by Susan Wiggs
Leaning on one elbow, he turned to face her. She felt caressed by his gaze, though he wasn’t even touching her. “There’s plenty to see right here,” he said, never taking his eyes off her. “Traveling is for people who lack imagination and are easily bored.”
She laughed. “That’s clever. But unfortunately, wrongheaded.” She had a terrible urge to place her hand on his cheek, perhaps winnow her fingers through his hair. Lord. In all her travels, she had never seen such a man.
Oh, Sancha, she thought. You were such a lucky woman.
“In what way is it wrongheaded?” he asked, annoyance creeping into his voice.
“Let’s not quarrel again.”
“Why not?”
“Because we excel at it already. We certainly don’t need to practice.” Leaning her elbow on the railing, she cupped her chin in her hand and studied his face, shadowy and lean in the torchlight. “Besides, I like it better when you’re flirting with me.”
“You’re easy to flirt with.”
They were so close their shoulders were nearly brushing. He had a smell all his own—the expected cedary scent of macassar oil and then something else, something unique and grassy and real. She had an overwhelming urge to fall into him, to explore until she found a name for that heady scent. She wanted to feel his arms around her, lifting her up and out of her own life, pulling her off the path she traveled and into a new world.
“Do I take that as a compliment?”
“Take it,” he said, straightening up and folding his arms in front of him, “as you will.”
She was trying to decide how to respond. Who was this new Blue Calhoun? Who did he want her to be?
A fresh wind rippled through the night garden, carrying the scent of the city and the sea, and far-off places she suddenly had no interest in seeing. Inside, the orchestra played “The Maiden’s Heart,” and down in the garden a couple strolled, their meandering path winding in and out of flowering hedges. She watched the slender man and petite woman stop walking for a brief, furtive embrace. They were in a world unto themselves, it seemed. Somehow their stance conveyed a complete disregard for their surroundings. They exuded a peculiar passion that made her look away to give them their privacy.
She placed one hand over the other on the railing and clenched her fingers so she would not inadvertently reach for Blue. “I flirt all the time,” she said with a nonchalant toss of her head.
“Funny,” he said. “Then one would think you’d be better at it.”
“I am good at it.”
“I’ve seen no evidence of that.”
“And just what are you looking for, Doctor?”
“Skilled flirting. The sort that makes me raving mad with lust. That makes me dizzy, as though I’d been hit on the head with a hammer.”
“That can be arranged.” Now her pride was at stake. She had failed at many things in her life, but she’d never failed to gain a man’s attention by flirting.
“Now you’re looking at me oddly,” he said.
“I’m just trying to decide how to begin this,” she said. Her voice sounded as low and soft as a secret.
“Begin what?”
She held out her arm and slowly, deliberately adjusted the edge of her glove. Her hand brushed lightly against his chest. “My flirtation,” she said.
An expression she had never seen before dawned on his face. The flinty-eyed doctor was changing before her eyes, and she was filled with undeniable excitement. Maybe there was hope for them after all. Maybe.
For the first time in her life, Isabel felt a sense of destiny that was not confined to her and her alone. Before meeting him, she had thought her path was laid out as clearly as the markings on a navigator’s chart. She would travel the world alone until she was very old and very rich. Then she would settle in some anonymous place by the sea where she would go for long rambles each day. In the evening, she would read books, or more likely write a memoir. Isabel Fish-Wooten: Lady Adventurer. She had always kept a chronicle of her life. Because she invented so much, she had to keep track of herself. It seemed important to write the truth somewhere, for her eyes only. Unfortunately, her calf-bound journal had disappeared the night of the shooting. It was a small loss, but to Isabel it felt huge. She had no one who knew her true history; that travel-worn book contained the only record.
Lately, her plans for the future had begun to seem lonely and lifeless. Now she craved a richness she could never find in her single-minded, solo journey.
