His brown eyes shaded to violet at the edges, warm as velvet. “I know.” His thumb rubbed against her cheekbone. “Honest Emma.”
Of all the epithets he had offered to provide her, that had to be the least flattering of the lot.
Emma grimaced. “Make me immortal, Emma, with plain-speaking? That doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”
His fingers found a bit of hair that had escaped from her bandeau. He smoothed it back behind her ear. Emma closed her eyes and let herself lean into his touch, just a little bit. Just for the moment.
“You said you didn’t want to launch ships.”
No, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to be just a little bit of an object of romantic desire. Someday. For someone.
Oh, well.
Emma abruptly sat up, her hair tangling in his fingers. “No, I just—”
She had been about to say sit on them, and maybe make a silly comment about something to do with not launching ships, but the words caught in her throat as her nose bumped his.
She went very still.
She could feel his fingers caught in her hair, the muscles of his arm tense beneath her hand, frozen, just as she was. She should, she knew, wiggle away, move back, laugh, say something.
Her voice came out half whisper, half squeak. “Augustus?”
“Emma?” he said, and she could feel the brush of his breath like a caress against her lips.
It wasn’t, she thought, entirely reassuring that he sounded as entirely befuddled as she felt.
“I—” she began, and broke off, because she didn’t have the least idea of what she was trying to say, or why she was trying to say anything at all.
His lips brushed hers, so softly she might have imagined it.
She should open her eyes, she knew. But there was something terribly seductive about the darkness, something drugging and dreamlike.
As in a dream, her hands moved without conscious volition, threading up through his hair, as tentative as his lips, learning as they went, following the curve of his scalp like someone embarking in twilight on an unfamiliar path through winter woods, warm and cold at the same time, fascinated and hesitant, white snow and dark trees, light and shade all mixed up together.
His hands cupped her face, not coercing or forcing, not pushing or demanding, but cradling. If he had pushed or demanded, she might have pulled away.
But he didn’t.
Chapter 18
Close your lips; don’t speak me fair;
Those wordy vows are but pure air.
My port is yours, my friendship free,
In simple camaraderie.
—Emma Delagardie and Augustus Whittlesby,
Americanus: A Masque in Three Parts
She smelled like violets and musk, innocence and experience, all rolled into one.
Augustus nuzzled the side of Emma’s face with his nose, breathing in the scent of her, so familiar and yet strangely heady at such close quarters, like perfume in its purest and distilled form, or spirits drunk straight.
She blinked at him, like one half asleep, eyes blurred and unfocused. She looked adorable that way, hair tousled, cheeks flushed. He had seen her flustered before, flustered, tousled, blustering, but never like this, soft around the corners.
“I don’t think—” she said hoarsely.
Augustus put a finger to her lips. “Yes, you do,” he said fondly. “All the time.”
Gently, he brushed his finger across her lips. For a moment, he thought she might argue, her lips parted as though to speak, but only air came out. Her eyelids flickered closed, lilac paint making purple shadows.
“Emma,” Augustus said, tasting the name on his tongue, invocation and question all in one. This was Emma and it wasn’t, commonplace and strange all at the same time, like a familiar landscape viewed from a new angle. What was the line? Suffer a sea change to something rich and strange.
Rich and strange, indeed. Her lips were soft and slightly parted beneath his finger, her breath a benediction on his skin. So many discussions they had had, so many conversations, so many arguments, and he had never imagined her lips would feel like this, like crinkled satin, smooth and soft to touch.
How had he known her without knowing this?
In fact, all of her was soft, from the whispery fabric of her dress to the bare skin of her arm beneath the small, puffed sleeve of her dress. The costly muslin of her dress felt coarse next to the silk of her skin, coarse and crude, the clumsy work of man a poor second to the wonders of nature. He skimmed his hand lightly up her arm, feeling the goose pimples rise beneath his fingers. He had dismissed her as skinny once, but there was flesh on her bones, soft, feminine flesh that quivered with the passage of his touch.
He ran his knuckles along the border of her bodice, once so seemingly low, now far too high.
“Emma,” he said again, and leaned in to kiss her.
“Don’t.” Emma jerked sharply sideways. Augustus’s lips grazed hair. “Augustus—don’t.”
Augustus spat out a blond hair that had attached itself to his tongue. “Emma?”
Using both hands, she held his head away from her. Her small hands had surprising strength in them. “No. Please.”
Augustus pulled back. “Of course. Whatever you say.” Seeing her look at him that way made him feel like the meanest sort of cad. Worse than a cad. Someone like Marston. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t.” Clumsily, she scrambled off his lap, her elbow digging hard into his chest as she pushed away. Her voice was muffled by the movement. “That’s just the problem.”
“That’s not—” Augustus broke off, befuddled.
He’d been going to say that wasn’t what he meant, but he’d be damned if he knew what he did mean. All he knew was that his lap felt very empty without Emma in it. His mind was still scrambling to catch up with his body.
His body, meanwhile, wanted to catch up with Emma.
