Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

“It must have hurt.”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She licked the lip. She couldn’t meet his gaze. He wondered, suddenly, if she might be a virgin. Maybe she wasn’t a con man’s mistress. The huckster spiritualist with his round glasses and pointy beard was just a caricature after all. A figment of his imagination. Maybe she wasn’t lying. Maybe she had been overcome at the séance. A country mouse might faint in a crowd. Particularly a country mouse in a corset. He pushed the thought away before it could prick at his conscience. She hadn’t fainted. According to Louisa, she had frothed at the mouth.

  “I bit … It happened at the séance. I can’t remember much of what occurred.”

  “You were possessed by Phillipa Trombly, my dearly departed.” He brought his face closer to hers. Her wild black eyes fixed on his, and she froze. Even her trembling ceased. “That is the supposition believed in some corners.” His eyes drifted over her face, slipped from the shining eyes to the smudged circles beneath and down the regal slope of her short, thin nose to the beckoning red of her mouth. “Unless you are willing to admit it was feigned?”

  “It wasn’t.” She didn’t move her lips as she breathed the words. She was afraid, perhaps, of inviting more attention to them. Too late for that. A little voice piped up in his head. “Stop,” it said. “You are definitely enjoying yourself.” And he shouldn’t be. But stopping was out of the question.

  This Miss Reed maddened him, how she flickered between timidity and ferocity, retreating then flashing defiance. How she used her body like it was a rigid little barricade between her true being and the world. She hid behind a black-and-white façade. She was elusive, entirely untrustworthy, utterly alluring. He wanted to destroy her defenses, force her into some spontaneous action, eliminate the distance she’d created between her inner and outer self. Not only because of the harm she could do if she began to prattle about the secrets that weighed on Phillipa’s unquiet soul. But because she was a puzzle that didn’t resolve into a picture he could recognize.

  Many women tried to present themselves as puzzles. They were subtle, intelligent, mysterious … but ultimately the pieces fit together. He saw what they wanted, what they feared. Miss Reed—if that was even her real name—seemed to shift like desert sands. He couldn’t get his bearings. A chasm might open at any moment.

  No matter who had put her up to it, no matter how much she knew or didn’t know about Phillipa’s secrets, the fact remained: she had feigned contact. She had wormed her way into Louisa’s confidence. She was positioned to rip open old wounds. To bring what festered to the surface.

  She was his foe. And suddenly he was glad of it. Because that meant he owed her nothing. Not respect. Not restraint. He could do anything he wanted to discover what she knew … to see how far she would go.

  “Can you summon Phillipa now?” He raised a hand and slipped a finger beneath her bonnet, pulling it back to expose her ear. “Is she with us?” He let his hot breath stir the fine hairs that covered the tiny, dark opening. Her convulsive response brought her breasts into brief contact with his chest. She gasped and jerked back, pressing herself into the tree. He fancied he could hear her spine grinding. Unless her mystic abilities extended to de-materialization, she would not escape through the wood. He smiled against her neck. She didn’t smell like an enchantress. She smelled like a good English girl, smelled of rosemary soap and freshly laundered clothes, and only a hint of something else, something tangier, saltier, her own smell. He wanted to inhale more of it. To nuzzle her neck, seek it out. He raised his mouth so his lips brushed her earlobe. “Does Phillipa want to kiss her betrothed?”

  He was teaching her a lesson. That was all. Showing her how dangerous it was to toy with people’s emotions. Showing her there were consequences she couldn’t anticipate. So what if it was ghoulish? Damnable? The whole business was ghoulish and reeked of brimstone. She had begun it.

  He plunged his hand more fully beneath her bonnet, feeling the silky mass of hair beneath. He lifted his left hand from the tree and pressed his forefinger to her upper lip, traced that deep indentation. He’d never cared to wear gloves except when riding, or when the weather was particularly inclement. He’d abandoned the habit altogether in Egypt. His hands were bare. The fingertips of his left hand were callused from the strings of the violin. He rubbed the roughened surface of his finger down the cleft and up the peaks of her lip. She drew in her breath, and her lips parted.

  “Or maybe it’s you who wants to kiss me?” he whispered. “Only you.”

