Hold Me Close Read online

  Now an urge to move, to take action, pumped through him, but the only action that seemed possible under the circumstances was, at long last, liberating the snagged bracelet.

  So, with no other options at his disposal, he released the last button of his coat and writhed his shoulders until he was able to wrench his arms from his tightly tailored sleeves, not caring if half the seams were rent, but taking care not to jerk Julia’s wrist too hard. He might not be able to do much for her, but at least he could get his damned coat off.

  It was indecent, but it worked.

  With his arms out, the bulk of the coat slipped off his back, and for just one moment, the whole weight of it hung suspended from Julia’s wrist. The coat was heavy—heavy enough to pull Julia’s fist hard against his chest. For a moment, it seemed that weight might snap the bracelet in two.

  But then, miracle of miracles, the bracelet let go its stubborn grip on the lapel, and the coat slumped free to the floor.

  “Look!” cried Julia, a bit more energy in her tone. “It’s spit your coat out, finally!”

  Ah—progress, at least. He’d made that happen for her.

  He drew a quick breath. “Maybe it will go the same with my shirt.” He didn’t stop to think it through. He made quick work of removing his waistcoat, then grabbed one cuff of his shirt in the opposite fist and yanked his arm from the sleeve, seized the hem and drew the whole thing up over his head.

  The collar, of course, was still attached to the bracelet on Julia’s wrist, so the shirt tented partway over her head as he tossed the hem away from him. But he was unfettered now, and could move more than a few inches away from her, which he was sorely, sorely in need of doing.

  She batted her way free of the pool of linen, coming out with her hair a bit mussed and her cheeks pinker again—and the shirt now hanging down from her bracelet like a miniature sail unfurled from a mast.

  She gave her arm three hard shakes, and on the third, the shirt popped loose from the clasp at last and billowed its way to the floor beside his coat.

  “Thank God!” he exclaimed.

  But Julia, for her part, didn’t seem inclined to celebrate. She stared at the pile of his clothing for a moment, then doubled over with a sudden keening noise, gripping her knees with her hands. Her back was convulsing.

  Was she...having a fit of some sort? Was she choking?

  He was halfway through rushing back over to her and seizing her about the shoulders when he realized she was laughing. He stopped dead.

  “Oh, that is absurd,” she said, straightening partway again, and wiping at fresh tears with the heel of her hand. “Utterly absurd. It was stuck so tight.”

  “Well,” he said, quite dumbfounded. “Well…I…the weight of the fabric. It must have pulled in just the right way, once it was hanging down.”

  She shook her head firmly. “Oh, no—don’t try logic, Major Holsworth. Logic doesn’t apply tonight.”

  “No?” Since when did logic not apply to everything?

  “No. It doesn’t apply in the slightest. ” She looked up at him, still laughing, and her eyes were oddly bright. “And I have no interest in more of your plausible explanations. You see, I understand it all now.”

  “You—you do?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s quite obvious.”

  “What’s obvious?”

  “It’s obvious,” she said, smiling, “that I’ve gone mad.”

  “What?”

  “Mad,” she declared calmly. “Completely mad. Stark raving.”

  4

  “Mad?” His stomach dropped to his boots. “Lady Grantleigh, you—you’re not—”

  She dismissed his objection with an imperious wave of her fingers. “Oh, but madness would explain so much,” she said. “You here, for one thing, appearing in our ballroom in Devon, when clearly you should still be in India.”

  “As I said, I—”

  “And Eleanor, sneaking into the house after traveling so very far, not showing her face, but leaving a bracelet in my room. What sort of nonsense is that?” Her voice became almost enthusiastic as she warmed to her topic. Able to move freely now, she began to make a little circuit of the room, her skirts swishing about her heels. “And more ridiculously still, the bracelet latching itself onto one of your garments, no, two of your garments, as though by deliberate will. You said yourself it seemed to have conscious intent, and inanimate objects are not generally supposed to be capable of that.”

