Suzanne Robinson (23 page)

“Good afternoon, ladies.” He included them both in his greeting, but he was looking at Kate. She spun around. From her expression he would have thought she’d been forced to eat tadpoles.

“Hellfire.”

Hannah sighed, and Kate put her fingers to her lips. Alexis ignored her lapse.

“How are you two getting on?”

Hannah floated over to him and gave him one of her sheer-as-cambric, helpless gazes. “We have been practicing demeanor. Earlier we tried polite conversation. I’m afraid Miss Grey knows so little of Society that it was necessary to lecture rather than converse.”

“I don’t know any of those people,” Kate said. She was squirming inside her corset, but Hannah frowned at her and she stopped. “Not only that. I can’t draw or sing or play the piano.”

Alexis went over to Kate and took her hand. “Don’t look so unhappy. You can learn to sing.”

“Only if you like to suffer.”

Trying not to grin, he thanked Hannah and suggested that the lessons be suspended for the day. Hannah agreed; she always agreed with him. Offering her limp hand for him to kiss, she poured a glutinous smile on him. He knew he was supposed to notice the difference between Kate’s brash healthiness and her languor and delicacy.

“Thank you,” she said. “I find myself quite fatigued, and I know I shall have to spend the rest of the afternoon on my sofa in order to be fit for dinner.”

When they were alone, Alexis offered to show Kate the
keep. She agreed happily, and they strolled across the lawn and inside the old tower. With walls fifteen feet thick, and the only light the little afforded by arrow slits and windows set high above the ground floor, the keep was chilly and black inside.

They entered a great vaulted chamber. Windows were set behind the second-floor gallery at the end of deep cone-shaped passages, giving the whole place the look of a sanctuary. The keep was the oldest tower at Richfield; the rest of the castle had grown up around it.

Threading his way through workmen’s toolboxes and saw horses, Alexis led Kate to the center of the keep. Beside them was a circular fireplace set in the floor. He pointed up at the wooden gallery barely visible in the faint light that struggled through the recessed windows. Beneath the gallery and spreading out toward them, was a massive pile of armor and weapons. Axes, staves, and pikes jutted from the pile at all angles.

“I’m having the gallery beams shored up or replaced,” Alexis said. “It’s not safe to walk around up there anymore. That’s why all the armor and things have been shoved out of the way.” He gestured toward a spot on the gallery lit by one of the windows. “Before a battle, the lord of the castle would stand there and speak to his men, who gathered below, where we are now. My ancestors hung thieves and murderers from a gibbet on the roof.”

“I think I would have preferred hanging from the keep like a battle pennant to being tossed into the oubliette.” She shivered, and Alexis took her back outside. They waited a moment to let their eyes adjust to the sunlight.

Alexis bent down and whispered in Kate’s ear. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who could wear mourning and not look drab. Black makes your hair shine and turns your skin to snow.”

She turned to him, and his heart jerked at the sight of her smile.

“I think you’re pretty too,” she said.

“Pretty!”

She nodded. “If you went to San Francisco you’d have all the ladies panting after you, and that’s saying a lot since there are hundreds of men for every woman. I think it’s because you look like you belong in one of your pictures.”

“What?”

“Like the one in the great hall. That one of the prince who was killed. He’s wearing a sword and riding a giant black horse. When you walk into a room, everyone looks as if they’re going to fall on their knees or bow.”

“I think you’re imagining things.”

She shook her head and swept an arm around her. “You take all this for granted, but I think you must have absorbed dignity and authority from the castle’s stones or something.”

“You make me sound like a doddering archbishop.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I come from a city that was a village of less than two hundred people before the gold rush. The oldest building in San Francisco couldn’t have been standing more than ten years. But this place …”

They walked on, and Kate looked around at the curtain walls, the towers and battlements. Alexis looked too. Her excitement was catching.

“In this place, I can feel time,” she said. “Sometimes, when I walk up one of the stone stairways, the ones that dip in the middle, I think of all the feet that must have gone up those same stairs throughout the centuries to wear away the stone like that. And I wonder, are we as different from them as we’d like to think?”

