by Sophia James
Tasting him.
He breathed in deeply, and Cassandra felt the power of which Celeste had spoken all those months before. Not a limited sovereignty or a slight one. When her fingers slipped higher to his face she outlined the features: his nose, his cheeks, the swell of his lips and the long line of his throat.
His eyes watched her, fathomless, twin mirrors of the sky and the water and the mist, but fire lurked there, too, and it was building.
‘I am only a man, Sandrine. So take care that you do not cross boundaries you have no wish for me to traverse.’
‘What if I do?’
There, it was said and she would not take it back, not even when the flicker of wariness crossed into grey and she saw in his soul the first thought of ‘why?’.
If he asks, I shall walk straight out of this pool.
But he remained quiet and the turn of hardness, his sex, budded beneath the limed water.
It was what she needed, this truth of reaction, no whispered lies between them stating a future that could never be. For this moment she felt like a woman reborn, the girl in her pushed back by a feeling that was new, creeping into the place between her legs and into her stomach. Heavy. Languid. Damp.
Lost in the transfer of all she had suffered.
And in control of everything.
* * *
He did not speak because he was a man who understood small nuances. It was his job after all, seeking truth and finding exactly what it was those buried under the shifting tides of war needed to survive.
Sandrine needed oblivion, and he needed her to find it. It was simple. A translation of grief.
She was weightless against him, her thinness in the water disguised. He was glad he could only feel: the small mounds of her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach, her long legs draped around his waist as if they had a mind all of their own.
Opened to him. Waiting.
He wrapped the fine length of her hair about his wrist, tethering her, gentling her, the cold in the air and the heat of their bodies making light work of the joining, and when his lips came down upon her upturned mouth he did not hold back.
He was in her, tasting, her throat arched upwards and their breath mingled. He knew the moment he had her assent, for she began to shiver. In her ardency her fingers scraped down the side of his arms.
‘I want to know what it is like to have a husband.’ The honesty in her words undid him.
No pretentiousness, the grandiose and flowery allowances of various ladies he had known pushed aside by a simple truth. She did not play games or set rules or say one thing, but mean another. Danger and hardship had done away with all the extraneous.
Hot. He felt hot from the pool and her skin and the building need inside him. ‘I would not wish to hurt you.’
She smiled at that, the dimples in her cheeks deep, and steam across the coldness of night lifting around them. ‘I know that you won’t. It is why I want it to be you.’
With care, his fingers dipped, the softness of woman and the heat there, and she tensed, her eyes sharpening as though pain might follow and when it didn’t she urged him further, a small sigh of release and surprise.
She was tight and tense, her eyes a clear and startled turquoise as she watched him, measuring, challenging, her hips lifting to allow him in farther though her brow furrowed as he found the hard nub of her desire.
She stilled him.
‘What is this?’
‘You, Sandrine, the centre of you.’
Relaxing even as he spoke, she allowed him closer, the feel of her body against his, her breasts more generous than he had thought them.
‘Beautiful.’
Exchanging his hand for his manhood, he pushed wide, edging inwards, filling the space of her. When her arms pulled him in he knew that he had her and, twisting his body, he came in deeper.
With the water and the bubbles and the steam about them, both lost their tapering hold on reason, the final absolution as she went to pieces, beaching waves of rigid need, and then was quiet.
He held her motionless as he took his own relief, his face held upward so that the fine mist of night cooled him, his groan of pleasure involuntary.
‘God, help us.’ He had never felt like this before with anyone, never wanted to start again and have her impaled upon him, for all the hours of the night and the dawn, only his.
He should have withdrawn, should have given his seed to the water where it would wither and die in the heat. And instead...
If she were fertile then a part of him would grow.
But she did not let him think. ‘Take me again on the bank in the cold.’ Her voice was soft and her tongue licked at the space about his chin.
A thin, brave and pale siren with no idea at all as to how much she had affected him. Lifting her into his arms, he came from the pool in a cloud of steam and laid her down in the nearly night and gazed.
‘You are so very lovely.’ He whispered the words, honesty in every syllable, and when she smiled he found the hidden folds between her legs and tasted her. Sandrine. Salty and sweet and young.
* * *
Much later he dressed her, carefully so that the cold did not creep into softness. He had marked her as his, the red whorls of his loving standing out on the paleness of her skin, telling the story of long and passionate hours. But already the dawn birds called across the wide mountain valleys, signalling in the light.
‘I did not know it could be like that.’ Her voice was guarded. ‘After Nay I was not a virgin.’
The rawness of her confession grated against the new day. A confidence she did not wish to share, but had felt the need to? He frowned.
‘No one could live in that hovel and remain...untouched, though Celeste soon worked out a way to protect me from them.’
‘How?’
