The Windflower (43 page)

"The one who put the ants in your luggage?"

"Yes! What a good memory you have! Well, Henry said, 'Missy, when you buy cheese from a man, you got to learn to look at the cheese, not the man.' "

"I'll be interested to see how you intend to apply that to Devon," he said.

"Nothing elaborate. I just thought I'd say, do you think Devon would sell me a white oak cheese?''

Six months ago Devon would have sold any woman not only white oak cheeses but wooden nutmegs and oak-leaf cigars as well. Now Cat was not so sure—but that didn't mean the man was no longer dangerous. Cat picked Merry up with a firm grip on her shoulders. Looking straight into her bluebell eyes, he said, "I think that whatever his intentions are, by the time Devon is finished with you, you're going to feel like someone's put your body through a cider press."

She blinked twice against the dying light that was dusting her lashes with pulverized gilt. Then she said simply, "I think so too."

When he let go her shoulders, she tried to sit up beside him, jumping and arching her body backward, and after her second failure Cat grabbed her under the arms and hauled her onto the porch rail by his side. She sat, kicking her legs into the blue ruffled folds of her skirt. "We could talk about
your
problems for a while," she suggested baldly.

"I don't have any problems. Morgan says I just skitter like a newt through everyone else's. ... I won't be here later, so if we're going to skitter, we had better do it now."

Being ready to talk and being able to do it without crying are two separate things. Glancing sideways at his shadowed face, she wondered how she would be able to put her emotions into words without drenching him with a tear-burst. It was a subject that she could only approach indirectly.

"What . . . what would you think of a woman who fell in love with a man who made her his captive?" she said.

"I'd think she was trying to save her neck," he replied. "If that woman's a friend of yours, you ought to advise her that a love like that doesn't have much of a future."

"She knows that already," Merry said, putting her hands on her knees. "But . . . she's less and less able to do anything about her feelings. And now that it seems as though the man is going to let her go, she can't bear the thought of leaving him." From an orange tree beyond the shaddocks came mockingbird song that filled the pause like tuned bells. "Why do you think this man would be kind to my friend while she was ill and then avoid her afterward?''

The opium had irritated Cat's eyes, and he closed them, wondering briefly how addicts could stand the attendant discomforts of frequent drug use. As the soothing eye fluids did their work he realized that this time he would have to answer her questions. Devon obviously had chosen not to talk about it with her, and Cat was grudgingly forced to concede the wisdom of that. Devon had evidently decided to free her, because unless he had given her reason to so believe, she would not have thought it possible. And he knew Devon would not change his decision unless some terrible act of Providence should intervene that— Cat stopped the thought. Rand Morgan specialized in terrible acts of Providence, and Rand, for some fathomless reason, did not want to see Devon and Merry separated. Protective fear for her rinsed like camphor through Cat's veins, and as he opened his eyes he saw that her hands, clinging to her knees, were beginning to tremble. The boy had to think a moment to recall what her original question had been. Then he said, very carefully, "If the man has some attachment to your friend, it might be difficult for him to let her go. It would be best for both if that attachment wasn't nourished."

In an oddly unmetered voice she asked, "But what if she decided of her own will to stay with him?"

Within the warm envelope of evening air Cat's fingers had become quite cold. That was one offer she must not make to Devon. "And spend the rest of her life as his unprotected dependent?" Pity had roughened his soft tones. "Running after him, nibbling his crumbs, to climb or plummet at every swing of his pitching fancy like all the others before her? She couldn't wish that for herself— and if this man feels anything for her, he wouldn't wish that either." Suddenly addressing himself no longer to the hypothetical friend, he said, "God knows, you don't have the temperament to be a whore of Devon's."

After an aching moment of silence she said, "Did he tell you that?"

"Not in those words."

"But something like that?"

"Something like that," he said.

"I suppose," she said in a small halting voice, "that marriage is not in the question?"

Marriage.
Cat's mind absorbed the word with a shock. She wouldn't have bothered to ask if she'd known Devon's full name. Oh, Christ, what an innocent she was. The Windflower. If there weren't a thousand other obstacles, Devon's complicated sense of honor would never permit him to solicit her hand while she was his prisoner. Affection was only another trap. If he loved her enough to ask, that love would prevent him from doing it. But all Cat said to her was, "As things stand, marriage is not in the question."

