Page 8 of Beecham’s Infirmary for the Affluent Afflicted (My Darling Malady #1)

And distracted , gripping me and canting my head toward her with one hand. It is I who shudders when she guides me past her ridden up skirt. I groan and lean into her, cupping her full breasts with one hand, teasing a peaked nipple with my tongue and teeth.

When I pull away, Annie looks up at me, her eyes sultry and dark, framed by wisps of lashes that beckon my soul; she sucks the blood off of her middle and ring fingers as I slowly enter her.

I’m about to lose myself, yet feel at home at the same time. My hand travels from her breast, up the side of her throat as I stroke her, gently at first, with what little restraint I can manage. My fingers settle upon her neck, just below her jaw.

Her eyes widen.

“Does this scare you?” I whisper.

She doesn’t answer at first, but her entire face and chest flush, blooming in heat and blood. I need to be near it. Taste it.

I bend to her throat—but there’s the cold bite of metal against my ear. In my periphery, the pair of shears hovers inches from my face. I don’t move, my pace gradually slowing, but not out of fear.

“You think I’m the one who should be scared?” she asks, holding the point perpendicular to my throat.

I swallow, and the movement presses the metal against my skin.

Her eyes wield a strange hunger of her own; she's not bluffing, not entirely. Annie waits patiently as I continue to fuck her—panting, almost as if she’s determined to see me flinch.

Almost as if she wants me to prove I’m not just another man who will entertain her until she draws blood, or whatever it is she’s experienced to make her arm herself this way.

But I don’t. Instead, I curl my hand around the side of her throat, reaching under, not to grip or threaten, but to cradle her. Remind her that I’m still here. Still a man amidst the want and delirium, and… and hunger. Still hers.

Stabbing me—or whatever it is she plans to do—can wait. I’m not finished with her.

I bring my mouth to hers; that seems to be okay.

She kisses me back hungrily, and my thrusts grow deeper, longer as she arches into me.

Whimpering against my lips, Annie stretches and crests over my cock, and I swallow the sound.

With one particularly rough thrust, the shears fall to the mattress.

She’s scrabbling at my back, scratching and likely drawing blood, but I don’t care.

All I can think about is hers.

And we… I haven’t even considered protection. Surely her poor grandmother can hear the bed creaking and my grunting like some poor beast.

“Annie,” I pant against her cheek, grazing my teeth along her ear. “I’m going to come. Where do you want it?”

What the fuck did I mean , Where do you want it? What was I doing?

Once I start coughing, once the fever returns for good, the port authorities would bar me from entry back to Paris. I’d have to make a full recovery here.

But… I was never going to return to France, was I? I’d known that when I accepted the summons and stuffed nearly every piece of clothing from my appartement in Saint-Germain into two luggages.

I would not return to my home ill, not with everything behind me. At the very least, not without her.

I freeze. Does she know that?

Fighting these monstrous urges of lust and craving the companionship I most definitely do not deserve, I move to pull out of her—but Annie’s fingers find my throat, squeeze, and yank me closer. I snarl, my hand flying warningly to her wrist. But I don’t dare remove it.

“Come for me, Jacques,” she begs, her voice like honey. “Wherever you want to.”

That’s all I need to hear from her. I buck, groaning against her collarbone, our sweat and sex mixing in the heat of the late September night, tempered by the gentle breeze fluttering the curtain’s edge across the top of Annie’s head .

I ease myself out of her, and she directs me to a neat pile of laundry in a basket under her bed. I clean her gently—she’s no longer bleeding—and just when I tug my drawers on and find her a nightgown from her drawers, a slow, winding melody floats up from the cracked window.

Annie finishes tugging the sheer gown over her head and crawls over her bed to peer out the window. We both glance down to spot a lone fiddler in the street, entertaining some of the night crowd.

“At this hour,” I comment, my forehead refreshingly cool against the windowpane. I’m not grumbling; the tune is pleasantly morose, somewhere between a waltz and a dirge. One I’d find out of place for a street entertainer.

But tonight, as the stars hold their breath and these strange hungers subside, it’s fitting.

Beside me, Annie’s on her hands and knees humming, her eyelids heavy with sleep. But she doesn’t cocoon herself in the duvet under us. Instead, she shuffles off the bed.

Like a man possessed, I follow.

“Dance with me,” she murmurs, the ghost of her gown swirling around her calves, the waves of her hair brushing her shoulderblades.

And so, I do. Barefoot on the worn floorboards, half-dressed and unguarded, swaying in the glow of a flickering oil lamp and the soft silver spilling in from the window.

Her cheek rests against my chest, my chin upon her head as I cradle her.

I press a tender kiss into her hair, and know immediately that this single night, in all of its quiet magic, is not enough.

“Jacques?” Annie says, after we’ve been swaying for a while. Minutes or an hour is anybody’s guess.

“Annabelle?”

She speaks without craning her head up. “Take what medicine Amah gives you tomorrow, and forget Beecham’s Infirmary, okay?”

The infirmary is the very reason I’m here, and it wouldn’t look very good on my resume if I abandoned the case, but it had happened on occasion.

I was contracted, and didn’t work for the police here.

I’d never work for them. I’d find other jobs eventually…

a different line of work entirely. Not that I’d be in any particular hurry.

There are certain lingering benefits to having once belonged to a family like mine.

“Do you mean, pursue it later?” I ask.

“Forget it altogether.”

I pull back; her expression is hesitant, as if she understands the weight of what she’s asking. I only smile and twirl her. “And? What do you propose we do instead?”

Annie ducks under my arm. “Fresh air and some sunlight would be good for you. There’s a place near the old cathedral. St Paul’s. It’s quiet, all stone and shrubbery. Mom and I used to go there when I was little.”

“A church?”

“The husk of one. Moss. Tombstones. There’s a difference.”

I don’t need further convincing. I hum against her, and we continue dancing until after the fiddler has retired. She’s cradled in the crook of my arm, and we lay there side by side, listening to the sounds of the street.

Annie is radiant in the lamplight, as if her skin is illuminated from within, and I find myself wondering how, after becoming so well acquainted with grief, I’ve managed to end up here.

In this creature’s arms, as she burns up with life.

It feels suspiciously like reprieve, or a dream I won’t survive.