Overseas

  I threw up my hands. “Oh, good grief! And I’m the jealous one? Anyway, Arthur isn’t even the point. He’s just a symptom of this… this whole attitude of yours, that I can’t be trusted with my own safety.”

  “Rubbish. I’ve merely taken reasonable precautions…”

  “Reasonable! I can’t take a freaking breath of fresh air anymore without bodyguards! You treat me exactly like a doll, Julian. You dress me, you accessorize me, you keep me under a glass dome! And then you take me out to play with when you’re in the mood, or else to show off to your rich friends…”

  “To play with!”

  “It’s true! It’s so humiliating! And you don’t tell me a damned thing about anything. I know you’re hiding things from me, things from your past.”

  “I do not,” he said tightly, “treat you like a doll.”

  “Yes. You. Do. Look at me! This… this dress, and this stupid necklace!”

  How amusing, a part of my brain observed. She’s coming completely apart.

  “I’m on display, Julian! Like I don’t have a brain or even a soul of my own. Like I’m one of those fancy little debutantes you used to flirt with. You probably wish I was!”

  “Kate, what’s gotten into you? You’re talking complete rot!” He strode across the room to the dressing hall, where he jerked off his tuxedo jacket and hung it up with a crash of the polished wood hangers. “Debutantes,” he muttered.

  “I’m not talking rot! I’m telling the truth! It’s what I feel!”

  “Well, you’re wrong! A doll, for God’s sake, as though that weren’t exactly…”

  “Don’t tell me I’m wrong! You, with all your lies and secrets…”

  “Lies!” He whipped around.

  “You admitted it yourself! You lied to me about the reason we were in Lyme. About your arm. And there’s such a thing as lies of omission, and God knows you’re the master of that! You and your freaking boxes! That shoe-store brain of yours!” I waved my hand at his head. “I just keep waiting for the next one to drop. Maybe you’ve got Florence herself stashed in an apartment around the corner. Maybe that’s why you’re never in my bed in the morning. You might be in hers, for all I know!”

  Oh, there’s a good one, my brain applauded.

  “Have you gone completely mad?” he exploded. “Like Flora at her damned unreasonable worst, which God knows I’ve…”

  “Well, I’m beginning to see her point! My God, facing the prospect of marriage to you, of being locked like a bird in a gilded cage! Nothing to look forward to but a good fuck once in a while!”

  Silence spread between us. Julian went still, one shoe in his hand, poised in the half-shadowed doorway to the dressing hall without a hint of expression. A curl of hair gave way and dropped like a sickle against his forehead.

  Well, Kate. You’ve said some stupid things in your life, but this just about takes the freaking prize.

  “A good fuck,” he repeated at last. “That’s all this is to you? A good fuck?”

  I wanted to look away from him, from the accusation in his voice and the curious light glowing incandescent in his eyes, but I couldn’t be that cowardly. “I’m no aristocrat, Julian,” I shot back. “I’m not an ingénue. I’m not even a damned iconic peace activist. I’m an American, and I’m modern and red-blooded and independent and… and vulgar, I guess. That’s the word Arthur used. But at least you have a real woman in your bed, Julian, and not some cold little bitch who would lift up her skirts when you were ready and push you back off when…”

  “Well, damn it, Kate,” he growled, “if a good fuck is all you’re after…”

  I took a wary step back, but he was far too quick for me. In the instant it might take for a predator to snatch a rabbit, he’d lifted me bodily, hoisted my legs up around him, kissing me, pushing me inexorably backward. We thumped against the wall and with one hand he ripped my ten-thousand-dollar dress down the middle, his mouth never leaving mine, rigid and unforgiving.

  I tried to turn my head away, but his grip was too firm, and suddenly, shockingly, I was more aroused than I’d ever been in my life. I started clawing at him, popping the buttons on his shirt, tearing it from his shoulders, biting and gasping and begging. I fumbled with his waistband, unfastening it somehow, and then I was up in the air, his teeth on my breast, my head thrown back. I heard him groan my name raggedly, felt the muscles of his arms flex around me, and I clutched at his beautiful lion’s head and was wholly lost.

