Once in a Blue Moon (44 page)

He rolled to his side, pushing himself up on his elbow to look at her. Her hair was a summer sunrise, all rust and burgundy red with a few vivid streaks of fiery orange. Her mouth looked pillaged and ravished, and as he watched, it fell open and curled up on the ends, and a rusty, squeaky noise spilled out of her throat. He caught her laughter with his mouth, and it filled him with fire.

His hands went looking for her breasts, and he pulled back from her, cursing. "Why does there always seem to be all these bloody clothes between us?" His impatient fingers slipped beneath the prim high neck of her dress.

"McCady, don't rip—"

"Then take it off."

Clothes went flying, hers and his both. When he gathered her back into his arms, she was wondrously and gloriously naked at last.

She had large nipples, rosy brown like hazel nuts. He laved each in turn, then drew one deep into his mouth. He loved the feel of it, hard and puckering against his tongue, and he loved the sounds she made—the little trembling sighs and incoherent pleas.

He traced an imaginary path with his lips and tongue across her rib cage and down her belly until he found the edge of her crinkly, curly hair. Her thighs were around his shoulders, gripping him, trembling. She was burning him alive.

He spread her legs wide and buried his face in the fire. She smelled of him, as if he had marked her with his scent like a wild animal. He plunged his tongue into her, sucking, licking. He scraped her tiny nub of pleasure with his teeth, pulling on it gently with his lips. Her thighs opened wider still, and she grasped the sides of his head with her hands, writhing and whimpering and coming hot and wet into his mouth.

He waited for her tremors to fade, savoring the hot taste of her; then he rose above her, to enter her. But she pressed her palm against his chest, stopping him. "Lie down on your back."

He rolled over, and she straddled him. She gathered up her hair, lowering her head, and then she let it slowly fall, over his chest. It slithered and coiled across his sweating skin, filling his senses with the smell of primroses, and he was sure that never before had he known such pure, piercing pleasure.

She took one of his nipples in her mouth, nipping it, and a ragged groan tore from his throat. Her lips went lower, tracing sex patterns over his shuddering belly, and lower still, her tongue licking at the edge of his dark, tightly coiled hair. And then he died as she grazed the length of his hard and trembling sex with her teeth, lightly, lightly, before she opened her mouth wide and took him into her.

She sucked in her cheeks, drawing her lips along his hard length, again and again, until he could bear no more. He tangled his fist in her hair and drew her up and then slowly lowered her down on top of him until he was buried so deep he was sure he must be touching her heart.

She rose and sank down, riding his length, harder and faster until she was plunging wildly, and he was chanting her name, "Jessa, Jessa, Jessa," and her head fell back and her mouth opened wide on a silent scream of pleasure as they climaxed together.

A long time later, when he could breathe again, he settled her down within the crook of his arm, and his eyes slowly focused on his surroundings. He took in the hieroglyphic bed-curtains, the jungle wallpaper, and what looked like a sphinx crouching next to the fireplace and serving no apparent purpose except to fix him with an enigmatic stare.

"How the devil can anyone sleep in this room?" he said.

Her laughter, wild and lusty, shimmered through the air, wrapping around them and drawing laughter from him in turn. She nuzzled his neck with her nose and chin, tugging at his gold earring with her teeth. "Did you really think I had left you for Clarence?"

His gave her a typically arrogant Trelawny look, although she didn't know he was doing it because she couldn't see. "Of course, I didn't think such an idiotic thing. I thought you had gotten a maggoty notion into your head to sell yourself to him for an afternoon of delight in exchange for those damn promissory notes. And don't look like that. You said you would do anything for me." He pulled her head up so that he could look into her face. "So what did you do?"

She pulled out of his embrace, got up, and went to the dressing table, where she retrieved a weighty-looking document from beneath a jar of face powder and a hare's foot, and he enjoyed the sight of her hair swaying back and forth, caressing her naked hips. She came back to him and gave him the document.

It was a statement in a clerk's trained hand, attesting that the yearly interest on all his promissory notes had been paid in full. The signature was Tiltwell's, although it looked a little shaky. A very official-looking seal had been affixed to the end of it.

He looked up into solemn gray eyes. "What did you do?"

A deep emotion pulled at her face, and she looked away. "I sold Blue Moon."

"Ah, hell, Jessalyn..." McCady's belly caved in with a feeling so wrenching tears burned his eyes. He wanted to weep the way a child weeps, loudly and harshly and beating his fists on the floor. He wanted to do everything over and do it right this time. He wanted to give her the world, but she had already given the world to him.

He stood up and cupped her face with his hands, using his thumbs to collect the tears she didn't know she was shedding. He drew in a deep breath, trying to find a way to speak around the clot of emotion in his throat. "That horse was the most important thing in the world to you."

