Lessons of Desire Read online

  She had been adamant that it not happen again last night. Her promises had been so heartfelt, her reassurances not to flee so genuine, that he had relented.

  It meant that he could sleep himself. The first night he had lain abed, restless and hungry, desire carving through him like a ragged-edged knife. Picturing her up there in that thin chemise, bound to the headboard, her hair glistening like copper silk and her body too visible—What are your intentions, Lord Elliot?

  Hell.

  He retrieved his valise and a long package and joined her in the carriage. Her straight back and distant, blank gaze said she accepted his company because she had no choice. She would not ease their time together with pleasantries.

  The boat he had hired waited near the Castel Nuovo. An hour later they were sailing along the land that rimmed the bay.

  Miss Blair stationed herself at mid-deck, holding on to the rail. She watched the passing coastline and the growing size of Mount Vesuvius in its background. The breeze pushed the shawl off her hair and her pale, unusual beauty caught the eyes of the crew. Elliot ambled closer so there could be no misunderstanding regarding his protection of her.

  He held out the package that he had brought.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A gift.”

  She smiled kindly, but firmly. “I do not accept gifts from gentlemen, Lord Elliot.”

  “You do not exchange gifts for favors, which is admirable. However, since I have not enjoyed the favors you are still free to accept the gift. If I seduce you, you can give it back.”

  He came damned close to saying “when,” not “if.”

  Still hesitant, but curious, she took the package and peeled off the paper wrapping at one end.

  “A parasol?” She stripped off the rest of the paper. She laughed. “Black. Totally black. How…sweet.”

  “I thought it would match.”

  “This is to save me from more tiny spots?”

  “It is to save you from illness. The sun here is very hot and it is midsummer. When we go inland you will be glad for the shade.”

  She popped open the parasol and poised it over her head. “You know the country well. Have you been here before?”

  “Twice. First on my grand tour, and again several years ago.” He pointed to the coast. “That is Herculaneum there. The same eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii in ashes buried Herculaneum in lava.”

  She squinted at the rocky site dotted with the colors of visitors’ dresses and coats. “I had intended to visit Herculaneum too, but Signore Sansoni—I will miss much on this visit now.”

  “Why not dally and see it after we return from this little journey?”

  “I cannot afford the time. I need to return home. I have a publishing house to run.”

  And a special book to print. If he did not receive satisfaction when he finally spoke to Merriweather, Miss Blair would not be sailing home for a good while.

  “I also do not think I will enjoy spending time in Naples when we have completed this little journey,” she said. “No doubt you will think that your word to Sansoni still stands then, and I will be stuck with you underfoot.”

  He admired the impressive view of Vesuvius’s high cone while they passed close enough to Herculaneum to see some workers at the dig. Copper hair fluttered near his arm. “Miss Blair, I wonder if it is not so much having me underfoot that you dislike, but not having me under your foot.”

  Her deep sigh spoke her thoughts. Heaven give me patience with this unenlightened, predictable man.

  “I suspect it is hopeless to explain this, but I will try in the interests of peace. I do not think either partner in a friendship, a marriage, or a love affair should be under the other’s foot. My view is only extraordinary because the foot in question so often wears a boot, and everyone assumes it is natural for it to be planted on a feminine back. I believe that men and women can stand side by side, neither owning the other. My mother’s life proved this is possible, and my own thus far proves it as well. Nor did we invent this belief. It is well known and has been espoused by people who are greatly admired.”

  “I know all about your belief, Miss Blair. I am not ignorant of the philosophy. It even sounds right and rational. The only problem is that it neglects to account for several things.”

  “Indeed? What things?”

  “Human nature. Human history. The tendency of the bad to make victims of the weak, and the need of the weak for protection. Venture alone into the hill towns of the Campania or the back streets of Marseilles or Istanbul, walk into London’s rookeries, and see what happens to a woman alone and unprotected.”

  “The lords of old gave their serfs protection. That does not mean it was right to demand their bondage in return.”

  He laughed. “Lords. Serfs. What a black view you have of women’s lives. It need not be that way.”

  “But it can be,” she said. “You know it can. The law makes it so.”

  Her emphasis on you was so subtle that he wondered if he imagined it. She poked at an old sore very gently but he felt the pain anyway. A dark anger coiled in him.

  She kept her attention on the coast. Her slight flush indicated that she knew she had crossed a line. He controlled his reaction, but predatory speculations slid into his head. He judged what it would take to be lord of this woman, to make her kneel.

  “My apologies, Lord Elliot. I should not—”

  “You compound your impertinence, Miss Blair. Better to have let your insinuation float away on the breeze.” Only she hadn’t, and he wondered about the secure way she had said it. “You were referring to the rumors about my mother, weren’t you?”

  She debated her response while she glanced at him carefully several times. “I will admit that her retreat to the country her last years has been interpreted as your father’s doing.”

  He knew the lurid story whispered in drawing rooms high and low. That his mother had taken a lover and his father had punished her by sending the man to die in a distant colony, and then imprisoning her at their country estate.

