He kissed her. She began to feel that sensation he had always made her feel-as if she would lose herself in some sweet, aching fall toward oblivion as long as he held her this way. He made a sound low in his throat, an echo of intense pleasure. It seemed so implausible, so impossible to believe that he could feel it too. Yet he kissed her deeply, pressing her to him. She could feel the stiff binding round his fingers, just touching the back of her neck, a strange reality of starched cotton amid the dreamlike dimness.
He leaned his shoulders against the great wheel of the carriage, drawing her off balance to him, kissing her throat and her temple and her hair. Through the oilskin coat and thin protection of her night rail, her whole body touched his. She felt wildly outside all bounds of decency and civilization. All her forbidden daydreams were concentrated in Trev, in this shadow love and outlaw fancy, waiting just beyond the fence of her everyday life. She reached up and put her hands to each side of his face. It had been no more than memories, never something to depend upon or believe could come true. Only this was true-that she stood here in the dark with a man who was going away, as he had always been going away, always receding into remembrance and dreams.
"Wicked Callie," he said against the corner of her lips. "You shouldn't consort with drunken Frenchmen in the middle of the night."
She made a small whimper as he grazed her ear with his teeth. She gripped her fingers in his hair and pulled him closer.
His mouth hovered over hers. "I dream about you all the time," he murmured, his voice a little slurred. "Do you know that?"
"About me?" She slipped her hands down and held his coat, squeezing it in her fingers. "I don't believe you."
"I know," he said. "Damn it all."
"You say these things-"
"I know. I know I do. But some of them are true."
She forced herself to stand back a little, trying to be composed. "I don't even think you're real. I don't think this is real."
He let go of a sigh and stroked his bandaged finger tips lightly across her hair. "If only it weren't. Maybe then my hand wouldn't feel as if a camel just stepped on it."
It was almost a relief to recall his accident. "You think the horse trod on you?"
"The horse should have kicked me in the head," he said. "I deserve it."
"Yes," she said, biting her lip. "I think you do if you leave Shelford now."
He slid his hands down to her waist, following the shape of her. "You'd better go back, wicked Callie in your boots and nightclothes, before I do something to deserve worse than that."
She knew what he meant. She thought of her room and her bed, warm and dry and safe. It was only a brief walk through the wind and rain, and a million miles away. Her whole body seemed to glow under his touch.
He drew her hard to him suddenly, opening his mouth over hers with a rough invasion. For an instant she was full of the delicious, smoky, sandalwood taste of him. She was seventeen again, and she was dying again, that infinite plunge into his kiss and his body pressed to hers, so familiar and so unknown.
He set her away as abruptly as he had kissed her. "Enough," he muttered. The f licker of the candle shadowed his eyes. "Give me a few hours' sleep now, and then I'll be on my way."
Callie gazed at him. As unlikely as it seemed to believe he was here, it was more impossible to believe that in a moment he would be gone from her life again. She hugged herself, shaking her head slowly, as if to clear her brain.
His lip curled. "You didn't suppose I'd be any less a cad than the rest of them, did you?" he said harshly. "Your father was right. You're well out of a connec tion with me, Lady Callista. I assure you it won't be long before you thank him for the second time."
She stood numbly, unable to summon any words amid the welter of feelings. She turned away and then turned back for a moment, as if to ask a question, but she could think of no question that he had not already answered with perfect clarity. In the dimness, all she could see was his rigid face, with that same expression of bitter disdain that he'd worn when her father hit him.
"Don't look at me as if I've swindled you," he snapped. "It's a dream. It was always a dream. Go back to the house." He took a step toward her. "Get out of here, you silly wretch, before we both regret it."
She turned and ran, her face and body hot with emotion, the way she had run before.
He was right, of course. It was a dream and always had been-another castle in the sky, dusted with just enough reality to make it more vivid and persistent than the rest of her foolish daydreams, her fanciful visions of being beautiful or adventurous or admirable in any number of highly unlikely ways.
Callie realized she had worn her muddy boots into her bedchamber and kicked them off. Being right about dreams did not buy Trev any gratitude from her. She tore off the wet oilskin and threw it on the f loor. She hated gentlemen. She hated every single one of them, the ones who had jilted her and the ones who had not. They were useless, hopeless, impossible, and mean. He said he was a cad like all the rest, and she heartily agreed. Doubtless he had a wife already, or perhaps a dozen, and mistresses by the score back in France, all of them beautiful and charming and never at a loss for words. Women adored Trev, all sorts of women threw themselves at him, she had no doubt, and the least of them would be more appealing than Callie on a good day.
She lay facedown on her bed, not quite sobbing into her pillow, but huffing rather brokenly while she envisioned herself running them all through with a hay fork. She would have nothing more to do with gentlemen, or any other people for that matter. She would go and live with her animals, so that she wouldn't have to speak to anyone ever again. Residing under a hayrick in the fields, with only the cattle for company, would be a perfectly blissful existence in Callie's view. She could not imagine how she had ever considered any other arrangement.
She plumped up her pillow and beat at it. Indeed, she really didn't like people at all. She didn't like to make conversation or be looked at or have friends. It was all painful and hopeless, and it would be worse when she lived with Hermey and everyone pitied her the more because she was a useless spinster sister who had been jilted three times.
No-she loved Hermey-but she couldn't bear it. She refused to do it. She would become a hermit instead, or possibly a witch, and frighten little children by haunting some dark wood with her moans. She would adopt a large-brimmed black hat, the more out of fashion the better, and encourage a great number of cats to hang about her.
No one would wonder at this in Shelford. Everyone here would perfectly comprehend that she preferred animals to people. Particularly to gentlemen. Most particularly to French gentlemen. They could all join Bonaparte on that island of his at the ends of the earth, and very happily she hoped they would be there, drinking good claret and singing " La Marseillaise," while she lived out her life under a stump.
She fell asleep contemplating these joyful plans, her pillow soaked in tears.
Major Sturgeon stood very stiff ly beside the mantel piece in the lesser drawing room. Instead of his uniform, he had worn a dark green coat with exceptionally high collar points, so that his entire jaw was swathed in linen. Even so, his clothing could not obscure a great bruise and swelling that made his mouth and left eye appear oddly crooked.
Callie sat beside the garden window, as distant from him as was possible, which was not very distant in the modest chamber. She should have received him in the more formal atmosphere of the pink drawing room, but there was no fire laid there before Lady Shelford's afternoon calling hours. Major Sturgeon had answered Callie's invitation with unnerving promptness, appearing at an hour of the morning that her father would have called encroaching. Taken by surprise, Callie had managed to clutch Hermey and pull her bodily to join them in spite of her sister's whispered protests.