Since the Surrender

by Julie Anne Long

  A shorter gate surrounded a small, neglected garden—one very large old mulberry tree presided over overgrown shrubs that could have hidden all manner of attackers.

  She seemed to be all heartbeat: the hammer blows of it rang everywhere in her body, and it made her blood whine in her ears. Never in her life did she dream she’d be breaking into a building brandishing a pistol.

  But Chase was there, and her own pistol was cocked, and she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t shoot the very first thing that stirred other than Chase.

  It was a very good thing nothing else stirred.

  She was able to scale the small gate with a decidedly inelegant hike of her gown, exposing her stockinged legs to the night air and, of course, to Chase. She avoided tearing her stocking, of which she was absurdly glad in the moment.

  She fumbled for the latch in the dark, and it gave easily in her hand. She jubilantly gave the little gate a push.

  The hinge screamed as though she’d plunged a knife into its heart.

  Sweet Christ.

  Her heart stopped for a painful instant. Keeled over with a thud, truly, like a stone.

  She closed her eyes, her breath dangerously shallow with terror. From the other side of the gate Chase seized her hand; hers was all ice, his all heat and strength.

  He clung to her for a breathless moment, pulling her close to him across that gate, and together, wordlessly, they listened hard, and he willed heat into her.

  At night, sounds carried oddly, and she thought she imagined hoofbeats off in the distance. She thought she heard the rant of a drunk somewhere, and two voices raised in a fruitless shouting match. The watch had better things to do than watch the museum, it seemed, which after all was surrounded by a spiked metal gate.

  She opened her eyes again, still clinging to Chase’s hand. She could feel his pulse: it was hard and steady and remarkably normal. It soothed her.

  He was very still, simply watching her. Arrested by her face. Or perhaps his long, long view of her long legs. His blue eyes glittering as surely as stars in that starless night.

  And his face—hard, fierce, uncompromising, enthralled—made her heart leap again with a primal anticipation. I want you, he’d said earlier this evening.

  She didn’t doubt for an instant that he always got what he wanted.

  She wondered how he would go about getting it.

  And whether she did indeed intend to give it to him.

  He gave her hand a quick squeeze; it was a query. It broke the spell.

  She nodded: I’m all right now.

  He edged through the gap in the short gate, lifting up his coat to avoid catching it. They forbore to close it, lest the bloody thing screech again.

  She spared it a disgusted look as they passed, as though it were a traitor.

  Five feet later they were on the threshold of the service entrance, and Chase spent long moments kneeling, the lock pick inserted. His ear to the door. A quiet click later the lock tumbled. He turned and made a “voilà!” gesture.

  He gave the door a poke with just one finger. It gave just a little. He poked it again. It swung wider by inches.

  Bless the maids who make a point of oiling hinges, Rosalind thought.

  And then Chase drew in an audible breath and pushed it all the way open. Silence and darkness and stale air rushed out at them.

  Instantly, it seemed to rob them of their voices the way a vacuum might.

  Delicately, they closed the door behind them, slowly, slowly.

  The door eased shut with a click.

  Blackness engulfed them.

  She fumbled for him; a stray shred of moonbeam caught the gleam of his cocked pistol, and she held onto his coat.

  She heard a snick. A spark flared against the glint of a blade—Chase had struck a flint against his knife to light a nub of candle scarcely as high as his thumb. It flared weakly. It was a wholly inadequate light, but was the only light that wouldn’t cast shadows up to the ceiling, which could then be seen, if someone were to look, through the arch of those great windows. The candle could light an inch or so in front of them, and so they would creep along.

  As agreed, they each drew their already unlocked pistols. The sound of unlocking could crack like a gunshot itself in a place this quiet.

  He gave her the candle to hold and motioned her ahead. He wanted to protect her from anything that might creep upon them, and so she would determine the path of their reconnaissance of the place.

