Simeon kicked the man closest to him so hard that the convict flew back against the wall of the yacht. In a swift, swirling circle he sent the other four spinning to the deck, one after another. Isidore wrenched open the door and flew at Simeon. His muscled arms closed around her and he threw himself backward, overboard.
They struck the water with such force that Simeon’s arms spun away from Isidore’s waist. Icy water closed over her face and her heavy skirts pulled her down into the acid-tasting water as effectively as if she had stones in her pockets.
Something brushed her face and she thought of waterlogged corpses rescued by the Dead Watch. Frantically, she beat her arms, trying to rise to the surface, but she couldn’t counteract the plummeting weight of all those diamonds.
Then, like a benediction, like a prayer, Simeon’s strong arms closed around her and he pulled her upward with a strong, smooth stroke. Isidore broke the surface, choking and gasping for breath.
“Easy,” he said, holding her up. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”
“I—I thought—”
He gave her a hard, swift kiss. “I want you out of the river.” And without another word he began towing her through the water as if she were no heavier than a babe. Isidore had just enough time to be confusedly grateful for Simeon’s passion for running and the strength it gave him. (Turquoise Coat would have left her to sink or, rather, he would have plummeted down right next to her.)
Then they were at the shore, where a hundred helping hands reached out to them. Simeon was up in a flash, turning around to pull Isidore up the bank. Her skirts seemed ten times heavier than they had been, and the weight of water and jewels made the silk of her overskirts stretch past her feet, tripping her. Finally Simeon just bent down, picked her up in his arms and walked up the slope.
Everyone on the bank was screaming and howling “Hurrah!” The noise was deafening. Isidore felt a sudden breeze, took one appalled glance down, and realized that the diamond-encrusted cloth of her bodice had given up its battle with gravity and had fallen below her nipples. She looked up, horrified, and met Simeon’s eyes. He was laughing.
A second later they were on the bankside, and Simeon wrapped a coat tightly around her. “I can’t let all of London know what they’re missing,” he said into her ear.
“Oh, Simeon,” she said, hiccupping, half-crying. “He struck you, Simeon. He struck you and I couldn’t do anything to stop him.”
“You did stop him,” Simeon said. “I might have died, but for you.”
“And then we were in the water,” Isidore said with another hiccup, “and I was going down, and all I could think of was the Dead Watch and how they would gloat when they were sent to find my body.”
“Never,” he said, his arms tightening around her. “I would never allow that to happen.”
“Don’t ever let them be the ones to rescue my body, Simeon,” she said. “Promise me.”
“You’re not going to drown. Ever.”
She put her head against his chest and listened to the strong beat of his heart. They were safe. Tears slid slowly down her cheeks.
He said something she couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“Don’t you see how lucky we are, Isidore?”
“Yes,” she said, a little damply. Her heart was still pounding with fear, even now she was in the warm circle of his arms.
He pulled back and cupped her face in his hands. “We’re like your parents, sweetheart. If one of us is going to be lost, both of us will go. I would never, ever stop searching for you if our boat overturned.”
Then he was kissing her, the kind of possessive, loving kiss that she’d seen her father give her mother a hundred times. Tears welled out of her eyes, and Isidore wound her arms around Simeon’s neck and held on as tightly as she could, even as her tears made him a little wetter than he already was.
It sounded as if the cheers grew even louder when he lowered his head to hers again…but maybe that was just her imagination.
Two minutes later, Simeon picked her up again and carried her through the crowd, regardless of her wet, heavy dress trailing behind them. Isidore hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening around her, but when the groomsmen closed the carriage door behind them and Simeon deposited her on a seat, she looked about. She was placed in the most luxurious carriage she had ever ridden in, upholstered in red velvet with gold coronets sprinkled everywhere. The horses started and she could hardly feel the motion, so sweetly was the coach designed and calibrated.
“Where are we?” she asked, half laughing.
Simeon was wrestling off his wet shirt and didn’t look up. “The Duke of Buckingham’s carriage.”
