Beyond the Sunrise (22 page)

His jaw tightened. “Then you had better try me,” he said.

She grimaced. “I wish you had not said that,” she said. “You know I cannot resist a challenge, Robert. But on this occasion I believe I must. My answer is yes, you see. I think we had better be lovers while we are together. Or sex partners, if you prefer the term. Yes, that is my choice. Are you glad or sorry?”

He was removing his coat. And then unbuckling his sword belt, holding her eyes with his own the whole time. And she knew what he was doing, what he was going to do. He was not going to wait until darkness fell, until the right moment came for love. He had meant it when he said no romance and no seduction. He was going to take her then, quite dispassionately, to prove to her that they were to be in no way lovers. Only sex partners.

Well. She smiled slowly. Two could play at that game. And if he cared to throw down the gauntlet—as he was in the process of doing—then she would pick it up even before it touched the ground. She unbuckled her belt and dropped it beside the blanket. Then she got to her feet, pulled down her undergarments and stepped out of them, and crossed her arms to draw her dress up over her head. She dropped it on top of her other garments. And she lay down naked on the blanket and looked at him.

He was angry. She knew it, though he said nothing. She had stolen his fire. He had meant her to be dismayed, disconcerted, embarrassed—any number of negative things. He had not expected her to prepare herself in as matter-of-fact a way as he was doing. She almost asked him what the delay was, but that would have been going too far. He would have known if she had spoken the words that she merely mocked him. He would have known that she was indeed
dismayed. She did not want to be taken with no semblance of love at all.

But she would win eventually, she decided. If he thought that he could be intimate with her for days or even weeks without his feelings being in any way engaged, then clearly he did not know her even half as much as she knew him. She would allow him his daily and nightly couplings if they gave him a feeling of power over her. But all the time she would be weaving a golden spell of love about him. Oh, yes, she would.

He had changed his mind, she saw. If he had meant to completely undress, he would have removed his boots first. But now he was removing them, and his shirt, and his trousers too. And oh, yes, she thought, watching him, he was every bit as magnificent as she had been picturing him in her imagination all day. Except that she had not pictured the scars, especially the large and still-purple one below his left shoulder, only just above his heart.

Like his facial scars, the ones on his body did nothing to detract from his overall attractiveness. He was beautiful. She wanted to tell him so, but this was supposed to be a dispassionate sexual encounter. So be it, then. And so it would be.

There was to be no kissing, no caressing, it seemed. She felt regret, but she parted her legs for him at the first nudging of his knees and watched him as he positioned himself and came into her in one swift thrust. She smiled up into his eyes.

“If this is to be for pleasure only, Robert,” she said, “then I expect to be pleasured.”

“Oh, you will be.” His voice and his eyes were hard as he brought his body down on hers and she was reminded of the weight of all those muscles bearing down on her, the ground at her back. “You will be, Joana.”

“And I expect to give pleasure,” she said, her hands sliding over warm flesh until her arms were about him and her legs slid up the sides of his and over the tops of them until she wormed her feet
between. “I will not give pleasure merely by lying like a fish until you have finished inside me.”

“Do what you wish,” he said. “We have a mutual agreement.”

Undressing in front of him and watching him undress had excited her quite as much as kissing and fondling would have done. When he had come into her, he had come into wetness, and she was throbbing there, and her breasts were tender and aching and hard-tipped, and her desire for him was pulsing through her.

Her love for him.

She held him with her arms and legs, all his hard-muscled magnificence, and moved against him, twisting her hips and her shoulders, drawing on him with inner muscles, feeling him hard and deep, wanting him and wanting him, and keeping her teeth firmly clamped so that she would say nothing. He had not moved.

“Does that feel pleasurable?” she asked him in a whisper. “Does it, Robert?”

“Yes.” He braced himself on his elbows, and his face was above hers suddenly, his blue eyes gazing down into hers, expressionless. But she could see deeper than his eyes and she knew that he spoke the truth.

“Give me pleasure too,” she said. “I want to be pleasured too, Robert.”

“Like this?” He withdrew very slowly and reentered as slowly. “Does that give you pleasure?”

“Yes,” she said, and he did it again, his eyes holding hers, and once more.

She wanted his mouth on hers. There was nothing more intimate than what they were doing. But the meeting of mouths brought the closeness of love. She wanted his mouth on hers, his tongue inside. But of course this was to be an experience without love. This was about intimacy and not closeness. About sex and not love.

She moved her hips again so that together they set up a slow rhythm.

“It is good?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“It is very good,” she said. “You are larger than most men, Robert?”

“You should know,” he said. “Is the ground hard? Would you prefer to come on top?”

“No.” The ache of her need was in her throat. She closed her eyes. He would surely know the truth if he continued to look into them. How could he not know the truth? Was it possible to do this—this, in just this way—only for physical pleasure? Perhaps it was for a man. Perhaps it was for some women. But not for her. She could not do this purely for pleasure. She could do it only for duty—though when it had been duty she had been able to stomach it only six times—or for love.

Did he not know that? And that she owed him no duty at all?

And was it not so for him? Was it always like this with his whores? With Beatriz?

“Is it like this for you with Beatriz?” Her eyes flew open and she found herself looking up into his again. “Is it as pleasurable with her?”

“Have done, Joana,” he said. “Hush.” And he lowered his weight onto her again, reached down with his hands to cup her buttocks as he had early that morning so that she would not feel the hardness of the ground, and built the rhythm of their loving to a faster speed.

She thought she would surely go mad. It took him forever to finish. Not that she had any complaint about that. She wished they could be joined forever. But he would not allow her her pleasure. When she felt it coming, recognizing the signs from the night before, and knew as she had not the night before what glory, what peace awaited her, he must have felt it too and stroked her more shallowly so that though she twisted and pushed against him, she could not bring him to the core of her aching, to the center of her being.

