Laura Kinsale (36 page)

“You would not—” she whispered, and then no more, afraid to ask if he would ever send her away from Elizabeth—from him—afraid of the answer, helpless to turn aside from the touch of his fingers against her cheek, his mouth lowered to her lips.

“Zenia,” he murmured. His hand spread in her hair, tangled in it, tilting her face up to his, drawing her to him. “Zenia. My God, please.”

But there was no pleading in his kiss; there was only possession—the thrust and taste of him. The alcohol was a heavy perfume, filling all the air she breathed.

He slid his arm behind her waist. She felt the scar beneath her palm as she slipped her hands upward, over his bare back. She turned her face suddenly and leaned her cheek against his chest, holding him tight and close. She pressed her face to the deep rise and fall of his breathing.

They stood still. She could feel the slight, slight sway of his unbalance, the soft rocking of his hold in time to each indrawn breath. He played with the hair that draped down beside her cheek, stroking it back behind her ear, kissing the top of her head, her temple, her lashes as he made her lift her face again with his fingers beneath her chin.

He kissed her deeply. Her body seemed to tremble and ache with yearning as his hands slipped beneath the loose wrap of her dressing gown, outlining her waist, moving upward.

“So long,” he murmured, “it’s been so long.” His mouth moved over her eyelids and her brows and her temple, soft heat as he spoke. “I can’t believe you’re real.”

She felt him brush the hair back from her shoulder. As he bent and kissed her bared throat, he pushed open her robe and drew it down from her shoulders. It fell, leaving only her linen gown.

He touched her breasts. Zenia whimpered. Her own sensations, her own need for this frightened her. She had never in her life been held close, never by anyone but him. He somehow knew secrets about her, knew how to make her body suffer sweet agony, sweet electric pain. He caressed the tips of her breasts, compressed them between his fingers, and a jolt of pleasure sent light delicious throbbing all through her.

But will you stay?
she thought desperately.
Will you always keep me with you?

She could not voice those fears. Her mother, Miss Williams, Lord Winter—all of the pieces of her heart she had ever given had been scattered or lost or thrown away. All but Elizabeth. She did not think she had the courage to love beyond Elizabeth, and yet her body cried for his, to be held close, to be part of him again.

Do you want me?
she beseeched him silently as he pulled her down beside him on the cot, as he kissed the back of her neck and slid his hand beneath her gown and drew it up to her hip.
Do you want
me,
and not just your daughter? Not just a woman to use this way?

If she turned and lay back and opened to him, if he mounted into her as he had done before, as his hands and his body and his kisses demanded—if she took his seed inside her again, she would be consenting to his dominion forever. Tomorrow he would marry her. She would not have to fear hunger or want, never again. She would only have to wait until he left her.

Because he would leave. She knew it to the depth of her soul; had heard it in his voice.
I don’t know if I can do it,
he said—and she knew that he could not. His demon drove him to wilderness and ruin; he only stayed now because of Elizabeth. And she feared—oh, she feared to desperation that he would take Elizabeth with him if he could.

She shuddered, alive with desire and grief as he ran his fingers between her legs. He laid her down, leaning over her, fumbling at the band of his trousers. She could feel the same tremor in him that seemed to weaken her—his hand was inept at the simple task of buttons.
 

“Too damn foxed,” he muttered. Then he smiled at her—such a smile, charming and wicked, and drew her hand to the fastening. “Will you help me, beloved?”

He rested on his elbow, his eyes half-closed in anticipated bliss, beguiling and seductive and dark and warm, the cruel beauty of the desert softened and gentled to the shape of a man.

Zenia did as he asked. She had always done what he had asked of her, resisted and surrendered and fallen in love with him, followed him in misery and glad compliance. Her fingers touched his hard shaft, and he groaned as if he hurt. He bent and sucked her breast and pushed himself into her hand.

Her head seemed full of sound, the beat of her own heart in her ears. She arched upward, her fingers closing in a convulsive caress each time his tongue stroked over her nipple. He moved in her hand, a velvety thrust in rhythm with the low animal moan in his throat. She heard something else—but he was shifting eagerly to come on top of her, bluntly pushing to enter her—until the sound came clear to both of them.

He stilled. The quiet knock at the door of her room was perfectly audible.

“That will be my supper tray,” Zenia said faintly.

He stared down at her with blank incomprehension. Then he snarled, “God damn it to bleeding hell,” and pushed up abruptly.

She could see that he was going to shout something at the wall, and moved quickly to put her fingers over his mouth. “Elizabeth,” she whispered, edging from underneath him. At first she did not think he would let her go—his hand closed on her waist—but then he released her and rolled back into the narrow space, lying against the wall with his elbow over his eyes.

The knock came again. Zenia grabbed up her robe and pulled it about her as she hurried into the other room, closing the door behind her.

