Beast (36 page)

"Just use the flowers, though, for the sweetest scent. Pull them off, drop them into your tub of warm water, let them brew a minute, then climb in and brew with them." He handed these over, making another wry, slanting grin. "Think of me as they float around you."

This wasn't quite the way it worked. Instead, that evening, Charles heard the water run and thought of
her
: naked with tiny purple flowers bumping into her smooth, white body, a fragrant steam rising in his new and shiny bathroom, the dampness pulling down her hair.
Ooh la la
. He lay there down the hall from this, more aroused with each splash of water, and contemplated solitary sexual release. He decided, rather, to get up and go down the hall.

He knocked on the bathroom door. "May I come in?"

He heard her slosh of surprise. "Well—Well, no," she said.

"I want to come in. Lou—Lulu." A barrier surmounted. By God, he would use this name rather than have nothing, no handle, no way to take hold of familiarity.

More splashing. He thought he heard her get out. Rushing to lock the door, in all likelihood.

He opened it. She was pulling a wrap around her. He saw a snowy-white flash, the upward curve of breast, this fleeting glimpse covered immediately with a thick layer of woolly knit. Her purple dressing gown.

He said, "What I do is more beautiful than what I am. Beauty is necessary to our lives. It's not a luxury.

You shouldn't hate being beautiful."

"Excuse me?"

"You bristled last night, I think, because I said you were beautiful. One of the reasons at least. But you are. You should enjoy it. The way you enjoyed the lavender today."

She laughed as she snugged the sash of the gown tight. "You came in here to talk to me about this?"

"No, I came in here to see you naked, but since you were quicker than I was, I'm willing to see if I can
talk
you out of that dressing gown."

She laughed again, slightly giddy this time, and tried to push past him. He moved and blocked her exit.

Then—instinct, frustration, he couldn't honestly say what made him do it, anger maybe: He bent, grabbing her round the buttocks. With a little
ooph
of surprise and a twisting kick of resistance, she folded over her shoulder. He carried her forward, wrap and all, breaking her fall just enough as she hit the water. His shirtsleeves got soaked, but it was worth it watching her go under, legs flailing, hands grasping at him, head and hair completely submerged for a moment. She came up with a sputter, her robe bleeding purple in his white claw-foot bathtub.

Spitting water, she shrieked, "Are you insane?" Her hair, which she had simply tied into a knot, leaned wetly, a dropping weight that unspiraled. It pooled around her purple shoulders.

Then sucked up against her as she got her legs under her. She might have leapt out, but as she rose her wrapper's laden weight began to pull it open. She sunk down into the water again and wrenched the soggy thing closed about her torso. One end secure, the other opened about her legs like the slow-motion parting of seaweed. A curtain coming up on a show. Charles stared at her streamline calves beneath evermore darkening water—her robe ran fantastically, like some wet and sagging monster hemorrhaging violet blood. He stared through this water, at her slender ankles, her shapely feet with their high arch of bone, these white feet beneath lavender blossoms, bruised dark from the heat of her bath, afloat in water the transparent color of plums.

She was stammering at him. "You—you—" Her French vocabulary was deficient in rude expletives.

He tried to help, suggesting, "Cretin, troglodyte, bastard."

"Whore's son."

"Well!" he said by way of surprised celebration,
ouais
! "That's damned advanced. And so much better than your usual prissy discourse."

She made a tight mouth and managed to sit around, become stable. Lifting a soggy arm, she scowled and said, "You could have drowned me."

"
Tu, tu
. Use it," he said, encouraging the intimate verb construction. The language used between lovers and friends.

"I don't know those conjugations. My instructor thought they were too intimate."

"Learn them. They're spelled differently, but you pronounce them the same as the 'I' conjugations. Thai's what they mean: 'you' and 'I' are close, the same." He took a breath. "Lulu—" In French, her name meant
cute, darling
, as with a dimpled child or tiny, fluffy dog. He said it again, "Lulu." then, "look at me." It was spontaneous: He began to unfasten the buttons of his shirt.

"Charles—" Her lovely eyes widened as far as they were capable—an upward flap of heavy lashes as thick as the wings of a gold bird.

He braved her expression and kept unbuttoning.

