The Windflower

by Laura London

  Murmuring his desire, he let his hands glide over her rippling undergarment to her hips, turning her to him, his fingers spreading on her bottom. He pulled her close, enchanted by the provocative form of her bare legs against his skin. Need for her ran like flame-licked brandy through his body. With searing tenderness he nestled his face into the warm cloud of her kitteny softness. The gossamer texture of her curls on his lips intoxicated him; and her fragrance, the sweet-briar tang of her bath soap tinged in nectarous awakening, possessed his rocketing senses.

  But he felt her straining to escape him, whimpering, “No… oh, Devon, please…” Looking up into the blue eyes darkened with arousal and heated distress, noticing the blush staining her cheekbones with twin rose-hued crescents, he saw he had shocked her. New to this as she was, she needed his moderation, but smothered as he was in desire that had been deferred until he was almost crazy from it, there was a panicked moment when he was afraid he might not be able to give it to her. He tried to remember a time when he had been as she was now, tender and untried, though he seemed not to be able to think of anything except her heat and colors and firm cherub’s flesh. Fighting to conquer the mindless demands of his appetite, he tightened his arms on her hips, drawing her down, rolling her onto her back, forcing himself to gaze down into the unguarded blue of her eyes.

  Stroking her cheek with the backs of fingers that were shaking badly, he said, “Forgive me, little flower… You’re so fair, every petal… Help me, Merry, please. Please, love, tell me to be gentle with you.…”

  The blue eyes snapped shut, the earnest lips twisting daintily in a martyr’s frustration. Painfully she whispered, “Don’t be gentle, Devon. Be quick.”

  He had begun to laugh then, and he was laughing yet when he came down to her again after shedding his clothes and slowly drawing off her chemise. His lips descended to her throat in a hungry caress before his mouth covered hers, glorying in the way she rose to meet his kiss, opening herself to his searching fingers. In a moment she murmured, “I g-guess marriage isn’t so ho-hum after all.”

  He smiled against the soft underside of her breast. “Under all circumstances,” he murmured, “a humorist.” Taking her nipple deeply into his mouth, he gentled his knee into the quilt between her thighs, his hands beginning the ravishing, unsteady journey upward to her face, tracing the intricate weave of bone and muscle beneath the thin fabric of her fevered skin. The movements of her body were hard and restless under his, her face, wreathed in damp curls, turning from side to side on the quilt. Dusty filtered light brightened the sheen of moisture on her eyelashes and on her swollen coral-colored lips.

  Catching her chin, he held her still to receive his kiss, gently swaying her face with his hand to vary the shape of their contact, penetrating her thoroughly with his tongue. Distraught whimpers fluttered from her throat, and her small hands twined around him as his lips formed the words “I love you, I love you” in a rough convulsive whisper against her burning mouth and he parted her thighs with gentle caresses. And then, gathering her slight body into the safe harbor of his arms, he eased himself into her melting warmth.

  An act of love, done in love. He had never experienced it, and its miracle cascaded through him as though it were the unseen resonance of some great carillon. Little thrilling arias sang in undiscovered nerves. For him, for this moment, all senses slept except the sense of exquisite wonder at the joy she was to him. He wasn’t aware that his eyes were closed until a small sound came to him from some brilliantly colored void beneath him.

  Opening his eyes, he looked down through many layers of iridescent love-gauze into hot bluebell eyes, pearly skin, and a panting, slightly open mouth that held an expression that he could only call—oh, dear God, he could only call it disgruntled. Love, pity, and—regrettably—amusement came to him in a roseate flood. Flaying the threatening laughter brutally into submission, he thought, No, Lord, no—don’t let me laugh at her. She’s so proud. In this as in all moments she had that absurdly guileless dignity that had managed to touch his heart from the very beginning. He wanted to say something to comfort her, but with body and mind free-floating in a honey bath of sensation, it was not easy to be promptly coherent. A sweat-tipped tendril danced at her temple under the erratic flow of his breath, and he brought a hand to her face to touch it back with his fingers, wondering how much of the aching tenderness that was twisting his heart was showing in his smile.

