by Sophia James
‘Are you sure, Florentia? This is what you want?’
‘It is, Papa, with all my heart.’
She would never forget the moment her father gave her over to Winter. James Waverley’s fingers were warm and strong and they clasped hers in a way that let her know that they were in this together, that whatever happened in all the years to come they would both face it. With the height of his neckcloth she could see no glimpse at all of the scar. She wondered if that was deliberate.
The candles smelt of rose oil and the play of leaves from the tree near a window sent shadow against the opposite wall.
A setting that showed layers of beauty and of truth. Like her paintings. Deceptively simple. Unthinkingly complex. The colours of polished wood, the gowns and the bower of blooms a vibrant mix of shades that melded to create a perfect backdrop.
Us. We. Together.
When Winter squeezed her hand she turned to smile at him and knew the sort of happiness that was as complete as she could ever imagine.
* * *
He took her home as the day dimmed into dusk and Florentia felt an excitement that made her tingle.
She smiled as they passed the chair opposite the grandfather clock in the lobby. She had known very little of the Viscount personally when she had first come here to make his portrait and the rumours of his past had been rife. His parents were notoriously difficult, she knew that from the endless gossip of them, people who had never settled in love or in life. His own shifting lifestyle had probably come about as the result of such flagrant disconnection.
‘Would you like to see how I hung your painting?’ he asked, taking her from those thoughts as they veered off down the hall to the right.
The portrait had been framed in a way that showed it off to its very best advantage, the gilded and elaborate plaster moulding bringing out the tones within and giving relief to the subject and its colours.
‘Is the frame French?’ she asked as she walked closer.
He nodded. ‘I found it at Christie’s.’
‘A perfect match.’
‘Like us?’ His eyes were darker tonight, clouded by high emotion as he reached out for her hand, lips warm on the back of her fingers. Stamping an ownership. Demanding much more than simple talk.
‘I would never hurt you, Florentia.’
‘I know.’
‘But I want the sort of marriage my parents did not have. A true one and real. Nothing held back. A love match.’
‘I want it, too.’
At that he nodded and drew the first pin from her hair. She stood there and let him make a careful deconstruction, the ivy loosening as more pins followed the first.
Her hair unravelled to her waist. She saw the colour and length of it in the shadow of his eyes even before one hand came up and knotted the fall hard in his grasp. Pinned into his want, she tipped her head back and met his gaze squarely, her mouth falling open and her lips dry.
‘Let me love you, Florentia.’
‘Yes.’ Her breath shallowed behind the word, consent a yielded surrender.
His fingers on her cheek were soft, feeling the contours, understanding flesh. When they wandered to her ears, she smiled. Today she had on her grandmother’s pearl earrings, the gold filigree in them intricate and beautiful.
‘These suit you, my love, and I shall buy you whatever else you would like in the way of jewellery.’
Her skin rose at his touch and as his eyes locked into her own he took her into his arms, tight and true.
* * *
‘I love you,’ he whispered. ‘I love you so much that it hurts.’ Her breath quickened as his fingers slid against the thinness of silk, finding the bud of her nipple with his thumb and moving across it. She arched into the caress, the body’s own music true and deep.
He did not halt as she came into her release, but felt the rumbling echoes of flesh when she cried out loud, the low and guttural sounds rising from the depths of a feeling that brought sweat to her brow.
And then she was limp, her head resting on his chest.
‘Not here.’ It occurred to him that his mastery as a lover was being tested even as he said it, lost in a feeling that was unfamiliar.
He was desperate, more desperate than he had ever been in all of his life to please her, the silk and shadows of his past melded into this one unprecedented moment when he felt the control he was famous for slipping. Slipping so far away that he carried her up the stairs and into his bedchamber like a green lad, fingers fumbling at her fastenings, a row of pearl buttons and stays and ribbons and hooks. He ripped the last layer of flimsy lawn and then his hands were on her breasts, ripe and firm and his.
Even language was deserting him. A blue garter was around her right thigh, trimmed in cream ribbon. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his entire life. Perfect. Unflawed. Glowing in the candlelight, burnished in wheat and ivory and gold.
Dipping his head, he tasted her, one pale pink nipple coming full into his mouth. Sweet and salty. Then he felt her hands thread into his own hair and bring him in closer.
‘Sweetheart, I can barely think with the wanting.’
‘Then don’t,’ she said and reached for his own nipple, flicking it as quickly.
A measured equal taking. That thought made him hard for the years of his own whispered prowess had left him always as the instigator, the leader. Here she was, an innocent finding in the tiny nuances her own sensuality and giving it back to him without any shyness whatsoever. When she leaned over and bit him as he had done her he simply lifted her up in his arms and took her to bed.
Always he was careful and thorough and clinical. Always he followed a pattern, a routine, a method. Habitual, customary and ordered.
