by Juliana Gray
Roland sighed. “I suspect he’s been working with the duke all along, and . . . well, things can get complicated, more or less, in tight quarters.”
She nodded. “I suppose so. I suppose you know all about these things. As my husband did.”
“Not quite like Somerton. I assure you, I relied whenever possible on my wits, rather than my fists.”
“I’m sure you did. Putting your life in danger every moment, of course.”
He kissed her hair. “My life held little value to me, at the time.”
“And now?” She looked up and spoke in a steady voice, the one he knew disguised her deepest emotion. “Are you going back to the Bureau?”
He sighed. He’d been doing his best to avoid the subject of his future with the Bureau. “I can’t simply abandon it all, darling. There are men who depend on me. But I promise you, I shan’t go on as I did before. I’ve too much to live for.” He caressed the side of her face. “Others whose claim on me is even stronger.”
She searched his face with anxious blue eyes, and he would have given his left arm to know what she was looking for. At last she laid her head against his chest and laughed again, a dry chuckle. “All this time, you were an intelligence agent? For heaven’s sake, Roland. You hid it well. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around it.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? To hide oneself in plain sight. I did rather a thorough job of it, I flatter myself. Turned old Penhallow into the most feckless, foolish gadabout . . .”
“. . . warming every bed in London . . .”
“. . . when in fact,” he said, drawing her away, so he could look in her eyes, “there was no one but you, Lilibet.” He drew his finger along the line of her cheekbone to smooth the fine hairs above her ear. “Only you.”
“Really?” she asked, breathless. “I can’t believe that.”
He shrugged. “You don’t need to believe it. It’s simply the truth.” Her body felt so fine and fragile in his arms, so right and perfect. He wanted to hold her, to protect her, to ravish her. To make up for all the lost years in a single passionate, sleepless night. A night for the ages.
Except that he was ready to drop dead from exhaustion.
He decided he’d settle for a kiss, for now.
He bent his head and brushed his lips against hers. She hesitated, and then put her hands around his neck and kissed him back, gentle movements of her mouth, almost tentative, as if they were kissing for the first time.
His loins ached, his entire body ached for her, but he pulled back. “All right?” he asked.
She nodded, without smiling.
He sighed. “It’s not all right, is it?”
She looked down again, slid her hands back to his chest, and fingered the buttons of his shirt. “It’s not that, darling. It’s just . . . well, it’s been a long day, very tiring, and . . .”
He picked her up in a single swoop and carried her to the bed.
“Roland!” she gasped.
But he didn’t lay her down in the middle, didn’t peel away her clothes with his lips, as he wanted to. Instead he sat with her, on the edge, facing the window, settling her in his lap with her head tucked comfortably into the notch between his chin and shoulder. “Look out there,” he said. “I’ve been watching the sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? The sky’s glowing purple, and there’s the Duomo towering up against it, with its red tiles. I think you must have assigned me the best room in the entire palazzo.”
She laughed. “Purely by accident, I’m afraid. And I’m quite sure Somerton doesn’t know you’re still here.”
“It’s none of his business, is it? He’s no longer your husband.”
Her laughter died. “Well, we aren’t quite divorced yet. Not until the final decree, in a month’s time.”
He kissed her temple. “Legal details, darling. The truth lies right here.” He picked up her hand and placed it on his chest, atop his heart. Her fingers curled and stretched, caressing him. “This truth. The one between us; the one that’s always lain between us.”
She said nothing, only watched her hand as it rose and fell with the rhythm of his breathing.
“What is it?” he asked. “Do you doubt me?”
“No,” she said, in a strangled voice, and he realized she was too full of emotion to speak.
He held her for a moment longer, watching the last of the sky’s color darken into night, and the Duomo’s red roof fade to a mere smudge on the horizon. He breathed in the scent of her hair, felt her soft body nestle into his, and at last had to shift himself, as discreetly as possible. “So, my dear,” he said, kissing her temple again to cover the awkwardness. “What next?”