  “Why are you still?” she said, as though her anxiety had forced her to speak.

  He connected in a softly unfocused way with the frown in her eyes. “To help you, little one. I won’t”—he stopped, to consume a gasping breath—“move until you’ve had time. Are you—Dearest love, have I hurt you?”

  “Well—yes.” The voice was small and glum. “I liked your hand better.”

  This time he had no choice but to bury his silent laughter against her shoulder. When he could trust himself to speak, he said, “Don’t despair, sapphire eyes. I hope”—a long, uncontrollable shiver of passion passed through him—“presently to be able to make things better for you.”

  “Hope?”

  Irresistible laughter swallowed him again. “I only have instinct, dear one. I’ve never been anyone’s first lover before.” As soon as the words were out, he could hardly believe he’d said them. The appalling reference to experiences past, and at such a moment—the utter confusion of his bliss was the only thing he could think of to account for such tactlessness; but studying her in dismayed concern, he discovered that his words seemed to have pleased her.

  The dazzling color of her cheeks enclosed a lopsided smile that was just sardonic enough to fascinate him. Pushing her soft nose into the nerve center of his palm, stroking him with her open lips, she said softly, “Instinct?”

  His fingers stroked her nose and lips while with his free hand he resettled her body beneath him, keeping himself deeply in her. Bringing her mouth to meet his, letting his hand drift to her throat and lower, he whispered, “Love, together we can find where the clouds are born.”

  Chapter 26

  One of the kittens had come during the night, waking Devon when it climbed his hair with struggling clawholds, padding across his shoulder to his chest. He lifted his hand absently to stroke its plump, furry body, and the kitten turned once, in a circle, batting his cheek with its tail, and then settled in a lump under his chin. In the absolute silence its purr seemed loud. Below, with her head nested in the hollow below his shoulder, Merry slept on.

  She had fallen asleep soon after their lovemaking, while their bodies were still tangled together like bright ribbands on May Day, and he was murmuring love words to her, trying to find some way to tell her that she had entered his soul like sunlight.

  The soft-dying day had crept under the thatch eaves to glaze the shadows in thin jewellike colors. Swallows twittered in the skies overhead, and hedge crickets bantered with the dusk; and as he had drawn his young wife’s sleeping body under the folds of the quilt he had wondered why men asked more of life than this. Gazing down into the helpless oblivion on her face, he had seen her again as she had been at the crest of her rapture. The fierce sweetness of it had possessed him so totally that he couldn’t remember when or even whether he had reached his own fulfillment. He savored the jubilant emotions for a long time before he slept.

  Now it was too black to see anything, but Devon could feel the kitten stand, stretch, resettle. And attuned as he was to her faintest movement, he knew the second Merry woke. He could even feel her moment’s bewilderment as she found she was pressed intimately to a man’s body. Then she tensed, and he felt her breath, drawn quickly in shock, as it flooded against his nipple. Before she could start to withdraw from him, he said softly, “We have a visitor.”

  His fingers followed the line of her arm until he reached her hand, and carried it to the kitten. He could feel her expression change against his skin—perhaps to surprise—and the contraction of her arm muscles against his chest as she began to
stroke the kitten. Her fragrant hair tickled his face as he strayed slow kisses there and caressed the lovesome geography of her, the flat, solid muscles in her back, the flesh of her nape under its warming hair-cover.

  “Do I seem different to you now?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  His wrist arched comfortably over her ear; the side of his thumb rode the potent softness of her cheekbone. “No. I seem different to myself.”

  “How?”

  “Wiser. And younger. Nearer to myself…” He put a finger on the tip of her nose and wiggled it gently. “I meant all the words I said to you, Merry.”

  “I didn’t.” Sudden tears scratched her voice. “I’m sorry about what I said—you know, during—about not liking things. It turned out not to be true.”