‘She began a relationship with Louis Baudoin and insisted I sleep in a small room off their own.’ Taking in a deep breath she continued on. ‘I think she thought the accident in the carriage was her fault somehow. She had wanted to take a detour off the main road and it was there that the horses stumbled down the hill. Her father and his godson were killed and Louis Baudoin found us just before it snowed.’
‘A saviour?’ He hoped she would not hear the irony.
‘He took us home, and Celeste was grateful.’
‘And you?’
‘I was grateful to her.’
When people lied they often glanced down before they did so. Their body language changed, too, the arm crossing the chest in an effort at defence. Nathaniel saw all of this in Sandrine, and when she did not answer he did not press her, but the joy of communion wilted a little in the deception and in her confessions.
With the wind behind her and the shadow of her hair across her cheeks she suddenly did not look as young as she always had before. But she was not quite finished.
‘My cousin was of an age when the adventures of life are sometimes sacrificed to the safer and more conventional. I could not save her.’
Nat stood and took her hand, holding it firmly as she tried to loosen the grip.
‘It is over now, Sandrine, and the past is behind us.’
But she only shook her head. ‘No, Nathanael, it is here right at our heels, and if you had any sense at all you would leave immediately and escape me.’
His laughter echoed about the lonely and barren hills.
Chapter Five
Maureen confronted her the morning after she had gone to the St Auburn town house, deep marks of worry across her brow and dark eyes fixed upon her lips.
‘You were so late home last night. I can hardly recognise who you have become, Cassie, and I do not think you know it yourself, either.’
Her rebuke stung. ‘This is not an easy task, Reena. T
here are so many who need—’
‘To be saved?’ A question. ‘And what will be your salvation when you are caught in the lad’s clothes far from home and I cannot find you?’
High emotion changed a careful diction so that the words slurred together unfinished and disjointed. Realising this, Maureen reined her anger in, the hands she used so much in communication hard up against her ears, pressing, and the guilt that had been Cassandra’s constant companion since the accident bloomed.
‘I cannot properly hear what people say any more, Cassie. Mama was certain that I would grow out of my affliction, but it is worsening.’
‘If Mama was still here she would know what to do, but she isn’t. She’s gone,’ Cassandra shouted back, for after an evening sparring with Nathaniel Lindsay she was heedless. ‘It was all my fault that she died. I was the one who did that.’
They had seldom spoken of the day of the accident, the memory too painful for them both. Their beautiful and clever mama falling down upon the floor, her eyes wide open with surprise and pain and then nothing. Save Reena with her hands on her ears in exactly the same way she held them now, her face creased with disbelief.
The laughter was unexpected.
‘Mama’s science is what killed her, Cassie. Mama and her foolish insistence on having us help her.’
The shock of the words kept Cassandra still.
‘Alysa only thought about her experiments. Don’t you remember that? She lived in her laboratory. Her scientific discoveries were her babies so much more than we ever could be and the thought of saving the world soul by soul through uncovering unseen sicknesses was what drove her. If she had not been killed in that particular accident, then there would have been another.’
Such revelations amazed Cassie. ‘You never told me this.’
‘I tried to because I could see that you thought it was your fault, but you loved her too much to listen and then you got sick.’
Heartsick. Body-sick. Soul-sick.
Leached of life by guilt and then by shame.
‘I should be rejoicing in my affliction in any case and not decrying it. I would have never met Kenyon otherwise for I would have heard his horse behind me and got off the path. What a loss that would have been.’
The day just kept getting stranger.
‘Kenyon Riley?’
‘Of course. I am getting older, old enough to imagine I should never have the chance of a family. I love him and he has asked me to marry him.’
Pieces of a puzzle clicked into place. Kenyon’s presence at the school, his interest in everything that they did, his generosity and his kindness.
‘You have been distracted lately, Cassie. I wanted to tell you, but you were never here. You were always dressed in your boy’s clothes and out in the night, helping others.’
Mama. Maureen. Kenyon.
My God, she had missed all the signs of change.
‘There is a problem, however, and I think it is only fair that you hear of it from me. There are whispers in places that say you were the woman in Lord Lindsay’s bed in that whorehouse in Whitechapel, and they are gaining in traction. Kenyon has tried to douse the rumour, but it seems you were seen.’
Maureen’s careful diction made the accusations sound so much worse, each rounded word ringing out the ruin.
‘Tell me it is not true, Cassie, and we can refute it together. I can say you were here with me and that they were mistaken...’ Her voice petered off as Cassandra shook her head and anger lit her dark eyes.
‘He forced you?’
‘No.’
‘You wanted him?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
Because I was abused once by monsters who held no mind for a young, thin, sick and frightened girl. Because Nathanael Colbert saved me from hell and we were married under other names in a town I can barely remember. Because I betrayed others to save his life. Because I have killed men by my hand and by my words and he hates me for it all.
