by Sophia James
‘Do you think there is a reason behind everything that happens?’
He saw a half-smile. ‘I used to.’
‘What changed?’
‘Life, I think. Hardship. Death. Now I think it’s all random and if you are unlucky enough to be in the place where the world falls in on you, then that’s just how it is.’
‘Fatalistic?’
‘Realistic.’
She said this without even a whisper of doubt.
‘I remember you told me once that you wanted to be a writer.’
She breathed out and stood, moving towards the window and looking across the city rooftops.
‘You are probably the only person in the world who knows this about me.’
‘I kept the story you wrote. The one you gifted me for my eighteenth birthday.’
‘A tale of two sisters. One good and one evil. I used to imagine myself as the commendable sister, the one whose life ran along the path of righteousness, but now...’ She stopped and placed her palm on the glass. When she took it off, the frosted warmth of skin left a mark into which she wrote her initials. C.V.F. Celeste Victoria Fournier. Another thing he remembered about her, the two sides of her heritage.
‘I panicked today. I have never done that before and it worries me, because if it happens again it will be too dangerous for the both of us and I would not want...’
He stood and took her hand and the same sense of shock he had felt last night seared through him again.
‘The dangers are there anyway, Celeste, crouching and close, no matter what we try to do to lessen them.’
She was soft and unresisting as he drew her in, the smell of her familiar as he found her upturned mouth and claimed the warmth. Elemental and uncomplicated. Everything was peripheral and far away save for the longing welling up inside.
Slanting the kiss, he came in harder, demanding things she had not surrendered yesterday, the breath of her mixing with his own, a woman who was an enigma and a chameleon.
It was not love he could call on after all these years of separation, he understood that, but what was left was enough.
‘Lie with me, Celeste. Please.’ Whispered under his breath, the saying of it caressed the skin at her throat.
She did not pull away, but neither did she help him. Today she was compliant, with a quiet sense of consent. He stripped off her jacket and it tumbled to the ground, leaving the wispy lawn in its place, the darker tones of her areolas easily seen through the loose weave of the fabric. His mouth closed over the left one, wetting the cloth, feeling his way as her head tipped back, the veins in her throat almost transparent under her pale skin.
One finger came up to measure the beat, the rhythm tripping fast along the slender and fragile column, though bruising was also visible there. He shook the reality of it away and concentrated instead upon the demands of his body.
He’d always been so very careful and correct, but now he was neither. This was undeniable, the roar of something in his blood that he hadn’t felt there before, unguarded and heedless.
He wanted to be inside, in her centre, where they could be joined under another law, a different edict that negated all he had thought proper. The craving in him burnt caution into ashes, argument into acquiescence, and he stripped the bodice from her, firm breasts in the moonlight waiting to be taken.
It was he who did the work tonight, he who covered each nipple and sucked the sweetness from it. He wasn’t gentle or tender or quiet, the need in him urging her response, and when he felt her fingers lift his shirt and scrape across the bare flesh on his back, he simply lifted her and took her to bed.
She did lay there, looking up, the colour in her eyes paled by darkness and moonlight, her hair ragged hanks of mismatched lengths, her lips full and ripe.
He had his trousers and boots off and then he tended to hers, the ties knotted fast. Reaching for his knife by the bedside table, he sliced through the tangle, releasing cloth, finding flesh beneath that was hot and ready, one finger slipping into her warmth before reaching deeper.
She did not glance away, but challenged him for more, her legs opening, the movement of their bodies the only thing audible in the silence of the night.
‘Lord,’ he muttered and closed his eyes, undone with passion. ‘Lord knows how I want you.’
Her hand came around him then, around the engorged flesh of his sex, claiming him as her triumph and directing him home.
He positioned himself at the entrance to her womanhood and plunged in.
* * *
Afterwards he didn’t speak as they lay there cocooned into silence. The great want had been replaced by pleasure, the tangle of her limbs arranged in all the lines of ardour.
He turned inwards to try to find comfort and normality again. He wished she might sleep so that he could slip off without explanation, but he knew she watched him. He could feel the scratches in his flesh where she had risen to his need and let him understand that her own were important, too.
This was no game of unequals.
He had never felt so formless. And neither had he wanted a woman so desperately straight away afterwards that his manhood rose unbidden, throbbing, and when she kneeled and took him in her mouth he leaned back and let her have her way. The groans he stifled with one hand, but he could not dampen the reaction of his body as he spilled himself upon her.
The spoils of war.
Then he lay down against her, wrapping his body around her own and they slept.
* * *
She woke to a netherworld, neither day nor night, the heat between them like glue. She could not move for one of his legs lay over her thighs, pinning her to the bed, the hand cupping her breast still in place even in sleep.
Mine, his body said, even in the midst of slumber. She shallowed her breath, remembering the feel of him in all the places he had touched with such tenderness.
