[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) (17 page)

"Oh, God," Basilio whispered, and Cassandra felt the rigidness of his arm beneath her fingers.

"What is it?"

One of the men, a razor-thin man with the heavy features of a sensualist, saw Cassandra and his eyes swept her with almost insulting frankness. She narrowed her eyes at him.

"I will explain later." Basilio turned away from the small group and took Cassandra's hand, almost too tightly. Moving with an urgency she did not understand, he pushed her into the shadows and kissed her.

It was a way to hide their faces, she knew, but she could also taste the despair on his mouth, could feel the fierceness in his fingers.

"Basilio, what is it?"

He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. "Catastrophe, my love." He did not say it lightly.

"Why—"

"Wait." He glanced over his shoulder. The small party lingered in conversation with another acquaintance.

Cassandra watched the girl resentfully be herded toward the doors, her body a straight exclamation of protest.

Basilio held her firmly, his mouth deadly serious. "Do not show your face." His arms and body held her tight against the wall.

"Who is she?" Cassandra asked, and realized at once who it must be. "Your betrothed?"

"Yes. And if she is here, she did not receive my letter." He made a harsh, pierced sound. "What have I done?"

"Basilio, it is not so tragic as that! Men take mistresses when they have already taken a wife—how much less a crime to take a lover before you have married?"

"It is dishonorable, Cassandra." The group drifted within, and Basilio at last let her go. His voice was raw as he repeated, "She did not get my letter."

A deep gulf lay between them, invisible yet as substantial as glass. Cassandra wanted to touch him, knowing her hand would be halted flat against the barrier. "Who is she?"

His hand fisted at his side and he closed his eyes momentarily, as if fighting some battle within.

"Her name is Analise." When he opened his eyes there was tragedy in them, longing and sorrow. "She is to be my wife. But her father must have heard—"

She guessed. "That you had a lover?"

"My mother was right," he said miserably. "Her father will sell her to the highest bidder."

"But you will marry her," Cassandra said, confused..

He shook his head, but before Cassandra could ask any more, the carriage arrived and they had to duck through the torrent of rain into the vehicle. Within, she said, "Tell me, Basilio."

Instead, he pulled her close, under his arm, into his kiss. "Not now. Tonight yet belongs to us."

But he pressed his face into her neck. "Oh, God."

"Basilio, I do not understand your horror in this."

Heavily, he raised his head. "I am bound to protect her, bound by a promise to my mother. If I do not marry her, her father will sell her to the highest bidder—and there is one who should not have her. He is cruel and has already had three young wives." His mouth tightened. "She cannot marry him."

Horror crawled on her skin, remembered pain and humiliation. "Basilio, you cannot allow that." Fear made her sharp. "I told you I would not marry, ever. Why did you do that?"

He took her hand and put it to his lips. She had been thinking of him as boyish in his joy, but she saw now that he was not a boy at all, but a man who lived vividly, a man bound by duty and honor. "Because I believe in love at first sight," he said quietly. "And so do you."

She fell forward against his chest. "Yes," she whispered. "I do."

His big hand curved around her neck. "In the morning, I will see what I might do to put this back the way it should go. Tonight belongs to us."

Basilio made love to her slowly, lingeringly, in the cold damp night. The rain pattered steadily, slapping the windows and the roof, as he imprinted her upon his mind—the twining of their fingers, illuminated by soft candlelight; the shape of her ear against his mouth; the curve of her ribs beneath his hands.

They did not speak, for it would have broken the illusion that both of them wished to hold close: that these were not the last hours of their too-brief idyll. Afterward they lay close together, bodies pressed tight beneath a shelter of heavy quilt.

After a long time, she said quietly, "This has been so beautiful, Basilio." She raised up on one elbow, a hint of a smile turning up one side of her mouth. Her hair tumbled wildly around her face, down her back, and his heart caught at the simple beauty of her slim white shoulder. "We've been wonderfully wicked, haven't we?"

"Yes."

"And think of this: now I will always be perfect. And you will live like a god in my memory."

"A stallion, I think."

She laughed. "The god of stallions."

He took up the game. "And I won't have to see you throwing up when you have a belly full of baby." But when he said it, he wanted to see her then, her breasts heavy with milk. It pierced him to know how much he wanted that, and he quickly added, "Or watch you laugh when you don't have any teeth."

Her brows lifted. "And I"—she pinched his side—"won't have to see you fat as a pigeon."

"And I will never have to endure you calling for me like a shrew. 'Basilio!' " He made his voice shrill and raw. " 'Basilio.'"

"Ugh!" She slapped his arm lightly. "Not even at my worst would I sound like that."

"No? And how would you sound?"

Her tongue darted out, touched her lip, slipped back. In a throaty, sexy tone, she said, "Oh, Basilio, come here."

"Come… where?" he said, and slipped a hand down her back, curling around a buttock, and grinned.