“A royal carriage,” she said, watching him under her eyelashes. Her breath felt hot in her chest. Surely he couldn’t mean to…
He did mean precisely that.
Because a second later Simeon was tenderly peeling her drenched bodice down to her waist. There were red marks on her skin left by the diamonds as she struck the surface of the water. He kissed every little bruise, moving down her body like a man who knew exactly where those kisses were most needed.
And though Isidore had never imagined such a thing was possible—making love in a carriage, let alone a prince’s carriage!—she found herself laying back on red velvet upholstery as her husband deftly woke her body into the same trembling, vibrating state she had experienced on the yacht.
“We shouldn’t,” she whispered at some point, and lost her train of thought when a wave of pleasure swept her into a place where words were impossible.
And when he thrust into her, she plummeted into a state where she could do nothing but sob for the pure pleasure of it.
Simeon’s body begged him to follow her, but instead he chose to make love to Isidore slowly. It was only by kissing her, by stroking her, by stroking in her, that he could tell her in a way that scorched the truth into both their hearts.
Finally, he couldn’t keep to his slow rhythm. He began pumping hard and fast, keeping his eyes open so he could see the way she strained to meet him, the way she gasped and cried out, the sheer beauty of her eyes and mouth.
The carriage rocked as it rounded a corner, and the sensation just increased their pleasure. “Simeon,” Isidore gasped, “we must be nearly home.”
“I told them not to open the door,” he said, but he could feel his control slipping away.
“Simeon!” Isidore cried, pulling his body even deeper inside her own, forcing him to throw away the remnants of his control and surrender to something wilder and more beautiful. Something that left Isidore crying ( just a little), and Simeon’s eyes misty ( just a little).
In the moments that followed, broken only by their whispered endearments, he realized something his heart already knew. They were partners. She would always make impulsive decisions and he would make slow, reasoned ones. He would always be a little terrified that she would look at him with the scorn he saw in his mother’s eyes. And she would always be a little terrified that he would look at her and not love her enough.
In short, they were made for each other.
He thought of eloquent things he should say, all the tenderness and passion and hope in his chest, and distilled it to one sentence. “I love you.”
She kissed him. And kissed him.
“Whither thou goest,” he said to her, in a voice so quiet that she could hardly hear it over the clattering wheels. “There will I go too.”
Chapter Forty-two
St. James’s Palace
London
April 10, 1784
It wasn’t until two weeks afterward that Isidore understood the whole of what happened. She hadn’t realized that most of London saw their daring escape, and Simeon’s rescue of her. Nor that the King himself watched Simeon carry her from the water and kiss her afterwards, and then swore that he would never listen to another solicitor bleating on about one of his noblemen being mad, let alone annul a marriage on those
grounds.
She didn’t understand that by knocking out the ringleaders of the prisoners’ rebellion, Simeon had enabled the king’s guards to trounce the uprising. And she certainly didn’t envision her husband being summoned to St. James’s Palace for a public proclamation of the nation’s gratitude, during which the Duke of Cosway declared that any success was the result of working together with his duchess.
It was the ball following the king’s declaration, and Isidore hadn’t seen her husband for at least an hour. She kept glancing over her dancing partners’ shoulders, wondering where he might be. She had developed a horror of the silver gown, and so Lucille had carefully removed all the diamonds—the ones that weren’t left behind in the mud of the Thames—and sewn them onto a presentation gown.
But she hadn’t chosen to wear that tonight; in fact, she thought it might be a long time before she chose to wear diamonds again. Her gown was a pale rose-colored velvet with Chantilly lace, and she wore it with a fortune in tiger rubies.
Her former suitors were out in force. Most of them hadn’t lost hope that she would find herself disaffected with Simeon. Even if she weren’t planning to annul her marriage, they hoped that she might turn to one of them by way of consoling herself for her husband’s eccentricities. They smiled, capered and bowed…She felt overwhelmed by their florid scent, by the way they “accidentally” brushed her chest, by the way their teeth showed when they smiled.