  The service hallway allowed them out into a hall lined with Renaissance paintings, lush colors washed on canvases hung in frames surely unnecessarily heavy and luxurious. The candle lit fragments of faces, hands, horses, angels, trees, as they passed. The hallway poured them out into the museum proper.

  Chase following her, his gait uneven, his walking stick touched down delicately, one hand at all times lightly touching her waist. And despite the delicacy of his touch, she could feel his angry, focused determination. In the heat of his body. In the staccato breaths that fell softly against the back of her neck.

  He wanted to make things right for her, for Liam, for everyone ever wronged, for himself.

  And she wanted to pay attention, to look for clues to what the museum might have to do with Lucy or any of the other girls being gone. But she saw nothing. And the scent of Chase behind her began to drug her senses. The floral of the lavender soap had faded to astringency; now she smelled man, and the cigar smoke clinging to his coat, and perhaps a bit of horse…and the musk of desire.

  Around a corner they stumbled upon a room full of insects.

  It was a large room, and it featured one of the high, half-moon windows that would have shed light had other buildings and clouds not interfered. A cloud scudded clear of the moon for a moment, and the insects were particularly dreadful in the moonlight that found the windows: enormous motionless butterflies still iridescent in death, fragile wings spread out for everyone to admire. Great dark scarab beetles, their spiky legs looking like towering thorns and their antennas many feet long, thanks to the magic of shadows. The tiny hairs at the back of her neck tingled as though a beetle were actually crawling about there.

  The smell of snuffed candles lingered here, caught in the dense and near motionless air. She thought she detected smoke from a cigar, separate from the scent that clung to Chase. It smelled, in fact, nearly like her late husband’s cigar.

  She stopped. She frowned.

  He paused, alertly, radiating a silent question to her: why had she paused?

  They listened. For what could very well have been eternity. It seemed to Rosalind that they would never have known, for time itself seemed literally embalmed inside the museum.

  They heard nothing at all but their own breathing. She fancied she could hear her hair growing. She prayed she wouldn’t need to sneeze, and then of course she nearly needed to, and her eyes poured water from the effort of holding it back.

  She shrugged. Soundlessly, of course. They moved on.

  Through the Egyptian rooms now, with their solemn-faced sarcophagi looking gray and tired and somehow not at all frightening in shadow. They peered behind them; saw nothing but wall. No mummies emerged from cases.

  Past the stone slabs of ancient words. Someone’s shopping list? A poem? Regardless, it was forever profound now that it had been etched in stone.

  Still they saw nothing at all of any interest.

  She stopped suddenly again. But this time it was purely for the pleasure of feeling Chase’s hard body bump into hers. And this time he lingered, touching her. As though he couldn’t bear to move away.

  For a moment they stood in mutual, helpless, motionless thrall. His fingers still only lightly brushed her waist. Any other man might have attempted at the very least a throat nuzzle. Odd, but just when she decided patience was not Chase Eversea’s long suit, she remembered that war was half waiting for something to happen, and that control comprised a goodly portion of his character.

  And honor, too. She knew he wante
d her to come to him. To decisively choose.

  I want to decide what I want, she’d told him.

  He would be leaving soon. The thought of this opened up a gulf of peculiar panic.

  She moved on.

  They inched down the hallway toward the room of gleaming suits of armor and pikes. None of the suits of armor suddenly sprang at them; no eyes glittered through the visors.

  Still, she slowed. And stopped again.

  In…out. In…out. The sound of their breathing. It could just as easily have been the sound of the night, because she felt indistinguishable from it now. And the nature of the tension in him had shifted, like a wave, into a different kind of tension altogether. With a great, great effort—it was like combating gravity, for her body knew precisely where it wanted to linger—she moved on.

  From the armor, they found their way down the hall lined with the hideous puppets—their garish faces caught in erratic moonlight crossbeams. Rosalind noticed she was urged along a trifle more swiftly by Chase here.

  And at last they arrived before the Italian pastoral paintings.

