Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (4 page)

Joints turned and shifted, became the support of elegant arabesques of arm and leg. Eyelashes, wondrously thick, hovered demurely over eyes. Hips and flank were swathed in a purple silk that flickered between opaque and transparent in the uncertain light.

“My, my,” breathed John. “Are those ostrich feathers?” he indicated the upper body attire the girl held in front of herself, fluttering and furling in the breeze.

“Mm,” Yevgena mumbled distractedly, watching with interest the interplay of firelight and lust on Jamie’s face.

Jamie, robbed of speech again, was finding even rudimentary functions such as breathing quite difficult. Other things, of course, seemed to be in fully working order. A flicker of smooth hip there by the fire, and the smell of strawberries and amaranth, dizzying, overwhelming and dissipating into the night. Music began to flow, designed for the baser senses it was heavy, thrumming and sliding through veins, blossoming in blood, redolent with salt and musk.

Berry-stained feet moved in rhythm, hands, sweetly sealed about feathers, undulated carefully, rounded parts dipped and circled and eyes remained downcast, lashes thickly fanned against flushed cheeks. The air became laden with sighs of two variations.

“Imagine,” John’s voice was somewhat strangled, “all that and a command of Persian love sonnets.”

“What?” Jessica asked, uncertain of what she was querying.

“Part of pilgrim lore, amongst other things those boys were never without an arsenal of Ottoman words of love. One never knows,” Yevgena stretched, the picture of a Turkish odalisque in profile, “when these things may come in handy.”

The music wound down and the girl disappeared, sighs gathered, collected and blew across the onlookers like an African sirocco.

She reappeared a moment later, ostrich feathers replaced by a length of crimson cloth. The music pulled hard from the strings, poured down from Spanish steppes, steeped potent in hot Cordovan suns. The dance was the dance of the Andalusian gypsies, the flamenco. Heel and toe moved in ancient and instinctive patterns. Hair whirled like silk around a tornado. She seemed all movement, skin and bone of a dissoluble piece. She seemed, Jessica thought in inexplicable despair, as if she were desire incarnate. The girl moved to the edge of her circle of fire and held out a hand to Jamie. Lashes tilted up and green eyes met their like.

“Dance with me,” she said quietly, “if you can.”

Gone beyond the space where madness and propriety were salient points Jamie, golden, reckless, rose in answer to her challenge and took her hand before anyone could think to stop him.

Despite the handicaps of inebriation, exhaustion and grief, Jamie
could
dance. He also knew, from a variety of experiences, how to hold a woman. Skin followed skin, blood beat in time and they whirled, spun, stamped and wooed there in the lost world of flame and body. Jamie was a spangled
djinn
in counterpoint to the girl’s dark melody.

Jessica, feeling as though she had a shard of glass caught in her throat bid her goodnights to John and Yevgena who absently replied without once taking their mesmerized countenances off the dancing pair. She fled for the security and comfort of the room Jamie kept for her occasional visits, the music in pursuit. Her suite, as misfortune would have it, looked out over the gardens. Fire and shadow flickered on the walls and Jessica, drawn against her will, looked down into the scene below.

The music had taken a brief respite and she hoped Jamie had regained his senses enough to ask for it to be silenced. But then the lone, shattering note of a Celtic pipe began, wounding and strangling, killing ivy hidden within the couch of deceitful jasmine. The music of blood and winter and endless grief, purely, tragically Irish. Jamie, shirt half undone, leaned in exhaustion against the girl, pearls of sweat gleaming in his hair, eyes glittering in a way that spelled disaster. She saw his cheek move restlessly against the girl’s, hands in a hard caress with the bones of her face. She could feel the words he spoke then, knew them as they slipped the breach of tongue and lip, “Take me to bed for god’s sake,” he said, “take me to bed now.”

Jessica, closing the draperies, felt the beginnings of a crashing headache.

“God’s teeth, is this what you had in mind?” John asked as Jamie, sparing a glance for no one took the girl by the hand and went into the house, shutting the door with firm intent behind them.

“John,” said Yevgena, “Jamie is not a man that should be without the company of a woman for long, particularly not,” she gave him a pointed look, “with his temperament. That silly girl he insisted on marrying has managed to tie him up so badly with guilt that I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t taken a woman to his bed since the last time she deigned to allow him into hers. That being said there are more practical reasons. In the last ten years, he’s lost three children, a wife and now a father. He’s carried the weight of Kirkpatrick Industries since he left Oxford and now he’ll have to decide whether to take up the political legacy his father’s left behind. And there are things,” she sighed deeply, “that even those of us who love him best don’t understand about his life.”

“I don’t quite see how a half-naked gypsy girl fits into this picture,” John said peevishly.

“Oh, I think you do John, besides there are reasons other than physical that she is here.”

“Such as?”

“You old curmudgeon, try to remember all that poetry you used to believe in before you took such glee in dissecting it for children.”

He gave her a look of utter mystification.

