“Now I need you to explain something to me,” he said, that vulnerability flaring in his face again. “Why did you leave before we could discuss any of this?”
She swallowed. “Because I was afraid you’d want me only as a mistress.” With a sinking heart, she realized he hadn’t yet said he wanted her for anything else. “Not that I blame you, of course. A man with your future doesn’t need a wife with my past as a liability. But I just couldn’t—”
“Oh, Bella, I’m so sorry I didn’t make myself clearer. All that talk about having you for my mistress was meant only to provoke you into revealing yourself. Once I made love to you, there was only one role I wanted you to play in my life, and that was as my wife. I wouldn’t settle for anything less.”
Her fear began to ease. “But what about your future in politics?”
“I have no future in politics without you, darling. Because if I can’t have you at my side, none of it is even worth pursuing.” He flashed her a rakish grin. “If you refuse to marry me, I’ll have to give it all up. Otherwise I’ll make myself a laughingstock. They’ll be gossiping all over town about poor Warbrooke and the widow who broke his heart.”
A smile crept over her face. “You’re exaggerating, you silly man, but I don’t mind. That part about my breaking your heart is very sweet, even if we both know it’s nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” he protested. “Are you blind? Can’t you see I’ve fallen in love with you? Good God, woman, do you think I propose marriage every day?”
That Roman conqueror’s look was in his eye now. She stilled, hardly daring to hope. “If you have indeed fallen in love, it’s with Bella.”
“No,” he said firmly. “I fell in love with all of you—with Bella, the fetching temptress…with Lady Kingsley, the highly moral reformer…and even with Isobel, the orphan millworker.”
She shook her head. “The only one of those who really is me is Isobel. Henry created Lady Kingsley, and as for Bella—”
“She’s you, too. Just as Lady Kingsley is you. Yes, your husband set out the road for Isobel to follow, but it was Isobel who took it, Isobel who did the work, Isobel who transformed herself into Lady Kingsley. There would be no Lady Kingsley without Isobel working behind the scenes. And even Bella, that naughty minx, is Isobel when she’s at home and relaxed…or in the throes of lovemaking. They are all you, my darling, and I’m in love with every single one of them.”
“Oh, Justin,” she said, hardly able to speak for the joy filling her throat, “that is quite possibly the most wonderful thing any man has ever said to me.”
“So that means you’ll marry me? Even if you don’t love me, perhaps in time—”
“Now who’s blind?” she said, stretching up to silence his ridiculous uncertainties with a kiss. “Of course I love you.” She mimicked his authoritarian voice. “Good God, man, do you think I accept a proposal of marriage every day?”
He raised an eyebrow. “This had better be the last. Because I don’t intend to share you with anyone. I plan to be Galatea’s only husband from now until eternity.”
Then he swept her into his arms and gave her the most delicious kiss yet. Or perhaps it was the most delicious because they were in love. And being in love seemed to make everything more wonderful—the air, the room, the kiss…She couldn’t wait to try this out in every room of her town house. And his. And theirs.
When he drew back, he wore a decidedly mischievous look. “Now that you’ve agreed to marry me, my lovely Isobel, I’ll have to establish some rules.”
She eyed him warily. “Oh? And what might those be?”
“Rule number one—no more masks.”
With a laugh, she relaxed in his arms. “I think I can agree to that.”
But he wasn’t finished. “Rule number two—no more sponges.”
“More? We didn’t even use them the first time,” she pointed out.
“Good. And we won’t use them in the future either. At least not until we’ve had a few children.”
She swallowed. “And if I can’t have children?”
“Then we won’t need them anyway, will we?” When she continued to stare at him uncertainly, he added, “Children or no children, I want you, Bella. But I should like to attempt to have some.”
“So would I,” she admitted shyly.
“And finally, rule number three—no more widows’ auctions. I’ll soon have pockets to let if I spend a thousand pounds every time I need to get your attention.”
