Crazy 4U

by Cach, Lisa

  She shucked off the black dress, as well as her bra, and put on the new gown. The hem came to a few inches above her ankles, the bust fit her perfectly, and, miracle of miracles, it gave the illusion that she had a small waist and long legs. The color was pale enough to make her skin look creamy, and it brought out the green of her eyes. She was still admiring herself when the clerk came back with a pair of high-heeled sandals.

  "You cannot wear those other shoes with this dress," she explained.

  A look at the sadly beaten black flats confirmed that fact for Eliza. She tugged off her socks and put the sandals on. Beautiful. Uncomfortable, toe pinching, ankle straining, but beautiful. The clerk disappeared again, mumbling something about accessories.

  A belated thought hit Eliza's mind, and she fumbled at the side of the dress for the price tag. It cost a complete paycheck. She whimpered with the pain of self-denial.

  The clerk came back with a dainty handbag and a sheer, silk chiffon wrap that she draped over Eliza’s elbows, completing the look.

  The dangerous impulse to buy flooded through her. She knew it was impractical and foolish, she knew she would live to regret it, but she had the edge-of-the-cliff feeling she was going to buy the dress. And the shoes, and the wrap, and the handbag.

  For one night she could be Cinderella on a date with a handsome foreign man, and there would be stars and violins and crème brulée for dessert. It would be something to remember when she was back home, wearing her country-check jumper with the red plastic heart-shaped buttons, her hair in a braid, rubber-soled shoes on her feet, discussing carbohydrates with patients and arguing about whether or not clam chowder was a liquid.

  For one night, she could be a beautiful princess on the arm of a prince.

  How could any woman say no to that?

  The princess was having nervous second thoughts as she waited in the entryway of the B&B. Sebastian would know after one look that she'd dressed up for him—he'd even know she bought the dress expressly for this date.

  She could hardly walk in the shoes. She wasn't wearing a bra. For God's sake, what had come over her?

  And more importantly, was her hair in place?

  She stepped carefully in her high heels over to the small mirror on the wall to check her coiffure once again. It had taken her half an hour, but she had finally managed a French twist with the right amount of fullness, and the right number of wisps of hair to frame her face.

  The doorbell rang.

  Her heart leaped into her throat, and she swallowed it back down again. After a long, steadying breath that did nothing to stop the tremors in her hands, she went to open the door.

  Sebastian looked up when the door opened, and caught his breath. An angel stood there, where his nun should have been. Light from behind cast her in a nimbus, showing through the outer layers of her diaphanous skirts and the filmy wrap about her upper arms. Her bare shoulders led up to a long, smooth neck, graceful as a swan's, supporting her perfectly oval face.

  It took him a long moment to recover from the shock. "Eliza," he finally said, holding out his hand and, when she took it, helping her down the stairs, "you are exquisite."

  The smile she gave him was small, shy, but the look she gave him from under her lashes was anything but demure. "Thank you."

  He held open the passenger door of his grandparents' ancient Saab for her, watching with pleasure each of her movements as she arranged herself, the flashes of lower leg, the emergence and retreat of collarbone under her skin. She looked up at him when she was in place, and he carefully shut the door.

  He came back around to the driver's side, got in, then sat for a moment in the semidark, trying to order his newly jumbled thoughts.

  It had been an impulse to ask her to dinner, and he had spent the afternoon wondering if it had been a mistake, despite the fact that he enjoyed her company: she so thoroughly appreciated being well fed, and appeared so genuinely pleased to be led around by him, no matter her initial protests. Her delight made him want to continue pleasing her.

  He also liked that her views contradicted his own, yet without the jaded, cynical attitude of the women he usually dated. She was willing to hear out an opposing view, even if she didn't like it, and willing to defend her own thoughts without rancor. She was gentle and, he sensed, kind; and yet she was no idiot. Ignorant in some ways, yes, but neither stupid nor unladylike.

