It was rare for Antonia to keep to her bed for any reason, but she was glad enough to obey on that afternoon. With no need to keep up her composure for the benefit of probing eyes, she felt much less strained, and she was glad of the opportunity to continue reading the family history—both out of real interest and a desire to keep her thoughts away from Richard.
That wish, however, proved futile. Antonia had fallen asleep last night in the middle of the account of Parker Wingate’s early years, and she soon reached the section dealing with his engagement to a young French girl; Linette Dubois was, in fact, his distant cousin, and had come to stay at the castle the previous spring.
The author of the history had obviously found the young lovers’ story touching; it seemed he had discovered journals written by both of them that provided him with a wealth of details. No other section of the book was so painstakingly recounted as the brief, tragic love story.
Antonia could not help thinking of Richard as she read. She could not help aching as the lovers’ own words about one another recounted a depth of emotion that was so powerful and intimate it had transcended time itself. They had intended to wed just after the new year, but their passion had been too intense to deny; they had become lovers—as noted in both their journals—the week before Christmas.
As Antonia and Richard had witnessed, Linette and Parker had met each midnight hour after the remaining family members were asleep in their rooms, spending the bulk of the night in her room because, as Parker had dryly noted in his journal, it was a much simpler matter for a man to don his dressing gown and slip back across the hall in the silent hours before dawn than for a lady to do so.
Antonia had to smile at that, but then she turned the page and discovered an abrupt, chilling, and inexplicable end to the lovers’ happiness. As she read the few remaining paragraphs, she shared the author’s sense of grief and tragic waste, as well as his obvious bafflement.
Only the events were known; the actions and results were without the motivations and causes.
“Milady? Do you feel faint?”
She looked up to find Plimpton hovering anxiously, and supposed that she must have gone pale. “I know what happened, and when,” she murmured, “but I don’t know why.”
“Milady?”
Antonia shook her head. “Nothing. I am quite all right, really. What time is it? I should dress for dinner.”
“We can have a tray brought up, milady—”
“No. No, I had better go down, or Mama will be convinced I am ill.”
“Very well, milady,” said Plimpton, clearly unconvinced. “I will draw your bath.”
Just over an hour later, Antonia encountered Richard waiting at his door to escort her, and felt a pang when she saw that he was wearing the button fob. His eyes were unreadable when they met hers.
“Good evening, Toni,” he said quietly, offering his arm.
For an instant, she hesitated, but she seemed to have no more power over her longing to be near him than she had had over the compulsion to follow a ghost through the darkened corridors of the castle.
“I trust you are feeling better,” he said as they walked down the hallway together.
“I was not ill, merely tired.” Quite suddenly, Antonia had a vision of years to come, of meeting him socially and behaving with this horrible stilted politeness, and her very heart seemed to wrench in pain.
How could it all have gone so wrong?
He might have been thinking similar thoughts. His voice was very even when he said, “As soon as the weather clears sufficiently, I will remove myself. I am sure you don’t believe this, but I have no wish to distress you any further.”
Not trusting herself to speak, Antonia merely nodded. She walked beside him, her head a little bowed, and wondered vaguely if the Wingates had always been unlucky in love. It seemed so. It seemed so indeed.
She was never able to recall afterwards how she managed to get through the evening. She remembered nothing of conversations, though knew she must have spoken because neither her grandmother nor her mother seemed to find anything amiss. She recalled only the long, slow walk with Richard back to her room late in the evening, and the stiffly polite good nights at her door.
She changed into her nightclothes and firmly sent Plimpton off to bed. Expecting another ghostly encounter, she didn’t go to bed herself, but sat by the fire reading the account of Mercy Wingate’s childhood, marriage—and tragically young death. It was not the best of stories to read while alone, and she was actually a bit relieved when a soft knock fell on her door a little before midnight.
It was Richard, of course, and his voice held the same quiet note as before, “I doubt either of us is in any mood to observe yet another passionate embrace in the hallway, however ghostly.”
Without even thinking of suggesting that he wait somewhere else, Antonia nodded and stepped back, leaving the door open as he entered. She returned to her chair by the fire, torn between her longing to be with him and the pain it caused. What she should have done, she knew, was to have moved to another room long since, but that had only just occurred to her.
“I believe they will both be in this bedroom tonight—at least for a time,” she said. “If, that is, they are reenacting the events of their lives.”
“How do you know that?” Richard asked as he came to stand near the fireplace.
Antonia touched the book on a small table by her chair. “I have been reading about them in this book of family history. Their account was based largely on their own journals.” She frowned briefly. “I must ask Grandmother if the journals still exist; I would like to read them.”
“So would I.” He hesitated, then added, “Though, of course, I will be gone soon.”
Antonia experienced another sudden flash of memory. It was early in their engagement, when he had taken her to visit the British Museum, and they had scandalized several other visitors by holding hands and ruthlessly criticizing the various works of art. Since both were playfully engaged in trying to outdo each other, their remarks had become so outrageous that one middle-aged lady had sat down plump upon a bench and declared that she had never been more shocked in her life.
