Last Night's Scandal (22 page)

Lisle looked at Olivia. “What engravings?” he said.

“Great-Grandmama’s,” she said in a bored voice. She put her book down, and rose from the chair.

“I’m going up to the roof,” she said. “I need fresh air. And I want to see how wide the gap is.” She collected her shawl and sauntered from the room.

I
t was most unfair.

She’d studied Great-Grandmama’s pictures. They were highly educational. She’d looked forward to experiencing those activities. But she’d kissed some men and allowed a few minor liberties and it had been disappointing. A little titillating—but that was mainly because of knowing she was misbehaving.

Then Lisle had come back, a fully grown man who’d probably learned kissing from oriental experts. He
would
go to an expert. And practice. Diligently.

Now she understood why the ladies talked so much about it and why Great-Grandmama had loved her one and only husband so much and why she’d been such a merry widow.

Not titillation.

Passion.

It didn’t require love, Great-Grandmama said. But love made a delicious sauce.

That was all very well, but passion had a nasty way of making one restless and vexed for no reason. Since Olivia had been so unlucky as to experience it for the first time with Lisle, she had to cope with balked passion, and that was most unpleasant.

She climbed up and up, wondering where all the cold air had vanished to. The wind wailed in the stairwell but it was about as cooling to her emotions as a hot desert wind.

She climbed round and round, up and up: past the second floor, then past the third floor, once the garrison’s quarters and now the servants’. Farther up she went, one last flight, then through the little door, and onto the roof at last.

She walked out to the wall, set her hands on it, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. The
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air was cool, beautifully cool, and it was quiet here, far away from all the talking.

She took another deep breath, let it out, and opened her eyes.

Stars and stars and stars.

All around her, above her.

She’d never seen so many. And there was the moon, high and bright, approaching the full. It was so beautiful, this wondrous place.

“What engravings?” came a low voice behind her.

She did not turn around. “Oh, you know,” she said carelessly. “The naughty pictures they sell from under the counter at the print shops. Along with the ones Great-Grandmama collected when she traveled abroad. Everything from Aretino to the latest illustrations for
Fanny Hill
. She and the Harpies still cackle over them.”

“I guessed it was something of the sort,” Lisle said. His evening shoes made almost no sound on the stone floor, but she could feel him approaching.

He came to a stop beside her, nearly a foot away, and set his hands on the wall. “But you never told me. You raised the subject in a letter, then crossed it out, in that provoking way you have.”

“I can’t believe you remember that.” She stole a glance at him, and that was a mistake.

Moonlight and starlight streaked his hair with silver and made polished marble of his profile.

“Of course I remember,” he said. “It was particularly aggravating at the time. I was—

what?—fourteen or fifteen? Naturally, I was dying to see them, and furious with you for teasing me. ‘Ha, ha, Lisle,’ he said in singsong. ‘I have dirty pictures. You don’t.’ ”

“You didn’t need dirty pictures. You had dancing girls.” He turned fully toward her and leaned his elbow on the parapet. He studied her face for the longest time.

She let him study her. She was a card player, a good one. No one could read her face.

“The dancing girls trouble you strangely,” he said.

“Of course they do,” she said. “Look at me.” She made a sweeping gesture, over the swell of skirts and ballooning sleeves.

“I’m looking,” he said.

“Me, in all this. Corseted and petticoated and hemmed in on every side.”

“That seems to be the fashion,” he said.

“They
dance in the streets
,” she said
.

He tipped his head to one side, his expression puzzled.

“I should give anything to dance in the streets,” she said. “But I’ll never do it. I shall fall in love, if I’m lucky, and I shall marry the poor fellow because I must not disgrace the family. I’ll turn into somebody’s wife and the mother of his children, and I shall never be anybody else or do anything else. Unless, of course, he dies and leaves me a wealthy widow and I can carry on as Great-Grandmama did—but no, I can’t do that, either, because women can’t do that anymore—or if they do, they must be much more discreet, and I’m hopeless at being discreet.”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t understand. What man would or could? Even he saw her first as a woman and
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second—or forty-second—as Olivia. Or maybe he didn’t distinguish.

“What do you want?” he said softly. “What do you really want? Do you know?”
I want you
,
nitwit
. But that was like her, to want to leap over the cliff when there were perfectly good, safe meadows to play about in.

Even she wasn’t so reckless, though, as to aggravate an already difficult situation by telling him she was—What? Infatuated?

She looked out at the world below them.

This was the highest point for miles about. She could make out the outlines of houses, faint twinkles of light in their windows, in the villages nestled in the valleys beyond. On a height not far away stood another castle. Starlight and moonlight bathed the scene. The cool wind rippled across her skin and lifted the ringlets fashionably framing her face. The brisk breeze felt wonderful.

“For a start, I want something like this,” she said. She waved her hand over the silvery landscape. “Magic. Romance. The way I felt when I first saw this castle, when I stepped into the great hall. What do you think I want? You know me. Who but Mama knows me better?

You know I want to be swept off my feet.”

He looked out at the moonlit landscape and up at the moon and the sparkling cloud of stars.

“You silly girl,” he said.

She turned away from the parapet and laughed and threw up her hands. He’d never change. Romance wasn’t
facts.
She might as well have talked to the moon and stars. They’d understand better than he ever could. To him, she spoke a foreign language—from the moon, probably.

He pushed away from the wall and held out his hand. “Come, it’s cold up here.” Practical as always. But that was who he was, and he was her friend. He couldn’t help doing what he did to her. She knew he truly didn’t mean to.

