"My pleasure, my lord," she said, dipping into a deep curtsy.
"Was that the one you practiced to deliver to the queen on your presentation, Caroline?" he asked as he led her onto the floor, from which the Turkish carpet had been rolled back. "Your forehead was in danger of scraping the floor."
She laughed. "It would have been a shame to practice such a curtsy for two full hours daily for six months and use it only once on the queen," she said.
She danced with energy and grace, smiling at him and at the other partners with whom she sometimes had to execute certain measures of the dance. He watched her the whole while, not even noticing his own temporary partners, and found it difficult to imagine that he could have missed her throughout the Season. Why had his eyes not been drawn to her as to a magnet? She was altogether more lovely than any other lady in the room. More lovely than any other lady he had known.
He frowned at the thought.
"Oh, this is marvelous," she said breathlessly as he twirled her down the set. "You don't expect me to appear bored, do you, Alistair, this not being a formal affair?"
"If you dare to look bored," he said, "I shall twirl you at double speed and then let go of you so that you spin off into space?"
She laughed.
He had always thought of young virtuous women as dull, humorless, timid, unexciting—the list could go on. But then he had not met Caroline Astor until last night.
The country dance was followed by a sedate waltz. He resisted the urge to hold his partner slightly closer than was considered proper. After all, most of the eyes in the room were probably on them—on Caroline, a member of the family, in the clutches of a man they must feel Colin should not have invited.
"Why have I never noticed you?" he asked her.
"Because you never notice virtuous women," she said. "Because you could not take me to bed without marrying me first."
"Could I have this afternoon?" he asked her, his voice low.
Her eyes slipped to his neckcloth. "You dumped me in the water instead," she said.
"But if I had not, Caroline?"
She looked up into his eyes again. "It is pointless to speculate on what might have been," she said. "The past is the one thing we can never change. But I am not sure that I can be described as virtuous any longer. I have never come even close to behaving like that before."
"I will marry you, then, and redeem your reputation," he said. He did not know quite why he kept saying such potentially dangerous things. One of these times she was going to take him at his word.
She smiled fleetingly.
"Come outside with me after this dance," he said. "We will see what the gardens look like in the moonlight. Shall we?"
"But of course," she said. "I have a wager to win." She peeped up at him from beneath her lashes with deliberate provocation and he grinned back at her.
"How are you going to do it?" he asked. "Do you have a plan?"
But she merely smiled.
It was a subtle plan. She strolled quietly along the terrace with him, first with her arm through his, then with her hand in his, her shoulder touching his arm, and finally with her arm about his waist as his came about her shoulders. By that time they had rounded one end of the house and stepped into a type of orchard.
Very subtle. The moonlight and the branches above their heads made changing patterns of light and shade over her face and dress and she lifted her face. Her eyes were closed, he saw when he looked down at her. She broke the silence first.
"Sometimes," she said, "one feels all one's smallness and insignificance in comparison with the vastness of the universe. And yet how wonderful it is to exist amidst such beauty. How privileged we are. Don't you feel it too, Alistair?"
"Yes." He could not talk on such topics. He had not thought a great deal about the miracle of life and the wonder of the fact that he had one to live. It was a new idea to him. He was wasting his one most precious gift, he thought.
"I am glad we were made to need others," she said. "Would it not be frustrating to see and feel beauty and have no one with whom to share it? I think we would feel loneliness and even terror instead of wonder."
"Yes," he said. He was very aware of her arm about his waist, his about her shoulders. Holding each other against loneliness and terror. It was a novel idea. He had never thought of needing other people, only of using them. He had never thought of other people needing him. Could anyone ever need him? Was he that important? That privileged?
She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. "I am glad it has been you with me today, Alistair," she said. "I am glad it is you out here with me tonight. But I am sorry." She lifted her head. "I said it would be romantic, did I not? I promised to make you fall in love with me. But all I can do is feel warm and cozy with you. All I can do is babble on about the universe and our human need for others. I have no experience in arousing romantic feelings. You asked if I had a plan. No, I have none. We had better go inside before our prolonged absence is noted."
The soft wonder had gone from her voice. She sounded sad suddenly, and he knew it was his apparent lack of response that had saddened her. He had made her feel that after all she was alone. But how could he express thoughts that were so new to him that he knew no words in which to frame them?
He tightened his hold on her shoulders and turned her in against him, wrapping his free arm about her waist. She turned her head to rest one cheek against his neckcloth. He held her for a long time, perhaps several minutes, without either talking to her or kissing her. He did not want to kiss her. He did not want to make love to her. There was a nameless and quite unidentifiable yearning in him that took the place of the sexual desire he might have expected to feel.
For some reason that he could in no way fathom he wanted to cry. He swallowed hard several times. She was soft and warm. A buffer against loneliness. A bundle of gaiety and dreaminess, of wisdom and innocence. There was something in her that he wanted, that he yearned for. Something in addition to her woman's body.
