She wanted to taste him. He brought the smell of the night in with him, on his shirt.
He wasn’t wearing a knife sheath on his arm or fixed at his back. Perhaps he’d tucked that deadliness into his jacket before he tossed it aside. He was tactful as well as lethal. One does not wear a knife to a romantic assignation.
“I won’t let my cousins kill you,” she said, “in case you’re worried about that.”
“Getting knifed by your relatives is one reason I shouldn’t be here. There are others.” He fumbled at his cuff buttons and didn’t take his eyes from her face. “I can’t think of a single one right now.”
She found it exquisitely endearing that he wanted her so much he had become too clumsy to undo a button. “Let me do that.”
He held out his wrist in a gesture, deceptively tame and domestic, so she could slip buttons from their moorings and free him. This was a symbolically satisfying chore, freeing him from the bindings that held him. They sat on the bed and she enjoyed every nuance of undressing him for the first time. There could be only one first time, though there would be many other times, if they lived.
The shirt was good linen, soft with many washings. She smelled the faint, clean scent.
“I was lying awake,” she said, “looking at the cracks in the ceiling and seeing maps of Scotland and hoping you would come to me.”
His hold around her became adamant. “Let me get the rest of these clothes off.” He lifted her away from his lap lightly, as if she weighed nothing. Then he held her a minute longer as if his hands were reluctant to let her go.
At some point since parting from her he’d darkened his hair to brown. When he was above her and inside her, she’d reach upward with her mouth and taste his hair, damp with sweat.
He leaned to pull off his boots and tossed them to the side of the bed. When he stood to unbutton his trousers, he pushed his sleeves back in folds up his arms. His shirt fell in long, loose folds from his shoulders to his thighs. His upright cock jutted, clearly visible, nudged hungrily against the cloth. His eyes were full of heat.
And she . . . she was suddenly too restless to sit still. She swung her legs around and stood up to walk to the window. Her skin prickled with the cold and the floorboards were chill under her feet. She’d be grateful for the warmth of Pax’s body in that bed.
She closed the slit where the window curtains had parted when Pax came through, excluding even the last small crevice of darkness, tucking the edges together.
There are explanations to be made when one is a woman of some experience. She began, “The men I lay with—”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said.
“It’s not an apology. I just wanted to say, those men didn’t know me. I opened my flesh to them, but not my mind. This is the first time I have made love with a man who is my friend.”
“I couldn’t do it at all,” he said. “I couldn’t take a woman to bed with me and tell her lies with every breath. Not a woman I cared about.”
“There were no good choices for us, were there?” He’s known only bought women. “The Coach House poisoned us both.” She rubbed her upper arms. Her shiver was not entirely from the chill in the air. It was excitement rising in her belly. “This will be different for both of us. I feel naked with you. Naked inside my skin because I have no wrapping of lies around me.” She shook her head. “I’m being dramatic.”
He crossed the room. Each step was set with care, deliberate as if he approached her across a lake, insecurely frozen, and any misstep might plunge them into the dark water beneath.
He was, of course, silent. That was the least of his skills.
They stood a few hand spans apart. Touching distance.
He said, “Truth. Lies. There’s probably a Baldoni saying about that.”
“Several. We say, ‘Telling the truth is planting coins in a field, hoping to reap bullion.’ You’re still dressed. Let me remedy that.”
He bent and let her take his shirt in handfuls of linen up, over his head. He came from her hands naked, beautiful, wholly at ease without clothing. That was another legacy of the Coach House, one of the more harmless.
The Greeks carved statues of their athletes and of their gods. Pax could have been one of them—an Olympic runner, stripped to lean muscle for speed, or the god Hermes. But the Greeks did not depict their gods in a state of arousal. Pax was most supremely aroused.
The sight of Pax, rampant in all his demanding sexuality, buffeted her like a fierce wind. Her breath built inside her and would move neither in nor out. Her skin heated.
The cloth of his shirt felt heavy and significant and warm as she held it. She wanted to take it to bed with her and hide it under her pillow, to keep the smell of him with her when he went away in a few hours. It was with reluctance she let it drop. That left no barrier between them, really, except her shift.
She said, “The first time, I was seventeen. He was the squire’s son.”
“Cami—”
“This isn’t about him. It’s about me. Let me tell you. He was very handsome and I hungered to fall in love and be foolish. Instead, I was mortifyingly sensible and calculating and clear-sighted. I was a French spy and could never marry anyone. He had to marry money. The daughter of a shipbuilder, as it turned out.”
“He sounds like a selfish popinjay.”
“He was a nice young man.”
“That condemns him absolutely. ‘A nice man.’” Pax shook his head, smiling. “What would you want with a nice young man? You scared him to death.”
“I don’t scare you.”
“Oh, yes, you do.”
Her lovers, both of them, had been dark, with wiry thickets of hair upon the body. She liked it that Pax was wholly different, pale as the moon reflected on a steel blade. That he was swift, precise, and austere as the blade itself. When she ran her hand across his chest, she felt smooth springing hair, invisible to the eye.
At seventeen, she’d longed to be overmastered by passion. Tonight she would be. There would be no careful exchange of pleasure in that narrow bed.
She was halfway mad already and Pax was shaking with the need to control himself.
She said, “I like your hair better when it’s white.”
“Disguise. I’m supposed to be sailing to France. About now, I’d guess.”
“Tonight? But—”
He set a finger on her lips. It was a shock, a vehement thrill. “That’s a long story.” His eyelids were heavy and half-closed. “I’ll paint you naked, if we both live. I’ll paint you in red silk and rose petals.”
She had never, not once, considered the possibility of being covered in rose petals. Her voice became husky. “You hollow me out until I’m full of wanting you. I can’t hold anything back. This is no light moment for me.”
“It isn’t light for me, either. There’s been no one else. No one but you.” She watched him follow his own fingers as they journeyed from her mouth, down her neck, to the pulse in the hollow of her collarbone. He said, “You hold me in the palm of your hand, Cami.”
To be told, so simply, that she had such power. That she was the first woman he’d felt this for. It left her without words.
He said, with stark simplicity, “This isn’t comfortable for either of us. Tonight, we’ll feel too much.” He slid her shift off, down her arms. “Let me unveil you. Let me see.”
Cloth slipped over her. She felt individual threads of embroidery brush by. Her breasts held back the glide of the linen for a moment, then let go. It whispered across her belly, down over her hips, till the hair between her legs was uncovered and cloth piled around her feet. Her mind tumbled and danced like a kite in a high wind.
He said, “I don’t deserve this.” Maybe he didn’t know he’d said that aloud.
She felt shy suddenly. “It’s not so much. A body. They sell them on the streets—”
“This isn’t about your body. It’s you. The body just comes along for the ride.”
He swept her up, easily, and carried her to the bed. He’d always looked frail, with his thinness and the keen, intelligent face. That was deceiving. Pax was distilled strength. Any weakness in him had been burned away in fire after fire his whole life.