  She didn’t deny it. Her eyes had closed, and the lids, with their faint mauvine smear, fluttered.

  “Open your eyes.” He still spoke softly, but it was a command. He would not allow her to retreat. She squeezed them shut more tightly. He cupped her face, pulled at her eyelids with his thumbs, stretching the thin skin, uncovering the black irises. Her eyes appeared more slanted then, more like Phillipa’s. Damn it. He lifted his thumbs. Her eyes opened wide and stayed open.

  “That’s right,” he said, harshly. He put his forehead on hers and felt her eyelashes sweep down, up, down, up, against his cheek. Then he could bear it no longer. He lowered his face and claimed her lips with his own.

  Her lips were dry, hot. They parted slightly as he breathed against them, and he availed himself of their opening. He slid his tongue along her lower lip, felt the little scabs, tasted the hint of blood, coppery, mixing with the cinnamon on her breath. God, it was the taste of sin itself. He took the lip between his teeth, gently, and suckled it, plump and salty-sweet. He felt her lips open further. He thrilled with triumph as her breath exploded. She’d been trying to hold it in her lungs, to tamp down the air in her lungs, to withdraw into herself. But she couldn’t hold back any longer. She gasped against his mouth, and her body shuddered, the clockwork mechanism winding down. He turned her face with his hands, kissed the peaks of her upper lip, the corners of her mouth, the smooth, white skin of her cheeks. He slipped his tongue along the damp crevice beneath her full lower lip, and she caught his upper lip between hers, returning his kiss, her tongue against his teeth. She pressed into him, moved her mouth on his with bruising force.

  He responded with a low growl, rocking back on his heels, pulling her against him. He wanted to rip her mourning gown down the middle, expose her white skin through the ruins of those black shrouds, reveal her breasts to his plundering mouth. He wanted to lay her down on the damp ground, on the first shoots of spring still weak and tender, struggling out of the dead earth, and take her there, the heat of their bodies sending warmth into the clay, enlivening it. They would be soiled by the act, rutting in the mud, leaves in her hair, cold dirt beneath his fingernails. They would defy the sanctified dead by rolling in the mire, that compost of corpses. He bent her backwards, one hand at the small of her back. The shawl slipped from her shoulders, and he bunched the soft wool in his hand, pulled it away with one smooth motion, and let it drop. He gripped the back of her neck, and she moaned, once, loud and harsh against his lips, the sound ugly with need. He was hard, straining against his trousers. He dragged his mouth from hers, dazed, and in that moment, he glimpsed her face. Her eyes. Her wide, open eyes, black, hungry, tormented, the pain in their depths the twin of his own.

  He had wanted to see how far she would go. How far she would take her little game. He had never expected he might push beyond his own limits.

  He knew he really was damned. Beyond any dream of redemption. Because he wanted her there with him. Because he hoped she was damned too.

  Chapter Eight

  Isidore Blackwood’s presence invaded her. She felt the hard trunk of the tree against her back. She couldn’t sink into it. It wouldn’t give. His arms, his broad chest were just as hard, just as unforgiving. There was no way out. Warmth emanated from him, carrying that heady mixture that was his scent, musky and tantalizing. She couldn’t block it out. She could only shut her eyes and try not to see him. She tried to disappear. She had done this often. Floated somewhere, anywhere else. A d
ark, featureless place in which everything was absent. She’d escaped so much pain, hovering beyond it. She worried that sometimes not all of her came back. That she lost a little bit of her soul in the journey. But the alternative—remaining locked in her wracked body—was worse. It wasn’t only physical pain that sent her drifting. When word came that Robert had been found—on the pebble beach in Porlock—she had gone away for days. She didn’t need food, or sleep. Papa spoke to her, but she couldn’t hear him. Though, finally, Papa was why she returned. Why she ate, why she slept, why she spoke again and listened and pretended all of her was there.

  She caught her breath and held it in. But he would not let her disappear.