She could only find that by straying from her chosen path, and here he was, standing before her, this unexpected detour into a vast new world that had been hidden from her until the moment she met him. Even lying wounded and bleeding, she had glimpsed the possibility of a different life.
“Isabel,” he said, “what if I won’t settle for a flirtation?”
She sensed, as she often did with Blue, the things he was not saying. She knew what he wanted, and she was terrified. She had never offered her heart. She would not be able to bear it if he refused her. And he would, of course, if she ever allowed the whole truth of herself to emerge. Giving him the answer he wanted would force her to sacrifice the life she had made for herself, and for what? So he could treat her like the other women the world had cast off, like Bernadette or Mrs. Li or any of the pathetic creatures who came to him for help?
She cleared her throat. “If you find a flirtation unsatisfactory, then what is it you want?”
A disturbance nearby broke the mood before he answered. Someone was coming. Isabel could not decide whether she was relieved or frustrated by the interruption. She stepped back and so did he. They maintained a decorous distance. Pretending nothing had happened, they resembled any other man and woman sharing a polite conversation.
Backlit by torchlight, a couple came toward them up a wide flight of flagstone steps from the hotel garden. They were holding hands and laughing, and a strand of the girl’s hair had slipped loose. They were so absorbed in one another that they didn’t even realize they were no longer alone.
Isabel watched them with fondness, and perhaps a twinge of wistfulness as well. The road would not be easy for these two.
She felt the moment Blue recognized them. The air around him took on a distinct chill as he stepped out of the shadows and planted himself at the top of the stairs. “Lucas,” he said in a voice that was both unfailingly cordial and glazed with ice. Then he bowed slightly. “Good evening, Miss Li.”
Lucas and June froze like hunted creatures unsure of whether to fight or flee. Both were flushed, their hair mussed by the wind. Their lips bore that subtle, indefinable but unmistakable look of having just been kissed.
“Good evening, Miss Fish-Wooten. Good evening, Father,” Lucas said, every bit as cordial and as brittle as Blue.
“Good evening, Miss Fish-Wooten. Good evening, sir.” June’s voice was little more than a terrified whisper.
“You’ll have to excuse us, sir,” Lucas said, offering no further explanation. With bold defiance, he took June’s hand and led her hastily inside.
Isabel studied Blue’s face. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said.
“Do I look shocked?”
“Like you’ve just been given a death sentence.”
“I suppose I was…startled to see them looking so…” His voice trailed off. He looked so helpless that she had the urge to hug him.
“So grown-up?” she suggested.
“They’re children. They were practically raised together.”
“Then they know each other well. They are both young and beautiful and on the verge of discovering their own world. It happens to everyone. Children grow up. They fall in love. They get their hearts broken. You can’t stop it from happening. It is as inevitable as the turning of the leaves in autumn.”
“This could be more than hurt,” he said. “Mrs. Li is a stern mother and a proud woman.”
“She also loves her daughter.”
“Enough to know that Lucas would be a disas
ter for her. Any non-Chinese boy would. Broken hearts would be the least of their troubles.”
“I don’t know. A broken heart seems rather serious to me.”
“Have you ever had your heart broken, Miss Fish-Wooten?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “Not yet.”
Twenty-Nine
Blue awoke in the middle of the night. A thrum of prescience, honed by years of midnight disasters, resonated through him. He lay still, listening for the outside call bell or the telephone bell. Perhaps a patient needed him. Perhaps there was an emergency.
But no, the house was quiet. Yet now he was fully awake. He felt restless, agitated. Despite the cool wind blowing gently through an open window, he was hot. And despite his best efforts to dismiss Isabel Fish-Wooten from his mind, he could not stop thinking about her. It was not just thinking, either. Nor was it ordinary lust; this was nothing like the straightforward and readily dispelled urges any man experienced.
No, his thoughts of Isabel were no mere urges. She was a burning obsession, a sheer, dizzying madness. She was a fever of the blood. Moderation and common sense had no power over the way she made him feel.
