A Lily Among Thorns, page 12
“I am a dull-as-ditchwater milquetoast Quakerish idiot,” he said without heat. “Pass the orange.”
“Precisely, and I’m a heartless bitch.”
He stared at her with something approaching amazement. “Huh. You’re right.”
“I generally am.”
He frowned. “So—does that mean I’m not a Quakerish idiot?”
She laughed weakly and threw the orange at him. “Well, you may be an idiot.”
He pulled a knife from his pocket and sliced it into eighths. Juice ran over his fingers and he sucked it off, looking irked. Somehow that little frown made it even more seductive. “I was unforgivably foolish this morning. Miss Jeeves would bore me to tears, I know that. But—but she looked like you, except—”
“Except what?”
He hesitated. “Except she looked at me as if she—as if she didn’t mind liking me.”
Poor Solomon. He didn’t even ask her to be pleasant. He just wanted her to be willing to like him, and show it. He had such low expectations, and she still couldn’t meet them. What made it worse was that she liked him so damn much. But she couldn’t show it like other women did. She couldn’t be like other women. She didn’t want to be. It was too frightening; it would make her too vulnerable. She sucked on a piece of orange and tried to think what to say.
He saved her the trouble. He probably thought she wouldn’t have said anything anyway. “Isn’t there anyone in your family you don’t hate?” he asked.
“My mother, I suppose. I haven’t seen her in six years.”
Solomon’s eyes widened. “Your mother is still alive? Where is she?”
“At Ravenscroft, I suppose.” His jaw tightened. She said with as much conviction as she could, “It’s not her fault. She can’t control him, and she’s not well, and she always tried to protect me.” More or less. She could guess what he thought of her mother, anyway, and she didn’t really want to hear it. To avoid looking at him, she untwisted the sheet of newspaper that had held their oysters and flattened it out.
DUCHESS OF RICHMOND PLANS BRUSSELS BALL FOR THE
17TH OF JUNE
LONDON, JUNE 11—FOREIGN OFFICE’S LORD VARNEY
ASKS PARLIAMENT FOR AN ADDITIONAL £20,000 TO
FIGHT FRENCH SPIES
Even here, she couldn’t escape René for a moment.
“We’ll get him,” Solomon said, reading her thoughts as easily as if they were printed headlines. The coldness in his voice surprised her. But then, his brother had been killed by the French. He looked at René and he saw what he ought to see: the enemy. No matter how hard she tried, she could only see her friend. It didn’t matter. She’d get him just the same.
“What I really miss is the sea,” she said.
“I’ve never seen the sea.”
Serena wished she could show it to him. “It’s beautiful. Sometimes I miss it so badly I can almost smell it—except I can’t.” That tantalizing salty smell was forever out of her reach. All she had in London was soot and fog and almond soap. “Sometimes I go into the cellar and open the barrels of pickled cucumber, just to smell the brine.”
Solomon’s brow wrinkled. “The sea doesn’t really smell like a gherkin barrel, does it?”
She laughed. “No.” It struck her then, like a hammer blow, that she might never again after this week go down alone into the cool cellars of the Arms and open the gherkin barrels, or inventory the round smooth wheels of cheese, or inspect the long rows of wine. “Maybe I’ll go to Brighton when I leave.”
It wouldn’t be Cornwall, but she’d rather die than crawl to Cornwall, alone and a failure. And Solomon, if he ever troubled to visit, would love the changes Nash was making to the Marine Pavilion. Prinny had shown her plans for the façade.
Serena hated Brighton already.
She looked up to find Solomon giving her that focused look of his. “Do you know what you need?” he asked.
“An annulment?”
“Later. Right now, you need to cartwheel.”
“To cartwheel?”
He nodded decisively. “Elijah always said there was nothing like it for raising the spirits, and except for chocolate, he was right. Do you know how?”
“Yes, but—Solomon, I’m wearing skirts!”
