A Stranger's Wife

by Maggie Osborne

  They traveled as far north as the gas works, then back through the streets of town, and then east to watch ice skaters gliding on the lake and the young people sledding down McGreggor Hill.

  Lily couldn’t resist. She was out of the sleigh the instant Morely halted to give them a view of the lake. She couldn’t sit still another minute, wrapped in Quinn’s warmth, their lips almost kissing when they turned to speak to one another. She needed to walk, wanted to run, needed to do something to release the tension drawn tight by the touch of his body and the thrill of his whisper in her ear.

  When Quinn climbed down, she hesitated, biting her lips, then bending swiftly, she scooped up a handful of snow, formed it into a ball, took aim, and let fly. Quinn’s hat sailed to the ground, and he gaped in astonishment. Grinning, she molded more snowballs and managed to pelt his shoulder and chest.

  Laughing, Quinn sent a snowball flying in her direction. Within minutes others had noticed then joined them, and the air thickened into a blizzard of flying snowballs. When Quinn finally helped her back into the sleigh, they were both covered with snow and weak from laughter.

  They both knew a snowball battle was something Miriam Westin would never have engaged in, would have been appalled to contemplate. They also knew they had been observed, and mild gossip would result. But today it didn’t matter. Today was theirs, and the rules had melted away.

  Nothing mattered but the smoldering promise in Quinn’s eyes, and the mounting anticipation that pounded in every quickened heartbeat. The tension and physical awareness wound tighter with every passing hour filled with teasing glances and provocative, suggestive whispers.

  Arm in arm, they strolled along Fifteenth Street, peering into shop windows. They purchased holiday gifts for the household staff and a few of Quinn’s major clients. Quinn bought her a nightgown with a daring lace bodice. She bought him a silk paisley smoking jacket. He bought her French perfume that reminded Lily of a rose garden. She bought him a beaver-brimmed Stetson which he wore the rest of the day.

  They lunched at the Lindall Hotel, but neither did more than sample the items on their plates. They flirted and laughed and drank too much wine. Lily rubbed her boot along his pant leg under the table, and Quinn suggestively circled his thumb on her palm.

  No real lady created a spectacle of herself as Lily suspected she was doing, flirting and laughing in public. She didn’t give a flying fig. Today, she was happily herself, or at least the hybrid creature she had become. After weeks of watching her p’s and q’s, of trying to move through her days with Miriam’s sad eyes and slumped shoulders, she gave herself this one gloriously charged day as Lily.

  The suspicious, almost defeated woman who had left the prison had vanished over the weeks. Her natural vivaciousness had resurfaced, accompanied by a newfound confidence that surprised and delighted her.

  “You are simply astounding,” Quinn murmured in a gruff voice. He hadn’t looked away from her since they sat down. “Dazzling. Amazing. You’re incandescent today; you blind me.”

  Intoxicated by wine and each other, they drove to Turner Hall for the matinee, but afterward Lily remembered none of the acrobatics or the tumbling acts. What she remembered was losing herself in the grey smoke of his eyes, watching his lips form words, thrilling to his fingers on the back of her hands, at the nape of her neck, brushing her cheek. They touched each other, unable not to, and pretended the touches were accidental. Their lips almost met when they turned to speak, and they pretended the mingling of breath was not deliberate. They heard the hoarseness of desire in each other’s voices and pretended it was an effect of the cold air in the unheated hall.

  When the performance ended, and the audience stood to depart, Lily’s bones had turned to liquid, and she clung to Quinn’s arm lest she stumble and fall. Her heart raced, and her fingers quivered on his sleeve. The frosty outside air felt good against feverish cheeks. Lifting her face to the darkened sky, she let a light drift of snow collect on her eyelashes and drew a deep breath of cooling air.

  “Open your eyes,” Quinn said in a low voice.

  “It’s snowing.”

  “That’s not what I want you to see.” Placing his large hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face the waiting sleigh.

