Fierce (19 page)

“Oh,” I said, “you’re playing my song. It’s been a
long
week. We’re going to dinner?”

“We are. I’m going to take you someplace beautiful, watch you eat delicious things, watch the way you drink wine, and think about how much I enjoy watching you have new experiences. That’s my plan.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing today?” I asked as he retrieved my jacket from the coat check and helped me put it on.

“Reckon it is,” he said. “And it hasn’t been bad at all.”

My heart began to beat a little harder when he stepped into the elevator with me back at the hotel and pushed the button for the third floor. And it began to pound when he got off the elevator with me and walked silently beside me to my door. 

I pulled the keycard from my purse and swiped it, and he put a hand out and held the door open above me. I hesitated, half in and half out, looking back at him where he—well, loomed over me. 

“Eight-thirty,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby. And we’ll get to work on that sauciness of yours.” And then, before I knew it, he hauled back and slapped me on the butt. 

He did. He
spanked
me, after he’d refused to even kiss me. I gasped and jumped, and he just looked at me, said, “Can’t wait,” let go of the door, and walked away. 

Way to set a girl up.

I wondered when I’d last taken an entire weekend off. Well, not an
entire
one, because I did put in a few hours before I turned off my laptop and left the room for a workout in the hotel gym. 

I didn’t do too badly at staying focused, either—at least until I was showering. Once I was in there, though, I couldn’t help but wonder if Hope had lit her candles and turned on the jets for her own bath, if she’d found the foaming bath oil I’d made sure would be laid out for her, because I’d had a feeling she’d love bubble baths.

The exhibit we’d seen in the museum today didn’t help.
L’Intimité du Bain.
The Intimacy of the Bath. Women undressing, their transparent white shifts falling down around their lush bodies. Women sitting on the edges of curving porcelain tubs, testing the water with a languid hand, or sitting down to brush out their long hair with a towel pooling around their hips. Women in all their glory, naked, glowing, and sensual, and Hope hadn’t turned away with a blush. She’d looked, and she’d enjoyed.

And then there had been the one that had made her stop and draw in her breath. A woman viewed from behind at her dressing table, the perfect hourglass of her back like the voluptuous body of a cello, gazing into the mirror while she lifted both graceful hands to her hair. The candlelight soft on her white skin and the rich mass of dark hair piled on top of her head, a secret smile on her face.

“Beautiful,” Hope had sighed. 

“Yeh,” I’d said, my voice coming out a bit husky. “Makes you feel her lover’s standing behind her, in the doorway, maybe. She’s seen him, and she’s letting him look, because she knows he wants to. Every fella’s got a bit of the voyeur in him, eh.”

“Does he?”

“Oh, yeh. Every man wants to watch.”

Just like I was watching Hope that evening as she walked toward me from the lift, dressed in a metallic gray beaded evening sweater closed with a row of tiny jet buttons, a full black skirt, and the shoes I’d bought her. Her fair hair was soft and tousled, and I could all but see the pupils dilating in the eyes she’d made up tonight to look huge and smoky. 

Her lips, though, she’d kept nude, exactly the way I loved them best. As I continued to watch her, they parted, and I could almost hear the uneven breath she’d be taking. She could’ve been in one of those paintings, just risen from tangled sheets, as if, in another moment, she’d be lifting those slim, softly curved arms to pull me down with her, to take me back with her again into the dark, sweet, secret places.

As she walked toward me, her eyes on mine, I knew we were both remembering that painting. That she knew I’d been imagining her in her bath, and that I’d wished I could’ve watched.

“Beautiful,” I told her when she arrived. 

“Is it right?” The delicate color stained her cheeks. “I borrowed it from my roommate before she left. In...in case.” 

“It’s perfect.” I reached to brush her hair away from her cheek, leaned down, and murmured in her ear, “Were you thinking about me when you chose the sweater that buttoned down the front?”

I did hear her intake of breath this time, and when she whispered, “Yes,” I felt the jolt run straight from her body into mine.

“But first,” I said, straightening up, “because we’re working with anticipation here, we’ll walk through Paris, and we’ll drink wine, and I’ll show you someplace beautiful. Someplace that’s one of my own favorites.”

She enjoyed the walk through the elegant shopping district of the narrow Rue St. Honoré, loved window-shopping and talking about what we were seeing, and she loved the restaurant, too. I could tell, because Hope couldn’t disguise her feelings if she tried.

 I’d brought her to Le 1728, the former home of the Marquis de Lafayette, with its individually decorated salons reflecting the opulence of the nineteenth century, the elegance of a bygone age. The maître d’ led us up the huge carved staircase to a small salon on the upper floor, where we were seated in lavender chairs in a corner, beside tall windows hung with extravagant lavender velvet draperies looking onto the golden lights of a Paris night. 

Time slowed beside the fire crackling in the huge marble fireplace, the soft light of the chandeliers enhanced by the candlelight gleaming against the hardwood paneling and carved ceilings. I sat, ate perfectly prepared food presented with painstaking attention to detail, and watched Hope enjoying her own dinner, saw the sparkle in her eye and the curve of her lips that told me how much spirit she hid behind her innocent appearance.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, taking another forkful of red mullet and humming a little with pleasure at the taste. “That’s not good enough to say, but it’s the best I have. It’s like being a princess, you know? Like there really are such things as fairy tales, even though we both know it’s not true. Or at least that it’s all right to pretend, for one night.”

“Maybe there are some enchantments that work,” I suggested. “Could be we just need to find the right ones. No fairy tales that touch that spot for you? Nothing more…realistic, maybe, that you can believe in?”

“Maybe,” she said, looking at me under her lashes. “But we got in trouble the last time we talked about fairy tales.”