  His jaw didn’t seem to be working quite right. “I’m—I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational—”

  “And that’s not to mention you tackling me in the conservatory. You’ve been unmannerly to me occasionally in the past, but nothing on that level of incivility.”

  “Oh!” He racked his brain for an easy way to explain his actions, but anything he could think to say to her about Brayles would only add to the list of absurdities. “Well, I—”

  “Ha! You can’t explain it!” She came to a standstill, crossing her arms over her chest, looking almost triumphant. “Clearly, then, I’m asleep and dreaming all this, or it’s lunacy. Either way, it’s a grand hallucination. Much more entertaining than anything that’s happened to me in months.”

  Marcus gaped at her. Was she being serious? Julia had always had a lively sense of humor, but he wished he could be sure she was joking with him now.

  Her eyes squeezed shut, then, and she heaved a shaky breath, the laughter dying on her lips. “Oh, perhaps Aunt Margaret was right,” she said. “Perhaps I stayed in my widow’s blacks too long. Or perhaps—it wasn’t long enough. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given them up at all.” The next breath was rather more like a sob. “I think that must be it.”

  “What…must be it?”

  “The dark, heavy color,” she said. “And all that weighty bombazine. It was an anchor of sorts, I suppose. In these past months, these awful months. ” Her fingers plucked fretfully at the frothy blue silk of her skirts. “I didn’t want to give up my mourning clothes, but I did, and now I’ve—I’ve snapped my tether. I’ve gone adrift.”

  It certainly didn’t sound like she was joking now.

  But she didn’t sound like a madwoman, either. Her words were sensible enough.

  Just sad.

  No…worse than sad. Heartbroken.

  Of course she was. It didn’t take logic to tell him that.

  But what on earth was he to do or say? He wanted to go to her and put his arms around her, but he suspected that would only upset her more—especially since he was no longer wearing a shirt.

  He’d have to try to manage it with words.

  “You haven’t gone mad,” he said, taking care to make his voice gentle and soft.

  She sniffled. “Haven’t I?”

  He supposed logic wasn’t really what she needed right now, but logic was all that came to him. “I assure you, everything that’s happened tonight is quite real, however odd it all seems. In any case, I know I am no phantasm.”

  She laughed again, and he was relieved to hear a note of genuine humor in it. “Oh, please! You’re the best evidence I have that this is all a dream.”

  “Am I?”

  “Look at you!” she exclaimed, her manner becoming almost giddy, like that of a lady who’d had too much wine. “Standing there, half-naked. In any rational universe, you’d still have all your clothes on.”

  He felt a warm flush race over his skin. Perhaps he’d been too quick to remove his shirt—but it had seemed utterly imperative at the time to get himself detached from her. He gestured helplessly at her wrist. “Your bracelet—”

  She cut him off again, making a sweeping gesture outward with both hands, apparently indicating his height and breadth. “Besides, you’re proportioned like a statue of Hercules. No flesh-and-blood man actually looks like that.”

  He was quite sure he was gaping at her again. Why couldn’t he keep his jaw shut, like it belonged? “I—I beg your pardon?”

  Her forefinger stabbed towards him, as if in
accusation. “Nobody actually looks like that,” she repeated. “So massive. With all those—those hard ridges. Like you’re carved out of granite.”

  “Granite?”

  “Granite,” she affirmed. “So, clearly, I’m imagining you.”

  He wasn’t sure what to answer to that statement. “I’m a soldier,” he insisted. “I spend my days in hard physical activity. Many of us look like this. ”

  “Don’t try to hoodwink me,” she said, lifting her chin haughtily. “When Christopher was in Parliament, I danced with ballrooms full of officers, and you dwarf the lot of them.”

  “Oh, honestly—”

  “And even if all soldiers did look like you, there’s still another flaw in your logic.”

  He stared hard at her, feeling his own head begin to spin. He sighed. “And what would that flaw be?”

  “I was married, you know. I saw Christopher take off his coat, night after night.”

  He wasn’t sure where this was going, but he was nearly certain he wasn’t going to like it. “No disrespect to your husband, Lady Grantleigh,” he said, “but Christopher was not a military man.”

