River Of Fire (56 page)

"I wonder if Bowden ever really believed your father was a murderer," Kenneth said pensively. "Since he had too much pride to end the estrangement, his desire for an investigation was a way to stay connected to Helen and Sir Anthony. To be indifferent would have been to lose them both."

"
A
classic example of how love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin." Images began flickering through her mind. "There's a painting in that somewhere."

"Now who's drawing the flames while Rome burns?" he said with amusement.

She finished her soup and set the mug on the bedside table. "Bowden must be pleased with the outcome of your investigation."

Kenneth nodded. "He's canceling the mortgages. It seems far too great a payment for what I did, but he insists on fulfilling the terms of the original agreement."

"You found the murderer and indirectly paved the way for Lord Bowden to reconcile with Father," she said quietly. "I think he got a bargain."

"Ah, but I also met you, which might never have happened otherwise. That would have been payment enough."

Kenneth set his mug aside and leaned forward, his face taut with emotion. "Now that I'm in a position to marry, I give you fair warning: I'm going to do my damnedest to coax you to the altar. I can't change the reason I came to Seaton House, but I hope it counts for something that I love you rather desperately." His eyes darkened. "I… I didn't fully realize how much until I came so close to losing you forever."

He reached into his pocket and brought out the gimmal ring. "I found the heart band on your finger and joined it with the other pieces." He handed it to her. "The ring is whole again."

She stared at the ring, almost suffocated by the chaotic emotions that his words triggered. Terrified by their intensity, she set the ring aside and said in a frantic attempt to change the subject, "What were you drawing?"

The scar on his face whitened at her blatant rejection. After a moment, he said, "I was inking in some details on a watercolor, but I don't think the picture is suitable for showing a convalescent."

"That sounds irresistibly interesting," she said lightly.

He shrugged and lifted the drawing board. "It's a picture of what used to be my worst nightmare," he said as he set the board across her lap. "I have a new nightmare now—the sight of you being dragged toward a cliff by a madman."

His watercolor picture strikingly depicted a massive tree set in a sun-seared Spanish plain. It was dawn, the sky was clear and delicately tinted—and from the branches hung the bodies of a man and a woman. The woman's long black hair floated in the wind, mercifully obscuring her face.

Rebecca felt a visceral shock of understanding. "Maria's death?"

He nodded, his face rigid. "About the only comfort I had after I was captured and the rest of the guerrilla band was executed was knowing that Maria was a long way off, and her older brother Domingo was with her. I was put in chains and sent across country to the French headquarters. We rode until well after dark, then stopped at a campsite by a tree. It was too late to build a fire, so we had bread and cheese and wine in the dark, then rolled up in our blankets.

"But I… I couldn't sleep. I knew something was horribly wrong, but had no idea what. Finally I woke the officer in charge of me and made him move thirty or forty paces away. It wasn't quite as awful there, though I still didn't asleep. Then the sun rose and… and I saw Maria and Domingo."

"How horrible for you," she whispered, her throat so tight she could barely speak. "I wonder that you didn't go mad."

"I did for a time." He closed his eyes with a spasm of pain. "Two days later, I managed to escape. I went back to my regiment and refused to do reconnaissance work again. It was Michael who saved my sanity. I never spoke of what happened, but he recognized desperation because he had experienced it himself, I think.

He was always there, knowing when to talk and when to be silent, until the madness had passed."

Rebecca reached across the distance that separated them and took Kenneth's hand. Touching him was like an electric shock, intensifying the emotions that pulsed through the room.

"Maria died for Spain," she said softly. "Her country is now free, and surely she and her brothers are at peace."

His hand closed fiercely over hers. "I hope to God that's true."

She felt the pain in him, and it found the matching pain in her, dissolving the frail barriers that protected her from unendurable sorrow. She was a grown woman; she should be able to accept the loss of her mother and carry on with her life. Yet inside her was a vast reservoir of grief that scalded like lava.

Voice agonized, she asked, "Do you believe in God? And in heaven?"

He hesitated, then said slowly, "I believe in a creative power beyond anything we can comprehend, and that spirit cannot be destroyed. Maria and your mother are not only at peace—somewhere they are as alive and real as you and I."

The tears she had suppressed since her mother's death erupted into a shattering paroxysm of grief. She began to weep violently. She had feared that if she ever began to cry, she would never be able to stop, and now she knew that her fear had been real. That no one could survive such anguish.

The bed sagged under Kenneth's weight. He shoved the drawing board from her lap and drew her into his arms, holding her tightly against the tempest that racked her. She burrowed against him, shaking uncontrollably and gulping for breath, as helpless as when Frazier had been taking her to her death.

But men she had been calm, beyond fear. Now she was reliving every sorrow she had ever known. She was a small girl yearning silently for attention, an older child confused by adult infidelities. She suffered again the misery of social condemnation, and the bleak belief that she was unimportant to her parents compared to the high drama of their own lives.

Most of all, she felt loneliness, and a desolate certainty that she would never be loved. That she was not worthy of love.

But she was
not
alone. Kenneth's arms cradled her, protecting her from the disintegration she had feared. Under her cheek, she felt the steady beat of his heart. Though their relationship had begun under false pretenses, he had never been anything but brave, kind, and honorable. Loving. Even the most terrible loss of her life was countered by the warmth and understanding she had found only in him.

As she clung to him, shaking, she slowly recognized the extent to which grief had paralyzed all her emotions. Now that her sorrow was released, other feelings were gushing free like a river in the spring thaw. She had not known her own capacity to love until now, when every fiber of her body thrummed with the power of her feelings for Kenneth.

