Games of Pleasure (7 page)

His fingers smoothed over her hair, feather-soft strokes at the temple. “You read books about astronomy before you were twelve?”

“No, but I saw the sky through a telescope and was told all about it. Jupiter has four moons. Saturn has seven. To learn about the stars was like a revelation to me, a miracle. Before that the sky was just a spangled quilt holding down the earth. Afterward it was as if I could lose myself in that huge infinity whenever I needed to.”

“Do you still wish to lose yourself?”

She sat up, but his hand only slid down to rest loosely on her hip, his fingers dark and strong and gentle against her white flesh, the bones gleaming in the faint sheen from the window.

“There are over a thousand stars,” she said. “Every one of them is a sun and each lies at the center of its own system of planets. I've always taken comfort in that.”

“In the perfection of Creation?”

“No, not that. In its infinite indifference, perhaps. When I was little I thought the universe must be perfect, but even our sun has dark stains on it. The marks grow and shrink as if cinders were being randomly tossed up from a furnace.”

His palm stroked up her spine as if he would shape her back in his memory. His fingers began to play idly with her hair. “That doesn't detract from its perfection.”

Miracle tipped back her head and closed her eyes. “Did you ever look at the stars when you were a boy?”

He hesitated for only a moment before he replied. “I used to creep out alone at night sometimes to stand on the roof of the Fortune Tower at Wyldshay. Not only to look, but to listen.”

“Listen?”

“My ears strained for the thin, high music that the planets sing as they revolve in their orbits. Some nights I even thought that I heard it.”

“Perhaps you did.”

He reached to take the brush from the bedside table. “Or perhaps the wind sang just so in the wires on the flagpole, or the breeze simply echoed its sighs around the gargoyles and battlements.”

“No. You heard the music of the spheres. It's a lonely enough melody.”

“I was hardly lonely. I had a brother and sisters and lived in a house full of servants.”

He began to smooth the tangles from her hair. Long strokes flowed from her scalp to her waist. Little tingles of pleasure danced after them, as if she were melting under his care.

“Yet you still strained to hear that forbidden song,” she said. “Your soul reached for the harmony of the cosmos. It's our best escape from chaos.”

“I wouldn't have put it quite like that, but perhaps all children make time for such things, even when life demands otherwise.”

“You were born the heir to a dukedom,” she said. “They must have demanded a great deal.”

He brushed her hair in silence for a few minutes. Tingling with pleasure at his touch, Miracle stared at the little rectangle of sky and the remote majesty of the king of the gods.

“Were you lonely as a child?” he asked at last. “When you learned about the stars?”

“Ah!” she said. “Never mind about me.”

He set aside the brush and began to braid her hair in careful fingers, then unfastened the ribbon at her throat to use for a tie. “You're perfection,” he said.

“Don't say that!”

“Why not? The curve of your back glimmers flawlessly in the starlight. Your skin seems almost translucent, as if you were a spirit of beauty sent merely to torment me.”

She turned to look down at him, at his dark eyes and tumbled hair, the broad chest and lovely male throat. With one fingertip he slowly traced the profile of her breast and nipple, as if he painted her in starlight. The sensitive tip puckered as sensation plummeted down to her groin.

“I torment you?” she asked.

“Only with the promise of more bliss.”

Miracle gazed down at him, his splendor blurred by starlight and the wavering haze of sudden tears. She took the ribbon from his fingers and caught his face in both hands to whisper against the loveliness of his mouth.

“I'm no wraith, my lord, just a woman—”

He stopped her words with his kiss. Miracle met his tongue with her own, then slid her thigh over his as she pinned his hands above his head in both of hers. His arousal reared hard against her belly. Slowly, exquisitely, she retreated from the terrifying chasm that had begun to yawn at her feet, and began to ravish him again.

 

 

RYDER woke with the bedclothes wrapped about his legs like a shroud. He fought free of them, only to grip his pounding head in both hands. Daylight flooded the room. Not the pearly light of early dawn. Bright, broad daylight. A clatter of activity floated up from the inn yard.

Though the light assaulted his eyes, he forced himself to look around the room. Harsh yellow beams bounced around the walls to illuminate the cold grate and the cheap furnishings. The fire had gone out. He sat up.

She was gone.

A fly buzzed lazily over the cold food on the table.

She was gone
. For a moment he didn't know if he could bear it.

He dropped his head back against the pillows and pressed both palms over his eyes. Memories swirled, a whirlpool of colored sensation. His tongue, his legs, his back, his whole body ached sweetly: a deep physical exhaustion, as if he had been drained of his soul. His head ached—not sweetly at all—as if a steam hammer had been set to push his brain from his skull.

Devil take it, how much wine had it taken? How many bottles to find the courage to make love to a stranger against all of his better judgment?

She had seduced him. Yet in the end the responsibility had been his. He had mouthed platitudes about honor and duty. Then he hadn't hesitated to exploit the vulnerability of a woman who had barely escaped drowning only a few hours before, a woman whose husband had beaten her and abandoned her to die.

In a blind search for comfort she, too, had made love with a stranger and even shared a few painfully deep personal insights. Obviously she regretted it. And so she had left.

Though she was right, of course. To wake together would have presented them both with the awkwardness of facing what they had done.

His hands shook as a rush of pain dampened his palms. Not the pain of too much wine. The pain of self-disgust. She had asked him for a loan. She had been desperate to leave. Claiming it was only for her benefit, he had insisted that she spend the night with him.

Had he known in his heart of hearts that he was trapping her into sharing his bed? If so, then he despised himself for his duplicity. Yet how could he regret the bliss he had experienced?

