Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Air left her body entirely the moment Colin Bridgerton walked into his chamber half-naked.

Penelope Featherington pressed herself into the narrow dark of his closet, her heart conducting an orchestra no sane composer would ever dare claim, her fingers curled around the door's edge, though she had known escape was no longer possible.

The candles had been lit for him. Three of them, golden and generous, their warm amber light reaching for him the way candlelight had always reached for beautiful things, as though flame itself could not help but wish to know the shape of him. And what a shape it was.

God forgive her.

His hair was wet. The brown locks she had studied from careful distances across a hundred ballrooms, a hundred drawing rooms, a hundred safe and proper spaces where wanting him had been bearable because it was distant — those locks had been darkened with bathwater and curling slightly at the ends, dripping slowly, meandering paths down the column of his neck. Each drop traced him as though learning him by touch. Each drop a small and devastating enemy for relishing everything she dreamt of.

She watched one travel the slope of his shoulder as her breath hitched.

He had changed. Changed from the boy who ran around the Bridgerton estate half-naked and fully covered in mud, chasing his victims of mudbath. Changed from the boy who wore waistcoats too big for his frame to appear bigger, more manly, like his brothers. Changed to a man, years of travel, of open seas and foreign sun and God-only-knows-what adventures, written themselves across his skin in shades of warm amber and honeyed gold.

The boyishness she had once catalogued in secret, the easy, laughing grace of him, the loose-limbed charm that had so thoroughly ruined her for other men, had been pressed out and replaced by something altogether more difficult. More dangerous.

Now his shoulders were broader. The candlelight traced contours of his chest with devoted attention: the firm plane of it, the gentle definition carved there by rope and sail and the particular labour of a man who had, for once in his pampered and charmed life, worked with his body rather than merely inhabited it. She had been able to see where the sun had kissed him differently, the deeper bronze at his forearms, the warm cream of his torso, the precise geography of travel written upon him like a map she had suddenly, desperately, wanted to read.

His abdomen. She would not— she could not— She simply stared in awe at the devastating descent of a V-shape where the helpless obedience of water sought its lowest point, down toward the only mercy in the entire wretched evening— a towel. White. Wrapped low. Tucked with the casual indifference of a man entirely alone in his own chambers, utterly and entirely unaware that he was being regarded with an intensity that would have shamed a portraitist.

Oh, if it had only hung lower.

Cut it!

Penelope snapped. She was a lady. She was, ostensibly, a grown woman of sense and sensibility. She had written some of the finest social observation in all of London, and she would not stand in a man's closet like some penny novel heroine unravelling over a towel—

Except there she had stood unravelling over the towel.

He crossed to the mirror, unhurried and unself-conscious in the manner of a man who had never once doubted the space he occupied, and raised one hand to drag his fingers back through those damp, dark curls. She felt it in her own fingertips. A phantom sensation — the imagined weight of his hair, the imagined cool of the water still caught between the strands, the imagined warmth of his scalp beneath her touch. Her fingers curled against her own palm, nails pressing half-moons there as though in punishment for wanting.

That was it. She was going to expire in this closet, and the scandal would finally eclipse even the worst of ton’s revelations. Though there would have been no Whistledown to report on it because she would be dead. So, she might have gotten away with it, the passion that burned her to cinders, tidily buried with her.

He reached up then, both hands threading through the wet locks and pushing them back from his face, the motion lifting the whole of him, arms raising the lines of his chest, pulling taut across the shoulders she was absolutely not looking at, before dropping his hands.

He reached for the knot of the towel.

A gasp escaped barely behind her teeth. She pressed the closet door shut with trembling fingers until only darkness remained.

Blessed, mortifying darkness.

She pressed her back against the wall and found it solid where her knees had long since abdicated all structural responsibility. She shut her eyes, yet he was there, painted in candlelight on the inside of her mind with infuriating detail. The wet curls. The amber skin. The impossible, unfair architecture of him.

Heat crawled up her throat and bloomed along her jaw.

The closet was very small.

And she was very warm.

