“You love me?” he asked, holding back the wonder of it, afraid to believe. Her words might have been disposable, easily tossed out and easily forgotten.
She closed her eyes, her sweet face pale, and wrapped her hands into the linen of his shirt. She nodded, as if she couldn’t admit the words out loud. Not again. But she rested her cheek against his chest, burrowed close as if she meant to stay there always.
“Well, isn’t that bloody convenient,” he said, “because I?—”
“Hand me the sledgehammer.” She held out her arm, palm up.
His eyes widened. “No.”
“Then I shall do it myself.” A few steps only took her across the room, and she lifted the large hammer with ease. She stalked toward the chair, her gaze hard and determined as she lifted the hammer, prepared to swing.
He darted in front of her, grabbed the chair and wrenched it out of her trajectory. He grunted. Damn thing heavier than he’d expected. But he pushed it across the room and stood in front of it, legs wide, arms crossed over his chest. “If you slam that into my chair, you slam it into me. Do you understand, Clara?”
She let the metal head of the hammer rest on the ground before her, her hands folded over the tip of its handle. “I’m stronger than I look. You cannot stop me.”
“Youlookbloody strong. Iknowjust how strong you are. Iadoreit. It makes me hard, Clara. Tell me, can I seduce that hammer out of your hands?”
“You adoreprotectingme.”
He sat in the chair, leaned forward, and braced his elbows on his knees. “If you hurt this chair, Clara, I’ll?—”
“You’ll what?” She batted her lashes. “You could never hurt a fly. I don’t care how many men you’ve killed in battle.”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. But those orgasms you’re so fond of me giving you…”
She narrowed her eyes, her grip on the hammer’s end tightening until her knuckles shone white. “I won’t have them anyway once you’re gone. Not from you, anyway. I’ll simply have to give them to myself.”
“Only if I’m watching.”
Her smile possessed a smug arch to it, but that wild thing still peeked out from behind her eyes.
“Do not touch this chair.” A direct command. She’d do well to heed it.
“I can bark orders, too. Donotthreaten to remain here when you must travel abroad to heal.” She walked to the window, put her hands against the sill, and stared out. Her sigh heated the glass. “I will promise not to harm the chair if you promise to leave. The chair will be here when you return.” She flinched then swung ever so slightly to peer at him from over her shoulder. “Will you return?”
He wasn’t going to bloody leave, but she didn’t seem to be in the mood to believe him. He could only ground out, “I will return.”
Relief rushed across her face. Such hope in her rosy cheeks, such love in her green eyes, such worry in the biting of her luscious bottom lip.
His entire body lit up at once, a room flooded with candlelight magnified by mirrors—all the words to the rest of his song rushing through him. He stood with a jerk and strode toward her, pointing at the chair. “Do. Not. Touch. That. Putthe bloody hammer down and don’t pick it up again. I’ll return.” He kissed her hard, his lips crashing into hers, a promise. “I’ll return.” Then he released her and ran. Out the door and all the way back to Briarcliff, all the way back to his pianoforte. Where he wrote the love song that had been building in him since he’d met his wife.
Twenty-Three
May Day found Clara alone, though it seemed the entire nearby village of Fairworth celebrated before her. Everyone had spilled out of their homes and onto the lawn at Briarcliff. Every face possessed a smile, every smile possessed a song, and every voice flung happiness to the blue spring sky.
Yet Clara stood at the edges of the crowd, feeling foolish. Atlas said he wanted to stay with her, and that made her heart sing to drown out all the other voices. But how could she know that he stayed because hewanted towhen every action he took answered the needs of others? She’d proposed the best solution. He should leave, and when he was ready, when he’d healed, he could return home.
The dancers wore ribbons in their hair and held them in their hands. The wind picked up those slices of color and curled them skyward. Souls taking flight. Beautiful. She laughed, a harsh little sound. Look at what that poet of a husband had done to her; he had shown her how to see beauty in the smallest thing.
To think… he had once seen such beauty in her.
But she did not want him to love her as she loved the ribbons curling toward the sky. Such love lasted only as long as theribbons did, becoming nothing more than a fond memory as soon as they were packed away or ripped from hands by the wind and tangled in the branches of the nearby woods.
She did not want to be loved like that, because as soon as Atlas stepped aboard a boat, he’d forget her. He said he loved her. But did he love her as she loved the ribbon? Did he love her the same way he had loved her the first day he saw her—as a thing of beauty to be admired, to offer a bright moment in the wells of his shadows?
Or did he love her as she loved him—in a way that would not fade with distance, that would not become less pleasurable nor less painful with time?
She should join the dancers. She did not wish to. No one from Briarcliff danced, not even Zander and Fiona.
