Beast (41 page)

For Charles knew all at once what—who—they were talking about, whether she knew overtly or not.

Arab Charles. More his competition, he was coming to believe lately, than all the pretty young men out here on the terrace. Here in Nice, most mornings, Louise walked to the sea, where she stayed sometimes for hours just staring out over the water.

"I used to live in Tunisia," he said. "It's horrible. Crowded, dirty. Dangerous," he added. "A bunch of lunatics."

She must have heard the bias in his voice.
This
interested her. She glanced at him, then her regard fixed on his face, his bad eye. She reached out. Her hand came close, then backed off without touching. "Did that happen in Tunisia? You have a scimitar in your bedroom in Grasse. This looks like a cut." She tried to touch it once more, then couldn't.

Self-conscious again, Charles shook his head no. "It
is
. Though a doctor made it. My eye has been blind since birth. An injury from a difficult delivery. I came out the wrong way, I'm told. The doctor used an instrument that saved me and probably my mother, but ruined my eye. The infection that followed, lanced, really put the finishing touches to it, don't you think?"

She didn't comment on this unsightly piece of him, but asked instead, "Does it cause you trouble? Does it hurt?"

"No." Since they were discussing all his fiendish features, he said, "My knee does, though. The scimitar, from my days in Tunisia, belonged to the fellow who bashed my knee. I do owe my wonderfully graceful gait to that country."

She turned more toward him. leaning an elbow onto the railing. "Why? Why would anyone hit your knee?"

"I was young, a green attache to the resident-general. The locals were unhappy with all Frenchmen. We had just taken over their country, a protectorate. One day, as I stepped out of a carriage,
voilà
, a Muslim fanatic decided Allah wanted me dead. He was wrong, though. Allah only wanted my knee shattered. He wanted the fanatic with the scimitar to bleed for two days then die of wounds I inflicted. I didn't take kindly to being attacked."

"Oh, dear. I'm—I'm sorry." she said, "that you went through these things. But I'm glad you survived them."

"I am too."

"You must hate the Arabs for that."

He shrugged. "Oh, Arabs, Moors, Frenchmen"—he laughed—"Americans. We're all about the same, good ones, bad ones." He sighed, turned around again, offering his good profile. "It's hard to like any place, though, better than this." He looked across the terrace, beyond heads to the steep cliff sides that rose behind them, while Louise at his side looked out toward the sea.

After a few moments of people bumping against them—a little crowd speaking excitedly that moved away after a minute—she said, "What about a tutor?"

"A tutor?"

"I don't much care for columns and figures, but I'm good at higher mathematics. Suppose we hired a tutor in chemistry."

"Chemistry?"

"If you want me to go with you, I think I could if I were allowed to take apart your perfume."

"Take it apart?"

"Break it down, dissect it, understand it, examine it. It—it makes me feel—I don't know. Feel things."

She looked up at him with a hopeful smile. "But it is just chemicals, no?"

"Well, no. Perfume is supposed to make you feel things. And it's more than chemicals."

She shook her head, frowning in dispute. "Well, if I took it apart, analyzed it, then I could derive the chemical formulas and build other scents, if you liked."

He gave her a distasteful look. "You want to make synthetic perfumes?"

"It's the coming thing, isn't it?"

"It's not natural."

"It's modern."

"They stink."

"Then they aren't mathematically perfect. I can figure them out, I'm sure."

Charles scowled. Blast youth and its fascination with the new and the "modern." He said, "All right.

Tutors it is. But in Grasse, yes?"

"Yes. And I will need some of your perfume. That new one and some of the attar of the new jasmine as well. And some books and a slide rule and some space in a laboratory with lab equipment."

He was a little bewildered, but relieved. Whatever it took, he was happy to have Louise agree to come with him.

He stared back into the crowd—the men tried to hide their glances at her, though they looked, even leaning to steal glances around trays and shoulders.

Charles guarded her, taking her hand again. He stood there playing with it for several moments before he realized Louise was studying him, from the top of his head to, well, down as far as the crowd would let her eyes travel, which was about crotch level if his frock coat had been open—a curious sort of range of which she availed herself.

