Leonie (49 page)

“Pardon me,” she said.

Their eyes met—hers glossy brown and tilted at the corners, swept by a fringe of curling lashes, his as transparently clear as a mountain pool.

“Oh,” she breathed, “how did you get that terrible scar?” She didn’t know why she said that, she hadn’t meant to say it at all, it had just slipped out. Oh, God, now what would he think of her?

“It’s a long story,” he said with a smile, “but one I’d be delighted to tell you. I meant to ask—as you seem to be alone tonight, and I, too, am alone—whether you might join me? I know we haven’t met, but we seem to be at the same hotel. It’s a sort of introduction, isn’t it?”

“But we’ve both ordered champagne,” she said foolishly. “Now we’ll have two bottles.”

Edouard walked the three paces to her table, smiling down at her. “Then I suggest that we drink them together,” he said, taking her hand. “My name is Edouard d’Aureville.”

“I’m Xara … Xara O’Neill de Esteban,” she said breathlessly. Is this how it happens—just like this? The man of your dreams walks up to you in a restaurant and tells you his name is Edouard—such a lovely name—and you drink champagne together and you flirt with him until the end of the evening when you know he wants to make love to you.

“Yes.” She remembered looking into the mirror earlier and thinking that at least her teeth were pretty and she laughed.

Edouard looked at her with delight; he could almost sense how that coral mouth would feel under his—it was a mouth to be dwelt on, lingered over, touched with a tongue, bitten tenderly. It was definitely a mouth he very much wanted to kiss.

“Tell me,” he said, sitting next to her, “how you can be called both O’Neill and Esteban.”

“The O’Neill is because of my father’s Irish ancestry—the family settled in Cuba two hundred years ago. De Esteban was my husband’s name.”

“Your husband?”

His eyes looked surprised. “My late husband,” she said quietly. “He was killed two years ago by bandits. They burned our estate … José had the finest tobacco
vega
on the island, the Flor de Sevilla.” She shrugged slightly and the taffeta flounces on her shoulders rustled prettily.

“I’m so sorry,” Edouard said to her.

“It’s been two years.” She looked into his eyes. “It’s a long
time.” She sipped her champagne. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said, “but today I decided to change my life. I had stayed on in the country at my brother’s estate and suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer. I wanted to be free of it all. I came to Havana, bought myself some new dresses”—her hand rested lightly on the ruffles across her bosom—“and I came here to dine alone. I wanted to force myself out into the real world again.”

“How lucky for me that you did,” said Edouard. “I, too, have a confession to make. I followed you here from the hotel. I thought you must be meeting your lover.”

“My lover?” She was startled. “Why should you think I had a lover?”

“You looked,” he said with a smile, “like a woman en route to an adventure, dressed in scarlet silk, flowers in your hair … a ravishing gypsy.”

“And you,” she whispered, “I thought you were meeting some cool British blonde … she would be icily aristocratic and as tempting as chilled wine on a hot summer night.”

He gazed into her glossy tilted eyes and she moistened her lips nervously. She felt breathless. She took a sip of champagne. His eyes held hers.

“Xara O’Neill de Esteban,” murmured Edouard, “I’m afraid I’m falling in love with you.”

She was oblivious to the restaurant, the waiters, the guitars, and the busy hum of conversation—he was falling in love with her; was she looking at him as longingly as he was at her?

Edouard bent his head and kissed her softly on the lips; she tasted of champagne and softness. “We’ve come too far already, Xara,” he murmured, “there’s no turning back.”

She wanted to kiss him some more, she was
committed
to kissing him. Oh, yes, they had come too far to go back now, but she shouldn’t be doing this. Well-brought-up girls didn’t behave like this, kissing perfect strangers in restaurants. But she was in love with this
perfect
stranger.

The waiter interrupted them with a discreet cough, carefully avoiding looking at them as he served the food. In Cuba, he thought, anything could happen.

“I don’t know you,” Xara said. “I don’t know anything about you.” It was suddenly terribly important that she know all about him, where he was born, where he lived, but she didn’t want to
hear that he was married—please don’t let him tell me that, she prayed, even if it’s true, not tonight.

She listened as he told her, sipping her champagne, fascinated by his mouth. She reached up and placed a finger on it, running it lightly along his bottom lip. He pressed the finger to him, kissing it tenderly. She turned away as tension crackled between them, it was as though they were suspended in time and space, just the two of them.

