Elisabeth Fairchild (18 page)

The paintings were unveiled one by one.

“
‘Jupiter Caressing Juno,’
” Miles said reverently. “A Hamilton.”

The second dustcloth fell and the third. Miles identified them with ease; sounding very much the expert he was reputed to be. “
‘Perseus Delivering Andromeda’
, Chiari.
‘Tarquin and Lucretia’
by Procaccini.”

The names meant little to Aurora, but the paintings took her breath away! There was no mistaking the reason why these massive canvases, rendered in rich color, had been removed from the walls downstairs. They were done in the Neo-Classical style, depicting gods and goddesses, scantily clad, muscles rippling, breasts bared. Each might be described with the same two words, passion and seduction. There was energy here, never to be found in a landscape, a warmth and color not to be reproduced in marble. Desire was captured on canvas, raw and urgent, the pursuit of woman by man.

The treasure hunting party stood silent a moment-- overwhelmed--frozen by the power of the works, by size, scope and subject matter. Emotion and color blazed in the dark, chill closed off space. The feelings these canvases laid bare were too big a thing to be experienced in so cramped and rude an enclosure. Aurora felt swallowed up, as if figures and forces and feelings she had never before encountered reached out to her from the glowing paint entreating her to cross the threshold of reality into some other world--a place that flooded her ribcage with too much air, or not enough, she could not be certain--a place that lit a fire deep within. Her blood seemed to simmer, her cheeks flamed. Unmentionable parts of her anatomy burned with heat.

She could not take her eyes away from the paintings for fear they would disappear like a dream too beautiful to forget and too perfect to remember. Breathlessly, she looked until she was filled with looking and thought private thoughts and listened to the others breath, and knew they could not be as affected as she.

Grace reached out and touched one of the paintings. “Marvelous musculature.”

Aurora could not look at Miles.

“Hard to believe they are close to a hundred years old,” He turned to her. He meant to ask her what she thought of them. She could feel the question hovering between them and yet had no ready answer when the question came. “What do you think of them?”

What could she say? How could she explain the way these expanses of canvas and paint affected her? Aurora didn’t know how to begin. She could not say these paintings fairly raised the temperature in the attic or that to her eyes there was a raw energy, a compelling strength to the characters depicted. She was unused to seeing passion given life and form and color. She was even more unused to discussing how such passion affected her. She did not want to say she was shocked and titillated and convinced, as nothing before had convinced her, of the power of art. What could she safely say? How was she to express her feelings? Most of what passed through her mind and heart was too personal to discuss.

He stood looking at her, awaiting her answer. An answhe must provide.

“They are provocative,” she said, the words wholly inadequate.

 “Yes.” He watched her closely--too closely, she thought. “They cry freedom, don’t they?”

He required no answer and so she gave him none. Something in his expression made her feel he found answer enough in her silence.

“Such passion should not be shut away in the attic-- ignored.” His tone made Aurora wonder if Miles Fletcher meant to pass judgment not just on these paintings and their place in the attic, but also on the state of her own bundled away passion. The gentle nudge of such a remark gave her pause. Was she locking away something beautiful and vibrant within herself, something as urgent and naked, as warmly stirring as this collection of living, breathing canvas and paint?

Miles seemed content to let her stew in the broth of her thoughts and feelings. He questioned her no more.

Aurora’s gaze flit from one painted scene to the next. The lifelike men and women made her uneasy. They gave life to the part of her impending relationship with a husband that she liked to think of least--this naked grasping of hand and limb. If she put herself in the role of the women in these paintings her heart began to race, her temperature rose, her pulse grew tumultuous. Could she picture Lord Walsh as a near-naked Jupiter, caressing her Juno?

The thought unnerved her. She found no joy in such a picture. In fact, her eyes turned time and again to regard Miles Fletcher and the passionate manner in which he stared at the paintings--eyes glowing, lips parted, breath accelerated--more apt to consider him in the role, wondering how he might go about rousing his Juno. There was far more of the requisite level of fire, heat and ardor in this man she had once considered no more than a dandy, than in Lord Walsh’s little finger. She had been warmed by it on more than one occasion.

Such a realization stirred frustration and discontent with her chosen lot. Aurora turned from the display of painted flesh with a shiver. It would serve her purpose far better to be downstairs chatting with Lord Walsh this very moment, than here beside Miles Fletcher staring at these provoking paintings.

“I’m cold,” she said abruptly. “If you’ve no objection to my taking away one of the lights, I mean to go downstairs.” Without waiting to see if anyone meant to go with her, or if indeed they objected to the loss of the lamp, she plunged into the darkness of the attic, searching the route by which they had come in.

Miles had watched Aurora’s reaction to the paintings, had seen the rise and fall of her breast, the parted lips, the way her cool green eyes drank in the powerful imagery. She did not stare so, as his sister did, to analyze a brushstroke or the use of shadow or background to better illuminate the rendering. The blush on each cheekbone told him as much. He was himself moved, not so much by the paintings as by Aurora Ramsay’s reaction to them.

When she plunged away from them, he knew she could no longer face the feelings these paintings provoked. That she would face darkness rather than stay and face her own aroused passions, made it imperative that he should be the one who followed her, the one who helped her find her way in the dark. There was a feeling not to be denied in the closed off, rain-scented depths of the attic, a premonition of potential passion as wild and moving as that he had witnessed in the paintings so carefully secreted away.

He took no light himself, only struck out in the shadowed space as fast as he could without knocking things over, following the bobbing passage of her lamp.

She was lost and breathing hard when he caught up to her. Turning toward his footsteps she held high the lamp, eyes wide, as if she expected him to be one of the fearfully passionate gods, stepped down from the canvas in pursuit of her. He had never seen her so vulnerable, this Amazon of a female who was so completely fearless in other ways.

