The Pursuit of Pleasure (35 page)

“Please, Lizzie, stop. Please.” He put a finger across her lips in supplication. “I don’t think I could bear it.” And then his hand was back at her chin, holding her still so he could look into her eyes. His clear gray gaze appraised her, open and unclouded by the lies they had become so fond of spouting. He looked at her face as if he was trying to memorize her and his eyes, full of unhappiness and disappointment, pierced her armor of indifference and left her bleeding. She pulled away, blundering out of reach. He let her go, dropping his hand to his side as a footman came through the side door.

“They’re looking for you, sir.”

“Coming.” He took a careful, measured breath. “Stay with Mrs. Tupper, Lizzie. Have her sleep in your room tonight. And if anything should happen, come to me. Do you understand? And for God’s sake, don’t bloody cut your hair.”

And it was only after he had gone that Lizzie realized they were finally telling each other the truth.

C
HAPTER 21

L
izzie hadn’t even known where she was going until she was there, at the door to the small, darkened cottage at the end of the lane. Come to him, he had said. It was all the invitation she needed.

Nothing had happened, not in the way he thought, but it was nearly three o’clock in the morning, and she hadn’t been able to sleep. Mrs. Tupper snored.

She’d never been to the gardener’s cottage before, and didn’t know what, or who, she might encounter. The house had seemed still and quiet, but once she had slipped out the kitchen door and gained the lane, the traffic was astounding.

The putative “footmen,” some still in, and others out of, livery, came and went at a scalding rate. What very busy spies they all seemed to be.

There was a light coming from the kitchen door, and she tried the knob. It opened easily, and she stepped into the tidy little kitchen. A low lantern was set on the wooden table, which was covered in charts of some kind and surrounded by people. By men. Navy men, who all stopped talking and stood to silent attention the moment she walked through the door.

Well, then. That answered her questions as to whether she was still under suspicion. Clearly, the answer was yes.

Jamie’s eyes seemed flat and closed, not giving anything away. “Yes?” Yet, there was a note of urgency to his voice. He had said to come only if anything was amiss.

“Yes, might I have a moment to speak to you?”

He backed away from the table with one final glance at the men surrounding it, and said in a very noncommittal tone. “We can speak in here. Gentlemen, if you will excuse me?”

He led the way through the dark passage to the front of the house, past the narrow staircase and into an even darker room at the front of the house. Lizzie followed slowly, trailing her hands along the walls to find her way in the low light. She paused at the bottom of the stairwell, peering upwards in the dim interior, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

“What are you doing here? What has happened?”

His voice came from what must have been the front parlor.

“Might we have some light?”

“No.” He was slouched in a straight-backed chair, his long booted legs sprawled out in front of him. Moonlight and the spill from the candlelight from the house across the lawns bathed him in a wash of golden white. “It’s easier for us to see out if the lights are doused. For us to keep track of things. Why have you come?” His voice was a weary growl. The hour had not improved his strange mood. He was in good company. She didn’t know why she’d come either. “You’ve really complicated things for us, Lizzie.”

“I’m sorry. I’d rather hoped to simplify them.”

He rose slowly, unfolding his tall form from the chair. He had changed into his rough work attire. He still looked tired, but at her words, all signs of weariness had dropped from him like a cloak. “Simplify? Do you mean to say you haven’t come with your attempts to torment me with talk of cutting your hair and other acts of defiance?”

Torment him? She hadn’t thought herself capable.

But he went on, misinterpreting her hesitation as some sort of answer.

“I do understand it’s all the rage in Paris, where they crop off ladies’ hair before they crop off their heads.
À la guillotine,
I believe they call it.” He turned away and gestured her into the room. “Do come in, Lizzie, so I might oblige you.”

She took a few cautious steps into the moonlit parlor. A greater portion of the little gardener’s cottage sat behind the kitchen garden wall, but this corner room looked out over the east lawn towards the house. Glass Cottage glowed like a lamp across the wide velvet greens.

