At last the smoke drifting in a gray pall from the General Quitman’s smokestacks turned black and was shot with sparks. The deckhands gathered at the gangplank, ready to hoist it aboard.
“Well, ladies,” Michel said with a whimsical smile and a brief gesture toward the vessel, “Shall we?”
“I expect we had better,” Deborah said, “before Renold decides we have deserted him.”
“Permit me, then.” Michel offered an arm to Renold’s half-sister. As she took it, he extended his other elbow toward Angelica.
She wanted to accept Michel’s laughing escort, to make some gay quip and march up the gangplank with the others. She wanted to be sensible and brave.
It wasn’t possible. She just couldn’t do it.
Her knees felt as if they might give way if she took a single step. Her hands were shaking and her stomach uneasy. She issued firm mental orders to herself to move, to behave, to stop acting like a senseless ninny. Her body paid no attention.
“Angelica, what’s the matter?” Deborah said with a look of sharp concern.
“I — I can’t go,” she whispered, her voice jerking in the middle. “All I can think of is the last time, the explosion. I don’t know why I feel like this, I wish I didn’t. I wish—”
Deborah, her eyes dark with sympathy, broke in. “Oh, I should have realized! I’m so sorry, chère; I wasn’t thinking. Would it help, do you suppose, if I held your hand?”
Angelica gave a quick shake of her head that turned into a shudder. “Nothing will help. No. I can’t do it. I really can’t.”
“But we can’t leave you here,” Deborah said with a worried frown toward the steamboat where the deckhands were untying the gangplank ropes. “Everything is ready; it’s too late to take our things off.” Suddenly her voice changed, becoming silvery with relief. “Oh, good. Here is Renold.”
“I hesitate to interrupt the party,” he said, “but it’s time to go. River pilots wait for no man, or woman, when the mood is on them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Deborah said with a sharp look at her brother’s flushed face. “Angelica is frightened, as anyone would be after such a harrowing accident. Tending to your wife will be much more useful at the moment than chiding us as if we were children.”
“When did you become her protector, chère?” Renold said with a crooked smile. “Never mind, I expect she has need.” He turned from his sister toward Angelica. “Do you?”
“No,” she answered, hardly knowing to what she replied. “Please, couldn’t we go back to the townhouse? The pilot will wait for you to unload our things.”
“Your faith in my influence is touching, but misplaced,” he said, his eyes keen on her face. “What is this? Perhaps a sudden premonition of disaster? Or have you suddenly realized that we will be duplicating the circumstances, incendiary as they might have been, of our first meeting?”
“Don’t!” she cried, her nerves rasped by the mockery in his voice with its gently slurred consonants. “I just don’t want to go!”
His voice soft, he said, “Not even if I ask it? Or can it be because I ask it?”
“It has nothing to do with you or the way we met,” she said, the words tumbling out as if shaken from her by her shuddering. “The thought of being shut up inside, of steaming away upriver, makes me feel sick. I think — I think I’ll die if I have to endure it.”
“Overemotional,” he said, “and highly unlikely.” He took a step toward her with purpose in it, and the hint of a threat.
Estelle stepped forward then, a deep frown between her dark eyes. “Maître, if you will permit, perhaps I could give her a calming draught?”
“No time,” he said, his gaze so forbidding the housekeeper blinked. With a panther’s grace, he moved closer to Angelica.
“You have to believe me,” she cried, panic and tears rising in her eyes as she backed away from him. “I can’t do it!”
“You must,” he said, “because the penalty for going back is the same as for going forward. Caught between two devils, which do you choose?”
She knew the answer, but that did not mean acceptance. A sharp denial rose in her throat, but it was too late.
“The devil you know,” he said, his voice soft and his eyes a bright, daring green. Immediately, he swooped upon her and caught her high in his arms.
Her scream was thin, instantly extinguished by her own disbelieving horror. Rigid with shock and dread, she sank her fingers into his coat, snagging a wrenching hold on his lapel. She pressed her forehead against the hard line of his jaw and squeezed her eyes shut so tightly she felt the prickle of her own long lashes against her eyelids.
