Page 44 of The Beloved Escapade

“Lucia,” she repeated. “I like that.”

“I will stop if⁠—”

“Don’t you dare.”

Afterward, he could not have testified which of them moved. There was the fire, and her face, and then the world had her mouth in it and nothing else. Soft, and certain of him, and tasting faintly of cider.

He felt the soft press of her lips against his, and the way they parted under the slow stroke of his tongue. She answered him at once, thorough and unhurried, her tongue sliding against his with a heat that went straight down his spine.

Her hands were at his collar. His were in the ruin of her pins, doing further ruin. The chair was in the way, and he moved it. A length of time passed in the little parlor that was made of breath and wool and the blind little adjustments of two people trying to stand closer together than standing allows.

The rounded edge of her jaw under his thumb. The lush give of her body against his. The smell of her, cider and salt and woman, filling his head until thought went thin. He could feel the press of her full breasts against his chest, the way her rounded hips settled into the hard line of him, and the want of her made his blood thick and slow.

“Someone will come down,” she whispered, without conviction and without stopping.

Nobody came down. But the parlor had one candle and a window on the street, and there was a kind of madness that still allowed for the counting of windows, and it was that madness, no nobler one, that took them, hushed and hurrying like thieves in their own inn, up the crooked stair to the little room at the stair-head where his trunk lived.

The ceiling sloped to the eaves. The candle he carried showed a bed, a chair, a washstand, a window full of dark sea. There was hardly floor enough for the two of them to stand in it.

They did not need floor. He set the candle down with the care of a drunk man and then she was in his arms again, and the latch clicked under his blind hand behind her, and the sea filled up the silence so that everything they did seemed to happen inside that silence.

He had meant, insofar as a man on fire means anything, a kiss. The kiss of the parlor, concluded honestly, and then her door across the passage closed with her inside her bedchamber and himself left to walk his blood cool by the harbor. That was the plan as he understood it.

The plan did not survive her.

It did not survive the discovery that the ribbon at the neck of her gown answered a single pull. The fabric loosened and fell open at her throat. It did not survive the sound she made, felt more than heard, a low hum against his mouth, when his lips found the pulse below her ear and opened there, tasting the salt and the heat of her skin. It did not survive her fingers, which tugged his shirt from his breeches before his conscience caught them. The cool air of the room touched the skin of his chest where her hands had opened him.

“Lucia. Tesoro. We must⁠—”

Her mouth arrived and disagreed with him, thoroughly. She kissed him deep, her tongue sliding against his with deliberate heat, and when he surfaced, he had lost the sentence and his cravat. He had taught her too well about kissing.

“We are not yet⁠—”

“I know what we are not yet.” Her whisper was ragged and laughing both. Her eyes in the candlelight were enormous, fearless, quite black with passion. “I know exactly the sum of what I am owed at the church door, and I am not asking for the principal, signore. But I have stood on the outside of my own life for years, and you look at me that way, and I find …”

His hand had moved of itself, tracing the line of her throat to where the loosened gown gave up its border. The soft upper curve of her breast filled his palm.

Her breath went, and the sentence went with it, and she finished on almost no voice at all. “I find I do not want to be proper. Not tonight.”

There was a word for what he ought to do, and the word was in the passage, with her door, and the plan.

“Then hear the terms,” he heard himself say instead, low, against her temple, his own voice gone to gravel and Italy. “Nothing that cannot wait for a ring, waits. That is mine and it does not move, amore, do not test it, it is nailed down. But there is a whole country on this side of that border.” He drew back the inch it took to see her face, because this she would say yes or no to with her eyes open or not at all. “Let me. Only let me. You are to do nothing, give nothing, you are only to be. It is a scandal how a man may study a woman and never⁠—”

“Lorenzo?”

“Sì.”

“You are talking.”

“Sì,” he admitted, and stopped.

He was thorough. He had been called nothing else his whole life. Thorough, obsessive, incapable of half a glance, and it had cost him friends and eaten his years. Yet here, at last, on a sloping-ceilinged night that smelled of tallow and the sea, the vice paid out its full worth.

He learned her the way he had learned altarpieces, slowly, in wonder, giving each discovery its full weight before permitting himself the next. The candle got the best of the bargain, and he envied it.

He eased the gown farther from her shoulders. It slipped down her arms and pooled at her waist, leaving her in her stays and the thin linen of her shift. The stays were still laced, the upper edge pressing against the soft swell of her breasts. He worked the knot at the back with fingers that were not entirely sure. The tapes gave, one by one, and the stays loosened. He drew them carefully down her arms and set them aside. Now only the shift remained between his hands and her skin.

The roundness of her breast settled into his open hand through the thin linen. He felt the tight peak of her nipple against his palm and the way her whole body answered when he closed his fingers gently around it. He bent his head and took the pulse below her ear into his mouth again, tasting salt and warmth, and her breath hitched hard against his cheek. He kissed lower, along the line of her throat, then lower still, until his mouth closed over the full weight in his hand through the shift. The linen was damp from his mouth. He felt her fingers drive into his hair.