Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

  “Ah,” she gasped, and he moved his hips. His cock slid deeper, stretching her, filling her. He groaned as it sank to the hilt, his hipbones pressing her thighs apart. She bit savagely at his shoulder, sucked his neck, and twisted her lower body. Her flesh was around him. She contained him, his heat, his hardness, and as she let her breath rush out so she could take even more of him inside, he began to push. His movements were gentle at first, the friction making her sigh, making her press her knees to his sides, rising and falling along with his rhythm. His face was tilted down; he was watching their joined bodies surge together. He liked what he saw. His face was flushed, lips parted. She shuddered, and his eyes locked on hers. He caught her hands, pressed them up above her head, and trapped them with his forearm, his other hand closing on her breast then sliding down to caress the heated junction of their bodies. The flick of his fingers made her cry out. She bucked under him, almost sobbing, the fullness leaving no room for anything inside her but him. He thrust faster now, harder, his groans mingling with her cries. His teeth mashed her lips, tongue sliding deep into her mouth. She was inundated, spilling around him, unable to hold anything inside her anymore but unable to wiggle away, to free herself. Suddenly all the sensation in her body contracted into a knot, pulling tighter, tighter. She strained against him. She moaned and burst, broke into pieces, her skull shattering, rib cage exploding, his pumping buttocks sending more and more heat shooting through her. His body went rigid, cords in his neck standing out, and he rolled from her, burying himself in the bed with a shuddering groan.

  She caught her breath, staring up unseeingly, skin tingling, inner thighs sore. He too had lost himself in that moment; she had seen it in his face. They had both been subsumed in the motion, the merging force of flesh made one. She didn’t realize her lips had curved until she heard his inhalation. He was propped on his elbow, staring at her.

  “Your smile … ” He touched the flat of her chest, followed her collarbone to her shoulder. “What it does to me.”

  He pulled her against him. She was lulled by the gentle movement of his broad chest, by the heat emanating from his densely muscled limbs. Their breathing fell into rhythm.

  She stirred first. The longer she indulged herself, the more difficult it would be to tear herself away. She heard footsteps in the hall. The servants would know what had happened. There was no way around it. But she shouldn’t be caught in his arms.

  “Ella,” he said as she pulled away and sat up, clutching the sheet to her throat. She looked down at him but gained no sense of power from the perspective. Even stretched out naked, limbs relaxed, he seemed ready to command an army. His hand wandered to her thigh and rested there. He drew his brows together. He rose to sitting and took her by the shoulders. “I’m going to say it all wrong. You … ” He paused. “That is … I … ”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” She cut her eyes toward the door. She willed herself to stand, to leave the bed. It was impossible to guess the hour. The shutters on the windows were closed. The room smelled thick: his musk, sweat, the sea. Remember everything. No regrets. She didn’t move.

  “This is new to me.” He stroked her hair back then held a lock between his fingers, turning it this way and that as though it were something wondrous. A miracle.

  “Stop,” she said. “Please.” Whatever jealousy had rankled in her heart, she couldn’t bear to listen to him speak as though Phillipa never were. There was no honor in it. “It isn’t necessary. This was what it was.”

  His face was setting into grim lines. “Was?”

  She made her face blank, her voice crisp. “You can trust that I’ll make no demands on you. I don’t consider anything changed. I will perform the séance. You will help me find a suitable position.” She looked at the strong column of his throat, watched his Adam’s apple move up and down. “We are united by that arrangement. Nothing else. I’m not a romantic.”

  “Like hell you’re not.”

  Startled, she lifted her eyes. He smiled his mocking half smile.

  “You’re as romantic as they come,” he said. “You’re as wild as a deer. You’re as elusive as a song.” His voice dropped to a seductive murmur. “You open like a rose.”

  Now she was spellbound. She tried to shake her head. He laid a finger on her lips.

  “You were made for ecstasies,” he whispered.

  Ecstasies. Fits of pleasure. But there were other kinds. Her eyes clouded.

