by Karen Ranney
But she would not trust him to be constant.
When he finally kissed her, she was sixteen again and the world was filled with summer. There were colorful flowers in the lush gardens, and she and Douglas had made their bed beneath the weeping willow. He’d spread a blanket for her, one she’d confiscated from the linen press. They’d lain together in the morning mist, their loving accompanied by the faint sound of rain drizzling from the branches.
He had taught her to kiss and she’d learned her lessons well. On that morning so long ago, she pulled away and asked him, “Do you love me, Douglas?”
He’d raised his head and smiled at her and she’d seen the answer in his eyes. “Yes,” he said, bending down to kiss her again. “With all my heart.” Another kiss. “With all my heart and soul.” One more kiss. “With all my mind and heart and soul.”
Love me, she said in her heart now, the words somewhat different but the desire the same.
She stood and removed her nightgown, grateful for the darkness as she bared her body. Taking the steps back to the bed, she knelt beside him. As young lovers, they had laughed and teased each other, taking turns in seduction. The lessons of her youth were not lost on her now.
Extending his arms around her, he drew her down atop him. Her breasts pressed against his chest, her thighs cradling his erection. They fit together perfectly, as if nature itself had designed one for the other.
She was the one initiating their kiss now, as her hands flattened against his cheeks, her palms abraded by his whiskers. She kissed him with all the longing of nearly a decade, all the loneliness of a thousand dream-filled nights.
His hands were large and warm, wandering over her backside, cupping her bottom, and pulling her even closer. Engrossed in his kiss, she didn’t notice when he abruptly stopped touching her.
Slowly, he sat up and, reaching inside the drawer, unerringly pulled out a tinderbox containing flints, steel, and tinder. He scraped the flint against the steel and the sparks ignited the cotton fibers. The small flame was enough to light the candle on the nightstand.
She moved, gathering up the sheets in front of her, and backed up to the headboard, feeling the carved vines and flowers of the wood press into her skin. In that second the mood was broken, the illusion of a shadow lover destroyed, and in his place a Douglas with set face and angry eyes.
“Turn around, Jeanne,” he said slowly.
She shook her head from side to side, silently calling herself a fool. She should have known what he would encounter. How could she have forgotten?
He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her. She beat at his arms, but there was nothing she could do against his strength. Feeling the warmth of the candle flame inches from her shoulders, she could well imagine what he saw. One of the other penitents had treated her after the last beating, and had been shocked enough to whisper, “Oh, your poor back, Jeanne. They have scarred you so.”
“What happened to you?” he asked.
She bowed her head. For a few moments she’d wanted to relive the past before all had been lost to her. What a fool she’d been to think that she could simply wish away all those years.
“What happened?” he asked again. He reached out his fingers and trailed them over her back, tracing the line of her scars.
She left the comfort of the bed, pulling at the sheet and wrapping it around her. Walking to the windows, she wished suddenly that she could simply fly from the room. She would be a bird and alight on a nearby tree and escape this questioning. But she was all too human, wasn’t she?
A fact that he’d just discovered.
“I was sent to the Convent of Sacré-Coeur as a girl. They found it expeditious to enforce some lessons.”
“By beating you?” he asked incredulously. “What did you do that was so terrible, Jeanne?”
She had questioned their edicts, smiled at a novitiate, been found weeping in the laundry. All such activities indicated to the nuns that she was still focused on her previous life and not the one that God had given her at the convent.
Instead of answering him, she remained silent. But Douglas wasn’t content with that.
“Why were you sent there?”
“I did something that earned my father’s displeasure.” She had fallen in love, deliriously and deliciously in love. She ached for that long-ago girl and the boy she adored. She would not mention the other secrets of her life. Douglas had been granted too much by accident.
A moment later she felt him beside her. Slowly, he turned her again.
“Jeanne,” he said, and she had never heard a more beautiful sound since the last time he’d said her name, a hundred years ago in a land far away. She felt tears come to her eyes and closed her lids, trapping one and letting the other escape to fall in a straight line down to her chin. She felt his fingers there as he captured it.
Did he hold her sorrow ransom?
Suddenly she could bear it no longer. She didn’t want the intervening years to come between them; she didn’t want anything to stay him from touching her. Let memory wait for an hour. Let her sin be forgotten for a span of minutes. Give her love now, perfect and joyous, enough to last for another ten years.
She extended her hands and placed them flat on his chest. “Love me,” she whispered and the words seemed too loud in that silent room. “Love me, Douglas.” The youthful Jeanne reached out her arms and enfolded him, gently pushed him back on the bed, and hovered over him, teasing as she had not done for years. “Kiss me.”
Abruptly, she was on her back. He said something that she didn’t hear. Perhaps her name or an oath or some other word whose meaning was inconsequential for this moment.
“Love me,” she whispered again, and now there was no doubt of his assent as his lips, warm and heated, covered hers.