Recalling their laughter now, Antonia felt a throb of bittersweet pain. “Richard—” she began impulsively, then broke off when she caught a glimpse of movement near the bed.
It was Parker Wingate, restlessly awaiting the hour of his rendezvous with Linette. They watched as he moved about the room. Richard nodded when Antonia identified him by name.
“Who is the lady?” he murmured.
“Linette Dubois, a distant cousin. And his betrothed.”
Antonia had no sooner spoken than Linette entered the room. Parker turned, obviously surprised, and she lifted a finger to her lips in a conspiratorial manner, her delicate face alight with mischief and love.
“I suppose,” Richard remarked, “they both consider it less improper for a man to visit a lady’s bedchamber than vice versa.”
He had read their expressions accurately, Antonia thought, and nodded in agreement. Then she forgot everything except the sweet tenderness of the scene they were witnessing.
Linette went to her betrothed and lifted one of his hands in both of hers. She rubbed his hand briefly against her cheek and kissed it, while he stood gazing down at her bowed head with an expression so filled with love and desire, Antonia’s throat tightened. He said something to her, and she looked up with a gentle smile before reaching into the pocket of her dressing gown.
A moment later, she placed a gold, heart-shaped locket into his hand. She opened it and showed him the curl of her fiery hair lying inside, then closed it again and stood on tiptoe to put the chain around his neck. She kissed him very tenderly. He held her close for a long moment, then lifted her into his arms and carried her from the room.
“Toni, love, don’t,” Richard said huskily, and only then did Antonia realize she was crying.
“You don’t understand.” Huddled in her chair, she
felt overpowering grief, for them and for all lovers torn apart. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. That is when it happens, tomorrow night.” She covered her face with her hands, unable to hold back a jerky sob. “Oh, God, how could it go so wrong for them? How could it go so wrong…for us?”
He made a rough sound and came to her, grasping her arms and drawing her up from the chair. “Please don’t, sweetheart, I can’t bear it. I have never seen you cry before.” His voice was still husky, and the arms that held her close were gentle yet curiously fierce.
Antonia couldn’t stop; she sobbed against his broad chest in a storm of grief. Gradually, however, she became aware of his murmurs, the hard warmth of his body, and the strength of his arms around her. She was still aching, but instinct warned her that she had to withdraw from him before her churning emotions sparked another kind of storm.
Finally, she was able to raise her head, but before she could speak he surrounded her face with his hands, thumbs gently brushing away the last of her tears.
“Toni…”
He was too close. His face filled her vision, her heart, her soul. The tenderness in his eyes was her undoing. She tried, but there was no force, no certainty, behind her murmured plea.
“Please…please just go.”
At first, it seemed he would. But then his face tightened, and his head bent toward hers. “I can’t,” he whispered just before his lips touched hers. “I can’t walk away from you again.”
Antonia couldn’t ask him a second time. The first touch of his mouth brought all her senses alive, and though some tiny part of her consciousness whispered of regrets, she stopped listening. The sadness of the tragedy awaiting the ghostly lovers had made her own painful love more acute than ever before. She would take what she could, if only for a night.
He kissed her as if he felt the same desperate need, his mouth slanting over hers to deepen the contact and his arms drawing her even closer to his hard body. She felt the thick silk of his hair under her fingers, and realized only then that she had slid her arms up around his neck. A fever of desire rose from the core of her, spreading outward until all she knew was heat and yearning.
She was kissing him back and, just as in that snug stable so many months ago, she forgot she was a lady and knew only that she was a woman.
She murmured a wordless protest when his lips left hers, but shivered with pleasure at their velvety touch on her neck. His hands untied the ribbons of her dressing gown, and she shrugged the garment off blindly.
“Toni…let me love you, sweetheart…”
She didn’t answer him aloud, but when his lips returned to hers he didn’t have to ask again. His tongue slipped into her eager mouth and stroked hers, and his hands moved down her back to cup her bottom, the fine cambric of her nightgown providing a soft friction between her flesh and his. Antonia could feel her entire body molding itself to his as if it were boneless, and the hardness of his arousal made her achingly aware of the emptiness inside her. Her breasts were pressed to his chest and they were throbbing, swelling with the need for his touch.
She wanted him to touch her, wanted to feel his hands on her naked flesh. It was an overpowering desire, a necessity so intense that nothing else mattered to her except the satisfying of it. She felt him lift her, carry her a few steps, and then the softness of the bed was beneath her.
Her eyes still closed and her mouth fierce under his, she pulled impatiently at his dressing gown until he wrestled the garment off. For a while then, she didn’t know who was doing what, only that her nightgown vanished and she felt the sensual shock of his flesh against hers.
In the stable, they had not completely undressed; the shortness of their time together and their haste to have one another had made that a luxury they could ill afford. But now they had the night and assured privacy, and Antonia wanted to cry or laugh aloud at the glorious freedom.
A little moan escaped her when he trailed his lips down her throat, and she forced her eyes to open. He was looking down at her naked body, his eyes dark and on his hard face an expression of wonder she had seen only once before.