She laughed and tightened her arms about his neck. “Don’t worry, my love. I’ve had enough of auctions to last me a lifetime. Unless you’d be interested in a private auction. I know this widow named Bella who for a certain price would be willing to commit the most naughty, outrageous acts imaginable.”
As desire flared in his face, he growled. “Oh? And what precisely would that cost me?”
“Your heart,” she whispered back. “Nothing but your heart.”
He grinned as he lowered his head to hers. “Then thank God that’s a price I’m more than willing to pay.”
Luisa’s Desire
Emma Holly
For Robert and Lana.
May your worlds always meet in love.
1
Tibet, 1600
The sun filled the air with diamond knives, its merciless brilliance shooting spires of brightness off the ice-locked Himalayan peaks. Beneath, on the precipitous path that circled the tallest mountain, Luisa del Fiore huddled deeper into her mink-lined hood. Black sheathed her from head to toe: her kidskin gloves, her yakhide boots, even the veil that draped her face was black as ink. Despite these precautions, the effect of the sun was barely muffled. This was Tibet, the roof of the world, and far closer to heaven than a child of midnight ought to go.
The sun was a drug to her kind, a pleasure beyond compare. Like all drugs, however, too large a dose could kill. Indeed, she would not have risked this journey had her need not been so great.
Unaware of her predicament, Dorje, her cheerful native guide, beckoned her forward on the trail. The mere thought of the drop to his right was enough to make her dizzy. The fall might not kill her, but even an upyr could break her bones.
“Come,” he urged. “Only little way more.”
He spoke the pidgin Chinese they used to communicate, the language of the traders to whom he sold yak butter and from whom he bought bricks of tea. A nomadic herdsman, Dorje was one of six whose pilgrimage to this lamasery she had joined. She knew she was lucky to have fallen in with them even though, had she been alone, she could have traveled in the sunless safety of the night.
Getting lost was not safe, of course, no more than freezing to death, a hazard to which she had not known she was vulnerable. Her first night in the mountains had taught her that hard truth. Thankfully, on the second night, she’d stumbled into Dorje’s camp. He and his companions had offered her the foulest tea she’d ever pretended to drink and welcomed her to their fire. When she divulged her destination, they volunteered to guide her. Never mind she was a stranger, and a foreigner, and very outlandishly garbed. Never mind she posed a danger they could not begin to understand. They had heard that the gompa—the lamasery—at Shisharovar was holy. Anyone who helped her would gain merit from the trip.
At the moment, Luisa cared more for her next step than she cared for merit. Her exhaustion seemed a living thing, like one of the demons Dorje told tales of around the fire. She had no words for her hunger. She had not fed since she’d left the ship. She had not dared. It was not discovery she feared, nor others’ violence against herself. Instead she feared she would feed until she slew these people who had saved her.
This was the crux of her dilemma, that she might kill when she had no wish to. Lately the urge had been getting stronger. She genuinely loved her life. The challenge of doing business among the humans kept her engaged. But with her years came an emptiness only blood seemed to fill, and only for a little while. When she had begun to drink from criminals—ju
st in case she lost control—she knew she could not trust herself anymore.
She was not the hand of justice. Better to starve than to act as if she were.
As much as she believed in her choice, she could have wept for the intensity of her hunger. To drink…to be strong again…
But strength was the object of her journey: true strength, not the strength that came from theft.
Ahead of her, Dorje’s crude felt boots punched holes in the snow she strove to follow. Like his fellows, he seemed to notice neither the cold nor the thinness of the air. Luisa felt both, her feet leaden, her blood-starved veins like overstretched wires of brass. She had not thought a mortal could be so strong. Forging steadily before her, Dorje seemed as tough as the grumbling yaks they had left in the spring green valley far below.
When she lagged, he laughed and urged her onward like a father exhorting a child to walk. She felt a child, so sunaddled she could scarcely stand. All around her the light was slow, sure poison, a wine of gold and blue, a scent as sweet and fragile as mountain flowers. It had been days now, weeks mayhap, that this deadly radiance had been seeping through her clothes. Drunk with it, she clung to reason by a thread.
