A Reckless Desire (21 page)

“On a night as warm as this one, I might, yes,” he said. Her confusion was understandable, for the bed was not neatly made up like more ordinary beds meant for rest. Instead he'd made this one a respite for inspiration, indulgently piled with striped silk Turkish pillows and soft wool coverlets and bright silk quilts, all on an embroidered blue velvet counterpane. “But mainly I lie upon it and gaze up at the sky. By day I watch the clouds, and by night the stars, and let my thoughts wander where they will.”

As soon as he'd spoken, he realized what an astonishing confession that was for him to make. An English gentleman was supposed to proceed through life with purpose and forethought, and not while away his hours and thoughts lying on his back and staring idly up into nothingness. He had wanted to share the roof with Lucia, but perhaps he'd shared too much.

“That is, I read whilst I am here,” he said, hedging. “I consider it my outdoor library.”

She smiled, her arms folded inside the coverlet. “Liar,” she said softly. “You know it, too.”

He shook his head doggedly. “I'm not lying. I do read here.”

“I'm sure you do, Rivers, because you read
everywhere,
but that's not why you brought me up to this rooftop,” she said. “Earlier you said that you wanted to prove to me that you didn't live through your books. Yet here, now, when the proof is all around us, you're denying it.”

He made a low grumbling sound deep in his throat, feeling completely abandoned by the words that were usually his facile friends. Why was it now, when he'd so much he longed to tell her, he could say nothing?

She, however, didn't seem disturbed in the least. She tipped her head, gazing up at the gauzy wisps of clouds drifting over the silver moon.

“In our Whitechapel lodgings, I'd always take the outside place in the bed,” she began, her throat pearly pale and vulnerable in the moonlight. “Three of us shared the bed, you know, and being on the outside isn't as warm as taking the middle or the wall, but from there, if I lay on my side, I could see the sky from the little window up near the eaves.”

He nodded, letting her continue uninterrupted. He hated the thought of her living in such a place, yet she had simply accepted it as her lot, no doubt the way countless other young women in her situation were forced to do. But she wasn't one of them: she was special, and he would make sure that she'd never go back to that kind of life again.

“It was only a little scrap of sky,” she was saying, “squeezed by roofs and chimney pots, but I still could see the stars. On some nights, I'd even see the moon glide by, and I'd think of all the great places and grand folk that same moon had smiled upon. It made me forget what had happened during the day, and gave me the freedom to dream.”

“That's it exactly,” he said, though he was looking at her, not at the stars. “The same moon, those same stars, shone on Cleopatra and Marc Antony, on Eloise and Abelard, on Petrach and Laura.”

She glanced at him uncertainly. “Cleopatra I know, but not the others. Are they all grand folk, too?”

“In their way.” He didn't want to explain that they'd all been famous lovers; not because he was reluctant to mention lovers, but because tonight he didn't want her to think of him as her tutor, endlessly explaining what she did not know. “But I've always thought that of the moon as well.”

She smiled wistfully. “From now on, whenever I see the moon, I'll think of it shining down on you.”

He didn't want to be reminded of a future without her in it. “But tonight that moon is shining on us together.”

“Yes,” she said softly, a single word, then turned away from him.

He wondered if she felt the same sadness about their future, or more accurately, their lack of a future together. He almost hoped she did, even as he could not think of what to say to ease her regrets, or his own—especially as that faceless specter of the bland, proper young lady who would one day be his wife rose, unbidden and unwelcome, in his thoughts, only to be quickly banished.

“Can you see the stars better with your spyglass?” asked Lucia, fortunately unaware of his thoughts. She ran the fingers of one hand lightly along the telescope, a large and costly instrument of mahogany and polished brass that he kept here on its tripod stand, pointed to the heavens.

“It's not a spyglass,” he said. “It's a telescope.”

She nodded solemnly, the way she did when she'd learned some new piece of information and was storing it away. Ordinarily it pleased him to see her learn something new like this, but now he winced inwardly, realizing too late that he must be lecturing once again.

