Authors: The Dream Hunter
He straightened, watching Zenia work the small woolen socks and tie the ribbons as she changed Elizabeth into her nightgown. There was a strong aura of tobacco smoke about him, and another scent, sweet and potent on his breath— neither of which Zenia had ever perceived on him before. When he would normally move away and keep a space between them, he did not.
“No, I haven’t had an answer,” she said.
“It’s been a week,” he said again.
There was a faint undertone of accusation in his voice. Zenia was puzzled and worried herself as to why she hadn’t had a letter from her father, but she only said shortly, “It is the Christmas season.”
Still he did not move away. She could feel him looking at her. If she turned her face, his shoulder would be at level with her eyes, his black satin stock and velvet lapels so close she could touch them just by leaning toward him.
“Was your dinner congenial?” she asked impersonally.
Arden made a sound, not a pleasant one, deep in his throat. And because he was intoxicated for the first time in thirteen years, he muttered, “No. I’m wretched ill at ease in company.”
Zenia looked at him in surprise. He rested his hand on the edge of the crib. His blue eyes held a glitter; his mouth was set in a mocking curl. But as he stood there watching her, something like wistfulness came into his face.
“I am perverse,” he said. “Hopelessly perverse.” He pronounced the words with a diligent clarity, as if they adhered to his tongue. “I should like to kiss you.” He blinked at her, slow and lazy. “I would be a great fool to do it, would I not?”
Zenia felt the blood come up into her face. She looked down at Elizabeth. “Perhaps not,” she said, so barely above a breath that she doubted he heard.
He pushed away from the crib, wandering off as if he had forgotten her. Zenia stood still a moment, and then finished tying Elizabeth’s ribbons. She lifted her daughter from the crib. And this time, for the first time, Elizabeth turned away from Lord Winter and didn’t want to go to him to ride on his shoulders.
“Mama.” She snuggled her face down in Zenia’s shoulder, curling her fists up and pushing them in her eyes.
Zenia left him standing in the middle of the playroom with an expression like a rejected suitor’s and took Elizabeth into the bedchamber, laying her down among the pillows. She leaned over and put her face next to Elizabeth’s sleepy one. “He doesn’t smell so very wonderful tonight, does he?” she whispered into Elizabeth’s pink ear.
“Gah-ha,” Elizabeth said. “Na-na-na-na-gah!”
“I don’t mind it,” she whispered.
“Pah!”
“Perhaps I’m not so nice as you,” Zenia murmured, with a daring rise of her heart, “to spurn a kiss.”
Elizabeth reached up, pulling at her hair. A loose comb gave way, and dark curls fell down in a shower on her daughter’s face. It made Elizabeth flinch and laugh. Zenia loved to watch her laugh.
Elizabeth turned over onto her front and Zenia pulled the bedclothes up, smoothing them over her. She was already dropping off to sleep, facing away from the door, when Zenia snuffed the candle beside the bed.
For a week, that door had stood open. He came at four to take Elizabeth for her walk about the house, then returned her. Elizabeth took her dinner in the proper nursery down the hall, leaving the playroom to him for an hour to change into his silks, and then he disappeared while Zenia changed and the nurse looked after Elizabeth. Zenia went up early after dinner and made all her bedtime preparations, and whatever Lord Winter made of his own was done in the dark after he had put out the light on his side. As the routine had crystallized, Elizabeth had become less fussy. But she still would not allow the door to be closed. Zenia looked around at it now, pushing back her hair.
She could close it. Elizabeth was already fast asleep and unlikely to wake, from the sound of her steady snuffling snores.
Zenia went to the door. He was sitting in the wooden nurse’s chair, gazing away into a dim corner of the room. He had pulled his stock and neckcloth off. They dangled from his hand, black and white.
She held onto the doorknob. She could feel her own pulse in her throat. The candlelight made a seductive sculpture of his face, falling on his cheek and jaw and mouth; his blue eyes pensive, focused far away on nothing.