  HE SAID NOTHING AFTERWARD. I could hear him heave for air behind me, but all I could see was the polished wood of the bureau beneath my face, the jewelry and objects scattered across it; all I could feel was the hot dampness of his skin pressed against mine and the pulsing aftershocks of a singularly explosive orgasm.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered, trying to summon my wits.

  His arms disappeared from my peripheral vision, and I felt the agony of separation. An instant later he returned; something silky draped across my shoulders, and then I heard the bedroom door open and close.

  That broke through the swirling eddies around me. I straightened achingly and turned around. My dressing gown slipped from my back to the ground; I snatched it up and shoved my arms into it and went to the bathroom.

  My face gazed back from the mirror. A stranger’s face: coldly, objectively, I saw the beauty in it, which I’d never done before. I saw how the large silver eyes fit expressively into the elfin bones, almost childlike; how the pale velvet skin sloped down from the wide cheekbones to the graceful chin. How the dark hair tumbled down around the shoulders, half hiding the rivière of rubies along the delicate ridges of the collarbone. I looked like a whore. An elegant, expensive whore.

  I closed and belted the dressing gown and put my hair back in an elastic. I fumbled at the clasp of the necklace, and finally left it there around the base of my throat.

  I FOUND HIM in the piano room, seated in darkness on the bench before the instrument, his elbows propped on the closed keyboard and his head in his hands. He didn’t even look up when I entered.

  He’d slipped his undershirt back on; his tuxedo pants had never, strictly speaking, made it off. I could see, in the faint light from the hall, the way his broad white-clad shoulders tapered down to his lean waist, disappearing into the blackness of his trousers: that mesmerizing physical beauty of his, which he carried off so gracefully, so unconsciously.

  The heavy silence in the room pressed into my flesh, an unbearable weight, until at last I padded over the knotted floorboards to stand behind him. Gently I placed my hands on his shoulders. “Will you play for me?” I asked, soft as a whisper.

  “Kate, I…”

  “Please?” I urged.

  My hands rose and fell under the heave of his sigh. “What would you like to hear?”

  I hesitated. “The C-sharp minor. The nocturne.”

  Silently he drew up the keyboard cover and rested his fingers on the keys. I bent my head, brushing my lips against his hair, and then he began to play, aching desolation, elusive joy, yearning on yearning. My fingers hovered for an instant longer at his shoulders, but I forced them down again, crossing my arms behind my back.

  When he was finished, when the last note had dissolved into emptiness, his hands dropped on either side of him, gripping the bench. I sat down, facing the opposite way, and twisted my fingers together in my lap.

  “Whenever you play that,” I said, “I always think of that first night. My first night in your arms. I don’t know why. So many beautiful nights together, but that one… I was so desperate for you. I needed the certainty, the honesty, everything else stripped away, just us. And you knew. God bless you, you knew. That look on your face, the way you touched me. The things you said. You understood what I meant. And it was so perfect, Julian. As though I became a new person in that moment.”

  “Kate.” His voice held an edge of despair.

  “I’m so sorry. Darling Julian. I said the most awful things, and I didn’t mean any of them. You??
?”

  “Don’t,” he said, staring at the piano keys. “Don’t. I should be begging your pardon.” A sigh shuddered through his torso. “I treated you like… I used you…” He didn’t have the words, of course. He didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it to me.

  “Look.” I hitched up one knee to rest beside his leg. “You may or may not have noticed I enjoyed that, Julian. I wanted you, just like that, just ferocious and beautiful. It was… catharsis. It was amazing. Do it again sometime.”

  He didn’t respond. I tried to catch his expression, the half of it facing in my direction, but the room was too dark.

  “Besides,” I continued, “I goaded you into it. I struck out like a child, instead of discussing things reasonably. I disproved my whole point, which is really annoying. I don’t like to lose arguments. But I lost that one, okay? Yes, I’ve been a jealous idiot about Florence Hamilton. Yes, I know you’ve forgiven me for my own past. Or I don’t know, maybe you haven’t. Maybe it’s just sitting there like a canker on your British brain somewhere, being pointedly ignored. Anyway, the point is, mea culpa. I overreacted.”

