The Forbidden Rose

skin. The calloused palm he held on her neck slid downward. When his hand got to her bottom, he brought her an inch closer. Pressed her to him.

He waited to see what her answer would be.

She wanted this. It would be so easy, so natural, to take this pleasure. To let her body answer his. There was no one on earth to stop her.

Except herself. Except herself.

She said, “I wish . . .” I wish I could lie with you. I am afraid and alone and I would be comforted by you. She picked one drop out of the sea of what she wished and put it into words. “I wish I were the miller’s daughter and you were the farmer’s son and we could play foolish games in the stable loft. I wish you were someone I could . . .”

“Be foolish with.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “But I am not the miller’s daughter. I have never owned such simplicity. I do not live one minute without calculation.”

“Pretend I’m someone you can kiss.” His lips came down softly over hers. Holding back, brushing lightly. Hinting. The taste, the possibility, was enough to hold her while he retraced the path up her backbone and slipped the calluses and strength of his hand under her wet braid and enclosed the nape of her neck.

He muttered, “We’re both going to stop calculating for a minute.”

He kissed across her mouth, slowly and deliberately, as if this were exotic territory and he was exploring. As if this were the first time he’d ever kissed a woman and he was getting surprised.

The whole length of his body was persuasive against her. His cock, hard in his trousers, throbbed at the cradle of her belly. His hand on her was heavy as his strength. Light as if it were part of her. He stroked with the tips of his fingers, making circles on her skin like whirlpools in a stream of moving water.

He slipped the kiss into her mouth. Kissed rows of exploration, back and forth. Wrestled a new hold on the corner of her lip. She felt herself pulled gently into his mouth. Licked. Tasted.

“Oh, my,” he whispered. “My God.”

She kissed him back. She felt him fighting his reaction to her. She had this much power over him. He twitched, as if shocked, when her tongue ran across his tongue.

She closed her teeth gently over his lips, capturing him for an instant. His instant of surrender overwhelmed her. They captured each other, teeth, lips, tongue, back and forth.

“You are . . . I don’t know what you are.” He growled it in the deep of his throat.

She unraveled. A curious liquidity, warm and quivering, spread from her belly. She pulsed inside her skin.

One of the goldfish giants of the pond surfaced and fell back with a slap of the water.

He froze. His arms tightened around her. It was as if the corners of the earth folded inward. “They could come back, any minute. Anybody could come walking by. And I’ve left that damn boy free to plunder France. You make me stupid.”

“We make each other stupid.” She resented him. She was also annoyed at her own body.

He pushed away from her. “Put your clothes on. We have to leave.” Before he stomped off, he said, “We’ll talk later.”

Seven

DOYLE DIDN’T MIND THE HEAT HIMSELF, AND GOD knew he didn’t plan to pamper the boy, but he hated to walk a woman through this mud.

The sky burned empty and pale blue. They went single file across a landscape of hedgerow and long fields. First him with Maggie, then Hawker and the animals. The boy had fallen back a ways owing to the number and quality of his ongoing discussions with the donkeys. Hawker was practicing what was beginning to be an extensive vocabulary of obscenity. He hitched his trousers up with a jerk and swaggered the way the mule boys did, enjoying himself, playing the Game as natural as breathing.

Maggie pushed the pace. Being determined about it. A woman with somewhere to go and something to do.

They were following the track that led to the Paris road. Maybe she was just getting well away from Voisemont and the people who knew her. But he thought she had herself a destination. It might be she was leading him straight to de Fleurignac.

The old man made the list. He knew who was slated to die. I find him. I take the list. And I do not get myself tangled up with his daughter.

Maggie lifted her face to the little wind that had come up and stood, eyes closed, drinking it in. She was dusty and sweaty. There was a smear of mud across her cheek. Her clothes were kitchen and cowshed wear. All that, and anyone with eyes could see what she was. Aristo.

Elegant as crystal. I keep thinking she’ll break, and she doesn’t.

You get to know somebody pretty well, slogging through French mud with them. Maggie was gold and grit. She set her clogs on the ruts and rocks with grim deliberation. He could have pointed her in the direction of China and she’d keep on going, one step after another, till she saw pagodas.

I don’t want to like de Fleurignac’s daughter. I don’t want to admire her.

He wasn’t sorry for what he’d do to her father. But he’d regret hurting her, if he had to.

Mistress Maggie scraped mud off her clogs on an upright rock, being a woman with a liking for lost causes, obviously. Strands of dark brown hair stuck to her forehead and her cheeks. Her clothes stuck, too, holding to the curves of her body. The tops of her breasts were stippled with little beads of sweat. Once in a while a couple of those drops got close and made friends and ran away together down the valley between her tits.

She’d be salty if he started licking her. Salty and sweet and musky. She’d taste like Maggie—like this particular woman out of all the world—with a sprinkling of dirt. There wasn’t a square inch of her he didn’t want to go over with his tongue.

If I hadn’t tasted her, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t be thinking about it. Serves me right.

They were avoiding the main road. This cart track led to the Rouen highway, if you cut through the fields. Keep on straight and it eventually wound toward the Paris road. They hadn’t met anyone in four miles but a bashful girl with a pair of cows—the cows didn’t take kindly to donkeys—and a dung cart drawn by a horse so old even the army wouldn’t steal it.

Pear orchards stretched across the hilltops, rows of trees with a few brown cows grazing under them. Dun- colored fields, dotted with haystacks, alternated with the green and yellow-green waves of uncut hay. They’d cut that as soon as they had two dry days in a row.

The wheat was doing well. They’d get twenty bushels an acre in August and everybody would eat.

If the fighting in the Vendée didn’t spill over into Normandy . . . If the weather cooperated . . . If they could harvest it with half the men marched off to the army.

Weedy footpaths ran between fields, up over the horizon and out of sight. Off to the west he could make out the steeple of a church. They walked the long downward slope toward a thin pinewood. It would be cooler there, out of the sun.

Behind him, Maggie hit a soft spot in the road, gave a little grunt, pulled her sabot out with a suck and a squelch, and started again. He could feel her eyes boring a hole into his back. Thinking and thinking.

He shouldn’t have kissed her. I don’t chase bobtail when I’m on the job. A thousand times I’ve told some idiot, “Keep it in yer breeches when you’re working.” Now I’m the idiot.

When he’d run away from home the first time, he’d been, what? Thirteen? He’d hid out in the rookeries and docks of London, doing heavy labor. Even that young, he’d been tall as a grown man. That intrigued women. He’d had offers enough he could have slept in a different bed every night.

Being a shy lad, he’d turned them down. Mostly.

Five years later, he’d made the rounds of the Polite World. Turned out the minor son of a major earl got the same offers. It was cleaner women, but the same hot greed. The same curiosity to see if his cock measured up to the rest of him. Some just wanted a toss. Some of them, God help the fools, thought they could marry into the