Chapter 28 #2
His body bucked against hers, his arms holding her in a tight embrace, an embrace of steel.
Not steel, that was soft and pliable compared to the granite that his muscles were composed of.
He was a statue, the work of a master, perfection incarnate.
Before she could burst through that crescendo, however, he submerged them both once more.
Under the water, they spun and twirled. Georgia lost all sense of up or down.
Darkness and light whirled before her eyes, but it was a backdrop to the face of serene beauty before her.
David made flesh. Perfection that would make Michelangelo weep for the knowledge that he could never capture the essence of such a face…
Georgia idled in the lapping water. Soft shingle and fine sand cushioned her.
Her toes dug into the gentle slope, and she savored the sensation of the tiny stones and shell fragments that shifted around them.
Keaton lay next to her, the water a sea breaking on the island of his slick, smooth muscle.
Their fingers entwined somewhere in the sand.
Georgia kept smiling, little laughs silently bursting from her like the bubbles that had risen around them as they made love.
“Why do you keep smiling?” Keaton asked.
“How do you know?” she giggled, tilting her head, flushed cheek touching the water.
“I can feel it.”
“I am happy. My body is happy.”
“Just your body?”
“All of me,” she amended. “But my body, particularly. I feel like I have just given it food that it has been craving, and now, it is finally sated.”
“For now.”
She laughed. “For now. I hope I do not face a famine before too long.”
“Oh, how you bring down the mood!” he exclaimed.
He turned adeptly onto his side and put a hand possessively over one of Georgia's breasts.
“Why speak of famine when we are at the beginning of a banquet?”
Georgia frowned, and Keaton instantly mimicked her.
“I can feel your frowns as well.”
“I am used to adversity in my life. Of denial and unpleasant surprises,” she explained.
“You are secure now. Safe within my walls with me,” Keaton assured her gently.
Georgia smiled, the expression flooding her face until she beamed from ear to ear.
“I thought as much when I lived with my parents. They were taken. Then Elias was my constant. He is gone. Do you see the pattern?”
Keaton went solemn. “I will break the pattern.”
There was such strength and resolve in his words that Georgia was immediately reassured.
He means it absolutely. He believes he can break the pattern. Which means he does not mean to abandon me once his objectives have been achieved. Unless he is lying.
Georgia closed her eyes, trying to quell the voice within her that wanted to look for the dark side of the situation, see the doom on the horizon. Then she remembered the ring.
It spurred her upright, looking around. They lay on the same shore that they had entered from. She walked up the sandy shore and onto the grass, through the reeds to where their clothes had been discarded. She found the ring a moment later, glinting amid the grass. A mad thought reached her then.
Keaton raised his head, following the sounds of her shuffling.
“Keaton? This ring that Mr. Thorne wanted... What does it look like?” she asked in a pitched tone, returning to him leisurely.
“Assuming I have it right from touch alone... it has a series of lines around it, carved into the metal which has the softness of gold. There is a large stone. I am told it is a ruby.”
Georgia listened, noting the similarities between the ring she held and the one he had been found clutching.
“Why?” he prompted.
“Do you have any idea what the lines mean?” she asked carefully.
“None. Rutherford could make nothing of them. Not entirely smooth and straight in places, curved or breaking off at angles in others. Possibly a map of a river's course?”
Georgia laughed. “Almost. It is the path through Egypt that my father took on his last expedition.”
She licked her lips, waiting for the reaction. Keaton went very still, then he spun in the water to face her. She stared back at him, forgetting for a moment that he was blind.
“You had better explain,” he began, quietly.
“I think you are the one with the explanation to give. This is my brother's ring. How did you come to have it?”
“Your brother’s ring?” he blurted. “I-I do not know. That is why I hired Thorne. I woke up holding it. Edric told me that there had been a terrible accident with the carriage, and I was thrown clear but suffered a head injury that left me blind and with no memory except...”
“Except…?”
Keaton held up a hand. “This is my brother's ring. That is what you said. But how do you have my ring?”
“Yours?” Georgia exclaimed.
“Yours. I mean, your brother’s. But in my keeping since that night. I could not find it to give to Thorne... did you take it from my bureau?”
“No!” Georgia defended, standing, clutching the ring in her fist, “I did not even know you had it. It fell from the linen I brought to dry myself.”