“I suppose I should be getting back to my room,” she whispered.
He cleared his throat. “Well, we can discuss that, too, but I rather meant the next few days. Weeks. Months. That sort of thing.”
“Oh!” She stiffened in his arms, a movement that caused another necessary and rather painful adjustment to his lap. “Yes, of course! I . . . well . . . I suppose . . . that . . .”
“Yes, darling?”
“I suppose that depends on you,” she said in a rush.
“On me?” He began to smile.
“Well, I’ll be staying here for a bit, just to make sure everything’s all right, and then . . . well . . .” Her words dangled in the air.
“Lilibet.” He delivered the Penhallow drawl directly into her right ear. “Darling. Are you waiting for something?”
“No! I . . . No! I . . . I mean, well, the course is quite clear. I suppose I’ll take Philip back to the castle, and we can resume our lives with . . . with the goats and . . .”
“Lilibet.” He edged out from beneath her—things were getting rather too uncomfortable, anyway—and kissed her nose, and her mouth, and her chin. He worked his way downward, kneeling onto the hard wooden floor, pressing kisses into her throat and bosom and a particularly tender one on the swell of her belly. He took her hands into his and looked up into her face, luminous with the rising moon, heavy with fatigue, surrounded by the haphazard strands of her loosened hair. “Lilibet, my sweet Lilibet. My dear and rather rumpled love. Mother of my scandalously illicit child. Will you do me the very great honor of becoming my wife, in, shall we say, a month’s time, in order to properly legitimize our offspring?”
She was laughing and blushing, trying to pull her hands back. “Oh, Roland. You silly thing. This is quite improper. I’m not really divorced, not yet . . .”
He held firmly to her hands, kissing them hard enough to brand them. “What’s improper, darling, is the round belly you’ll be parading about Florence as a nearly divorced woman. You’ve already done the improper thing, my strumpet, so it seems to me the sooner we’re formally engaged, the better.”
“Oh, Roland,” she laughed.
He rose and urged her backward, inexorably, parting her dressing gown with eager fingers. “To say nothing of the improper way you invited yourself into my room just now. One would think your intentions were rather less than pure.”
“That’s not true. I . . .” She broke off in a sigh.
Her right breast lay exposed before him, round and plump and dark-tipped. He kissed it reverently, ran his tongue around her nipple, admired the way it puckered at his touch. “One would think you had designs on me, you shameless wanton.”
“I had no such thing. I merely . . . I wanted to inform you . . . Oh!” She groaned at the hungry enclosure of her left breast by his hand.
“You do realize the sort of ideas a man gets, when a woman visits his room after dark?” He trailed his lips across the divine canyon between her breasts, and suckled on the other.
“It . . . it wasn’t quite dark, after all . . .” Her hands wound into his hair.
“It was decidedly twilig
ht, my dear. The question does not admit doubt.” He eased the dressing gown over her shoulders, exposing the entire tempting reach of her torso to his eager eyes. With one hand he lifted her bottom and slid the rest of the gown away from her body and onto the floor.
She wore nothing underneath.
“Look at you,” he breathed. He ran his hand along her smooth skin, across the rise of her womb, caressing her. He covered the mound with his hands, imagining the tiny miracle that lay beneath, not quite able to believe it. Had they really done this? Created a child together, Roland and Lilibet?
“A fallen woman,” she said, the laughter fading from her voice.
“The most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he said, kissing her belly again, and then lifting himself to kiss her lips. “The most honorable. The cleverest. The bravest.”
“I’m not brave at all.”
“Yes, you are. Even to contemplate a future with such a sorry rapscallion as myself . . .”
“Rapscallion?” A giggle burst from her lips. “Rapscallion?”
