Her certainty was like a balm and he reached forwards to trace the shape of her cheek before venturing lower, the skin on her neck and the full abundance of breast barely covered in fabric.
Her head fell back and she closed her eyes and he watched her as he found one nipple and turned it between his fingers. Dark blue silk fell away as he cradled the flesh and leant down to suckle.
Relief flooded into the parts of her body that had laid so dormant, his lips and tongue weaving magic.
When she felt the silk tumble from her shoulders she just stood there, in the room with the firelight and candlelight and perfume, a woman who wanted all that would come next and be damned for any consequence. She held his head, the thick glossiness of his hair twisted in her fingers, so that pain lingered in pleasure in the same measure as it rested in his pull on her nipple.
Not quite easy.
Not quite amenable.
No bedroom. No certain privacy. A risk. A gamble. His caresses made her limbs fluid and warm.
She wanted Cristo Wellingham to bury himself inside her with an urgency that was frightening, so when he lifted his head and smiled she was flustered by his restraint.
‘Now. Take me now.’
‘And have years of waiting to be finished in a few minutes? I think not, my lovely Eleanor.’ His teeth were white. ‘Your very first time was a rushed affair, but I swear, sweetheart, this time will not be.’
Placing her forefinger in his mouth, he rolled it on his tongue, in and out, spread across wetness, deep and deeper. The room tilted as his free hand found the fabric of her skirt, bunching it up around her bottom before entering the hidden folds. One finger and then two, the penetration the same as those at her mouth.
Her breath simply ceased. She swore it did, the cold silk, the moonlight on the carpet, the spills of ecstasy linked by feeling at both ends of her body.
Until he stopped.
‘Not yet, my love. Not yet.’
Leading her to the chaise longue, he sat her down, the midnight silk beneath her breasts. When her nipples tightened in the cool air he handed her a glass of wine.
Red like blood. Symbolic somehow. Stained in the burst of grape and in the momentary release of perfection.
The outline of his manhood was fierce in its shape behind tight breeches and she could barely believe that this was not a dream, that it was real and that he had called her his sweetheart.
When her more usual prudence deserted her completely, she reached forwards to lay her hands upon his groin.
He groaned and the smile on his face was pained. Perhaps he would not enjoy that caress, she thought, her fingers dropping back into her lap.
‘Martin Westbury must have had ice in his veins to be impotent with you.’
She shook her head. ‘When he found me in Aix I was very ill. He saved my life by taking me to Italy. After that it was hard to leave him.’
‘Ill …?’
‘From childbirth.’ She turned her face away so that he might not see what was in her expression, but he was adept at picking up the nuances and turned it back.
‘You are not telling me everything.’
She breathed in once and then twice, and his fingers found her own, like a lifeline in a swirling sea, she was to think later, though when she did not speak he began with a story.
‘My mother was Sylvienne de Caviglione. She met my father a month before she was to be married off in an effort to secure a political alliance. Sylvienne had hoped for a younger husband and Ashborne was a long way from home and lonely. When the result of their indiscretion was known she was sent to the country. I arrived eight and a half months later and my entry into the world was her exit from it. I tell you this, Eleanor, because I do not want any more secrets between us and I can see them in your eyes.’
‘Yet you grew up a Wellingham at Falder?’
‘My French grandfather had as little use for a bastard as he did for a dead daughter. He sent me to England as fast as he could, though his wife harboured her own measure of guilt and left me her family château in Paris when her husband died. I had killed their only daughter, you see …’
‘You blame yourself for your mother’s death?’
‘She was young and it was a difficult birth.’ Fury underlined each word.
‘Mothers die in birth as easily as children do.’ Eleanor held her other hand rigidly against her side, gripped into a fist.
Now. Now. Tell him now.
She made herself unclench her fingers one by one by one. ‘There is a story that says the stars house the souls of the ones who have departed, and that at night, between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, in the cluster known as the Pleiades, you can see them, and speak to them.’
‘Pleiades?’
‘The seven stars that sit in the constellation of Taurus.’
She looked across to the window, but only out of habit, for the time of the year was far too early. Still out of caution she did not tell him, did not speak of the times when she had watched month by month for something meant only for her.
‘Paris watches me from there.’
Tears welled in her eyes unbidden. Her son. Their son. Missing, and so very far from home. It was good to say his name out loud and to someone who might have loved him as much as she did.
Something was wrong. Something hidden and important. Paris? The city? Why would she cry for that? A name, then?
‘Paris?’ He repeated the word and she looked up and nodded. ‘Who is Paris, Eleanor?’
The darkness in her blue eyes was like a blanket of dull pain, stale grief and anger. ‘Our Paris. Our son. He lies in Aix in the cemetery under a marker of white stone.’
The truth of what she said made his heart stop and the pit of his stomach lurch.
‘Another child? There was another child?’
She nodded. ‘Florencia had a twin. A brother.’ Tears ran down her cheeks like two rivers, but she did nothing to dash them away. ‘You were not there, so I called him Paris. It was all I could think of to link him with you.’
‘God, Eleanor.’ He pulled her to him, as if in the embrace he might take some of her hurt, some of the suffering as he imagined how it must have been. Eighteen and alone in a foreign land with one living baby and one dead one!
‘He w-was too tiny. He w-was much t-too tiny. He would n-not have lived here, either, I d-do not th-think.’
Cristo nodded his head in agreement, not trusting himself to speak.
‘And it w-was too soon for them to c-come. Not quite eight months. Florencia was b-bigger. I wanted Paris to live, but h-he didn’t.’
The sobs increased, but her head was now nodding up and down, the arms that held him tightening.
In the firelight and in a strange house, miles from London, it seemed as if it were only them left in the whole wide world as she cried out her many years of silence.
She woke up in his bed. A blanket had been pulled over her and a pillow tucked beneath her head. It was still dark, though a small candle on the mantel had burnt down almost to the plate, making her calculate that many hours had passed.
She had told him!
Her