“Oh, God—Leda,” he whispered, with his hand in her hair, her body pressed to his.
Her trembling began to subside. She stood leaning on him, making smaller and smaller sobs. “I wish—I wish I would have thought of something very sharp and cutting to say to those men!” She took a breath and exhaled with a huff. “To be sure I will tomorrow, when it will be too late! I don’t see what there is in it for you to laugh about.”
“Don’t leave me.” He shook her. “Leda! Don’t ever go away and leave me.”
She pushed back from him. “Well, what a nonsensical thing to say! When you’ve done your best to drive me off!” Abruptly she flung herself away and marched to the buggy. She stopped there, her lips quivering, her dress and hair in wild disorder. “I daresay that if I were not a person of character, I would have gone!”
He took a deep breath. All that empty air beneath him, all the long fall—but he wasn’t going to ask, and hope, and work, and bleed, and slice his heart to shreds any longer. He wanted this; he was going to take it. “You’ve lost your chance to go.”
Her chin lifted. “I have never wished to have a chance, you impossible man! I suppose it is incomprehensible to you, as a male, to be told that I’ve loved you since you retrieved a pair of scissors for me when I was a showroom woman! That will mean nothing to you; I daresay you’ve forgot it entirely, but men are known to be the most hopeless creatures alive when it comes to a subject of any consequence whatsoever. And I must say, it is certainly beneath feminine delicacy to have to continue to insist upon one’s affection in such brazen terms!”
“Is it? What if I want to hear it?”
She tucked her chin and blinked at his sudden intensity.
“What if I need to hear it?” he asked fiercely. “What if I need to wake up every goddamned morning of my life and hear you say you love me?” His voice began to grow louder. “What if that’s all that means any fucking thing to me?”
She drew in a scandalized breath. “That is a bad word, isn’t it? That is most indecent language!”
“So what?” he shouted. “What if I fucking want it, Leda? Every morning! You love me. What if I want to hear it?”
She stared at him. He was breathing hard, as if he’d been fighting. The echo of his words went over the water and came back again and again.
She moistened her lips. Then she gathered her skirts and wiped her hand across her wet cheeks. Her petticoat made a rustling flourish as she stepped up into the buggy. She pulled pins from her hair and coiled and tucked it into a semblance of order.
“Well, then, sir.” She sent a prim look back at him beneath her lashes. “To be sure, you shall hear it!”
Thirty-seven
Leda felt quite shy, and Samuel was no help. Mr. Dojun was not even there to smooth over the delicacy of the moment with an idle conversation in pidgin. The gardeners had all seemed to vanish from the premises. Rising Sea was deserted, with the tall white pillars catching the late-afternoon light and casting sharp shadows across the lanai.
She wriggled her bare toes against the polished wood, having learned to leave her shoes and stockings by the threshold after Mr. Dojun had advised her that it wasn’t polite to wear one’s shoes indoors. She waited in the hall, just within the open front doors, while Samuel took the horse around to turn it into the paddock.
The house seemed stark and stately and lonely, white walls against the deep reddish-gold gleam of the koa door frames and tall shutters. There was no furniture in the hall, nor anywhere else except in the bedroom and study upstairs, where she had concentrated all her initial efforts.
She hoped that he would like it. She was hoping so hard that she couldn’t hear anything but her heart in her ears. He made her jump when he appeared, moving silently on bare feet. She’d suggested that he drop his hopelessly stained coat and shirt in the horse trough until the laundress could take it; he’d evidently washed his face there, too, for his hair was damp and the war-marks of blood were gone, leaving only an angry slash from his jaw to his temple.
She frowned at him. “Your poor face! I still believe that we should have reported this incident to the police.”
“Maybe I’ll develop a rakish scar.” A corner of his mouth tilted. “Not that it’s ever happened yet.”
A doctor should see to it.”
“Not tonight.” He leaned on the door frame, crossing his arms over his chest. In bare feet, muddy trousers, and no shirt, he looked as sun-bronzed and disreputable as Manalo, only without all the flowers.
She clasped her hands, feeling self-conscious. He hadn’t spoken much on the drive back, only informed her that the police would be of no assistance in this matter; that it had not been a kidnapping for ransom after all, but just some rather rough business associates of his. She made a mental note to deliver an address upon the wise and proper choice of one’s commercial colleagues in the very near future.