“A telescope, then,” she said, looking down at her reflection distorted on the polished brass tube. “What is the difference between the two?”

He barely refrained from a discourse on the variety of lenses, of curvatures and spherical and chromatic aberrations and corrections.

“Spyglasses are used at sea by mariners to plot their voyages and adventures,” he said instead. “Telescopes are employed by astronomers and other learned gentlemen in their studies and observations.”

She glanced up, and smiled wryly. “I need not ask which you are.”

“You might be wrong.” He stepped closer to stand with the telescope between them. “When I am here, Lucia, I can imagine whatever I please, with the stars I see through this as inspiration. My thoughts can take me on adventures that no sailor in his right mind would dare ever choose.”

“Will you show them to me, too?” She gazed up at him, her eyes brighter with excitement than any of the stars above. “The way you promised?”

“Of course.” Quickly he unscrewed the brass dust cap that protected the lens, made several small adjustments, and turned the telescope toward her.

“Place one eye to this place, here, shut the other one,” he said, guiding her to stand behind the eyepiece. “Now with your hand here, slowly turn this and scan the sky until you find a star.”

She did as he'd said, letting the coverlet fall from her shoulders. She shoved her hair impatiently back from her face as she concentrated and peered through the telescope.

“You needn't hold your breath,” he said. “The sky is filled with—”

“Oh, Rivers, I found one!” she cried. “Oh, and it's so blessed beautiful I can't bear it, so pure and white. Look, Rivers, see it there, brighter than a hundred silver spangles all together. No, a
thousand
spangles!”

She stepped aside for him to look, unable to keep from hopping up and down with excitement. “Can you see it, Rivers? Can you?”

“I couldn't miss it, could I?” he said, sharing her excitement. “That one's not really a star, but a planet, one of the brightest in the entire sky. Most appropriately, it's the planet Venus.”

“Venus?” she repeated, smiling, and clearly not sure whether to believe him or not.

“Venus,” he said firmly. “I would not toy with the heavens.”

“Let me see it again,” she begged, squeezing in between him and the telescope. It was natural enough for him to put his arms around her waist, and natural, too, to pull her close against his chest, her body fitting neatly against his.

“Can you see it now?” he asked, his lips close to her ear.

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice dropping to a husky whisper. “That star's so beautiful, Rivers. I know it's still so far, far away from us, yet looking at it this way, I feel as if I could reach up and pluck it from the sky.”

“If I could do that, Lucia, then I would,” he said. She was so small and feminine in his arms, and he felt the warmth of her skin through the red silk, felt the vibrancy that was always in her. “I'd claim that star for you to have so you'd never forget this night.”

Swiftly she turned around to face him, still within the circle of his arms.

“But I won't forget it, star or not,” she said wistfully. “Because I won't forget you, Rivers, not ever.”

“Lucia,” he said softly, brushing those tossing curls away from her face. He could have lost himself in those luminous dark eyes, even before he'd had a chance to kiss her again. Instead all he did was lose what he'd meant to say next, and in his muddle he fell back on more lines from the play—lines that were nearly appropriate, because they'd been said by Hamlet to Ophelia, but not quite, since they were being repeated as a mark of the Danish prince's careless seduction.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt that the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.”

There, he'd said that he loved her, even if it came by way of Hamlet. And he
did
love her, loved her in a way that he'd never loved any other woman.

She caught her breath, drawing back. “Do not taunt me like that, Rivers. I—I cannot bear it, not from you.”

“It wasn't intended as taunting,” he said, surprised by her reaction. “Not at all.”

Her eyes swam with unshed tears, and her slender throat convulsed with emotion. “Then don't say it as wretched, faithless Prince Hamlet, for I've no intention of falling from a tree and drowning myself. Say it for yourself.”

“I love you, Lucia,” he said, the words so simple and yet meaning so much. “I love you.”