Arden waited. Through the wall, he heard the soft thud of the outer door as the maid left. At first he thought Zenia must come back immediately—he was in such a state of suspension and arousal that he could not imagine she would not instantly come back, that she had even summoned the command of herself to leave him.

In his drink-bemused brain, he thought she must feel as he did. But gradually, as she did not come at once, it occurred to him that she was female, and different. He opened his eyes and stared at the dark, unfocused blur of his arm lying across his face.

It was her supper, of course. She would be hungry. He could hardly conceive of any other hunger at the moment but the urge to bury himself in her, to hold her and taste her and die with her. But she was female, and different. He occupied himself with erotic thoughts, remembering the shape of her body—her breasts, full and womanly; remembering that moment he had seen her nursing Beth; seized at the thought of it by an intense and driving lust to put another child in her.

He turned over, burying his face in the pillow, waiting.

She didn’t come. He had no idea of how much time had passed, but it seemed to him long enough to finish four dozen scones and drink ten pots of tea.

He sat up. Perhaps she had become shy. Perhaps she was waiting for him.

For a long time he looked at the door between their rooms. He kept thinking the knob would turn: his whole being seemed fixed on the expectation, while in his mind a slow, small doubt began to form.

He rose, walking to the door. And when he got there, a deep dread that it would be locked held him motionless, unable to touch it. He listened for any sound, any sign from the other side.

Only silence.

“Zenia,” he said to the polished wood.

She did not answer. He knew it was locked. He touched the brass plate, traced the engraved curls with his finger. He stared dumbly at the fine golden grain of oak.

If not for Beth, he would have kicked it down.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Arden lay with his eyes closed, unwilling to admit daylight and anger, but loathe to fall back into the dreams. In them, he kept trying to swim, trying to reach the gray shape among the murky waterweeds, but he couldn’t make his limbs move. The girl’s white dead face would change to Zenia’s face, her voice silent, underwater, and still calling and calling him for help.

Sometime in the dawn, the maid had come in to make up the fire. He had sat up in the dim light, confused and so thirsty that he downed half a pitcher of water, but it made him dizzy and drunk again, dragging him back down into the dreams. He lay now with no clear idea of how late it was, only that it was very late, and his belly held a sick shudder and his head felt as if there was a ten-inch stake driven through it.

He felt wounded and demoralized in the aftereffects of drink. It had been a long, long time—but the physical sensations brought acute recollection of a more horrible awakening. The dreams were dreams; he had no real memory of the girl calling for him to help her, or of seeing her beneath the water. It was a hole in time and space: he could remember starting to drink in his room, he could remember sharing the flask with a sympathetic stableboy, he could remember the way the neckcloth had seemed a confusion in his hands as he dressed to meet her, and filling the flask again and again from the decanters in the dining room—then a kaleidoscope of moments, the way she had looked at him, quiet and frightened, the still lake, the chipped paint on the oar, the way the swan had paddled aggressively after the boat, hissing and lifting its wings. He had laughed. She had screamed when the swan hissed. And that was all. Except that he thought he remembered sitting on the bank, dripping and crying, but he was not sure.

They said that he had tried to save her. That she had foolishly stood up, trying to avoid the swan, and turned the boat over. His father and two gardeners had testified before the coroner that they had seen it happen, that Arden had tried to pull her to the bank, but she was so hysterical with fear that she fought anything that touched her. His father had had the swan shot.

Arden did not remember that. He remembered nothing more. And no one had thought it anything more than a tragic accident. What man would deliberately drown his fiancée, after all?

But the way his father had looked at him. It had been like this—waking up, sick and groggy, and his father waiting...

He turned his face into the pillow.

He had left Swanmere, and he had never come back. It had been years before he had touched any drink again, before he could smell alcohol without it turning his stomach. And then he had only sipped at it, a public observance, to be less conspicuous, less painfully alien among his peers.

He had killed her, and yet it had been his emancipation. He had loved his exile. He had felt alive and real, alone. It was with people that he floundered; it was living as himself that he made into a debacle. As Haj Hasan, he knew what to say and do. As the Honorable Arden Mansfield, Lord Winter, he was and had always been baffled and uneasy.

He should not have allowed himself to sit there drinking the ale they kept pouring last night. He had known he was becoming drunk. He was certain he had done nothing awkward there, if sitting in nearly complete silence with a diligent smile on his face was not awkward. All of the tenants had been excruciatingly polite to him, as stilted as he, while his father had shaken hands and slapped shoulders and asked about grain and bulls and probably corners as well—the perfect open-handed English lord.

No, it was after the dinner, in this room, that Arden had made a perfect fool of himself. And there was no merciful alcoholic void this time. It was all quite clear in his mind.

He heard a door open. The maid, he thought with an interior groan, but the soft thump of running feet and a bright inquisitive, “Gah!” followed closely. Two small warm hands hit his bare arm.