  “You still mistrust,” he said. “Lie here with me a little longer.” He leaned back into the pillows.

  She hesitated.

  “Please, Ella.”

  She couldn’t resist him. A little longer. She settled her head on his shoulder.

  “I want to tell you about Phillipa,” he said. She bit her lip, stiffening. She had waited for this, had wanted it, and now she felt as though the air had been knocked out of her.

  “I loved her,” he said. “I loved her with all my heart.” He paused. She tried to regulate her breathing. In, out. In, out. Whatever he had to say she would bear it. She nodded and laid her arm across his chest. Yes. She could listen to the story of their love. She begrudged Phillipa nothing.

  “We were like brother and sister,” he said, and she felt a queer tension grip her. He continued haltingly, as if each syllable was being dragged from him. “I agreed to marry her because she was pregnant.” Ella pulled away to look at him. He met her eyes steadily, the words hanging between them.

  “She was pregnant with another man’s child,” he said slowly. “He refused to have her.” Hatred twisted his features. Those grim lines scored his countenance. Making it haggard. Lupine.

  She felt dizzy. “You couldn’t … force him?” The image rose in her mind: Isidore with dueling pistols in the mist of the morning. Preposterous. How could he force a man to marry? But she knew that he would have tried. Emotions roiled within her. Admiration for his loyalty. And something like relief. Brother and sister. Not lovers.

  He slid up and leaned against the headboard.

  “I would have had to force her first.” His hands were clenched into fists. “Force her to reveal his name. And I could not bring myself to threaten her. Not until that night. The night she died.” He shut his eyes, grief replacing the violence in his face.

  If she kissed him, perhaps she could silence him and spare him these painful memories. His lips were compressed, stark creases around his mouth cutting from nose to chin. But that would be distraction. A short flight from the bitter reality. She fought the impulse to bend toward him. She wouldn’t help him flee. She would help him face the pain. She owed him that.

  He opened his eyes. “She told me he’d agreed to run away with her. Paris, of course. She was very excited, drunk and excited, more animated than I’d seen her in weeks. He was jealous, she said, of our engagement.” He laughed, the blackest sound Ella had ever heard. “I was a fool. When she first came to me and confessed everything, I thought she’d given up hope of him. I should have known better. Reasoning with Phillipa was like reasoning with a thunderhead. She was a force of nature. She never gave up. She hadn’t resigned herself to becoming my bride. She’d hoped the announcement of our betrothal would goad him into action. In a sense, she was right.”

  She could hear the awful sound of his teeth grinding together. She reached out and touched the edges of his hair hesitantly, pushed a lock from his brow.

  “He didn’t know that Phillipa told you the truth?” she asked softly. “That you were not his rival?”

  “A hoodwinked lover was more to Phillipa’s purpose than a loyal brother.” He shrugged. “Part of her throve on intrigue. She liked to manipulate, to provoke confrontations. She was always maneuvering, always pushing everything and everyone to the limit.” He looked at her, brows knitted together.

  “Believe me when I say I don’t think it was a flaw in her. In different circumstances … ” He opened his hands, turned them palm up, stared into them.

  “She didn’t have enoug
h scope for her movements,” he said. “Her theater of operations was so small. Society stifled her. She should have been born a man and gone into the navy. She was a swashbuckler by nature. Brilliant, as well. She might have been a Nelson.” His face softened. Some fond memory was slipping in amongst all the horrors.

  He shook his head. “She sounded like a deluded child that night. She was elated. Spouting the kind of nonsense she would have jeered at if she’d heard it from another woman. Infatuation, or wounded pride, made her too eager to trust in empty promises. Her sense of strategy deserted her. Run away to Paris! With nothing to hold him accountable. He would have dallied with her and left her a humiliated exile nursing a bastard.” His jaw clenched again.

  “So you tried to stop her.”

  His bleak gaze spoke volumes. “I’d never lost my temper with her before, but I did then. I cursed. I yelled. I swore I wouldn’t let her out of my sight, that I’d haul her back by the hair. She ran from the room, and I tripped chasing, fell, maybe even blacked out. I was that drunk.”

