"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Yes. Are you?"
"Fine. Who crashed?"
"I think it was the Audi," he said grimly.
The Jaguar was running. I shut it off. It was amazingly quiet.
We opened the doors to a scene of carnage, made all the more unnerving by the absolute silence that accompanied it. The motorcycle was mangled, on its side, front wheel spinning crazily. I saw one person lying in the road, another sitting up. I hoped the camera was lost in the water at the very least. Bastard.
"Stay here, Sylvie," Paul said. In his voice, I heard the horror of what he was seeing. I glanced over, ready to look away fast, but I needed to know what exactly had happened.
The Audi had slammed into the side of a bridge. There wasn't much left of it.
My tolerance for car wrecks is miniscule, given the nature of my father's profession, the number of gruesome deaths I'd seen over the years. This was a bad one. I turned away, retching, and then realized that Paul was going to search Luca's body for the Katerina. In the distance, sirens started whooping.
"Paul, don't touch it!" I cried, and dashed toward him. "Please!"
He stopped me with a hand held out, fingers pointing in my direction. "Come no closer," he said. "You will not want this scene in your imagination,
ma cherie
."
His expression was so severe, I halted. "Please don't pick it up."
"Close your eyes, Sylvie, and turn around."
I did as I was told. Snow lit on my face in little splotches, and there was a smell of gasoline and hot antifreeze dripping on engines, and the ticking of cooling metal. I thought of Luca on the road in Scotland, and pulling him out of the wrecked car.
"Hey, princess," said the photographer. "Smile, baby."
My eyes popped open and I saw the photographer lift his camera and shoot the wreckage. Something in me snapped, and I roared across the space between us, snatched his camera, and threw it will all my might into the lake. "People died here, you bastard!"
He smiled. "Yep. And I've got it all right here." He showed me a small digital camera, and then sprinted into the night.
I let him go, the will to follow drained out of me by the long, long hours I'd been running, chasing, ducking. Bastards. It was a sick way to make a living.
The sirens were whooping closer and anxiety sprang up in me. I didn't turn around. "Paul, we need to go."
He came up beside me. "One moment, Sylvie," he said.
I looked at him. His expression was deeply serious, his eyes grave. In his hand, he held something. It was covered with blood, blood that also covered his hand. I hated the symbolism, the grimness of that vision. "Paul—"
He held up one finger from his other hand, then went to the edge of the lake and knelt, dipping the Katerina into the water, bringing his hand and the diamond up clean. He walked back, stopped in front of me, and soberly, ritualistically, raised his hand and opened his fingers, so the Katerina, clean and gleaming, dripping with water from the lake of her own country, sat like a plump egg in offering.
"She is yours, Sylvie Montague."
I stared at him, remembering his words in the car. If I took it and gave it back to him, perhaps the curse would be broken. If my love was true—
I bowed my head, plucked the jewel out of his hand, and tucked it in my pocket. "Let's go."
He took my hand, and we walked into the night, leaving the carnage behind.
Chapter 23
The very word "diamond" comes from the Greek "adamas" meaning unconquerable, suggesting the eternity of love. The Greeks also believed the fire in the diamond reflected the constant flame of love. For millions around the world that fire, the mystery and magic, the beauty and romance shining out from a simple solitaire says all that the heart feels but words can't express. However, it wasn't until 1477, when Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave a diamond ring to Mary of Burgundy, that the tradition of diamond engagement rings was born.
—www.costellos.com.au
W
e returned to the hotel and slipped in the back way. Impossibly, the ball was still going on, the laughter louder, the pleasure cranked up a notch. We went upstairs without speaking.
I was exhausted, sick at heart, confused.
And aching to be held. I thought of all the years, all the many, many, many nights I'd lain in a lonely bed and thought of Paul. Not many men, men who sometimes took his place, the
one
man.
This one. Paul.
We entered the suite and Paul locked the door, put out the Do Not Disturb sign. "We should sleep in tomorrow, hmm?"
"Sure."
My body buzzed with a dizzying mix of exhaustion and electricity and anticipation as I took off the drab brown overcoat, then reached into the pocket and pulled out the Katerina. I put it down on the table and we both reverently bent over it.
"Magnificent," Paul said.
"You know that I would give her to you if she were mine to give."
"Yes."
"Do you think it was the curse that killed him?" I asked quietly.
"I don't believe in curses," Paul said, and looked at me.
"I didn't think I did, either, but there's no denying that people who get mixed up with this jewel often die gruesome deaths."
