Tempting Fate (73 page)

She was almost to the stairs when she heard a low voice speak out of the darkness. “Gudrun!”

She might have screamed had she not been so scared. As it was, a little yelp escaped her and she pressed back against the wall. Yet she had recognized the voice, and after a few seconds she brought her hand up to the closing of her robe and whispered, “Saint-Germain, you … startled me.”

“So I perceive.” He came toward her through the darkness, his eyes not needing the light.

Between the wine and the aftermath of her fright, Gudrun was strangely pliant as Ragoczy drew her toward him. She let her raised arm drop and brushed a stray crumb off the lace as she felt his hands on her shoulders. “Ah-h-h,” she breathed as he gathered her close to him. In the years since he had become her lover, she had never felt his ardor so burning as she did then. This was not the pleasant, languorous prelude to a night of satisfying dalliance, but something much stronger, born more from his grief than from his desire for her. His hands were laced together behind her neck now, and he opened her mouth with the pressure of his lips. Her temples pulsed as her need for him grew sharp in her.

“Gudrun,” he murmured against her ear, tracing kisses over her cheek, the arch of her brow. He had not expected to find such passion in her, and he stepped back from her, holding her shoulders once again.

She swayed once toward him, as though caught by the tug of a magnet. Her pale skin was delicately flushed, her blue eyes were huge, and she sighed her protest. “Saint-Germain.”

Ragoczy shook his head slowly. “If you would prefer I left, I will not blame you. I am … not myself tonight.” He had, as their lips touched, quenched the scorifying pain within him. The kiss was ephemeral, the mourning omnipresent.

“No. No.” She brought her hand to her mouth, as if to seal the touch of his lips there. “Don’t go.”

“I don’t want…” His words trailed off. To disgust her? To hurt her? To use her? He was quietly appalled at the force of his craving for her, which bordered on insensibility. “Perhaps I should leave.”

“Stay!” she whispered with urgency. He could not do this to her, call her unacknowledged yearning from where it was hidden in her soul, and then abandon her, dizzy with anticipation and unfulfilled.

His breathing was unsteady. “I may not … be gentle.”

“Then do not be,” she responded more boldly than she had before. “Do what gives you solace. You won’t neglect me.” His doubt made her more certain. “When Jürgen died, I spent many nights plagued by desire, and nothing could release me; it was not my body alone that hungered, but my heart, my whole being.” She took one of his hands in hers, her fingers wrapped tightly around his.

“Oh, God,” he whispered, wrung by his esurience. He lusted for forgetfulness, if only for an hour, for the anodyne twining of flesh with flesh. He did not withdraw his hand.

“Come. To my bed.” She led him down the hall, this time walking with complete confidence, unfaltering. They went up the stairs quickly, silently, and she let herself smile now, pleased with her strange serenity.

At the door to her room, she turned to him and leaned against him. How much she liked his strength, she thought. Then she was through the door, drawing him after her.

In the dim light of her bedside lamp, she saw that he was in his black riding clothes, a roll-top pullover taking the place of a proper shirt. Tonight his features were uncommonly pale and there were hollows in his face that were not usually apparent. His dark eyes were hot as burning coals. She did not know what to say to him, now that she realized the depths of his anguish, so, wisely, she said nothing. Slowly she let her bed jacket fall to the floor, her eyes never leaving his face.

He came to her then, sliding her nightgown from her shoulders, letting it join the bed jacket crumpled by the fringe of the spread where it brushed the baseboard leg. Ragoczy’s hacking jacket was also discarded as he reached for her.

The times when he had come to her before, Gudrun had always felt that much of him was held back from her, not out of any lack of affection, but as a result of habit. Now she sought him with her hands, her eyes, with the softness of her lips, the accommodating curve of her body against his. His desolation stirred her more than his fondness had done, and she sought his love with all her will.

Ragoczy gave her numberless kisses, on her face, her breast, the curve of her hips, her inner thighs. He touched her, felt her tremble, tighten, and give a sobbing laugh as her spasm shook her. He was glad for her, pleased that she could find such pleasure in so bleak a world.