She jumped at the sound of metal sliding across metal and turned to find Jamie standing behind a desk, holding up a pair of wickedly sharp shears.

“Do you want to sit, or do you want to stand and let me cut away?”

“No! I didn’t come here to do that.”

She had come, she realized with belated clarity, because she wanted him to sound and to look at her the way he had two hours ago in the kitchen at Glass Cottage. She wanted him to look at her again, as if
something,
anything, about her mattered to him. As if
she
mattered to him.

He walked to her, crossing the room in steady strides, but Lizzie felt as if she were being stalked by a wolf. She could already feel the probe of his clear, almost luminous, gray eyes as he sought her face. She fought the urge to step back, to turn and run as fast and as far as her legs could carry her.

“Then why did you come here, Lizzie?” He was so close she could feel the heat of his breath against her neck and smell the scent of his body. Bay rum.

She smiled to herself. Footmen would never smell of bay rum. Silly, nonsensical thought, but that was it. She loved the way he smelled. She loved him. And this might be her last chance to tell him.

“There are caves under the house. They lead in from the cliff face down at the cove.”

He went still, searching her face. “I know,” he said finally.

“Oh. Well good. I found them, myself. The day I found … you.” It seemed somehow important to tell him this, so he might credit her with the accomplishment. How foolish. “I haven’t had a chance to explore or map them yet, but I think it’s where the free traders, where your smugglers, have hidden their cache. I think that’s how Dan Pike got into the house. And why he got into the house.”

Again, there was a pause before he answered. He was weighing her out, deciding if he was going to trust her with the truth. “We’ve mapped them, McAlden and I. And so had Francis Palmer. They’re empty. And they don’t lead to the house.”

“Really?” Lizzie was disappointed. “I was so sure they would go up to the house. But if they don’t connect, how did Dan Pike get in while the doors were still barred?”

“Don’t you think we’ve asked ourselves the same questions?”

Oh, good Lord. She hadn’t. She hadn’t thought so at all. She had thought she and Maguire were the only ones who knew anything. What had Wroxham said to her about thinking she was the cleverest girl in the room? She certainly didn’t feel that way now.

“Don’t you think we’ve been over every inch of that house? Searched every cellar and attic looking for the shipments of guns? Don’t you understand why McAlden and my crew have taken every stupid, dirty job, every workday run possible between here and the Channel Islands to try and find out who is running the Pikes’ organization? Who wants to use Glass Cottage so badly they were willing to kill Frank Palmer and even perhaps you?”

“I didn’t know. I…” It hit her—a low blow behind her knees. They had been trying to kill her. She worked hard to stay upright. To think. “I think you should tell Mr. Maguire. Or let me tell him.”

“Ah, yes, Maguire. Why do you trust this Maguire, Lizzie? Did it never occur to you
he
might be the one? The one running this gang of cutthroats, the one who sent Dan Pike and his pistols, the one who killed Frank Palmer, carried his body across the hill and threw him into the Dart?”

“No! I’ve known him all my life. He saved my life.”

There was a little moment of quiet before he inserted his words like a knife thrust between her ribs, silent and close.

“You’ve known me all your life as well.”

That was what it all boiled down to between them: trust. The root source of all their problems, of all their disagreements. For all their love, they had never fully trusted one another.

Lizzie took a first tentative step into trust.

“I used to trust you just as implicitly. And I desperately want to again.”

“Really? You didn’t trust me three days ago.”

“No. That was a mistake. I should have done.”

He stepped so close she could see the sheen of moonlight in his luminous eyes. “Do you trust me now?”

“No,” she whispered and saw his eyes sharpen with a pain so keen she felt its cut herself. “No, Jamie. I don’t entirely trust you, not only because you’ve still got those wicked, sharp scissors in your hand, but because you’ve got that look in your eye.” She leaned in close and raised her lips to his ear. “The one that tells me you’d very much like to take all my clothes off and take me, naked, right here in the middle of your carpet.”

