Tidal Wave (29 page)

The room, the music, the ship disappeared. Only the sensations of love and passion remained. Not until Nicholas had tenderly touched her cheek with the back of his hand and eased her off his lap into a sitting position did she realize that the music had stopped and Nicholas had covered her breasts and replaced the puffed sleeves on her shoulders.

He helped her up. They stood next to the unicorn looking down at the beast with admiration for its romantic beauty.

“I hardly know where I am,” said Arabella. “All this —” She waved her hand, encompassing the room, then kissed him as he held her in his arms.

“All this,” she repeated, “and heaven too. I never dreamed I could have so much.”

They were walking toward the dinner table, his arm through hers, when she said, “There is nothing that can surpass this evening and our being together.”

“Yes, there is. Being together always. Joining our lives,
our dreams, our hopes forever. How about being partners in love, passion, and life for eternity? How about marrying me?”

They had stopped and now looked into each other’s eyes. As if by magic the sound of the harpsichord swelled again from behind the ivory screen and filled the Empress Catherine Music Room.

“Say yes … just say yes,” he begged, as he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

Arabella wanted to say yes. Her heart, body, and soul yearned to say yes. Only her mind, full of the stored-up years of loving Anthony, held her back. Thoughts rushed through her head. After years of hoping, at last he offered her marriage, a life together — all she had dreamed of and yearned for for so very long. Now she looked into Nicholas’s face and was mesmerized by the love, excitement, and emotion in it. Those were the very same things she had imagined she’d seen in Anthony’s face time and time again. Yes! she realized; she had
imagined
those things! She had never really seen them, except perhaps during their lovemaking, their passionate and sometimes depraved sexual odysseys. Then she saw Nicholas lower his eyes and she felt him slip a ring onto her finger. Never releasing her gaze from him, nor herself from the tension of the moment, she felt a tidal wave of emotion sweep over them both.

Nicholas raised his eyes again and looked into hers. In that look Arabella saw a flicker of fear and anxiety, vulnerability, a stab of intense pain and desperation over her silence. In a voice cracked with emotion, he repeated the same words. “Yes — just say yes.”

Arabella’s heart was filled with a wave of love so profound it snapped her out of her own shocked silence. She put her arms around his neck and whispered, “Yes, yes,” then louder, “Yes,” and even louder, “Oh, yes, yes.”

Arabella was aware that here was a love stronger, more emotional and powerful than anything she had ever felt for another human being. She was painfully aware that in all
her years with Anthony never once had he opened himself, surrendered himself completely to her as Nicholas did now.

It was with a deep sense of sadness that Arabella now understood she had loved, given everything totally, surrendered herself completely, happily answered all Anthony demanded from her. She had done it with a naturalness that comes with love and the desire to please.

She knew now, with her “yes” to Nicholas still on her lips, that she had given too much to Anthony and he had given too little. It was a shock because she had never measured how much love to give, but she knew now that Anthony did and was mean with it.

Nicholas closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he smiled at Arabella. He held her up off the floor, against him, and she kissed him passionately on the lips, then his cheeks, his chin, and then once again on his lips. All the while she murmured, “Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.” When she stopped he put her down and they smiled at each other.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“You had better believe it,” she said, laughing. “I’ll not let you go now!”

“I don’t know what happened but for a minute there I thought I’d lost you, that you were thinking of …” Nicholas broke off in midsentence and went on. “Never mind that minute.

“When?” he asked. “When? Shall we try and get Captain Hamilton to marry us tonight here on board ship? I think captains can still do that, can’t they? No,” he answered himself, “not on board. Let’s have our closest family and friends around us. What do you think?”

Not giving Arabella a chance to answer, Nicholas carried on. “Just tell me when and we’ll plan our wedding together. Arabella, you’ve made me so happy. I’m the happiest man on earth. We’ll have a wonderful life together. I promise you that.”

“I know we will, my darling. Nicholas, let’s decide all that tomorrow — the when and the where. Right now I’m
floating on a cloud of love and trying to adjust to the reality that this is no dream, no shipboard romance that will be over tomorrow when the ship docks, but a love that now has the commitment of continuity to it.