He had told her that he wasn't a virgin. True enough as far as it went. He knew now that he'd had no more knowledge or skill than any callow boy. She had used her mouth to take him to the brink of madness. She had used her hands. Her tongue. Her legs. Her breasts. Her body. She had hesitated at nothing, done things he had never dared imagine, taken him to places he hadn't known existed—and kindled an insatiable potency.

That, perhaps, was easy enough to understand: the irresistible demands of the body. Yet they had also talked, like lovers or soul mates, lost in shared dreams of stars and childhood.

God! Why had he told her about those naive boyhood vigils on the roof of the Fortune Tower? He had not thought about any of that in years. He never went up to the rooftops at Wyldshay any longer. Yet he remembered as if it were yesterday when he had first thought that he heard Mercury's high singing and the base note of Saturn thrumming in harmony. That had been the very tail end of his boyhood, before he had fully realized that there was no place in his future for fantasy.

But she had woken to regret everything and so she had fled. Tearing his heart from his chest and carrying it with her?

Perhaps he had gone mad? For even in the height of his passion, his intellect had coolly recognized the level of his foolhardiness: Lord Ryderbourne, fascination and bane of society, had allowed a chance-met stranger to lay open his soul.

Was this obsession? Was this what had driven Sir Lancelot to betray his country, his king, his best friend?

Ryder forced himself from the bed and walked naked to the window. Dried sweat salted his skin. His hair was stuck to his head. He was sheened with musk and the scent of orange and lavender.

His clothes lay stacked neatly on a chair. The clothes he had bought for her were gone. She had taken them, at least—and his cloak, apparently.

She was, of course, forsworn. He would never know the truth about her now, nor be able to help her. Yet as neatly as if she had tied it up in her black velvet ribbon, she had made him a gift of his inexperience and his hypocrisy, instead.

What the hell had he given her in return?

Ryder strode back to his abandoned trousers and felt in the pocket. His purse was still there. He tipped coins onto the table. She had taken nothing, except the clothes and his cloak. So she was penniless. Was she fleeing back along the coast straight into the hands of a husband who had already tried to murder her?

He filled his glass with the remains of the wine from the previous night. Wealth could buy almost anything. Alas, that it could not buy a man sense! It could not even buy him honor. Ryder tossed back the wine, tugged on his trousers, strode to the door, and flung it open.

At his shout a man came running: Jenkins, who was taking care of his gelding, but who also owned the inn.

“Send up hot water and my riding clothes,” Ryder said. “Send the maids to clear away all of this mess and bring breakfast. Saddle my horse to be ready for me in half an hour. You may send the reckoning for everything to me at Wyldshay.”

The man tugged at his forelock. “Yes, my lord.”

Ryder turned back into the room. Something small and white caught his attention. He stared at it: One white satin slipper lay curled at the edge of the bed.

“My lord?”

He looked up. Jenkins still hovered at the door. “Yes?” Ryder said. “What is it?”

“And the lady's reckoning, my lord? We'll send that as well, shall we?”

“What reckoning?”

Jenkins stepped back, visibly anxious. “For the horse and saddle, my lord. For the victuals. For the extra clothes and the lady's riding boots and the gloves and the hat and all—and the saddlebags to carry everything. For a guide to take her straight to the London road. The lady said it was all by your orders.”

“A
horse
?”

“She said she couldn't use a hired nag, my lord, and be certain of it being returned. She purchased my daughter's saddle outright, too. She said it was all right, whatever it might cost, saddle horses for a lady being so hard to come by now that we've lost all our trade to the landslide.”

Ryder stared at him, almost incredulous. “What the devil horse did you sell her?”

“The very best I had left, my lord: that big chestnut with the bald face and the white patch like the map of Ireland on his rump. Though the lady said she didn't quite like the look of him, that horse'll go many miles without tiring and he's gentle as a lamb. Then there was the decent plain habit, the nice brown wool with the black trim that my daughter had new just last winter, and all the other necessities to go with it. But now—what with our business mostly gone—it's not easy for us to replace, my lord. Yet the lady said not to worry, just to charge it all to your account, even the rope hobbles.”

“Hobbles?”

“Yes, my lord. Like the Gypsies use. So the horse can't run away when he's turned loose to graze.”

Hilarity caught him like a punch from an unseen assailant, doubling him over. Lord Ryderbourne, son and heir to the Duke of Blackdown, stood half naked in a tattered bedroom in the most rundown inn in Dorset. It was as obvious as daylight what had happened in the bed.

Nevertheless, the minions of the Merry Monarch had, as always, leaped to obey his orders—even when conveyed by the unknown woman with whom he had shared the wildest night of his life.

He threw back his head and laughed till he ached. No word of any of this would ever leave the village, but who could blame an innkeeper if he charged that duke's son an arm and a leg for his silence and his services?

None of the servants looked at him askance as the room was cleared, the table cleaned, the bed stripped of its tangle of sheets. Alice and Mary brought copious amounts of hot water and his own riding clothes, cleaned and pressed. Knowing she would be generously rewarded for her labors, a laundry woman must have been up half the night.

As soon as Ryder had washed and dressed, his hair still damp from its plunge into warm water, Jenkins brought in a tray with coffee, eggs, beef, and bacon. Thirty minutes later, free of any visible trace of his night's adventures, Ryder sat at the window and stared out over the village to the beach.

The boats were gone, taken out for the day's fishing. A million tasks awaited him at Wyldshay, a burden of work as great in its way as that of the villagers, perhaps greater. Jenkins walked the black gelding up and down in the inn yard. Yet Ryder sat as if paralyzed, while thoughts swirled in his head.

She had left him one satin slipper.

He stood up with a curse and strode to the door. Even if he went after her, she had several hours' head start. If she had wished for further help from him, she would have stayed and asked for it. Instead she was forsworn. She had broken her clear promise.

The episode was over. He would very probably never see her again. He had a life of his own that demanded all of his time.