Today passion simply ruled him, pronounced and random, the haphazard and arbitrary desperation taking his breath into large unruly gulps and his erection as hard as stone.
When she suddenly looked up and smiled, he had the impression that she knew his thoughts almost as if he had spoken them out loud.
* * *
He was beautiful. As beautiful as any man she could have drawn, with the long lines of his body and the dimple in his chin. Bur there was something else there that held her, too. A vulnerability and a tenderness, addressed only to her and translated into flesh.
He had not removed his clothes though she was naked. But he was frenzied and when his hands pushed down his trousers she understood that he would be fully garbed when he took her. He met her eyes then, his manhood poised at the edge of movement.
‘I...don’t want...to hurt...you...’
And he pushed in, the length and breadth of him. When she cried out he held very still, engorged now inside, the thick ache of him unfamiliar. Exposed.
Above her the ceiling was moulded plaster and the chandelier sported candles in cut crystal. She strove for the details, for the tiny things she could see that might take her mind from the pain, for the colour of the beadings, for the top of the velvet curtains around the four-poster bed, ruched into dark gold and burgundy.
And then he moved again, slower this time, a gentle rolling rhythm interspersed with quicker pushes and a feeling grew that she could not stop, like a wave gathering force, building, peaking and breaking upon some far-off shore, taking her with it, the fire and the ice, the beauty and the grace. Just her breath now and his in the room, all else forgotten as she closed her eyes and only felt. Him. His force and his power. Taking her in the way lovers had for all of time immemorial, sacrificed upon an altar of delight she had no name for.
Endlessly primal and beautiful and astounding.
She felt as if the beating heart of her lust was there in the room as a physical form, scarlet gold, orange and black. White was present, too, the colour of safety and innocence.
She had alway
s seen life in terms of colour.
And finally the quiet crept back in, breaths shallowing, hearts calming, the movement of his fingers across her gentle and comforting. Close and content, the outside sounds of the night, the last bird calls, the roll of a carriage wending its way past, a servant moving through the corridor, the last sparks of flame in the grate.
Anchoring them to this life, returning them from the other.
‘Thank you, Florentia, for your gift of innocence.’ His breath warmed her shoulder. ‘I think I should have been gentler.’
She answered him with a simple shake of the head. ‘You were perfect.’
She felt the movement of a smile against her hair.
‘I lost control. It is something that has never happened before. Usually...’ He stopped and so did the movement of his fingers across her naked back. ‘I have not been without women in my life, but the rumours that multiply my conquests many times over are false. I want you to know that. There’s never before been anyone special. Until now, here with you.’
Raising herself up on one elbow, she looked at him, the neckcloth in disarray and the scar beneath easily seen. ‘I drew you after the inn in oil on canvas in the dark and sombre colours of grief. For years the study has been hidden away, but every now and then, and more often of late, I have taken it from its hiding place and felt the lines of you.’ Her first finger hovered over his jaw and his cheek before rising to his nose. ‘It’s as if I knew you through my drawing, like a ghost or a spirit, always there. A protection against life and the living of it. A guardian.’
‘And do I measure up? Now?’ The fullness of his lips were emphasised by candlelight as he asked his question.
‘When Bryson died I thought in my heart that my world would be frozen and dead for ever. I thought that the beauty in life had gone with him and that there was nothing left to live for.’ She saw him watching her, a small frown between his eyes.
She had to tell him, had to make him understand. ‘Now I think life has grabbed me and made the blood run again and even that makes me feel guilty because in the minutes you hold me close and safe I forget Bryson. Completely. Forget all that he was and will never be again. I allow him to die.’
‘It’s what you paint, isn’t it? His death. Again and again. I saw your work on the walls of your father’s library.’
‘He was my twin. Without him I was only half until you came and made me whole again. And it is a dangerous place to be in, this hope, because were you to leave as well...’ She didn’t finish because she couldn’t.
* * *
He felt his heart lunge and shatter. Into pieces. A thousand hearts all beating just for her.
‘It’s for ever, Florentia. This. Us. As long as we both shall live and beyond that if I am able. There will never be another for me, I promise you that.’
‘Thank God you didn’t die when Papa shot you.’ Her hand reached out to trace the scar and he stiffened. No one had ever touched his neck before and he had never come to any woman’s bed without his shirt on. ‘Can I see it? Can you undress to show me?’
Winter did not hear any pity in her voice and if he had he would have refused. All he heard was interest in the outcome of a piece of time in history that had changed them both. Besides, she’d just told him of some of her secrets and fears and he felt that there should be an equal sharing in return.
Sitting up beside her, he made his decision, but it was with trepidation that he untied his neckcloth and undid the buttons of his shirt. An armour that had been in place for so very long was difficult to remove and he knew the marks beneath the cloth on his skin to be shocking.
Please God, let her not be repulsed, he found himself beseeching to a deity he had barely prayed to for years.