“I’m sorry that your dinner was not agreeable,” she said.
His head turned toward her. He stood up. For a moment he looked at her with that lazy, strange lift to his black lashes. “Your hair is down,” he said.
She had forgotten. But the way he looked at her—she suddenly became conscious. A woman’s hair was her glory, to be shown only to her husband among the Moslemin. Even in England all women wore their hair pinned up under caps and bonnets.
She flushed, reduced to the barefoot Bedu boy with hair falling in a tangle to her shoulders. “I’m sorry. Elizabeth pulled it down. I’ll put it up,” she said, turning.
“No,” he said. “Must you?”
She hesitated in the doorway.
“Sit down,” he said, with a little stilted bow toward the chair. “Or—is she asleep? Should I put out the candles?”
Zenia pulled the door halfway closed behind her. “Light does not make much difference. She is either ready to sleep or not. I think she has already gone now.”
“Ah,” he said.
She hovered near the door. “But perhaps you are tired.”
“No,” he said. “Not at all. Quite rested.” Then his mouth turned up in an ironic twist. “It’s not as if I do anything all day.”
Zenia sat down in the hard-backed nurse’s chair. “Your father said that you are working in the management of the estate.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “What a prodigious great farmer I am.” The ale confused his tongue on ‘prodigious,’ and he said it again, with an abashed smile. “I beg your pardon. I am—a little on the go.”
“On the go?”
“Well,” he admitted, “I am three parts drunk.”
Zenia had once or twice seen servants of her mother’s drunk, but it was a very unusual thing, only when they had managed to steal bottles from the gifts of wine Lady Hester had sometimes received from Christian visitors. In the desert, of course, there was no such thing as alcohol—it was forbidden to the faithful, and worth a man’s life among the Wahhabis. She watched Lord Winter with a wary curiosity, never having seen him take more than a glass of wine at dinner.
Except for the scent and the slur, and the indolent drift of his eyelashes downward and up again, which gave him something of a piratical air, he did not seem affected. He was very steady on his feet. He didn’t appear to be about to crash into any walls or hit anyone.
“I have been learning bounds and corners,” he said, with a tilt of his head toward the window. “And looking at ditches. And keeping my distance from a pair of perilous bullocks, so they may not put a scratch upon me.”
“Oh?” Zenia said, puzzled.
He sat down on the cot. “You are mightily impressed, I see. So you should be. It is hard.” He leaned his forehead on the heels of his hands, pushing his fingers into his hair. “It is damnably hard.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
In the worst days in the desert, she had never heard that muffled note of despair in his voice.
Zenia pressed her hands together. “I have always thought,” she said quietly, “that you could do anything.”
He lifted his head. “Have you,” he said, with a sideways look at her.
“Yes,” she said.
He stared at her for a long moment. “I’ve thought the same of you. Zenia. The flower that can grow anywhere.” He smiled slightly. “Even here.”
She hugged her knees to her breast, curling in the chair. “It’s not so difficult here. It’s easy.”
“Oh, it is that,” he agreed. “Do you know—I think we’re both changelings. You were born here, to be a lady, and I at Dar Joon to be a natural savage, but the fairies changed us.” He shook his head. “It was a cruel trick.”
She looked at him in wonder. “You would not wish to be born to this? You would prefer Dar Joon?”
“I am perverse,” he said.
“You are a madman,” she said in disgust.
He smiled suddenly. “Ah. Little wolf. Sometimes I discover you, still here. Still with me.”
“I wish to forget all that,” she said into the muffle of her gown and robe.
“Why?” he asked, in a low voice that suddenly made her throat ache. “Why do you want to forget?”
She lifted her head. “You will not understand.”
“Because you want to be a lady?” His lashes made the slow downward sweep, his gaze traveling over her. “If you sit in that unladylike way, I must advise you, I cannot answer for my actions at present.”
She sat up, putting her feet on the floor. “Perhaps I should go to bed.”