  Beyond that was the room with the vast, velvet-hung bed, the mirror, and the ghostly man.

  She didn’t want to look in there. It had taken on too much meaning.

  The painting, as usual, told them nothing.

  It began to seem as if it wouldn’t have mattered whether they’d merrily jigged through the entire building with clogs on. Apart from whatever ghosts might linger, they were alone, for all intents, in the museum. They would leave no further edified than when they’d entered it.

  The quiet cocooned them, then held them fast. And in some instinctive agreement, they came to a stop. And then Chase dragged in a long breath.

  The sound might as well have been a thunderclap. It signaled a change in atmosphere. He exhaled with enough force to flutter the fine hairs on the back of her neck. Gooseflesh raced up her nape and arms in portent.

  Which was borne out when moments later his hands closed decisively over her shoulders. She went as still as a kitten seized by the scruff.

  He turned her slowly around to face him. Not gently. Not abruptly. Purposefully. Like someone who had decided it was time to solve a problem and knew precisely how to do it. In short: the way Captain Chase Eversea did everything.

  He held her at elbow’s length, his hands epaulets on her shoulders, the grip almost accusing, as if he’d captured her in the midst of a crime.

  She risked a look up to find his eyes as glitters barely distinguishable from the shadows. The semilight made a harlequin mask of the planes of his face. She couldn’t read his expression. It didn’t matter. The tremble in his fingers betrayed the drawn-bow tension in his body.

  And in seconds the heat of his body, still inches away from her, had induced torpor. They stood like that, staring at each other, until their breathing syncopated.

  And then…and then his thumb tentatively broke ranks from his disciplined grip.

  And once, twice, again, he drew slow feathery strokes over the sharp fine edge of her collarbone. Tenderly reacquainting itself with the texture of her skin. Uncertain of his welcome.

  Devastating.

  A long breath dragged itself shuddering up of the furnace her lungs had become, and she needed for an instant to close her eyes. She felt almost literally on fire. This would have seemed a comical thing to think only days earlier. Such a purple phrase.

  Then again, she supposed all clichés began as profundity. They were clichés because they were universal unassailable truths. So be it: she was on fire for Captain Charles Eversea.

  He was watching her. She knew he was waiting for an answer.

  And so she breathed in. And exhaled.

  And gave a short nod.

  His face came down hard.

  The kiss was rough—the scrape of his short whiskers against her cheek, a collision of lips and teeth and then, and then sweet merciful God, the dark sweet hot incomparable taste of him. She moaned into his mouth. It was almost more a devouring, in truth, than a kiss; she tasted him, dueled with him equally. They feasted. They’d waited long, long years, and it seemed they could not taste each other enough.

  The taking would be rough, too, she knew, when he pressed her swiftly, inexorably, back against an ancient polished bureau. Every bit of him was so implacably hard and immeasurably strong and wall-like, it occurred to her that she could not have escaped if she tried. A tiny part of her wondered whether he would allow it if she did try, such force and momentum he suddenly had, the momentum of years of wanting behind them.

  And all of this ought to have frightened her.

  Instead she helped him.

  Her breath came in impatient puffs as she yanked her skirts upward in shaking hands as his hands were busily dragging her skirt up the back. His arms were around her back, his hands sliding hard down the length of her spine to her arse to lift her up and press her closer to the hard swell of his cock, so hard already it nearly hurt, and yet a silvery shiver sliced through her and she knew she would come sooner than she wanted and not soon enough.

  He was shaking, awkward with his need, and for a moment paused, to tuck his chin against her throat as she pushed her fingers up hard through his soft hair, stroking, gentling him, though it was futile. This man contained battles, carried in him violence endured for the people and country he loved, fury over the injustices of life, at his own inability to right everything for everyone. And this could simply be release for him, but why he wanted her mattered not at all. It only mattered that she could give him what he wanted, because it was precisely what she wanted, too.

  Need boiled in her.