She was always swept into a vortex when Douglas kissed her. Now there was only a deep darkness, and a tightness in her chest. He kissed as he always had with deliberation and delight, his tongue entering her mouth. Then he kissed her throat, his lips pressed against the base of her neck and just below her ear, spots where she was especially sensitive. They had not forgotten all the special places they had discovered together—his neck, her breasts, his lower back, behind her knees.
Time had made so many changes in him that she wanted to savor each one slowly and deliciously. His muscles were more defined on his shoulders and back as her fingers trailed a path across his skin, remembering.
He’d obviously learned more about lovemaking in the intervening years and she jealously wanted to know from whom and when. But she was engaged in a pretense, imagining with half her mind that she was the girl of Paris, the one without a care except the greatest one—that of meeting Douglas in secret.
The stubble on his beard gently abraded her breast and then his mouth touched her nipples teasingly. His hand pressed against her abdomen with a gentle pressure and moved up and then down in a slowly taunting circle. His fingers stretched lower with each revolution until she placed her hand atop his.
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, as warmth followed wherever his fingers lingered.
When his thumb finally found her damp and swollen, she made a small welcoming sound and spread her legs wider for him. As delicious as his kisses on her shoulders, the edge of her jaw and her temple, as heavenly as his hands and mouth caressing her breasts, what she truly wanted was for him to be inside her. She wanted to be stretched and filled; she wanted to feel him surging in her until she shuddered in his arms. Until the past and the present were fused together in passion and neither could tell the difference.
He raised himself over her, kissing her slowly, deeply, and an instant later entered her with the same deliberate passion. She found his gentleness almost too much and felt tears well up in her eyes again. His invasion of her was slow, complete, and thorough.
She arched beneath him in a wordless demand that he met with a tender kiss. Patience was not a word for this moment. She wanted everything now. She wante
d to feel it all. If not forgiveness, then forgetfulness for a time.
He devastated her completely with a soft kiss, a gentle murmur. “Jeanne.” Just her name and nothing more than that.
In that instant, she allowed him inside the most guarded part of her—not her body, that he controlled as he began to surge within her—but her heart.
The boy who’d loved her had promised her fidelity and yet had not been faithful. The boy she’d adored had vowed his constancy and yet had vanished. The man was a stranger, but in this act of passion he merged to become the boy she’d loved.
“Douglas,” Jeanne whispered, as if to call him to her.
He bent and kissed her, hard, deeply, and she was caught up in a maelstrom of sensation. Even her fingers tingled and yet he didn’t move faster; he didn’t seek to find his own pleasure before hers. He had always been a considerate lover but now he was a maddening one.
She gripped his shoulders and bit her lip and arched beneath him. His patience and endurance summoned her response from where it lay hidden all these years.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she almost whispered the words that were forbidden between them. I love you lay muted on her lips as pleasure flooded through her. All the various parts of her separated in that instant as mind, body, soul flew away. When they rejoined, she felt weak, her hands trembling where they lay against his shoulders.
Her face was warm, her nipples erect and brushing almost painfully against his chest. She gripped his buttocks and pulled him to her and he acquiesced, surging into her deeper than before. A small gasp of surprise emerged from her as she climaxed again.
And then he exploded in her arms, and she held him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders as she felt him breathe harshly against her hot cheek.
Her eyes closed, the better to savor the tremors that resonated through her body. In the depths of her mind she spoke a simple benediction, comprised of only two words. Nevertheless, it seemed to be a prayer. Douglas. Beloved.
Chapter 13
F luffy streaks of clouds colored pink and gray stretched across the sky. Lit from below, they formed a blanket for dawn, adding depth to a magnificent sunrise. Beyond, at the edge of the horizon, the sky was tinted the palest blue, while closer the hue was indigo.
Morning had come to Edinburgh.
Jeanne felt Douglas leave the bed. In a brief, unplanned entreaty, she stretched out her hand. His fingers touched hers gently before moving away. A confession without a word spoken, a way of telling her that perhaps he knew how she felt. Or maybe it was nothing more than a silent farewell.
The entire night had been a joining of memory and flesh. She had been the Jeanne of her youth for a brief matter of hours. In that time she’d felt no guilt or remorse. The world had been a kind place, giving her no reason to hate.
For a brief span of hours he’d given her back a sense of herself, a person the convent had tried so hard and so long to extirpate. She felt almost innocent, naïve and joyous, as optimistic as a child. She wanted to thank him in words, but somehow they wouldn’t come. Now was not the time for speech or confession.
After hearing the door click shut, she opened her eyes. Her shadow lover was gone and in his place, the impression of his head on her pillow, the scent of warm bodies, and a hollowness.
Had it not been for the sweet feeling of lassitude in her body, she might have thought herself the recipient of a long and sensual dream.
What had she done?
If she were wiser, she’d leave. She would obtain a position as a scullery maid or shopkeeper’s assistant. She should leave Douglas MacRae’s house and go about the business of her life before he discovered things about her, or realized how weak she was when it came to him.
