by Sophia James
Guy Bernard. Her husband, a brute and a bully. He had seen that himself first-hand, for when she had allowed the thin silk of her bodice to fall away from her shoulders into bareness, he’d noticed other bruises there. Marks of passion or of violence?
She was thin but rounded and the sensuality that he’d seen in her as a girl had only multiplied in womanhood. He shook his head and banished such a line of thought, glad for the shapeless habit that would not show any sign of his body’s response.
* * *
She went to him in the darkest hours of early morning because she heard him call out in some nightmare of the soul.
Pulling back the bed coverings, she slipped in beside him, wearing only her thin camisole. Light. Amorphous. Barely there. She was hot and wanting, her breath sliding across his face as her hands crept lower.
She felt him thick and warm and ready, his dreams translated into engorged flesh and heat as she positioned herself across him. When his eyes opened into wakefulness she saw shock, passion and anger before resistance fled.
Hers.
He was hers in the blink of an eye, filling her, deeper and tighter, the emptiness beaten back, all her shadows in the corner.
She did not want it to be gentle. She did not want a quiet, peaceful joining. She wanted the pain of lust driving them both, squeezing out memory, breathless with feeling. She sucked at the skin on his neck and knew she would mark him, bruise him. Her nails, short as they were, left gouges as she urged him on.
It was the only time she could ever lose herself, the only time she forgot all that was as she reached for rapture, until he turned and rose across her, pumping in, finding her centre in a hard and relentless power.
The muscles on his forearms were veined, his corded throat straining for his own release as hers suddenly beached upon them, wild and strong. She cried out and he covered the sound with his mouth, teeth at her lips as he finished himself.
Like a death.
Certain and for ever, the heart stopping before it made its way back into life.
Unwillingly.
Always the same.
She swiped away tears and got up, leaving him there in the night with the evidence of his desire running down the soft skin of her inner thighs, the smell of sex and oblivion on the air.
Celeste had exited the bed with as much haste as possible, leaving him lying there with his heart pounding and his breath hoarse and ragged.
‘Hell.’ The word slipped from him in a quiet liturgy of disbelief. What happens now, he thought, after this?
He could hear her dressing in the other room, replacing the armour that she had shed in his bed. He’d woken from a dream with her there above him and both worlds of desire had collided into the reality of their joining.
As it was meant to be, a small voice echoed inside him. As he had never felt it before, another voice added, and he turned on his side to look out into the night. Pure lust. Only the physical. He felt the driving force of his want still there, crouched in every fibre of his being. Her scent was there, too. Musky. Undeniable.
His discarded habit and her rosary lay on the chair beside him. A fallen servant of the Lord, lost in the thrall of the flesh. Even the bullet wound in his thigh had ceased to ache momentarily.
Was it only this once that Celeste meant to bed him? She had not uttered a word. That worried him. Sitting up, he leaned against the wall and pushed the sheet away, looking at his body just as she might have regarded it.
Had she enjoyed such lust?
She was pacing now, he could hear the footfalls as they wandered to and fro in the other room. Softening his breath, he sat very still, wishing morning would come and he could dress and they could thrash out what to do about...everything. The quiet turn of paper alerted him to the fact that she was reading the book Lian had given her.
A journal, he thought, for in the second he had held it he had seen the name of the edge on the spine.
August Fournier.
Her father’s thoughts. That would not be easy reading. August had been a man ill at peace with his world or with his place in it. He wished Celeste would wander in to talk with him, to discuss such ramblings. But she did not, the candle blown out after half an hour and the dark descending.
He made himself think about the morrow, the routes they might travel, the dangers they could encounter. Part of him wanted to turn east on exiting the city simply because it was the last direction anyone would look for him. But he had more contacts in the west and south and he knew he would need them. He also had a good deal of money now and Lian’s help would make the passage from Paris so much safer.
He wished they were already out of the city and away on the rural roads. It was easier to hide in the country than it ever would be in a town filled with soldiers. Easier to be alone with Celeste, too, but he pushed that consideration back.
A sniff alerted him to something not being quite right. Then another one came, muffled by cloth. She was crying. He hoped it was the book that had incited such strong emotion and not the regret of lying with him.
After a few moments, the sound stopped altogether and then there was only silence.
* * *
I am at my wits’ end to know what to do about Mary Elizabeth. I think she is mad and her mother knows this, too, for she watches her daughter like a hawk.
Last week she tried to kill us. She fed us meat that was laced with a poison and it was only after a few bites that the Dowager dashed away the plates so that they crashed upon the floor, tablecloth and all.
We were sick for days with a fever and Mary Elizabeth was locked in the West Wing and attended to by a series of physicians.
She tried to kill us again this morning on the rooftop of Langley...
Celeste closed the journal. She remembered this. Her mother shoving them hard from behind with a large piece of wood so they slipped down on to the icy tiles and slid a good ten yards before fetching up against a gutter post that protruded upwards. When she had looked back, her mama was gone and she and her papa had finally found purchase to crawl their way back to safety.