“Ah,” I said with satisfaction. “So there
is
one. Go on, then.”

“You don’t want to hear me tell you a fairy tale.”

“I’m Maori. We like stories.” I leaned back a bit in my chair and smiled at her. “Entertain me.”

“If I tell you mine,” she said, the sauciness peeping out again, “will you tell me yours?”

“Maybe.”

“Not good enough. But all right, Mr. One-Way Street. My favorite is
The Wild Swans.
I won’t tell you the whole story, but—”

“No,” I interrupted. “The whole story. Telling stories is what we do.”

She looked at me for another long moment, seemed to make up her mind, and finally began to speak. Haltingly at first, as if she expected me to break in and tell her it was enough, to get to the point. But as she went on, staring into the crackling flames of the fireplace, her voice took on a dreamy quality, a faint singsong that settled into place somewhere deep within me. Familiar, and new. The sound of the voice I wanted to hear most, reciting a favorite legend.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a king who had twelve children. Eleven sons and one daughter, his youngest child. His wife died—probably from having twelve children—and he married again. The new stepmother was a witch, because they always are, and she was jealous of the children, and of the king’s love for them, especially his love for his daughter. So she enchanted them. The sons, she turned to birds. At the setting of the sun, they were men. But when the first rays of day broke over the horizon, they became wild swans. And as for the daughter? The queen tried to kill her, but Elisa—the princess—was so good that the enchantment didn’t work. See, goodness again. But this time, it works for me. You’ll see why.”

“So she couldn’t kill her,” I prompted.

“No. Instead, she banished her, and Elisa wandered in the forest until her brothers, who’d been searching everywhere, finally found her. They spent all night in their man-form weaving a net for her, and when day broke, they flew with her across the sea to safety, each holding an edge of the net in his beak, barely managing to land on an island at sunset before they turned to men again. Then flying and flying again, even when they were so tired, even when they wanted to quit, in order to rescue their little sister. And when they reached a new kingdom where she’d be safe at last, they set her down. That’s where that new kingdom’s king found her.”

“So that’s the story,” I said. “Not bad.”

“No.” She took another sip of the fragrant Sauvignon Blanc, the best the Marlborough Sounds had to offer. “That’s the beginning. The king took her to live at his castle, but she couldn’t forget her brothers, or stop wanting to help them. And when an old woman told her she could turn her brothers into men again if she gathered stinging nettles from the churchyard at midnight, beat them into fiber, and knit shirts of them, she knew what she had to do. But there was a catch, of course. If she spoke a single word before the shirts were done, the magic would fail, and her brothers would be swans forever.”

“But she did it anyway, I’m guessing.”

“Of course she did. Even when the nettles stung and burned her hands, even when she longed to speak, to explain, and couldn’t. Even when she knew her life might be forfeit, she held fast. Because the king was worried by her silence and her nighttime wanderings, and when his archbishop told him that she was a sorceress, and she refused to say a word to defend herself…the king didn’t defend her.”

She took another sip of wine, a final bite of fish, but she was frowning now, lost in her tale.  “So she ended up arrested, put on trial for witchcraft, held in a dungeon, and sentenced to death. And all that time, she kept working, kept making her brothers’ shirts, refusing to give up on the idea of saving them. She was still knitting the final shirt, in fact, when she was carried into the courtyard to be burned as a witch. She was put on the pyre, still without saying a word, still holding to her dream, and that’s when the eleven swans swooped down around her. Her brothers, coming to rescue her once again. The people watching cried out that she must be innocent, because swans were a good omen, but the executioner held out the torch to light the fire. And she barely noticed. She only saw her brothers. With the last of her strength, she threw the shirts over the eleven of them, and they became men again.”

I’d lost my breath, carried away by Hope’s intensity, and she looked up at me, the blue-green eyes burning. “As her last act, she saved her brothers. And when she fainted from fear and exhaustion, her brothers had to tell the king her story. And as they spoke, the branches of the pyre turned to flowers. The king plucked a flower and handed it to Elisa, and the two of them were married. And this is the part that kills me. Her youngest brother—she hadn’t had time to finish the final sleeve of his shirt, and he was left with a single wing in place of an arm. A wing that would always remind them of her sacrifice and her love.”

“I can see why you like that one,” I said after a moment. “That’s worthy of being a Maori story, or of being your story. All about sacrifice and family and courage. About holding fast.”

“But do you see what’s wrong with it?” she asked.

“What? That he had a wing? No, I think that’s a good thing. There’s always a price to be paid.”

“No.” She was still looking at me, her gaze so steady. “No. That
after
she proved herself,
after
she saved her brothers and they saved her, the king married her. But before that? Where was his faith in her? Why would a woman marry a man who’d been willing to let her die? The thing between her and her brothers—that kind of love, I can believe in.
That’s
true love. Love that endures anything, will sacrifice anything to save the beloved person. Love that’s stronger even than self-preservation. But the other kind, the love at first sight thing, the enchantment thing? Not so much. It seems to me it can end as quickly as it begins, because there’s not enough there to build a life on, or to put your faith in. So I love the story, but I hate the ending. Except the wing. I love the wing.” 

I was as knackered, suddenly, as if I’d had a session with Eugene on the heavy bag. “Yeh,” I said. “You’re right. He should’ve believed her.”

She smiled, and the mood shifted again. “But then there would have been no story, and no sacrifice, would there? Without the bitterness, without the pain, where would the sweetness and the pleasure come from?”

“It’s tied up together, eh.”

“Yes. It is. Just like I can love this day, because you wanted to do all this with me after it didn’t work between us before. Because you’ve been willing to try again.”