His body stiffened and he might have held his breath, so she continued. “And I rather hoped you might have seen I had a look in my eyes that tells you I’d very much like to take off all my clothes and lie down and fuck you right here, in the middle of your front parlor.”

She heard the slice of air as the scissors dropped, but he stepped away. She felt the enormous gulf those scant inches opened up between them. Felt the chilling loss of his heat.

“No,” he said quietly, but firmly. “Not in the middle of the floor. Not naked in the front parlor. You’re my wife and I mean to make love to you properly, in a proper bed.”

He took her by the hand and led her, quietly and slowly, up the steep, narrow stairs and into his small, steeply pitched room and next to his narrow, soft bed.

“Handsomely now, Lizzie,” was all he said.

They undressed each other slowly and carefully, like an old married couple. Like a couple who had all the time in the world together, every day, and never had to rush and fumble. Like a couple whose love and devotion and respect were made manifest in long languid strokes and quiet, low words. Who took the time to savor and appreciate each other. Who knew by heart the things to do and say to make the other sigh in bliss, and offer their bodies to each other in pleasure.

And when they had done, and were sated with the physical pleasure, they held each other close and were still, with nowhere to go, and nothing left to hide from one another.

Marlowe tightened his arms to hold her closer. “Lizzie.” He said it like an incantation, as if he could bind her to his soul. As if he could keep her next to him like this, quiet and soft, forever. But with Lizzie, the storm clouds were never far off.

She sighed, a long shiver of breath, and he braced for her dismissal. “This is how I always imagined it would be.”

He answered cautiously. “How what would be?”

“Between us.”

“Quietly erotic?” He let his hand shape her lovely little breast in encouragement.

“No, I mean yes, but that’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?” He caught some of her quiet gravity, her wistfulness.

“I meant this was how I had always imagined our first time together would be. In your narrow bed, in a small cottage somewhere. Somewhere cozy, just the two of us, and that after you made love to me for the first time I would feel …”

He rolled up on his elbow so he could see her face. He let the silence lengthen for a long moment, until he quietly prompted, “You would feel?”

“Complete.”

Marlowe felt a welling of tenderness. Oh, yes, this he understood. Completely. He brushed a loose strand of hair off her face. “And do you?”

“Yes, I suppose, now.”

The breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding relaxed. He thought about her answer for another moment as he stroked her hair and then asked, “And did you not before?”

“No. I didn’t understand. I thought it was something you could give me. But I never thought we would be at odds with each other the way we have been.”

That was an extraordinarily polite description of what had occurred between them, but it was important to show her he understood. “Yes, we have been at odds, haven’t we?”

“Yes.” She was quiet again for along time. He gathered her to him, so her head could rest against his chest, to encourage this extraordinary rush of confidences. “Did you mean what you said, really? About the government and treason, and my,” she swallowed hard, “neck?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” He tightened his arms around her, trying to temper his fierce possessiveness. “But I’ll do everything in my power to see it doesn’t happen. That you’re safe. I’ll protect you.”

Not even an extraordinary rush of confidences could change her personality. “I don’t need you to protect me,” she began with predictable bravado. “I can take care—”

He cut her off. He wasn’t going to stand for such a ludicrous fiction any more. “Lizzie, do you honestly think what you’ve been doing has been either prudent or effective? You’ve taken care of yourself by what? By carrying around that fowling piecelike a third arm? By shooting Dan Pike and bringing the rest of the smuggling confederation down on your head? By ignoring every piece of sane advice to go back to town and leave this godforsaken house behind?”

She shook her head stubbornly. “No. I can’t leave the house, it would—”

“Why is that bloody house so God-damned important to you?”

“Because it was yours, you ass! Because you gave it to me. Because you gave me everything I had ever dreamed I had wanted, all covered with roses and windows and stars, God damn it. Stars! You made me see stars.” Lizzie punctuated her speech with vehement little pokes to his chest. But she wasn’t trying to move away.

His smile started deep in his chest and by the time it made it all the way up to his mouth, he was almost laughing.

“Why, my darling, Lizzie, that is completely and hopelessly sentimental.”