"Alistair." She lifted her face to him finally and touched her fingertips to one of his cheeks.
He took her hand in his and kissed the palm. "Why did you say my name?" he asked her.
"Alistair?" she said, laughing softly. "It is your name, is it not?"
"Lyndon," he said. "Last night. You called me Lyndon. Before you woke fully."
She stared up at him, her expression turning quite blank. "I did not," she whispered.
"Yes," he said, "you did. When I first kissed you. Before there was light. Before you could possibly have known who I was. You called me Lyndon."
She shook her head slowly and he was sorry suddenly that he had asked. Sorry that he had not kept that particular memory to himself.
And then she pushed violently away from him, gathered up her skirt, and fled back the way they had come.
"Caroline," he called and took a few steps after her.
But she only increased her pace, if possible. He stopped. For some reason he had embarrassed her dreadfully. She had been dreaming of him? She had thought the kiss part of a dream, and she had identified him as her dream lover? When he was a stranger to her? A stranger she had seen only during the Season even though he had not seen her.
Damnation, he thought, clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides.
As he expected, she was not in the drawing room when he returned there and did not reappear for the rest of the evening.
It was half an hour before noon when she had met him the day before. It was a little earlier than that when she came downstairs now, pale from a night of little sleep, nervous at having to carry through this encounter, wishing that she could be anywhere else on earth. For starters, she could die of mortification. She had spoken his name aloud! If only she could have slept during the night, she would have had nightmares over that fact. But that was not the worst of it, of course. She was going to have to face him this morning and bring their wager to its conclusion. And then what?
The
rest of her life looked frighteningly blank. Not that it would be, of course. The remnants of good sense in her told her that this heightened emotion would not last forever or even for very long. Soon, or at least in the not too distant future, life would settle back into its routine and she would think of her marriage prospects again. But oh, that was no consolation now. Now it felt as if her life was to end within the next half hour.
If he had come, that was. If he had not hidden himself away somewhere—in the billiard room with some of the other gentlemen, for example. Or if he had not gone away, afraid that after all she would trap him into marriage.
He was in the hallway when she came down and looked as if he might have been pacing there for some time. Had she been able to look critically, she might have noticed that his own face showed signs of a certain sleeplessness too. He had not slept well, if at all, and he was not looking forward to the coming hour. It frankly terrified him. He was not an adventurous man, he had realized during the night. His life had been predictable for the last number of years. He liked it that way. He resented the fact that change was sometimes inevitable.
"Caroline." He smiled at her, bent over her hand, and kissed it. "Almost exactly on time. Shall we find somewhere private?" His heart was beating in his chest fit to burst through. How many hours had passed since he saw her last? Thirteen? Fourteen? It seemed more like a hundred.
"Yes," she said.
He led her outdoors and stood looking along the terrace, first one way and then the other, before leading her in the direction of the woods at some distance from the house. There appeared to be no walkers there today.
"Well," he said, "did your amazon sleep at the foot of your bed last night?"
"Yes," she said.
He did not attempt more conversation. They walked in silence, her arm through his, until they reached the shelter of the trees and he could release her arm in order to set his back against the trunk of a tree and fold his arms across his chest.
"The moment of truth," he said. "Do you want to go first, Caroline?"
She turned to look at him in some dismay and down to examine the backs of her hands, spread before her.
"Or would you rather that I went first?"
"No," she said quietly. "You have not won, Alistair. I am sorry. I enjoyed yesterday more than I can say. I learned to like you. And I learned that you are an attractive man, though I knew it already, and could make me desire you. I will not deny what must have been all too obvious to you on the beach. But that is all. I can feel no warmth of love. You have not won fifty pounds from me, you see." She looked up fleetingly and smiled briefly. "But then you need feel no obligation either."
He said nothing for a long while. But she had whispered his name. She had dreamed of him. She had noticed him even when he had not noticed her. And she had dreamed of him. She had desired him. But in her mind, desire and love were not the same thing. As indeed they were not.
Let us be done, she thought. Let him say something. She wanted to be back at the house. She wanted to be a stranger to him again. He was holding something out to her. A piece of paper. She looked at it.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A draft on my bank for fifty pounds," he said. His voice was very soft, but it did not have the seductive quality with which she was becoming familiar.
She looked up into his eyes. They looked steadily back at her.
"You have won it," he said.
She had won it? Her mind felt sluggish. "How?"
"You have made me love you," he said. "Take it. It is yours."
She raised her hand. He released his hold on the paper as she touched it. But she was not gripping it. It fluttered to the grass between them.
"No," she said, closing her eyes. "No, please. You promised not to lie."
"And so I did," he said. "Yesterday was the happiest day of my life, Caroline. Not only that. It changed my life. It made me realize that I have wasted thirty precious years out of a span of perhaps seventy if I am fortunate. It made me realize that I need more than myself and my own pleasure. And it made me realize that I would like more than anything to be needed. By one person. By the same person as I need. You."