She didn’t want to leave. Perhaps that was the true meaning of sin, to weigh the consequences of an act and still perform it, to laugh in the face of retribution, and to dare for the sake of pleasure.
Turning onto her side, she stared out the window. The room faced east and the sun was making its appearance on the horizon now.
She’d been labeled a harlot long before now and had paid the price during the last ten years for any number of sins. Let the world damn her again; she no longer cared.
Those months in Paris had been the most beautiful of her life, and last night had proven that her memory wasn’t false. He touched her and her body trembled in awe of it. He smoothed his hand across her thigh and incited sensations she’d never felt before or since. Her flesh pebbled and her sigh encouraged the passage of a finger down to a knee and upward to a hip. She wanted his touch everywhere, to single out each separate place on her body and to mark it in a special way no man ever had.
The world was not the kind place it had seemed for a few hours last night. Instead, it was filled with men like Robert Hartley. Here was safety, for a time, and pleasure, for as long as she wished it.
If the past months and years had taught her nothing else, they’d taught her the value of the moment. She should savor nourishment when it came, delight in beauty when it appeared, and treasure the absence of pain. Why should she not treat love the same and cherish it whenever it occurred?
Because it would bring incredible anguish when it ceased.
She was all too knowledgeable about despair and loneliness, and dreaded them both. Such familiarity should have made her stronger. After all, the limits of her endurance had been reached, stretched, and reached again. Loving Douglas would be almost like stepping beyond the boundaries one more time and testing herself further. All the while, expecting him to leave her once again, or banish her from his house.
A wiser woman would thank him for the gift of the night before, for allowing her to pretend for just a little while. A wiser woman would simply kiss him passionately one last time and take her leave. A wiser woman would stride away from this beautiful house and never look back.
But she had never been wise in regards to Douglas MacRae. If she had, she wouldn’t have been so lonely in the past ten years.
When she’d first gone to the convent, she’d awake to the sound of the wind whistling through the corridors at night, the sound similar to a baby’s cry. She’d shiver from the chill, and begin to cry, the tears like ice on her face. Two years had passed before she realized that no one was coming to rescue her. Slower still, she’d come to understand that her imprisonment would last until the day she died. Over time her tears came less until only her nightmares remained, confusing, chaotic expressions of her greater despair.
She no longer cared what they did to her at the convent, what punishments she endured, what she suffered from day to day. With her apathy had come a type of freedom and, in time, a release. She’d changed even further as the years passed, becoming stronger in her weakness than those who had once been the masters.
She also began to understand that there was nothing that could be done to cure the past. It was simply there, accusing and unremitting. Yet she still wanted it to be different with every breath she took and with every beat of her heart.
The house was waking around her, commonplace household noises marking the start of another day—maids walking down the hallway, the low murmur of conversation. Life was going on regardless of her participation. She felt outside of it at the moment, an observer. But then, she hadn’t been part of the world for a very long time.
Standing, she walked to the basin, surprised to find that the water was warm. Evidently she had slept through the maid’s arrival. Once that might have embarrassed her, but she was far removed from such petty concerns as reputation. If she had cared that much for the gossip of servants, she would have removed herself from the house the moment Lassiter saw her last night. She was not foolish enough to think that the elderly majordomo would remain silent. Even the most loyal of servants talked. She didn’t delude herself into thinking that they were ignorant of what had transpired the night before.
She pulled out one of her dresses from the valise, smoothing the fabric repeatedly until most of
the wrinkles were gone. Dressing took longer than it should have. Anytime a garment touched her skin, Jeanne stopped in remembrance of what Douglas’s touch had felt like on that spot. A sleeve sliding against her arm recalled his teasing kiss. Fastening her bodice reminded her of his stroking fingers on her breasts. Her palm pressing gently against her throat recalled his lips.
As she fastened her collar she realized that something was missing.
The locket she’d worn since returning home to Vallans was gone. How had she left her mother’s locket behind?
Twice she went through the valise that Douglas had carried to her room, certain finally that it was not there.
She had lost one of the last mementos of her former life.
Perhaps it was an omen.
Douglas was furious with himself. What the hell had he done? He’d lain with a woman he despised. He’d kissed her with gentleness, tenderness, and touched her as if he held some respect for her. Lust shouldn’t have transformed him from a rational man to a beast, but it had. Dear God, it had.
Last night he’d paced in his room, thinking of her. He’d almost worn a path in the carpet before he lost the battle with himself, finding himself in front of the door to the guest room.
If Lassiter had discovered him, he didn’t know what he would have told his majordomo.
Now Douglas entered his library and closed the door behind him, still conscious of the fact that the woman he had hated for ten years lay asleep above him.
She’d come into his home and he’d immediately lusted after her. She’d sat on his couch looking tired and what had he thought? Not that now was the perfect time to accuse her. Not that now was the opportune moment to avenge Margaret. Not that he would have the opportunity to punish Jeanne for past deeds. No, all he thought was that she’d been a pretty girl, but she’d matured into a voluptuous woman.
The night before had proven that he was a fool around her.
