Authors: Juliana Gray
EIGHTEEN
Midsummer’s Eve
F
inn couldn’t see Giacomo’s disapproving gaze, but he could feel it infuse the warm air of the workshop with pious contempt.
After all, he’d grown quite familiar with the sensation over the past two months.
“Come to berate me again for my folly, Giacomo?” he asked, not looking up. He was reinstalling the battery yet again, after still more improvements, and he dared not remove his gaze for an instant.
“Is only trouble, the women,” Giacomo muttered.
“Yes, and so you’ve observed to me on perhaps dozens of occasions now, yet I remain most steadfastly in love with her. So bugger off, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Bugger? What is this?”
Finn made a last clamp of the cable and propped himself up on the edge of the engine block. “A crude term, I’m afraid, referring to a peculiarly British preoccupation with carnal vice. What can I do for you, my good man?”
“Is the letters.” Giacomo slapped a few envelopes on the worktable with unnecessary vigor. “Is also a question.”
“Oh, Lord, Giacomo. Not another one of your questions. Can’t it wait?”
“Is she telling the ladies, the other ladies?”
Finn paused. “No.”
“Is she saying to marry you?”
“Not yet.”
“Is she saying she love . . .”
Finn pointed the remaining battery cable at him. “Look here, Giacomo. That’s quite enough. I’m not in the habit of telling a lady’s secrets, and certainly not to a woman-hating fellow like you. I don’t know how you’ve discovered these things, or think you have . . .”
Giacomo sighed. “Is not hard, Signore Burke. I see your face in the morning. I see the light in the window in the night, when the others are dark.”
“I often study late.”
Giacomo rolled his eyes. “
Study.
Ha. Is that what the English are calling it?”
“We are not calling it anything at all.”
“Is only trouble, this
studying
. You will see. One day you will see I say the truth. The women, there is no trusting them.”
Finn straightened. Tomorrow was the first day of summer, and though the carriage doors were wide open to the breeze coming down the hillside, the air in the workshop now grew warm and dense by noontime, particularly when the dynamo ran at full pitch, recharging the battery for the usual afternoon trial. He felt a trickle of sweat roll down under his collar and into his shirt. “Lady Morley is a woman of honor,” he said. “I’d trust her with my life.” He reached with his free arm for the glass of water perched rather precariously on a nearby axle rod.
Giacomo shrugged. “Ah, the lovers, the young lovers. They think they discover everything. They think they discover the great thing no person ever discover before. But I tell you, Signore Burke”—his fist dug into the worktable—“is not possible for woman to be true. Always, she is fuckle.”
Water sprayed from Finn’s mouth in an elegant triangle. “Fuckle?”
Giacomo gestured in the air. “She is fuckle,
mobile
, like the wind in the springtime.”
“Like the . . . ? Oh. Yes.” Finn set the glass down and dabbed at his chin with his sleeve. “I believe you mean
fickle
, old chap.
Fickle.
”
“Think of the song, Signore Burke.” Giacomo’s voice slid into a surprisingly lyric tenor. “
La donna è mobile
. . . Is true.”
“Yes, but as it turned out, she wasn’t fickle at all. That’s the point of the aria, after all. The duke was the fickle one. Irony, my good man.”
Giacomo frowned. “I am confuse.”
“The opera, Giacomo.
Rigoletto.
Your aria’s from
Rigoletto
.”
The man pulled himself up with dignity. “I am not seeing the opera. I am only hearing the song from the men.”
“Well, it’s a charming tale, I assure you. Delightful sort of yarn, except perhaps for that sobering bit at the end, when she dies for the cad. In any case, it quite disproves your point about women. Noble to the core.” Finn bestowed a smug smile upon the groundskeeper.
Giacomo’s eyes narrowed. “So you think, Signore Burke. So she says to you.” He picked up the small stack of envelopes from the table and brandished them menacingly. “But perhaps you read the letters. Perhaps you see what I am meaning.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Giacomo. How can you possibly know what’s in my letters? And what on earth have they to do with Lady Morley?”
Giacomo returned him the same smug smile he’d just bestowed. “When you are not busy, signore. When you are having the time.”