Sleep, the sunshine whispered. Pull off your cloak and bask in my golden rays. Be one with the beauty of the waking world.
Luisa cursed and grit her teeth. She knew she must not listen.
The waking world was not her rightful sphere.
They came to a turning. Dorje pointed higher and ahead.
“See,” he said. “Lamas here!”
As she rounded the scarp, the path widened into a table of land as flat as if it had been carved. Beyond this small plateau the mountain rose again, craggy and sharp, a final heavenward thrust of stone. Shisharovar nestled at its base. The lamasery was bigger than she had expected, many floors of white-limed walls and narrow, defensive windows. Lines of prayer flags fluttered against the sky. The jewel is in the lotus, she deciphered, the sum of what Tibetan she could read. A flash of silver drew her eye to men standing on the roof, tall brown men in flowing russet robes. She squinted. They held what appeared to be long trumpets. The low bleating the instruments made a moment later confirmed the guess.
“Oé!” Dorje exclaimed. With a sigh of resignation, he and his companions dropped their packs. “Lamas pray now. We wait.”
He gestured for her to sit but she could not. Within those walls lay darkness and warmth and quite possibly an end to her travails. She was walking before she even knew she meant to, crossing the trampled snow like a woman in a trance.
“Wait!” Dorje cried. “No can go. Lama here very holy. Very big power. Luisa make naljorpa angry. Luisa be sorry.”
He had her arm and was trying to drag her back. Anger rising, she spun around. Dorje’s jaw dropped. Her hood had fallen with the movement and the light shone clearly through her veil. She caught a glimpse of how she looked through his eyes: pale, porcelain skin and hair as gold as new-minted florins. Her expression was startled, even innocent. But she was too perfect, her eyes too vividly green, her mouth too carnally red.
Beauty like hers was dangerous.
His interest shimmered in the air between them. A sound filled her head: his heart pumping harder with desire, forcing the life-giving fluid through it, forcing his sex to rise. For a moment she felt faint. Blood, she thought, seeing it, tasting it. She closed her eyes at the power of her hunger—not just for food but to destroy.
She didn’t realize she had moved. When her eyes snapped open, her hand was wrapped behind his neck, already pulling him into biting range. Her gums were stinging where her teeth had broken through. She shook herself, then shook him.
He seemed not to notice the unfeminine force with which she did it.
“You go,” she said, sternly, huskily. “You no stop me.”
He stared at her, still under the spell of her foreign beauty. He licked his lips and she knew she’d done the same. Her mouth was watering, her eyeteeth razor sharp.
“You go,” she repeated. “Me no want hurt you.”
He grinned at that, as if he did not believe she could. “Haha,” he laughed with a Tibetan’s unpredictable humor. “No wonder you wear veil. You show face, you get too many husband!”
Her own laugh was weak but it allowed her to uncurl her fingers from his neck. His countrymen, she had learned, were polyandrists.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Me no want too many husband.”
She backed away, gesturing him to stay. He looked worried but this time he did not try to stop her. Perhaps he judged her a match for the terrible naljorpa, whatever in Creation that was. Steps led to the lamasery entrance, stone beneath the snow. She climbed them—one dozen, two…her eyes holding Dorje in his place.
At last she reached the top. Two large rings hung from the iron that bound the double door. Wincing at the bite of the frozen metal, she set her heels on the step and pulled. The hinges groaned. The door was too heavy for human hands, but impatience prevented her from pretending she could not move it. She was going in. Nothing, not prayers, not fears, not even her failing strength, was going to stop her now.
With a last grunt of effort, she heaved it open and slipped inside.
The shadows folded around her like a blessing, smoky and sweet and warm. Butter lamps, the ubiquitous Tibetan illumination, flickered on various altars along the walls. She had entered a towering hall, its roof supported by heavy columns, its walls hung with banners of colored silk. Through clouds of incense she made out the hazy forms of many Buddhas praying, teaching, and looking much like those she had encountered in Calcutta.