Penelope turned carefully and eased the door open by the barest increment. A thread of candlelight slipped inside, and with it a breath of cool night air that met her burning face with something very close to compassion.

For three whole seconds, she did not look at him.

For three whole seconds, she had been almost a sensible woman.

For three whole seco— her eyes, treacherous and ungovernable as they had always been where he was concerned, found him of their own terrible volition.

He had his back to her. And he was entirely, absolutely, catastrophically naked.

The gasp escaped before she could catch it. She saw him stiffen, his spine straightening with the slow, terrible deliberateness of a man who had heard something and was not yet certain what. She clapped her palm over her mouth. Did not breathe. Did not move. Did not exist, if she could manage it. Yet she heard it.

Footsteps.

One step, measured and curious. Then another. The candlelight shifted somewhere beyond her sliver of door. The floorboard nearest the closet answered his weight with a soft complaint, her heart no longer in her chest, having relocated to her ears, thundering there with a volume she was certain had woken all of Mayfair—

His hand closed over the knob.

She felt it more than heard it, the slight resistance of the door, the tiny shift of wood and brass, a twist so gentle it might have been interrogative. Is someone there?

This was it. The precise moment of her destruction. Not in a ballroom, not beneath the pointed observation of the ton, not even in the revelation of her pen name, but here, in a dark and cedar-scented closet, having witnessed a man she had no earthly right to love in a state of undress that would have made London's most experienced matrons reach for their smelling salts.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

If she were to die of humiliation, at least she would die breathing in sea salt and cardamom— the scent that lived in the wool and linen all around her, pressed into the fibres of every coat and waistcoat hanging above her head, the accumulated essence of his travelling and his living and his him-ness. She had smelled it before, on cold evenings when a draft carried it from somewhere, and had thought, shamefully, that is what home should smell like. She thought it now, at what might be the final moment of her dignity, and she smiled because at least she was dying in the embrace of her love's scent.

The door swung open.

The other one beside her panel. Fresh night air rushed in, candlelight falling openly across the small forest of his wardrobe. An arm entered the closet: the easy flex of his forearm, fingers finding what they sought in the dark with thirty years of practice. He drew out a garment, and the door closed.

Blessed. She shall live for another day.

But greed was a carnal sin, and despite having skipped church for most of her life, she still knew no good ever came from greed. But greedy she was, touching the space where his clothes had hung to imagine what it would be in his wear, in his embrace for the rest of the night. Loose trousers. Something soft, for sleeping. One look, she bargained quickly with herself. One last and definite look at the man's domesticity, and then she would wait in perfect stillness until it was suitable to slip out and down the corridor.

So she pushed the door forward by the smallest degree — but it swung open, her palm pressing against air where wood should have been, and she pitched forward out of the dark with all the grace of a woman who had been standing rigid in a closet for a quarter of an hour until her hand met something that was not air, not wood, and not any surface she had prepared herself to touch.

Warm.

Firm.

Alive.

She knew, before she lifted her eyes, exactly what she had done.

He was very tall from this distance, which was to say from no distance at all. The green of his eyes was nearly black in the low light, wide with something unsteady, something that had not yet decided what it was. His lips parted. The damp curl she had been mourning for the better part of an hour fell across his forehead.

"Pen," he breathed.

Just that. Her name, made into something barely a word, barely a sound, more air than syllable, as though the sight of her had displaced his language entirely.

"What—" his voice failed. His eyes travelled from her face to the closet, to her face again, to the hand she had pressed against the bare warmth of his stomach, to her face once more. "What are you doing here?"

And when Penelope Featherington — the author of some of the most composed and devastating prose in London's recent memory — opened her mouth, nothing came out. Nothing. Rather, she simply stared. And he stared right back. Until she felt, beneath that gaze, as though she were the one half-undressed.

As though the candlelight had chosen his side of this encounter and was illuminating every foolish wanting thing she had ever felt, every secret she had pressed into the pages of notebooks she kept beneath three floorboards and a prayer.

She removed her hand shakingly, yet he did not stop looking. As if looking away will end this moment. End the world as they knew it.

"Well?" he asked at last, and his voice careful and even.

