Love's a Stage (20 page)

They stepped inside as a white flash of lightning lit the interior. Visible in eerie relief were two long rows of oak roof-support posts stretching into the darkness like a long church nave and lined with piles of straw stored perhaps by local farmers. The lightning’s flicker outlined the narrow eyelets cut at intervals into the wall to admit light and fresh air. The rain drummed with a metallic echo on the stone tiles above them.

Soaked, bedraggled, her cloak a wet slab on her back, and her loose brown hair hanging heavy and cold on her shoulders, Frances’ only warmth was in the hand Lord Landry held. He turned to face her, his hair curling from the rain, and raised his free hand to drag off her bonnet and toss it on the straw. His expression was tranquil, and yet to Frances compelling; she could neither speak nor tear her gaze from his face as he slid his hands under the cape covering her shoulders and sent the garment falling around her ankles. A sudden chill took her, and a whisper of fear. Her feet caught in the sticky wet folds of her cloak as she backed from him, wide-eyed, shaking her head.

“No. No.” Frances found the sound of her voice jarring in the sweet-smelling serenity of the stable and the lulling thud of the rain. Then there came a damp breeze flooding through the doorway and a fresh clatter of falling water. Frances crossed her arms, hugging herself pathetically. “I’m cold,” she said.

“Frances, you’re not yourself.” He was smiling, but made no move to approach her. “You ought to know better than to give me an opening like that.”

“I hope you valued it, because that’s the last opening you’ll have from me!” she said meaningfully. She stepped back further, desperate to widen the distance between them. Her skirts and petticoats clung like a phantom skin over each graceful curve and swell, hobbling her; she lost her balance and fell to her knees on a pillowing foothill of the straw stack. He came to her, kneeling, and drew her tightly to his body, entwining his arms about her shoulders, pulling aside the damp curls. His lips singed the bare skin on the side of her neck, searing a path to her earlobe.

She tried to pull from him, but the heat of his nearness was overpowering, and the pulling away turned into a helpless throat baring, and the hands that she put up to push him back instead weakly clung to him. His lips worked their way from her ear down her delicate jawline, and when their lips finally touched, she could only drink in his deep kisses as though they were her breath of life. Sweetly they tasted one another; he held her so closely to him that her body ached with the contact and her tense muscles began involuntarily to yield. Her world was damp and warm, shivering with pleasure’s fever. In the vast bursts of lightning her gaze found the sensual line of his mouth, the fine eyes gentled with passion, as she lifted her hands to lay them on either side of his face. She heard him say her name and after each kiss whisper the delight she gave him. His lips parted hers farther, tenderly probing her shy mysteries and filling her with an exquisite, anguished longing so potent that she wished to open every pore of her body and have him flow inside until each empty cell overran.

His mouth took hers again and again as he raised her body and with one competent hand brought freedom to the hook-and-eye fastenings at her back. Her gown fell, baring her shoulders, and he laid her back on the straw, carefully spreading her flowing, rain-perfumed hair. Her breasts were soft and swollen beneath the damp fabric of her bodice, and Frances watched his face with fearful wonder as he eased the gown lower. Modesty suddenly intruded. She could look at him no more. A hard shiver ran the length of her spine as she pressed her eyes shut tightly. Beside her she felt him stir, then lift her hand and carry it to her breast. Uncurling her stiff fingers, he touched them gently against the blossom of her own fullness.

“You’re soft as a rose petal, sweet,” he said in a quiet voice so near and intimate that she might have made the thought herself. His lips found her tingling palms and then brushed feather-light over the tips of her breasts. A half-suppressed moan burned her throat; she arched her throbbing shoulders, fretful and confused. And when his mouth came again to her, she whispered “yes” when she had meant to tell him that he must stop.

With mindless innocence, she pressed against him, wanting to feel every inch of him through the clinging wetness of their clothes. They had been side by side, and she did not stop him as he pushed himself gently on top of her and kneaded her shoulders with strong hands as she fiercely fought him for more . . . deeper . . . wetter . . . her body tortured by the onslaught of new sensation.

