“Is he at the house now?”
“He’s gone to church.”
“Church?”
Her merry eyes winked. “Aye, driven him to religion you have.”
“I very much doubt that.”
“See for yourself.” She gestured to the steeple nearby, then bustled off.
Libby walked around to the church’s entrance and into the sanctuary. It was empty—no sacristan tending to candles, no worshippers—only him, sitting in the last pew, head bowed and hands clasped between his knees.
She dropped her heavy satchel on the ground and sat beside him.
“Do not tell me you are praying. Not in a church.”
“A man must find succor somewhere, mustn’t he?” He lifted his head and met her gaze and it was as though the wind whipped about beneath her ribs. He looked at her like no one else ever had, as though he knew all the thoughts in her head and found each of them beautiful.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Give me your hand.”
She did, and he lifted it to his lips.
“You are trembling,” he said, pressing his lips to her palm.
“I am overwhelmed. I had no idea this was what lovers do.”
“It isn’t. Lovers actually make love.”
“Why are you really in this church?”
He laced their fingers together.
“A man is coming to Edinburgh to speak with me. I will not allow him to call at the house. I await the vicar now. I will ask him the favor of meeting with my visitor in the privacy of the rectory.”
“From where does this visitor come that you choose to meet him in secret rather than at the Gilded Quill?”
“My homeland.” His thumb stroked over her knuckles. “He is coming to bid me return.”
Withdrawing her hand, she said, “I will leave you to the vicar.”
She went home. With no appetite for the dinner Mrs. Coutts had prepared, she put it away and climbed the stairs. Passing the mirror in her bedchamber she saw Joseph Smart.
In the church when he took her hand she had forgotten she was a man. She had forgotten she was a woman. She had only attention for him, for his touch, and for the news he had shared with her as though it meant so little, as though it had not torn the earth out from beneath her.
Changing her clothes with shaking hands, and scrubbing her face free of adhesive, she resisted the heat gathering at the back of her throat and eyes. Descending to the parlor, she opened her books. But her thoughts spun and the sentences folded back on themselves.
She should eat.
Leaving the parlor she went instead into his studio. The painting—her painting—sat on the easel. Finished.
He had not painted her as a damsel of ancient mythology, nor as a religious figure or even a simple nude.
Partially draped with a tissue-thin cloth from one shoulder to one thigh, she grasped in her right hand a surgeon’s instruments as though she had just plucked them from the heavens. Beneath her right foot was a toppled barber’s pole. She looked upward with the same crystal gaze of intelligence, curiosity, and confidence of his painting of Joseph Smart, but this time with a hint of vulnerability that looked like nothing less than humility.
Tears surged into her eyes.
“Do you like it?” he said behind her.
She whirled around.
“Why must you be so dreadfully good?” she exclaimed.
“I don’t know. For it has not been convenient.”
“I didn’t mean good as an artist.”
“I didn’t either.”
“If you were cruel or selfish or violent or even inconsiderate I could dislike you easily. I have no tolerance for those qualities.”
He folded his arms and leaned a shoulder into the doorjamb.
“You are angry with me because I did not paint you as a bored aristocrat draped in jewels?” he drawled.
“I am not angry. I think I am in love with you.”
His lips parted. His arms fell to his sides.
She dashed tears from her cheeks. “I tried to convince myself that it was only lust. But that was a lie. I am aching for you, as though I am ill with a disease that I haven’t any idea how to cure. It is both horrible and wonderful and I am furious about it, for this isn’t at all convenient.”
He came toward her, slid his hands beneath her dressing gown, and took her waist in his strong grasp. Gently he drew her to him.
“I am a disease?”
“I did not say you are a disease. Only the feelings. Though I try I cannot rid myself of them. I have never failed at anything so thoroughly before in my life.”
“Don’t try,” he said. “Kiss me.”
“I pursued you when you warned me not to. I am so sorry.”
“You should be. It is a terrible mistake. Now kiss me.” He lowered his lips to hers and she met him, felt him, opened to him, and drank him in. Wrapping her arms around his neck she pressed her body to his and he kissed her fully, deeply.
“Say you will make love to me,” she said, welcoming his mouth on her throat and running her fingers through his hair and needing to feel every part of him. “Now. Do not make me wait another minute.”
His hands spread down her back and around her hips.
“Another minute?” His whisper against her skin sounded like laughter. “I have been waiting three years.”
Breaking free of him, she shed her dressing gown on the studio floor, and ducked beneath the doorway bar. Beside the bed she awaited him, but he paused on the threshold.
“Why are you waiting?” she said. “It cannot be from nerves, at least not as wildly agitated as mine. You are not a virgin too, are you?”
“Elizabeth, are you certain?”
“Entirely.”
But he did not come forward. So she went to him, spread her palms on his chest, and willed her hands to express her certainty. The quick, hard beating of his heart buoyed her courage.
“I am not a typical woman.”
“I have noticed that.” His smile was marvelously unstable.