He cocked his head, and a smiling light edged into his irises. "That's like saying cocaine is a curse, isn't it? It isn't the drug, it's the activities surrounding it that cause destruction."
"Right." At his proximity, at the closeness of his sage-green eyes, I felt suddenly dizzy, and straightened, putting cold fingers to my forehead. "Whew."
"Are you all right, Sylvie?"
"Would you mind doing me a favor?"
"Of course."
I turned around and lifted my hair from the back of my neck. "Would you kiss the top of my back, just there? Just once or twice?" I pointed to a place at my nape. "There?"
He didn't move immediately.
"Please?" I said quietly, firmly.
His sleeve rustled as he moved, and the air was disturbed around us and his lips touched the back of my neck. His lips, then his tongue, drawing a little circle there. "Like that?"
"Again," I said and my voice was barely a whisper.
He slid an arm around my waist, and I bowed my head, my hands still holding my hair out of the way. He kissed each rise of my spine, lips first, then tongue, then moved and did it again. "What else?"
"My ear," I whispered, and he obliged me.
"And here?" he asked, kissing along my shoulder.
"Oh, yes."
My hands started their trembling again, and my knees were a little unsteady too. I let it fill me up, the hunger, the fear, the conflict between wanting him and being afraid to ruin everything.
I turned. "I have never, in all my life, wanted someone to kiss me as much as I want you to kiss me now," I said, and put my arms around his neck. "Can you forget everything else and just kiss me?"
"I cannot forget," he said, and his voice was gruff. "I have waited a thousand years for this, Sylvie. A million." His breathing was unsteady, and he cupped my face, lifted my chin with his thumbs, and kissed me.
Kissed me.
You think you know what a kiss is, how it proceeds, but this was not like anything I'd ever known before. The opening of his mouth, the thrust of his tongue, the way I opened to him, to take him, all of him, into my mouth. I wanted to swallow him, or crawl into his mouth. I couldn't breathe with the wanting, with the fierce thrusting need to inhale him. I stumbled forward, pulled him tighter, pressed my body against his.
His hands were in my hair, on my neck, and I shoved his coat from his shoulders, kicked off my shoes, started pulling at his shirt. It felt I would die of the need to see his chest, bare, with hair across it; die of the contact I finally made with it. I broke free of his kiss and pressed my nose into the very center of his rib cage, breathed in the concentrated essence of his skin.
I opened my mouth and tasted his skin.
Paul's
skin.
I wanted to weep with it, and I lifted my face to his again, and there were tears on his face, falling on me. "Oh, God, oh, God," I whispered as he kissed me, pushed the dress from my shoulders, down my arms, baring my breasts, which I pressed into the silky hair on his chest, belly to belly, chest to breasts, my skin and his, and our lips tangling, his tongue so deep in my mouth, and then drawing me deeply into his. He made a soft, harsh noise as the dress fell away to my waist, and picked me up, pulled my groin into his; I wrapped my arms hard around his neck, my legs around his waist, and kissed him even more, even deeper, breathing in, tasting, touching, feeling—
It seemed impossible. Impossible. Wonderful.
This was Paul,
my
Paul. Whom I had loved all my life. Whom I had wanted for at least a decade, probably longer. Finally kissing me, me kissing him, as we were meant to do. His hand in my hair, drinking of my mouth as if he might die without it, his arm around my waist, an urgency about us that was dark and thrumming with unsaid, unsayable things, expressing a thousand moments of loss, of connection, of longing.
He put me on the bed and paused, over me, looking at me, touching my face. So seriously, so soberly, with so much awareness it pierced me through. He kissed me, slowly, breathing my name between the press of our lips—
Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie. My love, my love
—his hands pushing away my hair, exploring my shoulders.
I touched him, running my open palms down his back, surprised by the tensile strength there, corded below his shoulder blades, down his spine. I reached below his belt, in his trousers, to touch his buttocks, pulled him closer to me.
His arms were trembling, and I felt that echo in my whole body, too. "Take off my dress," I said, gasping. "Take off your pants."
"Yes," he said, and scrambled up, tugged my dress the rest of the way off me, leaving me in ordinary bikini panties. I lifted my hips and skimmed them off, too. I lay there, on a hotel bed in Romania, at last naked before Paul Maigny, the man I had seen at seven and turned to my mother and said, "He is the most handsome man in all the world and I am going to marry him."
