The Bride Wore Scarlet (22 page)

He looked at her with an age-old knowing, his face shadowed with afternoon beard. Stroking one long-fingered hand down her calf, he shocked her by lifting her legs in turn, hooking them over his shoulders, and pulling her hips hard against his pelvis, opening her fully to his thrusts.

At once something changed and shifted. Geoff groaned deep and choked out her name. His ice-blue eyes were melting now. Anaïs felt herself quicken and rise to him. She matched his pace, taking him deeper and deeper, right inside to the very heart of her, his gaze never leaving hers as he pushed inside her, spiraling them higher and higher.

Those eyes. Those amazing, ageless eyes; so hot and so cold. She was going to drown in them this time. The warm blue of his ocean was drawing her relentlessly back into the waves like a riptide. Anaïs felt herself torn from whatever earthly mooring had held her fast. After that there was nothing but the brilliant light, a perfect crest, and the whisper of her name on his lips.

They came together as one, and it was as if her soul flew to his. The rich, churning depths washed over her, and Anaïs knew that this time she was lost.

Chapter 13

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

A
fterward, they lay together in the dying light curled round each other like cats. Geoff had settled behind her, her hips pulled to his pelvis, his left arm banded tight about her waist, spooning her body to his. He bent his head to the turn of her neck and set his lips to her pulse point, lingering so long she began to wonder if he'd fallen asleep.

“Geoff?” she muttered drowsily.

He stirred and nibbled lightly at her earlobe. “
Umm
,” he said, the sound vibrating against her skin. Then he tucked his head against hers and fell silent again. For an instant, she felt herself slip from sensually sated into something perilously like a deep sleep, then jerked herself awake.

“Time for dinner?” she managed, stretching one arm.

His kissed a trail down her throat. “I canceled it,” he said, “before I came up.”

“Oh?” she said, crooking her head to look back at him. “That sure of yourself, were you?”

“Lord, no.” She felt him lift one of her curls and begin to twine it round his finger. “No, Anaïs, I'm never sure of anything with you, a circumstance which I find—and I oughtn't admit this—utterly refreshing. And a little maddening.”

“Maddening?” Her curiosity piqued, she squirmed around in his arms, vaguely embarrassed by her naked state.

As if he instinctively understood, he reached behind him, snagged his shirt, and threw it over her. “Here,” he said. “
This
was the greatest madness, I daresay. We have two perfectly good beds downstairs, and I'm apt to have given you a chill.”

But she was still mulling over his previous words. “Geoff,” she murmured, her gaze searching his face, “can you not . . . see us? Could you not have predicted this, I mean, if you wished?”

He crooked his head to look down at her. “I told you, it's not like that for me.”

“What do you mean?”

He pulled her closer, and tucked his chin atop her head. “A Vates can't see his own future,” he said quietly, “and rarely that of another of his kind. I often feel things when I'm near other people—emotions, especially strong ones—if I open myself to it. Things like fear or malice or just plain dishonesty.”

“Yes,” she murmured, “I've noticed that about you.”

“But I don't just
see
things involuntarily,” he went on. “Not unless I'm ill, perhaps, or in some sort of weakened state. When I was a child, yes, odd visions often went skittering through my head. A touch or even strong eye contact could set me off. I was like Ruthveyn in that way.”

“Until you learned to keep your curtain drawn,” she murmured.

“Yes, and now it's the other way round,” he said. “Almost always now, I have to
try
to see—which I rarely choose to do.”

“And intimacy does not . . . open any sort of connection?” she asked.

For a moment, he considered it. “It could, perhaps, but never has,” he replied. “And it depends on what one means by intimacy, I daresay. I've bedded my share of women, aye, but I can't say as I was ever intimate with any.”

“So something like this . . . is just sex for you,” she remarked, cutting her glance away.

“No.” He seized her chin almost roughly, and turned her face back to his. “
No
. I'm speaking of other people, Anaïs. Besides, it could never be like that for you and me.”

“How do you know?”

“I
know
,” he said again. “Besides, you are of the Vateis, Anaïs. Like Giovanni Vittorio, you are descended from the great Celtic prophets, or perhaps even the people from whom
they
descended. And the Vateis cannot read one another. Not deeply. Not like you mean. That's just how it always is—one of God's small mercies, Ruthveyn says.”

