Susan Johnson (51 page)

Empress anxiously grasped the fence rail as Guy and Trey cantered off to opposite ends of the riding ring and, turning slowly, set their mounts in a collision course. They trotted first, then moved into a canter and, urging their horses to more speed as they began nearing the center, eventually rode headlong toward each other. Galloping flat out, each rose to a standing position on his horse’s back, balanced, carefully judging distance and stride and, jumping, exchanged positions as the bay and black gelding streaked past each other.

Guy performed with a young boy’s determination and slightly awkward verve, while Trey executed the astounding maneuver like he’d been born to the saddle, his movements economical, graceful, effortless. And Empress was reminded that under the image of idle young man of leisure was a warrior chief’s son trained in his father’s ways.

Trotting up and stopping his mount just short of the fence, Guy exclaimed exuberantly, “Have you ever seen anything so amazing? And it only took me two days to learn! Trey said he’d show me how to jump on and off, too—at a gallop!” Guy was beaming from ear to ear, dirt smudges on his face and riding pants. Trey, dressed in plain-cut chamois and elaborately beaded moccasins, sat his mount quietly behind Guy, his bearing relaxed, his bronzed hands resting lightly on the short knotted reins, his face expressionless but for the amusement in his eyes. “Isn’t Trey the best teacher in the whole world? I never could have learned this from Laclerc, not in a million years!” Guy went on effervescently. And when Empress didn’t answer immediately, he urged, “Isn’t he just, Pressy? You know he is. The absolute
best
teacher!”

Empress was forced to agree. “Yes,” she said, speaking automatically.

And the lounging horseman smiled at the beautiful woman cloaked and hooded in lynx fur.

But both adults’ thoughts were on another form of teaching.

* * *

By week’s end, Max recognized Trey whenever he walked into the nursery, and his eyes, so like his father’s, would shine in welcome. Then his plump arms and legs began pumping wildly, like tiny churning pistons until Trey picked him up and said, “Give Papa a smile,” which he always did on cue, a wet gurgling that ended in cooing bubbles. His Papa’s smile in return was proud and doting. Even Nanny had succumbed to Trey’s charm after she discovered that he spent a week each year salmon fishing near her home village in Scotland.

Empress found it detestable when he and Nanny lapsed into Robert Burns’s poetry, and when she vexatiously asked one time how Trey had become so familiar with the Scot’s brogue, he had mildly replied, looking entertained, “You wouldn’t care to hear. It has to do with a country school hidden away in a mountain valley and the schoolmistress who—”

“I’m sure I’m
not
interested!” Empress interrupted hotly, wondering if there was a woman in the world who hadn’t yielded to the warm, shining light in his eyes.

Max was always included in the children’s activities now, and whatever their schedule of events, Max would be cradled in one of Trey’s arms, and Eduard in the other, and they’d all leave in a raucous clatter of running feet and screaming voices.

But on Saturday—Nanny had her afternoon off—somehow the children were all in their rooms and Trey rested quietly in the nursery while Empress nursed Max. He had taken to settling into the same armchair whenever he visited the nursery; and he was comfortably sprawled in shirt sleeves, his collar undone. Their glances would meet occasionally, and Empress would always look away first, from the frank need in Trey’s eyes. But he didn’t make a move to touch her, fighting his own inner battle.

“What am I to do with you?” he said into the quiet twilight-shaded room, the words involuntary, musing thoughts unconsciously spoken. He smiled a quick, rueful smile and shrugged away the inadvertent words.

“Anything you want,” Empress was inclined to say but didn’t, her own desire sensitive to his powerful presence. Trey’s lean form was cast in lavender evening shadow as he
sat near the nursery fire, his head resting against the chair back, his hands lying gracefully on the unicorn-print upholstery. It would be heaven, she thought, to have those elegant hands caress her, but Trey’s casual words were based on his physical need, and if she was fool enough to read anything more into it, she’d only cry tears of remorse later. So she replied in as placid tone as she could muster, “If you care to, you could take me down to dinner in a few minutes. I think Max fell asleep.”

The invitation was the first Empress had extended to him since his arrival, and warning himself not to construe too much from the simple offer, he accepted.

