Elisabeth Fairchild (27 page)

She slept. Soft, he moved to her bedside, stood holding high the bed curtain. Her face was peaceful, golden in the glow from the fireplace. Guilt troubled him briefly. He brought with him anything but peace. Chaos, trouble and yearning, these were his to offer, and little else. He missed her company, missed the soft, peaches and almond sweetness of her. He closed his eyes, savoring the scent, wishing her awake, wishing for her silky wetness more than that of the bath.

In the shaft of blued light from the window stood the tub, beside it a table, and on it, a plate of bread and cheese, potted pigeon, an apple, three sweet cakes.

He took up the bread and cheese, wolfing it down as he checked the door, made sure it was locked, stripped away the low-brimmed hat upon his head, shrugged out of the billowing garrick coat, unknotted the red belcher at his throat and bit into the apple. In a small pile he left his clothes, on the window side of the tub--in case he need make a run for it. His breeches he slipped last, just before he eased himself into the chill water.

More than chill, it was freezing. His flesh shrank from the cold clutch. He almost spit apple across the room.

“Yi . . .” Stifling the yelp, with a slosh of water, he lifted himself out immediately, by way of his arms, bum dripping, stomach muscles tensed, manhood shriveled, gooseflesh lifting high every other inch of quaking flesh.

He could not hover there forever, intimidated by nothing more than cold bath water. A squeaky gasp from the bed and he plunged back in, trying not to splash, or make too much of a banging noise against the linen draped walls of the tub, muttering profanity under his breath.

A stifled laugh from the darkness.

He no longer had the breath to laugh or curse. His jaw had assumed a pained clench in an attempt to stop his teeth from chattering. He plied the soap with manic haste, rinsed with equal speed and discomfort.

Convinced he might feel the cold less if he plunged the whole of him into frigid wetness, he shut his eyes, slid down, water closing over his head, cocooning him in a brief, icy silence. His head rose again, the plan an utter failure, head pounding, face needled by the cold. Sputtering, shivering, dashing water from his eyes, he grabbed blindly for towels, cleanliness be damned. His benumbed fingers encountered leg instead--warm, shapely female leg.

His eyes flew open, soap stinging, water dripping, confronted by the bleared vision of Dulcie, dark hair spilling down her back, clad in the moonlit white of a gown too fine to remain impenetrable to the light from the banked fire. “Mind your toes,” she hissed as she poured a huge kettle of steaming water into the bath at his feet.

“Ahh!” he sighed, stirring hot into cold, his arm a paddle, his limbs squirming into the miracle of warmth. “Bless you. Bless you. That’s lovely.”

“Shh!” she warned, finger to her lips, leaning close enough to whisper. “I thought you would see the kettle steaming on the hob.”

He felt like an idiot. He was not wont to play the fool.

“Care to join me?” he asked, voice low, intentionally seductive, damp palm meandering a suggestive course beneath the filmy gown, up her well muscled calf, pausing in the hollow of her knee.

“I am quite clean, thank you.”

A towel landed with a splash, in the water in front of him. He daubed, left-handed, at his face. “I will make it worth the wetting,” he promised.

“No!” She turned her back on the offer. The fabric of leg, of gown, slipped through his fingers as she returned the kettle to the hob, gown diaphanous, glowing like a cloud of gold about the luscious curves of her body. “Manchester was a mistake,” she whispered.

“Only in that people died,” He plied a soap that smelled faintly of almonds.

She returned to her bed, nestling among the covers. “Why is Thistlewood in need of a milk wagon?”

“It would be safer if you knew nothing.” He soaped his hair, rinsed it.

She turned her back as he rose from the bath, grabbed up linen from the floor, and made short work of drying himself. His nakedness made him long for hers.

“I have seen a house,” she said.

It seemed a
non-sequitor
.

“In the touch of two different men.”

“Touch?” His toweling came to an abrupt halt.

“The house explodes.”

Towel tucked about his waist, he plucked up his clothing, piece by piece shook it out over the bathwater. What a shame to enrobe clean body with filthy clothes.

“What has this to do with a milk wagon?”

“I thought you could tell me.” She turned to face him, her gaze flitting nervously from bare chest, to drape of linen and back again. “Oh dear, wait!”