The gangplank swayed under them, the deck seemed to dance and swing around them. The main cabin was cavernous and filled with people, all exclaiming, whispering. The iron hold of Renold’s arms was painfully tight, yet he was her only security in a formless world of terror. Her breath was rough-edged, tearing in her chest, sawing at her throat. The shivering that wrenched through her in violent waves clattered her teeth together so that she could taste blood where she had bitten her tongue.
Hide, she wanted to hide, needed darkness and oblivion, and something, anything, to stop the pain of betrayal. She had thought Renold of all people must understand. He had been there. He had known, had felt the fire. He was part and parcel of her nightmare, yet her refuge from it. How could he push her back into it and hold her there with his hard arms?
The slam of the stateroom door was muffled and far away, yet it reverberated through her mind. The strides he took to reach the bed were uneven, almost staggering. She felt the soft mattress come up to meet her back. Crying, she twisted away, but he landed beside her in a hard jounce of the bed ropes.
“Don’t, don’t,” he said in a low supplication as he reached to drag her close. “I didn’t know, was too busy to see. God, I — I am as drunk as a politico and only a step away from comatose. Drive and necessity blinded me, but are no excuse. Another time, any other time, I would have known, seen. Curse me, hit me, but don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
His remorse pierced her despair, sundered her self-absorption. She was not the only one in pain, not the only one lost in a fog of confusion. And if he was less than himself, then for whose sake had he drunk the rotgut whiskey that made him so?
The resistance left her muscles. With a small, convulsive movement, she flung herself against him, offering comfort as well as taking it.
His hands upon her were gentle; he caught her closer. Their faces touched so that she felt the faint scrape of his beard stubble against her cheek.
The steam engine rumbled, began to hiss and thump into movement. With an inarticulate murmur in her throat and her eyes tightly closed, she burrowed nearer Renold’s hard, male form. Her lips brushed his chin.
Awareness did not come in an instant, but stole in upon Angelica like the creep of the morning sun through an open window. Her lashes quivered. Stillness and heat suffused her from head to slippered heels. As Renold shifted, getting an arm under him for leverage, she did not draw away. When his lips touched hers, she drew in a deep breath, but remained quiescent, unresisting.
He smelted of soap from the quick bath he had managed and starch from his fresh linen, tasted of the cloves he had chewed to remove the alcohol’s vile flavor. Warm, his mouth was warm and silken smooth. There was passion and competence in his kiss and a yearning that went beyond the moment. Against her thigh she felt the hard ridge of his arousal, and an odd pleasure shifted through her that she could stir him to it.
What would it be like to be his wife indeed?
It was not the first time the thought had fluttered through her mind, but it was the only time she did not immediately turn away from it. Embarrassment, doubt, and fear had stopped her before. Now, they hardly seemed to matter beside the urging of the moment.
To be with him always, to be wrapped in his concern, to be cherished and kept safe — what more could she ask? If there were children, she would
have someone to hold and to love, someone to love her unconditionally and forever.
It was not so different, really, from the marriage her father had planned for her. Renold might have chosen to keep her with him without her consent, but she could also choose him now, couldn’t she? One thing did not prevent the other.
And if she must be initiated into the rites of love, then she might well be in better hands with Renold than she would have been with Laurence. Experience was not necessarily of tremendous value in a lover, but care and consideration, patience and delicacy of touch certainly were. Intelligence might also offer untold advantages.
There was only one way to find out. What, after all, did she have to lose?
Her virginity. Her heart.
Well, yes. But how much were these worth when everything else was gone? How much, when in Renold’s arms was the antidote for fear, the cure for loneliness?
A soft sound came from Renold’s throat, as though he had been touched by a hot iron, as she relaxed against him and allowed her lips to part. His reaction was instant. His tongue slipped, swirling, into her mouth.