"I — I uh —"

She winced upon hearing herself, felt ten-and-four again, hovering at the edge of a Bridgerton drawing room, hoping the carpet might extend her the courtesy of swallowing her whole. She tried again, stretched her face into something approximating delight and said, in a register approximately two octaves too high and roughly the volume of a woman addressing someone across a crowded assembly:

"Good to see you have returned all fine!"

The words landed in the room like dropped silverware.

He blinked.

"I was not aware you were turning in this early—" her voice fractured at the seam, and she pushed past it with the grim determination of someone fording a very cold river, "— well. You must be tired." A laugh escaped her, thin and arid and barely a laugh at all. "I should leav—"

"Not before you explain yourself."

His voice arrived with a firmness she had not previously encountered from him — or perhaps she had, in small doses, and had simply never had it directed at her — and his hand closed around her wrist with a certainty that stopped her mid-flight without the slightest effort.

She stared at his hand on her wrist.

She stared at the door.

She calculated the distance. She calculated the likelihood.

"I was—" she began, "it wasn’t my intention—"

"Pen." His voice firmer.

"I was looking for Daphne's chamber," she snickers, with as much dignity as a woman could summon when she had recently been discovered in a closet. "We—Gregory and Hyacinth and little Edmund were engaged in a game of hide and seek, and I thought—Daphne's chamber being vacant and all…"

Something crossed his face. Something that was trying very hard not to be amused.

"It is nearly half past two," he said, measured and patient as a tutor. "Everyone in this house has been dead asleep."

"Children are an energetic bunch," she added with great conviction.

"Penelope."

Okay, so they had now moved from Pen to Penelope. She didn’t have many attempts left before he spelled out her entire name. "The little ones—"

"This," he piped with a patience she found, under present circumstances, rather offensive, "is not Daphne's chamber."

"I must have—" she cleared her throat, "—taken a wrong turn."

He looked at her.

She looked at a point somewhere over his left shoulder.

"You have been coming to this wing," he said, with the careful articulation of a man counting to ten internally (he was always slow with numbers, wasn't he?), "for the better part of twenty years." He tilted his head. "You know which chamber is whose. You could navigate this corridor in absolute darkness and arrive at precisely the door you intended." A pause, weighted and merciless. "But even were I to entertain the impossible notion that you entered the wrong room by accident —" his eyes made the briefest, most devastating tour of his surroundings, the blues and greens and warm browns of the décor, the particular arrangement that had been his arrangement since boyhood, "you might perhaps have noticed, once inside, that you were not in Daphne's chamber."

The heat that climbed her throat was positively architectural. It constructed itself floor by floor until she was quite certain it was visible from the street.

He stepped closer.

It was not a large step. It did not need to be. Because there hardly remained any space between them.

"Why are you here, Pen?" He asked quietly, the quiet somehow worse than firmness had been used previously, as the fine hairs along the back of her neck rose in a column, standing at perfect attention.

She looked at her own feet. At his feet. At the floorboard between them, which had declined, it seemed, to assist her.

"I truly did not know you were to return tonight," she mumbled. "From your travels."

His eyes did not waver. She could feel them, steady and patient and unconvinced.

"I am in earnest," she added.

"That is not what I asked."

The silence stretched as she contemplated and filled it the only way she knew — by capitulating and then immediately wishing she hadn't.

"I—I visit your chamber." She stopped. "Occasionally."

His expression did not change, precisely. But something in it sharpened.

"Why?"

The words formed and dissolved and formed again. The truth was right there, the whole dreadful luminous truth, and she reached past it with both hands for anything else.

"The bed," she said. "Is the comfiest one in all of Mayfair."

It landed with all the delicate precision of a woman throwing a bonnet at an oncoming carriage. But it landed, and she watched the sharp edge of his expression falter and bend, and then — oh, thank God — he released a helpless chuckle.