  He opened his lips, touched his tongue to where her heart was thudding in her throat, placed a molten kiss there: lips, tongue, breath, tongue. Finesse, but Rosalind didn’t require finesse of him at the moment. She dragged her own efficient hand down to the bulge of his cock and claimed it with a bold hard stroke.

  His head went back hard in a shock of pleasure and he hissed air in through his teeth. He brushed her hand away from his trousers, as always, a man of economy and purpose: he could get his own buttons open more quickly, and with impressive speed moments later they were.

  She did momentary graceless battle with the furlongs of his linen shirt, and it began to feel like a cruel magician’s trick, the one where scarves were pulled for an eternity out of a false-bottomed hat, and he choked a laugh.

  At last the shirt was clear of him and she was able to slip her hands into his open trousers and push them down.

  His muscles contracted as her palms and fingertips landed first to trace the sharp contours of his narrow hips, the hard plane of his belly, the fine hair trailing from the dip of his navel and hot, soft skin beneath—getting her bearings, the lay of the land—before she took his swollen cock in her palm and dragged her hand over it, relishing the heat and power of it.

  He ducked his chin abruptly into his chest, and the sigh might have held the shape of her name or might have been a profane oath of pleasure, but it was impossible to know. Her dress was now fisted in his hands and together they’d managed to gather it above her waist so that all she now wore below it was the hot motionless air of the museum.

  She hadn’t even realized this sort of thing could be done from a standing position until he’d told her, but Chase’s certainty and confidence was as usual contagious, and became her own, made it seem right and even sensible. She felt his hands, hard and hot on the vulnerable skin of her arse, his fingers sliding along her tender skin, soothing and arousing her, then teasing with one slip of his finger between her cleft, testing and finding her wet and ready, as he’d found her two nights before, and her body pulsed, leaped to his touch.

  And then his cock was there, the head of it smooth and swollen and hot. She whispered needlessly, desperately, “Now now, God now.”

  He at first eased…then thrust hard into her.

  The force of it rocked her backward, then forward. She stifled a gasp
against his skin.

  Locked together, he paused. He angled his head, leaned forward to kiss her.

  She turned her head. Whispered adamantly, “Now.” She said it for his sake as well as her own: she didn’t need to be kissed. She wanted to be fucked.

  Too long too long it had been too long.

  And Captain Eversea, so accustomed to giving commands, obeyed hers.

  And when he moved, the slide of him inside blindsided her.

  Her release struck like lightning; she immolated, became light and flame. She stifled a sob of incredulous, embarrassed bliss against his throat as her body pulsed with his; her bones were perhaps incinerated, because she nearly lost her grip around his neck, because they were both hot now, sweat slicking their skin, her hands sliding from each other around his neck.

  But he had her. He had her.

  He would never release her because he was intent on his own pleasure. His hands held her fast, and her hands found each other again and laced tightly round his neck, and his sweat-dampened hair brushed the backs of them. His breath gusted in her ear as his hips drummed his cock into her with the ferocity born of a need to vanquish all that had happened in the war, all that had happened between them, all of his fury and want. She felt him everywhere in her body.

  And she hadn’t thought it possible, but nothing was impossible now, in this museum and moment: rushing with bonfire speed upon her until every cell was a lit fuse, another release. She thumped a fist once against one of his hard shoulders, in mad joy and fury that he could move her to this, make her do anything, make her want him more and more even as he was inside her. The rhythm of his hips grew frantic; the smack of his skin against hers was unbearably erotic.

  And then it rippled through her, seismically deep, soul deep, wracking her with pleasure. Her head fell hard against him.

  The ragged roar of his breath stuttered, and his head rocked back; he bit his lip to keep from shouting. Her vision was peculiarly hazed; through it she could see the gleam of sweat on the taut cords of his neck.

  His body went still. She felt it tremor through him; her body felt his tremors as surely as her own as he spilled hotly into her.