Page 67 of The Beloved Escapade

He explored her as though she were the treasure, murmuring over her in two languages, unhurried, his mouth at her throat, at her breasts, until she had a fist in his hair and her breath was coming in pieces.

His hands moved lower, stroking the soft skin of her inner thighs. He opened her gently, palms warm against the sensitive insides of her legs. Then his mouth followed the path his hands had taken … down the plane of her stomach, over the curve of her hip, lower still.

She felt his breath first, hot against her, and then the soft press of his mouth. His tongue found her, slow and deliberate. At the same time, his fingers slid through the slick heat of her, one and then two, curling inside her while his tongue worked the swollen pearl above. The dual sensation pulled a broken sound out of her. He settled into a devastating rhythm she already knew by heart, tongue and fingers moving together, patient, thorough, building her higher with every pass.

Lucy stopped being able to think in sentences at all. The wave gathered the way it always did with him, rising out of deep water. She pressed her face into his shoulder to keep her cries from the sleeping house. He took her over the crest ardently, completely, generously, wave upon wave, until she lay wrung out and shining under his hands with her heart flying.

And then she reached for him.

She slid her hand down the front of him, sure of her welcome, wanting to give back the glory, wanting him undone above her, wanting him so far inside her that boundaries ceased to exist. “Lorenzo,” she whispered, against his jaw, drawing at him, opening to him. “Please. All of you. I want all of you.”

His breath went ragged. She felt the want in him, hard and shaking, felt his whole body lean toward her like a tide leaning at a mooring.

And then his hand closed around her wrist. Gently. Gently as always. He drew her hand up between them, away from him, and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, once, carefully.

“Not yet, amore,” he said, against her fingers, low and wrecked. “When we are wed.”

And Lucy lay under him in the dark with her hand held prisoner against his lips, and felt the insidious thoughts slip into her head.

Because he had said it before. It was the pattern of them, these weeks. He had said it in this same low voice with this same kiss on her knuckles, and she had lain glowing each time and translated it as honor. As respect. A man guarding her against consequence until his ring guarded her instead, a man denying himself for her sake, and she had thought it the most gallant thing she had ever been given.

Tonight, it read as a man keeping one foot outside the door.

She could not have said what was different, except that everything was. The furled hands. The silences. The half-breath his laughter came behind. She lay with her cheek on his hammering heart, the proof of his wanting right there under her ear, loud as surf, and understood that wanting had never been the question. He wanted her. And he would not have her. He gave her pleasure, punctually, lavishly, in full, and but held the final act back. The missing piece was himself, and he was holding himself back because he had not fully committed to her.

He would not finish what he would not commit to. Her body, sated and warm and stupidly in love with him, argued against every word of it. Her body lost.

He gathered her in, afterward. He wrapped her in his arms and drew the coverlet over them both and held her as though she were made of something precious. His breathing slowed by degrees against her hair, and lengthened, and let go, and he slept.

Lucy lay awake beside him and listened.

To his heart. To the house. To the sea, going on and on beyond the shutters, which tonight she could finally translate. She counted his breaths for a while, the way she had once counted the strokes of a clock on a birthday morning, waiting for a carriage that never came.

The window went from black to charcoal to a gray like the inside of a shell. Somewhere below, the first door of the morning opened. And Lucy Carroway lay in the circle of her beloved’s arms, on her last night on the island, dry-eyed and wide awake, turning the same hard truth over and over in the dark until it had no soft edges left.

The tide serving, they went down to the landing after breakfast, the whole tribe of them, and the beach filled up with farewell.

It was terrible and it was lovely and it was both at once, the way only families manage. Her aunt held her a long time without one word, which said more than the words would have, and then held her at arm’s length and looked at her, one long look, woman to woman, that saw, Lucy was almost certain, straight down to the bottom of her, and said only, “Come back to us one day.”

Edward wrung Lorenzo’s hand and then, surprising everyone including himself, embraced him.

The boy stood at the water’s edge with his boots on the correct feet for the occasion and gravely presented Lorenzo with a stone, the best one he owned, which Lorenzo received on one knee with the solemnity of a knighthood and stowed over his heart.

And Emily came to Lucy last. She came with her hands behind her back and her chin down and her mother’s eyes lifted up, and she stood in front of Lucy working up to it, and then thrust out both hands at once, cupped together, and in the cup of them lay a bird.

A little marble bird, the length of Lucy’s thumb, white as the cliffs, with the wood-grain of the island running through its folded wings, its head turned back over its shoulder, every feather suggested with three strokes.

“Papa calls you Lucy-bird,” Emily said, in a rush, to Lucy’s hem. “Matthew made it, but I chose it and I polished it, Mama showed me how, it took ages, and it’s so you don’t forget the island. You have to keep it in your pocket. Not a box. A pocket, so it’s with you.”

Lucy went down on her knees on the wet shingle in her traveling dress, which appalled Bessy somewhere behind her and could not be helped, and took the bird, and took the child, and held both hard, and let two tears go where the wind would dry them before anyone official could see.

“A pocket,” she promised, against the warm blonde-brown hair. “Always. I swear it. I will think of you.”

Her uncle came last of all, because he had been putting it off, pretending to see to the boat. He gripped her hands in the old grip, the handshake that was a sentence, and for a moment the sentence would not come.

“Every mile, Lucy-bird,” he managed, finally, low, only for her.

“Every mile,” said Lucy. “Whites’ statuary by Michaelmas.”