The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [47]
She said, “I don’t understand.”
“Understand what? That you are a passionate woman? That I am an immensely excellent lover?” The austere male arrogance was suddenly back, and she saw the blatant satisfaction stamped hard on his face, heard it in his voice.
“No,” she said slowly, rubbing her hands up and down his back, feeling his muscles, his bones, the warmth of his flesh, the wondrous smoothness of him through his fine lawn shirt. “I don’t understand why you are scared.”
He jerked out of her and was on his feet in the next instant, pulling up his breeches, buttoning them. He stared down at her, sprawled naked, her white legs apart, long and sleek, so utterly beautiful, so soft in the gentle candlelight. “Damn you, I am not scared. You are a woman. Stop drawing absurd conclusions based upon your own weak female notions. I am not scared.”
She slowly sat up and slowly pulled her nightgown over her legs. She was very wet with him. It was strange, this wetness. It had been a very long time since she had felt such a thing.
Since yesterday.
She stroked her fingers through her hair to pull out the tangles. She looked up then to see that he was staring at her fingers pulling through her hair.
She saw his own fingers clenching at his sides. “I am not scared. That is ridiculous. It is nonsense.”
She looked over at the broken chair, a lovely Louis XV, all white and gold, that had belonged to her grandmother. One leg had broken off cleanly. The other leg had splintered badly. With care, perhaps, the chair could be repaired, but that one leg would be difficult.
She looked over at the pile of pages beside her on the floor. They had both been so focused, so urgent, that they hadn’t even moved much, just gone mad together in one spot. The pages hadn’t been touched.
“I don’t like this, Helen.”
She sighed and stood up. Her legs nearly gave out on her. She grabbed the edge of the desk, waited a moment, then slowly straightened again. She said, her eyes focused just beyond his left shoulder on the narrow bookshelf in the corner that held her novels, “I am going back to my bedchamber now. I think you are doing a magnificent job on translating the scroll. It is about the lamp. I knew it just had to be. But how?”
He shrugged and tucked his shirt into his breeches. “I agree. I would have thought that since it is about the lamp, then the lamp would have been in the iron cask with it. Why was a letter or a message or whatever it is sealed up all by itself? What is the point? Where is that bloody lamp?”
“It is possible,” she said slowly, lightly touching her fingertip to the leather scroll, “that someone found this cask much later, perhaps even after the lamp was here in England with King Edward. Perhaps this someone knew where King Edward had buried the lamp in a general sort of way, and buried the cask nearby. Then if both were found, the scroll would explain about the lamp and all would be known. There was nothing else in that small cave. I looked very carefully. But perhaps close by, not too far away from the cave—”
“Helen.”
She raised her head and stared at him. He looked tough in the dim, spindly candlelight, tough and hard and dangerous. She had the sudden urge to fling herself on him and take him down to the floor. It was a floor she would never look at again in quite the same way. She smiled then. He had made love to her with his boots on.
“Don’t smile at me. Listen, I am not scared. But I will tell you this. It must stop. This has never happened to me before, this complete loss of what I am and what I’m doing. Not once did I think to withdraw from you, not one single time, either yesterday or now. If this continues you will become pregnant.” Just saying the word made his eyes nearly cross, and, strangely enough, not with abject terror. No, in that instant, he saw her belly rounded with his child, and she was laughing and telling him something that made him kiss her and laugh as well. And his hand lay over her belly, over his child. Then it was gone.
He didn’t know what