  Was it true? He and his brothers had concluded the lover had been real, but not the imprisonment part. His own father had sworn to him that he did not do what people said. And yet his mother’s exile encouraged the gossip, until she herself even believed it.

  He saw her in the library, her dark head bent to books and papers, lost in the world of her mind. Almost totally lost to her sons. As the youngest he spent the most time with her there. She would emerge from her concentration sometimes to guide him through the shelves, picking books for him to read, or commenting on his own pages.

  A few times, however, the bond had been closer, like the day she had received a letter that left her weeping. It contained news about an army officer’s death.

  He did this. To punish me for loving someone else.

  It had been an illicit love. She had been an adulteress. Her sorrow moved him anyway, but he had seen that her accusation was the dark fantasy of an unhappy soul.

  He felt Miss Blair beside him. Even his anger could not kill the way he responded to her sensual lure. Her father’s damned memoirs insinuated that a reclusive woman had been the only one who understood just how ruthless the Rothwell blood could make a man. His own certainty that it was untrue would not carry any weight when his father’s name was impugned.

  “They knew each other,” Miss Blair said. “Our mothers.”

  “My mother was familiar with Artemis Blair’s essays, but she never spoke of a friendship.” But then, she had rarely spoken about anything.

  “I do not believe they ever met. They corresponded. They were both writers, after all. Their interests were similar. Your mother sent mine a poem once. It was among her papers on her death. A beautiful poem that reflected an intelligent and sensitive soul.”

  He fixed his gaze on the approaching coastal town of Sorrento. It infuriated him that his mother had shared her writing with Artemis Blair and not her own children.

  “D
id your mother encourage her in her adultery?” His words sounded hoarse and harsh to his ears. “Did she preach her belief in free love in her letters?” He pictured the radical, renowned Artemis Blair turning his mother’s head in ways that would result in so much grief.

  “I believe they corresponded about literature and such. My mother only mentioned her once, upon news of her passing.”

  “What did she say?” It came out more a snarl than a question.

  “She said, He should have let her go, but of course, being a man, he could not.”

  That only made thunder rumble through the clouds in his mind. He wanted to say of course a man cannot allow the mother of his children to leave on a romantic whim. Of course his father had refused her that freedom.

  Only she had found a way to leave anyway, in her own manner.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a crew member taking too long with some rigging. The man dallied at his chore while he feasted his eyes on the beauty of Phaedra Blair.

  The storm in his head howled. Lightning flashed. He narrowed his eyes and spoke four words. The man hurried away.

  Miss Blair noticed. “What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing significant. A simple Neapolitan phrase that requests privacy.” He did not bother explaining that the words roughly translated to move on or die.

  A snapping wind helped them make good time. The landscape became increasingly dramatic as they angled across the bay to the Sorrento peninsula. High hills hugged the coast, dropping down to the sea in steep, green drops. Small beaches held some boats, and houses hugged the cliff, hanging like so many white and pastel cubes above the water.

  They rounded the tip of the small peninsula, passed the isle of Capri, and sailed into the Bay of Salerno. Steeper, perilous, inaccessible hills loomed above them. The scenery awed Phaedra. Lord Elliot had been correct. It would have been a pity to miss this.

  “What is happening up there?” She pointed to some activity halfway up the cliff side.

  “The king is building a road to Amalfi. They are carving it right into the hillside.”

  She noted how the road would be above the fishing villages. “Either way, one must climb up or down.”

  “At least people will not have to rely on boats or donkeys. And the prospects from up there will be spectacular.” He pointed ahead of them, down the coast. “Positano is right beyond that promontory. You can already see the old Norman watchtower on it. There are many of them on this coast, built to protect the medieval Norman kingdom that used to be here from the Saracen threat.”

  She walked to the bow of the boat so she could see better as the tower came into view. The old, angular stone tower rose several levels high, medieval in its construction and isolated on its finger of land. Small windows punctuated it like those on an ancient castle. It appeared a foreign and northern intrusion on this sun-washed land.

  “Those high windows face due east and west,” she said. “There is nothing between that one and the sea’s horizon, and nothing between the other and the peak of the high hill. Will we be here several days?”

  “I expect so.”

  She had lost track of the calendar while she was a guest of Sansoni. Now she worked it out. “The summer solstice approaches. I wonder if the tower will be used in some ritual.”

  “This is a Catholic land. Such superstitions were suppressed thousands of years ago.”

  Although Lord Elliot responded, she could tell he was not truly with her. A silence claimed him that had little to do with sounds. It existed internally, as if his life spirit had retreated to secret chambers of his soul.

  She regretted making even the vaguest reference to his mother’s situation. It had slid out in her pique at his arrogance in assuming he was right and she was amusingly wrong. She should have known not to engage in an argument about how she thought and lived. When it came to such things this man was as foreign to her as the fishermen in these picturesque villages.