Dinner that night was
en famille
, noisy, boisterous, and dangerous with undercurrents of passion. Under the soft glow of gaslight the small dining room, decorated in crimson and polished mahogany by a Jordan weary of rococo pastels, took on a cloistered seclusion, as though Trey and the Jordans were cut off from the world. The shadows in the crimson-walled room were denser, the carpet scarlet duskiness, the dark mahogany furniture somber shapes melting into masking darkness; only the animated children under the chandelier light and two quiet adults were illuminated. It was like a play being enacted on a very small stage.

While the children laughed and teased in their normal fashion, Trey was subdued, pleasant and agreeable but distracted when they tried to draw him into their silliness. He ate in a desultory way, refusing the first course and leaving the second uneaten. He tasted a portion of the veal but motioned to have it taken away after a few bites. Empress found she had lost her appetite completely, her heart thudding so loudly in her chest, she was sure the sound could be heard above the children’s laughter. They were much too close across the polished table. When she looked up, he was
there
, correct again, his suit coat and cravat restored, scowling a little when he wasn’t responding to the children, resting against his chair back, trying to keep his eyes off Empress. Dinner with the children joltingly reminded them both of the snowed-in days at Winter Mountain.

Guy had to ask Trey twice whether he had tickets for the circus, and when Trey finally heard the question, he only nodded in affirmation, his mind immediately distracted by the
rosy blush on Empress’s cheeks. The twin spots of color high on her cheekbones, so perfectly pink and balanced, looked as though they’d been brushed on from a paint box. She always flushed that way when they made love, he remembered, and he shifted slightly in his chair as his erection rose.

“Dessert, sir?”

Trey looked up and automatically shook his head.

“Trey, you have to have some,” Emilie said.

“I ate before I came here.”

“No you didn’t. You were with us.”

Then he remembered he
hadn’t
eaten. He’d drunk too much last night with Satie at the Chat Noir where the Duchesse’s party had ended the evening, and he hadn’t been in the mood for food today.

“It’s chocolate mousse, Trey!” Emilie insisted, the pearl earrings he’d bought for her that day bobbing in her ears.

So he nodded; the serving man carefully placed a portion on his plate; Trey took a spoonful, said, “Wonderful,” a moment later to Emilie’s expectant, shining face, and wondered what he’d just eaten. It could have been boiled bark and he wouldn’t have noticed.

Less cautious of the possible hurt feelings her siblings might suffer, Empress didn’t even make a pretense of eating. She simply said, “I’m not hungry,” and tried to keep her eyes from straying to Trey.

It was the longest dinner of his life.

Empress seriously considered snapping, “Go to bed this instant,” to the children, but dizzy with bewilderment, she didn’t know what she’d do if they did and she was left alone with Trey.
Get a grip on yourself
, she thought, and smiled at Genevieve, who had just finished telling a story and had a smug grin on her face. “Genevieve has such a marvelous sense of humor,” Empress said to the table at large and met the children’s confounded faces.

“I was telling Trey about my canary. The one Guy
stepped on
!” Genevieve said, retribution prominent in her arch expression. “He has to confess at Confession now, and do penance and—”

“How many times have I told you, it was an accident! It wasn’t my fault!” Guy protested.

“Was too!”

“Was not!”

“Was too!”

“Oh, dear,” Empress murmured.

Trey looked at the clock and gave a nod to have his wineglass refilled.

Eduard was tucked in first after dinner, and slowly over the next two hours the other children went to bed, each insisting on Trey’s good night.

With the last child settled in for the night, Empress and Trey stood outside Guy’s bedroom door, an awkward silence lengthening now that they were alone without childish banter and questions and the distractions that had diverted them from their own unguarded desires. Glancing up, Empress met Trey’s eyes for only a flashing moment, her gaze dropping instantly at what she saw in their heated depths. “I’d better … I’ll check … on Max … one more time,” she said, stammering, imperiled with Trey so close, with the intimate, dusky silence of the hallway enveloping them … with her own dangerous feelings demanding release.

Swiftly walking away, she fled down the long corridor to the nursery, praying Trey would politely leave and save her from her own susceptibility. But after she’d verified that both Max and Nanny slept peacefully, she shut the door behind her to find Trey lounging against the paneling in the hall.

