Chapter 9 #3
He eased the gown farther from her shoulders.
It slipped down her arms and pooled at her waist, leaving her in her stays and the thin linen of her shift.
The stays were still laced, the upper edge pressing against the soft swell of her breasts.
He worked the knot at the back with fingers that were not entirely sure.
The tapes gave, one by one, and the stays loosened.
He drew them carefully down her arms and set them aside.
Now only the shift remained between his hands and her skin.
The roundness of her breast settled into his open hand through the thin linen.
He felt the tight peak of her nipple against his palm and the way her whole body answered when he closed his fingers gently around it.
He bent his head and took the pulse below her ear into his mouth again, tasting salt and warmth, and her breath hitched hard against his cheek.
He kissed lower, along the line of her throat, then lower still, until his mouth closed over the full weight in his hand through the shift.
The linen was damp from his mouth. He felt her fingers drive into his hair.
She was trying to be silent because the walls were thin, and Bessy slept the sleep of the just across the passage, and her silence kept failing in flutters and catches.
He learned the places that made her breath break, the places that made her hips press against him, and the places that pulled a low sound from her throat that she could not quite swallow.
When his hand slid down over the curve of her hip, above the ribbon of her stocking, and found the heat between her thighs through the thin fabric of her shift, her whole body arched once into his touch.
He stayed there, slow and sure, learning the exact pressure that made her shake, until her silence came apart completely against his palm. Her breath broke hot and helpless into his hand while she shook, and shook, and quieted by beautiful degrees, like the sea calming after a storm.
For a long while, the room held nothing but the tide.
Then, drunk and muffled and barely a breath, from somewhere against his collarbone: “Well then,” she said, and started to laugh, and he had to gather her in and press his mouth into her hair while the two of them shook together like fools, silently, so that the bed would not betray them.
She surfaced eventually. Pushed her ruined hair off her face and propped herself and gazed at him, glowing, unstrung, her mouth swollen with what he had done to it, and her hand set out southward down his shirt with intent as legible as print.
He caught it. Held it flat over his heart, which was going like a smith’s hammer.
“No, tesoro.”
“That’s a foolish arrangement,” she mumbled, dreamy, mutinous. “You’re … I can see that you—”
“You can see the Alps from Turin. One does not therefore cross in slippers.” His voice was not entirely under his governance. He heard the strain in it and so, plainly, did she. Her eyes went soft and wicked together, which was very hard on him. “It will keep. I am asking it to keep.”
He carried her captive hand up and kissed the palm of it, the knuckles, the inside of the wrist where her pulse still ran wild, and the effort of it, of stopping, moved through him in one long, visible shudder he could no more hide than he could hide the rest. “Fino all’anello, Lucia.
Not until the ring. Let there be one thing in my life I did not seize the moment my hands could reach it. Let it be you.”
She stared at him for a slow moment, the candle glinting in each eye.
“There he is,” she said softly. “My adventurer, my gentleman.” And she brought their joined hands to her own lips and kissed his fingers once, a seal on a treaty, and folded herself against his side with a sigh that had the whole day in it.
“The most devoted man in England, and he is not even English. Whatever will the parish say.”
He held her while the candle burned down, this bright unimaginable creature who had bricked him into her life with her own hands and now slept against his heart as though the arrangement were the most natural in the world, and he stared up at the sloped ceiling six feet above him, aching in body like one long toothache, his loins afire.
Presently he rose, and did up what could be done up, and saw her across the black passage to her own door. At her threshold, she turned and kissed him once more, brief and sweet and proprietary, kissing what was hers, and was gone behind the click of the latch.
Lorenzo stood alone in the dark of the passage of the fishermen’s inn at the end of England, listening to the sea.
Tomorrow, he was to be a harmless lamb with a sketching-book, and drink the tea, and watch a fishwife teach his betrothed to mend nets, and wait. Wait, with three hundred years lying in plain sight across the water. A week ago, the prospect would have flayed him.
He went to his cramped bed under the eaves and lay listening to the tide come and go against the shingle, and found, examining himself in the dark with the rigor he ordinarily saved for brushwork, that he was not flayed.
Something had gotten between him and the old pain and was standing there, warm, smelling faintly of mackerel and cider, with her ruined pins.
Tonight, he slept like a man with nothing missing.