  “I wish, for once,” he said, and I realized he was still angry, “you would just trust me, Kate. I have reasons for my actions. I’m not being arbitrary.”

  “Well, if you would, like, tell me what they are, for example, then maybe we wouldn’t be having this argument. You’re the one who won’t trust me.”

  “Not for the same reasons. I happen to know it’s better for you, vital for you, if you don’t know certain things.”

  “Oh, please,” I groaned. “Julian, either you’re a paranoid obsessive, or else you’re still caught in that ridiculous Edwardian mind-set, seeing women as children, not to be taken seriously…”

  An exasperated bark. “Priceless. Did you learn that at university? Some bloody history seminar?”

  I looked down at my fingers. “All right. Fine. But either way, it can’t go on.”

  He turned at last: pale, beaten, his golden hair strewn about his forehead. “What do you mean by that?”

  I gathered my courage. “That I’m ready to pack my bags and head back to Lyme until all this has blown over.”

  He jerked, as if he’d grasped a live wire. “You’d leave me?”

  “Not leave you. Never that. Leave here.”

  My words seemed to echo about the room. I felt his blank stare absorb me, grasping for comprehension. “Kate, you wouldn’t,” he said at last. “You can’t.”

  “I can’t stay, Julian. I can’t bear seeing you like this. Burdened, tormented. Treating me like a child who can’t fight her own battles. I want the Julian who trusts me, who opens his heart to me.” My voice strained against the rising lump in my throat. “The one who laughs when he makes love to me. Who keeps nothing back.”

  He opened and closed his mouth.

  “Look,” I said. “That’s what I mean. Holding back. And I keep thinking to myself, when will he finally tell me everything? Trust me enough? Because I’ve laid myself so bare, Julian. I’m so open and vulnerable to you. You can just destroy me with a single breath.”

  “Oh God, Kate.” His right leg swung lithely over the piano bench, straddling it; his arms bound around me with harrowing strength. “I’d kill myself first.”

  “I’m ambitious, Julian,” I said fiercely, into his shoulder. “Greedy. I want to be the one who knows you best. I want to have that all to myself. I want you. I demand you. Let me share this thing with you, whatever it is; let me help you.”

  “Kate, I…”

  “No, wait. You trust me with everything else, everything you shouldn’t. Keys, passwords, bank accounts, alarm codes, credit cards, your entire life. So why not this?”

  “I’ve trusted you with my past, Kate.”

  “But not all of it. Not the unpleasant parts, the uncomfortable parts. Not whatever it is that’s bothering you now.”

  “My heart. Every last atom of that.”

  I turned my head inward and kissed it, right over the breastbone. “You’re trying to disarm me, aren’t you? You know I can’t resist that.”

  “I’m just trying to make you understand,” he said, “you already have everything you want. You own me, Kate.” He reached back and found my hands and brought them before him, kissing each palm. “Right there, in the hollow of your hand. Even if I lose my head and… take you… like some sort of animal…”

  I took hold of his wrists and drew his hands behind my neck. “Stop that. Stop it now. This is the twenty-first century, Julian Ashford, and you’re allowed to have raucous sex with the woman you love without feeling guilty afterward.”

  “I was angry. I lost control. I might have hurt you.”

  “You would never have hurt me. If I’d said no, instead of jumping on you like a cat in heat, you would have stopped. I know you, Julian, and you would have stopped.”

  “Would I?” he asked bitterly.

  I glanced upward at the ceiling. “Yes, you would. Self-control is what you do, Julian. It’s what holds you together. And that’s a wonderful thing. This discipline, this ability of yours to keep everything in check, to meet everyone else’s needs before your own. Always trying to do the right thing, holding yourself to some impossible standard. Torturing yourself with it. But you do know you can let that go with me, okay? You don’t have to be noble; you can be selfish with me. I want you to. It’s what I’m here for, what I was put on this earth for. To give you a break once in a while, you poor weary man, with all the world’s expectations on your shoulders since you were born, for God’s sake.”

