Steamlust (16 page)

“Your family’s name.” He pulled away from me. “Hell of a lot of good that did you last night.”

I grabbed his hand before it left the table. His fingernails still had soot under them, but he had cleaned them recently, so the whites were silvery gray. “Thank you,” I said. “For saving my life.”

He smiled the smile I’d first fallen in love with, uneven because he’d lost some of the feeling in one side of his face to a childhood illness. “You had a lot of good petals up under your dress,” he said. “Would’ve been a shame to see them ruined.”

My hand traveled up his arm to his neck, and my mouth found his. I caught the taste of spiced wood on his tongue; he hadn’t broken the habit of holding a dried clove between his back teeth when he was working. He gripped my waist like he always had, trying to feel my body under my corset and slip.

His mouth broke from mine, but he still stayed so close we kept our eyes shut. “Is that really why you left?”

“Yes,” I said, giving up the truth before I could think to lie.

“You didn’t go back to your parents?” he asked.

“I couldn’t.” Not after being with him. Not after making love at midnight and watching the sun rise over the
mesas
when we were still drunk from it.

His thumbs grazed my cheeks, his forehead resting against mine. His hands bore patches of calloused skin, but his touch was so gentle that the roughness on his palms felt as soft as lilac leaves. He held aside a loose curl and kissed my forehead;
I tried not to think of how he used to say my hair reminded him of black magic roses. I was so sure this was a good-bye that I gripped handfuls of his waistcoat fabric; I would not let him go.

He moved his head so his eyelashes brushed my temple. He was taking in the scent of my hair. “Marry me,” he said.

I opened my eyes.

“You may have been worried about me,” he said.

“I still am,” I interrupted, pulling away enough to look at him.

“And now I’m worried about you.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Think of it as strategic business. If we’re married, no one will ask questions when we’re together.”

I tried to tickle him through his waistcoat and shirt. “Who said I’d work with you again?”

“You already are. You just didn’t know it.” He kissed me again, once. “Are you going to answer my question?”

“You first,” I said. “I want to know how you saved me last night.”

He smiled again, like full dawn after rain. He knelt near his bureau and pulled up a board from the floor, unveiling a faint violet glow.

“Lightning marbles.” He offered his hand to help me to the floor. “Sam gets so many strikes out on his farm, we thought we’d do something with them.”

“You still work for Sam?” I knelt next to him. “Why haven’t I seen you?”

“I didn’t want you to,” he said. “He’s teaching me to distill.”

I cleared a slash of hair from in front of his eye. “Good.” Sam’s wife had wanted him to retire for years.

Ezra looked down at the floor. “He figures I know how to
handle flowers by now. Even the delicate ones.” He pushed the board out of the way.

Beneath the floor, an old jewelry box held a dozen or so marbles, blown-glass and all different sizes. Within each, tiny veins of electricity sparked and pulsed.

“How do you catch it in there?” I asked.

“You’ll have to marry me to find that out,” he said.

I tried not to smile. “How do they work?”

With a pair of porcelain tongs, he lifted one of the bigger ones to the light. It shimmered like raw amethyst.

“When it makes contact with a conductor, the lightning tries so hard to get out that it melts the glass away, just leaving the electricity.”

“So you can shock police guards and former lovers?” I asked.

He cringed. “I didn’t mean that to happen. I thought you’d run. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to touch something if you don’t know what it is?”

“My mother told me never to touch anything,” I said. “Especially you.”

He lowered his head so his hair would shadow his blush.

“What if you accidentally shock yourself?” I asked.

He laughed. “It hurts.”

“Then why did I…”

“Because you’re smaller than I am. And I’m used to it.”

I wondered how he pulled the electricity from my body enough to take me home, if my skin let off little shocks when it met his, if the charge passed through the petals in the lining of my coat as he held me. I wondered if it was still inside me, if sparks still spread heat through my body.

“They’re dangerous,” I said. “You shouldn’t be carrying them.”

He set the marble back in the wooden jewelry box. “They’re the only way to stall the corsos.”

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I won’t.” He lifted out another with the clay tongs, cupping his other hand to receive it.

“Ezra, no!” I said.

It landed in the hollow of his palm. A halo of violet glowed around his arm, and he fell back against the floor.

“Ezra.” I cleared his hair from his face and felt little shocks on my fingertips. “Ezra.”

He laughed, his eyes still closed. “I told you. It hurts, but that’s all.”

I shoved his shoulder. “Don’t do that.” I took his hand and kissed the faint burn in the center of his palm.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll fade. It always does.”

I climbed onto him and kissed him. I could almost feel the remnant lightning on his tongue.

He opened his eyes. He was trying not to breathe hard, and his lips were trembling for it. His pupils dilated and constricted with the slow rhythm of a lighthouse.

We grabbed at each other’s clothes. I unbuttoned his waistcoat and shirt. He unfastened my dress and slip. Too impatient to strip him naked, I undid his trousers and slipped my hand inside. He was already hard. Later, when we were lying in bed together, I’d tease him for it, but now I couldn’t wait, even for the few seconds of a passing flirtation.

He wanted to look at all of me; he was so hungry to see me naked I could feel it in the way he took hold of my lingerie, like it bound me and kept me from him. He pulled away my bloomers and freed me from my corset. He kissed the undersides of my breasts like he was thirsty and they would turn to water against his mouth. While he followed the lower curves,
his fingers explored the rings of brownish-pink at the tips of my breasts, like he was learning to draw them.

I straddled him, my knees on either side of his hips, and guided his erection inside me. He bit his lower lip to stop its trembling. His hands moved so easily from my breasts to between my thighs that I did not realize they were there until his strokes drew out more of my wetness. The tiniest sparks, so small I couldn’t know if they were real or imagined, leapt between his fingers and the pearl that held my deepest lust.

I put all my weight onto him, and it both heightened his pleasure and maddened him, because he barely had the freedom to thrust into me. But he knew the way inside me, as no other man did, and I opened to him so he could reach that last trace of electricity that his amethyst lightning had left the night before. When he found it, his own seed of newer lightning, still in his body, shuddered through his hardness and met the spark I held within my darkest place, just as dawn soaked the room in rose-gold light.

He said my name. I answered with his, my palms mapping the contours of his chest. He said mine a second time. “Yes,” I said as I kissed him, an answer I would give again to any question he asked. “Yes,” I said, as involuntarily as the noises I made when he touched me between my legs. “Yes.” A response to the question he’d asked but that I’d left suspended between us, unanswered, in lantern light. “Yes.” A cry for more of everything: his mouth on my neck, his hands on my breasts, his erection growing harder as he moved inside me.

Yes, things were better for me when I behaved myself. But I preferred the desperate heat we held between our bodies, and the sweet, slight pain of our shared lightning.

O
h, I do beg your pardon! Are you hurt? Please, allow me to assist you…”

Caroline Fortescue-Smythe scowled up from the ground where she sat in a crumpled heap of skirts and petticoats. The tropical glare behind him made it difficult for her to see his features. Nevertheless, despite his impeccable English, the man who had slammed into her was clearly Siamese. He extended his hand to help her to her feet. His other hand clutched some bulky contraption of leather and brass, embedded with lenses that glittered in the sun.

“You should pay attention to where you are going,” she grumbled, brushing the dust from her heavy clothing. Perspiration trickled down her spine and her stays dug into her ribs, adding to her foul mood. “I’m not injured, but I might easily have been. You were barreling along like a locomotive.”

“I am so sorry,” the young man repeated. “I was trying to capture images of the race.” He pointed to the strange mechanism he carried. A cheer rose up from the crowd as some
stallion or other crossed the finish line. “I was so focused on the horses, I didn’t see you.”

Caroline snapped open her parasol. In its welcome shade she felt fractionally cooler. “What is it?” Aside from the lenses, it did not look like any camera she’d ever seen.

“My latest invention,” her companion replied, pride evident in his voice. “A moving picture recorder and player.”

“Like the Lumières’ projector?” The French ambassador had been boasting about this marvel of Gallic technology at some official function only last week.

“You are familiar with their work?” He favored her with such a warm smile that it melted a good deal of her annoyance. “My videographic device is similar in function, but much faster and more versatile. The same machine can both capture and display moving images. You see, here, I can show you the last race…” The stranger drew her closer and indicated an oval-shaped glass panel built into the side of the recorder. He pressed a button. Sleek equine shapes galloped across the glass surface, the motion so smooth and natural that Caroline was astonished.

“Of course, the images can also be projected externally, for public viewing,” he continued. “I am working at the moment on the problems of color and sound.”

The enthusiasm in the young man’s voice banished the last of Caroline’s anger. He stood far closer to her than would normally be proper, his bare hand clutching her gloved one. When she took a shallow breath (the only sort permitted by her corset), she caught hints of cloves and jasmine. The scent, in combination with the pitiless sun, made her briefly dizzy.

She examined him more closely. Although he was dressed in Siamese costume, silk pantaloons and a formfitting white jacket with brass buttons, he wore his coal-black hair cut in Western
style rather than bound into a topknot. His complexion was the color of antique ivory. Behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were like pools of melted chocolate. His beardless features looked boyish but his broad shoulders and narrow waist suggested he was at least as old as her own twenty-three years.

“Quite impressive,” she said, finally. “My father will be interested to hear about this.”

“Your father? Oh dear, please forgive me once more. I get so involved with my little projects that I completely forget my manners.” He drew himself up to his full height, a few inches taller than Caroline’s petite stature. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ruangkornpongpipat Suriyarasamee. Please, don’t even try to pronounce it! My friends call me Pete.” He squeezed her hand and gazed boldly into her eyes. “I hope that I shall be able to count you among them.”

Caroline felt hot blood climb into her cheeks. “Suriyarasamee—I’ve heard that name, I think.”

“My father is one of the wealthiest merchants in Bangkok—quite fortunately for me, since he has ample resources to support my investigations. I am surprised that a foreigner would be aware of him, though. Who are you, if I might ask?”

“Caroline Fortescue-Smythe, at your service,” she replied, still embarrassed by her earlier rudeness. “The daughter of Thomas Fortescue-Smythe, Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s ambassador to Siam.”

“Ah, that explains it. My father frequently attends diplomatic parties. You may even have met him.” He released her, reluctantly it seemed. “Well, Miss Caroline—I do hope you will allow me to use your given name according to our custom, since Fortescue-Smythe is almost as much of a mouthful as my own moniker—I am truly delighted to meet you. And I apologize most sincerely for my clumsiness.”

“There was no harm done.” Caroline realized that she was still blushing. Meanwhile, her heart danced a hornpipe under her tight bodice. “I—um—I should get back to our box. My father will be concerned. Please excuse me…”

“Wait!” He snagged her hand once more and heat shimmered through her. “Do not go yet.”

“I must. I’m sorry…”

“It’s such a pleasure to converse with you. It’s not often I meet a woman, Siamese or European, with any interest in technology. Look, are you engaged this evening?”

“Tonight?”

“I’ve arranged a little performance at my house, for some of my friends. Another one of my creations. I’d love for you to come see it. With your father, of course.”

“Well…”

“I’ll send an invitation with the details to the ambassadorial residence this afternoon. I hope I will see you this evening. Until then, Miss Caroline.” Pete raised her hand to his lips as though to kiss it, but appeared confused by her glove. Finally, he turned her hand palm up and pressed his lips against her bare wrist. He lingered there for an endless moment. The wet tip of his tongue flicked across her pulse point. Electricity arced up her spine.

He smiled into her eyes, nodded, and moved on, pointing his recording device once again at the horses thundering down the track. The strip of naked skin between her glove and her sleeve tingled long after he’d disappeared into the crowd. It was several minutes before she recovered.