Since the Surrender (28 page)

And at last they arrived before the Italian pastoral paintings. Beyond that was the room with the vast, velvet-hung bed, the mirror, and the ghostly man.

She didn’t want to look in there. It had taken on too much meaning. The painting, as usual, told them nothing.

It began to seem as if it wouldn’t have mattered whether they’d merrily jigged through the entire building with clogs on. Apart from whatever ghosts might linger, they were alone, for all intents, in the museum. They would leave no further edified than when they’d entered it.

The quiet cocooned them, then held them fast. And in some instinctive agreement, they came to a stop. And then Chase dragged in a long breath.

The sound might as well have been a thunderclap. It signaled a change in atmosphere. He exhaled with enough force to flutter the fine hairs on the back of her neck. Gooseflesh raced up her nape and arms in portent.

Which was borne out when moments later his hands closed decisively over her shoulders. She went as still as a kitten seized by the scruff.

the scruff.

He turned her slowly around to face him. Not gently. Not abruptly. Purposefully. Like someone who had decided it was time to solve a problem and knew precisely how to do it. In short: the way Captain Chase Eversea did everything.

He held her at elbow’s length, his hands epaulets on her shoulders, the grip almost accusing, as if he’d captured her in the midst of a crime.

She risked a look up to find his eyes as glitters barely distinguishable from the shadows. The semilight made a harlequin mask of the planes of his face. She couldn’t read his expression. It didn’t matter. The tremble in his fingers betrayed the drawn-bow tension in his body.

And in seconds the heat of his body, still inches away from her, had induced torpor. They stood like that, staring at each other, until their breathing syncopated.

And then…and then his thumb tentatively broke ranks from his disciplined grip.

And once, twice, again, he drew slow feathery strokes over the sharp fine edge of her collarbone. Tenderly reacquainting itself with the texture of her skin. Uncertain of his welcome. Devastating.

A long breath dragged itself shuddering up of the furnace her lungs had become, and she needed for an instant to close her eyes. She felt almost literally on fire. This would have seemed a comical thing to think only days earlier. Such a purple phrase. Then again, she supposed all clichés began as profundity. They were clichés because they were universal unassailable truths. So be it: she was on fire for Captain Charles Eversea. He was watching her. She knew he was waiting for an answer. And so she breathed in. And exhaled.

And gave a short nod.

His face came down hard.

The kiss was rough—the scrape of his short whiskers against her cheek, a collision of lips and teeth and then, and then sweet merciful God, the dark sweet hot incomparable taste of him. She moaned into his mouth. It was almost more a devouring, in truth, than a kiss; she tasted him, dueled with him equally. They feasted. They’d waited long, long years, and it seemed they could not taste each other enough.

The taking would be rough, too, she knew, when he pressed her swiftly, inexorably, back against an ancient polished bureau. Every bit of him was so implacably hard and immeasurably strong and wall-like, it occurred to her that she could not have escaped if she tried. A tiny part of her wondered whether he would allow it if she did try, such force and momentum he suddenly had, the momentum of years of wanting behind them.

And all of this ought to have frightened her.

Instead she helped him.

Her breath came in impatient puffs as she yanked her skirts upward in shaking hands as his hands were busily dragging her skirt up the back. His arms were around her back, his hands sliding hard down the length of her spine to her arse to lift her up and press her closer the length of her spine to her arse to lift her up and press her closer to the hard swell of his cock, so hard already it nearly hurt, and yet a silvery shiver sliced through her and she knew she would come sooner than she wanted and not soon enough.

He was shaking, awkward with his need, and for a moment paused, to tuck his chin against her throat as she pushed her fingers up hard through his soft hair, stroking, gentling him, though it was futile. This man contained battles, carried in him violence endured for the people and country he loved, fury over the injustices of life, at his own inability to right everything for everyone. And this could simply be release for him, but why he wanted her mattered not at all. It only mattered that she could give him what he wanted, because it was precisely what she wanted, too.