  “But not to be a beast, Kate…”

  “Hush.” I brushed my fingers against his lips and moved them to cup his cheek. “You have so much passion. You feel things so deeply. Look at you, my God! It’s all there, burning in your eyes, all that love and loyalty and fervor. Your barbarian streak, you called it once. I know you think it frightens me, that it should frighten me, but it doesn’t. It’s the core of who you are, and it’s precious to me.”

  He closed his eyes. “Kate, you’ll break me, you damned uncanny creature. You’re merciless.”

  “Oh, Julian. You really don’t know, do you? How compelling you are, how absurdly sexy, even and especially when you’re angry.” I moved forward to murmur in his ear. “I can’t ever resist you. I want you now, again; did you know that? I can’t help it. One look from those eyes and I’m melting for you… Are you laughing at me?”

  His chest was shaking.

  “You’d better not be laughing at me, Ashford.”

  “Kate,” he gasped, “Kate, you’re killing me. I don’t know whether I’m laughing or weeping. You’ve gutted me tonight.”

  I slipped my hands down along his back to rest at his waist and laid myself against his chest for a moment, feeling my body move with the steady rhythm of his breathing. His arms went around me lightly, almost tentatively, as though he were afraid of crushing me. “So tell me about Arthur Hamilton,” I said. “I’ll be good. Reasonable. No jealous rages.”

  “You’ve no idea, do you, how terribly precious you are to me. How deeply it pains me to give you even the smallest amount of uneasiness.”

  “But that’s it. Why should the existence of Arthur Hamilton make me uneasy?” I asked, deliberately disingenuous.

  He looked back at me, uncertain, until at last I eased out of his arms and went to sit on the sofa; I needed to be away from his touch and his scent for a moment, just to speak clearly. “Julian, I was angry, of course. I didn’t appreciate getting ambushed back there, having to dig so deep to keep my composure. For poor Arthur’s sake, first of all. And to pay Geoff back by staying as calm as I possibly could.”

  “You were extraordinary, darling. And you’re entirely right. I should have told you about him. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Can you understand, though? I’m not like the women you used to know, Julian. I’m used to being independent, in total charge of my life. And suddenly nothing’s in my control anymore.
I mean, what kind of job can I get now? Just people wanting favors from you. I can’t go back on the Street anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  He came to me then, swiftly, kneeling before me and taking my hands. “I’m in your control, Kate. You have only to ask, and I’ll give it to you. Anything at all.”

  “You. That’s all I want. Just you. No rubies, no designer dresses, no bodyguard. Just you, all of you. Lying in the grass with me, with the sun in your hair. It’s all I’ll ever ask from you.” I wound my fingers through his.

  “Beloved,” he said brokenly. I slid down from the sofa and buried myself in the loving mass of him. “Forgive me. For this, and for the rest of it.”

  I looked up at his face, at the harsh shadows under his cheekbones cast by the single lamp. “Actually,” I said, “I think Geoff’s the one who really needs to pay, here.”

  “Oh, he will,” Julian said darkly.

  I sat back and took his hands in mine; some instinct made me look down at them. “Oh my God! What happened?”

  He glanced down at the red raw skin on the knuckles of his right hand. “Nothing.”

  “You punched someone!” I said accusingly, looking back up at his face, over which the shutters had abruptly slammed tight. “When did this happen?”

  No answer.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Fine,” I said, and took his hand to drag him back down the hall to our room.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” he said when he saw the small blue first-aid kit. “It’s not a wound, Kate.”

  I said nothing, only opened the case and took out the alcohol swabs.

  “I survived the Western bloody Front without this rubbish,” he grumbled, wincing manfully. “The most unsanitary conditions imaginable.”

  “It was Banner, wasn’t it?” I tossed the swab into the wastebasket and uncapped the Neosporin.

  “We exchanged a few words,” Julian said, “by which I conveyed to him my displeasure at his insulting manner of address.”

  “Defending my honor, were you?” The corner of my mouth turned up; I bent my head over his hand to hide it.