[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) (7 page)

When they rode beneath a stand of trees to come out on an endless, white stretch of sand, when the sound of the waves first struck her ear, Cassandra dismounted in a rush and ran across the soft sand to the water. She just stood there, smelling it, listening to it.

"It's so empty!" she said. "Why are there no villages along the beach? Are there terrible storms?"

A lift of a shoulder. "Sometimes. But this land belongs to the princes, for their hunting and such things."

"Are we being wicked, then?"

That glitter in his eyes as he looked down at her. "Very."

"Good." She turned and sat down in the sand, reaching for her shoes. "You won't be tiresome then, and be shocked if I take off my stockings and shoes?" Even as she spoke, she was stripping them away. "If I'm going to be wicked, I'd like to fully enjoy the experience."

He reached for his neckcloth and untied it, tossing it down beside her pile of shoes and stockings, then took off his coat. "We could be very, very wicked and simply swim naked."

"I'm afraid I'd rather not burn all those tender parts." She did, however, take off the offending hat and shawl. "Though you certainly may frolic nude if it pleases you."

He sat down beside her, grinning wickedly. "I certainly will if it would please you, my lady."

"What an astonishingly generous offer!"

A purely Mediterranean shrug. "I wish only your pleasure."

Smiling wryly, Cassandra stood, brushing sand from her skirts.

"A moment, if you please," he said, lifting his foot. "One would hate to ruin a good pair of boots."

"Oh, indeed." Expertly, she grasped his heel and toe and slid the boot off, then the other, and tossed them in the unruly pile growing in the sand.

He took off his stockings and Cassandra was very nearly felled by an inexplicable fist of desire, triggered by his naked feet and shins. While they were quite beautifully shaped, with high arches and silky dark hair on the straight line of shin, she had seen quite a number of ankles and toes. None of them had ever made her want to have sex. Bemused, she shook her head. "I suspect you do your share of shattering, Count."

Perplexed, he lifted his head, and saw her admiring his feet. "Ah! You like them?" He wiggled his toes and admired them himself, then plucked at his shirt. "I would be happy to take off the rest. Only in the interest of pleasing a guest, of course."

She laughed, and if it was throatier than ordinary, so what? She stretched out her hand. "Come, my wicked Basilio Let's put our naked feet in the water."

He took her hand and allowed her to help him up, then dashed toward the water with a cry. Cassandra ran after him, lifting her skirts, gasping with pleasure as the first ripples washed over her ankles. She halted, entranced, and looked down at the foam. Through the water, she saw her feet, tinted a pale greenish-brown. Sand sucked and shifted and rearranged itself in a thousand ways, and memories came tumbling from a thousand hiding places in her mind.

She was seven and eight and nine, and heard the sharp shouts of her brothers and Adriana in the distance as they shimmied up trees and played pirate. She heard the low murmur of her nanny and Monique, just behind them, and the baby laughter of the little girls.

"Tell me," Basilio said, wading toward her. "What puts that look on your face?"

It was so easy to smile with him. She kicked a little water his direction, though it wouldn't make much difference. Unlike Cassandra, he had not cautiously tiptoed into the surf but waded in with gusto, and his breeches were wet to mid-thigh. The damp cloth clung to his body, showing him to be surprisingly strong and muscular. Tiny silver beads caught in the extravagant curls around his face.

"I was thinking of being seven," she said. "I was very brave at seven."

"Too serious. Big eyes."

She nodded. "I liked to stand like this, right on the edge of the water, and imagine I was at the edge of the world. I tried to see those lands— what sounds they would have and what the people would wear and what strange creatures I would see."

"What did you imagine?"

"Elephants. India. Spices and glitter." She smiled.

"Yes, that seems right." He reached down and snared a pretty pink shell, holding it out to her in his wet hand. "No pretty rocks and bangles?"

"Oh, yes. I had many. Boxes full of them." She examined the spiral shape of the shell, and as if he were a ghost within the shell, her father appeared in her mind, not as he had been in his last, consumptive days, but as he had been then, when she was small. "My father used to bring them to me specially. We catalogued them together."

"He was a scientist, then?"