  “True, but irrelevant to my point. My point has to do with tailoring, and the effect of that cannot be very different from man to man, regardless of profession.”

  “Tailoring?”

  “Yes. You know—the structure of the garment, the layers of wool, the stiffness and the padding.”

  “I know the definition of tailoring, but—”

  She huffed out an impatient breath. “Christopher always looked smaller when he took off his coat. That makes perfect sense, like—like an orange looking smaller without its stiff peel. But you don’t look smaller without your coat. You look…bigger. Quite a bit bigger. It defies the laws of physics.” She waved her fingers again, this time in a wide sweep to either side of his neck. “There’s no way you fit all those—those shoulders inside your coat.”

  He glanced down at himself, reflexively, as if perhaps his body had swelled without his realizing it. But he looked exactly as he always did.

  “It’s simply impossible,” Julia said. “Ergo, you’re an hallucination. And I’ll prove it.”

  Without warning she stepped forward and planted both palms square against the front of his chest, giving him a shove. She hit him rather hard, as though she really hadn’t quite expected his bulk to stop her short.

  And surprised as he was, all he could think was her hands are so soft, her hands are so warm.

  “Oh, dear!” she said, blushing horribly, and backing away fast. “Well, you don’t feel like an hallucination, do you? Rather more like a stone wall.” Her retreat only stopped when her calves hit the little leather divan tucked against the far wall. “Oh, I’m sorry, Major Holsworth,” she said, sounding quite mortified. “That was—that was ridiculous of me.”

  In the absence of anything more productive to do, he shrugged. “Given the standard set by the rest of the evening, it was only…mildly ridiculous.”

  That earned a strangled little laugh from her. But then she sank down onto the divan and buried her face in her hands. “Honestly,” she said, her voice tight with mortification. “I don’t know what’s come over me. I really have gone round the bend, haven’t I? Flown up in the rafters with the bats and the pigeons?”

  “Lady Grantleigh, please,” he said, taking a step towards her. “I don’t know if you’re being serious with me right now or not. But, quite frankly, you’re—you’re worrying the blazes out of me.” He wanted to sit down next to her, to try to comfort her, but even he knew that getting so close was something no gentleman should do, not in their current situation.

  Julia groaned softly into her palms.

  Well, he couldn’t just stand here like a useless lump of stone. Of granite. He scooped up his shirt from the floor so at least she wouldn’t have to be exposed to his…hard ridges any longer.

  “You must believe me,” he said, as he yanked the garment back over his head. “You haven’t gone mad. I’ve seen that happen to men in battle, and—well, it’s far worse than anything you’re doing. Far, far worse.”

  She glanced up at him, wiping a fresh spring of tears. “Is that so?”

  “That’s so. Definitely so.”

  She nodded, looking perhaps a little relieved. “All right, then. I suppose I’m not actually mad. But I’m certainly not myself. Not at all what I used to be.”

  He squatted before her, trying to draw in his shoulders, make himself not quite so terrifyingly massive. “Well, of course you’re not what you used to be,” he said. “Naturally, you’re not. You’re—you’re grieving. Your world’s been turned on end.”

  Tears welled again. “Turned inside out,” she corrected him, quietly. “Crumpled up, and kicked down a hill. And—and rolled into a ditch.”

  “Oh,” he said. His heart contracted. “That bad?”

  She nodded, sniffling again. “That bad.” Her shoulders shuddered with another suppressed sob. “And everyone expects me to be cheerful by now, as if so much time has passed. They think I should get on with life.”

  A little stab of chagrin went through him. He’d expected that of her, too, hadn’t he? Expected her, after a year and half, to have sprung back to the vibrant young woman she’d always been. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “And I thought I was doing better, you know, when I stopped weeping all the time. I get out of bed every day now, and put on a clean frock, plan satisfactory household menus and write letters to my cousins, and from time to time even play the pianoforte.”

  “Well…that’s progress, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose. But—but it feels like I’m…drifting. Like I do it all in a fog.”