Need boiled in her.

He opened his lips, touched his tongue to where her heart was thudding in her throat, placed a molten kiss there: lips, tongue, breath, tongue. Finesse, but Rosalind didn’t require finesse of him at the moment. She dragged her own efficient hand down to the bulge of his cock and claimed it with a bold hard stroke. His head went back hard in a shock of pleasure and he hissed air in through his teeth. He brushed her hand away from his trousers, as always, a man of economy and purpose: he could get his own buttons open more quickly, and with impressive speed moments later they were.

She did momentary graceless battle with the furlongs of his linen shirt, and it began to feel like a cruel magician’s trick, the one where scarves were pulled for an eternity out of a false-bottomed hat, and he choked a laugh.

At last the shirt was clear of him and she was able to slip her hands into his open trousers and push them down.

His muscles contracted as her palms and fingertips landed first to trace the sharp contours of his narrow hips, the hard plane of his belly, the fine hair trailing from the dip of his navel and hot, soft skin beneath—getting her bearings, the lay of the land—before she took his swollen cock in her palm and dragged her hand over it, relishing the heat and power of it.

He ducked his chin abruptly into his chest, and the sigh might have held the shape of her name or might have been a profane oath of pleasure, but it was impossible to know. Her dress was now fisted in his hands and together they’d managed to gather it above her waist so that all she now wore below it was the hot motionless air of the museum.

She hadn’t even realized this sort of thing could be done from a standing position until he’d told her, but Chase’s certainty and confidence was as usual contagious, and became her own, made it seem right and even sensible. She felt his hands, hard and hot on the vulnerable skin of her arse, his fingers sliding along her tender skin, soothing and arousing her, then teasing with one slip of his finger between her cleft, testing and finding her wet and ready, as he’d found her two nights before, and her body pulsed, leaped to his touch.

And then his cock was there, the head of it smooth and swollen and hot. She whispered needlessly, desperately, “Now now, God now.”

He at first eased…then thrust hard into her.

The force of it rocked her backward, then forward. She stifled a gasp against his skin.

Locked together, he paused. He angled his head, leaned forward to kiss her.

She turned her head. Whispered adamantly, “Now.” She said it for his sake as well as her own: she didn’t need to be kissed. She wanted to be fucked.

Too long too long it had been too long.

And Captain Eversea, so accustomed to giving commands, obeyed hers.

And when he moved, the slide of him inside blindsided her. Her release struck like lightning; she immolated, became light and flame. She stifled a sob of incredulous, embarrassed bliss against his throat as her body pulsed with his; her bones were perhaps incinerated, because she nearly lost her grip around his neck, because they were both hot now, sweat slicking their skin, her hands sliding from each other around his neck.

But he had her. He had her.

He would never release her because he was intent on his own pleasure. His hands held her fast, and her hands found each other again and laced tightly round his neck, and his sweat-dampened hair brushed the backs of them. His breath gusted in her ear as his hips drummed his cock into her with the ferocity born of a need to vanquish all that had happened in the war, all that had happened between them, all of his fury and want. She felt him everywhere in her body.

And she hadn’t thought it possible, but nothing was impossible now, in this museum and moment: rushing with bonfire speed upon her until every cell was a lit fuse, another release. She thumped a fist once against one of his hard shoulders, in mad joy and fury that he could move her to this, make her do anything, make her want him more and more even as he was inside her. The rhythm of his hips grew frantic; the smack of his skin against hers was unbearably erotic.

And then it rippled through her, seismically deep, soul deep, wracking her with pleasure. Her head fell hard against him. The ragged roar of his breath stuttered, and his head rocked back; he bit his lip to keep from shouting. Her vision was peculiarly hazed; through it she could see the gleam of sweat on the taut cords of his neck.

His body went still. She felt it tremor through him; her body felt his tremors as surely as her own as he spilled hotly into her. Just breathing now.

There ought to be peace, and completion, satisfaction. But Rosalind had never felt wholly peaceful in Chase’s presence. She didn’t now.