"Not really, only concerned for me. The others, my siblings, paired off, you know. The three oldest, then the two baby girls, and my cousin with Phoebe, who is just younger than me. No one enjoyed the same things I did."

"Were you lonely?" Wind tossed his hair in his eyes and he shook it free.

"Not at all." Around them the sea rushed and rustled, eternal and somehow reassuring. "I enjoyed my own company, but he worried that I spent so much time alone."

"And he took time with you." A prompt, and an obvious one, but she gave him a brilliant smile for it, touched. What a good listener he was.

"Yes. He did. He took time for all of us, really. He was a very indulgent father."

"Is it from him you get your red hair?" He touched it idly. Casually.

"No one knows where I get this hair. I'm the only one." She tucked the shell into her palm and looked down again at her feet. "No, he was an ordinary looking man, in many ways."

"And you are not."

She chuckled. "That was rather vain, wasn't it? He had beautiful blue eyes, and a wonderful laugh.

Women always loved him because he was good to his children. He was good to women, too, I suppose."

"I wish my mother had found such a man." He tossed a rock into the sea.

"So do I," she said, and he turned back to her, his hair blowing on the wind into his face, his sleeves rippling, his legs in water to his knees. Behind him, the sky cast a backdrop of vivid blue. For a long dangerous moment, it seemed that they might kiss, but the sound of a dog barking interrupted. They turned together to look for it.

It was a brown and white creature, with ragged fur and an exuberant nature. It carried a stick in its mouth and brought it hopefully to them. Gladly distracted, they played and ran with the mutt, splashing in the water, dancing in the surf, laughing and crying out jokes and warnings.

At last, pleasantly spent, Cassandra collapsed in the sand and begged for the cheese and wine he had brought. While he fetched it, the dog came and fell down beside her, panting cheerfully as she stroked his ears. She had not been so relaxed, so at ease with herself and her surroundings, in a very long time.

Maybe even since those long-ago days in Martinique.

"I love the outdoors," she said. "I always forget how it makes me feel."

Basilio collapsed beside her, dropping the saddlebag without ceremony. "So do I." He tipped up his face to the sun, closing his eyes. "The world as God made it."

"Yes." His hair lured her, and that flush on his cheeks. She itched to touch the arch of his foot, and the chest she could glimpse at the opening of his shirt. Touch him. Kiss him. Lie with him, her Basilio, who was so unexpectedly beautiful— and so much more besides.

Man as God had made him.

Torture, Basilio thought. From the moment Cassandra had appeared this morning on her balcony, her hair loose and brilliant, her body clothed in only that whisper of
gauze
, the day had been torture. When he'd come upon her standing in the courtyard, her arms flung back, her breasts uplifted and delectably natural in their shape, she had stolen his breath. Laughing as they ate breakfast, then playing in the surf with the dog, he had seen a girlish side of her, one he suspected had been set free by his homeland.

Now they devoured hunks of bread torn from a fresh loaf, and chunks of white cheese, all washed down with wine he'd brought in a skin. She showed herself adept at the process once she learned it, though it squirted first across her cheek and down her neck in a red trickle. She wiped it away with a laugh.

The air, salty and heavy, clung to his skin and the flavors burst on his tongue. Sun burned down on his head, and he wanted to shed all of his clothes and all of hers and lie here with her, flesh to flesh. He felt the want at the back of his neck, and in his mouth which he filled with cheese instead of her breasts, felt it in his thumbs and his knees and the primal base of his spine. Everywhere.

And though it was torture, it was very pleasant, too. After all, she was here now, before him. It would not always be so. He sighed and leaned back on one elbow. "Here is a moment I would capture."

She tore into a crispy crust of bread and seemed to care little that crumbs had fallen into her lap. "Are you going to give me a couplet now, Sir Poet?"

"Not today." He lay back and closed his eyes. "When you are back in your cold room, huddled next to the fire, then you shall have a letter from me, and there will be a poem about the sun and the sea and a Siren."

"Oh, I am to be a Siren?"

He opened one eye. "Not you. The dog."

She laughed. "I shall enjoy it."