“Emma, I don’t know what to say. I—”
Turning away, Emma yanked at her bodice. A few tugs, and she had hoisted the fabric higher than it had ever been meant to go. “It’s quite all right,” she said. She wouldn’t look him in the eye but concentrated on righting her bodice. “You don’t have to say anything. I understand.”
He was glad someone did. He sure as hell didn’t.
Augustus shoved himself up off the rounded keel of the rowboat, his movements stiff and awkward. “Emma—”
Turning, she shook out her skirts, rousting out creases with unnecessary force. “Shall we go back to the house? It must be nearly time for supper. Are you hungry?”
Hungry? Food was the last thing on his mind.
Emma kept up a steady flow of chatter. “It won’t be anything fancy; it never is at Malmaison. Bonaparte likes to be simple in the country—the Emperor, I mean. I can’t seem to remember to call him that.”
“Wait.” Augustus plunged desperately into the gap left by a semisecond’s silence. “That’s it?”
“What’s it?”
“This. Us. Now.” It wasn’t his most articulate moment.
“There isn’t an us.” She fiddled with her rings, turning a cluster of diamonds around and around and around. “It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend. I know this isn’t about me.”
His body disagreed. It thought it was very much about her. He could still feel the press of her against the crook of his arm and more distracting places, like an impression left in wax.
Emma took his silence as assent. “It’s just that I was here,” she said earnestly. “I do understand, you know. You were hurt. You wanted comforting.”
No. Yes. Maybe?
Augustus shoved his hair back away from his face. “Emma—”
She smiled a rueful smile. “Right now, I imagine any warm body would do. Mine just happened to be here.” Turning, she ducked beneath a painted proscenium, maneuvering around a miniature version of the leaning tower of Pisa. “Shall we take the side door? It’s faste
r.”
Augustus grabbed for her, catching her hand. “Not so fast.”
Her hand felt painfully frail in his, tiny bones in tiny fingers, the massive stones of her rings biting into his palms, the last defense of a kingdom unprepared for siege.
“Yes?”
Now that he had her attention, he didn’t know what to do with it. What was he supposed to tell her? You’re not just a warm body? In fact, you’re rather chilly? Or Yes, this was all about Jane, but you’re not so bad yourself?
Brilliant, Augustus, brilliant. One could launch ships with that.
Brusquely, he said, “Don’t sell yourself short.”
Emma’s eyes fell to their joined hands. “I’m not.” She closed her eyes and then opened them again. “I’m just being…realistic. It’s a natural reaction, to seek consolation. How can I fault you for that? I’ve done it too.”
“Have you?” Augustus’s reaction was visceral and negative. He didn’t like the thought of that, not one bit. It had probably been Marston, the bastard, based on all accounts. He had never heard Emma’s name linked with anyone else’s, not in that way at any rate. Flirtations, yes; courtships, naturally; but an affair? Only Marston.
He hated the thought of Emma in Marston’s arms, her tiny form engulfed in his embrace, Marston’s hands in her hair, on her shoulders, her breasts.
She nodded, but didn’t elaborate. “So you see, I do understand.”
Augustus wished she would stop understanding. “Yes, but…”
“Well, then,” Emma said, as though that answered everything. She smiled at him, the smile she wore in Paris, the bright, fake smile that went with her paste jewelry and glittery garments. It looked very out of place with her snagged gown and tousled hair. “We only have two days left to rehearse. I do hope Kort manages to remember his lines this time.”
Damn Kort and his lines. “It doesn’t matter what he says,” Augustus said shortly. “They would applaud if he recited the alphabet.”
“I don’t think we’re quite so desperate as all that.” Emma twisted open a door Augustus hadn’t even seen. It opened onto a short path between the theatre and gallery that ran along the right side of the house, a faster and more convenient route than going all the way around to the front. “We should have some semblance of a play by Saturday.”
Augustus caught the door just before it closed. He twisted through, hurrying after her. For a small person, Emma moved quickly, her dress whispering against her legs, her sandals slapping gently against the close-cut grass.
“Emma, wait.” Augustus caught her just as she reached for the door handle. He twisted himself into the gap, wedging himself between her and the door. “Shouldn’t we”—he couldn’t believe he was saying this—“talk?”
He caught her off her guard. The eyes she lifted to his were vulnerable, confused. “Talk?”
“About what happened.”
Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find it. Her mask clamped down again, more effective than any amount of maquillage.
“Oh, Augustus. You are sweet.” It was her fake voice again, the society voice, like too-sweet champagne, sweet on the surface but cloying in quantity. Rising on her tiptoes, she pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. He caught a whiff of her perfume, musk and violets. “There’s no need, though. Friends?”
“Friends,” he echoed.
They were friends, friends in a way he hadn’t been friends since his early days at Cambridge and maybe not even then. He hadn’t counted anyone as friend for a long, long time. Not even Jane. Jane had been a poet’s fancy. A poet’s fancy and a very reliable colleague. They had trusted one another with their lives, but never with their inner selves.
They were friends, but that wasn’t the heart of it, what had happened between them here, now.
“Emma—”
“Good. I shouldn’t have wanted to lose you.” Her eyes seemed too large for her face, the kohl rimming them jarringly dark against her fair skin. With an attempt at a smile, she said, “Who else would provide me with adverbs?”