  “Open your eyes,” he said. His hands tightened, viselike, on her face, and his fingers pulled at her lids so her eyes watered and she saw smears of color. When he let them go, they stayed open. Instead of the nothingness, she saw him. His eyes—his eyes glowed a blue she had never seen. Like hellfire behind a stained-glass window. Where the light played on his face, she could see the fine grain of his skin, burnished bronze. Then the ridge of his brow pressed hard into her forehead, locks of his black hair stroked her temples, and she felt his breath blow hot across her lips. His lips came lower, closer, and suddenly they were on hers, between hers, pushing her lips apart.

  She knew it was a kiss. She had read of kisses in novels. And she had been kissed herself—twice. The first kiss hardly counted. She’d been fourteen, walking her lamed horse through the fields with Mathew Sunderland, who had claimed it was no sacrifice as the riding party was an absolute bore without her. He was thirteen, and his kiss, brief and light, reminded her of when she was very young and used to kiss buttercups. The second was a proper kiss three years later, the musical professor Papa had hired for the summer taking a liberty. He was young and handsome—much to Papa’s chagrin—and, like a man in an opera, he sang every word, from “good morning” until “good night.” On his final day at Arlington Manor, he had wrapped her in his arms. His mouth felt warm and pleasant. She was worried that he would break into an aria afterwards and alert her papa that something untoward had occurred, but instead he bowed, so deeply and so dramatically she had to skip to the side, and trilled a simple “La!” She shouldn’t have allowed it, but she was curious, and she knew nothing more would ever come of it. Such a silly, strutting fellow, though his voice really was a fine instrument. The next morning he was dispatched to Hanover Square, and that was the end of that. Those were kisses, and this too was a kiss, but so different it shouldn’t go by the same name.

  This was new. She had never known that a kiss could be so … powerful. That it could involve teeth, tongues, and burning breath. His tongue slipped over hers, stroked her, and she opened her mouth, released the air from her lungs, and pushed back with her tongue. She heard him groan, felt his suction on her lower lip. The rhythmic pulling sensation made something respond in her lower belly. It was something between a tickle and an ache and an itch that made her want to rub herself against his hard thigh where it nestled between her legs. The heat of their joined mouths was sinking through her, sending ripples all the way to her fingertips. His hands were on her head, on her back. Her own arms had twined around his neck without her knowledge. Her breasts crushed against his chest, and the tips felt like hot coals, hurt like hot coals would hurt embedded in her flesh.

  This was pain, but she wanted it. She wanted to feel it. She wanted to feel every fiber of her body stretch and strain and fray. She wanted to keep every sense alive to it. She wanted him to feel it too. She wanted to make him feel it, for the pain to be theirs and not hers alone. She tasted his skin—pine, smoke, pepper—and the taste wasn’t enough. She wanted to devour him. His breath was coming harder, and so was hers, and she realized her eyes were closed again and forced them open. She wasn’t going away. She was staying. She was inside her body, and her body was thrumming, and the little moan that she gave was the sound. His tongue moved deeper inside her mouth, filling her, and she wanted to scream then, because she wanted more, and this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. This wasn’t for her. This heat of skin against skin, tongue against tongue. Now that she knew what a kiss could be, everything was worse. It wasn’t fair, that she could feel like this. Hot and yearning and alive. She shouldn’t want to melt into him. She shouldn’t want to feel his tongue filling her, to take it in, to swallow him. But her body was proving that it wanted. It could experience this other pain, this sweet agony that made the blood race through her veins. Her red blood with its dark cargo. Its taint. Morbid material.

  He pressed into her, curved over her, and her body was bending back like a bow. She wanted it to break in half. She wanted the tension to release so she could force herself to twist away. She didn’t belong in his arms. Resistance stiffened her limbs. She felt a bubble in her chest, a little hole, expanding. She was empty. She would stay empty. Nothing would ever fill the hole inside her. She was damaged beyond repair.

  He was still kissing her, his eyes closed, kissing her lightly, his lips teasing hers, licking, tickling. She stared into the bronze blur of his skin, the dark smudge of lashes. Then his eyes opened too. Searing blue slits. He drew back with a ragged breath, gripped her shoulders, and looked at her. Isidore Blackwood. That brutal face still close to hers. The features so large, so strong. The most vivid face she had ever seen. But he was a stranger. A muscle in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth. What he found in her eyes made his eyes widen. He let her go, and she almost staggered. The air felt cold as it rushed to fill the void left by his body. Empty. She hugged herself to suppress a shudder. Her shawl was gone. Fallen to the ground. She bent to pick it up and shook it out, stalling for time.