“Rapscallion. Scapegrace.” Another kiss, long and dissolute and, he hoped, representative of rapscallions, which the ladies always loved. “Marry me, Lilibet. You really must.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I’ll marry you, Roland Penhallow. For heaven’s sake, it’s not as if you’ve left me any choice, half-gone with child. I’m not that immune to shame, I hope.”
“My thoughts precisely.” He kissed her again, with an emphatic smack. “And now that that’s settled . . .”
She moved so quickly he couldn’t finish, turning him over and swinging her leg over his hips, looking outrageously decadent with the fresh, newly risen moonlight bathing her naked breasts. She leaned in close to his face, letting her hair tumble over her shoulders to enclose them. “Now that that’s settled,” she said, “I can ravish you as you deserve. My noble Roland, my beautiful and quite irresistible Roland, composer of poems and savior of drowning passersby.” She kissed him and leaned back, unbuttoning his shirt with nimble fingers. “Passionate lover, daring spy.” She slid the shirt from his body, as, entranced, he lifted each arm with obliging promptness to assist her with the sleeves. “Faithful admirer. And oh, my darling”—she slid her hands up his chest, his throat, until she cupped his face—“the most important, the most wonderful Roland of all. The loving, openhearted father, for whom I can only thank God.” She lowered her face to his and kissed him, deeply and passionately.
The blood roared in his ears. His lips returned her kiss, while his hands went to his hips and shimmied off his trousers, taking particular care not to dislodge his love from her quite satisfactory post above him. At his expert kick, flicking the last of the offending garment from his right foot, her laughter bubbled up from her chest. She lifted her head and grinned at him. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“What’s that?” he mumbled, his wits not altogether at prime performance.
“That was far too well rehearsed a maneuver for a man of chaste habits.”
He assumed an angelic expression. “My agility is legendary in intelligence circles, madam, and quite up to the challenge of disrobing under pressure.”
“Pressure?” Her eyebrows lifted.
“The most immense and painful pressure.” He ran his hands down her back to cup her round bottom. “For which I humbly beg your most earnest efforts in relief.”
She smiled, a knowing, dreamlike smile, and reached down to caress the tip of his cock. His answering groan nearly rattled the window.
“Hush,” she said. “You’ll wake the house, and then where will we be?”
“For God’s sake, madam,” he ground out, grasping her hips, “do your duty.”
She laughed and went up on her knees, positioning herself just so, and came down hard, impaling herself to the hilt. This time her groan mingled with his, deep and heartfelt: acute physical pleasure amplified by the knowledge of connection, of oneness, of his body plumbing the depths of hers, soldering himself to her.
He fought the instinct to close his eyes and simply revel in the sensation of her hot embrace, slick and tight around his cock; he lifted his eyes to her face and found that she was watching him, too, her blue eyes dark and unfocused, her skin flushed and ready. “Move with me,” he whispered, and she began to slide upward, slow and a bit uncertain, examining his face as if for clues how to proceed. He let his hands travel upward, along the soft skin of her waist and belly to her breasts, warm and heavy under his fingers. “Ah, God,” he said, “you’re so beautiful, so damned alluring.” He circled the tips in a languorous pattern, keeping time with the rise and fall of her body along his, holding himself in check as she stretched and arched above him for long exquisite moments, trying him out at every angle until her eyes widened and her breath caught in her throat.
“That’s the spot, is it?” he said, smiling.
“Oh God.”
He moved his hips beneath her, increasing the pace, rolling her nipples gently between his fingers. He could see she wanted it faster, that she’d found the key and wanted to unlock the door, but he wasn’t quite ready to let her go. Instead, he dropped one hand to her bottom, guiding her, helping her find the precise rhythm to keep her shimmering just on the edge of release, to coil the tension like a fine tight spring, higher and higher, until she panted and moaned into the dark air, until her skin glowed with heat and her fingers dug into his chest.