"It is an exceptional mattress," he concurred, rubbing the back of his neck. "Had the cushioning brought over from… there's a craftsman in Northern Ireland, actually, outside of Belfast, the man's a genius with—"

He was rambling. Colin Bridgerton was rambling about mattress construction and she could have wept with the relief of it, the beautiful, ordinary domesticity of it, the sense that the ground had firmed beneath her feet and the walls were no longer closing in, and in another two minutes she would be able to bid him a perfectly normal goodnight and walk out that door with some fraction of her dignity still about her person.

But she glanced up. And her relief dissolved. Because he was looking at her again. The look she could not name and did not know how to survive.

"So," he hummed low. Almost conversational. Almost, if one were not paying very close attention, innocent. "You have laid in my bed before."

"No!" she cried aloud as awareness of her lighthearted jest settled in: "No — no, I—" her throat was closing, the words unable to pass, and her lungs unable to find purchase while he was standing there with a smirk at the corner of his lips, the hateful, knowing, insufferable edge of one, as though he was watching the web of her lies tighten and finding it privately delightful.

She hated him.

She had never hated him.

She hated him.

"Eloise snores," she said, with the flat, final energy of a woman detonating her last reserve as he blinked. So, she pressed on. "I don't have the heart to end our ritual, for we have read together until we fall asleep since we were girls, but I cannot sleep in that chamber." She shut her eyes briefly, ear-tips burning, voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "So, I… slip in here. Given you are hardly ever here." She forced herself to meet his eyes and then immediately regretted it. "I return to her chamber before she wakes, so she never found out."

He considered it. She watched him consider it: the slight movement behind his eyes, the turn of it, the examination. Then she notices his shoulders loosen, only a fraction, and his grip on her wrist eases.

"My apologies," she hummed. "It was not proper. I shouldn’t have— I will not, going forward, of course, I—"

"Show me.”

She stopped. Blinked.

"Show me," he said again, the quiet in his voice coated with warmth that did something very unhelpful to her chest. "How you lie in my bed when I'm not here."

A laugh came out of her involuntarily, slightly hysterical. It escaped before she could evaluate it, before she could decide whether or not it was the appropriate response to what was surely — surely a jest, but when she looked at him, she knew he was not jesting. The dark forest green of his eyes was entirely, absolutely, unflinchingly serious.

Has he gone mad?

"Colin," she hissed, her voice admirably steady, all things considered. She dampened her lips, tried again. "I — I cann—I will not."

"Why not?" The innocence of it was criminal. Oh yes, he was indeed mad. Very, very much. "You have done it before. Surely you can—"

"I cannot," she repeated herself, louder this time, louder than the room required, the word punching through the careful low-ceilinged intimacy of the conversation and filling the space. "This isn’t proper."

And he didn't deny. Well, then, perhaps he had some sense. But he simply stared until the echoes of her words landed back with her.

This isn’t proper emerging from the mouth of a woman who had been crouched in a man's closet watching him undress by candlelight for the better part of half an hour, who had confessed to entering his private chambers on multiple occasions to sleep in his bed, who was currently standing in said chambers at nearly two in the morning in the company of a man wearing nothing above the waist and—

"Very well," she muttered through teeth pressed together. "But only—" she lifted a finger, because if she was to humiliate herself, she would do it on terms she had negotiated, "only if you swear, on whatever remains of your honour as a gentleman, that you will never bring up this evening. None of the events. None of the… revelations. You will simply resume with our friendship as before once we are done.”

She watched the glee in his face take a small and satisfying blow.

"But—" he began.

"My terms are firm," she hummed, with serene and absolute finality when he paused to weigh it.

She delighted watching the flicker of protest, the consideration, the reluctant arithmetic of a man who very much wanted a thing and was learning what it would cost him. And then, with the particular grace of a Bridgerton accepting terms they found mildly offensive, he inclined his head.

Stepped aside.

And Penelope, for the first time in the entire catastrophic night, breathed with something approaching normality and crossed the room to his bed.

She would lie down. She would lie down for thirty seconds, demonstrate whatever it was he wished to witness, and then she would wish him a pleasant night and walk out that door and travel home and sleep for approximately four years. She arranged the pillow— not with particular care, for it didn't matter, she would be upright again before the minute was out— and bent to pull herself up.