He grinned wickedly at her. “There’s no one about.”
She was actually tempted. She used to turn cartwheels down the hill at Ravenscroft. And the idea of Solomon ogling her ankles wasn’t precisely unpleasant. However, she didn’t think turning cartwheels would be quite the same in stays and four layers of petticoat. “Perhaps later.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Serena stared at her bed. Somehow, she couldn’t quite get in and blow out the candle. Her nightmare of two days before, in the light of what she’d discovered at St. Andrew of the Cross, seemed all too plausible. Go on, this is pathetic. She took a resolute step toward the bed. But it was no use. She wasn’t shaking with fright or weak in the knees, but she also wasn’t going to get into the bed.
Like a spoiled child, she wanted light and warmth and comfort. She wanted chocolate. She wanted—why not admit it, since she wasn’t fooling anyone?—to be held as she fell asleep.
All of that was there, on the other side of the door. But explaining to Solomon that she was afraid to sleep in her own room was every bit as unimaginable as getting into bed and pulling the curtains shut. He would know how weak she was, and he would be so gentlemanly about it, so good-natured, so sympathetic—the idea was appalling.
She had let her guard down with him too far already. In one short week, she had let herself feel safe with him. To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. Small wonder that something as sweet and unexpected as Solomon had overwhelmed her. But she couldn’t delude herself that because he made her feel safe, that he could really protect her, or even that he would really try. There was no such thing as safety. Even if people cared for you, in the end they put themselves first. René was proof of that.
As hard as she tried, she couldn’t control how she felt about Solomon. But that didn’t mean he had to know. He’d own her then.
Solomon had just finished making up the batch of black dye he’d promised Uncle Hathaway when the door beside the fireplace swung open. He looked up.
Serena was barefoot, her embroidered orange robe unfastened over her revealing shift. Her hair hung in a black curtain to the top of her breasts. His black dye was the best in the business, but even so it would streak and fade with time. It would never match the dark richness of her hair.
She leaned against the door frame, her face in shadow. “Hello, Solomon.”
“Hello, Serena,” he said warily.
She tilted her head and smiled oddly. Something was very wrong. “Now, Solomon, you sound so unfriendly. I thought you liked me.”
“Yes, and I told you that I didn’t mean I wanted to kiss you.”
She moved forward until they stood barely two feet apart. Her eyes, fixed on his, glimmered strangely. “Oh, Solomon, so pure of heart. But as you also said, we both know that you do want to kiss me.” And as much as he felt off balance, as much as he knew something was wrong—well, didn’t he always feel off balance around her? She did it on purpose, and whether it was wrong or not, his body responded to her, to her low voice and her nearness and even the odd shine of her gray eyes.
She shrugged her shoulders, and the robe slithered to the floor with a fringed rustle. She stood before him in her shift, shoulders and arms bare, every curve plainly visible—and then she stepped closer and put her arms around his neck. Her breasts pressed against his waistcoat. He glanced down and there they were, there was the birthmark on the squashed curve of her left breast. He remembered the first time he had seen that swell of bosom, the horror it had evoked in him. Now everything had changed—now he knew her. He stifled a groan.
“‘I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt,’” she quoted. “‘I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.’” He knew the next line, just as she must have known he would. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning. She had been reading Proverbs.
That brought him nearer to kissing her than any of the rest, but still he was checked by her odd half smile. He drew in a ragged breath. “Have you been drinking?”
Her smile widened, lazily. “Why don’t you kiss me and find out?”
Self-control had its limits. “‘She is loud and stubborn, her feet abide not in her house,’” he said, and kissed her hungrily.
Chapter 11
Her mouth opened readily beneath his. She didn’t taste like liquor—she tasted, in fact, like strawberries. His last fractured thought, before everything was swallowed up by rising desire, was of the baskets of strawberries he had seen delivered to the kitchen that afternoon.
