My Beautiful Enemy (19 page)

He stared down into his own cup. Just when she thought he would not reply at all, he said, “You left your destination with some ladies of the night. Was it for me?”

She had to think for a moment to remember that she had gone to the pleasure house nearest the warlord’s compound, so that if he were clever enough, he would be able to catch up to her. “Yes.”

“Why did you want me to find you?”

A question as problematic as hers to him had been. She drew a deep breath. “No one else looks after me.”

That was true enough.

In the firelight, his eyes were a deep, piercing green. “You want someone to look after you?”

“Sometimes,” she said, her heart thudding.

What if he asked next whether it was him she wanted to look after her? What would she say?

But he asked no such question. He only said, “I don’t put up with your thorns. I like them.”

Silence fell. She drank from the mint infusion—she had never tasted anything with such a strong flavor and yet at the same time, such a clean sensation. And she was . . . happy, almost.

He, on the other hand, did not appear happy. He gulped down his infusion and spread open his bedroll in a corner of the cave, far from the grass mattress on which she sat.

“So . . .” she heard herself ask, “those women who practice the teachings from that book of love, you have been to them?”

He stilled, down on one knee, his back to her. “I have only heard.”

“Why have you not visited yourself?”

“I don’t like that kind of transaction. And how can anyone be sure that a woman has not been swindled or even forced into that profession?”

“Then what do you do when you want to lie with a woman?”

She was being completely inappropriate. But then again, sharing a cave with a man to whom she was not wed was already in itself the height of unseemliness.

“Nothing,” he said.

A unicorn of a man, her Persian. She leaned forward. “Nothing? Why not?”

L
eighton’s face heated. He could only be glad that his back was to her. Before him, on the wall, a bodhisattva regarded him with a gentle, steady compassion.

“What’s your reason?” she pressed.

He couldn’t explain, not in Turkic at least. And even in English he might have trouble articulating the true reason behind his celibacy, which was that he simply could not regard the sexual act with any kind of casualness.

His father had committed suicide after being caught with the man he loved. His mother had not been caught in the act, per se, but she had been caught by the result of her love: It was to protect Marland, her son with another man, that she’d given up Leighton, afraid that if she didn’t, Sir Curtis, Leighton’s uncle, would extract a pound of flesh from Marland. And even Sir Curtis, the seemingly invincible Sir Curtis, had been, in the end, destroyed by his own lust.

“I don’t know,” he said at last.

“But do you want to?”

Her tone was curious rather than seductive. But still, he had to swallow before he could answer. “Yes, I do.”

And she was the singular focus of all his unfulfilled desires.

He waited with bated breath for more probing questions on her part, but she seemed to have run out of them. Silence descended. He smoothed his bedroll.

“Are you going to sleep without first changing my bandages?” she murmured.

His head came up. She had already changed her bandages at the time of her bath—he knew because she had washed the strips of cloth and placed them to dry on the makeshift rack he had constructed out of branches. “Are you sure they need to be changed again?”

Several seconds passed before she said, “Yes, I’m sure.”

And that was an invitation even a fool could understand.

T
he Persian rose, turned around, and gazed down at Ying-ying. There was no greed or impatience in his eyes, only somberness.

Her fingers tightened on the blanket that covered the grass
mattress.
The Rubicon
, she thought. She could no longer recall Master Gordon’s explanation of the events of ancient Rome that underlay that idiomatic usage, but she knew very well what it meant: a point of no return.

He regarded her not as a mere girl, but as if she were his Rubicon, a boundary that, once crossed, would alter history.

And then he was seated next to her, on the edge of the bed, the fabric of his robe brushing against her knee. The hem of the robe was trimmed in a blue embroidered band—that she already knew. But what she had thought of as an arabesque pattern of curves and shapes was actually a hunt scene, with men in chariots and on horseback.

He lifted a strand of her hair. Her already irregular heartbeat turned downright erratic—he didn’t even pretend to check her bandages.

She looked at him, this beautiful foreigner who liked her thorns, and grazed the back of her hand across his beard.

He leaned in. She drew back a little, instinctively.

He did not follow further, but only rubbed his thumb across her cheek. She felt hypnotized, almost, by the contrast between the intensity of his gaze and the gentleness of his touch.

One of his hands curled around her nape. She understood what he meant to do: to hold her in place when he leaned in again. But he did not move closer. Instead, he smoothed her brow, a touch that both reassured her and made her restless.

She raised her hand again and felt the coolness of the gold hoop in his earlobe before taking that lobe itself between two of her fingers.

Now he applied a light but steady pressure behind her neck, lifting her slowly toward him. She heard herself exhale. His lips came close to hers. Closer. She held her breath.

His kiss, at the corner of her lips, was featherlight. But the heat that hurtled through her was beastly, as lawless and ferocious as a hill full of bandits. A startled whimper escaped
her, she who could take a kick to the solar plexus without batting an eyelash.

He cupped her face, holding her firmly, and kissed her again, this time just below the center of her lips. She was scorched anew.

She touched the ends of his hair. Closer to his head the texture of his dark hair did not seem very different from hers. But whereas her hair fell as straight as rain, at his ears his hair began to curl into loose spirals and the way they coiled fascinated her.