Anaïs just shook her head. “But how could Celts even get to Tuscany?”

Geoff shrugged one shoulder. “Have you read much Tacitus?”

She cast him a withering look. “Vittorio made me,” she said. “I did my best.”

He smiled and stroked his hand down her hair. “I'm sure he taught you, too, that there was a strong Celtic influence in the provinces north of Rome,” he said. “Some believe Tacitus himself to have been a Celt.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“But more importantly, his writings suggest that Celtic priests—all of them, especially the Vateis and the Druids—fascinated the Romans. They were sometimes captured and taken to Rome, and eventually Romans even intermarried with the Celtic tribes.”

She shook her head, her hair scrubbing on the mat. “I daresay all that's true, Geoff, but I am not like you,” she said quietly. “I am not like Ruthveyn.”

“Almost no one is,” he replied. “And thank God for it. But the Gift is an amorphous thing, Anaïs. Surely you know that. Some people dream of what is to come. Some have only keen intuition. Some divine from tea leaves in the bottom of a cup—and yes, almost all of those are charlatans. But a few—a very unlucky few like Ruthveyn—can hold your hand, look into your eyes, and tell you the means of your death.”

In his arms, Anaïs shivered. “I don't fall into any of those categories.”

“No, you have something a little more subtle,” he said. “Vittorio saw it, and honed it, because he knew how.”

She dropped her chin, and did not answer.

“You have a sixth sense, Anaïs,” he said, brushing his lips over her hair. “Like Maria Vittorio said, you're like a cat in the dark. And perhaps you could not stab someone through the heart blindfolded, like Vittorio, but you can feel the human psyche, I think—unless, of course, you're completed absorbed by something. Fencing, for example. Or lovemaking.” He paused to cup his hand round her face. “And then there's the tarot.”

She jerked her chin up. “What about it?”

He brushed his lips across her cheek. “Your great-grandmother was a practitioner, was she not?” he murmured a little too casually. “And honestly, I saw a tarot card propped against the lamp on your night table the other day, so I just assumed . . . well, I assumed that's what you kept in that old black box you cart around.”

Anaïs didn't respond. She had no wish to think about her nonna's old predictions; one of them in particular. Not just now, when she was aglow from Geoff's lovemaking. Instead she wiggled firmly onto her side, and buried her face against his chest. He smelled of sweat and man and something that felt—at least for now—like comfort.

For a long moment, she simply lay there, covered by his shirt, secure in his arms, and thought about the one thing—well, the second thing—she tried never to think about.

Always, always Anaïs had been willing to do what was asked of her. She was willing to work hard to be a Guardian if that was what her great-grandmother wished. She was a dutiful daughter to her parents—well, most of the time—and a loyal sister to Nate and Armand and the children. She had been a good cousin, too, sitting by Giovanni's bed spooning him broth and clinging to his hand until the cancer inside him had stripped the soul from his body and set it free.

She had even been a good girl—at least in the end—when Giovanni and Maria had sat her down and explained to her, through their tears and hers, that she had to let her dreams of Raphaele go. That he had a wife and a child, and that while he might be an egregious liar and a scoundrel, he had a family who depended upon him for their living.

So yes, she had been a good girl. She had set away her silly dreams.

But what she did not want to be—what she could not
bear
to be—was a damned fortune-teller.

And she was mightily sick and tired of being a good girl, too, now that she thought on it. She would far rather be a bad girl—far rather let the wicked Lord Bessett strip her naked and do the wickedest of his wicked things to her. For after one hour in his arms, being a good girl had truly lost its allure.

But some things, she knew, would never change. Some things, Nonna Sofia always said, were fated. Raphaele had not been her
Re di Dischi.
Certainly Geoff, the elegant and quintessential Englishman, was not. But her Tuscan prince was coming, sooner or later. And Anaïs was destined to be—well, if not forever a good girl, then at least forever honest.

She sighed, and shuddered a little in Geoff's arms, feeling oddly as if she might cry.

“I read for her today,” she whispered into the soft hair that dusted his chest.

She felt rather than saw him look down at her. “Who?” he murmured. “Charlotte?”

“Yes.”

Geoff sounded fully awake now. “So you can read?”

She shrugged both shoulders. “Anyone can, can't they?” she said. “It does not require the Gift.”

He gave a bark of laughter. “I don't believe that for a minute.”