His shirt gaped. He crossed his arms, grabbing two handfuls of shirttail. and lifted the damned shirt up and over his head, insisting, "Look."

She turned her face to the wall. "Put your shirt on."

"No." He brought his undershirt up over his head, dropped it onto the floor, then began on the buttons at the fly of his trousers. "Look at me. I am not such a poor specimen overall."

"Charles—" She brought her gaze around again, lifting those lashes once more in what seemed for the life of him to be a sly glimpse. Then her own behavior made her blush—an unusual occurrence. He had never seen her cheeks pink before.

He felt a surprising charge as Louise turned a deep, rosy red that vied in intensity with the water. Enough of a thrill that when he dropped his trousers, kicked them aside, and stood there in his underdrawers, the front of them lifted slightly. In so far as he could, he ignored the sensation, which she did not. Her eyes settled there, then glanced away. He said. "Look at me. Am I such a repulsive fellow as all that?"

She fixed her gaze down into her bathwater. "No." she murmured. She made a slight shiver; he couldn't decide if this was good or bad. She said, "You are a fine"—she hesitated—"mature man."

He frowned. "I am not old."

"No." She shook her downcast head. "You are—developed. Strapping."

"Then get out of that water and let me touch you, at least hold you."

"Charles, that's not it. I—I feel funny—"

"Funny how?"

"I can't explain it."

"Don't explain it, then. Get out of that tub or I'm coming in. One or the other."

Her eyes came up, open again, her mouth too, a little round pooch of lips, genuine prohibition. "No-o.

No, no—"

He stepped in, one foot—she drew her legs together—then with a single
ga-lumffing
splash, the other.

He straddled her knees, then sat down, butt first, into the warm water at her feet. She drew her legs up to her chest and circled her arms around them.

Charles slid down to settle armpit deep—he'd displaced the water almost up to her shoulders—in a tubful of steamed lavender, purple water, and rattled woman, the scent of all three rising off the violet surface in visible rolls of vapor, mingling up his nostrils. His flowers… her soap… her soaking robe smelling faintly of the perfume she wore, jasmine… none of this as powerful for him as the sweet eddying perfume of Louise.

Who scooted back as far as she could, bringing her wet dressing gown, dripping and slogging-wet, up around her chin. Like this, wrapped in her own arms and her clutched wrap, Louise stared at the man at the other end of the bathtub.

A man with the build of Poseidon. And the face of—She groaned inwardly. The worst part of Charles Harcourt's face was the nice half. The alert, faintly defensive blue eye. The square jaw, bony, a muscle that tensed just in front of his ear. A thin, vaguely aquiline nose, not handsome exactly; bladed, sharp, stirring. Aggressive. He was that. Here he was in her tub.

Provoking a confrontation: He stretched his leg, hooking his foot between her ankles, trying to pull her leg out, to drag her knee out from under her chin. They had a small battle of feet. His wanted to unbend her. Louise held to a ball. The prince in her tub conceded the battle, then all but claimed the war. He pulled his feet back and, with a suck of water, lifted himself up on his arms, on the rim of the bathtub, to come up over her knees. Louise leaned back, broke hold of her legs, managed a shin on his chest. Lord, his chest. It was warm and hard and as furred as a beast's from the forest; it rippled outright with the muscle of a Hun.

With this chest, he pressed her bent leg forward till she made a face. "That pinches."

He didn't smile or apologize or back off. He said, "Move it."

Then he released the pressure an inch or so, took hold of her ankle, and pulled her leg from between them—to the other side of his body so that when he
ka-ploshed
himself down, not only did his weight slosh water over the tub rim, it dropped right where he wanted: between her outstretched legs.

"Happy now?" Louise asked into his face. She pursed her lips.

"No," he said. "I'm miserable, to tell you the truth." Then with hardly more than taking a breath, he said,

"Bear up, darling. I'm going to kiss you."

When she pursed her mouth tighter, he let out an exasperated breath, one she felt across her lips and cheek.

"Come on," he said. He mugged a face. "I'm strapping, remember? And your effing husband"—the French word began with
F;
she didn't know it, nor, she suspected, did she want to. "See if you can put up with my mouth on yours for thirty seconds. would you? It's only a kiss."

