Beast (22 page)

No. She forced herself to become silly once more. She turned her arms over, wrists up, wrist bones together. "Your slave, sire," she said dramatically. Then she folded down into the billow of her own skirts, bending over, kowtowing to the floor. "Without a shred of underdrawers on, except where you see them."

"You little idiot," he told her. "What a stunt."

"But it will work," she said into her muffling skirts. "I could stay with you night and day, if we merely put out my eyes." She resented all at once the ridiculousness of what she was doing, of what he demanded.

"Don't even say such a thing." He drew her up, touching the blindfold again, checking, pressing his hands gently over it, around its edges, tugging again at its knot.

"But it is what you are doing to us," she told him. "We both may as well be blind."

He stopped. Silence. He disapproved. Then his low, faintly dangerous-sounding voice said, "In North Africa women do what they are told without question or complaint. Turn around."

"What?"

"I said, turn around."

His hands dropped away. He apparently stepped back, for he was not within reach when she involuntarily grasped the air where he had been. She tried consciously to find him for a second more, arms waving in the air, searching. Nothing. At sea. In the dark again. While he had sight.

She couldn't tell if he was teasing, couldn't read his mood at all. She tried reminding herself that he looked at her. An advantage she had been trying to claim for three days. In the fading light, with her colorful blindfold, she would be something to behold. Yet he made no sound, no movement, no contact: no admission of her power. Till she had done as he asked. She turned around, away from where he'd stood.

And immediately he came up behind her, drawing her back into his body. He put his face into the curve of her neck, kissing her as he began to undress her.

"Oh. my," she got out. Then, "Oh, dear God—"

He removed her clothes quickly, taking her defenses—her looks—and turning them into something distinctly vulnerable: viewing her naked body from the back, only her eyes immodestly clothed. A strange sight indeed, she thought.

Though not so inappropriate. At his mercy. At his command. How she adored his touch, his gentle invasions of her privacy, herself unwillingly engrossed by this game of his inadvertently pushed further, to more compelling degree.

He stripped her, caressing her while he remained fully dressed. Then he made certain she understood he looked at her, murmuring words there in the last rays of daylight. Things about the lithe, shadowed curve of her back… the deep indention of her naked waist. He traced his finger down the bumps of her spine and called it elegant. He waxed rhapsodic of her legs, while running the backs of his fingers up the inside of her knee, her thigh. Her legs were the most amazing part of her—ungodly long, he said—strong and graceful enough that the entire troupe of the Moscow Ballet would have stopped in their tracks with envy had they seen them. Then where her legs stopped, between, below the soft, round curves of her buttocks, she was deep rose-pink and shining wet, inviting…

He made love to her with words and touches, with an imperative to please that was extravagant, ardent.

Till she was pushed up against the door, breathing against it, fearful of her own sounds—they were so loud and unmistakable of origin. A woman overcome, possessed in every sense, deranged.

"I want you inside me," she said, stunned by her own explicitness. She tried to turn around.

He leaned, pinned her with his body. "No. Not yet."

Impossible, this. Impossible that she was pressed against a door, blindfolded, while his fingers performed the most intimate of pleasures. Impossible that he should be more familiar with her body than she, yet he was. He brought her to a fine pitch, without release, then stopped; once, twice. When finally, he let her drop over the edge, every muscle spasmed; she let her full weight collapse.

Dark and dizzy. She was on the floor, one leg braced against the wall. When had the room become dark? When had he pushed the blindfold up and off? He'd been afraid that she could see before, she thought, the reason he wouldn't let her face him. But never mind. He kissed her closed eyes now, his lips moist on the bare, thin, delicately folded skin of her eyelids as he opened his trousers.

What had begun as the most thrilling experience of her life was becoming, she knew, something else. For when he entered her, their union became central to her existence in that moment.

Inside, she kept thinking. Inside me. Not just physically, but emotionally. She hadn't meant to let him do this. But like the faint, exotic smell of him, she had drawn him into her, inhaled him, drunk him down. It was too late now. He'd crossed through, seeped into her blood, from where he exerted a mysterious force over her with—she feared—the absolute authority of what could be nothing less than love.

God help her. She didn't need a definition or a lesson on the subject. This man
was
the subject. For her, he was the avatar on earth of this emotion. She didn't know where he came from, who he really was, or even his true name. She only knew that she was in love with him. Horribly, fully, and irreversibly. And that her spirit needed him up against her, inside her, as surely as her body needed water to survive.

That night, they talked until their comments, their questions, and replies had become mutters. Charles guarded against sleep—not so difficult, he thought, with the infinitely engaging young Louise in his bed.

Even as she drifted off, her body falling limp against him, he remained awake. He petted her, nesting himself into the crooks of her warmth. He brushed his hands over her hip then her breast, loving the feel of her shift against him. He relished her movement as she entwined her limbs with his. The room grew quiet: the sea settled into a steady rock. Charles brought his leg up over Louise, pressing his genitals against her hip. feeling an intimate and unprecedented satiation, not just in his sexual parts but in his spirit.

