It was what she needed, this truth of reaction, no whispered lies between them stating a future that could never be. For this moment she felt like a woman reborn, the girl in her pushed back by a feeling that was new, creeping into the place between her legs and into her stomach. Heavy. Languid. Damp.
Lost in the transfer of all she had suffered.
And in control of everything.
* * *
He did not speak because he was a man who understood small nuances. It was his job after all, seeking truth and finding exactly what it was those buried under the shifting tides of war needed to survive.
Sandrine needed oblivion, and he needed her to find it. It was simple. A translation of grief.
She was weightless against him, her thinness in the water disguised. He was glad he could only feel: the small mounds of her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach, her long legs draped around his waist as if they had a mind all of their own.
Opened to him. Waiting.
He wrapped the fine length of her hair about his wrist, tethering her, gentling her, the cold in the air and the heat of their bodies making light work of the joining, and when his lips came down upon her upturned mouth he did not hold back.
He was in her, tasting, her throat arched upwards and their breath mingled. He knew the moment he had her assent, for she began to shiver. In her ardency her fingers scraped down the side of his arms.
‘I want to know what it is like to have a husband.’ The honesty in her words undid him.
No pretentiousness, the grandiose and flowery allowances of various ladies he had known pushed aside by a simple truth. She did not play games or set rules or say one thing, but mean another. Danger and hardship had done away with all the extraneous.
Hot. He felt hot from the pool and her skin and the building need inside him. ‘I would not wish to hurt you.’
She smiled at that, the dimples in her cheeks deep, and steam across the coldness of night lifting around them. ‘I know that you won’t. It is why I want it to be you.’
With care, his fingers dipped, the softness of woman and the heat there, and she tensed, her eyes sharpening as though pain might follow and when it didn’t she urged him further, a small sigh of release and surprise.
She was tight and tense, her eyes a clear and startled turquoise as she watched him, measuring, challenging, her hips lifting to allow him in farther though her brow furrowed as he found the hard nub of her desire.
She stilled him.
‘What is this?’
‘You, Sandrine, the centre of you.’
Relaxing even as he spoke, she allowed him closer, the feel of her body against his, her breasts more generous than he had thought them.
‘Beautiful.’
Exchanging his hand for his manhood, he pushed wide, edging inwards, filling the space of her. When her arms pulled him in he knew that he had her and, twisting his body, he came in deeper.
With the water and the bubbles and the steam about them, both lost their tapering hold on reason, the final absolution as she went to pieces, beaching waves of rigid need, and then was quiet.
He held her motionless as he took his own relief, his face held upward so that the fine mist of night cooled him, his groan of pleasure involuntary.
‘God, help us.’ He had never felt like this before with anyone, never wanted to start again and have her impaled upon him, for all the hours of the night and the dawn, only his.
He should have withdrawn, should have given his seed to the water where it would wither and die in the heat. And instead...
If she were fertile then a part of him would grow.
But she did not let him think. ‘Take me again on the bank in the cold.’ Her voice was soft and her tongue licked at the space about his chin.
A thin, brave and pale siren with no idea at all as to how much she had affected him. Lifting her into his arms, he came from the pool in a cloud of steam and laid her down in the nearly night and gazed.
‘You are so very lovely.’ He whispered the words, honesty in every syllable, and when she smiled he found the hidden folds between her legs and tasted her. Sandrine. Salty and sweet and young.
* * *
Much later he dressed her, carefully so that the cold did not creep into softness. He had marked her as his, the red whorls of his loving standing out on the paleness of her skin, telling the story of long and passionate hours. But already the dawn birds called across the wide mountain valleys, signalling in the light.
‘I did not know it could be like that.’ Her voice was guarded. ‘After Nay I was not a virgin.’
The rawness of her confession grated against the new day. A confidence she did not wish to share, but had felt the need to? He frowned.
‘No one could live in that hovel and remain...untouched, though Celeste soon worked out a way to protect me from them.’
‘How?’
‘She began a relationship with Louis Baudoin and insisted I sleep in a small room off their own.’ Taking in a deep breath she continued on. ‘I think she thought the accident in the carriage was her fault somehow. She had wanted to take a detour off the main road and it was there that the horses stumbled down the hill. Her father and his godson were killed and Louis Baudoin found us just before it snowed.’
‘A saviour?’ He hoped she would not hear the irony.
‘He took us home, and Celeste was grateful.’
‘And you?’
‘I was grateful to her.’
When people lied they often glanced down before they did so. Their body language changed, too, the arm crossing the chest in an effort at defence. Nathaniel saw all of this in Sandrine, and when she did not answer he did not press her, but the joy of communion wilted a little in the deception and in her confessions.
With the wind behind her and the shadow of her hair across her cheeks she suddenly did not look as young as she always had before. But she was not quite finished.
‘My cousin was of an age when the adventures of life are sometimes sacrificed to the safer and more conventional. I could not save her.’
Nat stood and took her hand, holding it firmly as she tried to loosen the grip.
‘It is over now, Sandrine, and the past is behind us.’
But she only shook her head. ‘No, Nathanael, it is here right at our heels, and if you had any sense at all you would leave immediately and escape me.’
His laughter echoed about the lonely and barren hills.
Maureen confronted her the morning after she had gone to the St Auburn town house, deep marks of worry across her brow and dark eyes fixed upon her lips.
‘You were so late home last night. I can hardly recognise who you have become, Cassie, and I do not think you know it yourself, either.’
Her rebuke stung. ‘This is not an easy task, Reena. There are so many who need—’
‘To be saved?’ A question. ‘And what will be your salvation when you are caught in the lad’s clothes far from home and I cannot find you?’
High emotion changed a careful diction so that the words slurred together unfinished and disjointed. Realising this, Maureen reined her anger in, the hands she used so much in communication hard up against her ears, pressing, and the guilt that had been Cassandra’s constant