Finn opened his mouth to reply just as Alexandra swept through the open carriage doors, blue skirts gusting about her legs in the sun-scented wind. “Good morning, Finn. How’s your battery coming along?”
Giacomo’s smile melted into a scowl of glowering proportions. “I leave now. Good day, Signore Burke. Signora Morley.”
She only raised her eyebrows as he brushed past, ignoring him in her stately way. She and Giacomo had never been on what might be called speaking terms. “Everything all right?” she asked Finn, placing her hands on her hips.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Battery’s nearly in. I’d greet you properly, darling, only I’m rather attached to the cable at the moment.”
She laughed. “Then I suppose I’ll have to do all the greeting,” she said, and crossed the room to plant a kiss on his lips over the engine block. “Mmm. You smell divine. All oily and sweaty. I adore you this way. You’re in your element.”
“
You’re
my element, but I’m flattered nonetheless. Could you perhaps toss me the clamp on the bench over there?”
“With pleasure.” She found the clamp and slipped it into his waiting hand. “I meant to bring the post, but it’s already disappeared. Wallingford, no doubt, rifling through your correspondence in desperation. I’m certain he suspects.”
“He’s always suspected, darling. It’s just that he’s given up caring anymore. Troubles of his own, I gather. In any case, Giacomo’s brought the post already. There.” He stepped back from the engine, wiped his hands on a reasonably clean rag, and captured his lover around her waist. “And
now
, my dear, I’ll greet you properly.”
She responded ardently, as she always did, with her gurgle of laughter and her soft figure curving into his and her face reaching upward for his kiss. As springtime had advanced, as the sun had mounted high in the hot blue sky and the grapevines had unfurled their leaves in long, undulating rows down the sides of the hills, she’d shed most of her petticoats and loosened her corset, like the rest of the women in the village. Now her body glowed warm and vibrant beneath his hands, a thing of summer; the luxurious swell of her hips teased him with memories of the night before, and all the nights before that. He caught her familiar scent curling around them both, and his body, recognizing all the signs, hardened like the well-conditioned beast it was.
She must have felt him stirring. A little groan escaped her throat and her lips slid across his face to whisper in his ear. “Do you remember what you told me about swiving women in libraries, those months ago?”
“That I’d never even begin to contemplate it, I believe,” he said, doing exactly that. He pictured Alexandra bent over a gargantuan lion-footed desk, positioned perfectly under the lamp’s soft glow, her round, firm arse beckoning him inward. Or else sprawled naked on a leather-upholstered chesterfield, her hair spilling over her abundant breasts, one leg propped atop the sofa’s low back.
Well, he was only a man, after all.
“Mmm.” Her hands slid down his body to cup his buttocks, urging his arousal into her belly. “I don’t know about libraries, but I daresay workshops would be perfectly suitable.”
“Strumpet. Coming into my sanctum with your lilies and your lascivious ideas, expressly to distract me.”
She laughed and pulled back. “You began it. And if you hadn’t insisted on denying yourself last night, I daresay you’d have no trouble at all resisting me now.”
He took her hands and brought them around front, where he could keep a watchful eye on them. “You’re in the exact middle of your month at the moment, darling. I daren’t go near you. Or that salient part of me, in any case.”
She groaned and pulled her hands from his, covering her face with them. “How on earth do you calculate these things? It’s mortifying.”
“It’s my business to calculate these things, my dear.” He kept his words quiet, gentle. “I know enough about a bastard’s lot to make quite certain I don’t cause another to be brought into the world.”
Her shoulders sagged. She parted her hands and peered at him, her face flushed and resigned between the fingers. “And yet, my dear, I’m eternally grateful your own father wasn’t so careful.”
He extended his long arms and drew her unresisting body back against him. “Only marry me, darling. That’s all. It’s quite simple.”
“You know I can’t.” Her voice was low and implacable.
“You needn’t take a penny of my money. I’ll give it all away if you like. Only be
mine
, for God’s sake.”
“I
am
yours.”
She had burrowed her face into his chest, her breath warming the sturdy cotton of his smock until he could feel it against his skin, could still taste it in his mouth: sweet with tea and jammy toast and her own particular essence. His arms tightened around her. “In any case,” he went on, more lightly, knowing better than to push her, “what difference is it to you? I made jolly fine work of consoling you last night, after all.”