“Let me see you,” she whispered when the delicious pulsations had subsided.

“No.” He liked the feeling of her skin under his hands, and the sight of her, pale and slender on the soft blue spread.

“But why not?” As long as she did not see him naked, she believed that he was remote from her, that there was a part of him she would never touch.

“I am badly scarred, Gudrun. Most people find the sight distressing. Surely this is enough…” His lips grazed the curve of her breast, teasing the nipple, closing around it with a gentle pressure that radiated through her with prickling desire.

Her head rolled back as she took a long, shuddering breath. Her questions scattered from her thoughts as she succumbed to the resurgence of her passion. Now she was unwilling to think, for it detracted from the warmth that washed through her, setting all her skin afire, sensitive to the least brush or lightest caress. She was weak with the fervor he offered her. Never had she been so roused, so deeply responsive to the least nuance of lovemaking. She trembled like the strings of a violin, and like a violin, her excitation instilled its shivering thrill in him. Her face and neck were flushed, deepening to a rosy shade as he brought her again to that ecstatic pitch of complete gratification, requiring nothing of her but that she find the furthest reaches of her desires.

It took longer for her to come to herself this time, and when she did, the glorious lassitude that engulfed her did not encourage her to question him again. She traced the deep grooves in his face with her finger, smiling faintly. “You’ve done nothing for yourself.”

“Not yet,” he allowed, not wishing to tell her that he did not yet trust himself to take what he required of her. His despair was too close to him, and should he indulge himself while the emptiness haunted him, he feared he would search for oblivion with Gudrun, taking more from her than she was able to give.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, aware of his hesitancy, if not the reason for it. “I don’t want to keep you from…”

He kissed her lightly, chastely. “In a little while, my own. Not yet.”

Although it was June, the mountain air was brisk at night, and Gudrun began to feel chill. She slipped free of Ragoczy’s encircling arm and tugged back the covers.

“I will warm you, Gudrun,” he said to her, pulling the blanket free and wrapping it around her as he used it to hold her close to him. He kept his arm around her but stared past her toward the windows and the night beyond.

“Saint-Germain?” she said when he had been silent for more than ten minutes.

Immediately he gave her his attention. “Forgive me. My mind was wandering.” He began to stroke her with long, light touches that were sensuous but without the force of his earlier precipitancy. He took strange comfort from the texture of her skin, from the motion her breath gave her body, from the shiver that traced the same path that his hands did.

“Oh, ja, dort,” she moaned softly as Ragoczy began a featherlight caress of the petal-soft rosy folds between her legs. Even as she felt her apolaustic sensitivity renew itself, she also admitted a private disappointment, a melancholy so faint that she scarcely knew it for what it was: Ragoczy would not share his heartbroken sorrow with her. She could alleviate his loneliness for a little time, but the greater suffering he would carry within him, alone. This faded from her mind as she soared with increasing rapture. Never had she been awed by tenderness, but now, with those small, beautiful hands working their enchantments on her and his lips awakening and soothing, evoking her most tempestuous exaltation, Gudrun shed the quiet dejection that had colored her life for so long. Now she rejoiced, her body, her soul a glorious paean. So wholly possessed was she by the ineffable splendor of her gratification that she was hardly aware of Ragoczy’s mouth on the curve of her neck. In the next instant the culmination of his desire joined with hers and together they blazed in the night, radiant as a comet.

Gudrun did not know if she had slept or if her passion had so consumed her that she had been magnificently mute and blind. She blinked, her eyes opening rapidly, then more leisurely. Ragoczy lay beside her, one arm around her, his dark eyes open and sad. “Saint-Germain,” she said to him, and he looked toward her.

“Gudrun,” he murmured, with such abiding kindness that she burst into tears. He turned on his side and embraced her while she wept.

“I … I don’t … know why I did that,” she said when she had brought her overwrought emotions under some control.

“Never mind, my dear,” he said to her, one hand ruffling her tousled hair.

“I haven’t done that … before.” Suddenly she blushed, as if the other nights passed in each other’s arms were somehow inappropriate to mention.