“Is he sleeping?” he asked, pushing away from the hand-rubbed tulipwood.

She nodded, unable to find sufficient breath to answer.

“And Nanny?”

“Sleeping,” she whispered in the merest exhalation of sound.

“Everyone’s sleeping.” His pale eyes shone out of the darkness of his face, his wide shoulders wider suddenly in the half shadows of the dimly lit corridor, his stature sharpened by her own vivid trepidation. He seemed very large. “You’re not going out tonight?” he asked so softly, the words were almost a whisper.

Empress swallowed once before she answered in the negative, nervously looking away from his lambent eyes and mesmerizing strength. Anticipation was poised, taut, screaming
through her senses, and she began counting the medallions in the carpet in a frenzied attempt to resist throwing herself at him.

“Where’s your room?” he said, low and hushed.

“No!” she cried, turning back to him, demonstrable alarm unmistakable in her huge eyes and suddenly clenched fists.

But Trey noted her quivering tremor, perceptible beneath the overt alarm, and he knew how little the no meant. “You have an evening free …” he murmured, the unfinished sentence ripe with meaning.

“No, please,” Empress breathed, but the no was several decibels softer than her first emphatic reply, while her “Please” was more a plea than a refusal.

Experienced with the physical manifestations of women who said no when they capriciously meant yes, he reached for her slowly, his rings flashing in the subdued light, and she didn’t move, only watched his arms come out to touch her, knowing she couldn’t stop herself from shaking. His slender hands gently closed on her shoulders, and she shuddered in a silence so solid that their breathing seemed to part the air in waves. With deliberation he drew her near, the scent of white lilac mingling with the fragrance of mountain pine permeating Trey’s clothes as the distance closed between them, her body unresisting beneath his hands, her face unconsciously lifting for his kiss.

Both struggled unsuccessfully against the resplendent passion overwhelming their senses, and in the hovering moment before their lips met, Empress whispered, “Please go.”

“Yes,” he said, the curve of his lowered lashes like ebony silk, and touched her lips with his.

It was a tender, butterfly-light kiss for only one scant moment, and then Empress threw her arms around his neck, his slid down to her hips, and he pulled her fiercely close, with such violence that she cried out. Selfishly he ignored her cry, intent on tasting the hot sweetness of her mouth, ravishing the welcome submission of her parted lips, crushing her body into his until every soft, silken curve melted into his hard-muscled frame. Only short moments later, with restless turbulence his mouth lifted from hers abruptly, as though his patience had a brief, measurable limit that suddenly had expired. “Which room?” he said, the words curt and urgent, his mouth drifting
across the smoothness of her cheek, his hand brusquely forcing hers down to the rampant rigidity of his manhood.

She trembled at the enormous pulsing size of him beneath her hand, and as volatilely as his abrupt question, she felt her body open in a melting rush. Restlessly he forced her the few steps backward until she was trapped between himself and the paneled wall. Not waiting for an answer, quicksilver with intemperate need, he pushed her hand aside, grasped a handful of silk skirt, and shoved it out of his way. Overwrought and compelled by months of abstinence, he’d find the bedroom … later.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Empress moaned, shaken by her swelling desire, feeling the coolness of the air on her legs, hopelessly aware of Trey’s strong hands sweeping up her thighs.

“I know,” he replied with soft gruffness, crushing the emerald silk of her gown, pushing the fabric and petticoats upward with rough swiftness, his fingers closing on the ties to her drawers. “This won’t take long.”

“Damn you,” she whispered at his blunt crudity, shocked back to reality from her tantalizing pleasure-drenched rapture.

“Damn you to hell, Empress Jordan, for doing this to me,” he growled, jerking on the tie with an abrupt tug.

“No, Trey, please,” she cried, alarmed at his intent, pushing at his intractable strength. “Not here. What if the servants … the children—”

And he stopped suddenly as if she’d struck him, the word
children
effective against his raging fever … but only for a brief moment. He was beyond reasoning, guided by an aching need that precluded logic. “Where?” he said in a harsh, deep tone that vibrated with urgency, his hand burning like a brand through the sheer batiste of her lingerie.