She made a disputing twist of her mouth. "In a tubful of water, lying on top of me in your wet underdrawers."

He actually smiled, a small curving line.

She turned her head the first time, the mistress of evasion. His mouth caught her cheek. He sighed, backed off. She didn't know what he was thinking, where he was getting the persistence when she could have listed a dozen other fellows she had stopped way short of anything like this.

The determined Charles Harcourt descended again, this time intentionally kissing her cheek in a path toward her ear, a damp trail of warm lips to where her jaw met her neck. It sent ghostlike prickles of goose-flesh up her arms, down her spine.

Oh. God, Charles, her Charles. He was suddenly there in the damned bathtub with them. How she missed him.
Will you be faithful once you're married
? Yes—who would have thought?—to you, my sweet pasha.

"Come on," said the real, robust Charles above her. He was massive. She couldn't see the ceiling or a good portion of the wall. He told her, "You're going to be as wrinkled as a prune before you get up from here. Kiss me, Lulu. Try it. Give me half a chance, will you?"

Lulu
. When had he dropped the
madame
and
mademoiselle
and
my dear
that had been so serviceably formal for the last two and a half weeks?

He went after the kiss again, rather poised about the whole business. Not timid, not shy. His thumb found her lips, brushed across them, as he kissed the corner of her mouth. She shivered in the warm water, part melting pleasure, part anxiety—horrible, sharp, rising. He rolled her lower lip down with his thumb, opening her mouth. His nail ticked across her teeth, an intentional tap telling her to open them. He brought his mouth close, tongued the inside of her rolled lower lip.

What a sensation. It was like being wooed by something mythic. A titan. A dragon. His hand slid round the back of her head and pulled her face into his. Dry-mouthed, he pressed his lips to hers. Then he twisted his head, opened his jaw, pressing hers apart with it, and pushed his way past her teeth, his tongue deep inside her mouth.

The carnal promise of her husband, Charles Harcourt, the strange and ugly Prince of Nothing blew through her like a hot Goliathan breath.

He kissed her mouth, teeth, tongue, and lips. She felt her robe slacken, along with her fists that held it. It floated loosely away from her body, a small drift in the tepid bath. The shape of the tub, her position limited where he could put his breadth and length. She could feel him adjusting, struggling slightly, misplaced against the inside of her thigh, thick and rigid—it was a whole lot more than half a chance he wanted. Desire spun around and lifted her up into it. A languor took hold, the delicious, drugged feeling of sexual intention unfolding. As with Charles.

Charles and Charles.

The two men merged. Louise turned her head, emitting a soft groan—not entirely one of pleasure: of confusion, loss, frustration. The present Charles, her husband, slid his leg down hers as he repositioned himself more flatly on top of her.

Louise closed her eyes. Darkness. Her head swam in erotic vertigo, while her muscles grew lax. as heavy to move as if she were deep under water. The bath water lapped against the tub. And she was suddenly on a tilted ship… She knew the feel, so precisely, of her Charles entering her body. His strength. The heavy substance of him as he pushed himself inside her. The rhythm of his breathing.

Fantasy. He wasn't here. The man who was stroked his thumb across her lip again, the crevice of her closed mouth, encouraging her to open it. turn back toward him.
What a monstrous lust
—she remembered saying this, spinning in the dark, kissing her Charles of the Dark Ship deep within his mouth—
I feel as though it could break me in two
.

Her pasha and not her pasha… He was here: he was not. This all got tangled up in a fear of her own duality: one woman on the ship, another one here, cooler, more distant… She had left a freer piece of herself back there on the ocean, one she couldn't find again yet she didn't dare lose. Louise felt broken in half indeed. Torn. Split. Drawn and quartered. Not enough anywhere.
Not enough
. Separated from a man, an experience, an impetus she wanted… fragmented…

She caught her breath, swallowing a sob before it broke the surface of expression. She didn't cry. She never cried.

"Louise…"

She was hallucinating. Now the voice above her even sounded like his, the mindless way he'd breathed her name sometimes into the dark. She opened her eyes dimly—and saw her husband, his ear as he kissed her neck. His mouth on her skin was warm, strong, sucking. So hungry he was going to leave marks. Had he said her name? Right name. Right place at the base of her jaw. Wrong man.