House of Dark Delights (26 page)

Six

C
ATHERINE STOOD
outside the library door around midnight in her bedroom slippers and blue-checked wrapper, two towels draped over her arm, taking deep, calming breaths. Through the door, she heard Thomas say, “Have you finished that section, Dr. Wheeler?”

“Hm? Oh, er, yes.”

Do it.
She knocked on the door. “It's Catherine.”

Thomas opened the door and ushered her inside, taking off his eyeglasses as he greeted her. Like Elijah, he was in rolled-up shirtsleeves and no collar, his hair uncombed. His beard-darkened jaw reminded Catherine of her hallucination in the cave, when her invisible lover pleasured her with his mouth, his prickly jaw scraping her inner thighs.

Thomas has probably done that to women,
she thought. He'd kissed them and touched them in their most intimate places, unlaced their corsets and rolled down their stockings, knelt between their legs and shoved himself inside them. She pictured him lying atop a woman, thrusting and groaning, and felt a flood of heat rush up her throat into her face.

“Catherine?
Are
you…?” asked her father.

“Am I…?”

“Headed off to bed,” he said with a little nod toward her attire.

“Oh. No, I, um…I thought I might like to take a little midnight dip in the pool. It's such a lovely bathhouse, and I won't have another chance after tonight.”

Thomas said, “You took Lili up on her offer of a bathing dress?”

“Yes, I borrowed it from her this evening, after supper. I, um, I thought perhaps…you'd like to join me.”

Thomas stared at her for a moment. “Oh,” he said, looking pleasantly surprised. “Well, yes, of course. Except…” He looked at the table at which he'd been sitting side by side with Elijah, transcribing the scroll. “I'm actually in the middle of translating the calendar, and—”

“Translating?” she asked. “Not copying?”

“We've finished the copying. Your father wanted to get started on the translation, no easy task with such an inadequate glossary. He had me do the calendar, and he's been doing the very beginning of the scroll, which I take it had to do with the Gallic Wars and the initial years of Roman occupation.”

“Did you find out why some of the Vernae stayed here and let themselves be enslaved by the Romans?” Catherine asked her father.

He just sat there, gazing at his open notebook, and the half-inked page on top.

“Elijah?” she said.

He looked up, blinking.

“You told me you thought this beginning section might tell you why some of the Vernae stayed behind,” she said. “Did it?”

“Um, yes. Yes, it did.”

“It
did
?” Thomas exclaimed. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Why did they stay?” asked Catherine, surprised that she cared.

“It had to do with one of their gods,” Elijah said. “It's…” He shook his head. “It's difficult to summarize.”

Thomas picked up Elijah's notebook and read the page to which it was opened. He frowned. “Hm.”

“That's something else,” Elijah said, “something that came at the end of that section.”

Catherine took the notebook out of his hand.

“Not all of the words are translatable,” Thomas told her as he looked over her shoulder. “Where there's doubt as to the meaning, we insert a question mark.”

Elijah's neatly printed translation read:

                  

                  

Catherine looked at her father, who sat staring at the spot on the table where the notebook had been.

“Dr. Wheeler,” Thomas said. “Do you think we really ought to be—”

“Go ahead to the bathhouse, Thomas,” said Elijah without looking at them.

“But the calendar.”

“You've done enough for one night.”

Thomas hesitated.

Catherine caught his eye and nodded, beckoning him toward the door.

“I'll need to change into my bathing suit,” he said.

She said, “You're wearing drawers and an undershirt, aren't you? They'll do.”

“You can't be serious.”

“Thomas, your bathing suit looks
exactly
like underwear. What's the difference?”

“She's right,” Elijah said. “Don't be such a square-toes, Thomas.”

                  

Thank God there's just a sliver of moon out,
thought Catherine as she and Thomas entered the bathhouse. The less moonlight, the better. What little there was reflected off the white marble edifice, casting the pool into a dreamy, indigo twilight.

Sitting on one of the iron chairs against the wall, Thomas removed his shoes and socks, shrugged off his suspenders, and set about unbuttoning his shirt. “What prompted you to ask me to join you?”

“Why wouldn't I?” she asked, standing near a corner of the pool with her back to him. “We've been friends for years.”

“You know what I mean.”

Catherine didn't respond to that. Instead, she laid the towels on a little marble bench, her hand trembling ever so slightly. She unbuttoned her wrapper and let it fall to the floor, leaving her entirely naked.

The soft sounds that had accompanied his undressing ceased.

She stepped down into the pool, submerged herself completely in the warm water, and stood, still with her back to him, to skim her hair off her face.

A thrumming silence filled the bathhouse.

She turned to look over her shoulder. Thomas was on his feet, staring at her, his trousers and shirt unbuttoned, suspenders dangling, eyes huge in the bluish half-light.

His throat moved as he swallowed. “I thought you said you borrowed a bathing dress from Lili.”

“I didn't say I was wearing it. I tried it on, and decided it was too long and heavy—too much soggy wool.”

She glanced at him again. He was still looking at her with those big, dark eyes, as if sorting through this unexpected new development in his mind.

“You needn't wear your undershirt and drawers on my account,” she said. “It's lovely having nothing between oneself and the water. I won't look, if you don't want me to.”

“Accusations of deformed toes aside, I'm not as shy as all that.”

It took him a minute to undress, and then he walked along the edge of the pool to the opposite corner, as if trying to put a respectable distance between them. It amused her to think that he was making up a code of propriety on the spot in order to deal with the novel situation of sharing a pool with her, stark naked.