  When he had asked her to dinner, he had been thinking of all that, and also of how entertaining it would be to unearth the sybarite who lurked beneath her Puritan exterior. He was convinced she was a voluptuary deep in her heart, a hedonist. All that apparent purity made him want to show her how easily she could be seduced by her own desires.

  But then another part of him, his conscience, had protested, telling him he should leave her alone, leave her untouched by pleasures deeper than chocolates and Belgian beer, and let her go away with her self intact. He had no right to play games with her, not when he knew he could promise her nothing. When her visit to Bruges was over, he would not pursue her.

  And now she sat beside him looking like a young Grace Kelly, cool and elegant, thoroughly feminine, yet still vulnerable beneath the sleek exterior. This new version of her still held much of the same innocence that invited corruption, but there was also pride there, a quiet, fledgling confidence in her appearance that spoke of an aware sensuality.

  At this moment, looking at the way the streetlight reflected off her smooth shoulders and silhouetted her features in profile, he knew his conscience would lose, and he would be seeking much more from her than shy blushes and a hand on his arm. He wanted her. All of her. Naked. Beneath him.

  "Where are they going?" Eliza asked, watching small groups of people make their way down the quiet street. She and Sebastian had just alighted from the car, parked along the curb in a small town fifteen minutes from Bruges.

  “Toward the church, I think. Perhaps there is a concert of some sort. Did you want to look?'

  "Could we?"

  "If your ravenously impatient stomach can wait, mine certainly can."

  She gave him a narrow look. "Sometimes I find it wholly unremarkable that you have managed to stay single for so long."

  "And other times you must thank your lucky stars that I have," he said, and winked at her.

  She laughed, a made a show of rolling her eyes, but in truth she was thanking her lucky stars, even though she knew she shouldn't. Every moment of acquaintance revealed him as more of a ladies' man–despite his touching speech about Margareta van Eyck–and yet she couldn't help but enjoy being the focus of his attention.

  They joined the others filing into the church, a dark edifice of stone whose shape was barely distinguishable in the darkness, the few exterior lights doing little more than illuminating the path to the entrance. Inside, a young usher handed them a folded program, and they followed others down the central aisle, finding seats halfway down.

  "What type of concert is it?" Eliza whispered in the hush, as Sebastian held the program close, trying to read in the dim light. There were no electric lights burning, only candles in the iron chandeliers hanging overhead. The side aisles were nothing but black shadow, the vaults overhead the same. Eliza blinked as she saw a shape flutter by overhead.

  "Just a minute." He tilted the paper, trying to get better light. "Oh. Well, that makes sense. Baroque music, on original instruments. Apparently they think original lighting will add to the atmosphere."

  "Did they bring in the bats, too?"

  "Hmm?"

  She pointed up at the chandeliers, and a moment later another shape fluttered through the flickering light.

  "Do they frighten you?" he asked.

  "If I said yes, what would you do?"

  "Use it as an excuse to put my arm around your shoulders." He grinned at her, teeth white in the darkness. "I was a teenager once, too."

  She wanted him to put his arm around her, but nothing on earth would make her tell him. "I hadn't realized that was an in
ternational technique," she said instead. "Rather unsophisticated for your type, I would have thought."

  In reply he stretched his arm out behind her, along the top of her ladder-backed chair, not touching her but letting his fingertips dangle off the edge to where they brushed the chiffon of the wrap about her shoulders.

  She looked up at him, questioning, but he only put his finger to his lips in a gesture for silence, and nodded toward the front of the church. The performers were taking their places, a quartet of musicians carrying their strings and woodwinds.

  There was no introduction, and no announcements were made. The musicians arranged their music, settled themselves, the last rustlings of the audience subsided, and then on a silent cue the music began.

  Eliza didn't hear a note of it for a good ten minutes, all her attention on that arm behind her neck and shoulders, the fingertips that she could almost feel the heat of. She peered in the dark at the program in her hands, able to recognize a few composers' names, if not the numbered pieces being played. She glanced at Sebastian, but his attention seemed purely focused on the performance.