“I haven’t the modesty, nor fear of the sexual act. And when you put your hands on me, when you kiss me, I want to feel you inside me so much that I am mad with wanting it. And I wish to finally see”—she slid her hand downward and felt the hard proof of his desire—“exactly how this functions.”
His hand covered hers, the other sweeping around the back of her neck and drawing her to him to kiss.
She had already been naked while sitting for him, yet removing her gown now was a new adventure, for as he assisted he touched her. Standing behind her he unfastened the stays, removed her shift, and his hands circled her waist, spread over her belly, then swept up to cup her breasts. He kissed her neck, and his fingers trailed about her tight nipples tantalizingly, then across them.
“What are you doing?” she said upon a shiver of pleasure.
“Making love to you, as you have requested and as I have wanted to do to the exclusion of all else.”
“I didn’t know this was part of it.”
“Anything you wish is part of it.”
She swiveled in his arms. He kissed her beautifully. Then, with exquisite care, he taught her what she wished to learn about the male body. His body.
As he undressed she took her turn assisting.
“I never imagined that the experience gained in my imposture could be put to such compelling use,” she said as she released the fasteners on his trousers.
“I did,” he said.
She looked up into his eyes that in the firelight were full of desire. Full of her.
“You did?” she said.
“Every day.”
Her mouth opened, and closed, then opened anew. “I did not know. You are excellent at dissembling.”
“Touch me, joonam. Learn what you wish, and bring my endless craving for your hands on me to satisfaction finally.”
She already knew he was beautifully formed. Now she found that he
was so in every part.
His skin, taut and smooth over hard muscle, revealed past abrasions: some scars small, but others evidence of grievous wounds.
“What will happen if I do this?” she said, doing to him what she had wished to do for months. Against her palm came the pulse of his body’s reaction and a rumbling groan sounded deep in his chest.
“That,” he said rather deeply.
Awe and a sensation of feral power coursed through her.
She continued the experiment. It was thoroughly intoxicating: his grasp tightening on her, his rapid breaths against her brow that told her she was dismantling his perfect composure, and the increased throbbing of her own arousal. He was satin and heat and hard desire, and she wanted to feel all of him, to taste him and make him hers. She opened her lips against his neck and slid her hand downward.
Five strong fingers clamped around hers.
“If you do that,” he said with glorious roughness, “this demonstration will come to a rapid end.”
“But it can be repeated.”
Upon laughter he pulled her against him and kissed her quite thoroughly.
She had believed him a man of restraint in all things. Now she discovered that in this, with her, he absolutely was not.
As she laughed in happiness, he touched her everywhere—lips, throat, breasts again and again, caressing until she was gasping and sighing more often than forming actual words. His hands on her body were nothing like hers when she had touched herself, for they were large and not at all callused.
“Your touch,” she said, clinging to his shoulders. “It is so gentle. It makes me feel desperate inside.”
His hands rounded her hips, fingertips strafing the undersides of her buttocks, and he kissed her throat, her neck, her shoulder. “It is to your liking?”
“It is perfect yet I want more. Much more. I beg of y—”
He stroked along her arousal. Like liquid fire, pleasure licked up through her. Light and soft, his touch was maddening, gorgeous, drugging. Legs weak, arms banded about his neck, she parted her thighs and her hips moved as though bidden to do so by his hand. “Ohh. This is—” She was wild with need, undulating to his caress. “Please. Now. Give me more. Give me you.”
So he did. Upon the soft bed linens he gave himself to her. First his hands that were both gentle and full of power spread her knees. Then he lowered his body to hers and she took him into her.
For many moments, perhaps minutes, they were still except for the deep, awed breaths that neither of them could fully draw moving her breasts against his chest. Cupping her face in his hand, he stroked her cheek and her lips with the pad of his thumb.
“This feels good.” Her words would not rise above a whisper.
“That it does,” he murmured, and kissed her softly, then again.
“It feels . . . proper,” she said between his kisses.
“Proper? You?”
“Us, proper. That is, right.”
“Yes.” Fever was in his eyes as his hand traveled along her throat and neck, and curved around her breast. As he caressed her peaked nipple he moved inside her.
“Oh. That was perfect. Do it again.”
He did it again, and again, and again. Faster, harder, they came together more urgently with each thrust, and shortly she understood on a purely animal level how it was that people so frequently wished to do this.
His hands on her were no longer gentle, but greedy like her hands were on him, as she gripped his waist and heard herself whispering his name, then crying it aloud. Everything was wet and hot: her lips, his skin, their bodies locked together.
Yet still he played her body with his clever caresses precisely where they made her wild and his sex deep inside her, until the spiral of tight ecstasy exploded. It rolled through her, deep and hard and complete. The sounds she made were barely human.
She did not have to ask him to identify the moment he found the peak of his pleasure; she saw it in the straining of the sinews in his neck and the flexing of the muscles in his chest and arms, and felt it within her own body.
Still in his embrace, when she was again able to fill her lungs entirely, and he was setting beautifully tender kisses on her cheek and jaw, she did ask him how it had felt to him and also whether it was always both this satisfying and this wet.
