Finally they came together like clashing cymbals. This was not the remembered innocence of youth, but the ardent sensuality of experience-skilled and knowing and unashamed.
Yet in spite of the mind-drugging pleasure, she knew that only his body was fully engaged. His mind and spirit held back, leaving a shadow of emptiness at the heart of intimacy.
Even as she shuddered with convulsive release, she mourned. He was as superb as a lover as one could imagine-except that he did what he did without love.
Margot slept in his arms, utterly still in the depths of exhaustion, her tangled hair adrift on his bare chest. Rafe was so tired that he could barely find the strength to raise his hand and brush the dark gold strands from her eyes, to trace the fine bones of her face. Yet he could not sleep.
One might say that he had been lucky, for fate had given him the opportunity to free himself of his obsession by allowing this passionate interlude with the woman who held him in thrall.
One would have been wrong. Though he had succeeded in his goal of briefly severing her awareness from her tortured memories, for him it had been an empty victory.
For years, he had dreamed of Margot coming to him with sweet words of longing and an intoxicating invitation. Tonight part of his dream had come true, yet he had discovered the bitter truth that the invitation was hollow without the sweet words.
If there had been only silence between them, he would have been able to maintain the illusion that they were lovers in truth. Instead, Margot had been so lost to her circumstances that words of love had escaped her. The declaration had hurt more deeply than he would have dreamed possible, because he knew that it was meant for another man. It was Anderson who held her heart. Only chance had brought her to his own bed tonight, when she desperately needed oblivion.
Yet in spite of the pain, he wished the night would never end. He had wanted Margot Ashton back, and with the bittersweet treachery that marked the gods' answers to human prayers, he had gotten what he wanted. What Rafe hadn't realized was that if he found Margot again, he would once more be as blindly, helplessly in love with her as he had been at twenty-one.
The obsession he had felt for Countess Janos was only another name for that love, but he had been too cynical to name his emotions truly. In the dark, with the palest of dawn light etching the windows, he recognized starkly that he had never stopped loving Margot. No matter what her betrayals and lies, no matter how many beds she had passed through, he loved her- more than wisdom, more than pride, more than life itself.
And in the morning, she would leave him. Tomorrow all the barriers would be firmly in place again, perhaps with an additional layer of shame on her part, for what she had done so shamelessly.
The irony was crushing. Rafael Whitbourne, fifth Duke of Candover, had been beloved of the gods- blessed with health, intelligence, charm, and wealth beyond imagining. Those who crossed his path gave him admiration and respect.
Yet he damned his fate with dark, despairing anger that this one woman, who mattered more than all else, could not love him. She had cared for him when she was young, surely, but not enough to be faithful through the short months of their betrothal. He had never come first with her, not then, and not now, when a traitor and spy held her first allegiance.
Staring upward into the softening dark, Rafe wondered what deep, crippling flaw made him unable to love any woman except one who could not love him back.
Tomorrow would be time enough to ponder that. For now, he would savor this handful of moments with the only woman he had ever loved.
With the bleakness that lies beyond hope, he knew that it was all the time he would ever have.
Chapter 16
Maggie felt deeply rested when she awoke, though the angle of the sun showed that it was still early. In the clear light of day, it was hard to believe that she had had the audacity to ask Rafe to make love to her. Yet the warm length of his body lying beside her was irrefutable proof of what had happened.
As a woman of the world, she had thought it likely that he would oblige her; though females needed a reason for intimacy, men usually needed only a place. She had had a reason, and Rafe had supplied the place… Yet what had passed between them had gone far beyond anything she had been able to imagine, and it would stay etched in her brain forever.
Turning her head slightly, she studied Rate's sleeping form. His numerous bruises had matured to melodramatic purple-black. God only knew how he had gotten her away from that mob. Take away his title and his wealth and his influence, and he would still be a man among men-strong and brave and heart-stoppingly beautiful, in an utterly male fashion.
Maggie closed her eyes in anguish. She had always known that if they became intimate, she would be helplessly in love with Rafe again, and it had happened. The love had always been there, since she had first met him thirteen years ago. Perhaps that was why she had never been able to love Robin as completely as he deserved.
No, the problem was not how much she loved Robin, but how she loved him. She cared for both men more deeply than words could ever express, yet Rafe she loved with conflict as well as harmony, challenge as well as understanding.
Strange to think that it was the harsher elements between them that gave her feelings for him such depth and intensity. With Robin there was always harmony, and their love was that of friends, almost siblings. Rafe she wanted as a mate, the archetypal male who made her feel most deeply female.
She swallowed hard and slid away from Rafe's arm, careful not to wake him. Though she would like nothing better than to spend the rest of her life in his bed, that was impossible. Conspiracy and death still surrounded them, and there were the charges against Robin.
One way or another, the business would be resolved, and then she would never see Rafe again. Considering the sexual fire between them, he might still want her for a mistress, if his pride wasn't too deeply injured by the way she had used him. But she would never dare accept. The memory of the previous night's passion made it almost impossible to imagine life without him. If they became lovers in truth, she would never survive the end of the affair.
When the end came, Rafe would be perfectly charming, of course, kind and a trifle bored. She could imagine it already.
Laying the back of her hand against his cheek, Maggie said a silent farewell to their brief hours of intimacy, resisting the temptation to kiss him one last time.
Since her clothes were neatly folded on a chair, she dressed, wincing over the incredible range of aches and bruises she discovered. A little crude mending disguised the worst of the rips in her garments so that she was more or less decent. Apart from being dressed as a man, that is.
Then she went to the window seat and curled up, hugging her knees to her chest as she waited for Rafe to awaken.
It was perhaps a quarter of an hour until he stirred. His first movement was toward the side of the bed Maggie had occupied. The emptiness woke him, and he pushed himself up on one elbow, his gaze scanning the room until he found her on the window seat.
Relaxing fractionally, he stared across the intervening space, his face unreadable. Maggie found herself distracted by the elegant patterns of dark hair on his bare chest. Last night she had experienced them as a texture, but now sight provided a different kind of pleasure.
Hoping that some of the previous night's intimacy would survive the light of day, she said tentatively, "Good morning."
He watched her with damnably cool gray eyes. "Is it a good morning?"
He was going to make this difficult for her. Maggie swung her feet to the floor and forced herself to meet his gaze. "Well, I'm alive, for which I am profoundly grateful. There wouldn't have been much left of me after the mob was done." After a brief struggle with the panic that flared at the thought, she continued, "There are no words strong enough to thank you for saving my life."