Somehow she’d decided that a man should smile gravely, smell faintly like cardamom soap, and touch her breasts only in the privacy of the marital bedchamber.
The nature of marriage is such that a woman no sooner formulates rules of this nature…than they are broken.
The Earl of Bisselbate was just bowing before her, flourishing his hand as if he were a peasant sowing seeds (Isidore thought uncharitably), when suddenly another hand touched her shoulder. She jumped and turned. Simeon. She smiled up at him, not even noticing that the earl had straightened and was expectantly holding out his hand to lead her into the dance.
“Simeon,” she breathed. “Where have you been?”
“The king had a private request,” he said, smiling down at her. “It seems the queen has taken a liking to tiger rubies.”
The earl cleared his throat.
“Do forgive me,” Isidore said, turning reluctantly back to her escort. “I—”
“As your Baalomaal,” Simeon said…His voice was low and meant for only her ears.
Without a second’s thought, Isidore sank backwards, throwing a hand to her brow, knowing that Simeon would catch her, feeling his arms go around her. “Oh!” she cried. “I feel so faint! It must be the heat.”
Simeon was laughing silently. He carried her swiftly through the chattering nobles, out the door and down one of the myriad corridors of St. James’s Palace.
Isidore lay her head against his chest, loving the strong beat of his heart, not bothering to ask what the danger was. Simeon was with her. All would be well.
A few moments later he whisked her through a door. It was a velvety dark space. He put her on her feet.
“Simeon?” she asked. It felt as if they were in a very small room. “Where are we?”
“A closet,” he said. “But there’s room to lie down…in case you felt like it.”
She laughed, but he fell to his knees, and pulled up her skirts. She put her hands on his powerful shoulders, bracing herself against the intoxicating little kisses that were burning a path up her legs.
“But, Simeon,” she gasped, feeling her knees weaken, knowing that in a moment she’d be lying on the floor of a broom closet in the king’s own palace. “I thought you would use that word baalomaal only in moments of great danger.”
He didn’t choose to answer until her breath was coming quickly and she was leaning against the wall, uttering broken little moans. Then he stood up, stripped off his coat, and put it on the floor. It was a magnificent coat, worked by Villiers’s own embroiderer, black roses on deep brown…It was also soft and made an excellent improvised bed.
A moment later Simeon was kissing his wife’s inner thigh again, and Isidore was having trouble keeping her mind on the conversation.
“There was danger,” he said, but only when she wasn’t sure what he was talking about anymore.
He waited until her breath was coming and going in unsteady little pants, and he was poised above her in the velvety darkness, feeling her twist up against him, begging, pleading…
Then he entered her in one swift stroke, savoring the exquisite beauty of sharing her body, her breath, her love. “Because I love you,” he said, his voice rough, the voice of a man who was come to understand that control is only worth having if it’s worth throwing away—at certain moments.
“I love you too,” she breathed, arching toward him, urging him on.
“It was a matter of some danger,” he told her.
He could feel her giggle. “Hmmm.”
The time for talking was over but he had to say it first. “Those men were in danger, Isidore. In grave danger. It makes me ache just to look at you. It makes me enraged to see other men look at you, let alone touch you.”
Her hands were sliding over his rear, inflaming him.
“You’re mine,” he said fiercely, taking her mouth in a kiss as possessive as he felt.
“I’m yours,” she said, kissing him back. “And you’re mine.”
An Epilogue
in Two Parts
Part One
The Bishop’s Study
Canterbury Cathedral
A month or so later
The Archbishop of Canterbury had to admit that the rules surrounding the reconsecration of a marriage were vague, even to him. It was hardly his fault; no one ever requested the ceremony. He spent a great deal of his time putting together couples whom he knew perfectly well were not bound for matrimonial bliss.
Now this couple probably would be blissful. Or perhaps it was better to say that they were blissful.
They had said their vows, holding tightly to each other’s hands. They’d said “I do,” with commendably loud voices.