But not now. Gentlemen were known to be inclined to resent any implication that they were not perfect masters of their own enterprise. She didn’t wish to discuss it with him now.
“Well!” She gave him a bright company smile. “I would invite you to sit down in the parlor, but I’m afraid there’s no furniture.”
“I thought you’d done nothing but haul furniture up here for the past week.”
“I have. I began with the upstairs chambers.” She felt herself blushing. “I thought—”
Samuel watched her.
“Manalo…he and Mr. Dojun recommended—”
He moved his shoulders back a little, a shadow of combativeness in his easy bearing. “You listen to me, not those two.”
“I shall be most happy to do so. It’s been rather difficult of late, as you weren’t here to be listened to.”
He was silent a moment. “Now I’m here.”
It seemed altogether too forward to just brazenly invite him up to the bedroom. She considered various modes of working it into the conversation, but since there was no conversation, or very little of it, and that only marginally civil, she felt helpless and somewhat ill-used. He was the most singularly provoking man of her acquaintance.
“Do you love me, Leda?” he demanded.
“Decidedly.”
“I want to—” He exhaled sharply and turned his head. The cut on his face grew white at the edges.
Belatedly, she realized what he meant—and what was happening to him. He muttered something too low for her to hear. She bit her lip, the corners of her mouth curving upward, but the abruptness with which he pushed himself off the door frame and came toward her made her turn and press her back against the wall.
He stopped short. His face went taut.
Then he swung away, walking past her to the staircase. “So. I want to go look at your damned furniture.”
He went up the hand-burnished stairs two at a time, past the elegant curve where the staircase bent back upon itself. He stopped there. She couldn’t see his face, but she saw him seize the carved rail.
“Leda!” His yell echoed through the vacant house. “God damn it! You said you loved me. And that’s me! I can’t help it; I can’t stop it; I want to touch you; I want to lie down with you; I want to be inside you. Christ, as soon as I got you out of that bastard’s hands I wanted it! On the deck, in the buggy, against a wall. I don’t care! It doesn’t make any damned difference to me!”
She looked down at her toes peeking from beneath the sandy hem of her skirt. “I prefer a bed.”
“Fine! I understand there’s one up here.”
“Well, yes—I’ve been wondering how I might genteelly allude to the topic.”
Her voice resonated back in a soft murmur and died away.
His hand was motionless on the stair rail.
“You were?” he asked slowly.
“Yes.”
A very long silence passed. The light breeze through the hall cooled the warmth of her face and neck.
“Then why the hell are you still down there?” he asked in an agon
ized voice.
She rubbed her toes together. “Because—I don’t wish to be there when you see—how everything is done up. In case you shouldn’t like it.”
“For God’s sake. It’s only furniture.”
“There are…a few other things as well.”
He said nothing. Leda tapped her fingers nervously against the wall. After a few moments, the hand on the polished rail vanished.
She knew that he moved silently. She thought that she should be starting to become accustomed to it. But the way he disappeared, and the lack of any sound for such a long time from the floor above, unnerved her.
Finally she went to the stairs. She mounted them softly. In the upper hall there was no one to be seen, no sound. She padded through the study to the bedroom.
He was standing there, among the ten-times-one-thousand red paper cranes of long life and happiness.
They hung from their suspended bamboo arcs in cascades, in streamers of twenty and thirty and fifty, spinning slowly from the twelve-foot ceiling. Some of them trailed almost to the floor, drifting an inch or two above it in the breeze from the open doors. Most strands were high enough that Leda and Mr. Dojun had walked beneath them easily. She had forgotten how much taller Samuel was; they brushed his face and rested on his hair, dangled over his bare shoulders, moving with his breath, like a canopy of crimson willows.
He raised his arms outward and upward, gathering a rustling quantity toward him. He closed his eyes and let them fall away across his upturned face.
Leda hung in the doorway. She didn’t know if he even knew she was there.
“Did you do this?”
He asked without opening his eyes, with his still face turned toward the ceiling.
“It was—my notion. The lady—Mrs. Obāsan—she made them all. Mr. Dojun said that the custom is one thousand cranes, but I thought—I thought that perhaps, as she had them already made up and in hand, that ten thousand would be an advantageous investment.”