Despite the fact that her body still seemed boneless, warm and pliant as wax, and she remained upright only because he held her. The very fact of him demanded so much from her.

She’d gotten her breathing under control and looked up. He was frowning a little, studying her. Then slowly he lowered her leg, slid his hands from her thighs. He hesitated.

And his hands came up to her face.

To her astonishment, he thumbed tears from beneath her eyes. Well, then. That would explain the haze of her vision. She was surprised and yet not surprised: he’d shaken her to the core, after all, and she was a woman, and had not given her life over to the practice of stoicism the way he did, the way men did. She gave a dismissive one-shouldered shrug. For some reason the corner of his mouth twitched up.

And then he looked down at his hand, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger gently, slowly, together. Rubbing her tears into his skin. There followed a long moment of silence.

“Well, there’s that done, then,” he whispered.

She stared at him. Not precisely the words she would have chosen. Not remotely close to a declaration of love. But what had she expected? Of all the impossible things taking place this evening, she considered that loving him might turn out to be the most impossible.

Love. She shied from the thought as though it had suddenly flown at her out of the dark.

“Come,” he whispered next.

And they crept out of the museum much the way they’d crept into it. And the journey out seemed to take an eternity and only seconds. Her body was still not her own. It was his. She felt him everywhere still, and she welcomed the silence and dark to unabashedly savor this, to hoard every sensation.

And as they passed through the Italian room once again, Rosalind thought that she smelled the smoke of her dead husband’s cigar. She wondered if it was the smell of guilt or of absolution.

As instructed, Chase’s driver, Phillips, arrived for them just an hour after they’d gone in—had it really been only an hour?—and they’d all but leaped into the carriage while it was still moving. And inside the beautifully sprung and maintained vehicle—which, Rosalind noted, still smelled a bit the way Liam had before he’d been cleaned—the distance between them was marked, as if each needed a distinct bubble in which to indulge their thoughts. To recover their equilibrium.

It was as though they had exhausted conversation, she thought, after greedily, violently breaking a fast together. And indeed, she had broken a fast.

“I’m sorry we found nothing.”

He was thinking about his failure to find answers—he who always had answers—and not about her.

She smiled a little, ruefully. “Did you…did you smell a cigar when you were in the museum?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Why?”

“I thought I smelled one the last time we were in. When no one was about.”

Perhaps it really is just my conscience speaking to me, she thought. Perhaps it really is just my conscience speaking to me, she thought.

She was nearly nodding off in a haze of fatigue when the driver pulled the horses to a halt before her little red-doored house. Chase stepped down, then reached up for her hand to help her down, too.

“Go ahead and light the lamps now, Phillips.” His voice was just above a murmur. “My thanks.”

The driver climbed down to do just that, and in moments the carriage seemed to sprout glowing eyes. Chase reached up a hand for Rosalind, and—her body, deliciously aching, humming from being treated the way a woman’s body ought to be treated—she took his hand and stepped down.

The sky was pearl gray. Dawn, she thought drowsily.

“I should like to speak to you privately for just a moment, Rosalind. May I come inside?”

So terribly formal, given that they had been climbing each other’s bodies just moments earlier.

It felt odd to speak in a normal voice after the long hush of the evening.

She was peculiarly relieved that he would be leaving. She wanted to be alone to review those shattering moments. To try to ascertain whether her curiosity had been satisfied. If the need had been sated. If it had been merely curiosity and need. And she was worried she would hear a reprise of his proposal. Perhaps his sense of honor demanded he issue one every time he touched her. She didn’t relish refusing him again.

“Very well,” she said softly.

Chase followed her inside.

He stood and watched while for a few moments she busied herself with little domestic things. The fire had burned low; she poked it up, coaxing a bit more heat from the weary coals. She moved to light two lamps. The softly swelling circle of light they created was like the rising sun by contrast to their hour of unrelieved darkness and quiet.