Chapter 17 #2
“Come here.” It wasn’t a command, not quite a plea, but something ruinously close to both. “If you want me”—he paused, letting the air stretch, tighten—“come and take your place on my lap.”
Watching her was his favourite sin.
He would not take her over the arm of a chair. He wanted her here. Facing him. Seeing his desire unmasked.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t blush. She simply gathered her skirts and crossed the space between them like a woman who had already made her choice.
“Show me.”
He looked up at her, heat pulsing through every vein.
“I need you now, Olivia. While you’re standing here like this. Wanting me.”
He reached for her, his hands skimming the silk at her hips before sliding upward, gathering the fabric until he touched the warmth of her thighs.
“You’ve only yourself to blame,” he said, voice deepening, his thumbs tracing the bare skin above her stockings. “For looking at me the way you do. For touching me. For making me forget everything but having you.”
For saving me without ever meaning to.
She raised her skirts, revealing the barest glimpse of thigh and the soft shadow between. Then came the tangle, silk and petticoats and limbs, before she settled astride him, pressed tight to his body, driving the air from his lungs.
Sweet mercy.
His hands found her hips, rougher than he intended, his control hanging by a thread. “Yes. There. Exactly where I need you.”
He felt her, flush to him, slick, hot, the pressure exquisite. Her soft moan told him she felt it too. He tightened his grip, moving her slowly, rhythmically, over every throbbing inch.
“This is what you do. You strip me bare. You get past every defence … and touch me like no one else ever has.”
She arched her back, every subtle shift of her body drawing a rough sound from his throat.
“I’m not sure how or why I have that effect on you,” she murmured, “but you leave me near mindless, too.”
She quickened the pace, rubbing against him.
“That’s it. Take what you need. You can come like this.”
Their breath turned ragged, lost amid the hum in the auditorium. The world outside seemed to fall away. No stage. No audience. Only the shocking truth of how badly he needed her.
“Gabriel … please. I need you inside me.”
He gave her what she wanted—what he craved—easing into her in one slow, measured stroke. Saints preserve him, the way she yielded. Enveloped him. Drew him deeper. A groan escaped before he could stop it.
“Do you feel that?” He held her closer, rocking her slowly, the world narrowing to the heat of her, the way her breath caught every time he moved. “Feel how hard I am for you? Feel the power you wield?”
“I feel it,” she whispered, a silk tendril slipping free of its pins and brushing her cheek. “All of you, and still ache for more.”
“Then take more.”
Her mouth found his in a rush. There was nothing careful in it. She kissed him like she meant to take every breath he had, and he gave it willingly.
His thoughts scattered.
He kissed her back, open-mouthed, tasting her, answering every shift of her body with his own.
She moved with him, the rhythm deepening, growing frantic, her fingers tightening on his shoulders as her composure unravelled. He watched it—felt it—each tremor of her body building like a storm behind her eyes, until it tore through her with a cry she didn’t try to silence.
Pleasure broke over her like something startled into existence, too real to be contained. She didn’t hide from it. And he knew she could not lie. Not in this.
But now was not the moment for thoughts. His body rebelled, needing its own reckoning. He buried his face against her neck, gripping her as he drove into her, hard and deep, until the last of his control gave way.
“Olivia …” His voice broke as the moment overtook him.
She understood, softening against him, trusting him even now.
He barely withdrew in time, release catching him mid-motion, hot and breathless as he spilled over her thigh. He had never known a release that felt so little like pleasure, and so much like surrender.
Neither of them moved.
Then she kissed him softly. “Is it always like this?”
Not until you.
He brushed a lock from her cheek. “You mean so intense?”
“So beautiful I’m at a loss for words.”
He wasn’t at a loss. He should speak the truth, tell her he was in love—but he held them back instead of trusting his instincts. Theirs was no polite marriage of friendship. It was a love affair. In time, she would come to that conclusion too.
She smiled. “Who knew that when we discussed morbid poetry we’d be making love like this?”
He’d known.
Somehow, he’d always known.
But she sounded like a woman bathing in the afterglow of lust, and despite the ache in his chest, he wore his usual confident smile.
Now wasn’t the time to say what burned behind his ribs. But it was coming. Sooner than he was ready for.
“The circumstances we found ourselves in were rather unusual.” He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her thigh. “Who knew I’d be tending to you while Rome mourns Caesar on stage?”
“I feel terrible about missing the second half of the play.”