Sometime during the course of their talk she had covered her face with one hand, and spiraling copper-bright tendrils fell from her hair-line to invade her fingers and her thumb where they rested on her brow. Brokenly she said, "If this is the way love feels ... Is it always this painful? How do people survive? You can't imagine what it was like this afternoon—to have him hold me and whisper love words and kiss me—and then to pull away, laughing and shivering."

But Cat could imagine it. The picture of it had haunted him until he had fogged the images from his mind with opium: Merry, bitterly hurt and confused, and Devon, worried for her, caught with such brutality in the web of his own contradictions, and heartsick from it. What had Morgan expected them to discover in this emotional morass?

"Devon was shivering. How were you?" he asked.

"I wanted to retch. After, he was so kind and charming—which only made it worse. If this is love, I hate it." She lifted her head, and the dimming light showed a blue tear on the edge of her nose. Blotting the tear with a freshly sunburned wrist, she said, "I promised myself I wasn't going to cry, so I insist you discount that tear." A second tear rolled down to replace its fellow. "That one too." She curled her upper lip into a rueful grin. "This won't happen to me every time I kiss a man, will it?''

"Are we planning to kiss a great many, then?"

"Go teach your granny to suck eggs," she retorted, imitating Raven's drawl, groping for any game that would help her escape the ready tears. She didn't want to cry. Tears, by their very triteness, were a sane and human balm to sorrow, and the wintry emptiness inside her seemed to have little to do with normal mortal processes. She didn't feel as though she'd lost someone dear, or had a severed limb; those things she could have grieved over. This was like having died unborn. The pain was outside and around her, pricking at her skin, her eyelashes, the membranes inside her nose—but within her was only the chilled reflection of a soul that will not acknowledge its own agony. Yet this dull, suspended agony was bad enough. She was in no hurry to feel its full brunt.

A small family of mastiff bats lived beneath the shingles of the roof, and Merry heard the scratch of their small claws on the eaves as one by one they launched themselves swiftly into the air. Oh, to be that free. Thank heaven for Cat, warm and trustworthy at her side, and ready to be teased. She said, "Maybe I will kiss a great many, if I can figure out a way to make them hold still for me."

"Rain comes when the wind calls," he said pleasantly "You won't have any trouble getting males to cooperate. Ask one. You'll be on your back faster than a bee stinging chain lightning.'

"Will
you
kiss me, Cat?" she said and almost could have laughed aloud at his expression. "Just one little tiny kiss?"

"Christ."
His eyes had widened slightly, and light speared the glowing filaments of his irises. "I don't give little tiny kisses."

"All right, then. Beggars can't afford to be particular. I'll take what you have. If you argue anymore, you know, I shall be quite cast down. You did tell me that males would cooperate."

"If you think I can kiss Devon off your mind ..."

"I don't, I don't!" Her shy madonna face warmed into a picture of openhearted, impish mischief. "I just want to compare."

"Brat," he said in soft amusement, lowering himself in an unhurried way from the balustrade. "I'll tell you what. I'll kiss your friend—in the interest of clearing up her confusion."

Merry's heart was hammering as she jumped down with him, though she had begun to grin, and when he turned toward her, she dissolved in an irresistible fit of giggles. Trying to stop them was like trying to push froth into a bottle, and laughter quivered through her voice as she said, "Where do you want her to stand?"

"It would be fine if she stood just where you are," he said.

"And what do you want her to do?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'll do—what has to be done."

"Should she close her eyes?"

"Yes, and her mouth as well." He stepped closer, letting his gaze play lightly over the velvet of her eyebrows and lashes and her lips, with their delicately female satins. Dusk whispered through the shadowy porch, but the last streams of orange sunlight nuzzled her brow, embowed her cheekbones, and drifted in a heart-shaped patch upon her chest that led the eye pleasantly to the soft valley separating her breasts.