She scanned him up then down, with people bumping into them. It didn't matter. He loved the feel of her looking at him. He brought her hand to his mouth, kissed a knuckle.

While Louise herself wasn't sure what she thought. She watched, transfixed, drawn, repelled, hypnotic to the sight of his mouth—his face—kissing the bend of her thumb.

She was coming to think of Charles Harcourt as… interesting to look upon. She watched him. studying the way he brushed his lips against her thumb, her sheer glove, the way he tilted his head to do this as he held his shoulders slightly forward, his spine straight yet his body relaxed. He was a graceful man, square, elegant, and precise of gesture. Courtly. Courteous to a fault. Courteous, sometimes, to the point of her believing he made fun of her.

He kissed the rest of her knuckles between words. "And perfume is—more—than—chemicals—" He bit her littlest finger before he offered with a smiling, wicked wiggle of brows, "It's magic."

She stared at him, wide-eyed for a moment, at the antics of his face. Then she felt her mouth begin to curve into a smile. The smile grew. It was the reaction he wanted—he laughed as her lips parted. She laughed too.

And this sound was so welcome to Charles he all but let out a shout of rejoicing. Oh, the girl's laughter, too long absent, here now: bubbly, infectious. The old Louise he knew.

She bowed her head, appealingly shy all at once. She murmured. "It's true what Monsieur Montebello says, isn't it? You are a womanizer."

He made a wounded breath. "
Paah
. No, absolutely not."

Charles curved his free hand round Louise's elbow and pulled her closer, up against the side of him. He lay her hand out in his own. opening her fingers up. tracing the underside of each as he bent it out along her voile glove and past to bare fingertip pads, then around the pink oval of fingernail. Her hands were smooth, perfectly soft, not roughened or hardened anywhere through hard work or age. He said, more honestly, "There have been, women though. But not now. I don't want anyone else. There never will be anyone else again. Only you, my Lulu. Do you believe me?"

Face still bowed, she shook her head no.

He blew air through his lips, vocalized.
Prrhh
. Insulted. Then she raised her face to him, smiling broadly.

What a smile this girl had. She was returning the favor of his teasing, playing, and.
ooh la la
. he liked it so much.

"Yes," she said. "I believe you." More seriously, she added, "Though I don't know why it should be true."

Satisfied, more than satisfied, he brought the palm of her hand to his mouth, kissed it, then rubbed the kissed spot, slightly damp, with his thumb. As if he could rub the kiss in. It was a nice moment. A really nice moment. Louise looked at him, her face and neck and shoulders suffusing with that furious red they could take on. He was willing to bet he could make her entire body flush like this, a real sight by the light of day.

For Louise, however, it was a real comeuppance, an unwelcome surprise to find herself so affected—and to discover the reason this time to be so much less amorphous: sexual arousal. She felt it clearly, was baffled, flustered by the degree. It left her without her usual solid footing, unable to function in the midst of a party, where she had always functioned so well.

Her hand went flat. It arched on its own, every finger stretched out. She tried to take it back.

He murmured, "Your mother is watching." They both knew that Isabel Vandermeer, his advocate, would not approve of (he limiting attitude Louise took with her new husband.

More breath than voice, Louise said. "Wh—what?" Beyond mere discomposure, she felt faintly dizzy.

As if to ease this, Charles let go of her hand.

But it was more an even exchange: He didn't relent, he merely rotated around in front of Louise, wedging her into the corner of the balustrade while hiding all view of her from the terrace with his body. He put his hands down on the stone rail at either side of her waist.

Louise leaned back, out slightly into the void of a long drop.

"Careful." he said. He took hold of her back. He moved close to her physically, feeling close to her emotionally, closer than they had yet managed to this point. He felt good. He was taking her back to Grasse, getting her involved in his own preoccupation. He was king of this party, if ever there was a French king of an American queen of glamorous allure. He couldn't get over her, how fabulous, how silky rich her hair, her skin, her dress, her composure, the way she moved… God, he was a regular idiot for this young woman.

It seemed utterly natural: He went to kiss her.