“You are not the happiest man in the world.
We
are the two happiest people on earth. I love you with all my heart, Nicholas Frayne.”

With her hand held up in front of her, the two of them admired the square-cut diamond ring Nicholas had slipped on her finger.

They walked to the torchère lighting the two wooden silver-leafed Russian wolfhounds in the middle of the music room and held the gem up to the candlelight. The blue-white diamond sparkled, sent off flashes of light, and flecks of rainbows danced on the sculptured animals.

“It was made for you! It fits perfectly. I knew when I saw the stone nothing else would do.”

“Nicholas, I simply adore it! It has such fire. It’s so alive! I love it!”

He kissed her on the cheek, then lifted her right hand, saying “That’s only the frosting, darling. Here’s the cake.”

He slipped a magnificent ivory wedding band inlaid with square-cut diamonds all around it on the third finger of her right hand.

They kissed. Arabella said, “Thank the Lord for the ship’s shopping mall, and M. Gerard’s boutique, your good taste and generosity, and, most of all, your love for me.”

“Wear it now, Arabella. I’d love you to wear it always,” Nicholas said before they kissed again.

“Oh, Nicholas, I will. It’s so elegant, unusual, and beautiful. But this is a ring I’ll always wear for what it means, not for its beauty alone.”

“I’ll borrow it for five minutes just before our wedding ceremony and then slip it on again before the eyes of the world and God and all that,” he said, kissing her again.

“Where did the unicorn come from? How did you manage it in the middle of the ocean?” Arabella asked.

“It was easy and I was lucky. I bought it in Paris from
an extraordinary collector of decorative arts from the Middle Ages and the reigns of the kings of France. I went to look at it with a friend. I was as shocked as everyone else when I walked away having purchased it!

“It was in the storeroom on board. I planned all this and had the case opened this morning after I left you.”

The eloquence of the harpsichord silenced them. Suddenly it took over and filled the room with the bravura passages, ornamentation, romantic rhythms, and fine dynamic shadings of Joaquin Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
. While the piece had been specially arranged for the harpsichord, it still sounded like the guitar and orchestra it had been written for. It fired the imagination, and they could have been in a secluded courtyard somewhere in Seville, surely not on the ocean waves. Only the sensuous rocking sensation of the
Tatanya Annanovna
was a reminder of where they really were.

Nicholas had created a secret fantasy world where a magic carpet flew them from one happy sublime place to another by pricking the senses.

The room, like the music, was bursting with life, an extension of them and what they felt for each other. They gravitated silently toward the harpsichord, sat on the floor of the rostrum, and listened. As the last note was played and the room was silent, neither of them moved. An essence of Rodrigo vibrated around the room. Arabella slipped off the rostrum and walked to the pierced ivory screen and the young harpsichordist sitting there silent.

Nicholas pressed a service bell underneath the dining table and almost immediately a waiter appeared through the hidden door in the boiserie. Nicholas asked him to pour three glasses of champagne. He watched the young musician rise and kiss Arabella’s hand before joining them. The three drank a toast to Rodrigo for his genius. Then, rather self-consciously, the young man made his exit through a small door in the boiserie.

Nicholas put an arm around Arabella and said, “I give you honest and fair warning right now. It’s not always going
to be like this. I’m usually a simple man who likes to sail his boat, hunt with his son on our mountain in Idaho. This new, romantic Nicholas Frayne who can only think of ways to make you happy is as new to me as he is to you.”

“Okay.” She laughed. “I’m warned.”

“And you’re still willing to take me on?”

“Sure, you bet I am!”

“God, I adore you! Come on,” he said. “I’ve arranged for delicious things to feed you, give us strength, make us sexy. Are you hungry?”

“All this and food too?” she teased.

“I believe we are ready for dinner, George.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the waiter. He then disappeared behind the boiserie, reappearing with an assistant and a serving table. They removed domed silver covers from serving plates and lit burners under chafing dishes. George opened a chilled bottle of vintage Roederer Cristal while the second waiter piled their plates high with chilled oysters on the half shell; big, fat, delectable Belons, so sexy to taste and feel in the mouth. The waiters retreated behind the paneling and waited to be called to serve the next course.