She had thought only that he would press a single sportive kiss upon her, so the brush of his hand against her cheek startled open her half-closed eyelids. Cat's head was slightly inclined, and she saw that his gaze had narrowed fractionally. The one upraised hand gently drew away her hair, and his eyes took on a drowsy look as he allowed her fingertip to trail suggestively over the most sensitive folds within her ear. With another man she would have been afraid, but this was Cat, and she knew that in some remote and cerebral way he loved her.

His fingers whispered over her face, seeking and slowly stroking nerve points, knowing where, how long, how much to caress. Her skin gained color under his touch; her eyes became enormous; her throat tightened. By her nose his little finger encountered a forgotten tear. Gathering the sparkling drop, he smeared it slowly over the curve of her lips and blew it gently dry. One hand came lightly to rest on her neck; the other supported her cheek as he sought her with his kiss.

"And now," he breathed, "she has to open her mouth." His thumb began a slow compelling rotation upon the frozen muscles of her jaw. "It's only Cat, Merry. Open for me." Soft kisses of languidly altering pressure wrung acquiescence from her lips, and they parted for his voluptuous pleasuring. Her mouth drank from his the scent of roses, the heady opium imaginings, the promise of sweet erotic riddles unveiled.

When he permitted her lips to leave their silken bondage, she gave him a round-eyed look that would live for months in his dreams. Then she turned to stare out across the fading landscape, and breathing unevenly, he laid careful hands on her waist and buried his face in the fragrant skin on the side of her neck, letting his hair pass in a sigh over her breast. He stood so for a moment, feeling the smooth caress of her pulse, and then he released her completely and went to lean against the porch with his heels crossed.

To Merry it was as though a portal had opened and she had briefly glimpsed his other life. It had been a courtesan's kiss—subtle, airy, tempting beyond reason, and spiced with urgent earthy pleasures. Given enough time, he could probably wring responses from a hearth plaque.

Whether he received any portion of the pleasure he gave was a question that could only have been answered by a person of much wider experience than she. Comparisons were irrelevant. For Devon the act of love had been always a feast of the senses; for Cat it had been, at best, a wearisome duty. In the ensuing silence his fingers discovered and began to caress the bare inner curve of her arm.

Merry slapped his hand away. "You've already made your point. Don't become obnoxious. I know when I've been taught a lesson."

"Including, one hopes, not to be so blithe in offering your lips to all comers?" he suggested sweetly. "But what did your friend think?"

"You know very well what she thought," Merry said firmly. "And don't try to pretend you don't. You nearly burned off her hair ribbons. Now I—no, I mean, she wants to know what comes next."

"Well, I'm not going to show you
that.
You must have formed an idea."

"Of course I have. But goodness, what if the full truth is a shock to me? What if I emerged half-crazed from my marriage bed?"

"That," he said in a dry tone, "would be highly unlikely." Then, with resignation, "Oh, all right. I don't suppose it will harm you any."

There are probably not many people who are introduced to the facts of life by a lecture beginning: "Now, look—and pay attention, will you—I don't want to go over this a dozen times. Furthermore, if you don't like what I tell you, don't squeak and fuss at me. I didn't design the world."

It should not be thought, either, that his vocabulary for such things was the same as hers, and after several shocking experiments she said, "Cat, please, do you have to use
those
words?" With opiated patience he asked her what words she preferred, and when she told him—hesitantly—he grimaced and said, "What the devil kind of words are those for a grown women to use about her body? Merry, infants give up that kind of talk with their third birthday." There followed a brisk exchange in which both parties dispelled the tension that had arisen between them by casting aspersions on the maturity, and indeed, good taste of the other. Merry had gotten much closer to being able to give tit for tat, but Cat could still get the best of her when he really chose to. Only the suspicion that she might not find him so forthcoming with this particular line of information in some future, more sober moment kept Merry from marching, in high dudgeon, from the porch. In the end they compromised on the clinical, and though Cat was wont to give a certain acid emphasis to words he considered unnecessarily euphemistic, his explanation was thorough, detailed, and dealt with variations. After he had dealt satisfactorily with all the points raised by her challenging questions, Merry was so much enlightened that Cat, holding his erstwhile pupil in a gently sardonic gaze, was perforce to say, "There now. With what you know, you'll be able to send your husband from your marriage bed—half-crazed."