Unfinished (Historical Fiction) (6 page)

His hand seemed to render her speechless. Blinking, she stared at him, then sighed and shook her head slightly. Tightening his grasp was involuntarily; he feared she was shaking off the very feelings that stirred inside him, searching for homeostasis. Particles that clouded the solution of his heart and soul as they were shaken by this turn of events. Particles that would, nonetheless, settle sometime.

Yet always remain in the liquid.

Her face inclined toward his, a small moon to the one in the sky, and as if pulled by fate his lips found hers, tiny hands wrapping around his neck as he bent over, nearly folding in half to catch her mouth.

Her artless response took him by surprise but increased this confounded tenderness that he could not help but feel toward her. While lacking in skill, Lilith's eager response showed an abundance of desire. As he slowly, playfully teased her lips with his tongue, a wellspring of desire claimed his rational mind and he pressed against her, his arousal unmistakably clear.

The kisses slowed, the connection fostered, the aftermath now inevitably making its way to clarity signaled to both that a parting of faces and bodies must take place. James, pulled back, then leaned his forehead against hers, inhaling her lavender scent mixed with the musk and grime of his respectable, though well-worn, coat.

“James,” she breathlessly intoned.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a healthy fear of billionaire fathers?” She kept her face hidden, but he could feel her grin piercing his heart, the implied laughter a balm that felt forbidden.

He pulled back and held her at arm's distance, the streetlight's arc of light around them forming a protective barrier against the dark. “I do indeed, Lilith. But more important: does your father have a healthy fear of Southie ne'er do wells who kiss his daughter?”

“I think,” she replied, narrowing her eyes as if appraising a jewel, turning her head to and fro to examine him through her own unyielding prism, “we are about to find out.”

Chapter Four

J
AMES SPENT THE NEXT MONTH WONDERING
how to court a billionaire's daughter. He might as well have attempted to build a time machine with scraps from the city dump. An impossible task lay before him, but memories of those kisses, of her gentle vulnerability, Lilith's willingness to let him in behind that seemingly impenetrable fortress, fueled him to find a way.

Jack Reed was no help; John Stone had dismissed him, and Reed hung on to his job by his teeth. As Reed's main clerk,this meant that James would have had no legitimate reason to conduct business in or around Lilith, but some finagling and flattery had gotten him moved over to work with the partner who now managed Stone's affairs, a well-known opium addict named Michael Hanlon. He was as slim as James was wide, with a face that hung so long it looked like the moon in its sliver time. Neither pleasant nor gruff, Hanlon kept his job for one simple reason: his father had founded the firm.

And, according to rumor, he had no sex drive of any kind. For women.

James helped Hanlon with very basic work and found ways to encourage the man to let him make courier deliveries himself. Four separate visits to the Stone house revealed nothing of Lilith. What would she want with him anyway? He could offer her kisses and a warm coat and not much else.

Soon enough, though, that might change.

James read constantly. Obsessively. He had figured out letters and words on his own, long before being shoved off to school at six, and he'd taken to printed matter like some kids took to pickpocketing. Even now, at twenty-six, he picked up any newspaper he found, reading it front and back. A chance encounter with a dropped copy of Financial News, a halfpenny newspaper from London, England, gave James an idea, a way out, an opportunity that could catapult him into the ranks of the Carnegies, the Jarveys – and, maybe, even the Stones.

The article described the Nitrate Railway, a system developed by one Colonel John North. Though he'd died several years back, the article described his success in extracting sodium nitrate, a powerful fertilizer, from the mine fields of Peru and Chile.

Maria Escola had popped into his head just then, and he'd promptly used the excuse of research to spend time at work digging into details on the nitrate industry in Chile. Some sources claimed it was in decline; North had so thoroughly exploited the profit from the perpetually-turmoiled South American governments. And yet a few sources claimed that some minerals experts believed there were large stores that remained to be tapped.

And the market was strong.

Ah, but he'd spent days, weeks – nay, months – chasing dreams like this. North was like him, a poor, workingman's kid from a run-down side of the city. Tucking the thought away, James went about his business.

Until one night, in bed with Maria, he'd asked her what she knew of the industry. Mutual attraction has taken hold after they'd attended a lecture on polygamy; Maria had scandalized most of proper Boston society by asking the lecturer the word for one woman with many husbands.

“Polyandry,” the befuddled anthropology professor had replied. “But it is very rare.”

“I should think so,” she had said. “Only a woman of extraordinary...appetites could handle more than one man at once.”

“Oh, no, Miss – ”

“Escola. Maria Escola.” One half of her fire-engine red lips raised in a sultry grin.

“Miss Escola. Not at the same time. Polyandry does not mean that the husbands and wives experience conjugal relations simultaneously.”

The crowd had tittered, Maria's half-grin frozen on her face. James had admired her composure, and saw the wheels turning behind her eyes, searching for a retort.

And oh, my, had she found one.

“Well, then, my fine professor, what is the point?”

The crowd's response had been schizophrenic. Half gasped, half roared. All knew her name by the evening's end.

While others shunned her, James sought her out. This was a woman worth knowing.

They'd been lovers for a few weeks, more from availability than any strong desire, and she seemed surprised that he would ask her anything of substance. Both seemed to find the other vapid, yet the sexual arrangements were pleasing enough to maintain a truce of sorts, an unstable detente between the bedsheets. Smeared red lipstick and mussed hair gave her an unfinished, rather than intimate, appearance, and James studied her as she spoke, as if watching a lecturer.