Made him feel. This was what was so new and disturbing. She had found the frozen, lifeless places in his heart and brought them to a state of stinging awareness. When he was with her, she made him come alive—against his will and better judgment. And unlike all the other areas of his life, he had absolutely no control over what was happening to him. He could not make himself not want her. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t want to make love to her, night after night, and sleep with her held close in his arms.
The way he wanted her was complicated. Straightforward lust he could’ve understood, but there were layers to his feelings for her that defied understanding.
Muttering under his breath, he flung back the bedclothes and donned a dressing robe. He abandoned all attempts at sleep and left the room. The moon cast a bluish wash of light down the carpeted staircase. In the darkened kitchen, he poured a glass of water from a stoneware pitcher and drank it down. But his thirst still raged, coming from a place the cooling water couldn’t reach. Nonetheless, he refilled the glass and prowled through the downstairs, past the shadowy landscape of beautiful antiques and tasteful furniture Sancha had taken such pleasure in choosing for their home.
Sancha. Lately, she drifted farther and farther from his thoughts. The idea that he might be forgetting her rattled him, and he stood in the formal parlor and forced himself to focus on her. Oh, he could still conjure up an image of her face, her smile. He could still hear her laughter and feel the shape of her hand in his. But she was like the antiques and art treasures in this house. Something beautiful but…remote. Untouchable. She wasn’t warm and vital and intriguing. She wasn’t sleeping in the bedroom adjacent to his.
Try as he might, he could not keep his mind on the past. He could still hear echoes of Isabel’s voice. You force Lucas to live with a father who has forbidden himself to take joy from life, all because of a terrible accident that happened a decade ago.
That was no longer true, Blue conceded. Somehow, over the course of the summer, his heart had changed. He wanted to put the past behind him, not only for Lucas’s sake but for his own.
He trudged upstairs again, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing he would. At the first landing he paused, spying a thin knife-edge of light around the door to Isabel’s room.
Isabel’s, not Sancha’s. The room belonged to a living woman once again.
He knocked softly and heard a murmured, “Come in.”
She sat up in bed, an open book spread across her lap. When he stepped into the light, she surely must have recognized the stark hunger in his expression, but she said nothing. She looked like a dream, sitting there, watching him. She had a way of looking at him that was utterly unique. With uncanny insight, she saw things he’d managed to keep hidden from the world—even from himself.
He lowered the flame of the reading lamp, then set aside the book she was holding. A diffuse glow of moonlight fell over the bed, lending mystery to the topography of rumpled pillows and pale coverlet.
She sat in uncharacteristic silence, yet he was coming to understand her silences as she understood his. All words were superfluous. There was no protest, no rationalizing, no declaration of any intent. Just…silence. And a shared yearning that had been building a bridge between them all summer long.
Without saying a word, he leaned down and kissed her. Every precious essence in the world flavored the kiss, the mingled spices of attraction and desire and loneliness and endless longing. Passion eased through him, borne on a wave of tenderness that took him entirely by surprise.
He drew her against him, intoxicated by the warm press of her body. Scarcely able to govern his hunger, he took in all he could of her, feeling the softness of her lips, tasting the candy sweetness of her mouth. His hands slid to places he had only imagined: gently rounded shoulders and yielding breasts, the petal-like smoothness at the base of her throat. She trembled beneath his touch, yet she didn’t seem fearful in the least. If she had, it would have been easy to pull away, to leave her be. But Isabel didn’t make anything easy. He sensed that she never, ever would. She blushed but made no attempt to hide herself. Instead, she returned his kisses with a generosity he hadn’t expected.
A woman’s body should be no mystery to a physician, yet it was. And perhaps the mystery was only deepened by his knowledge of physiology. How could something so real and vital evoke an invisible storm of emotion? When he’d treated her bullet wound, he’d seen her as something broken to be fixed. Now as he held her in his arms, he saw something else entirely—an object of earthy reverence, someone he could cherish and lavish with caresses, someone who had become so important to him that he could not imagine life without her.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, making one last attempt at resistance.
