“But I—”
“Hush now, and listen to me.” He cradled her face in his hands, stroking her cheeks with his thumbs. “The loveliest flowers are often the ones that take the longest to blossom. I can see the promise of real beauty in this charming little face already, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
For an endless moment, Catie let the sweetness of his words wash over her, before she forced herself to break away. “We can’t stay here. Someone may see us from the tavern.” Someone like Ben Hazard, she added mentally. How she’d hate for him to spoil this moment with his grumpy face! “Come, across here to the stable.”
Shyly she took his hand. Anthony Sparhawk wasn’t like the other men from the tavern that she’d always avoided. He was a gentleman, and he had defended her against Zeb. How could she not trust him?
“I was born on a farm,” she explained as she led him across the shadow-filled yard to the stable that shared the well with the Crossed Keys, “and when I cannot bear the city crowds and noises any longer, I come here to be alone with the beasts. Mr. Freeman— he’s the ostler—he understands, and lets me come and go as I please.”
Carefully she unfastened the latch and slipped inside, pausing for Anthony to follow her up the ladder to the loft. Her feet slipped deep into the mounded hay, the fragrance musty and redolent of summer. She knelt beside the narrow window and looked out at the harbor and the ships at the moorings.
“When all the sails are furled like that, I think the masts look like trees,” she said dreamily, the breeze from the harbor cool on her cheeks. “A whole magic, silvery forest on the water.”
She heard the straw rustle as he came to kneel beside her. “How old are you, pet?”
“Seventeen,” she admitted, hoping he wouldn’t think her a child. “But I’ve been working in Newport on my own since last spring.”
“That makes seven years between us. Was I ever as young as you, I wonder?”
She turned and smiled. “Of course you were,” she said. “Seven years ago.”
“Of course.” Gently he tugged off her white linen cap, letting her fine, pale hair spill over her shoulders. “In the morning I’ll be sailing in one of those ships for England. After years of fighting the French for king and country, my grandfather’s at last seen fit to reward me with a lieutenancy in a real regiment. My commission’s waiting in London.”
“London?” said Catie unhappily as she shook her hair back from her eyes. He might as well have said the moon. “When will you come back?”
“Ah, that only God in His mercy can answer. One year or ten, or maybe not at all.” He spoke with such a brave melancholy that it tore at her heart, and impulsively she slipped her arms around him, eager to take the sorrow from his blue eyes.
“You must not talk that way,” she said fiercely, pressing her cheek against the fine linen of his shirt. “You will come back, I know it.”
He sighed, letting his hands settle around her waist to hold her against his chest. “A good soldier’s life isn’t his own, pet, and he never knows when it may be forfeit.”
“But that’s so sad!” cried Catie, pushing herself back so that she could search his face. With all his grim talk of war and soldiering, she had meant to comfort him, but she was the one who felt safe here, his arms around her making a special haven in the warm, fragrant straw. “How can you bear to sail from home, knowing you may not live to return?”
With infinite care, he slowly traced the bow of her upper lip. “You can help me bear it, sweet,” he said, his voice deep and low. “Give me a memory to take with me.”
He kissed her then, as lightly at first as his touch had been, brushing his mouth across her lips until they parted willingly for him. If he wished to take the memory of her kiss with him into battle, then she’d give it gladly. How, really, could she not?
But in the first instant, disappointment stung her, for he tasted unmistakably of rum. How could he share this same rare joy that she felt if his senses were clouded by liquor? Then he deepened the kiss, his mouth warm and sure, and she forgot the rum and everything else in the heady new sensations swirling through her.
Drawn into his passion, she scarcely noticed that he’d lowered her back into the rustling pillow of the straw, or that somehow her skirts had become tangled above her knee as he caressed the soft skin above her stockings and garters until she sighed into his mouth with pleasure.
But still she started when she felt his hand roam higher, and clumsily she tried to move away and push down her skirts.
“You—you must not,” she gasped raggedly as she broke off their kiss. “No, Anthony, please.”
“Yes, sweet lass, yes,” he murmured, his breath warm on her ear. “I told you I was a chivalrous man, and I mean to prove it. You’ll have your pleasure from me, be sure of that.”
And Catie gasped, her protests forgotten as he kept his promise. She had no words to describe the delicious heat that filled her body as he kissed her and touched her again, or experience to warn her what would come next as her body arched with instinctive wantonness.
Another moment, her ravished senses pleaded with her conscience, only another precious moment more.
The pleasure spiraled dizzily upward, and her conscience fell silent. Lost in her own world, she didn’t try to stop him as he shifted on top of her. He was a gentleman, her Anthony, and she would trust him not to harm her.
She would trust him; and then came the sharp, sudden hurt that ended that trust and the pleasure with it, and the helpless little cry tore from her heart when she realized too late what he’d done, what she’d done, and now could never undo.
Afterward he smiled down upon her as he stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and called her his own sweetest pet, coaxing her to smile, too. But she didn’t smile; nor did she weep, either, not even when he heard the ribald, drunken bellow from the street and with an oath rolled off her to one side. All she did was close her eyes so that she would not have to see the shame of his nakedness.
“Damn Jon,” muttered Anthony as he buttoned the fall of his breeches and bent to peer from the window into the street below. “He’ll bring the whole bloody watch back here again.”
He turned back to her, shaking his hair back from his face as he shoved his shirttails back into his waistband. “I must go now, pet,” he said hurriedly. “I’ve still much to do, packing and such, before I sail, and besides, it’s high time I stopped my sot of a cousin from braying like a jackass at the moon.”
She’d sat up by then, tucking her petticoats tightly over her legs and hugging her bent knees to her chest. She could not understand why there was no blood on her shift to prove she’d been a maid, and miserably she wondered if that was a sign of her wickedness and sin.
He fumbled in his pocket, his fingers jingling coins together. He held them out to her as he bent to kiss her farewell, silver coins shining in the moonlight that had lost all its magic.
“Go,” she said softly, lowering her face to avoid his lips. Now she was only a fool, but if she took his money she would be something far worse. “Just—just go.”
And without another word, he left. She listened to the ladder from the loft creak beneath his weight, and heard the thump of the latch as he let himself out, the echo of his footsteps fading down the street while one of the horses in the stalls below stirred and nickered sleepily.
Alone in the silence, she closed her eyes. No matter how tightly she curled herself, the cold, empty hollowness deep inside wouldn’t go away. It was bad enough that she’d lost her maidenhead here in the straw like a common strumpet, to a man who’d