A group of monks, young and old, were crossing the passage as she came in—presumably headed to their worship. As one, they turned to gape. Luisa did not care. She was too elated to be inside. Her head was pounding, sun drunk still, but at least it did not ache. Giddy with relief, she threw back her veil and grinned.
It was a mistake she would not have made had her mind been clear.
Two of the monks cried out and the larger of them rushed her. She barely had time to brace before his weight crashed her over into the floor.
“Towo!” he cried as she struggled to free herself. “Tsem shes tsem!”
Luisa realized she must have bared her fangs. He had taken her for a demon.
“I pilgrim,” she protested in her limited Tibetan. “I come pray.”
Unimpressed, the monk took her head in both hands and smashed it against the floor. He must have been very strong. Like the crackle of early winter ice, she felt a tiny fracture in her skull. The break healed almost as soon as it formed but, however ineffective, the injury snapped her control. Instinct took over, the remorseless drive for survival that marked her kind.
Taking his head in the same splay-fingered grip, she stunned the monk by coshing his brow against her own. Then, before he could recover, before she herself could think better of it, she rolled him beneath her and drove her teeth through the wind-roughened skin of his neck.
His blood filled her mouth, hot, rich, a feast for her starving veins. Her head cleared at the first swallow. The second was just for greed. But she had to stop. She could not kill within arm’s reach of her goal. When he moaned, she shoved off him and got up.
She might not be sated but she was sane.
“I am not a demon,” she said, even as she drew her fine Spanish glove across her mouth. “Not towo.”
The monk who had attacked her was on his knees, too shaken to rise. “No,” he agreed, his eyes wide and locked to hers. “You are not a demon.”
He sounded almost normal, almost, but she knew her bite had thralled him. He was hers to command, for an hour or a day, though she could not see what good that would do. The rest of the monks had closed around her, many of them as big as the one she’d bitten. She knew she could not overpower them all.
“I have come to learn your ways,” she said, switching to her more fluent Mandarin. Pray God, someone here would speak it. “I beg the favor of studyin
g with your abbot.” Silence met her plea as she turned from one implacable visage to the next. “Look.” Careful to move slowly, she reached into the folds of her fur-lined cloak. “I bring a gift for him, for Geshe Rinpoche, the holy lama of Shisharovar.”
She held out her offering, wrapped as Dorje had advised in a white silk scarf. A rustle moved through the crowd, which suddenly parted to reveal another monk.
Everything seemed to hush as he approached—breath, heart, thought—as if the world itself had stopped turning on its axis. Even the terrible emptiness inside her stilled. Sun-drunk nonsense, she scoffed, but the sensation did not fade.
Here was a man to weaken knees.
Though young, the monk carried himself like a leader: upright, assured, with the grace of a creature whose body is completely in his control. He must be the lama she had come to see. His head had been shaved but not recently and new growth bristled out in a glossy brush. He looked healthy, smelled healthy. Helpless to quell the reaction, her pulse beat faster in her throat.
Swallowing, she tried not to stare at the way his stride moved the drapery of his deep red robe. Lifting her gaze did not help. The long, toga-like wrap bared one beautifully molded arm. As she watched, his hand settled on the shoulder of the kneeling monk. Without looking away from her, the lama gave the monk an order. Luisa could not suppress a shiver. His voice was as deep as the rumbling trumpets on the roof.
Whatever the lama’s authority, Luisa knew her victim could not obey until she released her mental hold. She stepped forward to do so. Unfortunately, watching a woman wipe blood from her mouth did not elicit trust. The lama barked a word and extended his second hand.
As soon as he did, something pushed her belly, something she could not see. It felt like a wall not precisely of wind, but not unlike. Under its influence, she slid backward, slowly at first, then gathering speed, her heels dragging on the stone, her arms wheeling for balance until she hit the plastered wall. The force of the collision drove the air from her lungs. Beside her, on a lighted altar, a heap of barley spilled from an offering bowl.
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