"You don't go in bed like that, do you?" he wondered as she twisted to look at him. He was gesturing at the blue cloak still wrapped around her shoulders— her concession to discretion that evening, her attempt at invisibility as she had moved through the dark streets between her home and his.

She stood, set her jaw, and untied the knot at her throat with short, precise movements.

"I sleep in nothing but my chemise," she informed him, the cloak pooling at her feet. "Shall I undo the gown too, then?"

She had not looked at him as she jested. She was already turning back toward the bed, which was why she nearly missed the pause, longer than was strictly natural, just a half-beat off the tempo of easy conversation.

"If you insist," he mumbled hoarse.

And she froze.

She blinked, positive she misheard, waiting for him to say something, clarify perhaps, but when nothing arrived, she looked at him with an expression she hoped conveyed the full scope of her disbelief, as she held it, refusing to be the one to blink or soften or look away, hoping the weight of his own gentlemanly conscience would descend upon him at any moment and produce the apology the moment required.

But he simply returned her gaze unapologetic.

She waited.

One minute.

Two.

The third passed in silence so complete she could hear the candle flicker.

"You," she hissed.

This was improper. She was under no illusions. This was so far beyond the boundaries of propriety that the boundaries were not even a suggestion anymore. The angels of heaven would be appalled. Surely, she surrendered her claim to sainthood with the first edition of Whistledown, and she had made her peace with that, but this would send her straight to hell!

But then she thought of him, not an hour past, standing in the amber candlelight with bathwater tracing paths down his neck, entirely unaware of the pair of wide and hungry eyes drinking in every detail from the dark. She thought of the irony. The ways universe balanced its scale.

So Penelope squared her shoulders and, with one swift motion, pulled the gown over her head, dropping it on the pile.

The air found her immediately, a shiver traced her spine in a single clean line from nape to hem. She did not look at him, for doing so would only make her reconsider the next bit. Rather, she focused instead on the corset laces, working them with efficient fingers, one by one.

"You don't have to—" His voice arrived and then stopped itself, hesitant. "You can keep that on."

"Oh no," she replied flatly, hearing the smile in her own voice. The last lace gave as she lifted the corset away and set it on the pile with the ceremony of a woman making a point. "You wished to know how I lie in this bed. I shall give you precisely that."

Penelope finally turned, looking at him, looking expectant, anticipating, relishing in advance the portrait of a man undone by the consequences of his own demands, the rueful recognition of a gentleman who had overreached, but he wasn’t even looking at her.

At least, not at her eyes. Not her face either.

Down her body instead, the whole length of her, the fine linen chemise that the room's warmth had done nothing to make feel substantial. His gaze moved slow and dark with a quality she had no language for, something that lived below the register of anything she had ever read or written or imagined in the careful, private hours of her most honest dreaming. His lips parted. The green of his eyes gone very deep, the way still water goes deep where it is darkest.

She felt it on her skin, warmth arriving from a direction she could not quite identify. So she turned away before she did something unforgivable, and she got into bed.

The sheets were cool. Crisp and yellow and newly pressed. Egyptian cotton, fine as paper, smelling of clean water and something faintly citrusy, definitely closer to her bath soap than his salt one. Ignoring, she settled onto her side, facing the single candle burning at the bedside, its flame very small and very steady in the stillness.

Of course.

The sheets had been changed for his return. The whole room had been prepared — aired and pressed and restocked and made ready— and she, who prided herself on the keenness of her observation, who noticed everything, who catalogued and cross-referenced and drew correct conclusions from half a detail and a gesture, had walked through the door tonight and noticed none of it. Had noticed nothing except the candle, and the familiar weight of the room, and the hunger she had always brought here like bags she could not set down.

She should have known.

But she had wanted this, and wanting had made her stupid, and there she was.

"I lay down like this," her voice came out flat and uninterested.

"Right side?" he asked with an enthusiasm that contrasted hers.

"Yes," she nodded, before adding quickly, rather foolishly, "And I slept like this." Sheshutclosed her eyes as the man chuckled.

