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He quietly groaned. Again and again, he’d witnessed this phenomenon with his friends. They got married. They were happy in that sated, grateful way of infrequently pleasured men with a now-steady source of coitus. Then they went about crowing as if they’d invented the institution of matrimony and stood to earn a profit for every bachelor they could convert.
Truly? That whole determined, dangerous saunter across the room was for me? In that case, would you mind going back and doing it all over again? Slowly this time, and with feeling.
The jasmine scent of her hair cocked a trigger, deep inside him. A memory stored not in his mind, but in his blood.
“I’m male. You rubbed your . . . femaleness all over me. I didn’t think. I reacted.”
“That’s it,” she said, balling her hands in fists. “I’m not letting you out of it this time. I insist that you take me to Scotland. I demand you ruin me. As a point of honor.”
“Jesus,” he finally managed, pushing water off his face. “Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. For that matter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.” Still not enough. He needed to reach back to the Old Testament for this. “Obadiah. Nebuchadnezzar. Methuselah and Job.”
“Yes. A proper kiss is like an excavation. When you’re digging up your little troglodytes, you don’t just go plunging your shovel into the soil higgledy-piggledy, do you?”
“Hmm. You taste of spirits here.” Her tongue traced the edge of his lip. “But here”—she dipped her head to nuzzle the underside of his jaw—“you smell of spice. Cloves.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “All those nights. You’ll be casting glances at me over those coy little spectacles, driving me wild with all your polysyllabic words. Sharing my bed. Kissing me like a brazen temptress.”
“Name it?” Colin eyed the plaster cast. “Why go to Scotland for that? We can name it right here. I suggest ‘Frank.’ ”
It was Colin’s first attempt at forbidding anyone to do anything, and it worked about as well as he’d expected it to. Which was to say, not at all.
He pulled his shirt over his head and cast it aside. Then he undid his buttons and dropped his breeches without ceremony. Well, not entirely without ceremony. There was a certain amount of fanfare. His rapidly growing erection all but trumpeted for attention, jutting out from its nest of dark hair. Waving in an embarrassing, adolescent way.
She looked like a memory, interrupted. A torrid dream. Or a glimpse of the future, perhaps.
“So there’s an . . . an etiquette to raking. Some seducer’s code of honor. Is this what you’re telling me?”
He shut his eyes and tried to turn his mind to the least arousing things possible. Spiders with hairy legs. Those bumpy, long-necked gourds that made him think of poxy genitalia. Mashed peas. The dust-and-beeswax smell of impossibly old people.
Without taking his eyes from Minerva, the young man leaned toward Colin. “Mr. Sand, do you think it’s possible to fall in love in the space of a single day?” He smiled. “I wouldn’t know. I only fall in love at night. Never lasts beyond breakfast, though.” Gilbert sent him a confused look. “B-but . . . But I thought you—” “We all have our demons, Gilbert.” He clapped the young man on the shoulder and leaned close. “A word of advice. Cleave to the bosom of the Church.”
Men never hesitated to declare their presence. They were permitted to live aloud, in reverberating thuds and clunks, while ladies were always schooled to abide in hushed whispers.
“Surely it can’t be,” he said, his hand stealing over her thigh, “that this intrepid explorer of underwater caverns hasn’t explored her own little cove?”
It’s in the name of science. Hah. That was a first-rate line, that was. Ranked right up there with, “You could save my life tonight,” and “Darling, teach me what it means to love.” Colin made a mental note to remember that one for the future.
“Oh, Colin.” She dabbed a fingertip to his sticky abdomen, then rubbed her fingers together, as though testing the quality of his seed. “That was fascinating.”
Perhaps, she thought, people were more like ammonites than one would suppose. Perhaps they too built shells on a consistent, unchanging factor—some quality or circumstance established in their youth. Each chamber in the shell just an enlargement of the previous. Growing year after year, until they spiraled around and locked themselves in place.
“I thought you were the one who argued against having any expectations at all. Isn’t that your grand life philosophy? You said expectations lead to disappointments. That if you expect nothing, you’re always surprised.” He gave a bark of laughter. “In that case . . .” He turned to her. His hazel eyes sparked with intensity. “Surprise.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “You’re marrying me.”
there’d be this word . . . a word that even the most grizzled, wizened elders might have uttered twice in their lifetimes, and in hushed, fearful tones at that. A word for a sudden, cataclysmic torrent of beauty with the power to change landscapes. Make plains out of valleys and alter the course of rivers and leave people clinging to trees, alive and resentful, shaking their fists at the heavens.”
“And I will curse the gods along with them, Min. Some wild monsoon raged through me as I looked at you just now. It’s left me rearranged inside, and I don’t have a map.”
“You didn’t destroy my dreams. You broke me out of my shell. There was bound to be a bit of a mess.”
