Page 28 of The Beloved Escapade

“No. Hear it all.” His hand came up, not commanding, almost pleading. “You compared me this morning, in your head, to someone. I watched you do it. Someone you loved who went to sea and filled your childhood with the world. And you have decided I am that man, and that marrying me is a ship’s passage, and perhaps you are right. But understand what you would be boarding. This—” His hand turned, taking in the wall behind her, the hidden dark, everything. “—this is not my occupation, signorina. It is my inheritance and my illness, both. It has ruined di Bianchi men for three hundred years. It ruined my grandfather. It is quietly ruining my father this very hour, in Florence, in a chair by a window. I have watched what it does, and I have it worse than any of them, and I will not lie to a woman in her own library. If the trail calls, I go. If it calls on our wedding morning, I go from the church door. If it calls when you are tired, when you are ill, when you are frightened, when any reasonable husband would stop … I will not want to stop. I will have to be made to stop, and I do not know if I can be made. My ancestor has had my whole heart since before I knew I had one. I cannot promise you the first place in it. I can only promise you I will never pretend the truth is otherwise.”

He drew a breath.

“That is what I am. Marry that, or shut no more doors on me, and we will find you some better arrangement … a courier, a companion, I will think of something. But do not chain yourself to a man’s madness believing it is a pleasure cruise.”

The library was quiet again.

And Lucy, whose heart should have sunk, felt it do the opposite. Felt it rise and rise like a gull on the wind off the flats, because she could have laughed out loud at him, at the dear, earnest enormity of his miscalculation. He thought he was warning her off. He thought he was describing the rocks, and he was describing the destination.

“Signore,” she said, “you have misunderstood me from the beginning, so let me be as honest as you. I am not asking for the first place in your heart. I am not even asking for your heart, not this morning; I have known you mere hours, and I am reckless, not simple. I am asking for the seat beside you when you go from the church door.”

She pushed off from the carved vines and closed the distance he had left, and had to tip her head back to hold his eyes.

“You say the quest comes first. Good. Then we want the same thing first, and I have never heard a better beginning for a marriage in my life. My mother put my father first for thirty years, and it made her frightened of weather. I do not want a husband who stays. I want a husband who takes me with him when he goes. You cannot frighten me with the very thing I am purchasing, signore. Chain myself to your madness? I am bidding on it.”

He stared at her.

“But know this also,” Lucy went on, and her chin did its work, “since we are laying terms. If I am to be chained to the madness, I will be chained as crew and not as cargo. When you go from the church door, my hand is in yours or you do not go through my house to get there. That is the whole of the agreement. Your quest first, our quest first, and me beside it. Every mile.”

And then the smile began.

It started in his eyes. That was the ruin of her, that it started in the eyes, some slow, dark kindling, like a lamp carried up from the back of a house, and then it reached his mouth and spread, unhurried, entirely without mockery. A smile that seemed to have traveled a very long way to arrive and meant to stay now it had come; and his teeth were white against the warm brown of his skin, and the last of the morning’s guardedness went out of his face the way weather clears, all at once, leaving distance and light.

This close, she could smell the miles on him, salt and leather and horse and clean linen and something warm beneath that was only himself, the smell of roads and harbors, the smell of away. And Lucy, who did not swoon, who had made rather a point throughout her life of not swooning, felt the room tilt gently on its axis and had to put one hand flat against her uncle’s carved vines.

Heat bloomed low in her belly at the nearness of him, at how his shoulders filled the space between them, at the olive warmth of his skin and the square line of his jaw when the smile reached it.

“Crew and not cargo,” he repeated, as though tasting it. “Signorina Carroway, I have watched every friend I possess walk into rooms exactly like this one and come out of them betrothed, one after another, like men going down a ladder into the sea, and I did not understand it. I thought it is a fever. I thought it will not take me, I am inoculated, there is no room in a man for two obsessions.”

The smile deepened at its own expense.

“And now, a woman I have known for one morning bars a door with her own body, hears the worst truth I have ever told anyone, and bids on it. You are the first person in a year of England … in a lifetime, I think … who heard where I am going and did not step back from it, but asked to come. Do you know how rare you are? I have handled objects hundreds of years old, and none of them was so rare as what you just did.”

“Is that a yes?” said Lucy. Her voice had gone to a thread. She no longer cared. Her pulse beat hard and low, a warm throb that answered every shift of his body toward hers.

“It is a negotiation,” he said gravely, stepping closer, “and I am told the English seal their agreements.”

And he reached out and pulled her to him.

She had been kissed once before, by a curate at a Christmas party, an event so brief and apologetic that she had spent the following year uncertain whether it counted.

This counted. His arm went round her waist and gathered her clean off her heels, plumping her breasts against his hard, muscular chest, while his other hand rose to cradle her jaw. He tilted her face up with a gentleness entirely at odds with the arm, and then his mouth came down on hers and Lucy stopped being able to account for herself in any organized way at all. She just … felt.

He kissed her like he did everything, headlong and wholly, with the entire scope of his attention. There was nothing apologetic in it and nothing curate-like in it. It was thorough. His mouth came down firm and warm against hers, sure and unhurried. She felt his lips part hers with gentle insistence. His tongue touched the seam of her mouth in a slow, deliberate stroke that sent warmth flooding low in her belly. As she sighed in pleasure, it slipped into her mouth to tangle with hers.

He tasted faintly of the tea they had shared and something warmer that was only him. The salt-and-leather smell of him surrounded her. She felt the slick glide of his tongue inside, and her knees weakened under her. Her fingers curled hard into the front of his coat without her deciding. A soft, helpless sound escaped her before she could stop it. Warmth spread through her skin until every inch of her body felt too sensitive and too alive at once.

His hand left her jaw and traveled slowly down the line of her back as though he were memorizing her the way he had memorized the wall, reading her stitch by stitch, and a fresh rush of sensation through her veins.

Lucy heard another moan escape and identified it, at some distance, as her own. Her fingers were already locked in his coat-front. The shelves pressed into her shoulders.

The library, the house, Gloucestershire, England, all of it went very far away and stayed there, and the only fixed point remaining in the world was his mouth, which was smiling against hers now, she could feel it, the wretched man was smiling, and the press of his body against hers made her knees weaken and her own body soften and answer without her telling it to.

He raised his head at last.

His eyes were very dark and very bright, and his breath was not entirely governed either, which she noted with satisfaction from her own wreckage. Her lips still tingled from the pressure of his, and the warmth low in her belly had not faded. It had settled there like a new pulse, insistent and alive. She slowly unclenched her toes in her slippers.

“Sì,” he said. “I shall marry you … Lucy.”