basso continuo floating beneath the melody: pleasant enough, but not what entranced the ear.

  Maddie, though—Maddie was better worth attending to. She strode at Sophie’s side, gaslight turning her hemline to gold and her hair to flame. Her thick cloak obscured all but glimpses of her figure as she walked: the long line of a thigh pushing forward, the soft swell of her hip as the wind pressed the fabric briefly taut.

  The first time they’d spent a night together none of Maddie’s clothing had come off. Sophie had been too distracted by what Maddie had been doing to her. And then she’d had to hurry away before she’d gotten to indulge her own curiosity.

  She wouldn’t make that mistake tonight. Hopeful heat burned through her veins. It tempered her, turned her hunger sharp as a blade.

  As if to quench her determination, it began to rain. Droplets pattered the stones around them. Sophie could swear they hissed where they struck her skin.

  One drop landed on her forehead, cold as a pearl. She grasped Maddie’s hand. “Come on!”

  They ran the last few blocks, gasping and laughing, but even so their hair and hems were wet through by the time they arrived at Maddie’s door. They brushed raindrops off one another in the hallway, breathless and shivering.

  Maddie craned her neck to glance down the hallway. “The kitchen’s dark. The others must have gone to bed already.” She and Sophie crept to the attic as carefully as they could, and only breathed easier when the door was closely shut behind them.

  Sophie shook more raindrops from her hair as she unpinned it and tried to rub feeling back into her chilled hands.

  “Let me,” Maddie murmured. Her own hands had stayed warm, protected by those thick blue mittens. She chafed Sophie’s palms and wrists.

  Sophie sighed with relief as sensation flooded back into her fingers. “I hate it when my hands get cold. It reminds me of—” She stopped.

  “That’s alright,” Maddie replied after a moment. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Sophie felt embarrassment scorch her cheeks. “It’s just that it’s hard to talk about.”

  Maddie’s voice was a deep, cool pond, a mirror-like serenity. “You’re allowed to keep secrets, you know.”

  “It’s not a secret. It’s just . . . distressing.”

  “You’re allowed to keep embarrassing things to yourself.”

  Sophie snapped, “You’re being kind on purpose!”

  Maddie dissolved into giggles.

  Sophie grumbled, but the corners of her mouth tweaked upward despite herself.

  “We’d better get you out of that wet dress,” Maddie murmured.

  They undressed, wet cold locks of hair sending shivers down Sophie’s spine. She all but whipped her clothing off and over the back of a handy chair. She burrowed into the bedclothes, wriggling until her naked limbs were safely sealed away from all that cold air.

  She looked up just as Maddie sat on the edge of bed. Her laces were loose and the yellow gown gaped at the neck, but she seemed in no hurry to take it the rest of the way off. Sophie wished she would. It wouldn’t take more than the slightest motion to pull the neck down, bare the breasts beneath the linen.

  “Sophie.” Maddie’s voice cut through Sophie’s lustful thoughts. Her gaze was steady and soft. “What is it you think of when your hands get cold?”

  Sophie only shook her head. Not so much in denial of Maddie’s question—but in confusion about where to begin to answer.

  Maddie waited. One remaining raindrop sparkled on her collarbone and slid down to her breasts, vanishing into the shadowed space between them.

  Sophie wanted to follow its path with her tongue.

  “Tell me,” Maddie pleaded.

  Sophie blew out a long and tortured breath. She knew she could say no. Maddie would understand. Sophie could almost hear how she’d say it. She’d be very calm and very kind—but some part of her would know it was a poor trade that Sophie kept her own secrets after she’d demanded Maddie offer up so many of hers.

  And Sophie would feel like the worst kind of swindler.

  “Fine,” she said, deciding. She sat up and huddled amid the blankets like a troll beneath a bridge.

  Maddie leaned back, radiating attention like a stove putting out heat.

  Sophie looked away. This was the thing she liked least about herself, and she was going to tell it to the person she most wanted to think well of her. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of a chiroplast?”

  “Never,” Maddie said. “Sounds horribly medicinal.”

  “It’s a sort of a framework,” Sophie said. “Designed to train students in proper hand position for playing the piano.” She demonstrated, hands out, wrists flat and flexible, fingers softly curved. “It’s a long piece of wood that goes the length of the keyboard, with metal frames you put your fingers into. They hold your hands in correct position, and they slide left and right along two guide
rails. The theory is that it forces the student’s muscles to only move the proper ways, and the teacher does not have to struggle with constant correction or explanation.”

  Maddie shivered and rubbed at her hands. “It sounds awful.”