Her lips trembled into a watery smile.
"You
are the most important thing in the world to me."

He gathered her into him and pressed her head into the curve of his neck. "I sold the others, too, along with Blue Moon," she said, the words muffled. He could feel her tears, warm and wet against his throat. He swallowed hard around the thick lump, but it still didn't go away. "Only it wasn't quite enough," she went on, her breath gentle on his skin. "What I got for them wasn't enough. S-so I had to s-sell Gram's snuffboxes, too."

"Ah, Jesus..."

He held her for a time in silence; then she snuffled a little sob into his throat. "You aren't angry with me?"

He squeezed her shoulders. "Only angry with myself." He pulled her head back so that she could look at him and see that he spoke the truth. "Someday, sweetling, I swear I shall find a way to make it up to you."

She looked up at him out of great, solemn eyes. "Such a thing can never be made up, McCady. But then it doesn't have to be, nor should it be. Not when it was done willingly, from the heart."

He stared at her, stunned by her wisdom and the purity of her soul. His chest tightened with that strange mixture of wonder, fear, and joy that came over him so often now whenever he looked at her or touched her. Or even thought of her.

She shivered, and he frowned at her. "For Christ's sake, Jessa, you're freezing," he said roughly. "Put something on.

She pushed her lips out in a parody of a pout that made him want to kiss her senseless. "I don't know why I should bother," she said. "You'll only rip it off."

Yet she went to the clothespress, and he watched her, savoring the sight of her naked body until she covered it with an Oriental-style silk wrapper. He pulled on his buckskins, not bothering to fasten them, and stretched out on the monstrosity of a bed. He waited for her to come back to him.

She sat beside him, a secret little smile playing about her mouth.

"I've always hated it when you do that," he said.

"Do what?"

"Smile at me as if you know something that I don't know."

Her smile widened, filling her face. "I was thinking that I love you very much McCady Trelawny."

He stroked the bare white flesh of her arm, unable to look at her. "Jessalyn, I..."

"Yes?"

"Nothing."

She withdrew from him, going to the window. He searched for words that would bring her back, but words had always been his downfall with her because they never came easily, and they were always the wrong ones. Freckles of rain pelted the panes, easting speckled shadows on her face, like a gull's egg. It had grown cool in the room.

A look of surprise crossed her face, and she pressed her nose to the glass. "McCady? Your Duncan is driving away with with my Becka in your phaeton."

"Nothing to concern yourself with, Lady Caerhays. They're only eloping. Some of the most respectable folk have been known to do it."

She spun around, and her laughter, rich and rusty, filled the room, until she caught it back with her hand. "That handsome devil—he said he would talk her around to it!"

"I'll wager it was more a case of seducing her into it," he said, smiling because she was laughing again. "That is the only method you women respond to with any degree of proven success."

"Oh, is it indeed?"

"Indeed." He patted the bed. "Come here and let me prove it you."

She came quickly and willingly. Slipping his hands beneath the silk wrapper, he began the slow, delicious process of bringing two satiated bodies back to arousal.

Her fingers tangled in the hair that spilled out the open flap in his buckskins, and he discovered that he was not so slow after all. "McCady? Duncan will never be able to make it back from Gretna Green in time for the trials."

"Not..." He lost his breath somewhere and had to start again. "Not unless he sprouts wings and flies."

"Then who will go along with you to drive your locomotive?"

And then he thought of one small gift that he could give her, and he smiled. "You will, Lady Caerhays."

The letters
COMET
had been scripted with dripping green paint onto the locomotive's bright yellow boiler. The
O
sagged at the top, like a boiled egg with one end bitten off it, and the
T
lay at a drunken angle, nearly on its side. It was crossed by a long, sweeping slash, which might have been a comet's tail, although somehow Jessalyn doubted such had been the artist's intent.

Her contemplative gaze went from the lopsided lettering to the bent head and broad shoulders of her husband, who was on one knee, oiling the hub of a bright green wheel. "McCady, what addlepated fool painted—"

"I didn't do it," he said, quickly. Too quickly. He cast her a sheepish look as he straightened. "It was some other addlepated fool."

Jessalyn sucked in her lower lip to catch a laugh. "Dear life. Whoever he was, he must have been frightfully foxed at the time."

Her husband pursed his lips, blowing his breath out in
a
soft whistle while he took a rag out of his pocket and polished imaginary streaks and thumb prints off the
Comet's
copper firebox. He was trying to look innocent, and being
a
Trelawny, he was failing miserably at it.

More laughter bubbled up in Jessalyn's chest, and she barely restrained herself from whirling around on her toes and letting it out all spill out of her from pure joy. It was a glorious day. Thin clouds wreathed the sun, bathing the countryside in pale marzipan colors. The air felt smooth as milk against her skin. It also battered her ears.