How had he lived without this? How had he survived without her, all these years, so passionate and beautiful, so essentially Lilibet, her keen spirit seething under its layers of serene perfection, like a flame behind a fire screen? Her head tilted back, her breasts danced before his eyes, her skin branded his fingers; he couldn’t hold on any longer, as the intensity of pleasure threatened to kill him. With his hips he urged her on, harder and faster, and it seemed she felt it, too, felt as desperate as he did. In mere seconds her body stiffened and her silken walls rippled with release along his length, and her stifled cry of joy sank like the music of heaven into his ears.
With an answering shout Roland let himself go, let the climax overtake him in long, luxurious pulses. Lilibet collapsed against his damp chest, her hair spreading and tumbling around them, and through the thick and now-familiar treacle in his brain he thought he heard her murmur something rather important.
He stroked her hair and blinked several times. The treacle remained, however, and so he pushed out, with great effort, “I say, darling, what was that?”
She stirred comfortably. “What was what?”
“What you just . . . You said something just now . . .”
“Mmm.” She pressed a kiss into the hollow of his throat. “I said I love you.”
He closed his eyes. The mattress gave gently beneath his back; the bedclothes caressed his flushed skin, soft and fragrant with lavender.
Or was that Lilibet?
“I thought so,” he said, and went to sleep.
EPILOGUE
The sun burned high and hot in the blue August sky as they made the turn from the main road, past the faded wooden sign that read CASTEL SANT’AGATA 1 KM.
Philip, riding a few yards ahead on his new brown pony, shouted back over his shoulder. “I can see it! Just behind the trees! There’s my window! Do you think Norbert misses me?”
Roland cleared his throat. “Well, in the matter of grasshoppers, old boy, it’s entirely likely . . . well, given the length of our absence . . .”
“. . . Norbert may be out playing with his grasshopper friends in the meadow,” Lilibet said quickly. “I’m sure Cousin Abigail wouldn’t have wanted him to be lonely, with you away.”
“Oh.” Philip’s shoulders sagged beneath his rather wrinkled cotton jacket.
“But we’ll head out into the meadow directly after lunch and find him,” Roland said.
&n
bsp; “Oh, yes!” Shoulders up again. “I’m sure he’ll come when I call. He’s a jolly nice grasshopper. He’s dom . . . domis . . .”
“Domesticated. Yes, quite,” said Roland. He glanced at Lilibet, his hazel eyes gleaming with humor and his handsome face now tanned from a month of Florentine sunshine, despite the protection of his straw boater. The sun adored her new husband. His skin had only to pick up a few errant rays to mellow into a rich and quite unfashionable glow.
“Papa, may I ride on ahead? It’s just a little ways.” Philip looked up at Roland from beneath the brim of his hat with a kind of hero worship in his eyes.
“Yes, of course. Keep to the road and mind the rocks.”
“Yes, sir!” Philip nudged his pony into a businesslike trot and headed down the familiar drive toward the castle. She was eager to follow him, eager to throw her arms around her cousins and tell them everything, but Roland had proven unshakable in his insistence that she keep to a sedate pace. She looked down at her hands on the reins, at the ridge beneath her glove where Roland had placed a plain gold band four days ago, and smiled.
“I expect you’re desperate to tell the whole tale to your ladies,” Roland said, as if he could read her thoughts. She turned to him, and her smile broadened.
“They’ll be quite shocked to see me swing off the horse, for one thing. I’ve grown out scandalously these past few weeks.”
“More beautiful every day,” Roland assured her, his gaze traveling down the curve of her body with a look of deep and appreciative sincerity. He moved his horse closer to her, until his leg nearly brushed her skirts.
She laughed. “I’ll be bumping into everything. Anyway, Philip will have told them every detail before we’ve even dismounted. His new baby brother and his new papa.”
“He’ll have the devil of a shock if it’s a girl. I’ve tried to explain . . .”
“Well, at least you’re not going to disappoint him.” She reached out and touched his gloved hand, curling her fingers around his, because the love between Roland and Philip made her heart draw breath and expand into every corner of her body.