He ran his hands down her back, the softness of her flesh separated from him by nothing but a thin layer of cotton. Sliding one hand up between them to cover her breast, he squeezed lightly. Her nipple hardened against his palm and her breath shuddered against his mouth. She was close and he wanted her closer. Cupping the curve of her buttock, he pulled her to him, pressing the core of her against his erection.
He still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, that this wasn’t real, that she would melt away under his hands like fairy gold. But he couldn’t think when she rolled her hips like that. His hands tightened on her, and she gasped and kissed him harder.
Finally she pulled away. “‘The mouth of strange women is a deep pit; he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein,’” she said. Solomon was still trying to make sense of that when she dropped to her knees and reached for the flap of his breeches.
Never mind the shocking heat that flooded him. Never mind how much he wanted her to. He leaped backward so fast he hit his head on the bedpost. “What the devil do you mean?”
She stayed on her knees. At first Solomon thought she looked as dazed and heated as he did, but when she looked up, her gray eyes were mocking. “Too squeamish for that, too?”
“I’m not interested in strange women.”
Her head snapped back as if he’d punched her. “Oh no?” she said venomously, dropping her eyes to the unmistakable evidence of his interest. “What’s that, then?”
“That’s for you,” he said fiercely. “I don’t want you to be a strange woman, Serena.”
She rocked back on her heels. “There’s not much you can do about that at this late date.”
“I mean that I don’t want you to be a strange woman to me. Is that all I am to you? A—a customer?”
She rose to her feet, leaving her robe in a silken puddle around her ankles. She did it gracefully, but he still thought of an animal with its leg mangled in a trap. She looked as if she’d claw and spit at him if he came close.
“I don’t care if you’ve slept with half the men in London,” he said, too loudly. “That has nothing to do with how I feel. I said I liked you. And when I said that I meant I wasn’t trying to get anything. Can’t you understand that? Don’t you like me too?”
She frowned.
He tried to ignore his hurt at her lack of an answer. He knew she liked him, damn it; but he wanted her to be able to say it. “Serena, all I want from you is you. If you don’t want to give me that, fine, but get out of my room.”
She looked at the ground. “I can’t imagine why you would want that.”
“Right now, I can’t either.” He strode to his lab table and pulled the bottle of Madeira out from behind a crucible in which he’d been trying to match the color of Serena’s eyes. Bluish-gray liquid sloshed about in it, looking like dishwater. He took a shaky swig; wine burned away the taste of strawberries. “Listen, Serena. I find it equally difficult to imagine why you would want any part of me, so I can’t be too critical. But don’t do this again.”
She pressed her eyes shut for a moment and ran a hand through her hair. When she opened her eyes, the act was gone; she just looked like herself. It was funny how much less graceful she was when she wasn’t thinking about it. “Christ,” she said. “Solomon, I—Christ, I’m such a harpy.”
He held out the Madeira.
She took it and knocked it back expertly. “I really wasn’t drinking before, you know.” She rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth.
“I know.”
“Would you like some strawberries?” she offered, uncertainly and intently.
He swallowed, almost choking on the desire that swamped him at the words. Would he ever be able to taste strawberries again and not think of Serena pressed against him? “Have you got some?”
“In the kitchen. Come on, we’ll get some. If—if you want to.” She didn’t seem to have ever learned how to apologize, and yet she always tried, in her own way. She fought herself, too, when she had to. He nodded.
She smiled, transparently relieved. Solomon felt almost all right. “Just let me braid my hair.”
He watched as she deftly wove her black hair into two plaits. Then she picked up her robe from the floor and wrapped it around her, fastening it securely. She picked up the candle from his bedside table and lit it at his lamp, the light briefly illuminating her face. When she walked past him to open the door, he saw that without a comb, her back part zigzagged crazily.
She opened the door and then, with her hand on the knob, she turned and said over her shoulder, “Oh, and Solomon—I never threaten to kill my father for people I don’t like at least a little.”