And because of his love, she could recognize other love. Earlier that day, her father had offered his life for hers. And her mother had loved her, too. Not always perfectly, but with the best that was in her intense, troubled nature.

An image blossomed vividly in her mind. "My mother was there today, Kenneth," she whispered in a raw voice. "I saw her when I was unconscious, I think. She was all light, like an angel, and she was trying to save my life. Is that possible?"

"Life-and-death circumstances can thin the veil between the seen and the unseen, Rebecca." He caressed her back with infinite tenderness. "Frazier dropped you when he was shot. You began sliding toward the edge of the cliff. I managed to catch you, but the slope was too steep for me to go back.

"We were both flattened on the rock, on the verge of falling, when a fierce gust of wind struck us. Somehow it shifted the balance so that I was able to get us both to safety. It seemed unnatural—and I swear it was the difference between living and dying. Perhaps it was your mother, lending her strength to save us both."

A seed of warmth took hold in her heart, swiftly growing into a serenity that flowed throughout her body. So this was faith, she realized with quiet amazement. Love and peace and immortality were real, and she had learned them from a corsair.

She raised her face. "I love you, Kenneth," she said huskily. "Don't ever leave me."

A slow, intimate smile lit his face. "I can't promise not to die—but I will always be with you, Rebecca, in spirit if not in body. I swear it." He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers, murmuring, "Always."

His kiss was like nectar, imparting a sweet strength that miraculously healed the ragged holes of her spirit.

After sweetness came fire. She lay back on the pillows and pulled him down beside her. "Make love to me, Kenneth. Please."

He stroked her gently, but his brows drew together in a frown. "That was quite a blow on the head you received today."

"When you kiss me, my head doesn't hurt at all." She pressed her lips to his throat, feeling the hard beat of his pulse. He tasted salty, and his long journey north had resulted in a pleasant rasp of whiskers. She slid a hand down his body. "If the physician were here, I'm sure he would agree that you're the best medicine for a headache."

He caught his breath as she caressed him. "You win, shameless wench." He caught the hem of her nightgown and worked the garment up over her head. "I foresee a marriage where you will always get whatever you want."

She laughed as she emerged from the muslin folds. "That will be easy, since what I want is you."

His garments joined her nightgown on the floor. He touched her as delicately as if she were made of spun glass, but her ardent response soon changed that. For the first time, the passion that had always joined them was allowed to run free, without doubt or reservation.

It swiftly became their own private river of fire, shot through with currents of warmth, tenderness, even laughter. All of the myriad facets of love. At the height of fulfillment she wept again, this time with joy, for she had never dreamed that in surrender she would find such wholeness.

After the storm they rested peacefully in each other's arms, lit only by the warm glow of the dying fire. His head was a warm, reassuring weight on her breast.

She ran her fingers through his dark hair, the silky strands curling around her fingers. "I shall paint you as Vulcan, god of the forge," she murmured. "He was all strength and physical mastery, like you."

"And he was married to Venus." He sat up, marveling at her loveliness and his own absolute happiness. "You could have modeled for Botticelli's Venus—slim and elegant and achingly desirable." He kissed her between her breasts, then climbed from the bed and dug into the pocket of his crumpled coat.

She made a small sound of protest that ended when he rejoined her. He lifted her hand and slid the Wilding betrothal ring onto the third finger of her left hand.

"I'm getting this all backward, my love." He kissed her hand, then linked his fingers through hers. "Betrothals should begin with a ring, not a bedding."

She smiled. "Artists are allowed to be different."

"I may be an artist, but I have a very conventional belief in fidelity," he said firmly. "No mistresses, no lovers. Just one man, one woman, and one bed. Forever."

She gave him Lilith's enchanting smile as she drew his head down for another kiss. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

Historical Note

As always, history provides marvelous texture and detail to help the author. Wellington did indeed use reconnaissance officers who rode fearlessly across Spain during the Peninsular War, gathering intelligence, working with guerrilla groups, and sketching enemy fortifications. The fate of Kenneth's mistress was taken directly from the tragic death of Juana, lover of Captain Colquhoun Grant, most famous of the reconnaissance officers.

Kenneth and Rebecca's success with their first Royal Academy Exhibition was inspired by two young pre-Raphaelites, John Millais and William Holman Hunt. At age nineteen and twenty-one, they worked on their exhibition paintings almost nonstop for days, finishing an hour before the deadline on Handing-In Day. No doubt the canvases they rushed to the academy were more than a little wet. That year, Hunt's picture was accepted and Millais's rejected. The next year, though, both were successful and their pictures were hung side by side "on the line." If Millais and Hunt could do that, why not Kenneth and Rebecca?

I shamelessly combined traits of real artists in my fictional characters. I thought of Sir Anthony as a cross between Jacques-Louis David and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Rebecca was intended as a sort of proto-pre-Raphaelite, with a dose of feminism added. Kenneth's work bears more than a passing resemblance to Goya, with maybe a dash of Theodore Gericault. According to my
Oxford Dictionary of Art
, Gericault was an "archetypal Romantic artist," and "virile and inspiring." What more could one ask for the hero of a romance?

Journeys of Passion and Desire

 TOMORROWS DREAMS by Heather Graham.
Beautiful singer Penelope Parrish—the darling of the New York stage—never forgot the night her golden life ended. The handsome businessman Seth Tyler, whom she loved beyond all reason, hurled wild accusations at her and walked out of her life. Years later, when Penelope and Seth meet again amid the boisterous uproar of a Denver dance hall, all their repressed passion struggles to break free once more. (406842—$5.50)