A blissfulness. He drew her against his chest, wrapping his arms around her. He thought he could wrap and rewrap himself around her, languishing in satisfaction all night, and never grow tired of this occupation. Yet he was more exhausted than he realized. For, in his comfort with Louise's body lying against him, Charles drifted off into a dark, rocking peace.

Only God knew how long he slept. When he awoke it was with a start, in a sweat of sudden, anxious awareness. He leaped awake, sat up, assailed by shadows, a thousand sleeping fears.

Daylight
, he thought; she would wake in a moment and see him.

Yet it was pitch black outside.

He fretted she was gone; she had left him.

Yet she was right there beside him, one leg entangled in his, her arm lying limply over his waist.

Guilt. His deception was somewhere, somehow quietly unraveling. When it sank, it was going to take him to the bottom for the tangle he'd be caught in.

Yet all was well. Louise slept soundly, a sweet, faint whisper of breathing, in then out.

This sound made Charles realize what had changed, what had awakened him, and he let out a sigh of relief. All was well, better than well. All was quiet. Utterly quiet.

The ship was silent and still. No movement. Not forward. Not up and down nor side to side; no tossing.

The
Concordia
was as motionless as if she were docked. The ocean was calm. There was no rain.

Through his curtains there was even a twinkle of starlight.

Charles frowned. No. all wasn't quite well, come to think of it.

He slid out from under Louise's arm. then scooted from the bed. Standing naked, he pulled aside the bedroom curtains. Below, the ship's running lights were glowing. They cast a halo of light out into the water. The sea was as smooth as black glass. Low. deep in the ship, he heard a tap. a faint clanking.

They were repairing the boiler, getting the generator up and going again.

On the bed. Louise stirred. She reached for Charles in her sleep. Awakening groggily, she found only warm sheets, the spot where he had recently been. She opened her eyes. No suavely stretched-out man of Middle Eastern leanings; no Charles of the Atlantic Crossing. She noticed the new light where it cast itself across the covers. Rolling up onto her elbow, she looked toward the source.

And, there, at the window stood a man she had never seen, a naked man of magnificent proportion, his silhouette distinct. He was much taller than average. He was straight and square with wide, lean, thick-muscled shoulders that rolled tightly down and around into a broad, powerful back; this narrowed quickly into a neat waist, a taut, muscular haunch.

Louise smiled with wonder and surprise. She murmured. "You are beautiful."

He leaped, jerked. The curtains fell back. The room became slightly darker. Though not much. She could see his outline clearly, his head swung round, his arms out in surprise. Then he stepped to the side into the shadow of his own dresser.

"Charles—" she began.

"You have to leave."

"I don't want to leave."

"The lights are going to come back on. They are repairing the ship. I can't even think which ones I lit."

"Turn them all off."

"How? How many pulls of the chain? Which way of the switch?"

She sat up. able to see her own pale shimmer of flesh among the phantoms of light and shade that played upon the bedding.

"Go," he said firmly.

She was going to argue. But after a moment of pointless dispute with herself—over all that could be said and all he wouldn't listen to—she only sighed and scooted off the mattress.

Louise looked for her clothes, ravaging the covers before she admitted, "Oh, God, I can't even remember what I wore."

"Your green dress with the pearl buttons."

This information was useless; her mind was suddenly, stupidly blank. She stood there, feeling more and more naked in the faint light, witless for not being able to accommodate him in so easy a matter as finding her clothes and leaving.

When, out of nowhere, her underdrawers were suddenly laid into her arms, her throat tightened—as if indeed she were a child about to cry over the whereabouts of her favorite things. Where was this green dress? Which shoes had she worn with it? Only these thin knickers? Where were the rest? Had she had on her lavender corset with the elastic stocking suspenders? (She always wore her favorite dresses and ribbons and underclothing when she came to him.)

Her clothes were not on the bed nor on the floor anywhere around it. She didn't know where else to look.

"In the sitting room, by the front door," he reminded her.

Her disorientation evaporated with flabbergasting clarity. She remembered loosening each article with sudden and far too specific a recollection. She drew her knickers on—a ludicrous piece of modesty under the circumstances—then headed toward the sitting room.

There, she was lost in the new dim light. She passed a hulking shape that became a piano, a huge grand, either black varnished or dark wood. It looked like no landmark she had ever seen before. Even the door to her pasha's suite was larger and heavier than she recognized, one of a double set—which, yes, of course, she should have remembered, yet didn't. She had felt it, God knew, but she had never seen it from the inside.

She dressed quickly, then turned back. She knew Charles had followed, though he held to the wall, the shadows. Absurd, she thought again. This was all absurd. "You are beautiful," she repeated.

"Don't say that." He was angry.

"Handsome," she corrected, thinking this was the problem. Men who veiled their women and hid them away in seraglios must have clear-cut notions of gender.

"Get out of here."

Louise stood still, at a loss, waiting for him to say something sweet, something mitigating. When he didn't, because she didn't know what else to do, she did as he asked.

She gently latched the door behind her. In the corridor, though, as she proceeded toward her rooms, she found herself madly revising.

No, she didn't love him. Of course not. See how easily she had left when she needed to? What she felt for him was carnal: a physical joy. Pure, ecstatic. The feeling was too sharp for love. Too potent for anything that might be lasting. It had to be transient.