“You are certain?” she asked, her voice no more than a breathless, broken whisper. “That you love me?”

“Never more certain of anything in my life,” he said firmly, not wanting to leave any doubt. “I love you, Lucia.”

She tried to smile as a single tear escaped to slide down her cheek and along her jaw. “And I love you, Rivers. I'm daft, I'm mad, I'm a fool to speak such a thing aloud, but—”

“You're not,” he said. “Not at all.”

Before she could speak again, he tipped her back into the crook of his arm and kissed her, a kiss blistering with all the passion he'd been keeping bottled up within himself for these last weeks. He had his answer. He loved her, yes, but better, infinitely better, to learn that she loved him. It was all that mattered to him now, and all he'd left to do was to show her how much she meant to him, and how much he wanted her.

But with that handful of words, she was his now. Her full, ripe mouth was his to kiss and taste and relish as much as he wanted. Her round, full breasts would finally fill his hands as he'd so often imagined, her lithe legs would part for him, her body would rejoice with his as they truly made the love they'd just declared.

He couldn't mistake her hunger as she kissed him, her little tongue darting against his as she made small happy moans of excitement that he felt rather than heard, vibrating between their mouths. Her hands were everywhere, blindly sliding under his coat and waistcoat and up along his back to his shoulders and down again over his spine, as if striving to learn every bit of his body.

It excited him, knowing her desire matched his. What little restraint he still possessed was rapidly fraying as she began to open the long row of buttons on his waistcoat, her fingers brushing against his chest. Impatiently he growled, and brushed one of her hands aside and cupped her breast, her flesh warm above the scarlet silk. Deftly he pulled the already-low neckline down farther, freeing both her breasts from the stiff boning of her stays, and immediately her nipples tightened against his palms. She shuddered, arching into his caress with a hissing small sigh of pleasure, and he kissed her again with unapologetic hunger, marking her as his.

He had to get her to the bed, only a few steps away. His thoughts had narrowed to one goal, desire pounding through his blood and more especially in his cock. She was so small that it was nothing for him to sweep her from her feet and into his arms and across the carpet.

But before he could set her down again, she had wriggled free of his embrace, stronger than he'd guessed. Now she was backing away, determined to separate herself from him. She stopped just out of his reach, tantalizing him, her lips parted and swollen from his kisses, her eyes wild. Although she pulled her shift back over her breasts, her aroused nipples showed through the thin linen in a way that was almost more enticing than if they'd still been bared.

“What the devil?” he asked roughly, stunned. She could not change her mind, not now, not after they'd come this far, yet the gentleman that he'd been bred to be knew that he could not force her against her will. “Lucia, please, you can't mean—”

“Are you certain no one can see us from here?” she asked breathlessly, tossing her hair back from her forehead. “Are you sure of it?”

“It's impossible,” he said, breathing hard. “No one can, and no one will.”

“Very well.” She raised her chin, almost defiantly, and yanked the carefully arranged pins from her hair. She raked her fingers through the heavy waves, breaking the stiffened curls that Sally had labored so to create, and shook her now-freed hair back over her shoulders like a wild, tousled mane.

“I love you, Rivers,” she said, her voice shaking, “and
will
love you, here, with only the heavens as witness. But I'll come to you without shame, without artifice, without acting, without these fine things that you've bought me.”

“There's no shame between us,” he said firmly. “Whatever I've bought for you was meant as a gift, not an obligation.”

“That's not what I mean, Rivers.” She pulled the pins that closed her bodice from the silk and shoved the gown from her shoulders, leaving her standing before him in her stays, shift, and petticoats.

“Lucia, please.” He reached out his hand to her and she backed away, shaking her head.

She kicked off her slippers as she quickly untied the knot on her petticoats and her hoops as well. She let them fall around her ankles and stepped free in her stockinged feet, her gaze never leaving Rivers's face. Finally she reached behind her and undid the knot that closed her stays, pulling apart the lacings until she could work the stays over her head and cast them aside as well.