Had she been any woman, Landry would have been careful of her needs; it was his nature to be so. But with Frances, he was careful and something more. Fine-tuning to the fragile soul of his virginal lover, he held back with tender patience, deferring his more sophisticated desires to lovemaking consistent with her inexperience. Checking his ardor to her slower pace, he made sure she had the time she needed under the refined luxury of his guiding hands. Later, he would reflect that he could not have gone about it any other way, even if he had fully known the price. If he had taken her at once in the white-hot giddiness of her early passion, she might have been too confused to stop him. Instead, he had waited for the blooming of her participation and the full and knowing maturity of her willingness. While Frances had long passed rational thought, she owned an inhibition stronger than the paradise she found in Landry’s arms. Infallible, unquestioned, was the conviction that the intimacy of her love must be given only to the man she would marry. Without triumph, without criticism, she accepted the tenet. The feelings she had for Landry seemed as immense as the heavens, but he had made plain to Frances the quality of his commitment, so that her trust for him was weaker than her faith in the dogmas of her childhood.

He would have loved her there in the warm straw, but as his fingers spread their heady magic beneath her breasts and lower, a gust of agony blew cool against the tide of her flaming blood. Her pulse surged, one beat hot, one cold, one hot, in an awkward chill as she tried with desperate haste to muster her surrendering strength. Her palms left his back to shove his chest and, in a voice she scarcely knew as her own, she whispered:

“You mustn’t . . . I don’t want . . .”

Landry had seemed to her so involved that she had anticipated a lengthy battle to gain his attention. He responded so rapidly that she felt a start of shock.

“What is it, love? You’re afraid?”

Her breath came in tattered gasps, and her eyes pleaded for his compassion. “Yes—but not that only. I can’t—you must know I can’t. You were wrong—wrong to start this.”

“I? Has it been all me, then, Frances?” His voice was gentle, but there was a curious trace of—what? Bitterness? No, it was more temperate than that and more subtle. She couldn’t have hurt him; it was impossible that she would have that much power. He was the only man who had brought her to these forbidden twilight realms, but to him she was merely one in many. Other women had shared, would share in the future, the same clever hands, the same expert lips. How small an effort for him to bring her, like all his others, to this silly joyous heaven, the better to plunder their flimsy charms and slake, for the moment, the boredom of his complex, questing intellect. The thought nagged her temper like a biting fly.

His words were too disturbing to be answered directly.

“I should like to get up,” she said in a tight, cold voice that reflected nothing of her bruised heart. The hard, hot comfort of his body pressed to hers was still igniting the tempest within her and the hands she had bravely lodged against his chest had caught his shirt and clung. The faint, cloudy light filtering through a high eyelet slash lent silvery highlights to his profile, and as she watched him, instinct was the only sense that warned her of the stronger emotions veiled beneath the seemingly relaxed detachment that had suddenly occupied his features.

His fingers spread slowly over her breast, her erratic, jumping heart. “Your tongue has a language different from your body.”

Shame that she was to be had with such ease took hold in her soul and gave her the courage to move sharply, as though to roll away. He stopped her by catching her wrists in a relentless grip and carrying them to the straw on either side of her head. His mouth met hers in a brief, sensuous caress.

“I wonder . . .” he mused dispassionately, “if we might be happier if I took the decision out of your hands.”

When Landry picked up arms, he chose his weapons well. Frances cried out piteously, as though she had been struck.

“Would you force me, David?”

If her words moved him, he gave no sign. “We both know, don’t we, sweeting, how
little
force you’d need.”

Salty tears began to burn in Frances’ eyes. “I know I shouldn’t have let you believe that I would—” She couldn’t say the word. “I—I en-encouraged you, but . . . I couldn’t help it.”

“Did it occur to you that you might ask yourself why? What we feel together is real, and not your mewling protests!” Odd that such biting words could be spoken so gently.

