The Lady's Tutor (36 page)

“Yes.”

Ramiel
descended the stairs two at a time, barefoot, naked underneath the robe. He
would shock her, perhaps, but it was a sight she would soon get used to.

Silently,
he opened the library door, closed it behind him. He leaned back against the
mahogany wood and watched her.

Elizabeth
stood looking out of the bay windows. He had a curious feeling of déjà vu. She
had stood thus when first she had braved his home, dressed head to foot in
shapeless black wool, surrounded on either side by twin columns of yellow silk
drapes and ribbons of gray fog. Now her hair glinted red fire in the sunlight
and a gray velvet dress snugly hugged a proud back and curvaceous waist before
bulging out in a curiously flattened bustle.

Electric
awareness shimmered in the air like dust motes in sunshine. Between one breath
and the next she turned, facing him.

He stared
at the rhythmical rise and fall of her full breasts underneath the gray velvet
bodice. Blood pumped into his groin at the memory of the taste and texture of
her. Last night he had felt her heartbeat and had listened to the quickening
rush of air inside her lungs as he had suckled her and brought her a woman’s
pleasure.

He closed
his eyes, suddenly overcome with a vulnerability that he had not felt since he
was thirteen years old. Would she find him meritorious? Or would she be
repulsed by the length of him, the thickness of him, the blunt reality of a
man?

“My
husband tried to kill me.”

Ramiel’s
eyelids shot open. Behind her a sparrow fluttered against a windowpane, seeking
impossible entry. “What did you say?”

“Or my
father.” Elizabeth’s voice was tight, like stretched wire. “He could have
arranged it. Two days ago I told my mother that I wanted a divorce and asked if
she would petition my father to intercede on my behalf. Yesterday, when I got
back from visiting with the countess—and you—he said he would rather see me
dead than have me ruin his and Edward’s political careers.”

Ramiel
pushed away from the door, stalked her. Reaching out, he grabbed her shoulders,
swung her around so that both of them were profiled by the warm rays of the
sun.

Elizabeth’s
face was ghastly white; her shoulders underneath his fingers trembled. She
smelled of gas—her clothes, her hair, her skin.

Many
Londoners perished of gas asphyxiation. There would have been no questions had
she died, just condolences for the bereaved husband and father.

And
with a single word she could have prevented it.

As he
could have.

The fear
and anger and guilt increased rather than replaced the heat that hammered
through his body. “Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”

She looked
up at him, pupils dilated, eyes black instead of hazel. “Edward was waiting in
my bedroom. He had the notes that I took when I read
The Perfumed Garden.
He
said he knew about our lessons. I thought he was going to commit me to an
insane asylum. For nymphomania, he said. He had my maid bring me a cup of hot
milk. It was laced with laudanum, and I poured it out of the window. I knew
then that I would have to leave him. I changed clothes and sat down in an
armchair to wait until he turned his light out—we have a connecting bedroom
door, you see—but then I fell asleep and I heard someone whisper my name. I was
dreaming about you and I did not want to wake up, so I turned my head away and
then I heard a sound as if someone blew out a candle. The next thing I knew,
someone was shaking me and everything smelled and tasted of gas.
I
did
not think my father meant it when he said he would rather see me dead.
”

Elizabeth’s
lips trembled; tears shone in her eyes, hazel again instead of shocked black.

Ramiel had
known that the potential for danger existed when Elizabeth told him some hours
earlier that she had asked for a divorce. He had not expected any action this
quickly. Especially since he had made it clear in no uncertain terms that he
was aware of Petre’s secret life and would not hesitate to reveal it to the
public.

“I smell
of—gas. The countess said that you have a Turkish bath. May I bathe in it,
please? Then I would like to kiss you and take you in my hands and pump and
squeeze your manhood until you are erect. I want to kiss and suckle you there
like you did my breasts.”

Ramiel
sucked in air.
The third lesson.
She remembered verbatim how he liked to
be held.

His
fingers tightened about her shoulders before he released her and stepped back,
heart pounding as if he had raced his stallion across the desert sands into the
sunrise. “You do not have to do this, Elizabeth. If all you want is a bath,
then I will bathe you and that will be an end to it. You came to me for help.
You may stay here as long as you wish. I do not require that you sacrifice your
virtue for payment.”

“I am not
sacrificing my virtue. I am trying to make sense out of what is happening. Last
night in your coach I experienced something that was—quite wonderful. I have
driven one man to murder.
I
need to give you pleasure.
I need to
know that I can bring wonder to someone too.”

I
need to give you pleasure
reverberated
in the semicircular bay of windows. It was silently chased by Ramiel’s
thoughts.
But not enough to come to me freely without the threat of death.

He closed
his eyes against her raw desperation and fought down the encroaching
bitterness. The sun burned the right side of his face; the left side of him was
ice cold.

Elizabeth
offered him more than any other woman had ever offered. The past nine years had
taught him to take what he could get.

Opening
his eyes, he lowered his head and stared at her lips. “Do you know what you are
asking, Elizabeth?”

Her lips
tightened, as they had the first morning he had asked it. “Yes.”

And she
lied to herself again.

He held
out his hand. “Then, come.”

She took
his hand, her fingers cold and uncertain.

He padded
down the mahogany-paneled hallway inlaid with mother-of-pearl, impervious to
the scratchy wool of the cold Oriental runner beneath his bare feet, aware only
of her hand in his, the heat of her skin, the swish of her skirts, and the
blood pulsing in his manhood.

