Chapter 16
I begin again this morning. The same tools laid out in the same order. Nothing is the same
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
On their last afternoon, Uncle Henry rowed her out to see the seals, and there were no seals, and they both knew there were never going to be any.
The cove let them out through the cleft into a long gold light.
He pulled along under the white cliffs with the ease of decades at the oars.
Lucy sat in the stern with her shawl about her and watched the island slide by: its ledges, gulls, and turf.
She printed every piece of it on herself.
Tomorrow, it would be a pale shape on the horizon. The day after, a secret.
When they were well out and the water held them privately, he feathered the oars and let the boat ride.
“Grey House,” he said. “You treat it like something you are keeping for me. I will not have it.”
“Uncle—”
“Spend the money. Live in the house. Warm the rooms. Buy what you want. And then go. See the places. That is what it is for.”
He glanced at her, softer now.
“And you will not go alone. You have found a man who carries the road in him. Take him with you. You have my blessing, Lucy-bird. All of it. Every mile.”
Lucy smiled across the boat. The smile cost her, but it held.
“Every mile, Uncle.”
“Send word through Matthew. Disguised as orders for statuary.”
He took up the oars and rowed her home under the white cliffs, talking of which passes were open in June. She listened, and laughed, and tried not to think about Lorenzo’s silence, only to enjoy her final afternoon with her beloved uncle.
She went to Lorenzo that night.
The house had gone down into its sleep, board by board.
She lay in her bed, listening to it settle and to the sound of the sea.
Her uncle’s blessing rang on in her, every mile, and she could not lie there under it another hour, being blessed and unbelieving in the dark.
So she rose, and did not let herself think, and went barefoot down the passage with her heart loud, and scratched at his door.
He opened it at once. He had not been asleep either. He was in his shirtsleeves with the collar open and his hair wrecked from his hands, the candle behind him. At the sight of her, his face did what it had not done in days. It opened.
“Lucia—”
She stepped in past him and turned, and reached up, and kissed him.
She was asking. She knew what she was asking, even as her hands slid up over his chest and felt his heart going hard under her palms, even as she came up on her toes into him.
Not this, not only this. She was asking, Say you want me.
Not the venture, not the partner, not the fortune.
Me, in a room, with nothing at the end but myself.
She could not ask it in words. The words had been sitting locked in her chest for nearly a week.
So she asked it in the only other language they had, with her mouth and her hands and the whole of her offered up, seeking reassurance the way another woman might seek pleasure, and hoping he could not tell the difference.
For a moment, he went rigid under her hands. She felt the withholding begin. Her heart began to go down.
And then it broke in him, whatever it was, dam or vow or grief, and his arms came around her, and he answered.
Lawks, how he answered. He kissed her the way the tide came up the Severn, everything at once, her name and Italian and her name wrapped inside the Italian.
The candle went somewhere. The bed found the backs of her knees.
Lucy went down into the pillows with the weight and heat of him following her, and thought, dizzy, singing, There you are, there you are, I have found you.
His hands were already at the ties of her wrapper.
He worked them loose with careful, shaking fingers, then slid the garment off her shoulders.
The cool air of the room touched her bare arms. He pushed the fabric down farther, past her elbows, until it pooled at her waist. His palms followed, grazing the soft skin of her upper arms, then the outsides of her breasts through the thin night rail.
She felt the heat of his hands even through the linen.
He found the ribbon at her throat next. One slow pull and the night rail loosened. He eased it down, baring one shoulder, then the other. The fabric caught for a moment on the swell of her breasts before he drew it lower.
Cool air and his warm breath moved over her newly uncovered skin.
He made a low sound in his throat when her breasts were bare to him.
His mouth followed his eyes … first the hollow of her throat, then the slope of one breast, then the other.
He kissed the soft underside, the curve, the tight peak of her pleading nipple, lingering until she arched into him and her fingers tightened in his hair.
She reached for his shirt with unsteady hands.
He helped her, gathering the linen and drawing it up and over his head in one motion.
The sudden expanse of his bare chest and wide shoulders filled her vision.
She set both palms flat against him, feeling the heat of his skin, the hard muscle beneath, the quick rise and fall of his breathing.
Her hands moved over him without hurry. Across his chest, down the planes of his stomach, up again to the broad slope of his shoulders. He shivered under her touch.
He finished with her night rail, drawing the rest of it down over her hips and legs until she lay bare beneath him.
His shirt was already gone. He kept his breeches on.
The weight of him settled over her, warm and solid, the cloth of his breeches rough against her bare thighs.
His mouth returned to her throat, her collarbone, the sensitive place just below her ear.
One of his hands traced the line of her side, from the curve of her breast to the dip of her waist to the flare of her hip, learning her again as though the shape of her were a map he had nearly forgotten and was grateful to reread.
He explored her as though she were the treasure, murmuring over her in two languages, unhurried, his mouth at her throat, at her breasts, until she had a fist in his hair and her breath was coming in pieces.
His hands moved lower, stroking the soft skin of her inner thighs. He opened her gently, palms warm against the sensitive insides of her legs. Then his mouth followed the path his hands had taken … down the plane of her stomach, over the curve of her hip, lower still.
She felt his breath first, hot against her, and then the soft press of his mouth.
His tongue found her, slow and deliberate.
At the same time, his fingers slid through the slick heat of her, one and then two, curling inside her while his tongue worked the swollen pearl above.
The dual sensation pulled a broken sound out of her.
He settled into a devastating rhythm she already knew by heart, tongue and fingers moving together, patient, thorough, building her higher with every pass.
Lucy stopped being able to think in sentences at all.
The wave gathered the way it always did with him, rising out of deep water.
She pressed her face into his shoulder to keep her cries from the sleeping house.
He took her over the crest ardently, completely, generously, wave upon wave, until she lay wrung out and shining under his hands with her heart flying.
And then she reached for him.
She slid her hand down the front of him, sure of her welcome, wanting to give back the glory, wanting him undone above her, wanting him so far inside her that boundaries ceased to exist. “Lorenzo,” she whispered, against his jaw, drawing at him, opening to him.
“Please. All of you. I want all of you.”
His breath went ragged. She felt the want in him, hard and shaking, felt his whole body lean toward her like a tide leaning at a mooring.
And then his hand closed around her wrist. Gently. Gently as always. He drew her hand up between them, away from him, and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, once, carefully.
“Not yet, amore,” he said, against her fingers, low and wrecked. “When we are wed.”
And Lucy lay under him in the dark with her hand held prisoner against his lips, and felt the insidious thoughts slip into her head.
Because he had said it before. It was the pattern of them, these weeks.
He had said it in this same low voice with this same kiss on her knuckles, and she had lain glowing each time and translated it as honor.
As respect. A man guarding her against consequence until his ring guarded her instead, a man denying himself for her sake, and she had thought it the most gallant thing she had ever been given.
Tonight, it read as a man keeping one foot outside the door.
She could not have said what was different, except that everything was.
The furled hands. The silences. The half-breath his laughter came behind.
She lay with her cheek on his hammering heart, the proof of his wanting right there under her ear, loud as surf, and understood that wanting had never been the question.
He wanted her. And he would not have her.
He gave her pleasure, punctually, lavishly, in full, and but held the final act back.
The missing piece was himself, and he was holding himself back because he had not fully committed to her.
He would not finish what he would not commit to. Her body, sated and warm and stupidly in love with him, argued against every word of it. Her body lost.
He gathered her in, afterward. He wrapped her in his arms and drew the coverlet over them both and held her as though she were made of something precious. His breathing slowed by degrees against her hair, and lengthened, and let go, and he slept.
Lucy lay awake beside him and listened.