  In the quiet he could hear her swallow the pooling moisture in her throat. Finding the underside of her chin with one finger, he tilted her face upward toward his. In this total absence of light he could see nothing more than the faint shine of her eyes, but their exhalations swirled together like cloudscapes under a sable moon. “Do you know what, Windflower? It’s appalling that women are made so their first love is painful. Whose idea was that, do you think?” Her watery chuckle quavered against his chest. “If it had been up to me, things would be much different.”

  Comforted, she snuggled against him, her fawn-soft breasts moving in an unknowing massage on the high shallows of his rib cage. She seemed content to lie in the peace of his arms, lulled toward sleep by the knowledgeable persuasion of his loving hands. A minute passed. Her voice came to him, a low melody.

  “Could it be true? Were Morgan and my mother—” She broke off, as though the relationship defied description.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t started thinking about it yet. I think it’s something I’ll have to prepare myself for by three days of fasting and meditation. Did you have any inkling?”

  “I’m not sure.” The kitten yawned, a tiny sigh. “On the night the British officers came to St. Elise, Morgan made me come with him to the beach. He knew that I had drawn those pictures before he saw them, and afterward I thought, How did he know? Is he clairvoyant?”

  “Morgan is many things, but a clairvoyant is definitely not among them.” Devon stretched his hand backward above his head to free a reed from the matted hay. He put it between his teeth, tasting the sharp wild grass flavor on his tongue. “Could your servant—”

  “Henry Cork?”

  “Yes. Henry Cork. Could he have heard you talking with your brother about the drawings and somehow passed that information to Morgan?”

  “It’s possible. He often hid in strange places, but we thought that was to keep Aunt April from putting him to his chores.” Her sleepy voice intoned the words slowly, as though she found the whole thing a hopeless bewilderment. “If Morgan knew from the beginning, why didn’t he tell you?”

  “I wouldn’t have kept you then.” Folding her into the warmth of his body, he felt a thrill of protective fear for her pass like metal fibers through his nerves. “God help us both, love, but I’m afraid those months of turmoil were my half brother’s notion of matchmaking.”

  Cat could have thought of another name for it. Alone in Lord Cathcart’s library, waiting, waiting… He had conducted several useless cursory examinations of the room; but there had been nothing to distract him except perhaps the book on probate law that lay open on Cathcart’s desk. Except for the book the room was bleakly tidy. Even the marble bust of Homer had not so much as a dust mote on its eyelids.

  Plucking an abridged history of Rome from the shelf, he had carried the calfskin volume with him to the couch. The Roman Empire. It was, in a convoluted way, his favorite period of history. One couldn’t find a more acute allegory of human civilization than the Roman coliseum, wherein the selfish, complacent multitudes gazed from their smug tiers at the sad struggles below. Rand Morgan would have done very well in Rome.

  Three days ago in Falmouth Cat had watched the traveling carriage bear Merry off, and then he had gone directly back to the Joke, where Morgan was poring over a sheet of figures, a candle assisting the pale dayshine. He was a striking figure, his ruffled shirt opened over the iron chest muscles, his hair darkly glossy, the color of apple seeds. Smiling, he had looked up at Cat, his eyes black mocking embers.

  “So—did she weep down your shirt buttons?”

  Ignoring the taunt, Cat had walked to the desk and picked up the sheet of figures. “Have you figured out yet how much of a bribe we’ll have to give Customs?”

  “Yes. That being done, I’m going to shore, where I want two things: to have a meal and to have a woman, and that means if you’re going to be emotional at me about Merry, do it while I pull on my boots, or you’ll have to scold my empty nightcap.”

  Cat set down the page. “I wish we could come to some kind of uniform agreement on whether I’m supposed to have emotions, or not have them.”

  “Very well,” Morgan said agreeably, picking up a boot. “You can have emotions. Abracadabra. Wasn’t that easy? Now, look around inside your skull for your common sense. You see? It remains in residence. No one makes you surrender your logic in order to feel. Hand me my other boot.”

  With temper chills biting like teeth in the lining of his stomach, Cat wrenched up the boot, strode with it to the window, pushed open the casing, and flung Morgan’s boot into the harbor, where it drowned in a crown-shaped splash. Its halo of disturbed water had expanded and vanished before Morgan spoke.