And that man, still lean, still more beautiful than anyone I'd ever known, looked at me, stricken, his big, raw-boned hands loose at his sides. "Oh, my Sylvie, you are wounded because of my greed."
I sat up, reached for his belt, kissed his belly urgently as I worked the buckle loose, bit at his navel, rushed to skim away his trousers before he let himself be lost in musts and shoulds and all those other things that would come between us much faster than I would like.
And then, he, too, was naked, and very aroused, and I raised my face and smiled. "Oh, you are splendid, my love. Even here, you are splendid." I kissed him, his member, and he pushed me, climbed onto me on the bed, put our bodies, finally naked, together. He kissed me, deeply, slowly. "I cannot bear to rush, Sylvie. Forever and ever I have wanted to touch you this way. I have thought of it a thousand times."
"A million," I whispered, cupping his face in my hands, wrapping myself around him, feeling him rock and slide against me. Naked chests, bare arms, nude legs, unclothed, undressed. At last.
At last.
He kissed me, and we pressed together as if we could sink into each other, trade cells, meld entirely. I struggled to stay conscious of the now, of this moment, this moment when at last I could let free my passion for this particular man, touch his skin, kiss his mouth, put my hands in his thick and wavy hair. "Oh, Paul," I whispered. "Paul."
At last we could no more contain the hunger, and he moved me, parted my legs and looked at me, and then guided himself in, into the warmth. He filled me, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then paused there, braced himself on his elbows and said, "Look at me, Sylvie. Look at me."
"I see you," I whispered, and it was true. I stared right into his gray-green eyes, saw the flicker and wounds of his life; he moved, slowly, slowly, kissed me again, looked at me, and we both had tears on our faces, and we fell into the depth and pattern of our own creating, something that seemed it had been waiting for me all of my life. As my orgasm built, split me, as he slammed into me, his legs sliding against my thighs, his hands hard in my hair, his tongue deep in my mouth, I heard a catch in his voice, and he came, his mouth on my throat, my chin, my face, my lips. "Sylvie," he choked. "Sylvie. Sylvie."
* * *
We lay together in the quiet, curled under blankets while the snow muffled all external noises. We touched each other in that longing, wordless way—our fingers lacing together, then coming apart, my body pressed into his, my leg over his thigh.
I wanted to say,
I could live here, in this moment.
I wanted to say,
I have never loved anyone in my life the way I love you.
I wanted to spill my heart, my guts, my soul to the one man who might really understand me.
But what if he didn't?
He kissed my forehead, my crown. "Sylvie, do not think too much, love. Let it be."
I nodded against him, but what did that even mean?
Let it be. I slid my hands through the hair on his chest. "Your skin is so silky," I said.
"Mmm. So is yours."
He slid downward. Kissed my neck. Gently bent over my bruised breast and kissed it. Spread a hand over my lower belly. I put my hands in his hair and drew him upward to me, and kissed him. "What does that mean, Paul, not to think too much? Do you love me?"
"Yes," he whispered. "But I am not going to hold you back from the things you deserve. Children, stability, a man who will not go to his grave decades before you."
"Don't say that!" The idea of him ever going to his grave brought tears of loss, a searing kind of fear into my heart. I couldn't bear to think of it.
"I have spent years trying to keep this from happening," he said, brushing hair over my face. "I thought we might finally be safe when you married.
I had hoped I was wrong about him."
"Well, you were right."
He braced himself on his elbow, looked down at me. His hand, huge and encompassing, curled around my cheekbone and jaw. "And don't you know, in your heart, Sylvie, that I am right about this, too?"
"No," I said. "I think you don't believe in me enough."
"I believe in you now. But I have also walked roads that are yet in front of you, and there are things—" he shook his head "—that will challenge you."
"And you're afraid that I'll betray you or something? Is that it?"
"No, no." He bent close, covered my mouth with his, and we got lost in kissing for a moment. "Quite the opposite—I fear you would discover you do not love an old man anymore, and you will suffer along without leaving me, longing for someone else."
"Paul!" I cried, aggrieved. "You don't believe that?"
"You don't know what life can do to a person, Sylvie."
I pushed my face into his shoulder. "Stop it."
He moved his hands over my back, down the hollow of my spine to my buttocks. Kissed my shoulder. "Whatever happens, Sylvie, I want you to remember one thing."
I looked up at him. "What?"
He swallowed, rubbed his thumb over my forehead, along the edge of my eye. "I love you."
It frightened me, the way he said it. Why did it suddenly feel that I was going to lose everything, just when I'd finally found it?