It was a shocking yet heady invasion. She made a soft, startled sound, but did not draw back. Warmth licked somewhere deep inside her, leaping into vivid heat. She shivered with it and reveled in the boldness of her own acceptance. What she was doing seemed so right, so necessary.
He lifted his head to stare down at her. She could see herself reflected in the darkness of his eyes with their too wide pupils. There was soft desperation there also, and something that was almost like pain.
There was no threat, nothing to fear.
As her eyelids drifted closed, his mouth came down on hers once more. She met it, her own lips tingling, ready. As she felt the probe of his tongue, she allowed herself to be enticed to sinuous testing of its velvet and satin, to be drawn into delicate explorations of the rich inner textures and tastes of his mouth. The intimacy was absorbing, fascinating. She savored the incredible pleasure in silent wonder even as she felt the slow expansion of her heart in her chest.
He shifted, placing a hand at the narrow, corseted turn of her waist. An instant later, he slid his grasp higher to cup the soft mound of her breast. His thumb brushed across the nipple under its layers of thin cotton and silk.
A current of exquisite sensation flowed through Angelica, coalescing in the center of her body. She gasped at its deep internal pulsing. A soft sound, like a cross between a laugh and a groan, left him as he caught her soft breath of wonder in his mouth.
The grainy stroking of his tongue over hers made her senses spin. She slid her arm along his shoulders to his neck, holding tightly. As sensations uncurled, threatening to sweep her into their vortex, she threaded her fingers into his hair at the base of his neck, closing them on the crisp curls.
Once he had kissed her, and the night had erupted in scalding steam and fire. It seemed it might happen again, only this time from within, from between them, because of the terrible internal heat and pressure of their two bodies. She didn’t care. Murmuring incoherently, she pressed closer to him, closer to the danger.
“Angelica, my angel and sweet incubus, take care,” he said, bracing his forehead against hers as he spoke in husky despair. “My need for you is strong, and restraint isn’t possible. What I do now, I may not recall or believe in the morning. Stop me, or it will be too late.”
“Stop you? But why?” The words were so soft she was afraid he would not hear. She need not have worried.
“To prevent accusations of strength using unfair advantage over weakness. To preserve the status quo. To guarantee whatever vestige of freedom you might once have claimed, since I hold what I take, keep what is mine.”
“Take me then,” she whispered. “Keep me.” And the essential desire and wanton intent in her words sent such a rush of sensation through her that she caught her breath with it.
His laugh was surprised, but rich with something deeper than mere satisfaction. “Depend on me,” he said, and lowered his mouth to tug with his lips at the tight nipple under the material of her dress, making her shiver with the hot wetness of his mouth.
Disoriented, drowning in languor and unimagined urges, Angelica hardly noticed when the buttons of her dress parted from their holes. She felt his hands at her corset and the tapes of her petticoat, but his tongue was abrading hers, and she twined around it, enticing deeper penetration.
She inhaled with the release of the corset’s tight clasp, but also with the feel of his hands upon her, soothing the indentations left by whalebones, turning the sweeping movement into an endless caress. Stretching under his touch with the abandon of a kitten, she reached out to tug his coat open and push it from his shoulders. Nimble-fingered, she loosened his cravat and began to slip the studs of his shirt free.
He was still for suspended moments, then he moved to help her. Together, with myriad kisses and growing impatience, they stripped away petticoats, stockings, and slippers; trousers, underdrawers, and half-boots, seeking beneath the layers for bare skin. Splendidly naked, they lay enjoying the lack of confinement, and the view.
Angelica looked with unabashed curiosity at the width of his shoulders, the hard planes of his chest and the flat surface of his abdomen, before reaching to thread her fingertips through the fine dark hair that glistened across his breastbone.
He caught his breath on a low laugh and rolled to cover her with his body, allowing her to feel his weight by slow degrees. She took it, reveling in it, needing it with a deep hunger such as she had never dreamed. Her breasts swelled, tingling, to meet the rough surface of his chest. She let her eyes drift shut while she closed her hands upon his shoulders, smoothing their ridged hardness under the mottling of scars, taking their power deep inside her.