He turned to her and grasped her forearm. “That’s the way I feel. No one else cares whether the older parts of the castle fall down, or if the keep needs new beams, or if the Saxon and Norman manuscripts in the library disintegrate.”

“They ought to care.” She poked his chest with her finger. “People didn’t just arrive in this modern age all on their own. What we have is built on the experience and knowledge of centuries.”

“Exactly what I told Val the other day. Do you know what he said?”

“No.”

“He said we’d all be better off living in tribes like the American Indian.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. She glanced at the moss-covered keep. “I like it here.”

“This is wonderful. At last I have someone I can tell all the grisly stories about my family. Would you like to see our Ghost Tower?”

She started tugging on his arm. “Show me now. Right now.”

He took her hand, and they walked together to a drum tower in the east wall. He shoved a door open to reveal a narrow stone staircase. Kate hesitated and glanced down at her crinoline.

“You’ll have to help me squish all this so I can get in.”

It wasn’t easy, but together they mashed the hoop down so that Kate could get up the stairs to the top of the tower. By the time they reached the chambers at the summit, both of them were winded.

Alexis opened a door set in the last turn of the staircase, and Kate squeezed through it. He had to duck to get inside. Kate was walking into a long, arched recess that ended in a diamond-paned window. She tried to get near enough to see out, but the bulk of her petticoat-padded crinoline made it almost impossible. She stepped back.

“Damnation! Ooops. I mean, oh dear.”

Alexis chuckled. “I think for the moment we must cast aside fashion. Shall I turn my back?”

She bobbed her head with such enthusiasm, he smiled and turned to face the dark paneling. Hearing the swish of
fabric, he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder. Kate was flushed with the effort of gathering the yards and yards of her skirt to her waist, and was now trying to see over the mountain of material to untie the tapes that fastened the crinoline. He snapped his head back around as she lifted her eyes.

“Alexis.”

“Yes.”

“Would it be terribly improper of me to ask you for help?”

God was kind. “I shan’t tell anyone.”

“Then could you get this hellish, I mean awful contraption unfastened?”

“I think I could do that.”

He was careful not to touch her body, but after he loosened the knots, dragged the awkward contraption down past her hips, and helped her step out of it, his hands were shaking. It didn’t matter that stockings, a shift, and petticoats separated his hands from her flesh. He could make out the outline of her legs and buttocks. It was at that moment that he decided he wasn’t going to stop at removing the crinoline.

With carefully studied negligence, he allowed her skirts to fall into place while he rose and put his hand on her waist. She looked up at him in surprise, but he guided her to the window seat. Helping her kneel on it, he opened one of the panes. They stuck their heads out. Below was a sheer drop made longer by the fact that the tower was built upon an outcrop of rock. Moss crawled up the face of the rock and invaded the stone of the tower. A breeze whipped Kate’s hair free, blowing a strand across his face. He twined his fingers in it and crushed its softness into his palm. She pulled back into the room, and he let go of the curl.

“This was one of my first projects,” Alexis said. He helped Kate settle herself on the window seat. “The room
needed new roof timbers, new plaster. And the furniture hadn’t been seen to since James I died.”

“It all looks uncomfortable.”

He smiled as she surveyed the chairs made of heavy, dark wood. There wasn’t a cushion in sight.

“I must admit,” he went on, “the bed took some refinishing. It was the one the lovers died in. The ropes were rotted.”

Kate was instantly up and trotting toward the bed. “What do you mean the lovers died in it?”

He strolled over to stand beside her. “This is sometimes called Lettice’s Tower.” Leaning against a bed post, he studied the wild curls that cascaded over Kate’s shoulders. “Lettice was the only daughter of Sir Richard Hopwelt, who got the castle when my family was dispossessed for fighting for the Yorkists against Henry Tudor. She was spoiled, but left alone much of the time while Sir Richard was at court.”

Kate tested the mattress. “And being bored?”

“She entertained herself with her father’s young, well-endowed steward. That’s Lettice’s portrait over the fireplace. As you can see, she would have no trouble seducing a man. Anyway, the poor fellow would meet her in this room late at night. He knew he risked death, but he was so besotted he didn’t care.”