  She almost flinched away from the self-loathing in his eyes. But he would interpret such a gesture as condemnation. He would think she reviled him as he reviled himself, and she could not allow that. She took his hand by the thumb, pulled it against her leg, and clung to it.

  Young, handsome, rich. She understood now Isidore’s description of the murderer.

  “Why did he kill her?” she breathed.

  For a long moment, Isidore stared into space. Then he shook himself and spoke. “Maybe he spotted us together going up the stairs. His jealousy became a rage.”

  “He refused to marry her.” She was trying to remain calm, to act as Isidore’s anchor, but a hint of the same fury and contempt that marked his face edged her voice. “He had no right to jealousy. What other option did he leave her but to wed immediately?”

  The question required no answer. He didn’t give one.

  “Maybe she listened to me. Maybe she confronted him and said she wouldn’t go. Maybe she insulted him. Laughed in his face. Ridiculed him. She enjoyed stormy scenes. I don’t know.” He pulled his hand away to scrub violently at his face. He had paled. “I was a beast to her. The last thing she heard from me I shouted in anger.”

  She couldn’t let him speak so. “A beast? How can you think it? You would have married her knowing … ” Her heart clutched as she considered the enormity of it. He would have claimed her child as his own. If she had borne a son … She stared at him. “You would have claimed another man’s son as your heir.”

  “Her son,” he said. “Her son would have been my heir.” He laughed. “The end of the Blackwood line. I relished the idea.”

  It couldn’t be that simple. He was stubborn, refusing to acknowledge the sacrifice. She wasn’t fooled. She kept her eyes on him. “Not many men would do such a thing.”

  “I don’t deserve that look,” he said gruffly. “I’m not a hero in this. She used to call me her black knight. But she was the knight. I owed her, not the other way around.” He took a breath, as though debating whether or not to continue. “I betrayed her once, out of cowardice.” He said this last almost defiantly, glaring. Admire me now. I dare you. She would take that dare, and gladly.

  She settled back against his shoulder. “Tell me.”

  “You know that I lived near the Tromblys as a child?”

  “Yes.” She smiled faintly. “Louisa told me she’d known you since you were a boy.”

  “My father did not approve of the friendship.” His voice was eerily flat. She felt a cold lump forming in her stomach.

  “What objection could he have?” she murmured. She heard the sneer in his reply.

  “Objection? The Trombly fortune was made in living memory. Michael is a businessman. Louisa is Irish on her mother’s side. My father could marshal any number of objections. The main one was that I was happy when I was with them.”

  She pressed her cheek harder against his chest, moved her body even closer to his, knowing no other way to give comfort. His arm came around her.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “It was Christmas Eve. Holidays were … gruesome with my father. I felt my loneliness even more keenly. He never allowed me a fire in my room. He thought I should be impervious to cold, to damp, to everything, really. ‘Blackwoods do not bend,’ he’d say. That December was frigid. I climbed out of my window and ran through the woods to Trombly House. I thought I could creep back after dark, that he wouldn’t notice I was gone. I was playing snapdragon with the girls when he came for me. I remember it so clearly. We were in the darkened parlor, flinging the flaming raisins into our mouths. Arabella was terrible at it. She’d start yelling before her fingers reached the bowl. The one time she grabbed a raisin she shrieked and threw it, not toward her own mouth, but away. The raisin lodged in Phillipa’s hair. We were all screaming, laughing until the tears rolled down our cheeks. At that moment, I heard my father in the hall. He rarely left our property, and nothing but wrath could have induced him to set foot in that house. The parlor door opened. The cold air clung to my father’s cloak. He hadn’t bothered to remove it. In his mind, the Tromblys were beneath contempt. Louisa stood shrinking beside him. What could she do? She had no claim to me. And he was terrifying. I remember looking at the last blue flame winking in the bowl as the brandy burnt off and then at my father’s face. His eyes were bright as those blue flames but so cold, so very cold. He could turn your blood to ice.”