They had a whole day to wait out before they could leave, twenty-four hours to attempt to interpret again what was between them. She moved slightly, just a small shimmer of flesh, understanding the power in such a gentle friction, becoming aware when Summer’s sleep changed to wakefulness and his big body rocked her own.
She was glad he was behind her and she could not see him, glad when he simply slipped into her wetness without words and took her slowly, the desperation of the night changed into a quiet and certain skill as he angled her hips and penetrated further. Deep and then deeper, she felt the ache of him building until all she knew was the blinding light of otherness, lost in time and space and self.
She closed her eyes and slept, anchored by flesh.
* * *
He lay there spent and disbelieving, the day lightening now into warmth, the sounds of the street muffled and the sun dancing on to dusty panes of cheap glass.
The sheets all about them lay in untidy mounds, crumpled with the weight and heat of their bodies. He was glad for the heavy key in the lock and the steel bar beneath it.
No one was getting in or out lest they wanted them to. They were prisoners of ardour and slaves to desire.
His fingers opened and found her centre, the warmth of her sucking him in, the beating pull of her sending him deeper. The other hand lay across her stomach so that he could feel himself inside her, joined together.
‘I can’t, again...’
He stopped her words with his mouth, taking her answer into his own and rolling across her, heavy with need. There was no other way.
And she knew it.
The ardour in him built and he grabbed her hands so that both arms were stretched upwards, secured against the bedhead.
‘Come to me, now.’ It was a command and as she rose towards him he took her mouth with his own, understanding exactly what such compliance had cost them both.
He didn’t roll away afterwards, but stayed there upon her, a heavy weight of masculine flesh, his fingers clenched around the curve of her bottom.
Chapter Six
It was getting lighter.
/>
He’d brought her water and food, and a clean wet cloth. Celeste wondered if she could ever get back to the woman she had been before entering this room.
She felt drugged by pleasure. She felt empowered and helpless, elated and ashamed.
She had not told him. She had said nothing in the dark watches of the night when he had whispered some of his secrets and she had remained so tight-mouthed about her own.
Summer was afraid for his brother. He was worried about the responsibility of a title. He wondered if he could fit in again to the tight strictures of English society.
Small concerns. She knew he had seen her scars. She had awoken at one time to feel the pads of his fingers running across the faded lines at her wrist.
‘We will leave as soon as it is dawn. There is a boat to take us across the river.’
‘The celebrations?’
‘Will buy us a little in the way of time.’
The coming of a new day meant their lovemaking would be consigned to the dark hours with survival their absolute priority.
She wanted the dawn to linger, to hold them in its embrace, to soothe doubt and allay fear. She wished time would stop now, this feeling of safety so final and complete. But true dawn crept in on quiet footfalls and touched all the hidden spaces of the room, and Summer rose to find them some breakfast.
When that was finished, she buttoned her new jacket to the neck and pulled on a hat that she had not seen before.
He was dressed as a gentleman of means today, his bearing a little bent and a greying wig placed across the short growth of his hair. He, too, wore a hat, an imposing specimen that was almost as fine as the ebony and silver cane he carried.
He so easily slipped in and out of personas, his voice carrying the waver of age as he spoke.
‘A carriage will collect us and remove us to the river. We are travelling down the Seine to Les Moulineaux to see my sister who has taken to her bed with an unexplained illness. She is not expected to make a recovery.’ Even the slight catch of worry was masterful as he lifted a small leather case and gave it to her. ‘You are the servant who will see to my luggage. It is as light as I can make it.’
The last remark was said quietly, his eyes soft with something that she could only interpret as worry. For her. Did he not know that the baskets of bread she often carried as the baker boy weighed ten times as much? It was a new experience to feel wrapped in his care and she found she liked it. It was a weakness, though, for such things could never last.
The carriage was substantial and well appointed. Inside there were small bottles of drink and crusted new baked rolls wrapped loose in calico. They touched nothing as the conveyance moved into the street and the driver called the horses on to a faster pace.
She had expected soldiers but they saw none, the way fast and largely empty. At the river, when the carriage stopped, she let go of the breath she hadn’t realised she was even holding because at least in the open there was room to escape.
Then they were on the boat and the ropes were heaved to, the current taking the weight of the small vessel and flinging it south on the Seine out of Paris.
‘We’ll disembark at the river before it turns north.’
‘And go west, maybe? The Americans at Nantes hold a great affinity for the English, despite being a French ally.’
‘There’s two problems I can see in that, Celeste. If we do somehow manage to avoid being blown out of the water by the British blockade standing out to sea, we will undoubtedly then be heading across the Atlantic to the Americas.’
‘It’s Spain, then?’
‘Well, we can’t go north, for odds are they’d think I’d head to England by the quickest route. It’s over a hundred miles to Le Havre or two hundred to Cherbourg. To get to the French–Spanish border is at least five hundred and once in Bayonne there is the problem of crossing the Pyrenees in an oncoming winter.’
