Chapter Fourteen #2
He was studying her thoughtfully now, as if he was considering what to say next.
“Ginny . . .” He paused. “You may hate me for saying this . . .”
Oh, God. She looked up at him warily.
“. . . but it was always too much for you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Raising your siblings, managing the house, all on your own. What happened to you, what your mother asked of you. It was too
much for you. It could have flattened anyone. But you . . .” He trailed off.
The way he’d said “you” was so richly complicated, so savored, it sent a rush of delicious sensation down her arms.
He gave a soft laugh. “Here you are. Still standing.”
She took this in, and waited for defensiveness to rear, for temper to flame. But it was gone. All of it. She recognized truth
when she heard it. It was a relief to accept it. It had been too much for her.
“It’s too much for any of us, really,” he added. “Life is. Including me. Somehow, we get on with things.”
The wind sighed through the long grass at the edges of the cemetery.
“I don’t hate you.”
She nearly whispered it.
And a thousand unspoken things thrummed in those four words.
“I know,” he finally said very gently. Like a wizard apologizing for the spell he’d cast upon her.
She reached into her reticule and retrieved the little red-and-white-striped heart-shaped stone she’d found by the bench in
the park and held it up. “Do you mind if I leave this for Michael?”
He glanced at it, then back at her.
“But that’s your best one.” He said this with only a little irony.
She knelt and propped the heart-shaped stone snug against the headstone, right beneath the “B” in “beloved.”
They both stood back and gazed down at it.
“I suppose the best thing about stony hearts is that they’re indestructible,” she said. “They never stop loving.”
He turned his head swiftly toward her.
She’d at last become strong enough to hold his gaze.
She thought, in fact, she’d be willing to hold it for eternity, as long as he looked at her the way he was looking at her
now, and the moment was long but not long enough, somehow.
“The night sky without stars,” he said finally. As though he’d long been working out a conundrum in his head, and this was
his best theory.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your face without freckles,” he explained.
Her breath snagged.
His expression was intent and somber. The rhythm of the wind through the trees sounded like breathing to her.
A fear that was very like elation, or an elation that was very like fear, filled her chest with an odd radiance and stole
her breath.
Finally, he tipped his head in a “let’s go” gesture.
He strode past her, trailing his fingertips in a caress across Michael’s stone as he went.
Marchand’s stride was a little too long and swift as they followed the path that meandered through the cemetery back to the
street. Almost punishingly so. She struggled to keep up.
One would have thought he was trying to flee her.
Or flee something.
She trailed him, deeply regretful that she hadn’t buttoned up her pelisse. A gust of wind yanked at her hem and flipped it out behind her like the tail on a kite. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be airborne in a moment.
She gasped when she almost collided with him.
He’d stopped abruptly and turned.
In a single smooth, decisive motion, he looped an arm around her waist, pulled her up against his body, and cradled her head
with his other hand.
His mouth came down on hers.
A small, wild sound hummed in her throat.
He kissed her like a lover, not like a virgin who had never been kissed. It was tender yet ruthlessly carnal and almost frighteningly
hungry. Her entire being at once surged to meet him, greedily. She opened to him and the taste of him at once went to her
head like a drug. Molten need poured through her. She reveled in his textures, the velvet heat of his tongue, the scrape of
his chin against her cheek, the drum of his heart against her hands. He held her against his body as though he’d recaptured
something once stolen from him. And she could feel vibrating in him everything he kept leashed.
He fanned his hand at her back and slid it down, down to the base of her spine, along the curve of her arse, dragging one
finger right along the seam of it, and it was so lasciviously, devastatingly erotic her knees nearly buckled. He pressed her
up against the hard jut of his cock, and pleasure bolted through her body.
When the tenor of the kiss gradually became deeper, became slower, became an expression of things they didn’t dare admit to themselves let alone to each other, she could feel herself unraveling. Her eyes began to burn with tears.
She was suddenly scared to death.
He sensed it.
He lifted his mouth from hers.
His heart drummed beneath her hands. She savored it wonderingly.
Around her, the world spun.
“Just as I suspected.” Her voice was shockingly kiss-scorched. She whispered just an inch or two away from his lips, “You
kiss like a granny.”
His eyes were starry, kiss-hazed, and amused.
He traced the arc of her bottom lip with his fingertip. Magical, that. That caress set tiny bonfires everywhere in her body.
“That’s very funny, Ginny,” he murmured. “Given that it’s you who needs a stick to walk now.”
He lowered his arms from her and stepped back just a few inches.
She nearly buckled.
She attempted to take a step.
She wobbled drunkenly.
He had kissed the bones right out of her legs. She was fairly certain he had ruined her equilibrium forever.
She righted herself. For a moment they stared across at each other.
His expression evolved from raw wonder to closed and guarded as she watched him.
She wondered if it merely reflected hers.
Suddenly she wanted to run. From him or from herself, she wasn’t certain. For some reason it felt all of a piece.
She tried another step. She was still unsteady, but she managed to stride ahead of him.
“Do you want to borrow my walking stick, Guinevere?” he called solicitously.
She didn’t turn around.
Little by little, she found her footing again, as she walked ahead of him, and she buttoned up her pelisse. As if in so doing
she could seal off forever every inconvenient, dangerous thing she felt.
But when they at last passed through the gates of the cemetery and reached the main road, he drew abreast of her. As luck
would have it, a hack was rolling by. Marchand didn’t even need to raise a hand. The driver, catching a glimpse of a gold-topped
walking stick and those shiny boots, pulled his horses to a halt at once.
Marchand reached for her waist and swung her up into the hack as though she weighed nothing. As if they did this all the time.
As though he’d claimed her.
Her heart knocked against her chest like a fist.
They gazed at each other, silently. He appeared to be deciding what to say.
“I’ve some business to see to that will take me out of London for a day or two. So I won’t be returning with you now to the
Grand Palace on the Thames.”
She was stunned.
Her heart plummeted in dread.
He correctly read her expression.
“I’ll return,” he promised. Gently. A little ironically. As if it was ludicrous to think he could stay away from her.
Her heart revived with such a sharp jolt it robbed her breath.
Infinitely reassuring, infinitely maddening as usual, he closed the hack door and vanished from view.