He laughed. “I don’t. The idea that we might find our villain disguised as a plebeian carrying a placard was always fanciful.”
“Perhaps we’ve let imagination get the better of us.”
“It’s our imaginations that put us here.” He brushed his thumb along the line of her jaw, arousal quietly thrumming beneath his skin. “You’re still astride me, and I’m in no rush for the play to end.”
She brushed an errant lock from his brow. “Clothes are cumbersome, and I’d prefer we were at home in bed.”
“Then I revise my earlier statement. Let’s leave now before—”
He didn’t finish.
The paintings on the far wall caught his attention. Six small prints of ancient amphitheatres, collected by his father on his Grand Tour. Rome, Verona, Athens, to name a few.
Olivia followed his gaze. “What is it? What have you seen?”
“It’s probably nothing.” He lifted her gently off his lap, buttoned his trousers, and helped her straighten her clothing. He caught her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, a small promise of what awaited her later. “We’ll continue this at home.”
But his gaze had already returned to the wall.
He didn’t move at first. Then something, a vague remark made years ago, drew him forward.
Olivia moved with him, silent, yet equally curious.
He stopped before one print. Not the Colosseum, nor Verona’s arena, nor a theatre in Athens.
The fourth. The smallest. The Theatre of Pompey. A ruin barely recognisable as anything grand, columns half-buried, a portico of broken stone.
His father had once held the print and called it a hive for traitors. The comment had meant little to Gabriel then. Now it sounded like a prophecy.
“You’ve seen something,” Olivia whispered.
“Caesar died at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Not in the Senate House as Shakespeare depicted or people like to claim.”
She bent her head and read the faded inscription. “Theatrum Pompeii—Campus Martius.”
The words chilled him, reducing him, briefly, to the boy who had crept from his bed to watch a play. Not in a theatre but in the ballroom at Studland Park, where the lighting was low, and the dancers moved like shadows. Shadows that wore no clothes.
He coughed, his throat tight.
His parents had entertained with satire and spectacle, rewriting classical plays for their own pleasure. Lace, ribbons, painted lips and sin masquerading as art.
He had not thought of it in years.
He had no wish to now.
“We were never meant to watch Julius Caesar.” He touched the gilt edge, lifted the print from its hook, and turned it over, pulse ticking at his temple. “Perhaps we were meant to find this instead.”
A small square of folded paper was fixed to the wood with a single dab of sealing wax.
Olivia inhaled sharply. “It wasn’t placed here recently. The paper is foxed with age. Have you always rented this box?”
“My grandfather helped pay for the restoration after the last fire, over forty years ago. This box was his recompense, secured under a contract that would span a hundred years.”
“When was the room last refurbished?”
“Three years ago, maybe four. But the prints were my father’s. They’ve always been here.”
They both stared at the rough-edged scrap, the silence thickening between them, before he tugged it free of the wax.
It wasn’t a letter.
Not a note.
Not co-ordinates to buried treasure.
Just a torn scrap, creased and dulled with age, bearing a faint wash of pale blue ink. Wings. The outline of swallows in flight.
No words.
Not one.
She leaned closer. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” Yet he suspected he did. It was familiar, and he wasn’t sure why. “The image is like the one on the disc found in the compass. Though I can’t help but think I’ve seen it before.”
She held out her hand. “May I see?”
“Of course.”
She smoothed her fingers over the worn surface, her brows drawn. “It feels like wallpaper. A pretty wallpaper, were it not so faded. Swallows instead of peacocks.” She paused. “Since the prints belonged to your father, might there be a similar design at Studland Park?”
He shook his head. “I’ll have to ask Mrs Boswell.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
He might have said the past was behind him, covered in dust sheets like everything else in that house. But it wasn’t. It lingered in every room, a quiet ghost. Just like it clung to his heart.
“There’s a reason my father carried a button bearing your crest,” she said quietly. “And why he left the white heather as a sign I could trust you. He knew it would lead me to you. Somehow there’s a link.”
The thought brought no comfort.
It wasn’t fate that drew them together.
It wasn’t a blinding attraction they couldn’t fight.
It was planned. Orchestrated.
And yet he’d fallen in love.
He stared at the swallows in her hand, wings extended mid-flight. So much pointed to the past, to things hidden, arranged, manipulated.
But she was here. Real. Warm.
Wanting him.
If there was truth in anything, it was in the way she touched him. In the way he lost himself inside her, silencing every doubt that threatened to rise.