  “Oh!” Her gloves flew to her cheeks and her eyes widened, then she laughed in delight.

  While they’d been inside viewing the performance, Morely, following Quinn’s instructions, had filled the sleigh with hothouse roses. Hundreds and hundreds of red and white roses covered the seats and the space between, spilled over the edges.

  Whirling, Lily caught Quinn’s face between her hands and kissed him deeply, her joyful gratitude impulsive and enthusiastic. Small hisses of shocked disapproval registered around her, but she hardly noticed.

  Running to the sleigh, returning Morely’s grin, she gathered an armful of roses and lowered her head to inhale their lush fragrance. “How will we get home? We’ll crush them! The thorns . . .”

  “I ordered all thorns removed. If you receive a single prick, I’ll buy the greenhouse and raze it to the ground,” Quinn said, smiling broadly at her pleasure.

  After bowing, he handed her into the bower of roses, and the scent of crushed roses enveloped her. Before they drove away from Turner Hall, Lily threw roses to a small group of children who had appeared to stand and gape.

  Now that it was dark, she snuggled against Quinn’s chest, and he put his arm around her. Roses lay under their feet and beneath their bodies, atop the lap robe and spilling from the sides of the sleigh.

  To Lily the world faded, and they were alone in a snowy garden. She didn’t remember ever being this happy. Lifting her face into the falling snow, she tried to tell Quinn that she had never had a day like this one and what it meant to her, but his mouth smothered her words in a kiss that seared flesh and bone. Beneath the mounds of roses, his hands found the edges of her cloak and slipped inside, covering the warm swell of her breasts. A moan issued from her parted lips, and she arched to fill his palms. Dropping her own hand beneath the roses, she touched him and gasped as he did when she felt the rigid heat between his legs.

  When his lips released her, Quinn crushed her against his chest. “Heaven help me. I have never in my life wanted a woman like I want you right now,” he said hoarsely.

  When the sleigh circled to a halt before the mansion doors, he didn’t wait for Morely to let down the step or open the door. He vaulted out and did it himself. Then he lifted Lily from the nest of roses and swung her into his arms.

  Circling his neck, she leaned back to gaze into his eyes, and what she saw pulled the breath from her body. A tremor raced through her limbs. “Oh Quinn,” she whispered. When she realized he intended to carry her inside, she pressed her face against his neck. “What will Cranston think?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  The front door opened, and he strode past Cranston and up the staircase. When he reached her bedroom door, he opened the latch with his knee, then kicked the door shut behind them.

  After setting her on her feet, he cupped her face between trembling hands and kissed her deeply, passionately, completely. His tongue explored, demanded, possessed. Lily’s arms dropped to her sides in fainting submission, and her knees crumpled, then she wrapped her arms around his neck and lifted on tiptoe to thrust against him and return his kisses with equal passion.

  Locked together, they tore at their clothing, sending it flying about the room. Breaking apart just long enough to throw aside cloak and jacket, reach for each other, part to claw at waistcoat and bodice, they came together again in feverish kisses that left her gasping and shaking. She jerked at his belt buckle and swore in frustration when her fingers fumbled. Mouth crushing hers, Quinn reached behind and stripped open the laces running down the back of her corset.

  As he pushed out of his trousers, she wiggled out of whalebone and laces. His hands swept her knee-length pants over her hips and down her legs, and they toppled backward on the bed
, locked in each other’s arms.

  Urgent, wild, frantic for each other, they rolled on the bed and then Quinn was above her and she saw his face in the dim snowy light and she wanted him, wanted him, wanted him. His hand slipped between her legs and she gasped and thought she was fainting, dying, then finally he thrust into her and she grasped his shirt collar with a sound like a sob and opened herself to the fullness of wave after wave of rocking sensation.

  They came together with explosive force, too eager for each other’s bodies, too impatient for gentle touches and tender caresses. Exploration would come later. Wild in their need, tormented by weeks of teasing glances and touches, by a day of deliberate provocation, of near kisses and suggestive whispers, they surrendered to sheer physical urgency and claimed each other with no thought but that of release from a need that had become desperate.