“No, you haven’t,” he whispered, wishing there were a way he could tell her what her passion had given him. His grief was undiminished, but now it was bearable, and for a time he would not give way to despair.

“Do you mind?” She had found an edge of the sheet and was wiping her eyes with it, for, absurdly, she could not speak without crying.

“No. I don’t mind.” He continued to stroke her hair, and after a while he felt her breathing become more regular as she faded into sleep. For the better part of an hour he stayed beside her. Once or twice he kissed her, though he said nothing. When the first faint tremblings of the approaching dawn came to him in the rustle of the leaves, the flutter of birds, and the subtle, distant restlessness of animals, he moved away from her, rising with care so that she would not be disturbed. Gently he drew her bedding over her, then bent to get his jacket. He stood looking down at her, grateful now that she showed her years, her maturity, for he doubted he could have touched her if she had seemed too youthful.

He went swiftly and silently through the Schloss, letting himself out by the door in the pantry, then passed through the empty stableyard. The path to Schloss Saint-Germain went off through the woods, and he kept a rapid pace over most of it. He was mildly surprised to see a light in the gamekeeper’s cottage where Maximillian lived, but he did not pause to investigate.

The sky was starting to face toward morning when he reached his Schloss. He stood at the side gate looking up at the stone front. Once the place had been more of a fort than a home, but that was in the Fourteenth Century. Now, with additions and improvements over the centuries, it was something of a showpiece, and as he regarded it, he despised it. He went in the heavy wooden door as if entering a prison. Just six weeks, he thought as he crossed the courtyard, whose paving stones were laid over a generous portion of his native earth. Six weeks from now, they would have been in London. It had been all arranged; he had been at pains to make sure there were no difficulties, either here in Bayern or in Britain. Six more weeks, so that she could finish her studies with Professor Vögel and so that he could accommodate all the new paperwork that was required of him. Six weeks, and they would have been gone from this wretched country, from brown-shirted men who killed young women in the streets. There was a thickness in his chest, and his throat tightened convulsively. Six weeks, only six weeks! The sound he made was terrifying and pitiable to hear, anguish without the solace of tears. He stood before the entrance to his quarters and could not bring himself to move. The Schloss was too full of her. The library rang with her questions, the music room echoed with her song. He would listen for her step in the hall, wait for her impulsive laughter. He leaned his back on the door, forcing himself to be silent. He would not go into the Schloss. There were Nikolai’s quarters in the stable, and with Nikolai still in the hospital, he could lie down there. Without his native earth beneath him, he would get little rest, but at the moment he preferred oblivion. He was almost out of the courtyard when the main door opened and Roger stepped out.

“My master,” he said quietly, in Latin.

Ragoczy did not turn, but he halted. “Roger.”

“Come in, my master.” The middle-aged manservant said this easily enough.

“I…”

“You must, my master.” There was a catch in his voice, the only indication of the sorrow he felt, both for Laisha and for Ragoczy.

“When it’s light.” He started to walk again, but Roger’s voice followed him.

“And then you will say in the afternoon, and in the afternoon, you will say in the evening. Simeon Schnaubel went back to his house, to get it in order. So must you.” He waited, holding the door open.

Ragoczy sighed, knowing that Roger was right. Eventually it would have to be borne. There had been so many other losses, how was it he could not accept this one? With laden steps he came toward the door.

“I have packed most of her things in trunks, my master. You will have to tell me which you wish to keep; the rest must be—”

“Disposed of,” Ragoczy said harshly as he entered the Schloss. Luckily there were a number of crates standing in the main hall so that it was less like a place that was lived in. It already had the faint musty smell of empty buildings.

“Tell me what you wish done, and I will attend to it,” Roger said quietly as he closed the door.

Ragoczy pressed his hands to his face, then said with more resolution, “There are schools for girls, aren’t there, that need clothing? Send the clothes there. Choose a school in France or Italy. I want nothing of Laisha left in Deutschland. It has her bones already; it can have no more of her.”

“As you wish.” Roger strove to keep a neutral tone, but the effort was telling on him. He required a little time before he spoke again. “Her other things?”