  They passed very close to the tower, cutting close as the wind billowed their sails. It appeared deserted.

  “Who is this friend we will be visiting?” she asked. “Since we will arrive soon, perhaps I should know his name.”

  “Matthias Greenwood. He was one of my tutors at university.”

  She swallowed her surprise. She knew Greenwood. She had tried in vain to locate his home in Naples. “Will he not mind that you have brought more baggage than he expects?”

  “He will be delighted to have the company of the daughter of Artemis Blair. He stepped into her circle on occasion, I believe.”

  “Yes, he did. I met him several times, the last at my mother’s funeral.” Matthias Greenwood was one of many scholars who had come to honor the woman who confounded the world.

  He was also someone who might shed some light on the “other” man. She had thought this delay in going to Pompeii would be a nuisance. Instead Lord Elliot was helping her check one thing off her list of things to accomplish in this land.

  “He admired her. He said if she had been a man, she would have been recognized as one of the best experts on ancient Roman letters in England.” Lord Elliot still spoke in a distracted tone, as if only half his mind paid attention.

  Phaedra looked upon the town of Positano with more optimism, and not only because her mission might be furthered there. She did not conform to stupid social rules, but most of the world did. She had wondered how she would be received when she arrived with Lord Elliot. Traveling with him implied things she did not countenance and would not like to have assumed.

  Mr. Greenwood would probably know better than to assume anything at all.

  She sensed her companion looking at her, and turned her head. He had returned to the world, most thoroughly.

  “He often entertains a mixed entourage,” he said. “There may be other guests visiting him. You will behave yourself, won’t you?”

  She trusted he did not expect her to play the docile mistress in some vain attempt to become a woman these guests could tolerate.

  Even if she wanted to create that deception, she would not begin to know how.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Positano lay on its own little cove that was cluttered with boats. The pastel buildings of the town hovered above the sea, stacked one above the other on the precipitous slope of the mountain. The town dropped steeply right to the shore.

  Phaedra took in the view of towering cliff, endless sapphire water, and deep green foliage. She had never seen anything so physically dramatic in her life.

  “Which house belongs to Mr. Greenwood?” she asked.

  Lord Elliot moved close and extended his arm so her sight could follow it. “That one up there, with the columns.”

  Those columns supported a long, covered veranda on the topmost house. It rose a little distance above the town itself. Its breadth created a crown on the village cascading beneath it.

  “Are we supposed to fly up there, or will he be dropping a basket down for us?”

  One of their crew had wandered off. He now returned with the answer. Two boys followed him with donkeys.

  Phaedra allowed the boys to help her onto the back of her animal. Lord Elliot merely swung his leg to get astride his. He dwarfed the animal, and his boots scraped the ground. The crew tied their portmanteaus and valises on two more donkeys.

  She laughed at the picture they made. “What a retinue you have, Lord Elliot. You will make an impressive procession through the town. Perhaps I will get out my sketchbook, to preserve for the world how finely you sit on that great steed of yours.”

  He kicked his donkey forward to take the lead, swatting her animal’s rump as he passed. “Tend to your own pretty seat, Miss Blair. Be careful you do not fall off or you will not stop rolling until you are in the bay.”

  She understood his meaning at once. Their donkeys paced up lanes so steep that they had been paved in deep, shallow steps. She thought she really might fall into the sea. The animals were sure-footed, but her per
ch, sitting sidesaddle, left her clinging on for her life.

  They created a small spectacle. Villagers peered out their doorways and windows, curious about the foreigners heading to the villa atop the town. Children gathered behind them, making a true procession. Two girls walked alongside her for a while, poking with curiosity at the red ends of her hair hanging beneath the shawl’s bottom edge. A few women made little curtsies as Lord Elliot passed, knowing from his bearing and manner that he had been born to the blood.

  She relaxed as she adapted to the donkey’s gait. She dared not look back, but she allowed herself to notice the houses, handsome in their rustic stone construction. Simple balconies and tiled roofs helped create a jumble of forms and color. A few larger ones sported colorful majolica tiles around the main doors. They all appeared very ancient, like the tower. Stucco covered most of them, often worked in decorative flourishes and moldings. Some houses were white but many bore tints of red and pink.

  Sounds of community life rang around her as people called to one another through open windows and down market streets. Somewhere a man lazily sang an aria from a Rossini opera, accompanying whatever labor he performed.

  The lanes leveled as they approached the villa. It was as if someone had removed a chunk of the hillside so the big house could be built.

  A man appeared inside the arched open loggia whose roof was supported by the columns. He stood tall, straight, and slim, with a shock of white hair and an aquiline nose. A jaw of uncompromising squareness gave way to a cleft chin. Phaedra had only met Matthias Greenwood a few times, but his appearance was so distinctive that one did not forget it.

  He waved a greeting, then stepped out and walked toward them.

  “Rothwell! What a relief you are finally here. My company is badly in need of your wit.”

  They greeted each other. Elliot introduced Phaedra.