should go on.’ Her voice was rough and she did not wait for him as she followed the path down the steep incline above the mist of cloud.
* * *
She barely spoke to him as they laid out their blankets that night under the stars and the warmer winds of the lower country. She hadn’t looked at him all afternoon, either, as the mountain pastures had turned to coastal fields and the narrow tracks had widened into proper pathways.
They had met with a sailor who was a cousin of Adan’s and he had promised to take Lucien across to England on the morrow. He’d also offered them a room for the night, but Alejandra had refused it, leading them back into the hills behind the beach where the cover of vegetation was thicker.
‘Is Luis Alvarez trustworthy?’ Lucien had seen the gold she had pulled from her pocket for the payment and it was substantial, but he had also seen the pain on the old man’s face when Alejandra had told him of Adan’s death.
‘Papa says that those who make money from a war hold no scruples, but I doubt he will push you overboard in the middle of the Channel. You are too big, for one, but as Adan’s kin he also owes the dead some sort of retribution.’
‘That is comforting.’
She laughed and he thought he should like to hear her do it more, her throaty humour catching. Tomorrow he would be gone, away from Spain, away from these nights of talk and quiet closeness.
‘Being happy suits you, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo.’ Lucien would have liked to add that her name suited her, too, with its soft syllables and music. Her left wrist with the sleeve of the jacket pulled back was dainty, a silver band he had not noticed before encircling the thinness.
‘There has been little cause for joy here, Capitán. You said you survived as a soldier by living in the moment and not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday?’ She waited as he nodded, the question hanging there.
‘There is a certain lure to that. For a woman, you understand.’
‘Lure?’ Were the connotations of the word in Spanish different from what they were in English?
‘Addiction. Compulsion even. The art of throwing caution to the wind and taking what you desire because the consequences are distant.’
Her dark eyes held his without any sense of embarrassment; a woman who was well aware of her worth and her attraction to the opposite sex.
Lucien felt the stirring in his groin, rushing past the sickness and the lethargy into a fully formed hard ache of want.
Was she saying what he thought she was, here on their last night together? Was she asking him to bed her?
‘I will be gone in the morning.’ He tried for logic.
‘Which is a great part of your attraction. I am practical, Capitán, and a realist. We only know each other in small ways, but...it would be enough for me. It isn’t commitment I am after and I certainly do not expect promises.’
‘What is it you do want, then?’
She breathed out and her eyes in the moonlight were sultry.
‘I want to survive, Capitán. You said you did this best by not thinking about the past or the future. I want the same. Just this moment. Only now.’
His words, his way of getting through, but she had turned the message in on itself and this was the result.
He should have stood and shaken his head, should have told her that the decisions made in the present did affect the future and in a way that was sometimes impossibly difficult. If he had been a better man, he might have turned and walked into the undergrowth, away from temptation. But it had been almost a year since he had slept with a woman and the need in him was great.
‘You are not promised to another in England? I should not wish to harm that.’ Her question came quietly and he shook his head. ‘Then let me give you this gift of a memory, for my sake as well as your own.’
Her fingers went to the buttons on her shirt and she simply undid them, one by one, parting the cloth. Then she leant forward and took his hand, placing his palm across the generous swell of her breast beneath the chemise. The heat there simply claimed him.
She smelt of flowers and sweetness, and the silk of her undergarment against his hand was soft. Her hair had fallen, too, over her shoulder, unlinked purposefully from the leather tie she more normally fastened it with, the dark of it binding them into the shadows of night.
Her nipple was hard peaked, risen into feeling, and the white column of her throat was limber and exposed, a holy cross in gold hanging on the thin chain. He could just take her, like this, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo with all her beauty and her demons, offering herself to him without demand of more.
‘Hell.’ His curse had her smiling as she brought the blanket around them, a cocoon against the winter cold.
Her hands were on his neck and his chest, feeling her way. He hated how his breath shook and how the certainty that was always with him was breached with the feel of closeness.
She filled him up with hope and heat, and even the ache of his wounds were lessened by her touch. For so very long he had been sore and sick and lonely and yet here, for this moment above the sea and in the company of a woman he liked, he felt...complete.
Such recognition astonished him as his thumb nudged across her nipple on its own accord in a rhythm that was ancient. He felt her stiffen, felt her fingers tighten on his arms, the nails sharp points to his skin.
‘You are beautiful, Alejandra.’ His member pushed against the thick fabric of his trousers.
Lifting up, he steadied her against the trunk of a pine, the blanket behind them a shield against the roughness of bark and a buffer of warmth. There was no time now, no dragging moments, no hesitation or waiting. Undoing the fastening of her trousers, he had them down around her knees before she could take a further breath and then his fingers were inside her, sheathed in warmth and wetness, the muscles there holding him in, asking for more.
‘Lucien?’ Her voice. Whispered. ‘What is happening? What is this that you are doing to me?’
‘Love as we make it, sweetheart. Open wider.’ When she did as he asked he found the hard bud of her centre and pressed in close.
Her shaking was quiet at first, a small rumble and tightening, and then growing. He held her there in the night air and the moonlight and brought her to the place where the music played, languid and true, a rolling sensation of both muscle and flesh.
She was not quiet as she called his name, or gentle as she held his hand there hard inside, wanting all that he would give her, the last edge of reason gone in the final flush of orgasm.
He smiled, his gift to her new philosophy of living for the now and one that would make it easier come the morning. He wished it could have been different. He wished he could simply follow where his hand had been. But there was danger in such abandonment, the least of which was an unwanted pregnancy.
As she slid down the trunk of the tree to sit at the base of it, her knees wide open, he thought she had never looked more beautiful or more content. The smell of her sex was there, too, and he breathed in and savoured it.
‘That