"No," she said, looking at her hands again. "You are being gentlemanly. You still think you are obliged to marry me, and you think to persuade me this way. Don't be cruel."
Cruel? He felt a stabbing of hope. Cruel? "But there is no question of marriage," he said. "You do not love me, Caroline. And there has to be love on both sides before you will marry, does there not?"
She looked up at him, her eyes luminous with misery and something else. "No one can change in a single day," she said. "I would be a fool."
Hope grew. If so much had not hung on the words they would exchange over the next few minutes, he would have grinned at her and teased her and forced her to tell him that she had lied. But he was too afraid for the fragility of his own heart to believe what his mind told him was the truth.
"No," he said. "It would take us both longer than a day, Caroline. It would take me many days, I daresay, to realize the wonder of the exchange I had made— numberless women in exchange for you. And it would take you many days, perhaps even a lifetime, to come to trust me and believe that it could happen. But we will never know, will we, if those changes would have been possible. Perhaps it is just as well. The familiar is safer and perhaps cozier than the unknown."
He watched her lower her arms to her sides and rub her palms against her dress, as if they were damp. Her eyes were on the ground at her feet. And then she stooped down suddenly, picked up his bank draft, and held it out to him, her eyes on the paper.
"It is yours," he said.
She shook her head and bit her upper lip. "No," she said. "I did not bring fifty pounds to give to you. If we both won or if we both lost, you said, we would be even. We are even."
"Caroline?" he said, taking the paper from her hand, folding it, and putting it away in his pocket. He found himself holding his breath.
"I lied," she said. "I am no gentleman, am I?"
He ran the knuckles of one hand lightly down her cheek and then set the hand beneath her chin to raise her face.
"I lied," she said again more firmly, a note of defiance in her voice, though her eyes were suspiciously bright. "Now tell me that you did too. Alistair." Her eyes grew anxious. "Don't tell me that you lied too. Please?"
"Why did you say my name?" He was looking at her mouth.
"Because I conceived a deep infatuation for you the first time I saw you," she said. "Because I thought I was dreaming. And I dreamed that it was you."
"Infatuation?" he said.
"I called it love," she said, "until yesterday. Now I know that it was not. Only infatuation. I did not love you until yesterday."
He set his hands on her shoulders. "What are we going to do?" he asked.
"I don't know." She patted her hands against his chest.
"I want to build sand castles with you again," he said, "and swim with you and talk and laugh with you. I want to love you. And make love to you. I want to have children with you."
She raised her eyes to his. "Oh," she said.
"I'm glad you agree." He smiled down at her and touched his forehead briefly to hers. "Will you take a chance on marrying a rake, Caroline?"
"Yes," she said. "Alistair, I am dreadfully inexperienced. I will not know how to—"
He kissed her firmly on the mouth. "We will teach each other," he said. "We will go back to school, both of us, for the rest of our lives."
"Teach each other?" she said.
"I will teach you how to make love," he said, "and you will teach me to love. Agreed?"
She laughed shakily and relaxed her weight forward against him. "Agreed," she said. "But I think your classes are going to prove to be more exciting than mine."
He chuckled. "If you are that eager to start," he said, "we had better open this school of ours as soon as possible. I will talk with your brother. How does a special licen
se and your brother's home next week sound?"
"For a wedding day?" she said, her eyes widening.
"And a wedding night," he said.
"Oh," she said.
"You have a lovely way of pronouncing 'yes,' " he said, lowering his head to kiss her throat. "A week is an awfully long time to wait, my love."
"Mmm," she said, arching her body against his.
"If it were not for the amazon," he said, his hands coming up to cup and caress her breasts, "I might be tempted to try a few more nocturnal excursions."
"Mmm," she said.
"We will have to set her at the foot of someone else's bed next week," he said, sliding his hands over her waist and hips and around to cup her buttocks and draw her more snugly against the core of his own desire.
"Mmm," she said.
He set his mouth to hers again, opened it beneath his own, and thrust his tongue inside deeply, once, twice, before withdrawing it and drawing back his head an inch.
"Caroline," he said, smoothing one hand over her sun-warmed auburn hair, "it is not just this I want of you, you know. It is you. I have wanted bodies before. I have never wanted a person. I want you. I want to join my body to yours so that we will be closer than close, so that we will share everything there is to be shared. I am on fire for you, as you can feel. But for you, not just for the lovely body that houses you."
She smiled slowly at him. "Joining your body to mine," she said. "Do you know how the very thought turns me weak at the knees, Alistair? Don't expect a shy bride. I am afraid I will be shockingly eager. And the rest of what you said too. Oh, that turns me weak all over. That is how love differs from merely being in love, does it not? Wanting the other's body and everything else too, right through to the soul."
"Speaking of bodies." He grinned at her.
"Mmm, yes," she said, wrapping her arms about his neck and smiling eagerly at him. "What was it you were saying, Alistair?"
"This, I believe," he said, opening his mouth over hers again.
From the Rakes and Rouges Page 6