She leaned over and kissed him soundly on the forehead, “Destiny John, destiny. Now you old terror let’s go get good and drunk.”

John thought that was, perhaps, the best idea anyone had had all day.

“My kingdom for a button,” Jamie laughed in exasperation. He was trying without success, to locate a clue, however minute, on where to begin unwrapping his gift.

“Scissors,” said the Gypsy Girl or Destiny if you preferred whose name was actually Pamela O’Flaherty.

He groaned with feeling. “Bottom floor, don’t think I can negotiate the damned stairs again and I wouldn’t know where to find them anyway.”

“Pathetic,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed, pondering the feasibility of simply biting through the knot end.

They were in his room now, a room done in all the shades of the sea, from deepest murky green to silver-shot blue and the white of sun-bleached sky. The effect of it was a bit, he’d been told, like drowning.

“Well there’s only one thing for it then,” she said with equanimity.

“Yes?”

“Patience.”

“Not my favorite virtue,” he said, black hair slipping and sliding between his questing fingers.

“You keep searching,” one fine-fingered ivory hand pulled her hair aside, “and I’ll find a way to amuse you.”

“Unless you’re acrobatic by nature I don’t quite see how to manage that,” Jamie said doubtfully.

She cast a withering glance over one shoulder.

“Music then?” he suggested humbly.

“Left my harpsichord at home,” she said blithely, “and my singing voice is likely to be less than conducive to,” she paused delicately, “the mood.”

“How are your Persian love sonnets?” He asked and she considered and then dismissed the idea that it was perhaps wrong to seduce a man so drunk.

“The mind is willing, but the memory is weak. However I’ve a head filled to the cusp with blue Elizabethan ditties.”

“What an interesting education you must have had,” he commented mildly, “perhaps you’d recite for me.”

She accordingly cleared her throat, straightened her slim carriage and began:

Mine’s the lance
To start the dance
Yours the lips
For Cupid’s pips.
Blushing melon
Makes a felon,
Sheathe the blade
Sweetling maid.
Push asunder
Nature’s thunder,
Maidenhead
Sweetly bled,
Honey mead
For the seed.
Turtledove,
Take my love.

“Blue indeed,” Jamie said in admiration as she finished. “A-ha,” he held aloft an unraveled end with triumph akin to the first man to set foot in the New World.

“What did they read to you as a child, precocious infant?” he asked as the unraveled end led into a labyrinth of tucks and folds.

“Everything I could get my hands on, my father used to say I ate books rather than read them. But my favorite—”

“Yes,” Jamie prompted, hands carefully navigating frontal delicacies.

“Was
The Velveteen Rabbit
.”

“Might I ask why?”

“Because it’s a very true story, isn’t it?”

Confronted with an alarming amount of bare flesh, Jamie wondered if it was wrong to sleep with a girl who believed in stuffed bunnies springing to life.

“What I mean is,” she warmed to her topic, “that you aren’t real until someone loves you.”

The crimson cloth, released at last, drifted then settled with a sigh around her hips.

The air became pregnant with the lack of touch.

“Is something the matter?” she turned around on the bed to face Jamie, who quickly cast his eyes heavenward.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“I’m legal,” she said calmly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I suppose that’s a relief,” he said a trifle grimly.

“Is it your father?” She laid a gentle hand on his forearm, “My father used to say that sex and death are natural companions.”

“Your father,” Jamie paused, “sounds eccentric.”

She gave him a stern look, “He meant it was a way to deal with grief, the act itself is a reaffirmation of the living still to be done.”

Jamie thought he’d never met such a terrifyingly pragmatic person.

“Shall we get on with the business at hand then?” In one lithe movement, she had swung a knee over his lap and settled herself quite comfortably.

“Um,” said Jamie inanely, “you have very nice skin.”

“Youth,” she smiled and took one of his hands, “despite its various disadvantages has some rather nice compensations. Now do you think you could do something for me?”

“Cross deserts barefoot? Slay dragons? Cut out my soul and hand you the knife?” Due to the placement of his hand, he was feeling increasingly giddy.

She sighed. “Could you just, for a minute or two, be quiet?”

Jamie, not surprisingly, found that he could.

In the morning, upon awakening, Jamie felt like a fleeced lamb—naked, against the laws of nature and left to die on a green hillside. Alone as well. It took him a moment or two to work out that last bit but then he spied the crimson scarf hanging off the bedpost and thought clarity was a quality he could manage without. Ignorance, for this morning, would do quite nicely.

He showered, shaved and putting on fresh clothes made his way downstairs.

John, Jessica and Yevgena were in the morning room eating croissants and drinking coffee, their morning chatter halting abruptly as he entered the bright, foliage-laden room. It was with relief well mixed with regret that he noted the absence of his nocturnal guest.

Yevgena, peacock brilliant in bright blue stretched up to kiss him on his nose. “Good morning, darling.”

“Good morning,” he replied, relief fleeing at the sight of the girl, cosily tucked in his best white terry robe, bowl in hand, appearing around a palm frond.