“From the linen? What?” Keaton exclaimed, raising his head to follow her voice.
He stood, water sluicing from his body. It was distracting to watch that titan rise from the water, especially after the experience she'd had with that body. She closed her eyes as Keaton approached her slowly, flicking his long tresses away from his face.
“It fell from the folds when I dropped the linen onto the ground when we arrived,” she clarified, “it must have been folded up with it in my cupboard.”
Keaton stopped behind her, one hand touching her back with outstretched fingers, noting her proximity.
“Someone put it there,” he muttered.
“Not me.”
Keaton paused, and she rounded on him. He frowned. “I did not say so.”
“You did not need to. I understand how you think,” she replied.
“When you have experienced a day without sight, you will find trust a rare commodity,” he shrugged.
Georgia closed her eyes, then blindly reached for Keaton's hands, placing them over her eyes.
“Very well. Let me purchase some of that commodity. Let me be rich, in fact. My eyes are closed. I will experience a day without sight and then, perhaps, you might trust me.”
He chuckled throatily, and she smiled. His fingers were so tender on her face, spiderweb touches that danced and flitted.
She found the touches erotic, even if all he touched were her cheeks and her nose.
Touching her in a more intimate area was a guarantee of a wildfire of lust. Innocent touching made her breath catch and her pulse trip, still.
“You forget that we are in the middle of an unmapped copse with many treacherous roots and stones underfoot. If we are both blind, we will succeed only in breaking an ankle or knocking ourselves out on a tree limb. Open your eyes. You are already rich.”
Georgia let her eyes flutter open.
“I am?” she asked.
Keaton took a deep breath and nodded. She could see how hard it was for him to make that leap of faith. To trust implicitly in another person.
“You and my Uncle Edric are the two richest people in the world by that measure,” he said.
“I am honored to be in such company.”
She shivered, the warm breeze taking on a chill as it dried the water from her body.
Keaton's body was alive with goosepimples.
She picked up his linen and pressed it to his wet body, letting it absorb the moisture.
He smiled and held up his arms. Georgia began to move the linen over him, along each arm to his fingertips, down his flanks and hips.
She knelt and rubbed gently at each thigh, over his calves and feet.
Then back up and with feather touches, encased his manhood in the linen.
He groaned, his head falling back.
“This is not intended as a prelude,” she warned him, shivering, “I am far too cold.”
“Then let me warm you,” he offered with heat in his voice.
Georgia rose, still drying his arousal with firm but gentle touches.
Keaton’s arms went around her, rubbing water from her back, pressing it from her skin.
Cupping her buttocks, squeezing and lifting them.
He took the linen from her and began rubbing it over her breasts.
The nipples caught on the fabric, standing proud.
“They feel cold indeed,” he muttered lowly, enveloping each one in his mouth to warm them.
“You said that you had no memory of the accident except... something. What was the something?” she breathed and writhed in pleasure.
Keaton pursed his lips, drying her stomach and hips.
“Joe,” he uttered.
Georgia frowned. “As in Joseph?” she asked.
“I assume so. A voice. The voice of a dying man, I would say. Gasping his last. And that is what he said. It was quite possibly a dream.”
“Elias used to call me Jo…” Georgia enunciated quietly.
The gentle, circular movements of the linen over her navel stopped.
“Why?” Keaton asked in a voice husky with emotion.
His hands were trembling now. Georgia pulled the linen from between them and tossed it aside. She still held the ring, and she pressed his hand to hers, the ring encased by their two palms.
“When he was young, he had a speech impediment,” she began carefully, “he could not say my name in full. He struggled after the first syllable, so I told him to call me Go. G-O,” she spelled it phonetically, “and over time, it just came out as Jo, like Josephine or Joanne. Jo.”
She felt proud that she could relate the story with only a small tremor in her voice.
Those memories were precious, but their recall was a knife to her heart now.
Keaton nodded slowly, tracing his hands up her bare arms. He couldn't see her face, but he was so perceptive that he knew what it cost to relate the story.
“It means...” she began, and her tears broke through the dam that had held them back.
“Can it be?” he asked, wonderingly, “that Elias was the man who gave me the ring? But how does he fit into this? It was a carriage accident…”
Georgia rested her head on his chest, shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle silent weeps at the only inference that could be deduced from his story. The emotion seared her. Finally discovering something about her brother.
And something that means he might be dead!