  Afterward, they clung together, spent and gasping, sprawled half-on the bed and half-off.

  When he could speak, Quinn lifted on his elbows and stared down at her, his eyes dark as charcoal. “My God.”

  Slowly Lily’s world stopped spinning, and her gaze steadied on his face. His shirt was plastered to his torso as wet with perspiration as her chemise. His hair was damp and his expression softer than she had ever seen it.

  Together they slid to the carpet and sat facing each other, struggling to catch a full breath.

  When she could breathe, Lily stretched out her hand and gently laid her palm against his cheek. He brought her hand to his lips, and suddenly she felt like weeping. Never in her life had a man made love to her as Quinn had. As if he could not wait another second, as if she were the most desirable woman in the world. And never had she felt the sensations he had aroused with the fire and fury of his need. Her body had awakened as if from years of dreaming, as if she had been waiting for this man, this moment, to experience the full joy of total surrender and fulfillment.

  Sitting on the floor in the pearlescent darkness of a snowy night, she let her fingertips explore the strong line of his jaw, the curve of a full lower lip. She touched his broken nose and traced the dark slash of his eyebrows, and marveled at this splendid man.

  And she knew there would never be anyone else for her.

  No other man could arouse her as Quinn had. No one else would ever summon the wildness of urgency and passion, or the feelings of tenderness she felt now.

  Leaning forward, he kissed her lips, gently, his mouth warm and light. Then he rose and brought her a wrapper from the armoire and assisted her to her feet before he found his trousers and pulled them on.

  “I’m going next door to my room. I’ll order a basin of warm water.” After lighting the gas lamp on the wall beside her vanity, he scanned the room with a smile and a wave. “Perhaps you could . . .”

  “I’ll sort it out,” she said, laughing at the tangle of clothing strewn across the floor and chairs.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Famished! But . . .” She caught sight of herself in the vanity mirror and gasped. Only one looped curl had survived intact. Her tangled hair flew about her shoulders, hung down her back. Her lips were red and swollen, and a rosy flush lay on her throat like a sunburn. “I can’t possibly . . .”

  Quinn smiled. “We’ll have supper in my room.” His eyes darkened and slid over her. “Don’t change a thing. Don’t brush out your hair, don’t remove the rest of your clothing. I want to look across the table and see you as you are now, warm and tousled, and wild.”

  She didn’t obey him, of course. After Cranston laid out a cold repast on the table near the window, Quinn carried the basin of warm water through the connecting door and discovered she had brushed out her hair and tied it at the nape with a lavender ribbon. And unless he guessed wrong, she had removed the perspiration-soaked chemise and her stockings.

  When he untied her wrapper and eased it off her shoulders, he discovered he was correct and she was naked.

  “What are you . . . ?” But her eyes turned sultry, and she smiled at him in the vanity mirror.

  Watching in the glass, he slid the wrapper to the floor and exposed her naked body as he had wanted to do for weeks.

  Gaslight had been created to flatter women. The warm golden glow smoothed out any small imperfections, cast intriguing shadows between her lush breasts and between her legs. Placed a shine of mystery in her eyes and gleamed softly on parted lips.

  Quinn inhaled deeply, staring at her in the mirror. Her breasts were full and pink-tipped. Her waist a sweet curve flaring into smooth pale hips. When he saw the blond triangle between her legs, lush, lovely, promising enchantment and fulfillment, he groaned softly and lowered his face to her hair.

  Turning her in his arms, he kissed her deeply, his hands moving to cup her buttocks and pull her roughly against him. He had intended to bathe her, but the sight of her body inflamed him.

  This time, he slowed the pace of their lovemaking, controlling his compulsion to immediately gratify his own selfish urges. There were other needs equally as satisfying. The need to stroke his hands over her skin and her magnificent breasts, the need to taste the salt on her throat and the texture of her nipples and the heat between her legs. The need to inhale the musky scent of their mounting passions. The need to feel her thrash beneath him and whisper his name in a voice husky and frantic with desire.