But even so they didn’t seem to want to stop vowing things to each other.
“I’ll always love you,” the groom said. “You’re the ballast to my soul.”
“I promise to be less impulsive,” she was saying. The bishop knew what that meant. His mother had been impulsive. He sighed and wondered if they were ever leaving.
“I adore you just as you are,” the groom whispered.
Oh really.
Kissing again.
He poured himself another glass of sherry. It was going to be a long evening.
Epilogue
Part Two
Revels House
A year or so later
There was a baby crying. Simeon staggered to his feet, shocked out of the sleep of the truly exhausted. Isidore lay next to him, not even stirring. He spared a lopsided smile for his wife, loving her tangled curls and long eyelashes, the arm flung over her head, even the dark circles under her eyes.
He made it to the door, banged a knee on the bedside table, and swallowed a curse. Life seemed more chaotic all the time, and his ability to remain calm in the eye of a storm wasn’t any stronger. As he opened the door, the nanny was already halfway down the corridor. “Here’s Lucia,” she said, handing over a warm little bundle.
A small red face ringed in soft black curls looked up at him for one moment, registered that he wasn’t the milk-providing parent, and erupted back into a howl. There was no telling Lucia that she was a pebble on the shores of eternity. She was a living, breathing, adorable source of chaos, and he loved her so much that it felt as if his heart were beating outside his body.
“Hush, sweetie,” Simeon said to her, running a finger down her passionate little nose. “Mama’s sleeping…won’t you let mama sleep for just another moment or two?”
She looked at him with her mother’s huge, almond-shaped eyes. But she knew
exactly who she was in life, and exactly what she could command. She was the lady of the bedchamber, and the sitting room, and the whole of Revels House, so she opened her mouth again to make that quite clear, just in case her papa mistook the situation.
He kissed her, and gave her a last cuddle, and handed her over to her mother. Who didn’t bother with endearments, just propped herself up against the headboard and tucked Lucia exactly where she wanted to be. Simeon just lay back down when he cocked an ear, sighed, and swung his legs off the bed again.
“It hasn’t been a terrible night,” Isidore offered sleepily. “I think we had at least three hours.”
“Lovely,” he said, trying to sound grumpier than he felt.
“Dante,” the nurse said cheerfully, handing him over. “And Pietro, but he’s still half asleep and won’t mind waiting for a moment or two.”
Simeon walked back into his bedchamber, his arms full of the reasons why he had given up an attempt to remain calm. He kissed little Dante (the smallest of the three) on the nose, and handed him over.
Then he sat down holding Pietro, who opened his eyes and blinked about a little before deciding to try out his newest, most precious accomplishment.
A smile.
That was the problem with living in a clean tent on the banks of the Ganges River. There were no gummy smiles, no warm little bundles, no beautiful, impetuous wives, no responsibilities…
No life. Real life.
In other words, no love.
Historical Note
The foremost subject of this historical note must be the intrepid traveler who served as the loose model for my hero. James Bruce, a laird from Scotland, was an extraordinary Georgian gentleman who travelled throughout many remote African states, returning home to publish multiple volumes of his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. Among his other accomplishments, he discovered the source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia (not to be mistaken with the White Nile, to its west). While I made up many of my duke’s experiences, Bruce did indeed meet the Bahrnagash, whom he describes as a small man in short trousers with bare feet and a knife stuck in his girdle, and he attended the festive marriage of Princess Ayabdar, a ceremony notable for including animal sacrifice and communal sex. (Bruce had trouble believing his own eyes; he insists that the ladies were “women of family and character.”) My duke wins Bahrnagash’s respect through a race; Bruce appears to have won his approval due to his expert handling of a black steed. If you are interested in reading more about a man who is definitely an early prototype for Jack Colton, the hero of Romancing the Stone, I recommend J.M. Reid’s life of Bruce (Traveller Extraordinary: The Life of James Bruce of Kinnaird) along with Bruce’s own Travels, which is still available through print-on-demand.