Taking her shawl from the pile of discarded clothing, she spread it over the sand to protect her hair when she lay down. Her hand found his and he took it as easily, pleased when he felt her relax beside him.

Her fingers were slender and graceful, and he resisted the wish to stroke the length of them. Instead he only let her palm fall across his own, feeling heat and moisture build between their fingers. He drifted drowsily in the warm sun, listening to the cry of gulls and the patterns of the waves moving close and far, now whispering, now breathing, now and then crashing.

Behind his eyelids, he saw the shape of colors he would capture for that distant winter day, for Cassandra—the blue of the hills in the distance, the pale sand, the brightness of her hair. Copper? Too pedestrian. Titian? Too obscure. Idly, he tried a dozen possibilities. None quite captured the sense of that color, not truly. Thinking he had forgotten, he turned to look at it again, and narrowed his eyes so it was all that he saw, only the brightness of Cassandra's hair. There were gold strands glittering among some of a very deep red, and still others of a kind of sienna shade. Some vivid orange, others a soft carrot. The whole together was impossible to name.

He smiled, noticing she had drifted off, and he slipped his hand from her grasp to brace himself on one elbow. The lips in repose were full and not so reserved, and the aloof dignity that marked her eyes disappeared. He skirted her torso and hips and gazed at her feet, akimbo and sandy. Long, very white feet. like her hands. He touched a nail, oval and arched.

Then he did allow himself to look at her throat, and the dip at the base, and lower, to the soft rise of breasts above her bodice, and lower to the plane of her belly. Unbidden came a vision of that skin uncovered, and a vision of his mouth at her throat, making a mark.

She turned her head and he found himself looking down into her steady, sober eyes. "I felt you looking at me," she said quietly, and lifted one hand to his hair, a gesture of invitation and permission. So natural and simple, that invitation. Basilio found himself leaning close, thinking of her mouth.

Just in time, he remembered he could not and merely put his nose against her cheek. He closed his eyes, narrowing the moment to the smell of her—faint perspiration and soap and sea air. Her hand moved, combing through his hair loosely, then again.

He wanted her in a way he had never wanted another woman. The purity and fierceness of it felt like poetry in his blood, weighted with that same magic, the promise of perfect beauty. The force of it made his breath catch, warred with his duty.

Duty. Always duty.

With graceless and urgent will, he pushed away from her and clambered to his feet. Hurt crossed her face. But better this hurt now, than the hurt that would come if he deceived her. He turned to the sea and bent his head against the brilliance of sunlight glittering on the waves.

When his voice could be calm, he turned back and smiled brightly as if there was nothing at all wrong.

"Come," he said, extending his hand. "We must return to the villa." Impulsively, afraid to lose control if they spent the evening as he had originally planned, he said, "There is a feast in the village tonight, honoring Saint Catherine and her special blessing on the town, and we must rest and restore our strength before we go."

The flood of words did not take the reserve from her stiff chin, and he saw measuring in the very dark eyes. Wind tossed a long curl of hair around her throat, and he thought of a painting. Her mouth was a red bow that he wanted to taste. Suck. The vividness of his desire made him step back as she stood, brushing sand from her skirts.

But even as he put distance between them, his ghostly self was hurtling forward, tumbling her to the sand, covering her with his body, with his mouth, with his hands. He made a sound, soft and frustrated, and turned to the water once more, imagining the salty waves cooling the heat in him. In he breathed, then out, his hands on his hips, inhaling the air, the salty scent that might make him brave enough to make his confession.

"Basilio, forgive my boldness. I am a widow— I did not think it would offend you."

"Offend?" He turned to her shaking his head. "I am not offended." Honor lay on him like shroud. "But I must tell you something."

She nodded soberly, as if she expected it.

"Do you remember the night I wrote to you of the gypsy on the road, when I was in despair and said there was some matter of duty that caused me some sorrow?"

"Yes. It is my favorite letter."

"My father had come to see me that day." Words stuck in his throat. "To tell me my duty— to tell me…"

He halted, shook his head, then blurted it out. "Cassandra, I am betrothed. I am to be married in a month's time."

Her features might have been made of wax and her eyes of glass, for nothing flickered, nothing shifted.