SPOILERS AHEAD
One of my favorite scenes in the book is the encounter between Minuette and Dominic on the night of her 18th birthday. It was one of the first scenes I wrote when I conceived the story, and it is one of the few untouched scenes to survive from the original long manuscript I finished in 2005. Hampton Court is one of my favorite places on earth and when I visit it next week with Jake, you can bet I will be wandering the kitchen lanes imagining that Dominic is about to come around a corner. (Note to self: Must. Not. Frighten. Normal. Tourists.)
I've always wondered what Dominic was feeling during this emotionally-laden encounter, so I finally wrote it for my own pleasure. I hope it brings pleasure to one or two of you as well :)
(And for the musically inclined, the inspiration song for this scene is AFI's Silver and Cold)
First
Kiss
Dominic’s
Point of View
28
June 1554
When Minuette disappeared with Jonathan
Percy, Dominic only kept himself from following by dint of pasting himself
against a tapestry on one of the great hall’s long walls. Several people tried
to speak to him; he rebuffed them all equally without even troubling to
distinguish one flatterer from another.
He knew the moment she returned, his
nerves alerted almost before his eyes caught her coronet of golden hair. She
met his gaze and, without hesitation, headed straight for him. Like a homing
pigeon. Or a friend who has good news to share. He knew his stare was
uninviting but when did such things deter Minuette?
She did not immediately speak of
Jonathan’s proposal. Rather, with a shy smile, she said, “Come dance with me,
Dominic.”
Dominic shook his head, knowing that if he opened his mouth he would be
lost. And when Minuette laid a hand on his arm, he stepped away abruptly from
the contact and, with the briefest of bows, escaped into the crush.
Without knowing where he was headed, Dominic simply walked. Perhaps the
movement would drive away the desire to seize her by the shoulders and shake
her until she came to her senses. Except she wasn’t the one who was being
suffocated by possibilities and the echoing taunts of ‘too late’ and the wish
to hit someone very, very hard.
Instinct led him away from crowds and courtiers, from the false
brightness of drunken voices and the dazzle of multi-coloured silks and
velvets, until he was deep in the servants’ section of Hampton Court. The
stables he knew, but these lanes wound through domestic buildings: enormous
kitchens belching with fire and steam and storehouses reeking of everything
from fresh game to salted fish. There were plenty of people here, as well, but
unlike the court they were unimpressed with Dominic. If they even knew exactly
who he was. As thunder rumbled nearby, he drew one deep breath to relax.
And then he heard her footsteps.
The click of heels and swish of skirts was unmistakably that of a woman
in court dress and who else would come after him when he was doing his best to
look menacing and unapproachable? Dominic rounded a corner by the pastry house
and turned, arms crossed to confront her.
She came around the corner ten seconds later looking suspicious and
irritated and heart-stoppingly lovely. His only hope was attack. “What do you
think you are doing traipsing around these lanes in a dress that cost more
than these people will see in their lifetimes?”
“I wouldn’t be traipsing around if you
hadn’t run away from me as though I had the plague.”
“I didn’t ask you to follow.” And please, he thought, please go away before I say or do something
I regret.
“Dominic, why are you angry?”
He opened his mouth to argue and she said impatiently, “Yes, you are
angry at me. What has happened?”
“You’re imagining things.”
He saw the flare of temper in the set of her chin. “You’re a rotten
liar, Dominic. However did you manage as a diplomat?”
Because he wanted so desperately to drive her away, he said the worst
thing he could think of. “I hear you’re betrothed to Eleanor’s brother. I
imagine you’ll quite enjoy family gatherings with Giles Howard.”
She looked at him as though he’d struck her and he instantly apologized.
“That was unforgivable. My temper got the better of me.”
“Then you admit you are angry.”
With my father and my mother and
the world and Jonathan Percy—especially Jonathan Percy—“Only with myself. I
wanted something and, in my arrogance, made no effort to secure it. And now it
is too late.”
Her eyes were enormous and filled with an expression Dominic had never
seen from her before. “What did you want?” she whispered.
It was beyond his ability to stay still another second. He uncrossed his
arms, which were as tight as though he’d been restraining someone else, and
moved forward one deliberate step at a time. She stepped back as he came, until
the wall was behind her and she couldn’t go further. Dominic did manage to stop
moving then, but let his hands come to rest against the rough brick, so close
to her shoulders that he could feel the warmth of her skin.
Leaning down so that her face had to tilt up to his, Dominic asked, “Do
you love him?”
“What?” She sounded rattled. “Who?”
“The Percy boy. Do you love him?”
He hadn’t known he was going to ask that. What the hell was he doing?
She must think him mad, looming over her in the rain that had finally begun to
fall, demanding an answer to a question he had no right to ask.
With a wrench, he stepped back and dropped his hands. She continued to
stare at him with a wary intensity that suggested she thought he had lost his
mind.
“Forgive me,” Dominic said, in a voice that passed for normal. “You need
not answer that. He, of course, is in love with you. A desirable quality in a
husband.”
He saw her swallow and braced himself for her to tell him the news, to
ask for his gladness at her betrothal. But before she could speak a servant
came around the corner and stopped short, eyes darting between them once and
then making a hasty retreat.
Dominic knew he had to get away from her, which meant first seeing her
safely returned out of the kitchen lanes. “Do you wish to return to the
dancing?”
“No, I . . . my chamber will do.”
Dominic concentrated on two things as he walked: navigating the maze of
a mostly unfamiliar part of Hampton Court, and not touching Minuette. The
latter was by far the most difficult.
There were torches burning at each end of her corridor, just enough
light not to trip over anything but not enough to illuminate subtle expressions.
He was glad she could not see his face as he bowed goodnight. He let his breath
out as he turned away from her, then stopped breathing entirely as she once
again laid her hand on his arm.
For once in his life, Dominic let himself stop thinking and act as
instinct drove him. Slowly—ever so slowly—as though she were a bird that might
take to flight with too sudden movement, Dominic curved back to her as though
she were his lodestone. He focused on her hand, coaxing it gently off his
sleeve until it rested in his own hand. Her fingers were narrow and pale in his
battle-roughened palm.
With the kind of attention he had previously reserved for field tactics,
Dominic cupped his hand over the top of hers and turned it until her own palm
lay face up in his. She shivered and there were warnings in the far distance of
his mind, but they were buried by the urgings of his heart.
He had only ever kissed Minuette’s hand in jest, but he had never been
more in earnest as he bent his head and let his mouth linger on that vulnerable
spot where her hand narrowed into her wrist. It was the most intimate act of
his life.
Minuette gasped softly, a completely different sound than her earlier
shock and anger. Though his mind was afraid to categorize it, his body knew the
meaning of it and responded in kind. And finally—finally—still cradling her
hand, Dominic looked at her.
He had thought it too dark for the nuances of expression, but he could
swear he traced every thought in Minuette’s eyes and knew that in this moment
he held her by far more than just her hand. Her hair was damp and her lips
parted and Dominic knew that in a moment his last shard of control would be
kicked aside and all he could think of was the bed waiting just beyond her door.
Minuette shivered again and the reasonable part of him almost begged her not to
do that, because surely it was a shiver of passion and if she wanted him in the
slightest he would not able to stop . . .
The tolling of bells echoed through him like the warning voice of
God—or, in this case, king. Dominic dropped her hand as though he’d been caught
in a crime and tried to pull together the shattered fragments of himself.
“Damn,” he said, not sure whom he was addressing. Then, to Minuette, “I
have to go.”
There was only way possible he could go—to walk fast and not look back.
Love this... and anything that has Dominic and Minuette together! Thanks for sharing.
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