In return, he kissed the shell of her ear; at the pleasure that spiked into her, she whimpered and buried her hands in his hair. He responded by parting her lips and kissing her
inside
her mouth. It shocked her. Though she had witnessed endless obscenities, the least of
his
moves seemed monumental, something no one had ever done before.

But it was delicious, what he did. When he would have pulled away she wrapped her hand around his nape and stopped him. He kissed her with greater force and urgency.

When she did let him go it was only so she could catch her breath.

What he did next made her lose her breath altogether: He opened her robe and pushed it off her shoulders. Without thinking, her hands came up to shield herself. But he caught her hands, leaving her exposed to his gaze.

For all that each of his movements had been slow and deliberate, she understood now that he would not stop, not until he had possessed her in full. A sudden panic caught up to her.

Her heart drummed in her ears as he kissed her again. One of his hands settled at the indentation of her waist; the other touched the undercurve of her breast.

She trembled and placed her hand on his chest. “If you make me yours, then you will be mine. Forever. And you can never leave me.”

He gazed at her a long moment. “I am already yours. Forever.”

The truth of his words resonated within her. And with it
came a fierce understanding. This was why fate had brought her to the wild heart of the continent, because it was only here that their paths would cross. It was only here that she would meet this remarkable man.

She kissed him, deeply and ardently, and tumbled him into bed with her.

“Your wounds—” he managed between kisses.

“Are mere scratches. And how dare you doubt my manly forbearance.”

He smiled slightly and slid his palm over her nipple. “Forgive me. I can never be half the man you are.”

She sucked in a breath at the sharp pleasure. He settled himself over her and she sucked in another breath at the rock-hard heft that now pressed into her thigh. The significance of what they were about to do overcame her once again.

She gripped his arms. “You won’t leave me?”

Amah’s lover had stayed with her for only six months.

The Persian took Ying-ying’s face between his hands, his eyes at once intense and impossibly clear. “Never.”

Her doubts evaporated before his absolute certainty. Suddenly she was impatient to claim him, to make him truly hers.

But he would not hurry. He caressed her as if the night were infinite and every square inch of her skin deserved its own hour of worship. And the places he touched—and kissed and licked. By the time he at last joined their bodies together, she was a mindless cauldron of lust. An entire storehouse of black powder that needed only the least spark to detonate.

How he ignited her.

Later, when they lay in each other’s arms, their breaths finally quieting to something approaching normal, she said, “Tell me again.”

He kissed her forehead, her eyelids, and her lips. “I will look after you, for as long as we both live. And there will never be anyone else but you.”

England

1891

T
wo minutes after Catherine left the antique shop, thunder boomed in the sky and rain poured as if Heaven meant to empty its entire reservoir.

She tried to hail a hansom cab, but the ones that drove by all had passengers—a miracle that she wasn’t drenched to the knee with the sludge their wheels splattered. She had planned on visiting two more antique dealers this morning—perhaps the time had come to try the underground railway that she had heard so much about, primarily in friendly advice regarding things not to do while in London.

Or perhaps she ought to just go back to her flat, make herself a pot of chrysanthemum tea, and curl up with Master Gordon’s jade tablet.

Every night since she had found it, she had sat with the jade tablet in hand, turning it over and over, examining every last detail. Even though she had seen it in Master Gordon’s presence only a few times, knowing how important it had been to him, knowing that he had carried it with him across ten thousand miles . . .

He’d had many dreams for her, dreams of a life at once free and secure. Some of the happiest hours of her life had been spent sitting across a table from him as he wove a tapestry of possibilities, a whole wide world for a girl trapped behind high walls.

In truth, they had been fellow prisoners, staring together out of a single tiny window. But such was the beauty of friendship that when she had been with him, she never noticed the bars on that window.

A black brougham pulled to the curb some fifteen feet away. The door of the carriage opened just as she drew abreast to it. “I thought that was you, Miss Blade. Do please come in out of the rain.”

Miss Chase.

And on the opposite seat, her fiancé.

The same shock overcame Catherine again: the same shock, the same searing happiness, then, the same throat-constricting realization that, dead or alive, he remained lost to her.

“It’s most kind of you, Miss Chase.” Catherine smiled with as much warmth as she could muster. “But I shan’t drench your carriage. My flat is only around the corner.”

Miss Chase turned to her fiancé. “Is it, Captain?”

The space of three heartbeats passed before he said, “No.”

“Well, that won’t do at all!” exclaimed Miss Chase, once again facing Catherine. “What would my aunt say if she knew that we left you out in a downpour? Now do please come in and let us take you home.”

Leighton Atwood left his seat and descended. Something acrid lodged in Catherine’s throat—he meant to leave. But no, he only intended to perform the gentlemanly task and assist her into the carriage.

He offered his arm and greeted her blandly. “How do you do, Miss Blade?”

She laid her gloved hand on the forearm of the man with whom she had meant to spend the rest of her life. There must
be layers of clothes under his coat, cashmere, silk, linen. Nevertheless, her fingertips burned.

With a murmur of gratitude, she sat down next to Miss Chase. The interior of the carriage was polished wood and velvet, the seats dark red, the fixtures brass filigree—not Mrs. Reynolds’s carriage, but his. He retook his seat and gave her address to the coachman.

“That’s not around the corner at all,” Miss Chase chided her. “You’d have been soaked if you were to walk all that distance, and it would have ruined your dress.”