Someone to Hold

“There are some things worse than not knowing your parents,” she said. “Sometimes knowing them is worse.” She sighed, her breath warm against his throat, and lifted her head. “But that is not really true, of course. How can I know what it would have been like not to know my father? How can you know what it would have been like to know yours? We cannot choose our lives, can we? We have some freedom in how we live them, but none whatsoever over the circumstances in which we find ourselves when we are born. And I do not suppose that is a very original observation.”

“Camille,” he said, smiling at her.

“But here we both are,” she said, half smiling back, “on our feet and somehow living our lives. Why are we so gloomy? Must we wallow in the tragedies of the past? When I stepped out of my grandmother’s house just over two weeks ago and set out for the orphanage and Miss Ford’s office, I had decided that for me at least the answer was no. Definitely not. Never again.”

“I have identity at last,” he said. “All is well.”

He cupped her face in both hands, and they gazed into each other’s eyes, both half smiling, for long moments. She closed her own briefly when he traced the line of her brows with his thumbs and ran one of them along the length of her nose, and opened them again when he feathered both thumbs along her lips, pausing at the outer corners. Her fingertips came to rest lightly against his wrists. He smiled more fully at her, drew breath to speak, changed his mind, and then spoke anyway.

“Come to bed with me,” he said.

He regretted the words immediately, for her hands tightened about his wrists, and he guessed he had ruined the fragile connection he had felt between them. She did not step away from him, however, or pull his hands away from her face. And when she spoke, it was not with either indignation or outrage.

“Yes,” she said.

* * *

They left the portrait of his mother on the easel, uncovered, and crossed the hall to enter his bedchamber, not touching each other.

“I am not the tidiest of mortals,” he said as Camille heard the door close behind her.

The bed had been made up, but the blankets hung lower on one side than on the other, and one pillow still bore the imprint of his head, presumably from last night. A book lay open and facedown on a table beside the bed. Camille itched to mark the page, close the book, and check to see that the spine had not been damaged. A few other books were strewn on the floor with a scrunched-up garment, probably his nightshirt. But at least there was no noticeable sign of dust.

“I never had to be tidy until recently,” she said. “I always had servants to do everything for me except breathe.” Her hair had given her particular trouble in the last couple of weeks. She was unaccustomed to brushing and styling it herself. And why did dresses almost invariably have to open and close down the back, when one’s elbows did not bend that way and one had no eyes in the back of one’s head?

But why were they talking and thinking of such things, allowing awkwardness and self-consciousness to enter the room with them? She had made a decision, a very spur-of-the-moment one, it was true, for his suggestion had been totally unexpected, but she had no wish to go back on it. She had come to believe that for twenty-two years she had been only half alive, perhaps not even that much, that she had deliberately suppressed everything in herself that made her human. Now suddenly she wanted to live. And she wanted to love, even if that word was a mere euphemism for desire. She would live, then, and she would enjoy. She would not stop to think, to doubt, to feel awkward.

She turned toward him. He was looking steadily back as though giving her the chance to change her mind if she so wished. How could she ever have thought him anything less than gorgeous? His hair, very dark, like his eyes, had surely grown in just the two weeks since she had known him. His facial features were all suggestive of firmness and strength. His Italian lineage was very obvious in his looks, but so was his English lineage, though he looked nothing like the young woman in the portrait. It was not just his looks, though. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken though he was, and seemingly uninterested in male pursuits and vices, there was nevertheless something very solid about him and very male. She could not quite explain to herself what it was exactly and did not even try. She just felt it.

He was gorgeous and she wanted him. It was really as simple—and as shocking—as that. She did not care about the shocking part. She wanted to be free. She wanted to experience life.

“Camille,” he said, “if you are having second thoughts . . .”

“I am not,” she assured him, and took one step closer to him even as he took one toward her. “I want to go to bed with you.”

He set his hands lightly on her shoulders and moved them down her arms. For a moment she regretted not being as slender and delicately feminine as Abby was—and as Anastasia was. But she brushed aside such foolish, self-doubting thoughts. She was a woman no matter what she looked like, and it was she he had asked to go to bed with him, not either of the other two. She slid her hands beneath his coat to rest on either side of his waist. His body was firm and warm.

He began to remove her hairpins, slowly and methodically, setting them down on the table beside the open book. She could have done it faster herself. So, probably, could he. But this was not about speed, she realized, or efficiency. This was about enjoying desire and building it—her first lesson in sensuality. Oh, she knew nothing about sensuality, and she wanted to know everything. All of it. She leaned into him, setting her bosom to the firm muscles of his chest, and holding his eyes with her own while his hands worked. She half smiled at him. Tension built in the room almost like a tangible thing.