In any event, she was a selfish wretch to keep him up here. He wasn’t used to the climate.

Since he was probably chilled to the bone, he’d think she was, too. He only wanted to take her back inside, out of the wind. Protective.

She took his hand.

He tugged, and she lost her balance, and he pulled her into his arms. The next she knew, she was bent backward, one muscled arm under her waist and the other round her shoulders. Her arms went up, instinctively, to circle his neck. She looked up into his face. He was smiling a little, looking into her eyes. His were pure silver in the moonlight.

“Swept off your feet,” he said, in the same low voice. “Like this, do you mean?”
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Chapter 12

I
t was the moonlight and the starlight and the silver in his eyes and the sound of his voice.

He’d swept her into his arms and swept away thought.

“Yes,” she said.
Exactly like this.

“What else?”

“
Think,
” she said.

“Passionate kisses, I suppose.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Dangerous.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Reckless girl,” he said. “What folly.” He bent his head and kissed her.

Perhaps it had seemed like playacting. It wasn’t, couldn’t be. There was no laughter in his voice or in his eyes and nothing lighthearted in the touch of his lips. But then he wouldn’t be playing, because Lisle didn’t. He didn’t pretend. She was easily false. He was never false.

His mouth wasn’t feigning. It was firm on hers, pressing until she gave way, and she did, instantly. His kiss, hot and insistent, took up where they’d left off. The feelings remained. All the talking and logic in the world couldn’t banish them. They’d seethed, hour after hour, waiting to be let loose again.

Unfinished business. They should have left it unfinished, but it—whatever drew them together—refused to subside quietly.

And the truth was, she didn’t want it to go away. She didn’t want it to stop.

She could taste the wine he’d drunk, and that only enhanced the taste of him, and that was the taste she’d craved. She’d waited a lifetime for this, for him.

Yes, she was swept away. It was like drinking in the moon and the stars and the magic of the night. It was like flying into the moon and the stars.

Don’t let go. Don’t ever let me go.

Her arms tightened around his neck and he pulled her up and against him, and staggered back against the parapet. This time his hands moved more quickly and surely than before. He drew away her shawl and broke the kiss to trail his mouth downward, along her jaw. Wherever his lips touched, they left heat, all the way down her throat until they touched the bared skin of her breast.

She felt the quivering excitement all the way down, and she couldn’t keep back the sound, a mingled cry and moan. This was one thing she couldn’t master or control. It caught her up, a dizzying whirl of sensation, as his lips glided over her breast.

Then his hands were there, cupping her breasts. She started to cry out, but his mouth covered hers again. The fierce kiss silenced her, and she surrendered, utterly, happily,
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sinking into a sea of feelings, and glad to drown there.

She moved her hands eagerly over his powerful arms and shoulders and back. He was warm and strong, and she couldn’t get enough of touching him; she couldn’t get close enough.

He moved his hands lower, and in the night’s quiet, the rustle of her skirts sounded like thunder. But that was only her heart, beating and beating with happiness and fear and an excitement so intense that she ached with it.

This time he pulled up her skirts more quickly than he’d done before, less patiently. His hand, so warm, slid up her thigh and swiftly found the opening of her drawers.

The intimate touch was a shock, but she’d waited a lifetime to be shocked like this. The warmth of his hand, cupping her there, so intimately, possessively, and the way it felt, so wicked and delicious and mad-making all at the same time. She moved against his hand because she had to. Something inside, in the tight place in her belly, compelled her.

Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

She couldn’t speak but she could act the words, her tongue tangling with his while her body moved against his hand. Then he slid his finger inside her and she thought she’d fly to pieces. If he hadn’t been kissing her, she would have screamed.

He stroked her
there
, the place whose secrets only she knew, but he knew them, every one, and more. Everything inside her was vibrating. All the feelings gathered up, like a flock of birds, and spread their wings and shot up into the heavens, the way the birds had done this day, from this same tower, and her body shuddered, as though it was her soul that had flown up, up, into the stars.

Then she knew what had to be. Every cell of her body knew.

She’d been moving her hands over him, over the muscles of his arms and over his back and down over his buttocks. Now she found the flap of his trousers, and fumbled for the buttons. He moved a little to give her room, while he stroked her still, more urgently, and she nearly fell back, wracked with pleasure. But her hands moved instinctively, and she pushed one button from the buttonhole.

When she heard the sound she thought at first that she’d made it. Then she realized it wasn’t her and it wasn’t the crows shrieking.

Someone was screaming.

A
chilling, soul-shriveling shriek.

Lisle’s head came up, and the world spun about him. A black and silver world. Stars, millions of them.

A woman in his arms, so warm and soft.

Olivia, her face luminous in the moonlight, and her breasts, pearly white, thrusting proudly from the bodice of her dress.

The thick red haze in his mind cleared, as though a cold wind had blasted through it.

His hands on warm, slick—

No. Not again.

He pulled his hand out from under her dress, and her skirts fell back into place.

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He pulled up the bodice, stuffing her breasts back inside. What else? Her shawl . . .

Where? There. He snatched it up and wrapped it about her.

He did it all quickly, instinctively. No time to think first. He was used to that. But what . . . ?

Screaming. More. Where?

He looked down over the parapet. In the courtyard, figures ran about.

Think.

No bodies on the ground.

Good. That was good.

He started toward the door to the stairway.

“Lisle, your trousers.”

He looked down. “Damn me. Damn me to hell.” He fastened the button. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dunce
.”