The Forbidden Rose (16 page)

He reached her breasts. Slipped soft linen across her, up and then down, stroking her with it. The folds caught, snagging her and tugging and stroking over her. He kissed gently at her nipples, through the fabric, back and forth from one to the other.

She gasped and arched toward him.

“Let’s get rid of this.” He lifted the shift up and over her head in one sudden unpeeling. Her hair fell back and swept down her skin and hid her. Then his hands discovered her breasts within the curtain of her hair. Shaped her breasts. His thumbs were eloquent on her nipples.

“You have pretty tits,” he said. “Just absolutely perfect tits.”

“And you are crude beyond measurement.”

“Just saying the truth.”

He was earthy and forthright and he did not choose to speak like a gentleman.
He could, but he chooses not to.

They shared one breath and then another, face-to-face. She was taller than he was, this way, when he sat upon the bed and she stood. He did not overwhelm her with his strength. Every moment was her choice. Her decision. His hands slid slowly up and down her body, rasping lightly because they were the hands of a warrior. Not soft. Not pampered. He pulled her body into fascination. Enthralled her.

When she held his upper arm, her fingers didn’t circle half the distance around.

I am not like my friends, who take many lovers and walk away unscathed. There will be a price for this. It will cost me dearly.
“This is a mistake. But I do not care.”

“A mistake. We can regret it later,” he said.

“That is my intention.” She had not expected the hair of his chest to be soft to the touch. Had not thought she would feel such strength beneath his skin. He held amazement within him, everywhere she laid her hands.

She bent toward his mouth. He stretched upward to her, to meet her. It was as if she attached a string to a mountain and it came to her when she pulled. His lips were smooth and hot. The trembling she felt was all her own. The doubt and the nervousness, all hers. He had no doubts at all.

A small kiss. Not hesitant, but a slow beginning of something he would not hurry. More kisses. Intense. Absorbed. Each different. He urged her head toward him the tiniest notch. Took her mouth. It was feeling and feeling again and only feeling until he was the world, and she was gasping for breath.

She could become lost in this man, as one did in the winds of a storm.

She put her hand to his cheek, studying the textures of his face. He had shaved by candlelight this morning, at the stream that ran through the field they’d slept in. Already he wore scratchy strong bristles again. He must fight continually with them.

Then, exploring, she went to touch his scar. To know what it felt like.

He caught her hand. “Leave it be.” A whisper. He turned her palm over and kissed inside it. That was shivery. A wonderful distraction, as he meant it to be. “Pretend it’s not there.”

She had not dreamed the scar would matter to him. It did not matter to her. “I do not mind it.”

“I don’t either. But that’s not what we’re sharing today.”

He stood up from the bed. They were so close his skin touched her everywhere as he rose and rose to his full height and took her against him. She felt, rather than saw, that he was undoing the buttons of his trouser band. That he was slipping his clothes off.

His cock was erect and proud and triumphant against the skin of her belly, full and heavy and male.

He was warm in all of his body, but his cock was particularly warm. She imagined it inside her, as it would soon be.
We will solve this problem of his largeness. His size cannot be . . . unmanageable. Someone would have said this to him. And I am ingenious.
She molded herself close to him and turned her cheek to be flat on his chest. There would be no space between them. She shivered everywhere, but she was not cold.

She would open to him. That was the gateway to pleasure. She would travel this country that was Guillaume.

He brought their mouths together and it was wonder and heat. Wonder that spun and buzzed and throbbed between her legs. She was lifted somehow. All unreal. All magical. She was on the bed, on blankets. The pillows scattered. He was beside her, massive as mountains. Deep beyond deep, in the cavern of his chest, Guillaume said, “This is . . . yes. This is yes.”

She was a hollow of expectation, filled only with need. No trace of thought. Nothing but breath and the feeling of his skin. She could do nothing clever, only hold on to him.

He knelt between her knees. He lifted her hips in his hands. He was huge within her, entering slowly. His fingers were soft between her parted legs. There was lightning in the touch of him. She heard him saying she was beautiful. Every breath of her was lovely. This. And this. Perfect. She was a flower. He stroked and she pulsed upward toward him. Curled to him, desperate.

Pleasure gripped her, as if it were a hand that closed around her and shook her. She thrashed with it and cried out and shuddered.

She felt him inside her. Felt wild force, barely held in check. Felt him withdraw. Felt his whole body stiffen. He thrust onto her belly and threw back his head and groaned. She was held, fiercely, by all the huge strength.

Bit by bit, he collapsed upon her, breathing hard. Very heavy. Very comforting. Right and natural in her arms. She opened her eyes and she was enclosed in a warm landscape of the muscle and flesh and bone of his chest.

“I’m crushing you.” He rolled to the side and settled next to her. They lay on the narrow bed together. She was tucked close to his body. One arm lay across her. The other cradled her head.

He said, “Let me hold you. We have a minute for that.” His breath tickled her face.

She pressed her ear against him.
I have this minute.
Her mind drifted in the sound of his heartbeat, in the stream of his life.

“STREET’S EMPTY.” GUILLAUME SLOUCHED UP TO her. “Let’s go.”

Marguerite could not say how this slouching he did down the Rue Palmier was different from what he had performed in the countryside, but it was. There, he had been a shrewd peasant, a man with fields and, most probably, a local feud or two. Now he was a city man, knowledgeably sly in a way that had to do with narrow alleys and cafés on the boulevards.

