Read Beneath a Silent Moon for Free Online Page A

drizzle against the windows sounded preternaturally loud. The weight of the silence was so heavy she could feel it pressing through the thin silk of her gown and reverberating through the hollowness in her chest. The room was filled with echoes of a conversation she wasn't supposed to have heard, with ghosts of a past she didn't understand and Charles wouldn't talk about.
    "Father asked me to call round at five o'clock tomorrow," Charles said, so abruptly that she nearly dropped the bandage. "I mink it's the first time he's requested a private interview with me since I left Harrow."
    Mélanie placed the fresh bandage over the wound. "If he wants to warn you about his betrothal, he's left it a bit late."
    "I should have known he might remarry." Charles's voice was matter-of-fact, but his gaze slid away. "I don't know why the announcement took me by surprise."
    Mélanie knotted the ends of the bandage. "Perhaps it's not the fact that he's remarrying so much as
who
he's marrying."
    He went still for a fraction of a second. "Honoria deserves better," he said in the same careful voice. "But she's a grown woman. Presumably she knows what she's about."
    Mélanie set down the scissors and the ends of lint and looked up at her husband. He returned her gaze, but his eyes had turned as impenetrable as the weathered rocks of the Scottish coast he loved so well.
    At such moments, there was only one way she knew she could reach him. She wondered sometimes if such tactics cheapened what they had between them, but at the moment she hungered for any affirmation of their bond the way a battlefield amputee longs for laudanum. She curled her hand behind his neck and pressed a kiss against his throat.
     
    A wall of flame shot up before him. Panic closed his throat. A woman screamed. He ran, stumbling through a dark, unfamiliar landscape, and caught her in his arms. She clutched him tightly, as though she was caught in an undertow. He thought it was his sister, but the hair he was stroking was a paler gold. Honoria. She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him, her eyes fevered with desperation, her face contorted with fear.
    Someone grabbed his shoulder, trying to pull him away from her. He shook the attacker off and clutched Honoria more tightly.
    "Charles." The attacker grabbed him again. "Darling, wake up."
    He loosed one arm to strike his assailant, but some part of his brain registered that the voice belonged to his wife. He opened his eyes onto darkness. He was sitting up in bed, his heart pounding, his skin slick with sweat, his arms wrapped over his chest, his fingers digging into his bare flesh.
    Mélanie touched his arm with cool, steady fingers. He flinched away from her all-knowing gaze. He couldn't bear to have her understand something he couldn't make sense of himself. Not to mention the risk of revealing secrets that weren't his to share.
    "I'm all right." He hunched forward. He was chilled to the bone despite the sweat drying on his skin.
    He pressed his shaking fingers against his temples. Usually Mélanie was the one with nightmares. Usually he held her. For the first time he wondered if she ever found being held an intrusion.
    Mélanie said nothing and didn't attempt to touch him again, but he could feel her concerned gaze on him. He turned his head and managed a smile. "Lobster patties and whisky. Always a fatal combination. It's a wonder my nightmares weren't worse."
    In the shadows, her gaze moved over him the way she checked for signs of physical damage over his protests that he was unhurt.
    He touched his fingertips to her face. Difficult to believe he'd been kissing it only a few hours before. He flinched again, inwardly, at the memory. He might not be a paragon of a husband, but he'd like to think he was above using his wife to exorcise his own demons. He'd failed at that tonight. He'd buried himself in her heat and let the touch of her fingers and lips and the taste of her skin turn his blood to fire, seeking