Ah, how sweet his lips were, moving so sensuously over hers, tasting, touching; how artful his tongue, flicking delicately across her sensitized lips; how electric his teeth, lightly biting her into shimmering awareness of her body’s yearning.
His hand came up and caressed her cheek as the kiss went on and on, melting her senses into honey, her self-reproaches into mist.
“I’ve got my period,” she lied against his lips, grasping at the slender strand of control that still connected her to reality.
Math drew his head back half an inch, and she saw the lazy, tender smile on his face and closed her eyes against what it did to her. “There are ways around that,” he said.
He kissed her again, kneeling up now and pressing his mouth against hers, so that her head fell back against the high back of the sofa. Oh, the clamour in her blood! Oh, the drunken, wild awareness of the senses! How she loved him, this man who had every right to call her cheat! How he gripped her heart!
He set their glasses down on the little stool beside the hearth, then lay back on the rug, drawing her down on top of him. She rested on his chest, elbows bent, and smiled down at him as his fingers stroked her face, her cheeks, her hair.
He had let her out of her prison, and was she going to put him into one?
“I love you,” he said.
Her heart thundered in her breasts, in her temples, her ears, deafening her to everything but the echo of the words. Her lips parted and she breathed in little pants.
“Do you?” she whispered.
His arms tightened around her. “You’re everything I have ever wanted, Elain. You’re my life, the breath in my body. I want you with me. God, how I love you!”
“I love you,” she whispered. She could not stop herself saying it, though she could smell the burning, from the future, of her life consumed in hell’s fire. “Oh, Math, I’ve never loved anyone like this!”
Her heart was tearing apart with love of him. Nothing had ever been like this. She whimpered as he pulled her down to meet his kiss, moaned as the pressure of his arms tried to pull her into his heart, sobbed as his kiss melted her, his hands remoulded her, his mouth devoured her.
Her back was against the rug, Math above her, wild, unleashed, uncontrolled. There was no gentleness now in his touch, as he kissed and kissed her. “I will never get enough of you,” he said hoarsely, harshly. “God, how I love you. From the first moment I saw you, there could never be anyone, anything for me but you.” The words came from his depths, and as he spoke his hands pressed and pulled her to him, shaping her, wanting her, the soul that has found its other half.
She was in a frenzy of love, passion and desire. There had been nothing like this since the dawn of the world. Her heart was breaking, her body was breaking, she was earth and water, fertility and storm, pouring over him, under him, through him; she was the bed he lay on, the sky that embraced him, the flood that swept him.
She cried and moaned as he pulled off her dress, tore her briefs out of the way of his wildly, fiercely seeking flesh. She spread her naked, sweat-glowing legs to embrace him, with a cry of passion and demand that even the universe must obey, and howled her acceptance of the powerful thrust of his body into hers.
“Elain!” he cried, wild with astonishment, stopping at the end of the thrust, deep inside her, his eyes burning down into hers. “Elain, my heart, my love, there’s never been anything like this.” He closed his eyes against sensation as his body involuntarily drew back and thrust home again, and his wild grunt of pleasure coursed along her nerves, driving her body’s joy, flooding into her brain.
He pushed and pushed into her, thick and strong, all-encompassing, driving all before him, cramming golden, melting sensation into every nerve, every cell. She was moaning, crying, tearing, embracing, drowned.
He held her head between his two hands, his face close above hers as what they felt drummed and flooded through them, wave after wave of it, a sea of feeling smashing over and over against the lush shore of their bodies.
“I love you, Elain,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me you love me.”
It was true; nothing else in the universe was true, but that was true. “Math, I love you,” she whispered. And then, as his body swelled in her in response, and pleasure took hold of them, driving him into her uncontrollably, she cried it aloud. “I love you, I love you!”
There was nothing between them now, only the raw flesh where their souls met and joined in a bond that was forever. The nightingale cried out the song of all the words of his yearning, and the rose drank them in, through petals and parched roots.
* * *
Later, by her lover’s sleeping side, she remembered, and wept.
* * *
“Let’s get your stuff up here this morning,” Math said over breakfast.
She choked on her coffee. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no point in your staying down there, is there?”
“Um, I—well, my painting—”
“Come with me.”
He set down his cup and stood up, leading the way to a door in the sitting room. Then she was in a curiously cosy room with two windows that faced the fortress, and a skylight above. The outside wall was naked stone, the inside rough-carved wood. An antique table and chairs sat in the middle of the floor, and there were a couple of sideboards, but she and Math had never eaten here. Only the electric light showed what century they were in.
“It’s north facing,” he said. “What do you think of this for a studio?”
“Math,” she said quietly, “I’m not ready for this.”
It was a lie. There was nothing she wanted more. But the way things stood now, how could she move in with him? Her position would be intolerable.
He went still, as though he were listening to some distant sound. Then his head moved. “Ah,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but it’s...it’s moving too fast for me.”
His face was expressionless. “Of course,” he said. “What will you do then, stay where you are?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He grinned at that. “I mind like hell,” he said. “But the decision has to be yours, doesn’t it?”