She’d visited Summer in the early afternoon of that same day, offering her body to the only true friend she had ever had, in gratitude and in shock. The white and blue garter she’d worn had been a symbol of all that she would forfeit in the gesture: marriage, domesticity, a future. She’d held on to him like a lifeline in a shifting sea and felt in such sacrifice the first stirrings of grace.
Long gone now, of course, such decency and mercy. She was everything these days that her mother had cursed her to be, half-dead and coldly detached. Broken save for this night in Summer’s arms.
That thought had her biting down on her bottom lip, gnawing at the shock of it. She’d begun to feel again in the deep thrust of his returned ardour, in the warmth of his skin and in the goodness of his soul. He’d leached out some of her coldness and replaced it with hope. Stupid, foolish, inane, nonsensical hope. The misguided desire for a second chance or another destiny that could never come to fruition for people like her.
When Summer had offered her marriage and the protection of his name, as they had both regained their breath after that first time in the barn at Langley, she’d laughed at him. She was tainted with the brush of her mother’s madness and not even marriage to Summer would save her from that. It could never have worked between them—demons and angels, after all, were a poor mix.
She’d wished her mother dead then and had returned to the house to find that she had killed herself, the windows being cloaked with dark fabric and the faces of the servants sombre.
She and her father had left Langley early the following morning, running for the English coast and France with all the haste of travellers who had chaos snapping at their heels.
And now here she was again, dancing in the arms of passion and trying to believe it could be more. Until the wedding ring had caught the light of the moon and slashed away any kind of a future.
The saint and the sinner.<
br />
There was a truth to the phrase that caught at her last vestige of honour and shattered it into pieces.
Lust required no invested emotion. She saw it merely as a physical process, a necessary action to soothe the mind and the body. Animals did it. Insects, too.
She shut the journal with a thud, wiped her eyes and lay down to sleep. No more. She must expect only the scraps of intimacy and be happy with it.
She was Brigitte Guerin, murderer, whore and thief, and a woman with the sort of past that meant she could never be more than a ghost on the very edge of a proper society.
Grinding her teeth together, she prayed that she would not dream tonight of the blood of her father’s death or of her own shame, so when the touch of Summer Shayborne came into her mind she smiled and relaxed into the warmth of memory. Take this little comfort, she thought, and savour it. Take tonight as a gift, the last joy of intimacy before she walked into the empty wasteland of her future.
Chapter Five
Shay looked through the window, the old glass distorted into waves of blurriness, like his world, not quite real somehow. Until last night, like an onion peeled back layer by layer, he and Celeste seemed to go back to the centre, to the start, exposing the past bit by bit.
He didn’t know what came next and this unsettled him, for things were changing in a way he could not quite keep up with and that was a feeling he had seldom experienced.
Footsteps made him turn and Celeste stood there, wiping her nose with the back of her hand as she sniffed, the urchin completely replacing the woman who had come to his bed in the dark hours of the morning, sultry and sensual, her breasts heavy and her lips swollen. There was dirt on her cheeks.
‘You rise early, Major.’
Not a question but a statement and said as she walked into the dining room. She carried the bag that Madam Caroline Debussy had given her across her shoulder before unlinking the straps and handing it over to him.
‘These are your tools of the trade. The sneaky, clever and unexpected ordinary weapons. I hope for your sake that they can be as effective as a gun.’
Taking the offered bag, he wondered where her firearm was for she had not placed it into the hidey-hole in the apartment in Paris even after promising that she would do so. It was probably in the left-hand pocket of her jacket. Quickly gathered, eminently accessible. But if she was searched, the weapon would be found, and he swore under his breath.
The habits of a spy were pressed into one’s soul like a brand. Hers had been a violent apprenticeship and so she’d brought the things she expected to defend herself with. A blade and a bullet.
He turned to gaze again through the window, watching those who passed by the front step and sifting through threat. He knew he should say something about last night, but he could not find the right words and reasoned silence might be better.
‘Where’s your friend?’ Her stress on the word friend was cold.
‘He didn’t come. We won’t wait.’
A frown passed across her eyes.
‘He’s a dangerous man, you know. He’s tied to those who sweep through the city for any sign of dissension and snuffs it out without asking questions. There are things said of Aurelian de la Tomber that are not flattering.’
‘He works for me sometimes.’
As church bells rang close, counting out the hour, Shay wondered why he might have told her that.
‘And you trust him?’
‘With my life.’
‘Well, it might come to exactly that, Major. There’s still a good mile or two until we get to the Seine and if he means to betray you, there is plenty of opportunity for him to do so. Clarke’s henchmen from the Ministry of War could be waiting this very second right outside our door.’
She turned to the table and helped herself to a ripe fig, splitting it open. He could see the blush of blood on her cheeks even at this distance. He wished he could not.
