Chapter 19 #3
He did not. He claimed her with the full heat of a man who had been denying himself for weeks.
Deep and relentless. The slap of skin on skin joined the wet sounds of her body taking him.
His manhood dragged inside her and she cried out, back arching hard, nails raking down his back hard enough to draw blood.
He groaned at the sting and thrust harder, grinding deep, the head of him kissing her furthest point with every stroke until she was shaking under him and still demanding more.
The pleasure built. Her inner walls began to flutter and tighten around the thick shaft of him in waves she could not control.
His hand slipped between them, found the sensitive nub at the top of her sex, and stroked it in time with his thrusts.
She felt herself clenching, milking him, pulling at him, and the more she clenched, the harder he thrust. He cursed in Italian against her throat, hips stuttering, the words broken and full of wonder.
“Lucia—I can feel you—you are—”
She came apart with a broken moan that tore out of her chest. Body locking.
The hot slick muscles of her womanhood clamping hard around him, pulsing, dragging at him in long rhythmic squeezes she could feel all the way to her toes.
The sensation ripped a raw sound out of his chest. He drove into her through it, deep and grinding, refusing to ease off, and then he broke with her.
Refused to outlast her by so much as a heartbeat.
His manhood jerked inside her as he came, flooding her with heat, pulse after pulse of it.
Her name tore out of him against her hair, half Italian, half prayer, and he kept moving through it, shallow thrusts that prolonged their joining.
They collapsed together, still one, both of them shaking. His weight settled over her, careful even now, and she could feel the last fluttering around the softening length of him still buried inside her. Every tiny pulse of him. Every residual throb.
The fire’s low light moved on his shoulders.
The rain went on softly at the shutters.
Lucy clung to him and let the miracle remake her.
Every place in her that had braced for the hand around her wrist, for the gentle goodnight kiss on the knuckles, for the withdrawal dressed as gallantry, braced now out of pure habit and found, instead, his fingers still laced through hers.
Both hands. Palm to palm. The whole of him spent and present and hers.
No stopping. No pulling away. Just the thick residual heat of him still inside her and the knowledge that this time he had given her everything.
They lay afterward in an ecstatic heap. Exactly that.
A heap. Tangled past sorting in the lantern-light.
Her cheek on his chest and his heart slamming gradually slower under her ear.
One of his legs pinning hers. The rug’s wool prickling against her bare back and the backs of her thighs.
The fire ticking. Both of them spent and glowing and entirely disinclined to move for the remainder of recorded time.
“I am going to marry you on Sunday,” panted Lorenzo, to the ceiling, “and then I am going to take you home.”
“Mm,” said Lucy, boneless.
“Florence, Lucia …”
And it began to spill out of him the way it used to, the way she had fallen in love with. His free hand escaped to describe things in the air above them. The fire found his rings of gesture. The whole expressive Italian of him poured out without apology.
“In the autumn, when the heat breaks and the light goes gold, Dio, the light, you have not seen such light, England does not have it, England has weather with occasional apologies of sunshine. The Arno in the evening with the bridges strung along it. I will take you up the tower steps until your legs hate me and then you will forgive me at the top; everyone forgives at the top. The Duomo. My city, amore, my streets. I will feed you until you are ashamed, figs and new oil and my aunt Lucrezia’s ribollita.
She will weep on you, I warn you now, she weeps on everyone; it is how we know she is pleased.
And the galleries. I will stand you in front of the masters, all of them, and hold your hand and watch your face.
I have been starving to show it to the right someone the whole of my entire life, and I did not know who until I met you. ”
His arm tightened around her. His voice dropped, went suddenly younger.
“And the workshop. My father’s workshop, that smells of pigment and stone dust and history.
I posted him a letter this morning, four lines, the worst four lines I ever wrote, the trail is ended, I am coming home, and Lucia, we will outrun it.
We will be in Florence before the mail. I will pay any courier on the Continent to lose that letter in a ditch, and I will walk into the workshop with you on my arm and I will say, Papa, I found treasure.
And then I will watch his face while he looks at you, and I will say … I brought it home.”
Lucy lay in the wreck of everything she had thought this day would be.
Listening to Italy pour out of the man under her cheek.
Plans and colors and his father’s face. She felt happiness of a kind she had no previous entry for.
Vast and noisy and slightly sore. Her eyes drifted, heavy, gold-washed, across the sleeping library.
And found, beyond the reach of the firelight, in the deep shadow of the far shelves, standing ajar into blackness, the shelf-door.
Memory detonated.
Lucy sat bolt upright out of the ecstatic heap so fast that Lorenzo made a sound as if he had been shot.
She paid it no mind at all. The whole night before the knocking came flooding back in one wave.
The candle. The skirting. The little worn sword in its ring.
The clunk in the bones of the house. The cold breath out of the black seam.
She had walked away from it to fetch a lantern, and a man had knocked and the world had ended and begun, and she had forgotten. She had forgotten. The discovery of the age had gone clean out of her head because the boat on the river had come back for her. And … Faith!
“Lucia?” He was up on one elbow, hair wrecked, alarm arriving through the wreckage of bliss. “What—”
“The wall.”
Her voice came out strange to her own ears, high and bright. She was already up, snatching for clothing, seizing his shirt because it was nearest and hauling it over her head, wrestling her arms through his sleeves.
“Lorenzo. Before you came. Tonight, past midnight, in the secret room, I dropped a page, and I went down after it with the candle, and the skirting, the baseboards, and there was a hollow, worn down to a breath, worn by fingers, Lorenzo, centuries of fingers, the sigil. The same one. The sword in the ring, the one that opens the shelf.”
She was pulling him up now with both hands. He was rising, half-dressed, wholly bewildered, only beginning to hear her.
“I pressed it. And the wall opened. Behind the desk, a seam cracked wide, and there is cold air coming up out of it, cave air, old air, and stairs, I think, going down, and that is why I had the lantern. I was fetching the lantern when you knocked, and then you were on my steps in the rain saying the only words in the world that could have made me forget it, and I forgot it, I forgot it, and—”
She stopped. His face had gone somewhere she had only seen it go once before.
Every drop of the languor was gone out of it. He stood half into his breeches in the dying firelight with his lips parted and his eyes blazing black. His voice, when it came, came out on almost no breath at all.
“Where the stone was born,” said Lorenzo, “there is the door.”
“There is a door,” said Lucy. “There is a door, amore, under this house, under our feet, it was here the whole time, and I do not know what is at the bottom of it, but I know what might be.”
The last wild thought went through her like a rocket going up.
The thought that had her bare feet already turning.
The thought she would examine for accuracy some other year.
That she might yet do it after all. That she might yet walk down into the dark of her own house and put Excalibur into this man’s two hands.
She seized the lantern off the floor.
“Come and see,” said Lucy Carroway, and she went flying back across her own library, lantern held high, trailing lamplight and the tails of his shirt.
The man she loved was three steps behind her and gaining.
The shelf-door swung wide under her hand.
Beyond it, in the little room, the black seam stood waiting where she had left it, breathing its cold breath into the secret room. Patient.
The dark below breathed out to meet them as they swung the door open.