  He had seen something in her face that shocked him. A hint, perhaps, of the beast she could be, the beast she became. Not even human.

  She held the shawl in her hands, staring at the soft blackness. She wanted to hide in its folds. Make it into a black tent and crawl inside. She draped it over her shoulders. The copse was not so thick that she couldn’t see the open green of the park through the trees. She could hear the low roar of mingled voices, hoof beats, carriage wheels. The city that had faded away when the world condensed to lips and stroking hands was reforming around her. The world wasn’t her body and his, pressed together, moving as one. The world was out there, vast and terrible, and she was alone in its midst. Not a part of it. Not a part of anything. She had to remember what she couldn’t have, or she would want more. And that was a hurt she could spare herself. She must not want … more.

  Now that he was out there, detached from her, a part of the world that she wasn’t, she could look at him. He stood a few feet away, the angle of the light casting one side of his face into shadow. She couldn’t read his expression. His chest rose and fell evenly, as though he hadn’t groaned in her ear, panted against her mouth. He hadn’t felt it—the dark need, the sweet, driving pain. He was unmoved. Disdainful. Judging her.

  A kiss couldn’t be a revelation to him.

  She realized her bonnet was askew and straightened it, tucking back the hair that had fallen from her bun with a savage motion that caused a sharp pain in her scalp. This kind of pain—simple, so different from the double-edged agony she’d just experienced—cleared her mind.

  He had kissed her to be cruel. Shame swept over her in a wave. Shame and fury.

  “Did that accomplish what you expected, my lord?” She met his eyes, his startling eyes, blue-black rings starred with paler blue. “Do you feel closer to Phillipa?”

  “Not in the least,” he said, voice flat. He scrubbed a hand across his face. The creases alongside his mouth deepened. He looked almost haggard. She could imagine, suddenly, how he might look in twenty years if the care continued to eat at him: Lines etching the bold planes of face. Features even more marked. Nose like a blade. A grim face. Then his look softened, and the vision vanished. He was young again, and his stark beauty made her yearning a bodily ache. Dear lord, she would need to find new
ways of ignoring her body. Her body was finding new ways to betray her.

  “Miss Reed.” He searched the treetops. With his head so angled, he revealed the broad column of his neck, the shape of his chin, the rich red of his upper lip, the slight bump in the bridge of his nose. “I want to apologize for my conduct. That was … unkind. I should not have taunted you.”

  And what of the kiss? Suddenly she did not want him to apologize for the kiss. The taunts, yes. But his lips on hers … Had the unkindness of the impulse been borne out in the act? Did he feel that the act had polluted him? Could he … taste it … her tainted flesh? He had tasted … delicious. And she … Am I foul? Tears pricked her eyes. It must have been so different from kissing Phillipa. Phillipa’s lips must have been sweet.

  “I have never been a bully.” He linked his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, studying her. He looked boyish, ill at ease. Guilty. His mouth quirked with self-mockery. “I hate bullies.”

  The old viscount. His father. She remembered the shadow that had crossed Mrs. Trombly’s face when she spoke of him. A controlling man. Watching the play of emotions on Lord Blackwood’s face, she suspected the old viscount had been rather more than simply controlling.

  “This is a deuced odd situation. I’ve handled it badly.” He shrugged, still distant. A male voice boomed beside them, as though the speaker were standing right there, just through the trees. A flurry of “What hos!” followed, growing fainter.

  She glanced about to locate the figures and saw slivers of masculine couture—tweeds and top hats—receding. No interruption forthcoming from that front.

  She fidgeted, balling her hands in the edges of her shawl. “I cannot summon a spirit at will.”

  Now the quirk of his lips turned sardonic.

  “My dear Miss Reed,” he said. “I never thought you could.” He shrugged then threw his arms open in a gesture meant to communicate helplessness. Except he could not look helpless. The reach of his outspread arms was prodigious and only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders.