Sleeping Beauty (27 page)

They kissed like this, touching each other everywhere in their dark corner of the hallway, while dishes clatters and feet padded somewhere beyond—their lunch being cleaned up.

In the end, it wasn’t even a matter for discussion. James backed off. He stared into her face, inches away, frowning, examining her intentions. He must have seen them, for he abruptly let go and marched down the hall.

In a quick speech, he sent all the servants away with three days’ pay and the understanding that they
would return on the fourth to clean everything up. Afterward, he and Coco went upstairs to another breezy, cool room, her bedroom—or rather, the music room. It had been her split-second choice when she’d arrived, the most distant room from Phillip’s that still had a bed—though, in this case, a small daybed.

Thus from one end to the other of the large music room that faced out toward another wide terrace with another idyllic view, James and Coco scattered each other’s clothes. He hung her corset on a small harp in the corner, her chemise on the piano stool, her stockings on a music stand. His trousers, braces still attached, lay eventually over the foot rail of the daybed. His shirt was thrown on the floor. His gentleman’s combination swayed from a terrace door handle. While Coco and James themselves ended up on the terrace balcony, making love in the sun on the cushions of an iron loveseat: James sitting, leaning back, Coco astride him, naked, hands gripping his shoulders, her body arching as he lifted her by the buttocks.

He entered her, uttering a delicious love-muddle of words. “Oh, Coco, I adore you I love you can you arch forward till
oophhh
yes the nipples of your breasts touch my chest yes there there am I doing this
oophhh
too hard
oophhh
I’ve missed you
oophhh
I love
oophhh
I
oophhh
oh God need you…”

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to shout for joy. She smiled down into his face as her body rose toward climax. Oh, this is worth it, she thought. I won’t regret a minute of it. She held his face in her palms, watching his amber wolf-eyes, fixed on her,
focused, unflinching, as direct and warm as the sun on her back. It became a kind of game, staring into these eyes as she felt his fingers dig into her backside; he parted her buttock slightly as he lifted and drove into her. They joined, riveted to each other’s gazes.

And, oh, the pleasure. The deep, warm pleasure of James. James, whose face she caressed, James’s smooth cheekbones, perfect under her fingers; James’s jawbone hard against the pad of her palm, the skin of his jaw gritty, the friction of a recent shave of a stiff-growing beard.

He watched her reactions, penetrating her body with what became sharp, hard spasms. His eyes never strayed from hers as he tightened his grip on her, as the muscles of his shoulder hardened, bunching up under her hands…as, lower, her body opened, welcomed the thrust of his hips, shuddered with the pleasure of his strong, rigid member, the strength in his driving buttocks.

She let go before he did. Her vision blurred. She no longer saw him as she called out, giving herself up to shivers that quickly amplified into pulsing contractions, pleasure beyond thought or control. She became aware of only the most basic throbs of stimulus. James pulling her against him with sudden force…James kissing her mouth violently…the two of them careening over an edge into someplace else…a place where, for an instant, they were no longer separate, but rather united in sensation…one mind, one body, one glowing moment so strong it seemed capable of briefly alloying souls.

In the middle of the night as Coco lay draped over James, half asleep, he murmured into her hair, “Coco?”

“Hmm.”

“Are you awake?”

She muttered softly, laughing, “All right, I can be awake, if you want.”

When he said nothing immediately for several seconds, she pushed back from his chest and tried to find his face in her own shadow on the pillow. “What?” she asked.

“Well, I’m half afraid to broach the question, but—” He paused, then broached it: “Does today mean you’re not going to marry Phillip?”

She knocked him lightly in the chest. “Oh, a nice thing to say after what we’ve done from one end of the house to the other.”

“Right. Of course. I knew. Still, Phillip meant his offer, I think, and David would like it—”

“And I wouldn’t. Oh, James, don’t put too much stock in the drunken rambling of a middle-aged man whose life has come to a crossroads. I don’t.”

“Nonetheless, I think he’d do it.”

She rolled off him onto her back, looking up into the dark. “My dear, if I had a ha’penny for every time Phillip Dunne had said he would make an honest woman of me, well, ha!” She laughed outright. “I
do
have a ha’penny for every time he’s said it, and I’m a rich woman from it, I will tell you.”

James wasn’t comforted. He lifted up onto his elbow, rolling up onto his side. “He’s asked before?”

Coco lay in his shadow up against him. “Certainly,” she said. “Years ago, he offered regularly,
at least once a month.” She sighed. “I’d believe him. I’d wait at the house, while he was supposed to set things in motion. Then he would return saying Willy was not feeling well; now was a bad time to burden her. Or it was too close to the holidays; after the holidays he’d ‘give her the bad news.’ There was always a reason. For two years I waited in England. For five or six years more, he visited in Paris, saying much the same thing. But no matter what he said, he kept having babies with Willy. I was slow, but eventually caught on: if I wanted holidays and any sort of regular care and attention myself, I had to make my life elsewhere. So I did.”

Realizing that James might take the story as a threat, an ultimatum—and, above all, not wanting to hear any excuses why he couldn’t marry her—Coco said quickly, “And now, of course, marriage is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?”

“Certainly. I’ve grown used to an independent life. I don’t ask anyone’s leave to do anything. Moreover, I could never turn my property and fortunes over to someone else. No, thank you. I’ve raised my child, given him a name. There is nothing to motivate me ever to marry again.”

James’s silhouette nodded, but he said nothing.

Coco worried she had overstated her case. What if he were thinking he’d
like
to marry her? Would she like to marry him? She loved him, there was no doubt. Then she had to sigh. “Oh, my poor tarnished knight. What am I doing to you?”

He let out a surprised laugh. “Nothing.”

She wished it were true. She willed it to be true. She said a little bleakly, “We’re going to lie, aren’t
we? I mean, you weren’t thinking you
wanted
to marry me, were you?”

“Hmm?” His voice in the dark had become distant, as if he were lost in thought.

“Were you thinking we should marry?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, then, a man called rudely back to earth, he mumbled out, “Um, ah, I wasn’t—I—”

She cut in quickly. “That’s fine. I just wanted to know in which direction we were going to compromise you. So,” she said, “we’ll be surreptitious, live one way, act as if we live another. We’ll trade a little piece of your honesty for our time together.”

He snorted. “My honesty, my God. As if it were so shining.” He jostled her good-naturedly. “Come now, you can’t think a man gets to the ripe old age of twenty-nine without having told a tale or two.”

“You never lie. You told me so.”

“I was lying when I said that. I tell huge lies. I once told my mother I was down the street, when in fact I’d taken the train to London, spent the day there. I was eight.” He laughed.

Coco wanted to cry.
This
was James’s idea of a falsehood. A lie to his mother regarding his whereabouts when he was a child. And he still carried it with him, remembered doing it, because in his mind it was noteworthy. “Oh, dear,” she murmured.

Defensively, he insisted, “Coco, I can tell lies with the best of them.”

Tell them, yes, but could he live one? “Fine,” she said. So an illicit love affair was what it would be.

As decisions went, it couldn’t have been too bad
a one, she reasoned later, because they certainly took to it with enthusiasm.

They spent the next three days glutting on fruit, leftover game hens, some salt cod they found in the kitchen, and each other. It was an existence so lovely for Coco, it seemed more magic than reality. They ate, drank wine, laughed, talked, and made love. They swam at night naked in the cold Mediterranean till their teeth chattered. They snuggled under a blanket till they were as cozy as puppies piled up by the hearth. They went to bed late, then slept past noon, entwined.

Three magic days. They became the most ridiculously happy ones Coco could remember living in the entirety of her life. Perfect days, or almost. Because, in the back of her mind, she had begun to count them. Three magic days, four, five…. How long would they last? In reality, she told herself, there were no forevers.
Happily ever after
was a phrase strictly out of fairy tales.

Chapter 18

“H
ow are we going to manage this?” Coco asked, as she watched James dress on the morning of the fourth day. The servants were due in at noon. His train left at two-twenty-five, taking him back toward the Channel, then another train to Cambridge where he had to be day after tomorrow for congregation and commencement.

“I don’t know,” he said distractedly. He was rebuttoning the fly of his trousers. Talking about departures and train schedules, he’d buttoned it wrong on the first attempt.

She lay back on the bed, watching his agitation, full of sympathy for it, but uncertain how to put him at ease.

She might have told him that the standard way now was for him to buy her a house…oh, in Ely or Royston, somewhere near him though not so near as to be obvious, to establish her there. Except that she was loathe to think of herself and James as “standard”—and neither did she want to be the one who defined where they departed from the usual ex
pectation. This left her silenced, unsure of herself in a way to which she was unaccustomed.

His fly still gaping by two buttons, James stopped and pushed his hands back through his hair. “You should come with me,” he said.

She laughed. “Ah, my dear, the first rule of illicit goings-on: We don’t arrive together. And I most definitely don’t move into an all men’s college with you. People would catch on to us right away if we did that.”

He looked at her. “Coco, I need you.” He blinked, frowned, searching for words, then said with utter sincerity, “I can’t be happy without you near me.”

Sentiments like this one, out of James’s mouth, stopped her cold. With anyone else, she would have made fun of the romantic idiocy of it. But with him, the way his eyes fixed on her, something softened inside; the core of her chest grew warm, liquid. So instead of bringing him back to earth as she should have, she smiled foolishly over the bed’s foot rail and said, “I’ll buy this house. We can stay here.” She laughed so he would know she meant it as a joke.

He didn’t move. His hands remained upon his head, elbows in the air, his hair askew, while he simply looked at her. As if he might really be mulling the idea over.

Not likely, she thought. Yet what a picture: the captain of the cricket team. Or, no, James didn’t care for cricket, she’d discovered: a rower, a crew member of a victorious eight in the Mays, the Bumps race, the Head of the River, an All Souls fellow with double firsts to his credit, exuding all
the fresh-faced, creamy English charm of a Cantabrigian—while standing there with his fly partly open, his trouser braces dangling at his knees, the shirttail of his generous bespoke shirt hanging out of his tweedy, well-tailored trousers—seduced, undone, contemplating throwing over his upperclass friends and future for the sake of his shady lady love. An outrageous image that he manifested extremely well with his bewildered expression, his blond hair disheveled, and his clothes askew; his handsome self in disarray, looking besieged and overwhelmed.

Coco stared, though in the end had to avert her eyes. She picked up his vest where it lay on the bed beside her. Light summer worsted, heavier on one side for a watch in its pocket. “Here,” she said, holding out the waistcoat. “You’re going to miss your train.”

James took the vest. As he slipped it on, he said, “If we bought this house”—she blinked up at him—“or one like it here, I’d still hardly ever be able to get to it. Between terms perhaps. For longer during the summer.” He threw her a frustrated frown. “Coco, I want you with me. I want my life to include you in a regular way.”

Oh, yes
. Oh, no; if only she could have kept the voice inside her from cheering every time he said things like this. Coco pulled the sheet around her hips for modesty. All right, she thought, was buying a house here all that crazy? Why not? “Don’t go back to Cambridge. Let me buy the house. Truly. Stay here.”

She caught a glimpse of his expression, a frown that furrowed into a quick scowl, then he bent away.
On one knee as he looked under the bed, he asked, “Have you seen my shoes?”

“Under the piano. Oh, James, really: stay here. Don’t go back.” It seemed like such a bright idea all at once. “There are good universities in France. Apply to one.”

“I don’t speak French.” He threw her an impatient look over the edge of the bed. “Nor do I speak Italian. I’m English. Besides”—he dragged his shoes from under the piano—“
you
heard Phillip. I can go back to Cambridge”—he balanced, pulling on one short boot, then the other—“do the most interesting work of my life, and do it all honorably in a way that is good for everyone.”

“And there’s your earldom to consider, which should be right around the corner now, yes?”

He shrugged, a not entirely honest gesture. The honor mattered to him, she was sure, not to mention the property that undoubtedly went with it. Scholars did not in general grow rich, but James Stoker would.

Coco picked up her dressing gown from the bed and slid it onto her arms as she stood. She used it as a kind of curtain to hide the childish plummet of disappointment she felt. Genuinely childish. One didn’t ask a lover to give up such fine earthly rewards. Of course, he should have his earldom, the satisfaction and prestige of work well done.