She felt so vulnerable with the heat and hardness of him pressing against her softness. At the same time, she had never felt stronger. The desire racing in her veins was a glory she could not contain, one she wanted to share. The need was overflowing inside her, filling her, mounting to her head with a passion so acute it might, if she were not careful, be mistaken for love.
Love. Did she love him? Was it possible?
Or was the physical act between a man and a woman designed to counterfeit that deeper emotion? Was it a sham to trap the unwary into being fruitful and multiplying the species?
Did it matter, while her heart was battering against her ribs and her mouth burned for his kiss? When his hands upon her were seeking the very center of her being and closing it in his gentle hold?
His fingers as he opened the tender folds were careful and not quite steady. His eyes, how dark they were, and shadowed. She could not see what he was doing, but she could feel it.
Yes, she could feel, and the force of it took her breath, caused her to writhe upon that slow and careful penetration while liquid delight overflowed like broached champagne.
He made a sound deep in his throat. Stopped. She felt the sting of his invasion even as he spoke.
“Tight, tender, repelling the impaling as only a virgin can. Why? Why was there no experimenting on some lonely road while driving in the country? No fumbling on the front veranda while your aunt read in the parlor? Why is it left to me?”
“I told you—”
“So you did. So you knew Eddington as a child. Even children are sometimes more forward.”
She could hardly think straight with his hand still in place. Her voice was strangled as she said, “I didn’t mean to disappoint you.”
“Disappoint? A paltry word. I am appalled, incensed. And with these, as fiercely glad as any doubting barbaric chieftain with a stolen bride. But it makes it more difficult.”
“Does it? But how?”
“You will hate me more.” The words were so soft they barely disturbed the air.
“No, why should I?” she said with something beseeching in her face.
“Some things are less forgivable,” he said, even as he pressed deeper, stretching the fragile, offendin
g membrane.
“You are making me afraid again.” She turned her head, unable to bear his despairing gaze or his detachment. She was shaking, so finely poised on the edge of some unknown hazard or pleasure that she could hardly bear it.
“It’s nothing to my terror,” he said.
It was true. There was a fine trembling in his every limb. His hair and the surface of his skin were damp with perspiration. In his eyes was the reflection of lamplight and torment and an inner desolation beyond comprehension.
“Come, then,” she whispered, “and let’s give each other courage.”
He complied. Easing his way with the emollients of care and intimate caress, he parted the tender folds, introduced his silken hardness to the petal-soft opening. Carefully pressing, he eased deeper. The barrier was reached and breached with hardly a pause. Then she encompassed him, taking his hardness, his throbbing fullness, into her internal heat.
Abandoned, that was how she felt. Transfigured. Incredibly alive. Her heart expanded in her chest, filling it to overflowing. She wanted to laugh, to cry, to jump up and down. Her hands closed upon him in a hold so tight her bones ached, and still it was not enough.
“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.
He was stretching her; she could feel the long length and power of him with every breath he took. But he was not hurting her. She shook her head, a quick, positive movement.
A low laugh shook him. Gathering himself, he began to move in a slow, deliberate rhythm. It rocked her, sounded her, sent the blood surging to her head. She gasped, holding to him. A moment later, she caught the motion and joined it, panting, her skin prickling with sheer, fathomless delight. He bent his head, kissing her forehead, her eyes, tip of her nose before taking her mouth. There he mocked the sensual cadence with his tongue and invited her to do the same.
It was wild grandeur, it was fascination. It was a deep erotic exploration. Time was obliterated; effort had no meaning.
He lowered himself over her, entangling his legs with hers before rolling with her to draw her on top of him. Setting her free, then, he let her take the pace. She shifted, finding comfort, sitting upright. Flinging her hair that had loosened behind her back, she rode him with a gentle rocking.
Silver-Tongued Devil (Louisiana Plantation Collection) Page 19