“An advantageous investment,” he repeated.
“In good luck and happiness. In the manner of stocks, and bank shares, and so forth. I trust that cranes work upon the same principles. I don’t see why they shouldn’t. And one has the benefit of a discount when buying in quantity. Have you seen the turtle?”
“No,” he said in an odd voice. “I haven’t seen the turtle.”
“It’s in your study. On the writing table, in a very handsome black lacquered bowl, with some white rocks and a little water. It’s only a box turtle. Dickie has lent it us, until our own can be imported.”
“You’re importing a turtle?”
“Mr. Richards is to arrange for it. He thinks it will arrive within the month.”
“Why?”
“It’s a gift. My wedding gift for you. Mr. Dojun said that you would understand.”
He just looked at her.
“And there is something else, too, from me. But I—I’ll show you that in a moment. First I must tell you that Mr. Dojun has given us this bed, with the crane on it. And the drawers on the chest sing a little note when one opens them. He did that, too.”
Samuel touched one of the two bamboo plants at the foot of the bed.
“And bamboo is a lucky plant,” she added. “Constant, devoted, flexible.”
He pulled a leaf downward and let it go. “‘Be as the bamboo leaf bent by the dew.’” He shook his head slightly. “Dojun’s always saying things like that.”
“Is he? I shall have to listen to him more closely.”
“Don’t listen to him. Don’t touch any more ‘bride-tables’ on his account.”
“I am so sorry about the table!”
“Forget the table. It’s nothing. One hundred percent nothing. He made up that bride rubbish.” He lifted his face. “But this—” He shook his head again, with a dazed smile. “I can’t believe you did this. And a turtle, for God’s sake. You awe me. I’m—awed.”
“You are?”
He lifted his hand and let a streamer of cranes slide across it. He grinned.
“Oh! I’m so glad. Then perhaps you will like the fish.”
He gave a laugh. “Jesus—not dried fish? Leda!”
“No, no. I think dried fish would have an odor, don’t you? Come here.” She caught his hand, drawing him through the door into the bath. It was fitted up in the most modern style, with hot and cold plumbing and a white marble tub two feet deep and six feet in length, the present occupants of which were two ivory-and-golden fish, regal and slow in their circling progress, trailing translucent mists of tail and fins. “This is my real present. This is what I’ve been planning since—” She touched her upper lip with her tongue. “That is, since—the first night—when you came to—when you came…that is, when we…” Her embarrassed voice fell into silence. “Do you remember?”
He took his hand from hers.
“They’ll have to stay here until a place can be made in the garden. Mr. Dojun says they must be sunned for an hour every day, to keep their color. I hope you don’t mind. I hope—”
He slid his fingers up the side of her throat, forcing her to turn, to lift her face. He kissed her ruthlessly. His tongue searched her mouth. He held her tight up against him.
“I hope you like them!” she said breathlessly, when she had a chance.
“Tomorrow—” He tasted the corners of her lips. “Tomorrow I’ll like them. Tonight…Leda…”
He began to unbutton her dress.
She submitted to it graciously. It was a well-known fact that gentlemen must be provided with all due encouragement in such circumstances, so as not to hurt their feelings. As her dress fell away, Leda closed her eyes, lifted her arms around his shoulders and her mouth to his, and set about encouraging in a most correct and cheerful manner.
About the Author
LAURA KINSALE is a winner and multiple nominee for the Best Book of the Year award given by the Romance Writers of America. She became a romance writer after six years as a geologist—a career which consisted of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and driving hundreds of miles alone across west Texas to sit at drilling rigs, wear a hard hat, and attempt to boss around oil-covered males considerably larger than herself. This, she decided, was pushing her luck. So she gave all that up to sit in a chair and stare into space for long periods of time, attempting to figure out What-Happens-Next. She and her husband David currently divide their time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Texas.
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By Laura Kinsale
FLOWERS FROM THE STORM
THE SHADOW AND THE STAR
UNCERTAIN MAGIC
THE HIDDEN HEART
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SHADOW AND THE STAR. Copyright © 1991 by Laura Kinsale. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition February 2007 ISBN 9780061751585
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Laura Kinsale, The Shadow and the Star
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