She turned her face. His mouth brushed her ear, her usual duck and parry. He was becoming an expert, though, at savoring little things, nothing at all—the sensitive skin of his lips against the wisps of hair at her hairline, his nose dragged along the dewy softness of cheek. With the tip of his tongue, he traced the thin ridge of cartilage that curled in her ear.

She bent her neck, ear to shoulder, turned her face, looking at him. "People will see," she whispered.

"Good. I am married to the object of my affection, so it is a new wonder for me to be able to express myself openly"—he admitted—"without worrying that a husband is going to tan me alive." It
was
a great marvel. His. His Louise. Not another man's wife, but his own. His own to love and cherish and. if he could figure out how to get in under the barriers, his own with whom to begin a family.

She arched back, out further over a drop of sixty rocky feet. "Charles. This isn't the place."

"Where is the place then. Lulu-girl?"

She just shook her head, wonder and worry and disapproval on her face. She seemed slightly appalled by either him or the circumstance, probably both. "Not here," she reiterated.

In
her
mind, nowhere was the place.

Everywhere was becoming the place, in Charles's scheme of things.

He could hear his own blood in his ears. Louise looked divine, all ribbons and draped taffeta and piled curls. She smelled divine—she was wearing that jasmine perfume he remembered from the very first night, the one with light notes of clover and acacia. She felt like an armload of silk, unraveled bolts of it in his arms, soft and shushy and slightly unwieldy as she shifted, trying to make him back off.

He did, slightly, so as to take her hand again. She relaxed a little, giving it over, a compromise. Yet he could feel her light, ragged breath hit his thumb. He could see the rise and fall of her silver-blue breasts—as he rolled her gloved arm over again, cupping the top of her wrist in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the inside, the buttons of her gloves.

He lifted her wrist to his mouth, brushing his lips along the buttons, then pressed kisses onto the only skin available: into the spaces between the glove's closures. Looking as chaste and innocent as possible, he licked his tongue into the first of these openings, wetting the skin there. A man took what he got. He closed his eyes.

"Charles—" She tried to pull her hand away.

He wouldn't let go. "Take off your glove." he murmured.

"Charles." She couldn't catch her breath. He could hardly believe this. Louise, breathless for strange-looking him. "I—No one has ever—This—" She couldn't speak, either.

What he was doing to her felt so strange and new 10 Louise. So indirect. So unlike what she was familiar with. It hinted that there was more, a great deal more, with which she was sexually unacquainted… things Charles Harcourt knew all about, a man whose appearance in all likelihood required he make a specialty of the circuitous, the suggestive, the slow, strong, inexorable build that insinuated itself into a woman's senses before she knew what was happening.

Not a monster—no vampires or incubi here—but a man, a husband in possession of a preternatural ability with an explainable origin, a faculty that was rather frightening in its strength.

"I can't have much of you." He entreated, "Let me have your hand." Adding, "Your bare hand."

She pulled her kissed hand away, rolling her fist, glove and all, into a curl against her chest.

He kept his palm out, asking. "Let me. It's just your hand."

"But the way you hold it—" She couldn't finish. She looked around, a quick glance that yielded nothing since he had her more or less backed out onto the cliff.

Yes, villain that he was, Charles thought. Her lovely violet eyes looked at him. a sweep of long lashes and heavy lids—not exactly a maidenly glance. Then she looked down and. rather fetchingly, bit her bottom lip with the edge of her teeth.

Charles's scrotum tightened. His trousers lifted slightly into her skirts. God bless, he thought. He took her hand back and rolled it over again, the inside of her wrist up. He undid the buttons himself, then, starting at her elbow, began to work the glove down.

He didn't get far before she stopped him. Her other hand came up out of her skirts—a fist laid over the rumpling glove, a fist that contained something that rapped Charles across the hand: her fan. And here was something else that he remembered from that first night on the ship, the largish fan she had used like a cane, then a bayonet, as she'd disciplined a young lieutenant.

Charles saw it; he felt it, the little echoing knock of wood slats and stretched silk across the cuff of his shirt and the side of his thumb. Not much of a whack. But it made him see red—a quick flare of temper.