And so despite everything she was losing this particular round
of their struggle. She had to bite down on both lips not to whimper and plead. And he knew it. He was using an expertise she could not compete with. He was playing with her as one would play with an opponent one was absolutely sure of defeating. She could not fight him, not even the hopeless fight she had fought with him before. For she could not play mind games with him when her body was crying out its love and its need to be loved.

“Now, Joana!” he ordered against her ear, though he might as well have spoken Greek for the amount she understood the words. But she understood the language of his body. He had slowed and deepened, and then he drove urgently into her so that she shouted out and came against him with a shattering force that obliterated all thought and even consciousness for endless moments.

She was lying on her back, gazing up at tree trunks and branches. The warm air of evening was cool against her bare skin. Her cheek was close to a shoulder that radiated heat and that drew her like a magnet. She rubbed her cheek against it, and the shattered pieces of her mind came together again.

“Thank you, Robert,” she said. “That was indeed pleasurable.”

“What the devil did you mean,” he asked, “mentioning Beatriz in the middle of all that? Do you have no sense of decorum whatsoever? And what about all your lovers? Do I measure up against them?”

“Very favorably,” she said, closing her eyes. “Very favorably indeed, Robert. I think you may have spoiled me for them all.”

“Well,” he said, “Leroux and countless dozens of the others can give you a fortune and a lifetime of luxury as well as a damned good time in bed, Joana. I do not believe you will pine for me for long.”

“I never pine,” she said. “Except once. That was before I learned to cope with life.”

“Was there ever such a time?” he asked.

“People laugh at the love between children,” she said. “They call it puppy love, just as if it is not love at all but something merely to
cause amusement. I believe it is the best love, the only love. It is pure and innocent and all-consuming. I would never belittle such love.”

He had turned his head to look at her. She was staring across his chest to the trees beyond him.

“He was beautiful,” she said. “He was seventeen years old, but very grown-up to my fifteen-year-old eyes. He was the first man I danced with, the first man I kissed. He was the first to touch me.” She smiled dreamily. “He touched my breast and I felt sinful and wonderful. I loved him totally and passionately, Robert—he was that other Robert I told you about. I vowed that I would love him always, that I would never marry anyone but him.”

“And yet,” he said after a short silence, “you have loved countless others and married someone else.”

“For political reasons,” she said. “And no, I have never loved anyone as I loved him.” Except you, she thought, the thought sweeping at her, and she turned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes. “It lasted for only a few days before my father caught me—he was ineligible, you know—and took me away. But I pined for him for months. Foolish, was it not, as the age of fifteen?”

“Yes,” he said. “Foolish.”

“But it was not foolish,” she said. “He was the one beautiful thing in my life, my Robert. But he died. When Papa wanted to take me back to France, I did not want to go. And perhaps he guessed the reason why. So he told me what he would otherwise have kept from me—my Robert died of smallpox only six weeks after I left him.”

“Did he?” he asked after a pause.

“I thought I would die too,” she said. “Is that not foolish? Are not young people foolish to believe that a broken heart can kill? Instead I went back to France with Papa and I learned that I am beautiful and attractive—I am, am I not? And I learned how to keep men at bay so that I would not have to experience that pain again. Love is painful, Robert.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I just wish . . .” she said.

“What?”

“I just wish,” she said, “that I had not believed the lies my father told me about him. I did not for very long, but it was too late when I admitted to myself that my Robert would never have boasted about me to the servants and called me a French bitch. You might call me that, Robert, but he would not have. He was a gentleman despite his birth. And I taunted him with his birth because my own feelings had been shattered. I think I hurt him. There was hurt in his eyes when I left him.”

She heard him swallow.

“You see?” She smiled against his arm. “I was human once too, Robert. I loved. You would not think me capable of love, would you? But then, of course, I was only fifteen years old. It was only puppy love. Not the real thing at all. Rather amusing really. But you remind me of him. Is that not absurd? He was a tall and slender boy, and gentle. He hated the thought of having to kill, once his father bought him his commission. Nothing like you at all. And yet you remind me of him. Perhaps he would have matured into a man like you, had he lived. Perhaps not. I suppose it is as well I will never know.”

“We must dress, Joana,” he said, “and then sleep. I would not like to have to get up in a hurry dressed as I am now.”

She did not want to move. She felt a deep grief, as if time had just rolled back eleven years. “There,” she said, dashing a hand over her eyes to wipe away a spilled-over tear, “my memories are reducing me to a watering pot. Have you ever known anything more ridiculous?”

He sat up suddenly and linked his arms about his spread knees. She felt bereft and very lonely and frightened by her feelings. Normally she guarded herself carefully against any vulnerability. The most negative of emotions she would allow herself normally was boredom.

“There is nothing ridiculous about it,” he said. “It is quite natural, I think, at times to crave the innocence and joy of childhood and
youth. And to grieve for their loss. There is nothing foolish about your story, Joana.”

She felt warmed again, reassured. And her love for him was almost a tangible thing. She stretched out a hand and would have touched his side, but she did not do so. He would have misunderstood. He would have thought she was asking for pleasure again. He would have thought it a purely physical gesture.

“Get dressed,” he said, and began to pull his own clothes back on. “You would not wish to be found like that, Joana, even by your French lover. He has a whole company of men with him.”

He might as well have told her to get dressed and slapped her face to hasten her along, Joana thought ruefully as she drew her dress toward her. His words were more painful than a slap. Her French lover? Did he not have that extra sense that she had? Did he not know that she had no lover but him? That there
could
be no one but him now?

Apparently not. And it seemed that her second love was destined to bring her as much grief as the first.