  “It was.” Sophie swallowed. “I wore one every day for a month. It was all to lead up to a concert. The day when we would demonstrate the true success of Mr. Verrinder’s method of teaching. There were twenty of us—some as young as seven or eight. We would be playing the same piece at the same time. One teacher producing almost two dozen students in one class.”

  Maddie’s eyes were sharp and her rosy mouth pursed in disapproval. “Sounds like a factory.”

  “It felt like one sometimes.” Sophie shivered. “Every one of us strapped to the keyboard, playing in unison. The sound was . . . not beautiful, but somehow mesmerizing. Mr. Verrinder walked from each to each, checking the fit of the chiroplast. Several of them I’d been instructing already, individually, but many of the youngest were brand-new to the piano—I could only show them enough to perform by rote the part they were assigned. According to Mr. Verrinder, we didn’t have time for real instruction before the concert.”

  “Ah,” Maddie said knowingly. “He was leaning on your teaching as much as on the device.”

  “He promised I’d be well compensated—and famous, too. Applauded. Appreciated.” And he’d seen the stars in her eyes when she’d looked at him, and he’d smiled, and he’d managed to promise a thousand other things without ever once saying the words.

  Somehow that was still the part that hurt worst of all. Probably because of the small voice in her head that whispered that on this point, Sophie had deceived herself.

  “Go on.” Maddie put her hands demurely in her lap.

  Something about the prudishness of the pose, even as Maddie’s dress threatened to fall down to her waist, gave Sophie something solid to fix on, and pull herself back to the present. She took a breath and pressed on. “The crowd for the concert was enormous—twenty students’ families and neighbors—every music teacher and piano maker in London must have been there. I thought I was going to be sick I was so nervous. Mine was the most complex part, the showy center of the whole piece. Before I knew it we were walking out into the room, twenty Roseingrave pianos gleaming and ready for us. Mine raised a little higher than the rest. My father fit to burst with pride. And then . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Here it was: the worst part. Sophie steeled herself. “We didn’t even get through the first movement before someone stood up from the crowd and denounced Mr. Verrinder as a fraud. He’d stolen the chiroplast from someone else—an inventor and teacher. And the inventor was furious. Not least because—as it turned out—the invention didn’t really work as he promised. It was a supplement to teaching, not a replacement for it.”

  Maddie let out a long breath.

  “Mr. Verrinder protested his innocence, but the man claimed he could prove the device’s failure. He turned to the youngest pupil—Sarah Prewett, her name was—and demanded to see her play a scale.” She still felt her stomach twist at the memory of the look on Sarah’s face. “And she couldn’t. One of the first things every student learns, the foundation for everything that comes after—and she couldn’t play it. Because a scale requires you cross the thumb underneath the fingers—and the chiroplast doesn’t allow for that motion. So Sarah had never practiced it.” She hunched her shoulders as the echo of the crowd’s mockery rang in her ears. “I’d been playing for years before Mr. Verrinder came along. I should have noticed that lack. But we’d been so focused on the concert piece that I hadn’t thought about what we weren’t teaching the girls.” She swallowed against the sour bile of regret and pushed onward. “Sarah started crying and ran off. When we looked for Mr. Verrinder—well, turned out he’d run off, too. And he’d taken hundreds of pounds of investments with him. The whole time we’d been practicing he’d been collecting money for lessons, for unbuilt pianos, for a license to use his method. My teaching career was over before it had even really begun.”

  Maddie breathed out. “That’s awful.”

  “It hurt even to look at a piano after that,” Sophie said. “We sold everything from the warehouse for less than its value, then sold the warehouse too. To move here and start afresh. And do you know what I keep selfishly thinking?”

  “What?”

  “That if I’d been a better performer—if I’d held the audience enraptured as I was meant to—everything would have gone off without a hitch.” She hunched beneath the weight of her own failure.

  “That’s absolute nonsense,” Maddie said, “and I can tell you why.”

  Sophie clutched the coverlet at her throat, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Mr. Verrinder was counting on people watching you and not him. I’d bet good money that at the end of that concert he was planning to disappear anyway. He knew you’d hold their attention. You would have, if the original inventor hadn’t interrupted.”

  “But I’m not . . .” Sophie curled half in on herself.

  “You’re not what?”

  “I’m not anything,” Sophie all but whispered.

  Maddie raised one hand and curved it against Sophie’s cheek. “That’s not true,” she murmured.

  “You can’t tell me I’m beautiful,” Sophie warned. “You promised never to lie to me.”