Drifting across the bed, in an explosion of bed linen, like a clumsy ghost, she delved into a trunk at the foot of her bed, emerging with a bundle.

“A fresh shirt,” she said. “Old pair of buckskins. Father can no longer fit into them.

He crossed the room, took the bundle.

She wore a heated, doe-eyed look, pupils large and dark, fearful and aware, her hand trembling in the exchange, fingers like ice.

“You are cold.” He dropped the bundle, catching her hand in his, held it to his heart. For a moment her fingers uncurled, fluttered birdlike against his bare flesh. When he would reach for the other hand, she jerked away.

He bent to retrieve the clothing. “Thank you. Thoughtful of you.”

He shook the folds from the blouse, and threw it over his head. She had returned to the haven of warm sheets by the time he emerged from the neck. He perched beside her, on the edge of the bed, to don the breeches. The warmth of her body clung to the sheets. He longed to throw them aside, that they might share a deeper heat.

He shook wet hair out of his eyes, along with the sort of thoughts that blinded him. “This house? These men?”

“Yes.”

God, but she tempted him, propped among the pillows. He paused in lacing the breeches. Her eyes upon him held promise.

“A house with exploding windows,” she said, agitated. “Screams.”

“In whose touch have you seen this? Mine?”

“No. Thistlewood’s, and the West Indian’s.”

Davidson. He rose from the treacherous trap her bed might prove, plucked up a dry towel and knelt by the fire to vigorously rub dry his hair. When he would finger free some of the resultant tangles, she pointed.

“A comb. On the dresser.”

He knew where she kept her ivory comb, rose to get it, felt strange in using it, as though she offered something as personal as her body in offering him cleanliness and comfort.

She watched his every move from the nest of the bed, drawing about her pale shoulders a corner of the bedclothes. He did not feel the cold, though his hair had yet to dry. The sight of her set his blood afire.

Her teeth chattered with a cold that had less to do with the temperature of the room than with the burning, nerve stretched need for warmth between her legs. To see so much of him bared, muscles dimly backlit in candlelight, here, in her bedchamber, only a few feet from her bed, and none of it for her--seemed a special sort of torture. She knew too well the warmth he had to offer--the heat he could rouse.

The bed swam with room for his body. His hair, shimmering flame-like, unbound, begged touching.

“Do you think you could recognize this house?” His eyes closed as he dragged the comb through his hair, the action, coupled with the heat from the fire, lulling him.

“You must come to bed,” she whispered.

That woke him. Cinnamon brows arched with interest into the cascade of tousled fox-red hair. His eyes glowed with sudden light. “Must I?”

She flung back the covers, slipped her feet into damask slippers beneath the bed, dragged a bit of the duvet about her shoulders and sank, thus nested, into the Queen Anne chair beside the head of the bed. “Rest. I will sit watch. We must not be discovered. The housekeeper has a key.”

He rose, took up a fiddle-back chair, and positioned it, back against the doorknob.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The Selwyn Townhouse, Wellclose Square, London

He asked her, more than once, if she would not change places with him. He would take the chair. She must have the bed. She remained unmoved, tried to convince him she meant to stay awake. She would read a book.

He fell asleep as they argued, eyelids drifting down twice in the midst of their discussion, voice fading, and in an instant his head sagged into the pillow and his breathing deepened.

She sat staring at him for a long while, pleased she had convinced him to sleep. His light strengthened with every deep, relaxed breath.

She had no intention of falling asleep, held no memory of the book dropped or candle burned low, of sliding half out of the chair, half onto the bed. She woke before dawn, to the first sound of wheels in the street below, a crick in her neck, face down in the pillow, the clean smell of him enticing.

He woke, gaze meeting hers, as her head rose. His hands immediately reached out, drew her into the warmth of the covers, into the comfortable hollow of his arms.

She moaned a protest. He stilled it with a kiss, warm and liquid. She slid into it as easily as he slid her into the bed, limp as a drowsing kitten, body disconnected from mind.  They came together in the pre-dawn light with a sense of inevitability. His warmth cocooned her. She found nothing to protest in his smooth removal of her chemise. Her limbs moved in a swimming sort of dance to facilitate their baring, as her nightshift, too, came away, along with the shirt she had loaned him--her father’s shirt, so that for an instant his presence invaded the bedchamber and warned her to stop.

