It only makes him more beautiful.
God, I had no idea a man could be beautiful. I thought that was just something people said in stories, yet here it is in a thousand different ways. His eyes are lovelier than a lonely ocean in winter, so cold and still and pale I can feel them freezing me where I stand. I want to check my fingers for frostbite, until I realise that the idea is mad. I’m not actually cold.
In fact I’m blazing hot. I thank God I only did up three of the buttons, because the air on my back is a glorious blessing. I think it saves me from sweating, and for that I am very grateful. He already knows my eyes have been hypnotised. I would rather he stayed in the dark about my over-heating body – though somehow I doubt he will for much longer. I mean, most of his face is bad.
But his mouth is worse.
His lips have almost no outline at all, as though they were made when someone kissed against the glass of his face. Give it a moment and they would probably disappear altogether – though most of me hopes they will stay a little longer. I haven’t quite finished looking at them yet. I need a second to marvel over the middle of his upper lip, which seems to be unlike every other lip on the planet. Most people have those soft hills, one after the other. They have a bow.
He has two sharp peaks, barely visible but still definitely there.
It makes his lips seem both cruel and at the same time so utterly soft that I would give almost anything to feel them against my skin. I consider smacking my face into his, as if by accident, despite how intrusive that would be. Most likely he would fire me.
But I think it might be worth it.
Christ, am I really thinking that? I have to pull myself together – and not just because I seem to be having ludicrous thoughts. He is looking at me now as if he would probably murder me where I stood if he thought he could get away with it. His hands are twitching a little, in a way that suggests his preferred method would be strangulation.
And to my horror the only response I can come up with is: what a way to go. He has long but fine fingers, and I find myself wondering what they would feel like around my throat. Probably heaven until you began to run out of air, I reckon, and then I really have to change the subject in my head.
Though it’s a shame I do it by blurting out:
‘Sorry, I just wanted to see.’
It sounds so feeble he flinches.
Or is it more the content that makes him mad?
‘You wanted to see if I was lying.’
‘Well, not lying exactly.’
‘Then what?’
‘Maybe making things up.’
‘There is no appreciable difference between that and telling a falsehood, Ms Parker – a fact I am sure you are aware of, considering that almost keen mind of yours.’
‘Could be the “almost” part that stops me short,’ I say, then wish I hadn’t.
Now does not seem like the best time to get funny with him, no matter how much it makes my heart sing to do it. At the very least I should probably wait for him to forget I ogled him – though somehow I doubt that will ever happen. He still looks disgusted about it, halfway through this conversation about something else altogether. Or, at least, I think he does.
His expressions are nearly impossible to read.
He could be offended by my suspicions.
He might wonder how I dare to be amused.
All seems possible, when he speaks.
‘Well, as you can see, it does indeed fit, despite your every effort at putting it on incorrectly. It may come as a surprise to you, but buttons are supposed to go in their corresponding holes rather than bizarre diagonals of your choosing. Honestly it seems a wonder to me that you ever manage to get dressed at all.’
‘There are a million of them and you only gave me a minute.’
‘Of course I only gave you a minute. I had no idea you had decided to strip off and yank everything on in my hallway. You are aware you are in my hallway, are you not?’
‘In the excitement I forgot,’ I tell him, and know immediately that I used the wrong word. His eyebrow flickers the moment I say it, and I can’t stop my face heating. Most likely he sees right through me. He probably knows where my thoughts are going, and even if he has no clue his next demand seals my fate.
‘Turn around,’ he says abruptly. So abruptly I can only blurt out a startled ‘what?’
And then he says it again.
‘Turn around, Ms Parker.’
This time I obey. I go slowly, of course, most of me nervous about what he might be going to do. I’m so used to rough treatment that I think of him manhandling me out of the hall first, rather than anything sweeter or finer. I don’t imagine for a moment that this is going to feel like someone stroking a hand over my cheek as I sleep. I don’t think it will make my body buzz, but oh, God, it does.
The very second I feel him touching the buttons I slide away on a wave of something strange. Bliss, I think, but how can I know for sure? No one has ever fastened me up like this before, and even if they had I doubt they would have done it like this. I have the barest sense of unbelievably deft fingers arranging and rearranging without making contact.
He doesn’t brush my skin. There is no real sense of him.
So it seems outrageous that the non-existent contact should flood my body with heat. That it should leave my cheeks flushed and other parts of me burning. All the funny things I want to say suddenly die on my lips. I can’t tell him that he’s a supercilious control freak, when my nipples are tightening inside this infernal dress. I can’t accuse him of wanting to cop a feel, when this was the furthest thing from that.
He steps away as though he barely did a thing – and why not? He did barely do a thing. Any excitement I may feel comes from me and my apparently insane libido. Once the door closes behind me, I have to take deep breaths, and even afterwards the currents of sensation do not ebb away.
Only my dignity does that, despite my best efforts to hold on to it.
I tell myself that I am not going to react in an inappropriate way to him again. He gives me no reason to, after all. He may be extremely clever and very attractive and always wear ridiculously sexy things like cravats and velvet jackets, but that is no reason to lose my head. I have to be better than that. I am better than that. I am practical and level-headed. I know that life is not a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and even if it was I would probably hate it.
I bet it was cold all the time back then, and miserable, and when you think about it Rochester seems like a complete arsehole. He abandons his first wife and sluts his way around Europe, then has the nerve to complain about it all as though the world did him wrong. Is that really the kind of man I like?
Because that is undoubtedly the kind of man Harcroft is. No one could be that gorgeous and not have treated at least one woman really badly. I bet she writes him sad letters all the time and he just laughs and tells his haughty friends at the Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club about it, even though he doesn’t go to a Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club. In truth, I’m starting to suspect he never goes anywhere or does anything. He seems to have no real job, though that could be explained by an enormous inheritance.
That he never leaves the house, however, is slightly harder to explain.
And especially when he seems so uncomfortable around me.
Sometimes he stops in the hall when he sees me coming, then goes in the opposite