  She shifted in her seat and tried to pay attention. The piece ended, and the audience rustled and sighed as the musicians turned pages. Eliza watched the bats flying about, and then the music started again, this time a piece she immediately recognized as one of her favorites, Bach's Arioso.

  A half smile curled her lips, her eyelids lowering as she lost herself in the rising and falling notes. She barely noticed when Sebastian removed his arm from the back of her chair, lost as she was in the speaking vibrations of sound. A moment later he took her hand in his own and held it, startling her.

  When she looked at him his eyes were on the performers, and his apparent inattention made it easy after a few moments for her to accept his hand around hers. She closed her eyes again and let herself enjoy the music and the warmth of Sebastian's hand, giving it a gentle squeeze as silent thanks for bringing her here.

  The music changed to something by Couperin, and with the notes Sebastian's thumb began to massage small circles over her knuckles. He rubbed his thumb atop the base of her fingers, and then slid it between her index and middle finger, pressing intimately against the delicate skin at their juncture.

  Eliza's body answered with a tingling rush of arousal at the seat of her femininity. It was as if he had touched her there, rather than on the innocent surface of her hand.

  He slid his thumb its whole length between her fingers, forcing them apart, then brushing lightly across her fingertips, setting the sensitive nerve endings alight. He turned her hand over in his, the pad of his thumb pressing deep into her palm, forcing her fingers to curl, then straightening them again with his hand on an upstroke, descending slowly palm to palm with his fingers between each of hers.

  Eliza's lips parted, her breathing coming deep as he continued his seduction of her hand. With her eyes shut, her perceptions narrowed to only sound and touch, the notes and sensations intertwining, following each other with his movements on her hand, each touch awakening an answer elsewhere in her body, as if her hand were a map of the whole.

  She did not know how long it continued, or how long it was before she began to play her own fingers along his skin, their two hands twining, sliding along one another,

  spooning and pressing and exploring intimate, private corners: the stretch of skin between thumb and forefinger; the underside of the wrist; the mounds at the base of each finger, named after Roman gods. The mount of Jupiter, the mount of Venus ...

  She knew the concert ended only when Sebastian's hand abruptly left hers, and the muted rumble of clapping filled the air. Her eyes opened on the dark church, and for a long moment she was overcome with a dreamlike sense of confusion and unreality, and then she joined belatedly in the applause. When it ended, Sebastian led her down the aisle without a word and out into the cool night. As other patrons took the lighted path around one side of the church, Sebastian pulled her in the other direction, out of the light and around into the shadows at the side of the nave.

  Faint moonlight reflected off the white of his shirt, but served more to cast him as a dark shape than to illuminate his features. He backed her up against the stone wall of the church, her shoulder blades feeling the rough coolness through her wrap, her heart beating hard in her chest as he braced his hands on either side of her head, trapping her, his body a dark wall before her.

  The tilt of his head said he was watching her, waiting or planning. Her body was aware of every inch of his presence, seen or unseen, so close it would take only inches of movement to connect them. Anticipation rose like a tide in her blood, desire making her body yearn toward his, her face tilting up in a silent plea.

  He took the invitation for what it was, his dark head coining down to join his lips with hers, gentle at first, exploring her mouth as he had her hand. She lifted her hands to his shoulders, laying them lightly there, then letting her fingers trace up into the hair at the back of his head, pulling him closer, asking him to take more.

  He would not obey her, setting his own pace as he moved from her mouth to her cheeks, to the corner of her eye and then down to her ear, his breath a gentle taunt and stronger lure, his tongue on her earlobe making her ache for more even as she wanted the light touch to go on forever.

  He took one of his hands from the wall and placed it on her waist, his thumb rubbing over her ribs just beneath her breast as he lowered his mouth to her neck, licking and biting gently. Eliza's arms tightened around his shoulders, everything but her voice telling him to touch her, take her, press her against the wall and have her standing, her thighs about his waist if he wanted.

