Beast (17 page)

She held to her chair, almost shy to stand up.

Not her pasha. He rose and turned away from her, walking into the room's blackest shadows. She heard the clink of a bottle against crystal, the glug and fizz of wine.

"I wasn't criticizing." he said from across the room. "A moment ago. About your contradictory feelings toward your parents and aunts and uncles." When she didn't respond, he added, "Such feelings are not so unusual, though I found them to be uncommonly expressed. Articulate, perceptive. You are a complicated young woman in the rather engaging process of making sense of her own paradoxes. I salute you."

She laughed, lightly she hoped. "Flattery will get you everywhere," she said. Her voice, her laughter sounded more coy than she had intended. She frowned to herself. "Why don't you bring that champagne?"

She knew she was being too flirtatious; she was drinking more wine than she should. Yet the circumstance, or else this man, something—her own "paradoxes" perhaps—made her behave this way, more outrageous, more provocative. The room's blindness felt good one moment, then it turned around, leaving her vaguely apprehensive. While the man across the room moved in the dark—he breathed it, imbibed it—as if he were born to it.

She could feel his strength in the dark. He moved in it with more ease than she did. He seemed to sense her shifts and stances clearer, as if he could see her, in ways that had nothing to do with her sitting in his rooms, his territory. The darkness was his territory, as in the kennel; it was a place of power for him.

His voice stayed where it was, uncommandably on the far side of the room. He said. "It wasn't flattery. I am sincere: Your relationship to your family is fraught with the commotion that we"—he paused—"in my country call love."

Louise's face flushed. She shifted in the chair, feeling touchy, moody. He took too deep an interest in what she had only meant as passing diversion. She murmured, "I don't know what made me talk so much about myself."

"I enjoyed it." He laughed warmly. "Just as I am enjoying embarrassing you a little now. I don't know when a woman has been so"—his laughter grew softer, richer—"loquaciously open with me." He added,

"Or so humorous while she was about it."

"Humorous?" She continued to frown down into her lap, at her own indistinct fingers as they felt their way along a fold of her gown, rolling a pearl in an indention of satin.

"Yes, you entertained me." He added, "And surprised me: As pretty as you are, you are more intelligent than you are pretty. You are more honest as well as, I suspect, more generous, more giving to those whom you love."

Louise scowled deeply and asked, "Could you bring that champagne?"

She had never thought of herself as generous or funny. Or even open.

She heard him pouring, but didn't know exactly when he turned, when he walked back toward her. He apparently held to the edges of the room until he could approach from the darkest quarter, moving silently (on slippers, she imagined, red ones with curling toes, or bare feet). All she knew for certain was that he was suddenly near again.

She could feel his presence, was conscious of him. his closeness, in a peculiar way—through a heightened awareness of the sound of his breathing, the warmth, the humidity of his skin. He smelled of the ship's soap, a recent bath, his hair possibly damp. There was a faint odor of something else, something more personal, a man's toilette, bergamot perhaps.

pagne, a quiet swallow. She leaned over the arm of her chair, toward him, reached. Through the dark, she found the glass, balanced heavily, relatively full, on his thigh. "May I?" she asked. She lifted it from his fingers. Then lost it; he lifted it higher and took it away.

She was stymied. Her poise disappeared into every vacant space where she wished she could read his reaction. Was he bent toward her or away? Was he teasing? Was he serious? What was he doing?

Thinking? Conversely, she wanted to say,
Look at me. See me
. She wished she could light up her invisible beauty, distract, outshine any other judgment about her.

She leaned farther over the armrest, her whole weight onto her forearms, till her dangling fingers grazed his leg. "So," she said, "are you a holy man of sorts? Corrupted slightly by champagne? Is that why you can talk to me like this?"

"'Like this'?" he repeated.

"Like a priest? Is that what you are, a caliph or something?"

He let out a
ha
of surprise and sat back.

More wine
, Charles thought. He drank up then poured again—he'd had the presence of mind to tuck the bottle under his arm and bring it over. He topped off the glass, then licked his thumb as he set the bottle down behind him.

He no sooner settled forward again, though, than Louise bumped his arm. "Are you going to share or not?" she asked.