With each
step the anger built. At Edward Petre. For hurting Elizabeth. At Andrew
Walters. For threatening his own daughter’s life. At himself. For wanting
Elizabeth to flaunt society and come to him for no other reason than because
she wanted
him.

He came to
a door, opened it.  Relinquishing her hand, he reached for a switch, found it.
Harsh light flooded the stairwell. You have electricity.” Her voice was a
hollow echo.

“A recent
acquisition. Someday soon I plan on replacing all of the gas fixtures.
Electricity is less hazardous.”

“Yes.”

Ramiel
winced. She would not have been nearly gassed if Petre had invested in
electricity. He would make certain that the rest of his house was wired within
the month.

He
gestured for her to descend the spiral staircase. At the bottom she did not
wait for him to open the door. She turned the knob herself and stepped into the
cavernous pit that was the bathing room.

Ramiel
followed behind her, guided by the heat of her body and the icy tiles
underneath his bare feet. He searched the wall for—

Blinding
light clicked into being. Ramiel had installed electricity because of the added
convenience and privacy of not having to rely upon servants to light gas
fixtures whenever he wanted to swim. He stepped up behind her and tried to see
the room as she might see it—the large swimming bath wreathed in a thin haze of
steam, the floor that was a mosaic masterpiece of intertwining fauna, the empty
black marble fireplace in the far right-hand corner, a small porcelain tub
painted in delicate yellow, blue, and red against the outside wall.

It
belonged to her now. Everything he possessed was hers.

He would
not let her go again.

“It’s—colder
here than it was at your mother’s.”

Ramiel
nudged her toward the porcelain tub. “My mother is lazy. She prefers to relax
in her swimming bath, whereas I prefer to swim. I keep the water warm but not
as hot as a regular bath. I wash here.” He reached down and put a stopper into
the porcelain tub before twisting twin gold faucets; hot and cold water gushed
from the dolphin-shaped spout. “And then I swim.”

Straightening,
he untied the silk belt holding together his robe.

Elizabeth
stared fixedly at the water cascading into the tub. A pale pink flush infused
her cheeks.

Ramiel
shrugged out of the robe, let it slide off his body until it puddled around his
feet.

The flush
in her cheeks darkened. “I have never done this before.”

Steam
coiled around the two of them. “You swam at the countess’s.”

“Yes, but
I undressed behind a screen.”

“I don’t
have a screen.”

“Would you
turn your back, please?”

“No,” he
said baldly.

He would
not allow her to genteelly hide behind a screen or false modesty. He wanted
what she offered too badly to accept anything but naked honesty.

She
stiffened her spine and studied the array of brushes and soaps on top of the
mosaic-tiled shelf above the tub. “I have had two children.”

“So you
have said.”

“My body
is not. . . what it used to be.”

“Elizabeth,
I want the woman you are now, not the girl you once were. If you want to please
me, then undress for me.”

“If you do
not like what you see, you must tell me.” He strained to hear her over the
muted roar of the cascading water. “I would not force myself upon you.”

As she
had her husband.
Someday,
perhaps, she would tell him what Petre had done and said when she tried to
seduce him.

Elizabeth
clumsily took off her bodice. She wore the same chemise she had worn the night
before, the square neckline cut low over the curve of her breasts.

Ramiel’s
breathing quickened.

Averting
her face from that place on his body that amply showed what a fully erect man
looked like, she glanced about for a place to hang the velvet bodice. Ramiel
calmly took it from her. He tossed it toward the fireplace and waited, the roar
of the water filling the tub loud in the silence.

Head
bowing, she unhooked the waist of her skirt and let it fall around her feet.
Untying the flattened horsehair-stuffed bustle, she let that drop too, the thud
muffled by the velvet covering the ceramic tiles.

Ramiel’s
body tightened, in anticipation, in apprehension. She had almost been murdered;
no doubt she was still in shock. He should stop her from taking this step until
she was recovered, because once she gave herself to him there would be no going
back. She had said she would regret dancing with him last night. He would not
stop at a quick waltz around the swimming bath. He would not stop until they
had fully explored all forty positions of love plus all the other variations
that Ramiel had learned in the past twenty-five years.

One by one
she untied the two petticoats and he still did not stop her. White cotton
mounded over her feet.

Without
thinking, he reached over and bunched the shapeless chemise in his hands. His
knuckles rested on her ribs; her skin was taut underneath the flimsy cotton. “Lift
your arms over your head.”

He pulled
the chemise over her head and froze, her arms still in the air, the chemise
holding them captive.

Magnificent,
Joseffa had said. Ramiel
had never seen anything more beautiful in his life.

Her
breasts were creamy white with puckered rosebud nipples, swollen and tender
from his kisses the night before. She had a slender waist that flared to
generous hips, concealed only by clinging cotton drawers.

Sexual
heat flushed his face; it traveled all the way down to his feet—

“Ela’na!”
He jerked the chemise
over her arms and tossed it he knew not where. Bending down, he twisted the
gold faucets to the off position.

The tub
had overflowed. Elizabeth stood as if she did not know what to do with her
hands while the clothing at her feet soaked up hot water.

Ramiel
knew what she could do with her hands. She could pump him, stroke him,
suckle
him.
... All the things she said she wanted to do to him but which she had
planned to do for her husband.

He
straightened. “Turn around and look at me.”

Slowly,
slowly, she turned around.

Tensed,
body hard as the stone leaf she had once tried to remove from a statue, Ramiel
waited for approbation.

He could
hear her intake of breath, could see the widening of her eyes. “You—have pubic
hair.”