She was walking on glass. She would never get through without breaking something.
* * *
She had to find out the truth, or she would be destroyed.
* * *
She found her chance next day at lunch-time. All the men broke at twelve-thirty, and the restaurant was so busy Olwen was helping. Elain slipped into the office and turned quickly to the guest file.
“Brian Arthur,” she read. “Fifteen Branwen Close, Cardiff.” She memorized the address and the car licence number. Then she went to the kitchen, meeting Jan on the way out, her arms full of plates.
“Do you mind if I get a glass of water?” she asked, and Jan just waved her through. Elain crossed to the large old-fashioned porcelain sink, said hello to a harassed Myfanwy and picked up a glass. She slowly filled the glass, then leaned against the wall to drink. Myfanwy was working with her back to the sink. It wasn’t difficult to slip around the corner and down the stairs to the basement.
There were no lights on, and she didn’t dare put them on. It took her five agonizing minutes to feel her stumbling way across the basement, and when she hit the steps unexpectedly she nearly fell flat.
But at least when she turned the corner there was some light, from the open roof at the far end. The plastic sheeting everywhere distorted images, but the light still came through, and in another minute Elain was picking up a large portable lamp. It was too heavy for her, but she’d rather strain a muscle than run into something in the darkness.
They’d boarded up the doorway with two crossbeams, but it was an easy matter, if a bit dirty, to crawl under them and into the passage. For a moment she stood there, playing the light around. The supplies were still there, no one had touched them. Could there be a clue here? Elain wondered. Was there anything in what had been hoarded?
Some scene from one of her favourite old movies vaguely tried to surface. Hadn’t hoarding been illegal during the war? But surely no one would bother to prosecute such a crime now—or even care. And anyway, whoever had owned the house and done the hoarding had died before they could use their stash.
Like the man in the Bible. Storing everything up and then dying in the night. She flicked the light over the pathetic bundles that marked someone’s fear of going without and shook her head. Give us this day our daily bread, but that wasn’t usually enough for most people, Elain thought. We all want security.
Behind the hoarded stocks there was nothing but a stone wall to mark the end of the passage. She frowned. There was something she’d seen.... Elain lowered the light again, playing it over the dirt between two rotted sacks. Yes. There it was. Two deeply cut circles in the dirt of the floor, and a few chips of earth where whatever had made the circles had been shifted. The earth was too hard packed to show other marks, but fifty years of pressure would have driven the rim of the petrol cans down into it. Of course Math had seen this the other day. The question was, had he blocked off the passage because he was afraid someone else would figure it out? He had tried to keep everybody out at first, hadn’t he, but had given up when he saw how determined they were.
Elain shrugged and turned the other way down the passage. Raymond was right. No one would have risked setting petrol alight when the house was their only escape route, and still less would they have dared to stay here in the passage—or even deep in the tunnel—while the house burned down above them. Anything might happen—the oxygen getting used up, the wall exploding....
It was heavy, but still the lamp’s glare seemed feeble as Elain walked down the passage and into the dark tunnel beyond. At least she knew she was safe up to the rockfall. Math and George had been that far. But it seemed a long walk, and the uneven floor threw moving shadows that disturbed her vision and made her halting progress slow.
She felt the wind around her ankles. Of course. That meant that the tunnel was open somewhere. She wondered who else had realized that the other day, when they had felt the breeze. No one had said anything, but they might have guessed. Math must have realized.
The walls were roughly cut. For all she knew, they might have been made at any time. The wall and the roof had collapsed on the right and spilled rocks and earth right across the tunnel. It looked, at first glance, as though the fall had closed the tunnel completely. But there was still that breeze.
Elain tried to feel it with her face, her hand, tried to locate the direction it came from. Time must be passing. How long had she been down here? Would they need the lamp? Would they suspect what had happened and come after the thief?
Never let urgency get to you. That was one of Raymond’s rules. One of the hardest to obey. Elain took a deep breath and tried again, playing the light over the fall of rock and around the walls.
It was a trick of shadow, and of assumption, that kept it hidden. She had been looking for a hole in the rockfall, a place where it did not quite meet wall or ceiling. It seemed to be flush everywhere around its perimeter. But up on the left, the wall was throwing a curious shadow on the rocks. The rockfall was flush with the line of the wall all right, but there was something not quite right....
Elain scrambled up the long, slanted heap of stones closer to the junction, and saw that there was a hollow in the wall itself. Where the fallen rocks seemed to meet the wall, there was a niche. The rockfall had occurred just where there was a U-shape in the wall, and had not quite filled the space. And she could feel that it was here that the air came through.
It looked hardly big enough for a child, but someone must have been through here, someone not a child. Flattening herself, she pushed sideways into the niche, carefully leading with the lamp, though there was nothing to see. Then suddenly, there was space. Not a U-shape at all. Beyond that narrow passage, the left-hand wall simply disappeared.
So did the tunnel. Elain played the lamp into the darkness, but its beam fell on emptiness, so that in an atavistic impulse, she nearly screamed.