‘It’s not a pretty sight...’ He told himself to stop and be silent. No manner of words would lessen the shock of it and apologies and confessions would only make things worse.
So when he turned so that she could see the full wreckage of his back and shoulders and neck he felt the shivers of shame turn with him.
‘Esp...ion...?’ He heard her pronounce the word and felt her finger trace the letters in flesh.
‘Spy,’ he returned, hating the hope in his voice. ‘Under Moore in the First Peninsular Campaign. I was caught, you see, and held...’ His voice broke as the memories he tried never to recall weighed down upon him.
‘And these?’
Now he felt her gaze and touch on the long horizontal scars that covered his upper back.
‘From being whipped. Like a dog,’ he continued and made himself go on. The honour had left him a long time ago and the three days in the pit of hell had made him a different man altogether.
Detached. Indifferent. Callous. Cold.
‘What of here?’
The softness of her fingers was now on the bands of white scars around the top of his arms.
‘Ropes. They bound me and when I fought the ties tightened and stripped off the skin.’
He turned then and stopped her hands from finding more, simply by holding them together on her lap.
‘I am damaged and ruined, Florentia. Much more so than you should ever think and if such wreckage is something you feel you could not stomach to look at, then...’
Her lips closed over his mouth, her small tongue finding in his silence what he had found in her. She did not hold back or half-heartedly try to reassure him that things were all right, that he was not too much damaged, that the scars were small or the shame was nothing.
Instead she simply gave him back his life in the one way she had just re-found hers.
I was only half until you came and made me whole again.
She had told him of it before, but now she was showing him, her lips on the mark at his neck careful and gentle and kind before moving on to those on his back. Not as if she might simply erase them with her attention, but as if to her they were only just a part of him, a part of them, a part of the life he had led.
‘Let our past lie in the same bed, Winter, where we can allow it some honour before we forget it.’
The tears fell down his face before he could stop them, he a man who had never cried, not once in all the years of his hardships. Not when he was young and unloved and lost. Not in the pit with the French soldiers who liked nothing more than to hurt him. Not even in Tom’s house after the debacle at the inn. His eyes welled with relief and release and gratefulness that he should have met a woman who could finally understand him.
Florentia with her wisdom and her difference, with her honesty, intelligence and enlightenment. How, after twenty-nine years of being alone, had he finally found a woman who was his?
Such a question staunched the sadness and brought a half-smile. He had found her by ruin and deceit, by accident and charade, by luck and by design. She had sought him out to understand just who he was and he had agreed on the portrait to get closer to the truth of who he had been. Two ends to the same question. Pole opposites whom Lady Luck had finally favoured because they belonged together.
Standing, he shrugged off the rest of his clothes and then lay down beside her. Her hair fell like a curtain of spun gold on the sheets and the long line of one leg came across him. Her eyes were the colour of skies in summer and seas on a quiet and favoured wind. They were the blue of cornflowers and sapphires and tourmalines.
‘When I look into your eyes, Florentia, I can see right through you.’
‘Into my heart?’
He laughed.
‘And beyond.’
‘Show me what you can see, Winter.’
His hand fell across her stomach and downwards and then he drew her a picture of all of the feelings in the world.
And that night he slept in her arms from midnight until dawn, all of the broken nights’ sleep he had known for years lost in a calming
slumber and warmth.
* * *
When the bells of London rang and there was birdsong he could not believe that it was six o’clock on the old timepiece on top of the mantel.
‘Florentia?’ he whispered her name.
‘Yes?’
‘Love me?’
‘I do.’
Chapter Fifteen
It was the very last ball of the Season and as Florentia and Winter had virtually stayed away from any formal social occasion since being married they decided that they would attend the Bell-Harris soirée before leaving town to live permanently at Atherton Abbey.
Winter had bought her a gown for the evening’s entertainment from a dressmaker who was newly set up in London and the current favourite of this Season. It was a deep navy interfaced with cream and gold, the sort of dress that took two maids and a great amount of time to get her into. Florentia felt like a princess.
Maria and Roy had been down in Kent in Albany for the past ten days and her parents had returned to London with them and were to come to the ball. The first time her father had been out in proper company for six years. She was pleased he had made such an effort to be in their lives again and her mother was bathing in all the marital bliss of her two daughters.
Faith had taken to her father like a duck to water and had gone down to Albany with them. She would be back this evening, too. Winter and Flora had missed their energetic and excitable puppy and were looking forward to seeing her.
Flora’s life had fallen headlong into a wonderful place. Winter was everything she could have ever dreamed of in a husband and a visit to Atherton had revealed a home of beauty and substance. The Carmichaels were to visit them in Herefordshire the following week and Arabella had promised that she would show Flora how to begin her own garden.
She played with Bryson’s ring that she still wore around her neck on the long golden chain.