  “That might have caught my attention, but think of the poor fisherman who pulls it up on a line instead of a sea bass.… I don’t know what you’re worried about. The chit can handle Devon.”

  “Rand, she doesn’t know that. She’s frightened. And she has good reason to be too.”

  “She has no reason to be. Why do you think I let him drag her off on St. Elise? They’ve both had a chance to see that you can pour anger into him until it steams from his ears like hot sulfur, and even then he can’t harm her. What else would you like to know?”

  Cat took a long silent breath of the moist air that cascaded through the open window. “About her mother.”

  Behind him Cat heard silence. A low laugh. A voice. “Here.”

  Turning, he caught Morgan’s other boot, lightly tossed.

  “Why do things by halves? Send down a pair.”

  So Cat threw the second boot after the first and sat down on the window bench, watching Morgan stretch out in a chair, cross his stockings at the ankle, and rest his hands on the naked flesh of his abdomen. For a long time Morgan stared at but not into Cat’s eyes. Elbows braced on the chair arms, the pirate raised his hands, knotted absently in prayer fashion, touching his own lips with the steeple of his fingers.

  “When I was thirteen,” he said suddenly, softly, “I went to England to see my father. Literally to see. As one sees the pyramids. It was five years before the war of 1793, and I’d been smuggling with a crew of Corsicans all winter. When spring came, I landed in Margate with a pocket full of coins and made my way to Teasel Hill. On Sunday morning I sat on the churchyard wall and saw them all—my father’s exquisite child-bride, and Devon, squalling his bloody head off under a hundred ells of lace, and Jasper himself, beaming down at them as though they were all the angels in heaven. They disappeared into the church without looking around.”

  The gnawing in Cat’s stomach had grown more intense. “That was all?”

  “That was all.”

  “Did you want more?”

  Morgan grinned. “From my father, no. But I wanted to unwrap his smothering infant and swive his wife. Neither thing being possible, I thought, Well, I’ve seen them and set out across the meadows with my thumbs tucked in the waist of my ragged knee breeches.” The hands relaxed, conjoined still, against his chest. “That afternoon I saw her. Her. The girl who became Merry’s mother. She was my age, but in most ways a child, and I first saw her walking in a dry ditch with strawberry clover all in flower. Her silk skirts were spread o
ut all around her like willow boughs, and her ringlets were filled with wild apple blossoms and falling down on one side; and she had put her bonnet on a lamb that she was trying to lead on a red ribbon, as though it were a puppy, but the lamb kept balking and chewing the ribbon. Her eyes were light blue, the color of robin’s eggs, and they opened round when she saw me standing in the lane above her. Then she grabbed my hand and drew me into the ditch beside her, putting two fingers on my lips and saying ‘Ssh!’ when I would have spoken. She whispered to me that I had to be very quiet because Indians were coming. And when I told her that I didn’t know there were Indians in England, she touched my lips and said ‘Ssh!’ again. England was full of Indians, she said, only they had to stay mostly out of sight because people made such a fuss when they saw them. Sometimes, she said, she let the Indians scalp her, and sometimes she hid. And the next time she opened pink-bud lips to speak, I put my fingers on her mouth and said ‘Ssh.…’ ”

  The dark gaze was blind, the smooth jet irises catching quills of light like the seed globe of a thistle. “I stayed until late May, working for a chandler in Leatherhead, seeing her when she could slip away. On the last day it rained, and we met under a beech tree, with celandine growing in a mat beneath, the flowers closed in the poor light, and she said it seemed as though the sun had drawn closed its shutters.” A long pause. Morgan’s eyes returned to Cat’s. Mildly the pirate said, “I had to leave her, you know. Her family would never have allowed me to court her openly. Too gently reared for friendship; too wellborn to marry; too young to bed. The temptations were too great, which was why I tried not to learn what became of her, but I imagined her cherished, and happy, and in time… married. Years later I discovered by chance that her family had left England in a state of poverty. I had the Joke and money, and I searched for her, but by then she had died. There were two children, Merry and an older brother; and a widowed husband—James Wilding.”