“Aurora!” he dared call her by her given name, voice gentle. He would not further threaten her. He approached slowly, his manner as unthreatening as his voice.

“You have taken a wrong turn,” he said softly. “Shall I take the light and show you the way?”

He reached for the lamp. Her hands were shaking. In her agitation, she tipped the lamp too far. Wick doused, their light extinguished.

Just as they were plunged into absolute darkness, so too did she plunge--in his direction--flying into his chest, grabbing his lapels, fearing the dark more than she feared proximity.

“It’s all right, Aurora,” he soothed her, voice low, desire close to the surface. “I shall have the lamp lit again in no time.” He could feel the pounding of her heart against his chest. His arms came about her in seeking out matches, and in opening up the lamp and relighting it. She offered no resistance to his embrace, clinging to him like a child. Even with the light renewed and the soft glow revealing how close they were come to each another, she did not step away. Her trembling was not yet entirely abated. To warm her chill, to still her trembling, he pulled her deeper into his arms and continued to whisper to her. “I am here, my dear. There is nothing to fear. Nothing at all.”

Her face was too close to his for him not to think of kissing it.

She nestled in his arms, lips turned not away but toward his. He kissed her chin, kissed her cheek and with a sigh that washed his face with the desire she unveiled to him here in the attic, she turned her mouth to meet his. Their lips became one with the darkness, mysterious, musky, and as drenching as the rain that peppered the roof above their heads. Nature herself seemed in tune with the deepening of their kisses. Wind driven, the rain grew heavier on the slates, as if determined to penetrate the rooftop barrier that separated them.

So eagerly anticipated was Miles Fletcher’s embrace, so meltingly perfect the placement of his lips, that it crossed Aurora’s passion befuddled brain that she was in need of rescuing after all--rescuing from herself and the feeling of completeness, of rightness, the feeling that she was exactly where she was supposed to be in Fletcher’s warm embrace.

That Miles Fletcher’s lips should blot out the chill, rainy darkness of the attic so completely, replacing it with a warm, citrus-scented haven in his arms, did not surprise her in the least. She had fled the possibility of passion from this man, but now that their lips were met, she could not imagine their ever being pulled asunder again. This hot, caressing pressure of his mouth against hers offered blessed release from the passions built within her as she gazed at the paintings he brought her here to see. So in tune with the emotions that coursed through her was this urgent embrace, she would have lain down in the dust of the attic, if only to perpetuate its satisfying intimacy.

Like the rain, his kisses, his hands, his straining need for the barriers between them to be gone, seemed matched by her own ardent desire to bend herself to him. Her lips, her hands, the little moans of pleasure she breathed as he rained kisses on face, neck and breast, all spoke of a pleasure that equaled his, desire roused to fever pitch, a desire and passion that rivaled the paintings too wild to be displayed downstairs.

Miles wanted her desperately. He wanteto take her, right here, in the rain-racked darkness of the attic. Thunder rumbled, Nature echoing the power of his need. Like thunder he wanted to rock this woman in his arms with the urgency of his desire, lifting her on the rolling wave of sound and feeling to such heights of ecstasy that she need never fear darkness again.

But, the thunder, so loud it rattled the floorboards of the attic, revived her fears, rather than assuage them.

“No,” she murmured as his lips, trailed hotly from her throat to the cleavage of her breast. Even as she said no, her back arched, her body pressed more provocatively against his. He traced a line down the center of her neck. She shivered.

“Do not deny yourself, Aurora,” his voice was husky. “There is a lesson in passion between us here.” His lips closed on hers again.

Her mind warred with her body. She broke away from the embrace, pushed away from his chest and again the word, “No!” came between them. Her head won the battle with her heart. This
no
was stronger, more decisive. This
no
was non-negotiable.

“Stop,” she insisted. “We must stop this. Why do you kiss me, when you know I have set my heart on winning another man’s affections?”

“Are you certain you did not wish to be kissed as much as I have longed to kiss you?” Breathing hard, Miles let her go. The rain lashing the slates above them seemed to protest this uncomfortable conclusion to such promising beginnings. She was right, of course. They must stop, before the fruit that grew between them was spoiled in having been plucked too soon. He had yet to tell her the reasons he sought her out, had yet to explain his uncle’s involvement. Without the truth between them, such an unleashing of passions would be wrong. “Are you sure it is Walsh you would offer these honeyed lips to, the next time you offer them up to a man?” he demanded.

Uncertainty wrinkled her brow. Uneasily her hand rose to gently touch her lips as if to ascertain they were indeed her own. “At this moment,” she said, “I am certain of nothing.” She took up the light, as if to defend herself with it and began to back away.

“I will not press the lesson,” he said softly.

“Lesson?” she snatched her hand away from her mouth. “Did you mean no more than to teach me the art of lovemaking, sir?”

His voice, cool and dispassionate gave no clue to his true feelings. “Passion is not to be taught to the unwilling,” he said.

Her own voice was as unsteady as the light in her hand. “You are a strange professor, Mr. Fletcher. How many pupils have been so schooled by your hand?”

Before he could utter a response she said, “No matter. I grow wiser for your every lecture.”

She backed further from him. With her went the light. “I would have you teach me the way to the drawing room below where I might further my education in the company of--”

“Lord Walsh,” he finished the thought flatly. He had been prepared to bare all truths to her until this mention of Walsh. How could another man enter her head when they were both still warm from such an embrace?

She pursed her lips and drew herself to indignant height as if to declare him impertinent. “Do you mean to lead me, sir, or do you mean to lead me astray?”

“I, my dear lady,” Miles said with forced politeness, his needs at war with his words, “will take you whence you will. Your wish is my command. You have but to ask.”