‘If they take me, Celeste, I want you to run. I will stop them following you.’
‘Run like a coward?’ She threw this back at him and he smiled because he could not imagine she could ever be such a thing.
‘It is worth it for the protection of your life,’ he countered after a few seconds. ‘I promised your grandmother that if I ever met you on my travels, I would keep you safe.’
‘Safe from what, Major. Myself? My grandmother was not inclined to find favour in anything that I did and in the end I gave up trying.’
‘She might be surprised by your strength now if you went home.’
‘My strength to kill and cheat and lie?’
‘I was thinking more of the strength to survive no matter what the world throws at you.’
‘As if you know what life has thrown at me, Major. As if you have even the smallest idea of what my life was like after England.’ Now only fury marked her face. ‘Susan Joyce Faulkner would hate me a thousand times more now than she did then and she would be right to.’
‘The capitulation of the damned?’
She simply looked at him, flinted anger in the vivid blue of her irises.
‘I had not taken you for a quitter, Celeste. I thought you might fight for a better life, for a finer future.’
‘Not with her. Not like that. Not like before.’
‘Then where.’
She threw up her hands. ‘Anywhere but England. Anywhere away from fear.’
‘Make this the first step, then. Give me your gun.’
‘No.’
‘No one will be able to save you if you are searched. Not even me. There is no reason for a humble leather worker to hold such a weapon and that is where the danger lies.’
She swallowed, her tongue wetting her dry lips, and he looked away as his body tightened. ‘There’d be nothing left to fight with if they take us.’
‘Save wisdom, I think. And luck.’
‘Poor counterparts to a well-aimed bullet, Major.’
‘There is an army behind every soldier. Shoot one and they will all be after us.’
‘They already are.’
‘But not with such a personal vengeance. Escape depends on good contingency planning and a well-prepared charade. Not reactive force.’
He knew the second she gave in as she reached into her pocket and handed him the pistol. ‘Your protection had better be as robust as it is rumoured to be, Major Shayborne.’
‘I promise I will give my life to keep you safe, Miss Fournier, and that your enemies will have to walk across my dead body to get to you.’
He took the pistol in one hand and squeezed her fingers with the other, pleased as the warmth of them momentarily curled about his own. It was odd to be on such formal terms after what they had shared this night.
* * *
She wanted to hold on. She wanted to press into him and tell him of all that had happened to her. But she couldn’t. Not now. Not ever.
The small, quick connection was as much as she might hope for out here in the no man’s land of war, where even a simple mistake could see them both dead.
He looked tired this morning, the scratches she had left on his neck red and angry when he turned to deposit the gun in a box on the table. She hoped they hurt almost as much as she prayed that they didn’t.
She wanted to believe that he might drag her through the hundreds of miles of enemy territory to safety without betraying her. The face of Caroline Debussy came to mind and she shook it away, for once the woman had been like a mother to her before she knew the truth of her father’s murder. There was no faith left in anything.
‘We should go.’ She walked away and felt him follow behind her, his silence welcome.
Outside it was warm, the promise of greater heat carried on the wind that blew in from the south. She was wearing too many clothes and the jacket without the weight of her gun in the pocket felt peculiar.
Summer was dressed simply in his tunic, scapular and cowl, the hood pulled back so his face was on show. Watching him, Celeste saw the finesse and the
solidness that held him apart from other men. The persona of a Catholic priest was in the kind lilt of his face and in the soft use of his hands, a religious man who walked as though the world was still new and beautiful and there were angels and not beggars on each side of him.
The children of the streets were numerous this morning and his kind face brought them to his side. There was no sign of the soldier, no hint of a man of war and espionage.
He humbly held out the last of the bread he’d taken from his bag and shared it whilst reciting a verse from the Bible.
‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’
She could hear the accent of the western mountains in his French today. His feet were bare and his nails were dirty. The stubble of two days lay upon his jaw and upper lip, catching all the colours of light.
But Summerley Shayborne was so much more than he seemed. There was a solidity about him and an innate goodness.
A group of soldiers further up had the urchins scattering. ‘May God go with you,’ he called after them, his hands held together now under his chin in the sign of prayer as the men approached. ‘And with you, too, brave sirs. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.’
He was rustling through his bag now, bringing out the faded portrait of her father’s ancestor. ‘In the name of the patron saint of St Barbara, I invoke success and protection so that your journey will be a kind one and a safe one and you will return home unscathed into the heart of your families.’
‘We thank you, Father.’ The first soldier said this, his smile wide and genuine. Each man bristled with weaponry which made a strange contrast to the homespun plainness of Shayborne’s priestly persona, yet he held them in the palm of his hand as he blessed them with charity, compassion and love. And then they passed, hailing a man further on, the street before them empty once again of threat.
‘Do you ever doubt yourself?’ Celeste’s voice shook because the fright was still there embedded in her skin, ice cold with fear. She seldom allowed herself to come so close to any soldiers.