In response he wrapped his arms around her, kissed her hair, then her brow, then her lips. She loved his mouth, the sweet heat of his tongue, the little bites upon her lips that made languorous rapture skitter about in her sex anew and her nipples tighten.
Her heart was still beating far too swiftly. She was full—so full.
Drawing away from her, he reached for a pitcher of water and a garment that had previously been discarded in favor of mutual nudity—her shift or his shirt, perhaps. Beginning with the sweat in her hair he began bathing her. He accompanied this with kisses.
She allowed it. As always she had many questions, but she had no words sufficient to express her feelings now. When eventually he reached her hips and gently applied the linen between her legs, she forced words over the lump clogging her throat.
“I have no particular awe for royalty.”
“I have in fact noticed that.” Smoothing his palm over her damp belly, he smiled a bit.
“Still, I don’t think you should be bathing me as a nurse bathes a child or a servant bathes a great lady. That is, not precisely like those, for a nurse or servant would presumably be dressed.”
“Presumably.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Yet you must allow it this once.”
She needed to know whether by this once he intended for them never to do this again, or if she must only allow it this first time although there would be many more occasions when he might bathe her but would not.
“Ask what you wish, Elizabeth,” he said, somehow knowing that questions now teetered upon her tongue.
She swallowed them.
“Thank you,” she whispered instead, surrounding his face with her hands, and drew his mouth to hers.
Soon he slept but she could not, instead hovering in a semiconscious haze of aching satisfaction and another kind of sensation that was not satisfying, rather uncomfortably desperate and lodged beneath her sternum. It made her watch him in sleep, the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest, the handsome face without any care now, his features at peace.
Eventually he stirred, turned his head, opened his eyes, and met her gaze.
“I expected you to shout,” she said.
“When?” he mumbled, still partially asleep.
“In your sleep,” she said. “From the nightmare.”
He turned onto his shoulder and faced her, the flexing of firelit muscles magnificent.
“The nightmares have gone,” he said.
“Gone? How wonderful! When?”
He rose above her and kissed her on her mouth and on the tip of her nose and on her brow. Her palms reveled in each ripple of his spine. His lips were in her hair.
“Before you,” he said, “there was only fire.”
“Am I the rain?”
“You are the flood.”
Her hands clenched on him.
“I do not wish to be the magical cause of your nightmares ceasing,” she barely whispered.
“There is nothing magical about it.” He kissed her jaw and she lifted her chin so that he could set kisses on her neck just beneath her ear where his lips truly did magic. “Why are your fingertips drilling holes in my arms?” he said against her skin.
“Because I want to swallow you with my hands. I want to touch you everywhere. And I want you to tell me that the nightmares will not recommence as soon as I leave this house.”
“To the last I can give you no promise. To the first two, you have my eager consent.”
“And to my statement that I will leave this house?”
“I know that you will leave it.” He looked into her eyes. “I am not your destiny, güzel kız. And you are not mi
ne.”
A sound escaped her throat: a sob of some sort, coming from her lungs and belly and heart all at once. It was impossible—this pain in the midst of such pleasure. Irrational. Unbearable.
He took her face between his hands and kissed her mouth. Caressing her lips, he parted them. Their heat became one.
He kissed her throat and neck, working his pleasure-magic along her collarbone and between her breasts, stirring her skin to a hot flush, and making her whole body wake again with hunger. Teasing the soft flesh of her breast with light kisses, he stroked the nipple and it hardened. When his lips closed over it she groaned, arched up from the mattress, and welcomed his teeth on her, and his tongue.
His fingertips stroking the length of her side to her hip tickled and tormented at once. He followed them with his mouth, soft and beautiful on her ribs and then her belly and then the skin stretched over her pelvic bone. She felt positively worshipped. It was the most ridiculous notion, yet his touch, his caresses, the beauty of pleasure twirling through her body echoed the glorious majesty of the goddess he had painted.
When his hands urged her thighs apart she did not resist, but spread them, eager for the hard thrust, the deep penetration, the wild pleasure.
Instead, he licked her. She choked upon a gasp. Their gazes met. His tongue stroked her flesh slowly, decadently. A sound rumbled in his throat and he closed his eyes, as though tasting her gave him pleasure. A wash of fragile elation cascaded through her.
“Touch your breasts.”
She surrounded them with her hands, stroking her fingertips over the taut tips, and watched as he kissed her sex again, and again.
Bringing her to climax required very little of this. She groaned as he licked her, repeated the soft caress, then penetrated her. Holding her thighs apart he took her entirely with his mouth. She panted, finally thrusting, telling him with words and her body that she needed him inside her.
He obliged, sliding up into her, their bellies brushing as he stretched her with slow, wet, gloriously confident ease that only drove the torment higher, tighter, then drawing out until she was gasping. Desperate to reclaim the pleasure she gripped his hips and tried to force him in.
Finally he thrust hard. She shouted an assent.
“This pleases you?” he said.
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