“My father invests in such, how do you say in English? Companies? No, people who wish to go out and find the products in the fields, in the mines. Those people.”

“Really?” He sat up, propping his head on his and, and narrowed his eyes. “He funds prospectors?”

“Prospectors? Is that the word? Men who say there is still coal or copper or nitrate in a part of the land, but who do not have the money to go themselves? Then yes.” One hand dipped under the sheet and reached for him.

Thoughts of nitrate had disintegrated.

But they returned later. And through a series of pillow talks with Maria, James had gained access to her father, Marco Escola, a dark-haired, bushy-browed Latin man who spoke more with his hands than his mouth. Nobility flowed through his veins, blood centuries-thick with aristocratic ties, but when it came to money, investment, and ambition, Stone and Escola were equals. Momentarily. And then Marco had offered a deal James had no choice but to accept: basic expenses in return for unfettered devotion to finding a new, untapped store of nitrate.

The offer left him reeling. Ma and Da relied on his paycheck at the firm. He'd never left Boston, much less the country. He didn't speak Spanish, though Maria had taught him enough words to navigate her body; somehow, he didn't think that would help him much when he arrived in the Andes mountains and needed to hire men for the mines. And, worst of all, he would have to tuck his desire for Lilith away, fold it neatly like a contract one never signs, a mark of what could have been that stays filed away for future reference but never redeemed.

“What have you learned?” Lilith hissed through clenched teeth, using the lecture's program to cover her mouth. It had taken a month, but she had stirred up the courage to attend another lecture on sexual health, this one on the importance of exercise for women to prevent hysteria.

“He is known for his sexual appetite, Lilith. And Maria Escola is his dinner.” In desperation, Lilith had turned to her college friend, Esther Nourse, for help with information on James. Esther was eccentric; anyone who kept a Capuchin and dressed it in infant clothes could not be trusted for any mission but social spying. And organizing Oberlin college reunions.

Esther's wild, greying hair spilled out from its bun, her eyes too alert and bright. Though they were the same age, twenty-four, Esther looked to be closer in age to Lilith's mother, as though Esther were an eccentric, spinster aunt one tolerated at family gatherings in hopes of being named in her will one day.

She resembled a woman terrified half out of her mind after a fright, but on Esther the look was permanent. A constant twitch of the left eyelid added to the portrait of madness, and Lilith found herself falling down a spiral hole of surreality, hoping that she could end this evening and get out from Esther's socially-deprived clutches.

“So they are lovers.” Lilith's words were not a question.

“They were as of a month ago. Other sources tell me that Miss Escola is angry, having been spurned by Goliath.” Pleased with her own joke, Esther had now used it precisely six times this evening. What had been faintly amusing had now instilled in Lilith a deep desire to poke a hat pin through Esther's hand.

Esther fumbled with her carpet bag, which appeared to move of its own accord. A snout protruded from the opening near the clasp, followed by a searching eye.

“Esther! What do you have in there?”

“A tiny dog,” Esther answered, as if it were the most normal object to stuff into a purse at a lecture hall.

“He must go!” And with that, the dog agreed, escaping down the row of chairs.

“Rodrigo!” Esther cried, chasing after the little Mexican canine.

Emulating Rodrigo, Lilith took the chance to escape. Walking down the same street where she and James had kissed just a month ago was pure torture. Maria Escola? Lovers? His lips had craved hers, licked and laved and touched and teased with mouth and hands on that woman, just as he had done on her. A furious flush filled her and she began to sweat from anger, her heart beating twice as fast as it should, hand fluttering to her collarbone to quell it. A familiar darkness skirted around the edges of her vision and she searched out a bench, panic setting in.

But Esther had said James spurned Maria. A month ago. Did that mean...?

In that simple kiss, Lilith had come home. Her soul felt settled. She couldn't make heads or tails of it, and it made no sense at all, yet she was pragmatic, even about passion. There it was: she was falling in love with a poor, Irish man from South Boston, like something in a cheap rag that the maids passed around to read to each other. Except in those stories, the rich character was always the man. She didn't care. Never in her life had anyone made her feel this alive. His mouth spoke to her without words, stirring a deep – dare she say it? Love? – that felt more complete than any feeling she knew possible. She wanted nothing more than this. Ever.

And yet the same man was sleeping his way through the wealthy daughters of Boston?

Damn it, Lilith.
It meant that talking with James was the only solution. She walked back to her carriage and gave the driver James' address. Startled, her coachman asked, “Miss Stone, you sure you want to go there? Now? It's awful dark and that part of town isn't...” His voice dropped off with the implication that she understood his unexpressed meaning.

“Are you afraid you will not be able to protect me should harm come my way? If so, you must not value your job.” His implication set off an angry tirade inside that threatened to spill over into the night air.

“No Ma'am,” he answered tightly. “I am from that part of town, in fact, and I know it well. That's why I advise – ”

“I need no advice from you. I need your driving skills. Which is it?”

The horses began to pull away, the steady, unsyncopated beat of their hooves on the cobblestones gave way, after a few minutes, to the softer pounding on the caked dirt of South Boston’s roads. New automobiles puttered by on their way to finer neighborhoods. Perhaps going to James' home was a mistake, but it was also a test. He'd hidden her from his real life. Including Maria Escola.