The candle was very warm against her eyelids. Even through the dark, she could feel it — the same candle that had always burned at this bedside on the rare occasions the room had been occupied, the same one she had watched from this same pillow on the handful of nights she had allowed herself this particular, carefully rationed foolishness. She knew this flame.

"Was there anything particular you, uh,— did," he said, and his voice had gone anxious, almost timid, "before sleep took you?"

"No," she replied immediately. Too quick for her to have known he wouldn’t believe this lie.

"I think," she amended, a moment later, in a smaller voice.

"Of?"

“Books.” She felt the warmth of the candle through her closed eyelids. "Life." A pause. "Candles."

"Candles?"

"Yes," she said. "Candles."

She opened her eyes.

The flame was very small. It had always been very small in this room— this candle, which spent the better part of its existence in darkness, in an empty chamber, with no one to watch it. She had noticed that before. She had thought about it before, lying precisely here, in this same position, with the silence of a sleeping house around her and the particular ache of a woman who had grown very practised at wanting things she could not have.

"They are fragile things, wax worked and made careful from the very beginning. Trimmed and fitted and made ready through much practice." Her voice quiet. "Every candle made to be held and lit and give light and burn." A pause. "Yet only some are chosen. Only some are picked and lit and set somewhere warm where people see them, appreciate the warmth they give, allow them to burn beautifully… with purpose."

The flame shivered, very slightly, in some current she could not feel.

"You see, some are not," she groaned. "Some sit on their shelves, dust settling over them in layers, until the wax goes cold all the way through. After long enough, even if someone picks it up and tries," she stopped. "The wick wouldn't take."

There was a silence with the end of her words that she did not try to fill. She simply stared at the candle afront until she heard him again.

"You lay in my bed and mourned for candles?"

A low and genuine laugh came out of her, surprisingly, as she hummed, "Someone had to."

She pushed herself up on one elbow. The candle was right there, close enough to feel. She looked at it for a moment — the small, faithful, burning thing — and then she leaned forward and blew it out.

The darkness was immediate as she lay back and shut her eyes.

"I know what it is like," she piped quietly to the darkness, "to be unchosen." She let the words sit. "So, I sympathize."

He did not respond. She had not expected him to. This was, she decided, enough honesty for one night, enough of herself laid out in this room that was not hers and this bed that was not hers and beside a warmth she had no right to seek. She would rest her eyes for a moment. Just a moment, just long enough to let the ache settle and the night stop spinning, and then she would leave as intended.

Except she felt the bed shift.

The mattress creaked to a weight that was not hers, and she felt it before she understood it,  the gentle displacement, the dip, and then the scent of him arriving in the dark like something she had only ever known in memory and imagination, salt and cardamom and the warm animal reality of a person choosing to be near.

Her eyes opened to realize room changed, for all the candles were gone now. She did not know when; she had not heard him move through the room, and yet they were extinguished, and the moonlight fell in silver panels across the bed and the figure lying beside her on top of the coverlet.

It found the damp curl still resting against his forehead. It found the edge of his jaw, the corner of his mouth, the dark fan of his lashes against the plane of his cheek. It made him look like something she had dreamed, moonbathed and hers.

"I—" she started, rather startled. Penelope sat up. She put her hand on the coverlet, prepared to rise, prepared to say goodnight and be sensible and go home and never once—

But his hand found her wrist.

Loose, this time. A suggestion rather than a demand, an idea, a timid request. She could have broken free of it without any effort at all. A breath, a slight shift of her weight, and she would have been standing. She would have been across the room. She would have been gone.

"You can slip out at dawn," his voice in the dark was something she had never heard before — unguarded, unhurried, stripped of the easy charm that was his habitual armour and left with whatever lived beneath it. It was quiet. A little unsteady. "Like you said you do. Return to Eloise's chamber." A pause. "If that is what you wish."

Gentle breeze settled between them, the curtains swishing by the window.

"But for the night…" he paused—no, stopped, for he added nothing more.

But having known the man for nearly two decades, having loved him for so long, she knew how to read the words he never spoke aloud, knew how to read him even in the darkness of the night.

Stay.

Penelope lied down once more, this time facing the man of her dreams.