“Toni…Oh, God, you’re so beautiful…”
Antonia felt no embarrassment, and not even a hint of shame, no matter what the whispery voice of her ladylike upbringing insisted. She was glad he found her beautiful, glad that her body pleased him. Her hands touched his broad shoulders, the strong column of his neck, and then her fingers slid into his hair as his head bent to her again.
His lips trailed over the satiny slope of her breast, and then she felt the burning pleasure of his mouth closing over her tight nipple. She cried out in surprise, her body arching of its own volition, stunned by the waves of sensation washing over her. His hand was stroking and kneading her flesh, his mouth hungry on her nipple, and she knew he could feel, perhaps even hear, the thundering beat of her heart.
Heat built in her, burning, and she couldn’t seem to hold her body still. His hand slid slowly down her belly, making all her muscles quiver, and when he touched the burnished red curls over her mound her entire body jerked at the shock of pleasure. Her legs parted for him, and his hand cupped her, one finger probing gently.
Antonia moaned wildly, all her consciousness focused on his hand and mouth, and the surging response of her body to his skilled touch. He was caressing her insistently, stroking her damp, swollen flesh until she didn’t think she could bear another moment of the coiling tension. It was pain, yet it was pleasure, and she shuddered at the vast, engulfing sensations.
“Richard…please…I can’t…”
She heard her own thin voice as if from a great distance. Mutely, she tugged at his shoulder, and almost sobbed when he immediately shifted his weight to cover her tense, trembling body. She felt the hard, blunt prodding of his manhood, and then the shockingly intimate sensation of her passage stretching to admit him.
It was…not quite…painful. She had taken him inside her only once, months before, and he was a big man; it was almost like the first time. She felt smothered for an instant, and tremors shook her as her body accepted him. The stark closeness was shocking, but her intense satisfaction when he settled fully into the cradle of her thighs pushed everything else aside. She could feel him, deep inside her, and his heavy weight on her was a pleasure beyond words.
His arms went underneath her shoulders to gather her even closer, and a shudder shook his powerful frame. “You feel so good, sweetheart,” he whispered, and his jaw tightened when she moved slightly beneath him. “God, Toni—” His mouth took hers hungrily, and he began moving.
Antonia was lost, and didn’t care. She held him, moved with him, her body matching his rhythm with female instincts as old as the caves. The tension wound tighter and tighter, gripping all her muscles while the rising fire burned her senses. It was like being in some desperate race she had to win no matter what the cost to her pounding heart and striving body.
She heard her voice moaning his name, and she thought she kept telling him she loved him over and over, but she was kissing him so wildly that she wasn’t sure the words were anywhere except in her feverish mind. There was an instant of something like terror when she lost all control in the helpless wash of feelings. Then even that was submerged beneath waves and waves of pulsing ecstasy. She whimpered into his mouth, her eyes opening as her body carried her far, far beyond herself, and pleasure exploded everywhere.
Crying, she kissed him wildly and held him with the last of her trembling strength as he groaned and shuddered with the force of his own release.
In the stable, the aftermath of their loving had been cut short because of the groom’s expected return, but there was no need for haste now. Antonia lay close beside him, in his arms, the covers drawn up over their cooling bodies. The fire was dying in the hearth, but the lamps were still lit, and a soft glow filled the room.
She looked at her hand resting possessively, trustingly, over his hard chest, saw her fingers move caressingly in the thick mat of springy black hair—and
she had never felt so confused in her life. What had she done? Swept away by desire for the second time in her life…
“Toni?”
“Hmmm?”
“I love you.”
She tilted her head back and found him gazing at her steadily, his eyes so tender it made her heart ache. There was only one response she could give him, because there was nothing left except the truth. “I love you, too,” she said simply.
He touched her cheek, then shifted slightly, raising himself on one elbow so that he could see her face more clearly. “Don’t say it like that, sweet—as if it hurts you to love me.”
The conflict within her was plain in her voice. “It did hurt me once. It hurt me so much I can still feel the pain. That hasn’t changed, Richard. I’m afraid to trust you.”
There was something a little bleak in his eyes now. “All I can do is give you my word that she lied, Toni.”
“I know.” She didn’t have to say it aloud, that his word wasn’t enough. They both knew. She had to feel trust, and nothing he could say would repair what had been shattered.
He was silent, gazing down at her, stroking her cheek. “When you told me that morning it was over, all I could think, all I could feel was the shock and pain. You were suddenly a stranger, so filled with hate and bitterness that every word you spoke was like a knife. I didn’t know what went wrong, but I could see you were unwilling to talk about it. So I did as you demanded.”
His mouth twisted. “I didn’t expect you to leave London immediately, nor stay away so long. And when you refused to see me, when my letters were returned unopened…What was I to do, Toni? Make a fool of myself by chasing after you like a lovesick boy?”
“No, of course not,” she murmured, admitting that he had been put into an impossible situation. With the gawking eyes of society fixed on him, he could hardly have done anything except what he had done—behave like a gentleman.
He bent his head and kissed her, very slowly and thoroughly, until she felt more than a little dizzy. When he drew back at last to look at her, she had to fight the urge to pull him down to her again. The first tingles of feverish need were stirring in her body once more, and it was difficult to think of anything else.