Her back vibrated with a chuckle. “You were splendid. I woke up this morning and instantly thought of a dozen ways I might have reciprocated, had I any remaining faculties after you were done with me.”
“Ah. I should very much like to hear them all.”
She drew back and touched her finger against his lips. “Not now, I’m afraid. I only came to tell you that I won’t be able to assist at the trial this afternoon. This wretched Midsummer’s Eve feast tonight. Abigail has the household in an absolute tizzy over it.”
He opened his lips and sucked her fingertip into his mouth.
“Mmm. I’ve been drafted to help with the preparations—oh, that’s very nice.” She withdrew her finger and traced around his chin and down his neck, leaving a damp track behind. “I shall be in a frenzy of decoration and whatnot all afternoon. Abigailish sorts of things, quite impossible to explain.”
He frowned. “Exactly what is this feast of yours? Is it for the village?”
“It’s Abigail’s idea. Signorina Morini says it’s an old tradition on the solstice, quite deliciously pagan, though of course the Church now sanctions it and the village priest will be there and all that.” She circled her finger around the hollow of his throat, the action absorbing all of her concentration. The innocent touch went straight to his groin and tingled there, almost painfully. “We’re going to have masks and torches and music and dancing. All very decadent. You must come, of course.”
He thought wildly. “I haven’t a mask.”
“We’re making the masks ourselves, this afternoon. Oh, do come.” She looked up and smiled at him with her charming, catlike smile, glimmering eyes tilted upward at the corners. “It will be most dreadfully dull if you don’t. Who the devil would I flirt with?”
The thought of a masked Alexandra, dancing in the torchlit midsummer twilight outside the castle, made his heart thud in his chest. “You’re to flirt with no one else but me, of course,” he said firmly.
“Then you’ll be there?”
“I suppose I must. Though my dancing may put you off forever.”
“I’ll have dragged you into the orchard long before that.” She went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I’m already late. Abigail will be wondering where I am. Do mind the time. You’re to be downstairs by eight o’clock, washed and shaved and presentable.”
He opened his mouth to ask for more information, like whether the Penhallows were attending as well, but she had already slipped out of his arms and hurried to the doors. “Good-bye, then! Don’t be late!”
Bloody women, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated on bringing his raging flesh back under control. Not an easy thing to do, either, considering he’d brought her twice to orgasm last night without so much as a palliative pat to his own organ, which had remained decorously clothed throughout to prevent any fatal indiscretions. Twice, he’d watched her in the throes of pleasure, her head tilted back, her ripe flesh contracting around his fingers, his lips. He could still taste her salty tang, could still smell the erotic musk of her arousal. With a single stroke, he could have taken her, spilled himself inside her, created a life between them, perhaps. Bound her to him for evermore.
But he hadn’t. He’d shut his eyes and thought about alternating circuits while her body cooled and the heavy thud of her pulse had returned to normal, and then he’d gathered her into his arms and watched her eyelids drift downward into sleep while he calculated the number of days until he could once more bury his eager cock inside her without much fear that some stray swimmer might find its mark. Calculated the speed at which he could track down the necessary equipment in Rome, and no longer have to deny himself during the peak of her cycle or tear himself away from her at the critical moment.
Actions he found more arduous with every passing week.
No, the stakes were too high for carelessness. He wouldn’t trap her into marriage, wouldn’t take the chance that she might not allow herself to be trapped. A woman like Alexandra must be won with great care. She must come to him willingly, pledge herself willingly. And it would be worth it, because once she was won, once she had laid her hand in his, she would never let it go. Beneath all her charming, complex, contradictory layers beat the heart of a lioness.
His lioness. Fierce and graceful and seductive . . .
Hell.
Finn’s gaze, searching for distraction, fell upon the letters on the worktable, white and glaring in the light from the window. Business correspondence, from the look of it. The reports tended to arrive in clusters toward the second half of the month: fat summaries of his affairs, responses to his queries, statements of account, contracts needing signature; all gathered together by his man of business with annotations and suggestions. The envelopes had arrived with increasing heft and frequency of late, now that his long-contemplated purchase of the Manchester Machine Works was nearing its final stage.