Anaïs sighed. “You're likely right,” she muttered. “Indeed, I did not mean to do it today. It was a lark. A
stupid
lark. I meant simply to tell her what I wished her to hear. But the cards, Geoff, they—”

She stopped, and shook her head.

“What?” he gently pressed.

She lifted her head from his chest and looked up at him, feeling more than a little lost. “The cards—they fell true from my hand. And I knew it. They took on a life of their own, Geoff. Yes, I read them. I had no choice.”

“You mean you read from
here
—” he murmured, settling a hand over her heart.

She slowly nodded. “And I knew what they meant—not just from years of watching Nonna, but . . . in some other way, I knew. So I told her. And I . . . I frightened her. Good God, I frightened myself.”

“Anaïs,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her head. “Poor girl.”

“Poor Charlotte!” Anaïs corrected. “At first I merely felt dirty—as if I were using her. Lying to her. But afterward, I was furious. With myself, I mean. The tarot is dangerous, not something to be trifled with. I knew that.”

“The tarot is dangerous for someone who has the Gift of reading it,” said Geoff softly. “For one who does not, love, it's just a pack of cards.”

Anaïs set her cheek to his chest. “I suppose, Geoff, I have been simply deluding myself,” she muttered. “But I don't want the Gift of
anything
.”

“I know that,” he whispered. “Oh, trust me, Anaïs, I know too well.”

But before she could speak, Geoff gave her a swift, hard hug, then urged her away. Rolling onto his back, he lifted Anaïs over him until she was balanced on top of him, her knees set to either side of his ribs. Until they looked at each other face to face.

Gently, he picked up his shirt and tucked her into it, then lifted his hand to push a stray curl behind her ear. “So that's what all this was about,” he murmured, his gaze drifting over her face. “This fury. This hell you unleashed on Monsieur Michel's poor boxing bag.”

She rolled her shoulders uncomfortably. “Geoff, I just want this to be over,” she whispered. “I don't want to go on lying to Charlotte about who and what I am. And I don't want to have to think about what I am.”

“I want it to be over, too,” said Geoff calmly. “But I daresay you probably told Charlotte more truth today than she has heard from anyone since her husband died. None of this is your fault.”

Anaïs cast her eyes up at the skylight, the scant clouds above now lit with violet. “I saw it, Geoff,” she whispered. “The evil you spoke of. The blackness. Charlotte is in trouble—more trouble than Giselle, perhaps.”

“What sort of trouble, do you reckon?”

She bit her lip, and shook her head. “I wish I knew,” she said. “But there was something there, just beyond my grasp. Something the cards wanted to show me. I have the most awful sense we are missing a part of the puzzle here. I do know we cannot leave her here. We must get the both of them away, and soon.”

Geoff's hands still sat at her waist, his gaze intent as he looked up at her. “All right,” he said calmly. “We need to end this. But first we need as much information as we can get, as fast as we can get it.”

“Of what sort? And how?”

Geoff's brow furrowed. “Tomorrow night we'll dine with them,” he said. “Lezennes will keep the child away from us, I am sure. One of us must distract him. I need an object—something belonging to Giselle, perhaps, that her mother has given her. Something that might be imprinted with
both
their emotions. That, and Charlotte's handkerchief together—yes, perhaps that will help us time our approach.”

“Or our escape,” Anaïs grimly added. “And I'll find you something that belongs to Giselle, trust me. By the way, Lezennes has already proposed marriage to Charlotte, and he's pressing her hard. Perhaps I can give her a little breathing room.”

“And how would you do that?”

Anaïs let her gaze drift over his beautiful face. “I shall bat my eyes outrageously at Lezennes,” she said. “Perhaps he will think to use me to make Charlotte jealous.”

“Too dangerous,” he said. “Don't even think of it.”

“But you will be with me,” she said. “And—”

There was a sharp sound somewhere within the house, like the
clack!
of a broom handle striking a wall. Geoff's eyes widened. “Good Lord,” he said. “The real world returns. And I forgot to lock the door.”

Anaïs smiled. “I shall take that as a compliment,” she murmured.

“Aye, you should,” he said, his gaze heating as it drifted over her. His warm, long-fingered hands slid up her ribs to cup her breasts. “Ah, Anaïs, is there anything about you that is not utter perfection?”