Simply Magic

by Mary Balogh

  It was her undoing.

  “No,” she said, not knowing exactly what she meant but quite certain that she did not want to chatter politely with him about inconsequential matters when this was their last time alone together.

  Ever.

  “No,” she said again, more firmly, and she smiled fleetingly and turned her head to look ahead along the path once more. “But in what way are we to do it, then?”

  “Let us simply enjoy the afternoon and each other’s company. Let us laugh a little,” he said. “But real enjoyment and real laughter. Let’s be friends. Shall we?”

  It was foolish to feel tragic. This time next week, next year, she would look back and wonder why she had not taken full advantage of every moment instead of living with the emptiness of what the future would hold. How did she know the future would be empty? How did she know there would even be a future?

  “What a good idea,” she said-and laughed.

  “I think it quite brilliant.”

  He laughed too, but though their laughter was about nothing at all-her comment and his retort could hardly be called witty-it felt very good. And suddenly she felt happy. She would not peer into the future.

  “Have you noticed,” she asked him, “how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quite unnoticed?”

  “Until it becomes the past?” he said. “ Then it gets our attention. Yes, you are perfectly right. How many present moments will there be before we arrive back at the house, do you suppose? How long is a present moment, anyway? One could argue, perhaps, that it is endless, eternal.”

  “Or more fleeting than a fraction of a second,” she said.

  “I believe,” he said, “we are dealing with the half-empty-glass attitude versus the half-full-glass attitude again. Are we by any chance talking philosophy? It is an alarming possibility. If we are not careful we will be trying to decide next how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

  “None at all or an infinite number,” she said. “I have never been sure which. If there is a correct answer.”

  “Well,” he said, chuckling, “shall we agree to live this particular endless moment strictly in the present tense? Or this myriad succession of present moments?”

  “Yes, we will so agree,” she said, laughing with him again.

  And as they strolled onward, Susanna lifted her face to the changing patterns of light and shade, warmth and coolness, and was aware of the sounds of birdsong and insect whirrings and the scurrying of unseen wildlife and the smells of earth and greenery and a masculine cologne. She felt every irregularity, every small stone on the path beneath her feet, the firm but relaxed muscles of his arm beneath her hand, warm through the sleeve of his coat.

  She turned her head again to smile at him and found that he was smiling back-a lazy, genuine, happy smile.

  “I see a seat up ahead,” he said. “It is my guess that it looks out on a pleasing prospect.”

  “It does,” she said. “This path was very carefully constructed for the pleasure of the walker, as you observed yourself when we walked to the waterfall.”

  They stood behind the seat for a while, looking through what appeared to be a natural opening between trees across wide lawns to the house and stables in the distance. An old oak tree in the middle of the lawn was perfectly framed in the view.

  And she was here now looking at the view, Susanna thought, deliberately feeling the soft fabric of his coat sleeve without actually moving her hand.

  “The path moves up into that hill,” she said, pointing ahead. “There are some lovely views from up there. The best, though, I think, is the one down onto the river and the little bridge.”

  They stopped a number of times before they came there, gazing alternately out onto the cultivated beauty of the park and over the rural peace and plenty of the surrounding farmland.

  “I wish you could see Sidley,” he said, squinting off into the distance when they were looking across a patchwork of fields, separated by low hedgerows. “You did say you had never been there, did you not? It always seems to me that there is nowhere to compare with it in beauty. I suppose I am partial. Undoubtedly I am partial, in fact. It smites me here.” He tapped his heart and then turned to her suddenly and smiled roguishly. “It smites this chest organ, this pump.”

  “The heart, the center of our most tender sensibilities,” she conceded, “even if only because we feel they must be centered somewhere. It must indeed be wonderful to have a home of your very own. I can well imagine that you would come to see it more with the emotions than with the eye or the intellect.”

  “I hope you will have a home of your own one day,” he said, tapping her hand as it rested on his arm.

  They strolled onward, following the path down through the lower, wooded slopes of the hill until it climbed again into the open and they could see down to the river, narrower here than it was closer to the lake. And there was the little wooden footbridge that spanned it, so highly arched that the path across it formed actual steps up to the middle and down the other side. The water flowing beneath it was dark green from the reflections of trees growing thickly up the slopes from its banks.

  “Ah, yes,” he said as they stopped walking, “you were quite right. This is the best view of all. Even better than the view from the waterfall. That is spectacular, but like most of the views here it encompasses both the wilderness and the outside world. This is nothing but wilderness.”

  Susanna let go of his arm and turned all about. The hill rose behind them to meet the sky. On the other three sides there was nothing to see but trees. Below were more trees and undergrowth and ferns and the river and bridge.

  “I had not really noticed that before,” she said. “But it is true. That must be why I love being just here so much. It offers total…”

  “Escape?”