He let her take the glass, his fingers and all. keeping hold as she sipped.

She used both her hands to bring his and the glass to her mouth, tilting, taking a healthy slurp. Then he felt his fingers being pried off the glass. "Thank you," she said as she took it. She settled back, saying,

"So are you celibate or what?" Her usually clear enunciation had taken on a kind of rounded tone.

Nothing so crass as a slur, though she was indisputably tipsy. On a glass of champagne.

"Celibate?" he asked blankly.

"You know, do you not
want
to kiss me, because I was just wondering, since you haven't even tried."

He snorted then told her, "You're too used to young lieutenants, I'm afraid."

Charles had a vivid recollection suddenly from last night, of a girl who was not just pretty and sweet-smelling, but also tactile by contrasts: the hardness of all those tiny pearls covering the dewy smoothness of her throat, down over perfect breasts mounded above the neckline of her satin dress…

strings of pearls waylaid by the hills of these breasts, detoured into their steep valley… then more strings, longer, falling, swinging down over her taut silky bosom, to dangle out precariously, far and wide from her slender waist, like an alpinist's lifeline gone wildly amok, pitons come unplanted…

Her shadow thought about his answer a moment, then apparently granted him leeway. She sank back into her chair, a hush of cushions and silk. Her ease was all the more engrossing in that he had just told her in so many words that he cared less about kissing her than about taking her measure, about judging where a kiss would lead them.

Through the dark, he reached over, touching her arm. He ran his hand down her forearm to the champagne.
God help him
, he thought; his fingers tingled. He felt a mild lift, the first pressure in the battle with the seam at his trousers, the buttons at his fly. He shifted forward on the piano bench, letting gravity reposition him as he smoothed his fingers around the back of her hand to find her palm. In this manner, he repossessed the glass, raising it away, his chest rising with it, then sinking. He closed his eyes. His breathing accelerated.

She was right. He was resisting, he realized. Why? Then this became a stupid question. He liked this Lulu Girl, cheeky, precocious thing that she was. He didn't relish hurting her or playing any sort of dark joke in which she was the laugh. Besides, her awakening to be possibly horrified by him didn't seem so funny anymore.

On the other hand, he wouldn't mind kissing her—having a little sample, as it were, of the bride-to-be.

God above, was she luscious
. Maybe even a very large sample, a full sample. Never mind his presumptuous idea of giving her a lesson in humility. New plan: Let her have her fling, quite safely, with him. There would be no embarrassment to his pride; no shame for either of them. Then he could send her on her way, off into marriage and fidelity—

Fidelity
. Charles's brow drew down at the word, till the scar at his eye pulled the skin at his hairline. He couldn't help asking, as casually as possible, "Do you think you will be faithful once you are married?"

"To whom?"

"To your husband, for God's sake."

"I don't know." Louise didn't seem to be paying too much attention. "I hope to be faithful to someone someday, you know, faithful to something…" Her voice drifted off.

She reached over the arm of her chair, leaning toward Charles. Her hand found his thigh and the wine balanced there. She possessed the glass then didn't sit back, drinking another swill of champagne, an audible chug. She set the glass down on his thigh again, as if he were a table, leaving her arm draped there. "You know, this is much better than the champagne the captain was serving at dinner."

Ah, more than one glass
. He wondered how drunk she was, while her sweet hand drooped perilously close to a quickening piece of evidence of how little any wonderings or ruminations were going to matter in a minute.

Charles leaned closer to her in the dark, closer toward a pretty young woman on a slightly sideways ship who sought the shelter of what must be a very secure part of her life—the attraction of the opposite sex.

Which he felt in spades. The backs of his eyes were hot from it.

He was going to kiss her. He was going to. She wanted him to; he was going to. Yet he sat there, reluctant, inexplicably cautious—only God knew why—of what seemed to be happening, anyway.

She made a joke out of it. "Has the cat got your tongue? Or some other part of you?" She giggled nervously at her own bawdiness, then said, "I'm not drunk. I want you to know I'm not drunk. I swear it."

She raised a hand high enough that the dim light from the curtains outlined a flat palm, a sworn oath. "Ask me anything." She was not squiffed exactly beyond reason, but she was ever so loose. "A question about Islam?" she suggested.