The kitchen felt strange without the blazing heat and light and the clamor of upraised voices and turning spits and, from outside, London. Moonlight streamed in through the now-closed sash windows along the high ceiling, silvering the long rows of copper pots.
To his surprise, Serena went, not toward the door to the ice room, but to the opposite corner of the kitchen. She bent and began tugging at something on the floor.
“What—” Then he saw. She pulled on a great hoop fixed into the floor, and a section of floor about four feet square swung up with a smooth gliding of gears and hinges. Serena pulled it back and fastened it open with the hook on the end of a chain that Solomon had wondered about when he first saw the kitchen.
“If you ever read in a history book that no one knows how young James escaped his pursuers when he went to ground here, then you know that that eminent historian has never spoken to anyone that actually works here,” she said.
“A priest’s hole?”
“Better. A secret passageway. I’ve no doubt he made his escape quite easily while they were guarding the doors.”
“No popish treasure, then?”
“I’m afraid not. It isn’t very secret either. It’s a tunnel to the laundry, so we can bring the sheets and things back and forth in the rain without crossing the courtyard. It stays cool, so we have a little icebox here for our most delicate things. I’ll be right back.”
And she and the candle disappeared into the dark mouth of the tunnel. A minute passed, then another, and Solomon grew a little worried. He walked over and looked down the stairs. He couldn’t see her. “Serena?”
“I’m fine, just a moment.” Her cold tone was at such odds with her friendliness of a few minutes ago that Solomon knew at once something was wrong again. He went gingerly down the wooden steps, careful not to hit his head on the edge of the hole in the kitchen floor. The tunnel, its walls covered in neat blue-and-white tile, looked like the other servants’ hallways in the inn. But it was wider and the floor was stone instead of wood, worn smooth by centuries of laundresses’ feet.
There was a gap of about three feet between the staircase and the wall, and Solomon followed the glow of the candle under the stairs to a little icebox and Serena. She was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed tightly, huddled in on herself. When he neared, she turned her face away. “I’ll be fine in a minute,” she said indistinctly.
His first impulse was to go to her, but he tamped it down. He had learned she was a little like a wild bear—you had to tempt her to you with honey, or she would savage you.
Actually, now he thought about it, probably it wasn’t a very good idea to tempt a wild bear to you with honey. What would they do when the honey was gone? Or what if you accidentally got some on your hands? But the principle was sound. “What’s wrong, Serena?”
“I’ll be fine in a minute,” she repeated, and this time it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than him. “Leave me alone.”
“You know I’m not going to do that.”
She nodded, huddling deeper into herself. “Sometimes I wish you would.”
Only sometimes. Well, that was a victory of sorts. “You’re not having a very good day, are you?”
She gestured at the icebox with one hand while the other stayed tightly clutching her upper arm. Her knuckles were white. “This is one more thing I’ll never get to do again.” She turned her face toward his at last, and the nakedness of her expression wrung something inside him. “How can I leave?” Her voice broke.
Thank you, Solomon said silently. Thank you for letting me see this. He did go to her then, gathering her into his arms. “You won’t have to leave. We have another week. We’ll figure something out. I promise.”
She clung to him for long moments, as if she were still Miss Jeeves. He buried his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of almonds. She pressed into his embrace, reminding him all too clearly of what it had been like earlier, in his room.
Afraid that in her tangle of emotions she would try to stage an encore of the earlier scene—and that this time he wouldn’t be able to resist—he moved away, holding her not quite at arm’s length to examine her face. A little to his surprise, it wasn’t tearstained, but it was lost and heartbroken and a number of other adjectives that Solomon didn’t like at all.
“You know what you need?”
She shook her head, her eyes large and dark in the candlelight. “Do you?”
“Cartwheels.”
She scoffed weakly, but didn’t protest when he put an arm around her waist and drew her back into the main part of the tunnel.