She stood perfectly still for a moment, trying to calm her panicked heartbeat, when what she really wanted to do was turn around, press her way back into the tunnel and run home. She was in a cavern, that was all. With enough light she would see the walls, and it would be simply a perfectly normal cavity in the rock. Even now she could see distant rocks glinting in the rays of her lamp.
Ever since her time in the burn ward, isolation of a certain kind frightened her. She had dreamt then of being swallowed up by empty darkness, and this was too much like her dream for comfort. Her lamp was so frail against the darkness, and what would she do if she fell, if she dropped it, if...? The thought of dying of thirst in complete darkness where there might be rats made her chill.
At last she came out of her reverie and shook herself. An old nightmare it might be, but it was not irrational. People got lost in caves with horrible regularity. It would be foolhardy in the extreme to explore this space by herself. At the very least she should have left a letter in her room saying where she was, so that if she did not return, they would know where to look.
But her fear was abating with time. At last she decided to explore only within easy reach of the opening, only to the extent where her light still reached it. Slowly she crept and slid along the rocky slope to the solid floor, then turned and played the light over the way she had just come, memorizing that curve in the wall that led to the tiny cleft.
Broken rocks glinted in the light. The cavern itself wasn’t as big as she had first imagined, but there were tunnels or caves leading off it, making it perhaps the hub of a wheel.
Without warning her ankle turned, and she fell, and the lamp went out. Elain screamed, panic flooding her brain as the utter darkness closed in. She lay still, winded and unable to catch her breath, and the horror was, her eyes did not accustom to the darkness. It was complete, and it would never get any lighter. Not even vague shapes became visible. She realized suddenly that she was cold.
She groped around her for the lamp, praying as hard as she had ever prayed in her life. When her fingers did not find it, she got to her knees and crawled a few inches, carefully feeling the ground before her, trying desperately to hold down the rising bile of sheer terror that gripped her throat.
Please, please, please. There! Her hand brushed something. Stifling the superstitious urge to snatch it back away from the touch, she reached out and felt the comforting shape of the flashlight. She rolled over into a sitting position and drew it onto her lap. Please, please. Her groping fingers found the switch and she pushed it.
Nothing. Tears of fear burnt her eyes. Please! she begged, and then suddenly there was another switch under her fingers, and she pushed that.
A flashing red glow came from the other end of the lamp, and her heart nearly burst with relief. Of course, this was the kind of lamp motorists carried to warn of danger if they were stranded on the highway. Elain laughed with the crazy joy that suffused her, and the sound of her own cackling mirth echoing from the empty walls sobered her. That was the sound of hysteria, and she must control herself.
She rose carefully to her feet. She could see almost nothing in the red glow, and she was no longer sure of her direction. She had kept her back to the rockfall as long as she was on her feet, but God alone knew where she was now.
She stood staring into the darkness that surrounded the intermittent red glow, trying to see her way. Then it seemed to her that she was not quite alone, as though something drew her, some knowledge both within and without. She didn’t resist. She followed her sixth sense, her intuition, her guardian angel—whatever it was, and soon her feet struck the loose shale of the rockfall.
“Thank you,” she breathed aloud. “Oh, thank you.” And a minute later she had squeezed t
hrough the little opening and into the tunnel beyond.
She heard the thunder of sawing and hammering as she approached along the secret passage, but the men were all on the next floor up. Elain set down the lamp and moved as quickly as she could through the darkness and to the stairs.
* * *
“Where on earth have you been?” Rosemary demanded, staring at her in fastidious horror. Elain stopped where she stood, cursing her luck. She had come straight up the stairs from the kitchen, and what rotten luck to bump into Rosemary coming out of her room! Another second and she’d have been halfway up the next flight and home free.
“I fell,” said Elain lamely.
“Into what, pray? A coal mine?”
It occurred to Elain that she didn’t have to answer the question, and she just grinned and dashed up the stairs.
She was certainly filthy. She stood in front of the full-length mirror and admired the greasy black streaks that covered her jeans and shirt and arms. Also her face. She really did look as though she’d been down a mine.
She wrinkled her brow. The greasy dirt reminded her of something. For a moment she tried to remember, then shrugged it off. There was too much else to think about.
Chapter 15
Mudpie was sensuously rolling in a patch of sunlight, ruffling her head against the rug, offering her tummy to its warmth. When Elain tapped on the open door, the cat flung herself upright and glared reproachfully.
Math turned from his work and smiled, the lazy, loving smile of a strong man disarmed by the sight of his beloved. “Hello,” he said. His eyes narrowed and his smile grew quizzical. “Have you been somewhere interesting?”
She had done no more than wash her face. She looked ruffled and very grubby. “Math, I’ve been down in the tunnel again.”
He frowned. “Alone?” When she nodded, he said, “You shouldn’t have done that. Dammit, it could be dangerous. What if you fell and broke a leg?”
“Yes, well, I did fall. I broke the flashlight. But not before—Math, the passage isn’t closed by that rockfall. There’s a way through.”
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