  Goose bumps had risen on her skin as he spoke. She couldn’t suppress a shiver. He lifted the sheet and tucked it around her shoulder, smoothing it down beneath her chin. This gentle gesture was so at odds with his grim monotone.

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Eleven.” His voice was tightening. “Phillipa was only seven. But she tugged at my arm. She whispered to me. She said I didn’t have to go with him. She said her father would protect me. I rose anyway, but she was quicker than I was. She was at the doorway in an instant. No one ever stood up to my father. It was unthinkable. But she put her tiny body between us, and she looked right into his face. ‘Isidore wants to stay with us,’ she said.”

  He fell silent, struggling with himself. Ella waited.

  “My father didn’t so much as glance at her. He fixed me with those eyes, and he asked me if it was true. Did I want to stay with them. And I said no. I left with him and without even looking at her. I didn’t have the courage to stand by a girl of seven. I hated him, but I was his creature. That night, he had a fire built in the parlor, and we played snapdragon. He made me kneel, and he held my hand in the flames.”

  She wanted to weep, but what good would her tears do for that little boy on his knees, suffering in that long-ago winter? The skin of his hands must have reddened, blistered, blackened. He must have screamed for mercy and hated himself for it all the more. She was mute.

  “She never mentioned that night to me.” His voice, so close to breaking, held. “But I never forgot. How brave she was for my sake. How I failed her.”

  “It’s easier to be brave when you’re loved.” She swallowed hard. “Phillipa was surrounded by love. You had no one.”

  “I had her after that,” he said. “And you’re right. It was easier.”

  In the silence that intervened, she listened to his heart, steady and strong. His life was precious to her. She wanted to make things easier for him, brighter, more joyful. But she wasn’t fashioned to bring happiness. Ah, but it was a cruel thing, their meeting. She wasn’t sorry, wouldn’t be sorry. But it was cruel, cruel, cruel.

  “Your mother … ” She didn’t know what she wanted to ask.

  “Died in childbirth along with the babe. I wasn’t six.”

  “But you remember her.”

  “I remember her,” he said. “She was dark-haired and gentle. And sad.”

  Of course. She would have to have been sad married to such a man. But she would have known happiness as well, in Isidore.

  She said: “The fact of y
our existence must have comforted her.”

  He breathed out heavily, almost a sigh. “She would come into the nursery and weep by the window. I would try to get her attention, but she wouldn’t look at me. It was as though she didn’t see me. Sometimes, if I clung to her long enough, she would touch my head and sing. Sometimes she would play for me.”

  Until my father smashed her violin. She was spinning now. It was too much to comprehend, the sorrow and the violence. How had Isidore survived? How could he reach out to another human with tenderness? As if he listened to her thoughts, his fingers slid through her hair, a soothing motion.

  “Louisa gave me a violin after my mother died so I could practice with Phillipa. I used to play in the woods and pretend my mother could hear me. One day … the groundskeeper told my father.”

  She made a strangled noise, her throat constricting. “He cut your ear.”

  “For my own good,” he said. “To keep me from womanly pursuits.”

  “What makes a man so vicious?” she whispered.

  “Tradition.” His fingers paused in their stroking. “It’s the Blackwood way. I saw the scars once on my father’s chest. Each the size of a farthing. I’ve thought often of how long you’d have to hold a cheroot against the skin to burn a mark so large … ” His fingers tightened, straining her hair at the roots. At her sharply indrawn breath, he relaxed his hand.

  “Christ,” he swore and lifted her off him. She knelt by his side, watching him, aching at the misery in his eyes.

  “I hurt people,” he said, with finality. “I am a Blackwood through and through.”

  “You’re a Blackwood.” She looked into his blue eyes, which must be so like his father’s. He was born of Blackwood blood and had suffered for it. She knew what it was like to suffer from an accident of birth. “You can decide what that means,” she said. “You don’t have to be the same kind of Blackwood. And you’re not.” She said it fiercely. “I know you. You’re … ” She stopped, gulped, shook her head wordlessly. Tears threatened to fall.