Chapter 5 #3
Heat bloomed low in her belly at the nearness of him, at how his shoulders filled the space between them, at the olive warmth of his skin and the square line of his jaw when the smile reached it.
“Crew and not cargo,” he repeated, as though tasting it.
“Signorina Carroway, I have watched every friend I possess walk into rooms exactly like this one and come out of them betrothed, one after another, like men going down a ladder into the sea, and I did not understand it. I thought it is a fever. I thought it will not take me, I am inoculated, there is no room in a man for two obsessions.”
The smile deepened at its own expense.
“And now, a woman I have known for one morning bars a door with her own body, hears the worst truth I have ever told anyone, and bids on it. You are the first person in a year of England … in a lifetime, I think … who heard where I am going and did not step back from it, but asked to come. Do you know how rare you are? I have handled objects hundreds of years old, and none of them was so rare as what you just did.”
“Is that a yes?” said Lucy. Her voice had gone to a thread. She no longer cared. Her pulse beat hard and low, a warm throb that answered every shift of his body toward hers.
“It is a negotiation,” he said gravely, stepping closer, “and I am told the English seal their agreements.”
And he reached out and pulled her to him.
She had been kissed once before, by a curate at a Christmas party, an event so brief and apologetic that she had spent the following year uncertain whether it counted.
This counted. His arm went round her waist and gathered her clean off her heels, plumping her breasts against his hard, muscular chest, while his other hand rose to cradle her jaw.
He tilted her face up with a gentleness entirely at odds with the arm, and then his mouth came down on hers and Lucy stopped being able to account for herself in any organized way at all. She just … felt.
He kissed her like he did everything, headlong and wholly, with the entire scope of his attention.
There was nothing apologetic in it and nothing curate-like in it.
It was thorough. His mouth came down firm and warm against hers, sure and unhurried.
She felt his lips part hers with gentle insistence.
His tongue touched the seam of her mouth in a slow, deliberate stroke that sent warmth flooding low in her belly.
As she sighed in pleasure, it slipped into her mouth to tangle with hers.
He tasted faintly of the tea they had shared and something warmer that was only him.
The salt-and-leather smell of him surrounded her.
She felt the slick glide of his tongue inside, and her knees weakened under her.
Her fingers curled hard into the front of his coat without her deciding.
A soft, helpless sound escaped her before she could stop it.
Warmth spread through her skin until every inch of her body felt too sensitive and too alive at once.
His hand left her jaw and traveled slowly down the line of her back as though he were memorizing her the way he had memorized the wall, reading her stitch by stitch, and a fresh rush of sensation through her veins.
Lucy heard another moan escape and identified it, at some distance, as her own. Her fingers were already locked in his coat-front. The shelves pressed into her shoulders.
The library, the house, Gloucestershire, England, all of it went very far away and stayed there, and the only fixed point remaining in the world was his mouth, which was smiling against hers now, she could feel it, the wretched man was smiling, and the press of his body against hers made her knees weaken and her own body soften and answer without her telling it to.
He raised his head at last.
His eyes were very dark and very bright, and his breath was not entirely governed either, which she noted with satisfaction from her own wreckage.
Her lips still tingled from the pressure of his, and the warmth low in her belly had not faded.
It had settled there like a new pulse, insistent and alive.
She slowly unclenched her toes in her slippers.
“Sì,” he said. “I shall marry you … Lucy.”
Her name, in his mouth, in that accent, undid whatever the kiss had left standing.
Her heart was pounding like a thousand soldiers marching on Napoleon, like ten thousand, like the whole Grand Army coming over a hill with the bands playing, and she stood in the circle of a stranger’s arms with her back against a secret three hundred years deep, one day into her new life, betrothed.
Betrothed. By her own demand. To an Italian she had met at a quarter past ten.
Somewhere, a hundred miles to the east, Mama was writing letters at her little desk, entirely unaware, still composing her campaign to bring Lucy safely home to needlework and eligible neighbors.
A bubble of wholly disgraceful laughter rose in Lucy’s chest at the thought of the letter she would have to write in return.
Mama was going to be utterly, spectacularly distraught.
Despite this, Lucy could hardly wait.