She laughed and fell against him with a sigh. "It's no use, Basilio. I will miss you desperately."

"As I will miss you." He thought with regret of the letter Analise had missed, lying on a table in the cloister. An agony of missed chances. "If I ask you a question, will you promise to answer me honestly?"

She looked at him. "Yes."

"Would you have married me?"

"No," she said, but lowered her eyes. Raised them. "Oh, I lie. It would have frightened me— but yes, I believe I would have. It appears I was not meant to be a married woman." She smiled sadly.

"Perhaps now you will see there is a man who can be your husband." He swallowed, twisting a lock of her hair around his finger. "I do not like to think of you old and alone. You should have children."

A flicker crossed her eyes. She shifted, hiding her face. "My work is important to me," she said. "And no man but you has ever begun to understand that. In marriage, a woman loses herself, loses all that she has worked to gain. Why would I bind myself that way?"

He couldn't answer her.

"I am not given to extravagant words, Basilio. I cannot say it the way you do." She raised up, sitting naked with her hair as her cloak, her hands folded before her. She gazed at him with that odd composure for a very long moment, then reached out to touch his face.

She took a breath, her face sad and soft. "But I loved you before I saw you, as if we are two sides of a coin. That will not happen again, and having known it, I will not settle for less." A single tear glistened in the corner of one dark eye, and she bowed her head. "I'm glad to have known it with you. I do not regret it, not even a little."

With a violence of love, he rose and kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her. There was nothing else.

Basilio awakened suddenly a little past dawn, woke suddenly and completely, and then lay there, not knowing what had drawn him from his sleep.

Cassandra lay in his arms, her hair scattered over his chest, and he put a an open palm over the scattered strands, bemused by the fierce pleasure it gave him. One of her legs was flung over his thighs, and her head was deeply cradled in his shoulder. He had never loved a woman like this. In gratitude, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

Then he heard a shout from below. No, not only a shout. A bellow, a crash. His limbs tensed, recognizing the voice before it fully penetrated his sleep-glazed mind.

He sat up urgently, bringing Cassandra with him. "Wake up," he cried, reaching for his breeches on the floor with suddenly unsteady hands.

Sleepily, she peered at him. "What is it?"

Yanking up the breeches, he heard the bellow-ing coining closer and looked around madly for something for her to put on. "Cassandra, take the blanket, and run to the balcony." Outside his door, he heard the rage in his father's voice, and urgently, he pushed her. "Go, Cassandra. Hide."

"I don't—"

"Go!" he cried.

Cassandra clutched the coverlet to her as the door burst open, scooting backward in the bed instinctively as a man, crimson-faced and enormous, roared into the room. "You dare!" he cried, and his great hammy fists clutched Basilio's hair. "You dare defy me?"

Basilio grabbed his father's wrists. "Father! Listen!"

The man shook free. "You cub!"

One of the enormous fists slammed into Basilio's face, and Cassandra cried out, "Stop!"

Basilio wrenched around and slammed his hands into his father's chest, shoving him back. "Listen to me!"

But his father punched him hard, in the face, and Basilio reeled backward.

She saw the madness in his eyes as he rallied. "Do you still beat me like a child?" he cried in disbelief, wiping blood from his lip. "Do you not see that I am a man, and one younger and more hale than you?"

His father made a gesture that needed no translation, fingers wiggling him closer. The great jaw jutted out, and with a roar, Basilio hurtled across the room, his shoulder catching his father's chest.

"Basilio, stop!" Cassandra cried again, terrified at the difference in their sizes. His father was a bear of a man, stout and burly, and far beyond reason. He bellowed again like a baited bear, and batted Basilio with that enormous, powerful fist.

Cassandra rose in place, clutching the cover to her. Basilio saw her and held out a hand, as if to keep her in her spot as he narrowed his eyes at his father.

His voice was dead calm. "You can beat me. You can even kill me, but you cannot make me obey you.

It will be my choice, Father, to marry Analise or not."

"What?" The crimson in the man's face went mottled, and Cassandra thought his head might explode. He surged toward his son, and she had never seen such pure, unadulterated hatred in her life. She had not believed Basilio when he spoke of his father's hate; now she believed. The huge fists rained down on his head, his shoulders, his face. Basilio's blows were less frequent, but landed more squarely—to his jaw, his gut— but size won out. Basilio would be beaten to death by this bear.

"Stop!" she screamed. Without thinking, she caught the blanket around her and rushed toward them, vaguely aware that two servants had crept into the room. One grabbed for her ineffectively as she moved to intervene, but she slipped free.

"Stop!" she cried again, nearly sobbing in fear that this enraged beast would kill Basilio before her eyes.

She flung herself between them—

And caught an agonizingly powerful blow squarely beneath her eye. The force of it sent her sprawling, stunned and grasping madly at the blanket that barely covered her.