  His mouth returned to hers as his hand moved up to cup her breast, massaging it in slow circles through the thin cloth as his lips found and parted hers. His tongue came inside her as his hips pressed against her abdomen, her softness giving way to the hard ridge of flesh she felt there. His other hand came down to hold the back of her head, holding her captive as his tongue sought out the secret depths of her mouth.

  When at last the kiss ended and he drew back, it was only with great reluctance that she untwined her fingers from his hair and let her arms slide back down to her sides. Animal passions were raging in her blood, dangerous desires, impulses far more impetuous and foolhardy than the one that had led her to buy the dress.

  Sebastian let out a long, low breath as if he, too, were having trouble returning to earth. He reached out and brushed a wisp of her hair back to the side of her face from where it had fallen across her cheek, his touch tender on her skin.

  "If we don't go now, you might never get your dinner," he said.

  She didn't care, but would not tell him so. Instead she put out her hand, silently asking for his arm and escort. "Then by all means, let us go." Let him take her back into the light, where she might barely manage to keep those animal lusts at bay.

  Even in the dark, she could tell he was slightly surprised by her calm answer, as if he had expected her to have protested his kiss, or at least to have lost her composure. And she had lost it in her way, for those dangerous lusts his touch had aroused were still within her, begging for satisfaction.

  And fool that she was, she knew that she was too close to listening.

  Chapter Seven

  "Can I lie down right here and not move for three or four hours?" Eliza asked, gesturing to the sidewalk as she and Sebastian climbed the last of the steps up from the basement bicycle rental shop and emerged into the shaded light of the narrow street. "You can direct foot traffic around me."

  "I warned you there were hills in Flanders."

  "You didn't bother to tell me they were invisible, made of wind." The landscape was flat, but the winds swept constantly across it, treating those on bicycles like sailboats on the water. It had pushed against them no matter which direction they rode, making pedaling more difficult than it should have been on the level ground.

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes. It was pulled back
in a low ponytail, but the aforementioned wind had pulled much of it free, leaving it snarled about her face. Her skin felt pink with sun and exercise, her muscles slack as rubber bands. She was glad she had worn her lavender tank dress without the usual T-shirt underneath, the loose rayon allowing cooling air to flow about her body. She had more than once caught Sebastian's eyes on the neckline, low enough to reveal the tops of her breasts. That had been the purpose of not wearing the T-shirt, but the coolness factor was a welcome bonus.

  Sebastian glanced at his watch. "It's nearly six. Come, if we hurry we can be at the top of the bell tower when the bells ring."

  Eliza groaned. "Is it far?'

  He laughed. "It's right behind you."

  She turned to look, seeing only the high brick wall of what could have been a warehouse, for all she knew. Bruges was a maze in places, and she was never quite sure where she was until she came to the market square. But if this was part of the building that held the bell tower, then the market square was less than twenty-five yards down the street.

  He took her hand and led her around the corner, past small gift shops and then through a wide opening between two shops, the passage leading into an open courtyard. Three stories rose on each side, and opposite them was a flight of steps leading up into the building. Directly above those steps rose the bell tower.

  "The tower was built in the thirteen hundreds," Sebastian said, pulling her up the stairs. "The building around us was used by the cloth merchants, during Bruges's heyday as a trading center."

  "Fascinating," Eliza said, paying attention only to the protesting muscles in her thighs. They came to the top of the stairs, and he let her stand there and rest while he paid their admission.

  She could not help smiling after him, despite her tired legs. There was something light in his mood today that had not been there before. He was more inclined to laugh, his smiles coming easier. She could swear he was having fun.

  For herself, she could not forget the possibility that last night's kiss in the churchyard had laid open to her. Dinner afterward had been a delight, as romantic as she could have wished, even though there had been no dancing. They had talked about their families and their childhoods, and on the drive home listened to one of his grandfather's CDs of 1940s French music.