  But she frowned and shook her head.

  “Retreat,”she said. “It is a better word, I think.”

  “Shall we sit down for a while?” he suggested. “There is no seat just here, but I don’t suppose the ground is damp. There has been no rain for several days, has there?”

  He stooped down on his haunches and rubbed his hand hard across the grass. He held the hand up, palm out, to show her that it was dry.

  She sat down, drawing her knees up before her and clasping her arms about them. He stretched out on his side beside her, lifting himself onto one elbow and propping his head on one hand while the other rubbed lightly over the grass.

  The sun beamed down warm on their heads.

  “Oh, listen,” she said after a few moments.

  His hand fell still.

  “The waterfall?”

  “Yes.”

  They both listened for a while before he lifted his hand from the grass and set it lightly over one of hers about her knees.

  “Susanna,” he said, “I am going to miss you.”

  “We are not supposed to be thinking about the future,” she said, but she had to draw a slow, steadying breath before she spoke.

  “No,” he agreed. His hand slid from hers and he tossed his hat aside and lay back on the grass, one leg bent at the knee with his booted foot flat on the ground, the back of one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

  There was the rawness of threatened pain at the back of her throat. It was no easy thing to hold the future at bay. She concentrated her mind again upon the distant sound of the waterfall.

  “Do you ever wish,” he asked after a couple of minutes, “that you were totally free?”

  “I dream of it all the time,” she said.

  “So do I.”

  Two weeks ago-less-she would have assumed that such a man had all the freedom he could possibly want or need. Indeed, it had seemed to her that most men were essentially free.

  “What ungrateful wretches we are,” he said with a low chuckle.

  “But it is not freedom from school or from
relative poverty or from anything else in my circumstances that I yearn for,” she said. “It is…Oh, I once heard it described as the yearning for God, though that is not quite it either. It is just-mmm…”

  “The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?” he suggested.

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh.

  “Are we talking philosophy again?” he asked, and he removed his hand from his eyes, turned his head, and grinned up at her. “Twice in one afternoon? I think I must be sickening for something.”

  She laughed and looked back at him.

  And something happened.

  Suddenly the moment was very present indeed, as if past and future had faded to nothingness or else collapsed into the present. And the moment was simply magic.

  And unbearably tense.

  Their eyes held, and neither spoke as their smiles faded-until he lifted his hand and set the knuckles lightly against her cheek.

  “Susanna,” he said softly.

  She could have said or done any number of things to cause time to tick back into motion. But she did none of them-did not even consider any of them, in fact. She was suspended in the wonder of the moment.

  She turned her head so that her lips were against his knuckles. And she gazed down into his eyes, violet and smoky and as deep as the ocean.

  He slid the hand down and pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. He brushed it backward and it fell to the grass behind her. She felt the air warm against her face and cool in her slightly damp hair. He cupped her face in both hands and drew it downward. She released her tight hold on her legs and turned so that she was kneeling beside him.

  And then their lips met-again.

  It was a kiss as brief-and as earth-shattering-as the last one. He lifted her face away from his and gazed up into her eyes, his thumbs circling her cheeks.

  “Let me kiss you,” he said.

  It was something of an absurd request, perhaps, in light of the fact that he had just done exactly that without asking permission. But despite her almost total lack of experience with kisses, she possessed enough woman’s intuition to know exactly what he meant.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  She continued to kneel over him, one hand spread over his chest, the other bracing herself on the grass on the far side of him, while he kissed her again.

  But this time the kiss did not end after a brief moment. It did not end at all for a long, long time. And this time it was not a mere touching or brushing of lips.

  This time his lips were parted and warm and moist, and he nibbled at her lower lip with his teeth and touched both her lips with his tongue and with its tip traced the seam between them from one corner to the other and back again but pressing a little more firmly this time until it curled up behind her top lip to caress the soft, sensitive flesh inside. And then he feathered little kisses across her mouth and down to her chin before kissing her fully again, his mouth pressed harder, more urgently to hers. His tongue pushed past her lips, past her teeth deep into her mouth. And then finally the kiss softened, and he lifted her head away from his again.

  His eyes were heavy-lidded as they gazed into hers.

  “Lie down beside me,” he suggested. “You look uncomfortable.”

  She was still crouched over him, her hands clutching one lapel of his coat and a clump of coarse grass.

  She stretched out beside him, lying on her side, his arm beneath her head. She rested her hand over his heart and closed her eyes. She did not want him to speak. She did not want to think. She was too busy feeling.

  Did people-men and women-really kiss like that? She had had no idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naïveté she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body other than just her lips. All parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places.

  Neither had it ever occurred to her that a kiss might involve the mouth as well as just the lips.

  She could feel his heart beating heavily beneath her hand.

  And then, before she had even begun to recover her wits, he turned onto his side to face her, and his free hand touched her cheek again and his fingers feathered through her hair, moving it away from her face.