God forbid
, he thought. He would kiss her just to shut her up.

Charles reached for her, finding the curving crown of her head, the back of her cool, silky hair, knowing, as he slid into the sexual, he was making a mess of his equilibrium somewhere. He felt upside down, frowning, smiling, drawn hopelessly… He found Louise Vandermeer dear, surprising, puzzling; bright, funny, sweet. His wild, misunderstood thing—he would gnash his teeth at this naive assessment in only ten minutes (and wish to shoot himself for it in a month's time), but at this particular moment as he leaned forward through the dark to find her mouth, he thought the description not just apt but positively inspiring.

While Louise herself was transfixed. With his hand cupped at the nape of her neck, this man whom she had never fully seen in the light pulled her through the dark toward his mouth. Anything tentative about him disappeared in the touch of his lips. He angled his head and kissed her with openmouthed greed. Her senses lit; they became the brightest point in the room, blinding white heat. She turned her face into the kiss as if it were the sun, as he took it deep into her mouth; wet, lascivious, hot. She opened her lips further, wallowing in the swift, steep pleasure of it.

There was an inciting, palpable ardor to his kiss, in the press of his warm, slightly chapped lips, in the deep, slippery-moist inquiry of his tongue. Each second her heart beat faster and harder than the second before. As he kissed her, her hands of their own accord lifted off the arm of the chair. They hung—caught in erotic startlement—in midair. Until her pasha took hold of her just above the elbows and stood, taking her up with him into the drifting, anchorless dark.

No chair, no support, just the rough ride of a leaning, ploughing ship that brought her against a tall, solidly built man. He was broad through the chest, lean, more muscular through the arms than she had expected; athletic somehow. Though nothing matched his thighs. They were thick, hard, thewy and sinewed; a horseman's thighs, a strong horseman. (She imagined Arabian stallions ridden bareback in the desert.) She braced her weight against him, and he against hers; together they countered the movement of the ship. As he kissed her again, something dropped—the pearl. It bounced,
tap-tap-tap
, across the floor, with shorter and shorter distances between contacts until it
laddie-tapped
into a smooth roll across the tile and into the fireplace.

All modesty and control rolled away with it.

He brought her arms round his neck, and she clung, rising up on her toes, pressing herself to him. How strange this was. It was not that Louise had never felt the building sensations of willingness, but she had never felt them in such quick, sharp succession, as if all at once. As natural as gravity, his palms descended the underside of her arms into her armpits, the heels of his hands nestling against the edges of her breasts. His hands kneaded where the flesh first mounded at her ribs. It was a delicate titillation one moment, then his hands slid around them, encompassing. He took full possession of her breasts, and her breath caught. She let out a great, groaning burst of air into his mouth.

Charles swallowed up her groan in another fierce descent into her mouth. He wanted to live off the air in her lungs. His own breathing was ragged, coming in huffs like a steam engine. The only other sound he was capable of making was a grunt of satisfaction as he pushed her breasts together, letting them release back into his hands. Louise's breasts were full and high and warm to the touch—and smoother than the satin of her dress where her flesh pushed the neckline. He lifted these breasts, compressed them, weighed them, all the while stroking their tips with his thumbs. He mounded them above the neckline of her dress, then breathed down the deep channel there, a humid heat, before he kissed the place he'd made, mouth and tongue.

Louise bent her cheek to her shoulder and groaned. Her heart pounded in her chest, a hard, radiating beat that pulsed her throat, that throbbed down into her belly. She prayed for his hands and mouth to be everywhere, not to miss an inch of her. This man in the dark exceeded all imagination. Secure…

un-cowardly, un-celibate… hot-mouthed, smooth-handed, warm-chested. In fact, bare-chested. She realized her hands had come to rest down into his robe at his shoulders, onto bare skin. He wore just trousers and a robe, half naked, her sheikh, her pasha of a primitive race. One sleeve of the robe was soaking cold where it brushed against her. Her fingers inside the edge caressed his neck. The hair at the base of his skull was damp. She touched his cheek. She wanted to kiss his face, his jaw, his nose, his eyes.