They said that more than ten thousand people were lining the tracks along the twenty-mile course of the trials. The air was a din of coach horns, pie hawkers, neighing horses, and screaming babies. The starting point for the trials was right across from the Crooked Staff Inn, which had already sold out of gin and was fast depleting its stock of ale. Many of its customers were the navvies, those rough and tough men who had dug out the cuttings and the tunnels and laid the tracks for McCady's railway. And when they weren't digging and drinking, they liked to wrestle.

A match that had been going on for quite some time was suddenly decided by the winner's bodily picking up the loser and throwing him overhanded like a cricket ball at a stack of ale barrels. The winner turned, dusting off his hands at a job well done, and Jessalyn was astonished to see this behemoth was a woman.

She was further astonished to discover the behemoth making a beeline right at her. She backed up a step; the behemoth kept coming. She backed up another step. She was just about to pick up her skirts and run when the behemoth smiled.

"You be his woman?" the behemoth bellowed out of her deep chest, and Jessalyn was nearly knocked off her feet by the powerful odor of raw onions.

She smothered a sneeze with the back of her hand and tried to breathe through her mouth. "Whose woman?"

"Why, his nibs's, o' course. The earl what built this tramway."

Jessalyn wondered if the behemoth meant to wrestle her for the right to ravish McCady's body. She would do a lot of things for that man, she decided, but a woman must learn to draw the line somewhere. She pointed to the
Comet.
"He's over there."

"Aye. He's a right un, is his nibs." The woman took a big yellow onion out of her pocket and bit into it like an apple. She was dressed like a navvy in corduroy trousers, stout boots, and a brightly colored scarf knotted around her neck. She had muscles to rival Duncan's. "Many was the time he swung a pick right 'longside the rest of us, building this tramway. Not too proud to dirty his 'ands and lift a tot or two o' gin with the likes of us." She eyed Jessalyn up and down, her nose quivering. It was big and hooked like a lamplighter's pole. "You be his woman or not?"

"I suppose I am. We're married. Actually."

"Not married long, I'll wager. I seen the way he been lookin' at you." The navvy woman threw back her head and hooted like a coach horn. "Cor! Ye're pretty enough, I'll grant ye that." She reached out and gripped Jessalyn's arm, squeezing hard. "But ye'll be needing t' put some flesh on yer bones, if ye expect t' be keeping up with his nibs. He told me oncet that he were going to build a railway from one end o' this isle t' other. Fancy that."

Jessalyn smiled with pride. "But he will. From one end of England to the other."

"That he will, cor! That he will." The woman turned onion-watery eyes onto Jessalyn. "I have little uns t' feed, but maybe afterward ye might want to lift a tot or two with me. The stories I could tell ye about that man of yours. He's a hell-born babe, but with a soft heart underneath for all that. Aye, a soft heart underneath," she said, hooting again as she lumbered off.

Left alone for a moment, Jessalyn smoothed down the bodice of her wine-colored merino riding habit. She wet her palms with her tongue and ran them along the sides of her hair, smoothing back any stray strands. She looked down, saw dust on the toes of her half boots. Quickly she pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and brushed them off. Dear life. Why did she always wind up looking like a ragamuffin? All these people here today. They all would be watching her when she stood up by his side on the
Comet,
and she wanted to do him proud.

She felt someone's gaze on her, and she looked up into the dark, piercing eyes of her hell-born babe. She blushed to have him catch her fussing, yet she could not help asking, "How do I look?"

His gaze roamed the length of her, up, down, then up again, and a drowsy heat came into his eyes. "All I can say is that when I get you alone tonight, you had better be out of it fast. Or I won't be answerable for its condition come morning."

"McCady, honestly. If you persist in ripping off my clothes, I'll soon be reducing to wearing nothing but rags."

He flashed an unrepentant grin and had opened his mouth to say something more, when one of the government officials who was running the trials hailed him and drew him aside to sign a document festooned with ribbons and seals.

Nervous excitement made Jessalyn fidgety. At least an hour yet remained to be endured before it would be the
Comet's
turn to run the trial. Each locomotive started separately, at times staggered a half hour apart. The engine to cover the twenty miles in the least amount of time would win, and winning meant a contract from Parliament to supply the engines for all of England's railways for ten years to come. Winning meant untold wealth and a dream come true.

But as Gram had so often said, "You mustn't jump the fence, gel, before you trot out the stable door." So Jessalyn strolled past the other locomotives to size up their competition. One, painted an apple red and with blue wheels, seemed twice as big as the
Comet.

She joined her husband who was squatting on his haunches on the
Comet's
footplate and scowling into the empty interior of the firebox. "That
Falcon
looks awfully big and powerful, McCady. Do you think we can beat her?"