Arabella sank her teeth into the succulent oyster lolling on her tongue. As she swallowed the taste of sex filled her thoughts as the slippery crustacean slid down her throat. Her eyes met Nicholas’s; something in his look combined with the eating of the oysters made her feel sexy and warm all over.

She picked up the empty shell, sucked the juice from it, and then said smiling, “They’re so sexy to eat they’re almost indecent!”

“So are you,” he said.

“Don’t look at me that way, Nicholas. It’s as indecent as the oysters!”

“How can I help it? You’re provocative, sucking on those shells.”

He reached out and slowly moved his hands over her throat and bare chest. “You’re so beautiful. Everything else in the world seems bland next to you.”

He leaned over sideways, pulled her chair a few inches closer to his, and ran his tongue down between the cleavage of her breasts. He kissed her passionately on the lips; their mouths opened and their tongues met.

Nicholas took her hand in his and buzzed for the waiters. Two of the waiters removed the shell-laden plates while the other walked around the table to one of the chafing dishes and stirred the steamy bubbling soup with a silver ladle.

Arabella watched as he ladled the thick liquid into two Sèvres soup cups. He served them to the lovers and then placed a small silver jug of thick white double cream between them and was gone. Nicholas leaned toward Arabella, kissed her on the tip of her nose, then slowly poured some cream over the thick turtle and green pea soup.

“Oh, it smells divine!” said Arabella.

Nicholas reached over and took Arabella’s left hand in his, then they picked up their round soup spoons. The cream had spread like a thin film over the epicurean delight. Arabella broke the surface of the cream and filled her spoon with the thick green soup. The cool, velvety rich cream and hot pungent taste of turtle and pea combined with the smooth texture of the soup was mouthwatering and devastatingly sensual. Nicholas knew quite well how erotic the food they were dining on was. He had, after all, planned the menu.

After the fourth spoonful he squeezed Arabella’s hand and felt a tightening in his crotch. Swallowing the ambrosia only served to remind him of how wonderful it was to make love with the woman at his side. He licked the empty silver spoon and placed it in the saucer under the soup cup. He undressed Arabella with his eyes.

The harpsichordist had returned, and he was now playing a Telemann piece reminiscent of springtime, of nymphs and satyrs in a wood or dashing through fields of wildflowers. Arabella stood up and bent down to kiss Nicholas, who took the opportunity to put his arm around her waist and press his face to her breasts. “Let me touch you,” he said in a husky voice. He saw desire in her face, heard her sigh and felt her change her stance, her legs move wider apart. He
slid his hand through the long slit of her dress up between her legs and was delighted to feel the luscious thick pubic hair unhindered. He pulled her tight to him and his fingers played up and down the length of her. He was thrilled by the heat and silky smooth wetness he found there.

“Oh, how I wanted to feel you! You cannot possibly know how exciting and divine it is for me to sit here fondling you like this.”

Arabella couldn’t answer him. She let out a soft moan. She was torn between wanting to ease his cock out of his pants and move on to it and thinking they should stop. There was, after all, someone else in the room, albeit behind the screen.

She whispered in his ear, “Send the waiters and musician away so you can take me now, here, now ….”

She could feel his erection throbbing against her.

“No,” he said. “Let’s wait. The evening has just begun. You’re making a dirty old man of me. Let’s wait at least until dessert!”

Arabella stepped back and adjusted her dress. Her face and chest were flushed and her eyes sparkled. Nicholas rang for the next course and George duly prepared it: lobster stuffed with wild mushrooms and covered in a succulent shrimp sauce, served hot from one of the chafing dishes. The waiter covered the little burners with their silver caps, putting out the flames, thanked the couple, and asked them to ring should they want anything. He then retreated behind the door.

Nicholas said, “I chose our dinner from the sea for this evening. Sexy food from the sea. Proteins and minerals to give us strength to match our passion is an added bonus for food so delicious, don’t you think?”