  She was as uninhibited and as unself-conscious as he had fantasized she would be. She gazed at him with unabashed curiosity, explored as he had explored, and his throat grew full with gratitude that he had found her.

  How could he let her go?

  * * *

  “Tell me about the paintings,” she said near midnight, after they remembered the supper Cranston had delivered hours ago.

  Quinn lowered a chicken leg and blotted his lips with a napkin. “I spent a year in the Italian countryside and fell in love with Italy. Someday I’d like to live there.”

  “You should have been a cat,” she said, laughing. “You need nine lives. You want to be a rancher and a governor, maybe a lawyer, and now an Italian.”

  “What do you want to be?” he asked, refilling their wineglasses.

  “Me? I don’t know.” Turning her head, she watched the snow pelting the windowpanes. “I know I can’t go back to being what I was before . . .” A wave indicated his bedroom and the rooms beyond. “When I think about Rose and me living in Europe, it’s a blur because I’ve never been there, and I can’t imagine it. But I know we’ll be living among strangers and a long long way from home.” She turned her lavender eyes to him. “Do they celebrate Christmas in Europe?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying not to laugh. She was wise in so many ways, ignorant in others. He looked at her across the table, and he wanted to open the world for her, to watch her face as she saw Rome the first time, or Paris. He would have liked to show her the world’s great architecture and sculpture and paintings.

  “Well, you can’t,” she said, looking down at her hands as he told her a little of what he was thinking. “You have a state to govern.”

  Firsts were magic and could never be repeated. It pained him that someone else would be with her the first time she saw the Mediterranean, and the Parthenon, the Louvre and Versailles. He didn’t pretend that she would lack for male company. Her beauty and the polish she was acquiring would attract suitors like moths to a flame.

  Nor was she a woman to stand in the shadows and merely observe. Lily would want to run barefoot on the shores of the Mediterranean, would insist on touching cool marble sculptures, would lean her nose up near the world’s great paintings. She would never be content to drift through Europe—or life—as a shadow. For her the world was meant to be touched and tasted, heard and inhaled. Experienced rather than witnessed.

  “What?” he asked when he realized she had asked a question.

  “Where do you go on Wednesday nights?” When he didn’t answer, she gave him a look of uncertainty. “I think I understand your schedule except for the regular appointment on Wednesday n
ight.” Her hand lifted in a gesture of apology and frustration. “I guess I’m asking . . . do you have another mistress?”

  He made himself smile. “I’m flattered, but one mistress at a time is all I can handle.” Changing the subject, he asked a question of his own. “Do you dance?”

  Placing her elbow on the table, she propped her chin in her hand and gave him an exaggerated look of superiority. “I am the epitome of grace and dexterity on a dance floor. Women collapse in tears of envy when they observe my waltz.”

  He laughed. “Paul will be delighted to hear it. I believe he envisions a rushed course of dancing lessons.”

  She grinned at him. “I learned in prison. Before she poisoned her husband, my friend Ida was a music teacher. She taught young ladies and gentlemen to play the piano and dance.”

  “Your friend the poisoner,” he repeated with a smile.

  “Paul’s going to be angry about today, isn’t he?” A sigh lifted her shoulders, and she leaned away from the table. “I started a snowball fight.” Lifting a hand, she ticked down her fingers, listing her transgressions. “I drank too much wine, I laughed and flirted over lunch. And, the worst, I kissed you in public.”

  Paul was also not going to be happy when he heard that Quinn had filled the sleigh with roses.

  “There’ll be some gossip,” he agreed with a shrug.

  “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to create a problem. I just wanted a day without rules. A day when I could be me.”

  That’s how he liked her best, when she was Lily, not Miriam. Lifting his wineglass, he looked past her at the snow piling on the sill. And he remembered Paul’s concern that he was falling in love with this unique and enchanting woman.