Neither of them wanted to eat. “Let’s go.” He took her hand firmly in his. “We’ll walk.”

All of Havana was out on the streets, seeking a breath of air on the hot windless night, crowding the brightly lit café terraces where beggars slipped from shadow to shadow, making their rounds. Pretty girls flirted behind lace fans with dashing young men in immaculate evening dress, lounging at tables next to jolly families, whose children in their best beruffled finery ran laughing and indulged among the throng, and lissome young girls with heavily painted faces and flashing dark eyes paraded the cafés looking for customers. The mingled scents of flowers and cigar smoke, spicy foods and heady perfume lingered in the night air, heavy with promise and intrigue.

Edouard took her arm, feeling the smooth coolness of her skin under his hand. I’ve never felt like this before, he thought, never. She’s a dream, a fantasy image in scarlet silk and high heels—and I’m in love with her.

In the shadows at the edge of the square, they turned instinctively, folding their arms around each other, pressing their bodies close as they kissed, an endless, deep, searching kiss. There was no going back.

Hand in trembling hand they walked through the shadowy streets to their hotel, stepping softly up the curving marble stairway to the galleried hall above. Xara leaned against him weakly as he turned the key in the lock. The door closed behind them and she was in his arms, lost again in his kiss. She never wanted him to stop kissing her. He tasted like wine. She pressed closer as his hands slid down her naked back. She wanted to touch every part of him with her body, to be so close to this man that she would see his soul through his transparent eyes.

The windows of the room were open to the hot night, and the sound of guitars strumming in the cafés reached them faintly in the darkness. The big bed with its tall Spanish headboard could
have come from some cloistered convent, its carved cherubs and winged angels muted and mysterious under the protective white mesh of mosquito netting. Unpinning the gardenias, she placed them carefully on the table by the bed and shook her hair into a loose slide of shining black silk. He reached out to touch its soft luxury; he wanted to bury his head in the fragrant mass. Her shoulders under his hands were fragile as he slid the scarlet dress from her body, letting it fall in a rustling petaled heap at her feet. “You’re beautiful, Xara,” he whispered, picking her up and carrying her to the bed. “You are perfect.”

The pile of Paris dresses were swept impatiently from the bed and she lay inside the gauzy tent looking—he thought as he stripped off his clothes—like a painting by Goya.

He lay beside her, trembling from his need for her. Her skin was cream satin stretched taut on a framework of delicate bones. They were drowning in each other’s eyes, lost in the first ecstatic passionate touch as their hands explored each other, pressing kisses onto eyes and mouths and throats, onto curves and softness, promising pleasure to each other, loving the way the other felt, longing for more, and more. He knelt over her, slender and strong, postponing that final moment from which there is no going back. “You are perfect, too, Edouard, my perfect stranger,” she whispered, reaching out to him. He engulfed her with passion, clasping her body to him, winging her to new heights of fulfillment, as his sweat mingled with hers in the hot Cuban night and the guitars in the square throbbed an accompaniment to their thrusting tangled bodies, masking their moaned desires, her pleas, their final cries.

Still entwined with her, he pushed the silken hair from her damp neck to kiss it, burying his face in the curve of her throat, breathing her scent, soothing her still trembling body beneath his hands. “I love you, Xara O’Neill de Esteban,” he said. “We’re strangers because we only met today, but we’ve been looking for each other all our lives. I love you, oh, yes, I love you.”

Xara smiled, lying there in the semidarkness with a man who loved her. Life was wonderful. Sometimes all it needed was a little push and then things happened, wonderful things, like Edouard d’Aureville.

Edouard lay on his back staring at the ceiling. Xara’s silken leg was still flung across him and her head lay on his shoulder. She
slept on, breathing deeply and with a look of such contentment on her vulnerable, sleeping face that he closed his arm around her protectively. How could he let this woman go? She was his as completely as if they had known each other forever. It didn’t matter that they had only just met, he knew the way she looked, the way she thought, what she felt—the way she responded. Xara O’Neill de Esteban was his woman and he wanted her to be his wife as soon as possible. He wouldn’t leave Cuba without her.