He took her arm, something he had not done in the countryside. Thinking about it, she realized this, too, was a difference between the city man and the country man.

It did not disturb her that Guillaume LeBreton should change in this subtle way. She did not know all of what he was. Probably she did not want to know. But he was also the man who had made love to her an hour ago. It was that man she would say good-bye to.

“That’s where they’d put somebody to watch for us. See?” Guillaume slowed.

Adrian glanced into the passageway between houses, narrow and not too clean. “Obvious. No art to that.”

“Most folks are not what you’d call artistic. A better spot . . .” Guillaume looked up to the very highest attics under the roof where poor men rented cheap rooms. “Up there, up with the pigeons, in one of those windows. That’s where I’d put my man. Nobody ever looks up.”

The Hôtel de Fleurignac was a hundred feet ahead, on the left. It had been built sixty years ago of the cream-colored stone they mined from under the foundations of Paris. The blocks might have been quarried from under the very roots of the house, fifty feet down. Hôtel de Fleurignac wasn’t the grandest house of the quartier, but it had not been sacked in the last four years, which was a great advantage.

Guillaume walked with the firmness of a citoyen vegetable farmer who had business to conduct in some café or shop or at the back door of one of these mansions. They were not alone on the street. One woman passed them briskly, without nodding, carrying bread in a basket. A little servant girl, head down, wearing a floppy mobcap, swept a doorstep.

“On the other hand, if it was the Secret Police doing the watching,” Guillaume continued, when they were out of earshot of the maidservant, “which it’s likely to be in this town, they’d bully the patriotic citoyens of . . . ah . . . that house, I think, or the one next to it, and put their man in the front parlor. If he was careless, you might see a curtain pulled back. Maybe a light.”

“There is a timber merchant living there.” She could be informative, having followed the fortunes of all these houses. “He was a Dantonist, two months ago, which is no longer a desirable political association, of course. Now he is an enthusiastic follower of Robespierre. He would keep a battalion of infantry in his parlor if the police asked.”

But no one would bother to watch for her. If the Committee of Public Safety wanted her, they would simply send gendarmes to pound at the door. Aristo women waited at home, terrified, until the police came to get them. She had rescued enough of them to know this. La Flèche always found them, proud and disbelieving and stupid as rabbits, hiding in their parlors.

The Hôtel de Fleurignac had not been given over to timber merchants or land speculators from Lyon. Five years ago, Lafayette himself had stationed guards to protect the house from the mob. In the disorder of the bread riots, Danton’s men had been posted outside, drinking heavily and pissing in the stone flowerpots. When Lafayette had fled and Danton was dead on the guillotine, the authority of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety protected them. Cousin Victor arranged this protection, leaping from one party to the other as circumstances dictated.

Victor was the son of Papa’s younger brother. He was the last to bear the de Fleurignac name, the others having made ill-judged stands against the march of the Revolution. His sense of timing was exquisite. He should have been
danseur noble
of the corps de ballet, he executed such clever jetés and pirouettes on the stage of politics.

“You live here.” Adrian ran his eyes over the ledges and carvings and the bowed iron railings of the windows. “Nice handholds all the way up the side. Be easy to get in. Bit of a plum, really.”

“You’d see that. I want you to keep walking. Make a . . .” Guillaume marked a figure eight in the air with his index finger, “up and down some streets and come by here again. Keep doing that till I’m finished.”

Till I’m finished.
They were almost finished with one another, she and Guillaume LeBreton.

It was good-bye to Adrian as well. She turned in the middle of the street and kissed him quickly on the forehead, astonishing and appalling him. “Be safe.” It was a pleasure to break his perfect self-containment for one instant. “If you are ever in trouble, go to the kitchen door and tell them you have a message for me. If I am alive, I will come. Remember that.”

Guillaume said, “Which is better than you deserve, boy. Off with you.”

She stood beside Guillaume LeBreton and watched Adrian take his grin and the two donkeys away, down the street, around the corner.

“The boy doesn’t know what you’re offering. What it means to be a de Fleurignac in this country. And he’s talking the simple truth about robbing the house.”

“So I believe. I have never known a professional thief before. You must find him an interesting traveling companion. Are we so very easy to rob?”

“For him. Yes.”

When one had walked for days to arrive, it was a great foolishness to discover one did not want to be there at all. She crossed the empty street to go home. She had five minutes more to be with him. Maybe ten. Some small number. She had avoided thinking about this, as one would detour around a deep swamp that one did not wish to be swallowed up by. There was no more avoiding the subject. They had arrived. If she looked down, she would see her feet sinking.

He did not take her arm again. He had assumed yet a new identity and trailed a half pace behind her, as well-trained servants did. As respectful inferiors did. It was nicely done.

She stopped at the door. Several important tasks would fall upon her shoulders the moment she stepped through. She would be Citoyenne de Fleurignac. She would much rather have stayed Maggie a little bit longer.

After a while, when she did not move, Guillaume said, “If you want that open, you’d better knock on it.”

“You are a fountain of wisdom.”

He showed a mild interest in the mansard roof and the carved garlands above the windows and none at all in her. This would have hurt her, if she thought his face revealed any tiny particle of what he was actually thinking.