  Maddie leaned forward. Her voice was low and firm with no room for misunderstanding. “You gladden the eye. It’s something better than beauty. There is something in the way you move, in your expression, that draws people in.” She pressed one steady hand to her chest. “I feel it here, every time, like a hook. You pull at me.”

  Sophie hadn’t let herself dream of declarations of love from Maddie Crewe. But she found herself utterly conquered by this simplest of phrases: You pull at me.

  Her wondering eyes took in everything. The candlelight faint on Maddie’s skin and a gold halo on her hair, the way the rain had spattered the yellow silk with drops of darker amber. The true and steady light in Maddie’s eyes.

  Maddie slipped one shoulder free of the silk. Sophie’s eyes snagged there, ravenous for the sight. The linen of her chemise was as fine as any Sophie had ever seen: light and airy and all but translucent where the rain had dampened it. Maddie peeled the bodice down to her waist—and then rose and stepped back. She was all cream and silver from the waist up and billowing gold below.

  Sophie smothered a groan. “Where on earth did you come by so fine a gown?”

  Maddie grinned, her arms buried in the fallen bodice fabric. “Mr. Samson found it in London—he’s been supplying us with items for Mrs. Money’s mourning wardrobe, as well.” She slid one hand along her hip, smoothing down the fabric and making Sophie sigh at the curve it outlined. “I like to imagine this one belonged to a scandalous young widow who wanted bright colors as soon as she was out of mourning—she’s got control of her late husband’s fortune and has gone in search of debauchery.”

  Sophie’s skin felt tight and hot; she squirmed in the heat of the blankets. “Does she have a partner in mind for these debauches?”

  “Oh yes.” Maddie pushed the dress off her hips so it pooled on the floor with a hiss of sliding silk.

  Sophie felt that sound in every fiber of her being.

  Maddie gathered the gown up and put it away. She strode back across the room and presented her back to Sophie. Ribbons climbed up her back. “These stays are new and a bit stiff—would you help me?”

  Sophie’s fingers fumbled with the laces. This garment was far more fashionable than the soft stays Maddie usually wore. The cotton had the telltale gloss of sateen, and tiny silver stitches dotted it like stars. “Who is the widow looking for?” she whispered with a voice gone bone-dry.

  Maddie cast a temptress’s smile over one creamy shoulder. “There is a brilliant young woman—a pianist—that the widow met at a dinner party. She was soft-spoken so everyone thought her shy. But then she began to play. And
all the widow could think about was her hands. How they’d feel, where they’d stroke and caress and pinch.”

  Sophie’s fingers shook as they untied the last ribbon.

  Stays loosened, Maddie let the garment fall to the floor like a shed cocoon. She turned, the chemise an insufficient veil against the keenness of Sophie’s sight. Slowly Maddie pulled the garment up by the hem and tossed it aside. And there she stood, better and more beautiful than all of Sophie’s frequent and fevered imaginings. A creature of flesh and flame and desire, long legs and rounded hips and lovely breasts—but other places, too, that Sophie yearned to know more intimately. The dimple in her knee. The tender skin of her wrist, and the long muscles of her forearm. The dip where her throat met her collarbone, and where one last raindrop still lingered, waiting for Sophie to lick it away.

  When Sophie’s eyes reached her face again, Maddie actually trembled. As though she’d felt that gaze like a touch.

  Sophie lifted a hand and beckoned Maddie closer. “Let me tell you a secret about that pianist. One your scandalous widow doesn’t suspect.”

  Maddie’s lips parted on a breath of surprise and sharp delight. She walked over, step by teasing step, until she stood by the side of the bed. She bent and tilted Sophie’s chin up with a brush of her fingertips, her lips hovering a bare inch away from kissing.

  Sophie went up on her knees on the bed. One hand curled possessively around Maddie’s hip. “She’s very gifted with her hands—but she’s even better with her mouth.”

  She stretched up for a kiss and swallowed Maddie’s gasp. It turned into a moan halfway through, as Sophie pulled her close. Chill skin met Sophie’s blanket-warmed body, sending the most delightful shudder through both of them. Sophie skated her mouth down to suck at one pearled nipple, then kissed a trail down the tender expanse of Maddie’s stomach. Maddie spread her thighs wide as Sophie bent to slide two insistent fingers into the soft curls between her legs.

  She stretched out low and kissed Maddie there, where she was hottest and sweetest.

  God, but she was delicious, rain and salt and honey. Sophie licked and sucked and hummed with pleasure, until Maddie was shaking and panting and on the verge of release.