That is what she could have said, might have even tried to had her brother not have chosen that very second to interrupt them and come tumbling into the room with a parrot upon his shoulder.
‘I was given this by a sailor in the park who had come from India and wanted to go back again without the bother of a bird. Sixpence, he charged me, and he said I was to call him “Mine”.’
At the sound of his name the bird lunged from his perch on Rodney’s arm up on to the gold clip in Maureen’s hair, pecking at the glitter to create havoc. And Cassie knew without a single doubt that any moment of truth was well and truly lost.
‘Mine. Mine. Mine’, she heard them both calling as she slipped through the doorway and left.
* * *
Cassandra lay in bed that night and thought of all that Maureen had said. If the gossip about her were to become widespread, what would happen? Nathaniel Lindsay would hardly be stepping forward with an offer of his hand. Again.
Wonderful and terrible.
The day had been that. Maureen’s good news balanced against her bad. The guilt felt about her mother’s death lost into the wonder of Reena meeting Kenyon Riley and all because she did not hear the hoofbeats of his horse as they came from behind her. Despite everything else, Cassie smiled and rubbed at the china shard Nathanael had threaded for her in the tiny village of Saint Estelle.
They had come down into the settlement late in the afternoon, the thin sunlight slanting on to their faces as they walked in silence after their night at the pools. Cassandra had not dared to break with words the magic that danced about every part of her body.
This was what she had heard of in the ballads and in the books. This crawling, sensuous, languid warmth that sifted through everything and left her different.
She wished they might find a room somewhere, alone, and begin all over again. The punching throb of need made her groan, and he turned.
‘Are you hurt?’
The redness began at her breast and crept up on to her cheeks, a wave of heat similar to that she had felt last night. Unstoppable. She was like a woman in a story book, a woman with little will of her own and a singular wish for the feelings expressed in the works of the Romantic poets Celeste and she had read under the candlelight.
Thrilling.
Please.
The word coiled inside her like a snake waiting to strike.
Please. Please. Please.
She saw the moment he understood what it was she hid, blue darkening across silver in a will all of its own.
Lust it might be for him, but for her love held on at the edges, grasping tentatively. The feel of the ring against her skin deepened it, a circle that held them together, caught in the company of each other, pledged to God.
And by flesh now, the feel of him within her, the building joy of need, the hours of play and delight so different from anything she had known at Nay.
She shook away the darkness. No. She would not think of that again.
‘I will find us a room.’ His voice sounded strained and unnatural.
* * *
This time the feeling was different. This time they circled each other fully dressed in a chamber that was...comfortable. Now instead of a strange world far from the one they knew, a certain familiarity crept in. The crystal of the glasses. The bed with its feather quilts. A window where the blinds had been drawn across the remains of the day; curtains of floral damask much like the ones hanging in the library room at home. Bread and wine sat upon a gilded tray on the table.
The consequences of choices already made settled in. One day she would be back in London and this would all be a memory.
She began to unbutton her shirt, but he stopped her.
‘We will eat first.’
First.
She shook her hea
d. She was not hungry for food or wine. She did not want to wait until they had supped and spoken, all the normal things that happened in a relationship. This was not normal, the aching lust that coursed through her and made her want to lunge at him and take everything that his body could offer hers. She wanted him inside, moving; she wanted to feel all those things she had last night and this morning when her mind for once had flown away from thought and into a place that was only feeling.
No past or future, only now.
‘We have time to—’
She stopped him. With her fingers across his lips. Pressed hard.
‘No.’ Her other hand unbuttoned his shirt and came inside, the warmth beguiling. Yesterday he had flicked her nipples with his forefinger and she had liked it. Today she did the same to him, measuring his heartbeat as it quickened.
‘Tonight is by my bidding.’
The slate-grey darkened, the last light from a dying sun slanting through a gap in the curtains and reaching the skin on his chest where she had peeled away clothing.
‘Like the daughters of Achelous?’
‘The sirens?’ She laughed. ‘Dangerous and beautiful?’ He knew the old legends of Greece and the names of the gods. For a second she wondered just exactly who he was, this man dressed in clothes that had seen better days, but when she kneeled to undo his trousers she forgot about such intrigue entirely.
He was her husband and he was ready for her, sprung hard against lust, nothing hidden. A gift offered without payment or coercion. Or hurt. Legal. Sanctioned. Authorised.
She laid her fingers around his shaft and brought it to her tongue, licking the ridges and the smoothness, finding the essence; and when he swore roundly she brought him in deeper.
* * *
Hell, Nathaniel thought, his world spinning in a way it never had before, the sweet feel of yearning drumming in his ears. Wild curls hid Sandrine from him, trails in gold and red, her slender shoulders bent in concentration to all that she gave. He knew she wanted control, but in another moment his restraint would break and he had to give her back more than just his own relief.