“Then you should leave right now.” She spoke with total control over her emotions, yet he was coming to know her. He knew, somehow, that she was struggling as much as he.
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
“I didn’t think you would.” With that, she slipped out of her nightgown. He knew this garment, like all the others, had been borrowed from Sancha, and then he realized he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. He watched Isabel peeling away the layers to reveal smooth bare skin, creamy as alabaster. Her blush deepened, but she made no sound, not even taking a breath. The stubborn will with which she’d survived a bullet wound now held her modesty at bay.
She reached for him, slipping her hands up over his chest, leaving a trail of heat and need. He wanted to believe she seduced him with the practiced ease of a courtesan, but that wasn’t so. She was simply frank and direct in a way that startled and excited him.
There was nothing more to say. He’d had the debate raging endlessly in his mind for days, and he knew a hundred reasons—moral, ethical, societal—why this was wrong, and yet here he was anyway. The urges of the body were a powerful force that could be resisted by steely willpower. But the urges of the heart had no antidote.
He stopped thinking and applied himself to kissing her. With a gentle thrust of his tongue, he conveyed the pulse of his desire. She answered with a shuddering sigh of surrender, opening to him like a flower, lips, arms and thighs spreading to encompass him, to invite him in, to carry him away to places that had existed only in his imagination—until now.
He used to believe he was dead to feeling; now his heart was as desperate as his body was parched. He wanted to tell her so, but he knew the words would sound hollow and inadequate. False, even. But his hands and mouth imparted the honesty and tenderness words could not. With his body, he shared deeply intimate truths that verbal declarations couldn’t express. Feverish need heated and nearly burst into flame when she touched him with slow, searching caresses. For long moments, broken only by the uneven rasp of his breathing, he struggled to hold back, wanting to prolong the moment of pleasure.
He lowered his mouth to hers as he pressed his full length against her, flesh to flesh, as though to take in her vibrancy, her energy, the passion she gave with a generosity he didn’t deserve. Finally, trembling with the effort of control, he braced his arms on either side of her, letting her hair spill over his fingers while he kissed his way downward, her small cries like a song in his ears. She shuddered and dug her fingers into his shoulders, and he raised himself up. A gleam of moonlight illuminated the damp path his kisses had left on her skin. She stared at him with wonder and desire in her eyes, and her trusting look nearly took him apart.
He tried again to offer her the chance to send him away, to remind him that there was no future for them together. “Tell me to stop,” he said, dragging the words from a painful well of reluctance.
“Why on earth would I do that?” A tremor in her voice softened the question and he realized she was moved by him.
Then he felt her hands moving over his body. There was a curious hesitancy in her touch, yet he understood that it was not reluctance or bashfulness. She touched him with a compelling sense of discovery, and with an honesty of emotions she’d never expressed in words.
Blue forced himself to hold back, though he nearly shook with the effort. Even knowing so little about her, he had expected her to be more practiced at the art of making love. Instead of the slick skill of an experienced woman, she showed a peculiar naive wonderment as she explored his body, every part of him as though gathering flowers from a garden and taking pleasure from the simple act of touching him. He couldn’t tell if he was just another of her adventures or if this was all new to her. He should ask, but he didn’t want to ask, not right now. He didn’t want anything right now but her.
Like a fever rising from her skin, he sensed in her the same urgency that scalded his blood. He was twenty years old again and on fire. He caressed her everywhere, discovering the moist silk of her skin, the scent of her throat, the yielding softness of her breasts. Ten years, he thought. He had endured ten years without this heat and the flavor of a woman on his lips and the raging of his blood to every part of his body. He’d been with women for the sheer relief of it, but never like this. Never with the sense that he’d found the essence of who he was. She had come to him like a gift, dropped into the middle of his life. A sense of intimacy seared his body and stole his breath, burning away the last of his doubts. At last he sank down, feeling an astonishing jolt of emotion as he joined with her.