With that parting shot, she swung away, yanking open the door to the gallery with a decidedly dramatic flourish.
And froze.
Rather than the empty room they had anticipated, the gallery thronged with a collection of women in expensive evening dress and men in brightly colored uniforms. Servants scurried to lay out refreshments, while empty glasses were already accumulating on all available surfaces.
It wasn’t just the cast of the masque anymore. Their brief interlude of privacy was over.
Over Emma’s shoulder, Augustus saw a woman in white raise a languid hand in greeting, calling out, in an unmistakable Creole drawl, “Emma, my dear! We had wondered where you had got to.”
Chapter 19
Beset, besieged from every side,
I run, I flee, I look to hide
But where shall I some shelter find?
What solace from my own weak mind?
—Emma Delagardie and Augustus Whittlesby,
Americanus: A Masque in Three Parts
Madame Bonaparte!” Emma dropped into a curtsy. The door swung shut behind her as she released it, banging her in the backside. “I hadn’t thought you were to be here until tomorrow.”
A dozen or so sets of eyes turned in her direction, identified the new arrival, and slid away again, back to their own conversations and pursuits. Adele gave a wave before turning back to the man at whom she was fluttering her lashes, one of the naval officers who had been impressed into the production to play a naval officer. Jane was at the far end of the room, in conversation with Kort.
Jane, whom Augustus thought he loved.
Did love. Had loved? Emma wasn’t sure of anything anymore, least of all the untrustworthy ramblings of the human heart.
Behind her, the door remained closed. Augustus must have slipped around the other way, leaving her to greet Mme. Bonaparte alone.
That had been good of him, she told herself. He had done the prudent thing. To have entered the room together, looking as she did, would have been tantamount to an announcement of an affair. Neither of them wanted that. It would be embarrassing for her, more embarrassing for her than for him. In the eyes of the insular circle that had formed around the First Consul and his wife, she would be either the predator, the bored matron who had taken a poet for a lover, or the prey, the wealthy widow being seduced for her patronage.
Why, then, did she feel quite so shunned?
She felt cold. Cold and tired and strangely wobbly. It had taken more strength than she would have thought to laugh and smile and pretend—because it was pretense—that she didn’t care. It had been even harder to make him stop.
She hadn’t wanted him to stop. Not one little bit. Not at all. It wasn’t just in her lips that she still felt his touch; it was everywhere, memory blurring with memory, awakening desires she thought she had pushed aside long ago, blurred memories of lips and hands and panting breath, sweat and skin and tangled hair.
Only this time, it wasn’t Paul’s face or Paul’s hands that memory provided to her.
Idiot, Emma told herself, and crossed the room to lower herself into the curtsy that the new court etiquette made de rigueur, even at harum-scarum Malmaison, the curtsy that once would have been an embrace.
Mme. Bonaparte raised her up.
“Emma.” A powdered cheek drifted across hers, bringing with it the distinctive scent of roses and rouge that always made Emma feel as though she were fourteen again, accompanying Hortense home from school for a rare weekend away. It had always been a treat to come stay with Mme. Bonaparte, in a house with no routines and no rules, where one might breakfast on sweetmeats and spend the day lollygagging with a novel or grubbing in the garden, just as one chose. “My dear girl.”
Emma felt tears well up in the back of her throat, silly, pointless tears. She had come to Mme. Bonaparte and Malmaison when her marriage with Paul had failed and then again, seeking peace and solitude after the brief madn
ess of her affair with Marston. And here she was again, nearly twenty-five and no wiser, with the scent of roses and rouge, entangling herself where she shouldn’t, playing roulette with her heart and making a general mess of everything.
“Of all surprises, this is the most pleasant,” Emma said, making no effort to hide the moisture in her eyes. Mme. Bonaparte cried easily herself, although only when she stood in no danger of ruining her rouge. She would think they were tears of joy, and be flattered. “I’ve missed you so, Madame.”
Mme. Bonaparte beamed the warmth of her famous close-lipped smile on Emma, well pleased. “We came down early. I couldn’t wait to see how you were getting on.”
“Famously,” Emma said quickly. “We’re getting on famously, especially with Mr. Whittlesby to help with the verse.”
Why had she felt the need to mention him? She might as well take out a column in Le Moniteur, with the heading, “Lady kisses poet. Both agree it meant nothing.”
That wasn’t entirely true. If there had been any kissing, it had gone the other way. He had kissed her, not the other way around.
What did it matter? It had been an aberration. It wasn’t happening again. Friends. They were friends, that was all. Friendship meant more than passion in the long run; she of all people should know that.
Mme. Bonaparte didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. “It was terribly clever of you to hire a poet,” she said complacently. “So much more sensible than trying to write it all yourself. But, my dear, what have you been doing to yourself? You look as though you’ve been playing in the dirt!”
Emma ducked her chin, trying to see down her own front. Her white muslin dress was no longer quite so white. “Oh. Dear.” She looked up at Mme. Bonaparte. “I was backstage in the theatre, trying to put together one of Mr. Fulton’s machines. I’m afraid the floor wasn’t the cleanest.”