He flung a glance down the tracks at the other locomotive. "She's too big. See, she's so heavy she has to be mounted on six wheels to carry her load. She'll never make it up that long grade outside Exeter. No, the one we have to worry about is the
Essex Lightning."

He nodded with his chin at a sleek-looking iron horse painted orange with black trim. "She's fast," McCady was saying. "But her weakness is in the positioning of her boiler. The way they've got it lying on its side like that makes it inaccessible in the event of a breakdown. But she is fast, curse her."

"We're faster," Jessalyn said emphatically, for she did not doubt it.

McCady flashed her a stunning smile as he jumped off the footplate. She looked up into his beloved dark angel's face. Today the shadows had been banished from his eyes, allowing the golden sunbursts to come shining through. She had never seen him so joyous.

Love for him filled her heart, squeezing her chest. She had to say it, even at the risk of seeing the shadows creep back in and swallow the suns. "I love you, McCady Trelawny."

"Jessa..." His hands fell on her shoulders, gripping them so tightly she felt a sting of pain. His throat worked, as if he were having a hard time pushing out the words. "Jessalyn, I..."

"What?"

"I..." There was a harsh tautness to his face now. His gaze jerked away from her to the
Essex Lightning.
The muscles along his jaw bunched.

"McCady, what's the matter?"

"I... There's someone I need to talk to." He crushed her against his chest, kissed her on the mouth in that fierce, rough way of his, and strode away from her so fast he was almost running.

She watched him until he had disappeared among the navvies drinking and wrestling in the Crooked Staff s yard.

Clarence Tiltwell's thin mouth curved into a faint sneer as he watched the red and blue locomotive huff and puff its lumbering way down the track toward Exeter. The
Falcon.
What a silly, fanciful name. As if that that clattering, thumping monstrosity could ever hope to emulate the sweeping, soaring flight of the noble hawk.

The next entrant had started to fire up its boiler, and steam rose white in the still air with a whistling sigh. It was odd, Clarence thought, but there seemed to be a tingle in the air, like a hot summer's day after a lightning storm. A part of him couldn't help being caught up in the excitement, the way he had been caught up that summer when he and McCady had built the locomotive to run on his father's tramway. He remembered those long afternoons in the Penzance ironworks, McCady putting the engine together and he mostly watching. And listening as McCady talked and spun dreams in the air. He had wanted to believe in those dreams, yet he had not wanted to believe. And in the end he had been glad of McCady's failure.

Today the
Falcon
carried sandbags packed into the carts that were hitched one after the other behind her like a cranberry string. But suddenly Clarence could picture the way it would be if the carts were filled with coal and bales of hay. And carriages hooked up, too, carriages with wheels made to go on rails, all filled with people. He could see it just the way McCady had described it that summer, and a bittersweet ache filled his chest. He wanted to go back and live again those afternoons in the ironworks, with the blast furnace making the sweat pour off their chests, and the hammers battering their ears. And McCady talking and spinning dreams and flashing that devil-be-damned smile.

Those afternoons before Jessalyn had come between them.

He knew she was here today, and his gaze sought her out, although he would not go to her yet. That was for later, when she would need him, need his comforting arms, his soothing words. For now he only wanted to look.

She was easy to find, a tall woman with hair the color of autumn leaves. She was no different, and somehow that surprised him. He would have thought that it would show on her face—all those nights in a Trelawny's bed. Yet she was the same girl, a girl with too-bright hair and a too-wide mouth and a leggy way of moving that always reminded him ol an unbroken colt. The same Jessalyn whom he had kissed before the Midsummer's Eve bonfire six years ago.

As he watched her, a vivid look came over her face, and her whole body seemed to shimmer with breathless excitement. For a moment Clarence thought that she had seen him, that the wide, laughing smile was for him. He actually started toward her. But then McCady Trelawny came out the swinging door of the Crooked Staff, sauntering toward her.

A man with shaggy hair and pock-mottled skin sat with his back pressed against a high stone hedge. He was gnawing on a hunk of bread and cheese and swilling it down with a pail of ale. On the ground next to him were a burning candle in a dish and an opened canister of fulminating powder. From time to time he peered through a crack in the hedge and looked down the gently sloped gully toward the mouth of a tunnel newly hewn through a hillside of yellow granite.

Jacky Stout finished his dinner, mopping the sweat off his face with a filthy rag that left behind smears of black powder. His gaze dropped down to the spalling hammer in his lap, then quickly jerked away. He couldn't look at the hammer anymore without feeling a bit queasy in his innards.

God, the boy had screamed.

Squawked like a chicken right before its throat is cut. But the sound the hammer had made was even worse—a horrible scrunching sound, like stepping on one of those big black beetles that live down in the mines. Blood had spurted everywhere, and the bones had pierced through the bruised flesh, jagged and white. Jacky was sobbing as loudly as the boy when he had raised the hammer high again.