Unclothed, Thomas Lee was a revelation. Leanly muscled and perfectly proportioned, he put her in mind of a classical statue—which, in turn, put her in mind of the four lewd statues erected at the corners of the pool. She couldn't help wondering if Thomas had done the things that the satyr was shown doing with the nymph. Had he ever bent the laundress over her washtub and taken her from behind? Had he held any of the bauble-and-trinket girls up against some lamppost or alley wall, and taken her that way, or lifted her on his shoulders so he could bury his face between her legs? Had he ever made his Indian mistress kneel before him and lick his erect penis? Had he ejaculated that way?
Could
a man ejaculate that way? Now that Catherine knew that women, as well as men, could reach a sexual climax, she thought perhaps it was possible.

She tried not to stare at Thomas's male member as he lowered himself into the pool, but neither could she seem to tear her gaze away. It was, of course, not quite as generously proportioned as that of the satyr; it more resembled the penises of the men in the book of lascivious etching she'd seen in the cave. The major difference was that it wasn't erect—or rather, fully erect, for it was indeed, more distended than she would have expected.

He was at least somewhat aroused, she realized. The knowledge that she'd done that to him, simply by taking her clothes off and asking him to remove his, gave her a sense of gratification unlike any she'd ever known.

He settled into his corner a bit stiffly and gave her an awkward little smile. “So.”

She stood up and waded toward him in the waist-high water, watching his darkly intent gaze shift from her face to her breasts, and farther down.

Quietly, seriously, he said, “Catherine, please tell me you're not doing this to tease me.”

“You know me better than that, Thomas.”

“I do. But then…why?”

She came up to him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. He kissed her back, hard, his hands tangled in her hair, then grasped her arms and pushed her away. He stood, saying, “I've got to leave.”

“Why? Because you want me?”

The look he gave her sent shivers of heat down her spine. “Yes,” he said.

“I'm glad,” she said. “Because that's what I want, too.”

“Does this mean you've changed your mind about marrying me?”

“Ask me afterward,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

He gripped her by the waist to keep her from pressing herself against him. “Catherine…darling. We can't. I couldn't…do this without offering you a commitment of marriage.”

“You
have
offered that.”

“And having you accept it. For
your
sake.”

“Thomas, I know the unspoken rules. If a lady is engaged, and is discovered in a…compromising situation with her intended, she is generally forgiven—so long as they're wed within a decent interval. But I don't want this to be about rules and customs and what's appropriate and what's not. I want it to be about us. About you wanting me and me wanting you.”

His hands tightening around her waist, he said, “What I want most of all is to marry you. If you're saying you won't—”

“What I'm saying,” she whispered as she stroked his face, “is that you'll need to ask me afterward.”

“But—”

“Thomas, I love you. I just want to—”

“You love me?” He looked astounded, thrilled.

“Deeply, madly, and completely. So, if you would just please stop fretting over what's proper and what's—”

He hauled her to him and banded his arms around her, kissing her so passionately that she felt as if her heart might explode from sheer elation. She felt his restless hands everywhere, on her throat, her back, her breasts, her bottom—and, more gently, on her sex, which he caressed with a slow, deft touch as his erection rose between them.

Curious, she reached down and glided her fingertips very lightly along the rigid shaft, which was much smoother than she would have thought, with a network of ropy veins beneath the tightly stretched skin. “Oh, God,” he breathed as she conducted a lingering perusal of his male anatomy—the satiny glans with its tiny aperture, the weighty scrotal sac. His breath quickened as she stroked and explored; his hips flexed. “You'd better stop that,” he said, “or this will end far too soon.”

Thomas lowered himself onto the submerged bench, lifting her by the waist to seat her astride him. He clasped her to him and kissed her deeply, his tongue flirting with hers in a way she found incredibly arousing. Drunk with desire, she rocked her hips unself-consciously, her sex growing slick as it rubbed against his, the outer lips swelling open in anticipation.

He thrust hard against her, groaning into her mouth, and then abruptly stilled. “Stop.
Stop,
” he pleaded, holding her away from him, his lungs heaving. “I'm too close. I'm…We need to—”

“Here.” Rising up on her knees, she began to position him to enter her.

“No. Not…not like this. Let me take you inside, to a proper bed.”

“If I'd wanted you in a bed,” she said, “I would have tricked you into coming to my room instead of here.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “The thing is, it's your first time, and water washes away…It…tends to make things a bit trying, especially for the lady. I don't want that for you.”

“All right, then.” She climbed up onto the marble floor of the bathhouse, sitting on the edge with her feet in the water. “How is this?”

He swam to the opposite corner in two strokes to retrieve the towels. Laying one out behind her, with the other rolled up for a pillow, he lowered her down so that she was lying on her back with him kneeling on the bench between her legs.

“You must tell me if this hurts,” he said as he positioned himself, his other hand holding her hip to steady her.

There was some discomfort as he nudged into her, partly because she was still raw from the experience in the cave, but for the most part, what she felt was inexpressible joy at being united with this man she'd known for so long, but had never really known until now. He felt so hot and hard and
right
inside her, so utterly perfect.

Bracing his hands on the floor to either side of her, he leaned down for a tender kiss. Unshaven and naked, his disheveled hair hanging across his forehead, he looked so devastatingly virile that she could scarcely believe she'd spurned him as she had.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I'm wonderful,” she sighed. “
This
is wonderful.”

“This is incredible,” he said as he began moving inside her, his thrusts hypnotically slow, deliciously deep. “You're so beautiful, Catherine. I've wanted this for so long. I can't tell you how many nights I've dreamt of this.”