  She both saw and heard him swallow.

  “The trouble with kisses,” he said softly, “is that inevitably they make one want more.”

  “Yes.”

  More?

  Kisses as a prelude to…

  He kissed her again, softly and lazily, and they lay with their arms about each other while she responded with moves of her own. She moved her lips over his, touched them with her tongue, stroked his tongue with her own when it came into her mouth again, sucked on it. When he made a low sound in his throat, she spread her hand over the back of his head, twining her fingers in his sun-warm hair.

  That was when he brought the rest of her body against his and she felt all the unfamiliar thrill of being flush against the hard-muscled body of a man from the lips to the toes. One of his Hessian boots hooked about her legs to hug her closer.

  “Susanna,” he whispered into her mouth.

  “Yes.”

  “Say my name,” he murmured.

  “Peter.”

  It was so much more personal, so much more intimate, than his title. She had never even thought of him as Peter before now. But it was his name, his most personal possession. It was how she would remember him.

  The ache of-of wanting became almost unbearable.

  His hand was at her breast, exploring it lightly, caressing it, his palm lifting it, his thumb rubbing over her nipple, which was taut and tender. He hooked the same thumb beneath the fabric of her dress at the shoulder and eased it down her arm until her breast was exposed. His hand covered it again, warm and dark-skinned against its paleness. And then he lowered his head and, before she could guess his intent, took her nipple into his mouth and suckled her.

  Sensation stabbed like a knife up into her throat and behind her nose, down through her womb and along her inner thighs.

  It was the moment at which she abandoned self-deception.

  This was no ordinary, innocent friendship.

  It never had been.

  She could not bear the thought of tomorrow. But it was not just because she would be losing a friend. She would also be leaving behind the man with whom she had tumbled headlong and hopelessly in love.

  Hopelessly being a key word.

  Hopelessly. Without all hope. Without any future.

  There was only now.

  He lifted his head and brought his mouth close to hers again. But instead of kissing her, he gazed deep into her eyes, his own heavy with a desire that clearly matched her own. It was not hard to interpret that look even though she had not seen it on a man’s face before.

  “Stop me now,” he murmured, “or heaven help us both.”

  Stop?

  No! Oh, no. If there was no future, if there was only now, she would not have it snatched away from her-forever. She would have the whole of it.

  It was not rational thought, of course, with which she considered his words. She was past rational thought-but had no experience with anything else. Her mind did not even touch upon virtue or morality. Even less did it touch upon consequences or the very real dangers inherent in not stopping him.

  There was only now.

  Now he was here with her.

  Tomorrow she would be gone, and the day after so would he.

  “Susanna?” he whispered again.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Please don’t stop.”

  He did not stop. He turned her onto her back, kissing her, baring her other breast and fondling her with expert hands and lips while she lay beneath him, bewilderment and desire and sheer physical sensation tum
bling together through every vein and bone and nerve ending in her body.

  And then he lifted the hem of her dress, drawing it all the way up to her hips and disposing of undergarments until she could feel the grass against her bare flesh. He fumbled with the waist flap of his pantaloons and brought himself over between her legs, which he parted with his own before sliding his hands firmly beneath her to cushion her against the hardness of the ground.

  She knew what happened. With her intellect, she knew the process-or some of it anyway. She knew about penetration and the spilling of the seed. It had always seemed to her that it must be both painful and embarrassing, though she had always wanted to experience it anyway.

  There was pain. He came into her slowly but firmly, pressing past the barrier of her virginity until he was deeply embedded in her.

  There was no embarrassment.

  She had not known how large he would feel, how hard, how deep.

  And she had known nothing of what happened between penetration and the spilling of the seed.

  What happened was pain and pleasure and shock and satisfaction all rolled into one. Pain as he withdrew and thrust over and over again past the soreness of her newly opened womanhood. Pleasure because it was more wonderful, more exhilarating, than any other sensation she had ever experienced. Shock because she had not expected such a deep and vigorous and prolonged invasion of her body. Satisfaction because now, before it was too late, he was her lover. Because she would always be able to remember him as her lover.

  Despite the pain and the shock, she wanted it never to end. She braced her feet on the ground, feeling the supple leather of his boots along the insides of her legs as she did so, wrapped her arms about him, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to feel every painful, powerful, wonderful stroke of his body into hers, to hear every labored breath they both drew, to smell his cologne and the very essence of his maleness, to understand that at last, for once in her life, she was celebrating her sexuality-with a man she loved.

  She would not be sorry afterward.

  Surely she would not.

  She would not even think of afterward.

  But it came anyway.

  His rhythm quickened and his strokes deepened until he held still in her, every muscle tense, and then sighed and relaxed even as she felt the gush of a greater heat deep inside.