He looked at her with a open gleam of hunger. “I’ve not touched a woman since you. And now I have to sleep on this cot, knowing you’re there, just beyond that door.” He stood up, kicking a stray block aside. It landed with a violent thump against the chest of drawers. “If sleep is the word for it.”
Zenia rose, moving toward the door, listening for a sound from Elizabeth. But none came, and she hesitated. He had already turned away, sweeping up his cravat and neckcloth from the cot and tossing them over the clotheshorse.
“I suppose it’s different for you,” he muttered, pulling off his coat. “I suppose fine ladies don’t lie in bed and burn. A well-known truth, my boy!” He unbuttoned his waistcoat, as if he thought she was gone, and dropped it in the direction of the horse. The waistcoat missed, sliding to the floor. “An exceedingly well-known truth.”
While Zenia watched, he pulled his shirt loose. With a faint groan, he dragged it over his shoulders.
His bare back was tanned a deep gold in the candle’s glow, with deeper shadows across the play of muscle as he moved. But her eyes went instantly to the great scar that ran from his lower rib up beneath his right arm, a ruddy irregular wound that had not healed well, overlaid and extended to his chest by unmistakable burn marks, where red-hot brands had been pulled from the fire to sear against the lacerated skin, the Bedouins’ answer to any injury.
He dropped the shirt, turning. When he saw her, he grew still. And the desert came back between them, sharp and real. She knew what had happened; she knew him, that he would not have made a sound as they cut and probed with a knife for the bullet and then poured boiling molasses in the open gash, or cried out when they laid on the brands. It was a wound that should have killed him, by degrees, a slow dying in heat and thirst.
He said nothing. He leaned over, pressing heavily on the cot, and dragged the blankets and sheets free of their neat tuck. Zenia watched him, the strong line of his back as he stretched, the little wayward step he took for balance as he rose. She could hardly remember how it had felt when he made Elizabeth inside her. It had hurt, but she had wanted him, wanted him as close as she could make him.
“If you keep at this pretty lingering,” he said, taking a pillow from the wardrobe and tossing it down, “you may find yourself playing Lady Winter in the most intimate possible manner.”
She was going to be his wife. He had agreed to it. There was really no reason for this waiting. She knew what her father must say; she knew what was best for Elizabeth.
He straightened, with that leisurely lift of his lashes, a sidelong look toward her. “I am dead in earnest, Zenia.”
“You may kiss me, if you like,” she said.
It clearly caught him short. He stood with his hand still on the wardrobe door. She lifted her chin a little. Her heart was flooding her face with heat.
“You realize, of course,” he said mockingly, “that in England, if a gentleman kisses a lady, she must marry him out of hand.”
“Well,” she said, with a nonchalant shrug.
“‘Well.’“ The ghost of an ironic smile curved his mouth. “A most ladylike answer.” He leaned on the edge of the open door, crossing his arms. “Nothing so honest as yes or no.”
“You said that you would like to kiss me. I said yes, you may.”
His expression grew intense, his gaze traveling up over her, from her hem to her waist to her breasts and lips. “If I do it, Zenia,” he said slowly, “I’ll be damned if I stop there. And that will be the end of this farce. You will marry me tomorrow.”
She stood still, feeling weightless, breathless—uncertain of what she wanted, unable to move. She ran her tongue over her lips and saw him instantly fix his gaze on her mouth.
He pushed away from the door and moved near her. She thought he was going to touch her, but he stood before her, looking down. She was as tall as any Englishwomen she had yet seen, as tall or taller than most Bedouin men, but gazing straight ahead she saw only the arc of muscle from the base of his throat, the line of his jaw and his mouth. She would have to look up to meet his eyes.
“Tomorrow, Zenia,” he said softly, “we will marry. The license is ready; the parson will come on a moment’s notice. Tomorrow this foolishness ends.”
Somewhere in her mind, there was a reason why she should think, a consequence she would be reckless to forget—but she could only comprehend the magnetic heat of him so near to her. She could only remember his body lying over hers, the weight of him.