Virtue and ardor were so garbled in Frances’ mind that they began to seem as meaningless as the storm’s patternless staccato. It seemed tragic to stop, tragic not to; it was the loss of his half-mocking, effortless affection that hurt her most deeply. Never before had she admitted to herself how dear that had become to her, or that she might be willing to do so much to gain it back. Would the world be forever bleak after “no” and “I can’t”? She turned her head to the side, into the cold pile of her hair, rejecting her unhappy choices.

He gave her no time to cower. Shackling both her wrists under one hand, he brought the other to catch her chin, jerking her face toward his. There was no option for her then. She must commit herself to one thing, or to the other; and she had already thrown her lot with chastity.

Landry watched sardonically as she fought his implacable grip. Then he said, “Far be it from me to shatter any of your fondly nourished illusions, but in the interest of fostering an advance in your immature understanding of physical contact, I think I ought to point out that writhing around beneath me like that is
not
doing anything to lessen my desire.”

“Oh! How dare you!” Stung by this new injustice, Frances’ wildly flailing emotions veered into a bright, healthy anger. “You know I am trying to free myself!”

Frances was released with disconcerting swiftness, a burning cold stinging her where Landry’s body had been. His crisp movement was a paradox with his expression, which had become abstracted, almost preoccupied, like a man who has suddenly remembered an appointment he must keep across town in half an hour. Finally he stood and asked her:

“When I’m not touching you, does it make you free?”

She lifted her head to see him moving like a shadow toward the door of the stable.

“David?” The word burst from her.

He stopped, but it was a moment before he spoke. “I’m not deserting you. I have to find a place where we can get warm. Wait here.”

Then she was alone in tomb-quiet, save the intermittent drumming of the rain and the tiny flicker of a sound as a mouse scuttled toward its nest in a far corner. As she waited, the last of the light deserted her, and the tall rectangle of the doorway glowed eerily blue, surrounded by black. Ancient horsey smells arose from the cobbled floor beneath her and mingled with the odor of damp and straw. Draughts surrounded her, and desolation, They were the loneliest minutes of her life.

Landry did return as he had promised, but after so long a time that she had begun to fear he had, indeed, left her. He came through the doorway and stood over her, silently extending his hand. She didn’t take it, struggling to stand in the clammy wetness of her gown. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark enough for her to see him find her mantle and bonnet and drape them over his arm as he led the way from the stable. Faint starlight filtered through a break in the clouds as she followed Landry along the outside of the building. Tiny blisters rose on black puddles in the yard as they were struck by the dying rain, but Frances and Landry were protected by the overhanging eave. Over his shoulder, Landry said casually:

“And you were the one who didn’t believe in bodily electricity.”

They reached an open stairway, which Landry mounted, his boots echoing on the wooden slats as he climbed. She made no move to follow him, and he turned.

“The coachman’s quarters. It’s not perfectly pristine, mind you, but at least horses haven’t been living in it for two hundred years. And I’ve made a fire.”

Frances hung back with her icy hand laid on the stairwell. “Before you left the stable—you said—you threatened . . .”

He clattered back down the stairs toward her, and she felt his hand warm on her own as he embraced her for a quick second and then released her completely. “There—you see? I’m a reformed character. I’ve made myself busy long enough to erode the nasty wash of temper. Lesson one hundred and thirty-six: Don’t take seriously anything a man says when he’s lying on top of you. Did you really think I was going to ravish you? Things said in anger . . .” She saw him shrug in the darkness. “Don’t let it distress you; no doubt I came by my just deserts. Come up with me.”

He began to climb, and when she hesitated still, he turned back and with a note of laughter in his voice said, “Besides, I’ve seen to it that we’re to be adequately chaperoned. I have a very respectable missus and her husband in attendance upstairs. Come up and greet them.”

She decided to follow him, with trepidation and curiosity. Once they had reached the top of the stairs, she noticed that the lock to the door had been smashed, but instead of calling Landry to account for his disrespect for the property of others, she peered nervously around the corner.

Before her was a small sitting room with a motley scatter of elderly furnishings much the worse for wear and a broad stone-linteled fireplace bright with a cheerfully crackling blaze. Before it sat the two blackfaced sheep, chewing dreamily on the moth-bitten remains of a green carpet.