"Neither she nor the child looks real because they are meant to look divine, beyond the baseness of man. They were idealized to set them apart," Sebastian explained.
"Oh," she said, deflating. "Well." She considered a moment. "But she was supposed to be real, wasn't she? I mean, the guy who painted this, van Eyck, he believed that Mary had once lived. So he could have given her a real face. There are no paintings here of real women."
Sebastian took her arm and led her over to another painting, this one a portrait of a woman with a ruffled white cloth atop her head. "This is van Eyck's wife, Margareta," he said cheerfully. "Is she real enough for you?"
Eliza blinked into Margareta's annoyed gaze. The woman had a narrow mouth with no upper lip, a long, prominent nose, and an expression that made it clear she was not to be trifled with. "Good gracious," Eliza said beneath her breath. The woman's hairstyle made it look as if she had brown horns emerging from the sides of her head. "He couldn't have loved her."
Sebastian's eyebrows went up. "Why ever not?"
Eliza gestured at the stern face, expecting it to speak for itself. "He has put each and every fault, of both personality and feature, into this portrait."
"She could not help the thinness of her lips," Sebastian said. "He was being accurate."
"If he had loved her, he would have seen her a bit more beautifully."
"How do you know he didn't? The real Margareta may have been far less attractive."
"But she looks like a burned-out grade-school teacher!" Eliza protested.
He laughed; then his expression became almost tender as he continued to gaze at the portrait, his voice softening. "He gave her intelligence, and he gave her a soul behind those eyes. He knew this woman, inside and out, and he made her immortal in this portrait. It was an act of love."
She saw the way he gazed at Margareta, and found she did not want to contradict him or try to change his mind, finding instead that her heart was melting around the edges, like chocolate held in the warmth of a hand. "Do you think that you could have loved her?" she asked quietly.
He looked down at her and smiled. "She would not have caught my eye in a train station, but I believe if she had been my wife, I would have grown to love her. When you get to know someone as well as van Eyck knew his wife, over years, it becomes impossible not to love. Not a fevered love like Romeo and Juliet, but something deeper, from the soul."
"The divorce rates would seem to say otherwise."
Sebastian led her away from the keen eyes of Margareta. "There are always exceptions. When I marry, I will spend my life getting to know my wife the way van Eyck knew his, and I will love her unto death."
"And will you find a way to make her immortal?"
He smiled. "Perhaps I will name a gâteau after her."
Chapter Six
Eliza stood and stared at the little black dress displayed in the window. Short sleeves, a square neckline, and a hem that would reach to somewhere above her knees. Wasn't that what every woman was supposed to own, a little black dress?
Sebastian and she had parted after the museum visit, but not before he had, seemingly to his own surprise, invited her to dinner. He would come by her B-and-B at seven o'clock, which left her nearly four hours on her own.
And here was a little black dress crying out to be bought. The paper placard at the foot of the dress dummy declared it to be on sale— for the equivalent of two days' salary at work. But every woman should have one, she told herself.
It couldn't hurt to try it on. She went in.
The routine of trying and buying clothes was the same as in the States, and in a few minutes a young saleswoman with chunky black glasses, messy, rust-colored hair, and a thick layer of brown lipstick was pulling shut the curtain across the dressing stall. Eliza pulled off her own baggy garment and slid into the acetate-lined coolness of the black dress.
She looked at herself in the mirror and sucked in her stomach. It didn't help.
The dress was too loose around the shoulders and chest, but fit more than well enough across her hips. Her breasts were lost under the black material, but her pale legs glowed as if with an inner luminescence, drawing attention to their slight chunkiness. Terrible.
The sales clerk pulled back the edge of the curtain. Eliza turned to face her, displaying the poorly fitting dress. At least I don't have to make excuses for why I don't want to buy it, she thought.
"Ah, no," the clerk said. "That dress, it looks bad on everyone. It is why it is on sale. Do you have someplace you need to go, a special occasion?" she asked.
"Sort of. I have a date tonight."
"He is taking you to a nice place?"
"I don't know. He might." She had hopes of violins and stars overhead, despite the low probability of that occurring. She hadn't managed to figure out why Sebastian wanted to spend any more time with her, but was not about to question him on the subject. He was doing too good a job of living up to her fantasy of a vacation encounter with a foreign man. She could almost forget how obnoxious he had been yesterday.
"We will make him want to spend thousands of francs on you. You wait here. I will be right back."
Eliza sat on the chair in the corner of the stall, the dress unzipped and hanging open down her back. Moments later the clerk reappeared, shoving a long, pale sage green dress through the opening in the curtain.
"This will suit you," she said. "What size shoe do you wear?"
Eliza took the dress, hanging it on the hook on the wall. "Seven, U.S. I don't know in European sizes."
"Try the dress. I will be right back."
Eliza took a closer look at the gown. It had spaghetti straps holding up a neckline that went straight across the chest. The bodice was gathered just under the breasts, making an Empire waistline. Below that, layers of filmy sage material fell smoothly to the hem.
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.
The clerk came back with a dainty handbag and a sheer, silk chiffon wrap.
Eliza felt her mouth go dry, the impulse to buy flooding 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 brûlée for dessert. It would be something to remember when she was back home, wearing her cheery 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.
The princess was having nervous second thoughts as she waited in the entryway of the B-and-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, if he gave it a moment's thought. She could hardly walk in the shoes. She wasn't wearing a bra, for God's sake. 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 so often 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.
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 at heart, a hedonist. All that apparent purity made him want to corrupt her, to show her how easily she could be seduced by her own desires, to prove her don't-touch exterior to be no more than a flimsy mask.
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 he had sought to corrupt, 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.
"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 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 ducked her head and tried to hide her laughter. She shouldn't find him amusing; 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 like the Cheshire Cat's. "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 international 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 feminity. It was as if he had touched her there, rather than on the innocent surface of h
er 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, then 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.
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