  A painful lump was forming in his throat. “I’m sorry.” It felt pathetic, to keep repeating that phrase, but he knew of nothing else to say to her.

  Her hands fisted in her skirts, twisting at the cornflower silk. “And Aunt Margaret doesn’t seem to understand why I’m still so sad, why I can’t adjust to the way things are. To hear her talk about it, her widowhood seems scarcely to have affected her at all.”

  Ah. “I never met Lord Lambert,” he said. “But from what Lady Eleanor’s told me, it wasn’t much of a love match. Lady Lambert was young, and caught up in romantic illusions, but once the courtship was done, the man showed his true colors as an ill-tempered prig. When he died, she was glad enough to return to her childhood home.” He heaved a deep sigh, and couldn’t seem to refrain from reaching out and clasping Julia’s hands in his own. Thankfully, she didn’t pull away. “But your marriage,” he said. “That was another thing entirely. Christopher was…an extraordinary man, with an extraordinary heart. And he deserves to be mourned deeply. As deeply as can be.”

  Julia’s features crumpled as streams of tears ran down her cheeks. But she was nodding, and he took that as a good sign.

  He rubbed his thumbs across the backs of her hands, chafing them gently, like he would with an injured soldier, trying to encourage her. “Anyone with eyes could see how you two loved one another. Christopher lived by your breath. And you—”

  “I lived by his.” She squeezed Marcus’s fingers tight, as if holding on against a tide that was trying to sweep her away. “And now I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep breathing.”

  “But you’re doing it already,” he insisted. “You are breathing. At this very moment. And that’s all you need to do—keep on doing it.”

  “For how long?” she asked, her voice strained. “Until what? He isn’t coming back.”

  “No.” No, he wasn’t. Neither of them would ever speak to Christopher again, lay eyes on Christopher again. Ever.

  Sorrow tugged hard at his insides, making his chest sore and heavy.

  Even now, it seemed half-unreal to him that Christopher was gone. Weeks had passed before the news reached India, and with the war in progress, Marcus hadn’t even been able to accompany Lady Eleanor home for the grand state funeral held the following sprin
g. Some mornings when he woke, his first impulse still was to reach for paper to pen Chris a letter.

  “No,” Marcus said. “He’s not coming back, and that is brutally unfair. That isn’t how the universe should work.” His throat seemed to close up, and suddenly he had to choke out his words. “I—I miss him, too,” he said. “I miss him horribly.”

  Julia gasped, and, oddly enough, some of the light that had been absent suddenly lit again in her eyes. “Oh, of course you do,” she said, her voice soft with compassion. “Here you are, comforting me, and you—well, he was like a brother to you, wasn’t he? You’ve known him—you knew him—forever.”

  And then, of all things, Julia took her hands from his and placed her palms softly against the sides of his face, one fingertip stroking the scar a Pindari saber had left on his cheek.

  Her expression was unguarded, vulnerable, open—not hidden behind her usual formality. The pure brightness of her gaze focused entirely on him, and it sent the sweetest ache through the length of his body.

  I would die for her, he thought. I would gladly die if that would do anything to help her.

  She studied him for a long moment, and he could have sworn she saw straight through skin and bone to the naked center of who he was.

  And then she nodded.

  “You’re kind,” she said quietly, in a wondering tone, as though it was a revelation to her. “Kindhearted, under that fearsome exterior. Christopher always said so. I don’t know why I never saw it until now.”

  A soft, sad smile played on her lips, and all at once he found he, too, wasn’t sure how to keep breathing.

  Nothing felt quite steady—not his legs, not the floor beneath him, not the walls of the room. The air seemed to have grown warmer, much warmer, as though the boiler in the cellars had been overzealously stoked in the past few minutes. The scent of the orange blossoms in the conservatory seemed to grow thicker around them.

  Perhaps he was going a bit mad himself.

  Julia’s eyes were still scanning his face, her palms warm against his cheeks. The glow of the lamp illumined her like an angel. “It must be awful for you,” she said.