‘A long way and dangerous?’
‘It will become safer the further we get from Paris. Time and distance have an effect of weakening the resolve of an enemy. But it is me they are chasing the hardest and if you feel you might do better alone...’
She shook her head. There was nothing between them save the past and that was fractured and difficult. Yet for the first time in a long while she felt she had found a place, even if only for a short while.
‘I won’t come back to England with you, but Spain might do.’
‘To live in?’
She shrugged, such vagueness a way of life. Make no plans. Set no times. Stay in the shadows. Lay low.
‘I have good contacts in Santander,’ he said.
She nodded and when he did not press her for more she was grateful. Everything about their relationship was strange and dislocated. But it was familiar, too, and it was this that pulled her back and made her want to stay.
There were weeks of travel before them, each day holding no certainty. In just three days they had nearly been killed, shot at, knifed and punched. They’d been tracked by experts and helped by other shadowy figures, always contending with the revolution’s atmosphere of lies and double dealing. It was hard to trust anyone in the underbelly of espionage.
Maybe Shayborne did not trust her either. That thought had her swallowing, for why should he? She wanted simply to fold herself in his arms and tell him that she would always keep him safe. But she didn’t, because how could he believe anything at all that she said? His friend Aurelian de la Tomber had taken the true measure of her. She had seen the dislike in his eyes.
She wished she could have gone back to the moments in the Langley barn again, become that young innocent girl who had laid her virginity out for Summer like a gift. She wished the circumstances of their tryst might have been different. She wished her mother hadn’t just tried to kill her and her papa hadn’t threatened to leave England altogether come the light of the morrow.
Thrown out.
Those other words echoed across the kinder ones. When she had finally returned to the house to find her mother was dead, her grandmother had exiled her father and called him every name under the sun, her own grief whipping out to include Celeste as well.
‘At least leave me Mary Elizabeth’s daughter so that I might try to reverse all the damage you have done to her.’
Damaged. Even then.
And here she was again, repeating exactly the same mistakes. Hoping for more.
‘Are you ready to disembark?’
She blinked into the light at the sound of his voice and was once again back in the moment.
‘There will be horses waiting and we will travel south tonight. The more miles we can cover the better. Tomorrow we shall each become someone else again.’
It was a busy wharf, but there were no soldiers anywhere. The ease of having transport made the transition from boat to land simple and within half an hour they were leaving the river behind them.
Celeste had the thought that she might never see this waterway again, but as the outline of the city against the distant horizon faded, she was not sad. Paris had been her father’s home, but it had never been her own. When they turned south it was like shedding another skin, like a cicada, the symbol of a new beginning. She felt immeasurably lighter.
* * *
Shay glanced at the time on his fob watch and calculated that they had at least five hours’ fast riding before they stopped. That should put them somewhere in the vicinity of Versailles, he thought, which was good because it was a town large enough to be invisible and there would be places to find a lodging. The identity cards they carried would suffice, but Lian had warned him that the checks were more rigorous now. Napoleon’s capacity to incite fear, he thought bitterly. Nobody he had ever talked with believed in the wisdom of the Emperor’s mission to strike towards the heart of Russia, particularly given winter in the northern lands was known to be uncompromisingly bitter.
Thoughts of the Battles of Narva and Poltava came to his mind, the failed campaigns of ancient defeats suffere
d in the snow. It felt like the beginning of the end, Napoleon’s demise hanging on poor choices and grand pretensions, and today he and Celeste had only just escaped the tail end of it. A crumbling dictatorship was always the most perilous, so many losers scrambling for purchase.
She looked exhausted, the dark rings under her eyes easily seen in such a flat light. But they could not afford to relax their guard, and if anyone had observed them closely today, then they might remember more detail tomorrow.
There was no logic or sense in war, but a thousand different possibilities that could be strung together at any time. Relax, and disaster would follow like it had in the north of Spain, as he and Guillermo had ridden through the olive groves, imagining they were safe.
* * *
Four and a half hours later, when they reached Versailles, Shay was more than relieved. It had been a long day after a long and sleepless night and the tavern on the edge of town seemed to suit their purpose exactly.
‘Just the one room?’ The proprietor was an elderly man and hard of hearing.
‘Yes, thank you. The boy can lie on the floor by the door.’
‘I’ll send up an extra blanket, then, sir, with your food.’
The chamber was small and the bed was, too, a single cot with two grey blankets and two pillows stacked at its foot.
* * *
Locking the door, Summer motioned for her to sit, though the movements required to accomplish even such a simple task seemed onerous and difficult. Her bottom stung, her thighs were chafed and every muscle at the back of her neck felt hard and tight.
Celeste prayed to God that they would not be disturbed tonight and that she could just close her eyes and shut out the world until the dawn.
‘Here. Have this.’ Summer passed her his water canister and she drank from it, the cool liquid making her head clear a little.
‘The food will be here soon.’