Kate climbed up on the bed and sat, her legs swinging. She looked down at her feet, then bent closer to peer at the floor. “Alexis, there’s a stain.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes grew as big as plums, and he quickly sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. He lowered his voice to a whisper.

“One night Sir Richard came home and found them asleep in this bed. He went mad and ran the steward through with his sword. Impaled him to the mattress.
Then he dragged Lettice from the bed and threw her on the floor. Right there. And he stabbed her to death.”

Kate pursed her lips. She leaned over to study the faded bloodstain. He leaned with her. They leaned back. She looked at him, their faces close together.

“I wonder if she thought having him was worth it,” Kate said.

Brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers, Alexis kissed the corner of her mouth. “When you desire someone, not having them is so painful that it becomes an obsession.”

Her brows went up. “Really?”

“Really. ‘Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,’ my dear.”

While she was thinking about the words, he was absorbed in the redness of her lips. He was about to kiss her again when she spoke.

“Is it like that? Madness?”

He didn’t have to ask her what “it” was. “A little. Pleasure fills the senses until there is no room left for anything else.”

Putting one arm behind her, he rested his weight on it, and she leaned back as he eased toward her. He caught her with his free arm so that she wouldn’t fall. When her back met the mattress, he followed her down into a kiss.

Her cheeks were hot, and she wasn’t protesting. Afraid to speak, he kept up the assault until she was breathing as rapidly as he was. It was almost impossible to keep his head. In spite of the damned corset and the thickness of her bodice, he could feel the pliancy of her breasts. His fingers tangled in curls of fire as he unfastened the buttons at the back of her dress. He didn’t want to give her time to think, so he pulled a breast free of the bodice and fastened his mouth on the nipple. To his surprise, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed herself into his mouth.

Expecting a fight, he was disconcerted by its absence.
In his surprise, he lost the reins by which he’d been guiding his passion. He was lying beside her, and he inched his leg up until it lay across her pelvis. It wasn’t enough. Giving in to the lust that was driving him, he swept skirt and petticoats upward and burrowed his way between her legs.

“Oh, hellfire.”

He lifted his head. “Did I hurt you?”

She didn’t seem to hear him. She was staring up at the canopy that covered the bed. He watched her eyes close, then she thrust her hips into his. Alexis sucked in his breath and knew a dread that made him want to scream. He put his cheek to her breast. She was thinking again.

“I can’t stand it,” she said. Her voice trembled. “I’ve decided, Alexis. I’d rather have the madness than the pain.”

His head shot up, and he stared at her flushed face in disbelief. She had decided to have him. After all his plotting and attempts at sensual disarmament, she had removed the choice from him and taken it for herself. He had no time to pursue the thought, for Kate pulled his face down to hers and started nipping at his cheeks and lips.

“God,” he said in between kisses. “I can’t stand this either.”

He got rid of her clothes. Refusing to let her become embarrassed, he lay down on top of her as soon as she was naked. He teased her nipples, pressed his fingers into the soft flesh of her breasts, and ground his hips against hers. One thrust was enough to tell him that he had to get his trousers off or burst through them.

A little hand worked its way beneath his jacket. It invaded his shirt and stroked the skin of his breast. Another hand joined it. They tugged impatiently at the shirt.

“Aren’t I supposed to see you?” She sounded so unsure and so disappointed, he smiled.

“I didn’t want to frighten you.”

He pulled his jacket and shirt off while he kissed her face and breasts. Boots and socks vanished, and he freed himself from the imprisoning trousers. Again he didn’t give Kate time to panic. He came back to her, shoving her legs apart, and lowered his body to hers once more. His loins were burning and swollen. When they touched hers, she jumped. He murmured words of assurance, and she quieted.

He had planned the seduction of Kate Grey down to the last kiss. Those plans vanished the moment he moved his hips. As his rigid flesh pressed into the moist triangle, he felt her small hands knead the skin on his back, and then—incredibly—they sought his buttocks and squeezed.