Page 63 of My Darling Mr. Darling

“I won’t.” He hooked his fingers beneath the blanket that rode low over her hips, slowly pulling it down to expose the soft swell of her bottom.

“Dandelions.”

Her skin was so warm, so soft and inviting, it was impossible not to cup one of those sweet globes in his palm, squeeze— “I beg your pardon. Did you saydandelions?”

She blew out an aggrieved breath, pillowing her face in her arms once more. “Itoldyou—”

He smoothed away her pique with a kiss between her shoulder blades. “Vi, dandelions are a weed. The bane of every good, English garden.”

One narrowed eye emerged from beneath the tousle of her hair. “I like them. They’re bright. Cheerful.” She gave a sinuous stretch, the copious candlelight playing over her skin in a marvelous golden ripple. “You can always find them, you know. In cracks and crevices. They thrive, even in conditions that would choke out any other flower.” Curling into the slow stroke of his hands down her back, she added, “Theypersist. In spite of everything.”

Of course she would prefer a weed over a cultivated hothouse bloom. Ofcourse. But it meant something that she had shared it, this small bit of insight. Still, that faraway look darkened her eyes, and he brushed his lips at the shell of her ear. “Favorite food?”

He heard the catch of her breath in her throat. “Mrs. Nettles’ plum cake. You knew that already.”

He had, but at least it had kept her talking, reeled her back in a bit. “Favorite pet?”

Her nose wrinkled as she considered it. “I don’t know. I’ve never had one.” She chewed her lower lip as his hands curved over her hips, sliding down toward her thighs. “I’m not fond of cats.”

Neither was he, so that suited him well enough. Straddling her legs, he edged the blanket down further, sliding his thumbs over the curves of her bottom, admiring the silky, taut flesh of her upper thighs. “Favorite…” The request fell away into silence as the texture of her skin changed minutely beneath the cover of his palms, as his hands slid further to reveal flesh lined with thin, white lines layered in irregular patterns across the backs of her thighs.Scars. Very old ones, healed over long ago, but nonetheless evidence of wounds she had borne—andwouldbear for the remainder of her life.

She had gone rigid beneath his hands, her shoulders drawing up tight. Her voice, when she spoke, was very small, uncertain. “Are they…are they very ugly?”

John’s stomach pitched and rolled at the question. “No,” he said, and his thumbs coasted over the smooth, white ridges of the thin scars. “Vi, there’s no part of you that isn’t beautiful.” He’d known about this, of course, though he’d never seen them himself. Other girls had carried similar tales of beatings, always in places easily concealed. Still, he had desperately hoped that Violet had been spared this brutality, this terrible cruelty.

“They don’t hurt anymore,” she said, as if she suspected that the light touch he had feathered over the old wounds had been an effort to avoid hurting her. “I can’t see them,” she added. “But I can feel them. I know they’re there. Sometimes they feel like mountainous ridges under my fingers. I’ve imagined what they look like, and it’s always dreadful in my mind. But I can’t even see them in the mirror, really, so I had wondered…”

Even he might not have noticed them, had he not felt the texture of them beneath his hands. The lines were fine, careful. Strokes designed to inflict the most physical pain with the least physical damage. She breathed a sigh of relief when he abandoned the scars and slid up the bed to lie beside her, then turned her cheek into his palm when he cupped it, tangling his fingers in her hair in the process.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Do you mean to ask what I did to merit it?” she replied, drawing her knees up.

“Nothing you could have done would have merited being beaten, Vi.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead, laid his head beside hers upon the pillow. “I only want to understand. What you suffered, and why.”

Something unspeakably fragile swam across her gaze, her brows drawing. “They started out swatting knuckles with rulers for minor infractions. When that failed to correct my poor behavior, Mrs. Selkirk gave the staff leave to beat me. She had a switch made from a riding crop—very thin, very fine. They were adept at drawing blood. I think some of them even liked it. Theylikedto wield power over the girls in their care, and to hurt us whenever we failed to meet their expectations. They liked inciting fear; they gathered all the girls together and made us watch. Said it was adeterrent.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve read the reports, the testimony.” But he had neverseenit.

She gave a nod, followed by an odd, frenetic giggle, and her eyes had gone distant—as if she were reliving a memory that had been buried at the back of her mind. “I broke the switch,” she said, a vicious thread of satisfaction pulsing through her voice. “Mrs. Selkirk had ordered five lashes to poor Cecily—a meek, well-mannered girl who had done nothing more than share her breakfast with another girl who had missed it. So when they brought out the switch, I grabbed it—and I broke it. I swear the crack of it reverberated through the room. Mrs. Selkirk slapped me for it, but she had to order a new one, and by the time it had arrived, she had forgotten about Cecily’s transgression.” Her breath rattled in her chest. “That was the first day they put me in the Coffin. After that, I was its most frequent prisoner. She never had to lash me again. She’d found a far more effective tool.”

He wanted to argue with her, because for all the conviction in the words, he knew the truth—while Mrs. Selkirk had used that dank, cramped closet as an instrument of torture, terrorizing her charges, Violet had never been cowed by it. It had left its impression upon her psyche, but if Mrs. Selkirk had thought to use it to force Violet into the mold of the perfect, proper young ladies she had churned out, she had utterly failed.

Every punishment had only strengthened her resolve, cemented her resistance. Mrs. Selkirk and her staff had only honed the sharp edge of Violet’s fury, her derision for their petty vendettas, their cruel punishments. The crack of that switch had been the beginning of the end of Mrs. Selkirk’s school—because Violet had become an avenging angel living beneath its roof, a martyr who took up the cross for her weaker contemporaries. Despite her fear, she had sacrificed herself time and time again for those girls she had hardly known, taking responsibility for their lapses. Sentencing herself to her own worst nightmare.

Because she could bear it. Because she was strong, and angry, and unbroken.

Her eyes had grown dark, dull, as if she had been cast once more back into that dark little closet, her breathing shallow, curled in on herself. He smoothed his hand down her back in a soothing stroke, pressed his forehead to hers until she blinked, her dark lashes fluttering, drawn back to the present.

“Tell me,” he said, softly, drawing the covers back up around her; a comforting cocoon of silk and velvet, “about the night you left.”

She drew a swift breath, and her lips pressed into a thin, white line. Slowly her eyes closed, lashes deep, inky fans against cheeks that had gone pale. For a long moment, he thought she would decline, that perhaps this particular memory was too personal, too private.

“They left me in the Coffin for three days,” she said slowly. “I don’t even remember what I had done.”

Like as not, the infraction hadn’t even been her own—just something she had accepted the blame for—but he slid his arm around her shoulders and held his silence.

“They forgot me,” she said. “They forgot I was there at all, until days later, when another girl—when someone else had earned a punishment. And when they opened up the door, I tumbled out. I don’t remember it. I wasn’t conscious. Not for several days after.” Her right hand uncurled from beneath her chin, and she stretched out her palm, laying it against his chest—as if the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips steadied her, comforted her.