She stirred slightly in her sleep and he brushed her blue-black hair tenderly from her warm face. He would wait until she woke and then he would ask her to marry him. Or maybe he should
tell
her she was going to marry him so that there could be no room for any doubt. In any event, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

The pale, early morning sunlight filtered through the green slats of the shutters as she awoke and he kissed her before her eyes were open. “Marry me,” he murmured to her closed lids, “marry me today. Now. I want you this very minute.”

Her eyes flew open, the curling lashes tickling his smiling mouth. She kissed him back, winding her arms around his neck. “Are you sure it wasn’t just the scarlet taffeta,” she whispered, “and the romantic Cuban night?”

“This is the morning, and I’m very romantic, and I love you. Please be my wife, Xara O’Neill.”

“We hardly know each other,” she said hesitatingly.

“We have the rest of our lives to find out what we’ve been missing. Marry me, Xara, please.”

“When?” Her mouth fluttered across his lips in tiny sighing butterfly kisses.

“Today.” His hands caressed the nape of her neck. “I can’t today. I must speak to my brother first, and you must meet my family.” She wriggled closer to him, her long leg still wrapped around him, anchoring him to her body.

“Tomorrow, then … this week.…”He kissed her throat, moving his lips down further across her breast.

“Yes,” she murmured breathlessly, “oh, yes, Edouard. I’ll marry you.”

–
• 47 •

New York! Amélie jumped out of bed and ran to the window to check that it was still there outside the Waldorf Hotel.

Fluffy flakes swirled from an invisible sky, settling silently on the ground in a plump white blanket. Her eyes grew round with astonishment.
Snow!
It was really snowing! With a whoop of joy she sped across the salon and into a darkened bedroom, shaking the form buried under a mound of blankets.

“Roberto, Roberto, get up! It’s snowing!”

“Oh … go away, Amélie.” He burrowed deeper under the covers.

“Roberto! You must get up! It’s snowing out there.”

“Amélie”—his sleepy blond head emerged from beneath the covers—“it’s seven o’clock in the morning. This is meant to be a holiday … go away will you.”

“But Roberto, don’t you understand,” she cried in exasperation, “I’ve never seen snow before.”

He sat up slowly, pushing back his hair and yawning, his clear blue eyes taking in her excited face.

“Oh, all right.” He smiled. “I’ll get up.”

“Hurry then,” she said, bouncing on the bed, “you must get dressed right away.” She grabbed the covers to pull them off him and he gripped them in alarm.

“Don’t do that, Amélie,” he protested.

“But why ever not?” She looked at him in surprise. His naked chest was tan against the white sheets. “Aren’t you wearing pajamas?” she asked suspiciously.

“I don’t wear pajamas anymore. I don’t like them.”

“How silly,” said Amélie, tugging at the covers. “Anyway, I’ve seen you often enough without your clothes on.”

“It was different when we were just kids,” Roberto announced
firmly, “but I’m sixteen and you are fourteen—it’s time you started to behave like a young lady.”

Amélie was crushed. “Oh, Roberto, I never thought you would say that to me. Everyone else, but not you.”

“Well, it’s true.” She looked so downcast that he had to smile. “We’re all growing up, Amélie. What about your friends at school, aren’t they becoming different now, too?”

“Oh, them,” she said contemptuously, “all they can think about is clothes and boys.”

“Well, thinking about clothes isn’t a bad idea,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, modestly wrapping the sheet around himself. “You would look a lot better in some pretty clothes.”

Amélie stared down at the complicated pattern on the hotel’s green carpet. She hadn’t even realized that he didn’t think she looked nice; looking pretty hadn’t been something she had even considered. She was the way she was. Looks hadn’t seemed important, not nearly as important as being cool in the heat, or cutting off her hair because it was so much easier to manage—though it had grown again since the disastrous occasion when she had shorn it close to her head. As for being a young lady! Amélie heaved a sigh. Everything was so complicated lately. She and Roberto had always been together—she’d crept into his bed to snuggle up to him and whisper secrets when they were little, she’d worn his baggy white linen shorts clasped round her waist with one of his belts, she’d borrowed his sweaters, swum naked with him in the river at the
fazenda
—and now he wanted her to be a young lady! She supposed that he must now be a young man, whatever that meant. She glared at him, swathed in his sheet, what was he hiding under there that she hadn’t seen before? And what difference did it make anyway? She flounced off the bed and made for the door. “I’m going to get dressed and then I’m off to see the snow,” she announced. “You can come if you like.”