She closed her eyes to all feeling of guilt or accountability or fear of the future. There was only here--now--only the growing light chasing away the night of her soul, illuminating the depths of loneliness and desire.

She wallowed, content in the blue of him, eyelids bombarded with splashes of purest color as they lost themselves in a riot of touching. Purest buttery gold, the bright pink stain of raspberry, pansy blue, petal soft.

Fabric skimming, falling away, the rasp of linen against bare skin, cold air kissed naked flesh. Searching fingers, warm, knowing, insistent, found the source of desires she had no notion she possessed in the heated satin slide of muscle to muscle, flesh to flesh.

The honeyed taste of his mouth fired an appetite for every part of him. She found herself drawn to touch, to tongue, to arrange her limbs in ways that would never have withstood the light of day and a mind blown free of all the cobwebs of dreaming. Their movements seemed a heated, liquid swim, an instinctual rhythm of hand and foot, arm and leg, torso, buttocks and breast.

This time no hoofbeat stopped them, nor clank of arms. The house held its breath, listening to their muted moans and stifled laughter. She allowed him complete freedom, no resistance, no defenses, only an entrancing friction, silk and rain dewed kisses and two bodies drawn together, become one.

She gave herself freely, not wantonly, openhearted, her love a gift, a joy, his to do with as he would. The colors they created, curtained their bodies from fear, from worry, from the rest of the world, colors so radiant they hung from the ceiling like tinted gauze. Light and heat wrapped her, filled her like a sponge, overflowed, washed her heart happy and light. She floated in emotion unleashed, the colors pure, vibrant, a visual ecstasy, lapping like waves, flooding her eyes, climaxing in an tidal wave of white as she cried out her satisfaction.

They clung, legs atangle, as color and the urgency of their need ebbed. Dawn peeked past the bed curtain, leaving the room washy and pale, overhung with the heady perfume of their lovemaking. She clung to the languid sense of well-being, the impression that she held now a clearer sense of herself by way of her joy in his body bound to hers.

“I might once have called this lust,” he said gently, the light still alive in his eyes. She felt the tug of its brightness in her heart, in her gut, and lower, in the wet heat that bound them. “But it is more, far more, and I struggle to remember myself a gentleman whenever you are near, so strong is it’s lure.”

Breathless, hungry, he drew her closer, as if afraid she might slip away, as if he clung to smoke. Another deep kiss, another exploration along her backbone.

“Animal Magnetism,” she said, tracing lines along his ribs. “It is animal magnetism.”

“Tell me of this animal pull,” he growled low, and nipped playfully at her shoulder.

She laughed, the laugh contagious, traveling by way of vibration from her abdomen to his. “I told you once.”

His hands slid the curve of her backside, drawing her astride. “There are certain truths . . .” he touched upon a truth so sweetly she gasped “so deep . . .” he demonstrated the depths to which he referred “they must be plumbed more than once.”

She marveled at the union of their bodies, the colors that swirled around them. “Mesmer claims that the universe is permeated by invisible, intangible waves of a fluid which can be sensed only by the inner faculties.”

“How far inner,” he chuckled, hips rising beneath her.

“As deep as one can go,” she whispered, the words born of passion.

He sighed his pleasure. “Animal magnetism. Ah, yes!” Mouth to ear, he whispered throatily, “It surrounds the body, does it not, as you surround me?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Full of mysterious streams . . .”

She moved like water against him.

“Yes,” he groaned.

“And tensions. Forever touching, vivifying each other.”

He said nothing, breath ragged.

Their twined bodies arched in what seemed a mutual effort to disappear, each within the other. The room filled with color: first rose, then butterscotch and saffron. Emerald green washed away the yellow, cerulean bled into the green, then violet, softer, fainter. Finally a burst of white filled her eyes, head and heart, filled every sense so completely that she went temporarily blind to color, thought, feeling. She floated in a beautiful nothingness, complete, vaguely conscious of his arms, his body cradling hers, the bed softer, warmer, more comfortable than ever before.