“Is yer family there?” Bess turned to cast a queer look at her. “Will they be fretting after ye?”
The lady didn’t bother to sweeten the tea; she simply lifted it to her soft mouth and puckered her lips to blow across the surface before taking a sip.
A strange, hollow longing overtook John as he watched her shiver with delight as she swallowed the warm liquid and let out an almost imperceptible sigh.
Christ he’d give his soul to taste tea again.
“My family is in Paris for Christmas this year,” she answered vaguely after the silence had stretched for too long.
“And ye’re not with them?” Bess prodded, catching flame to a bit of peat she’d laid beneath the kindling.
“No. No, I am not invited to—that is, I don’t travel with them, generally. I am more often occupied by my own adventures.”
An awkward silence fell over the room like the batting of a moist blanket. The lady sipped at her tea, retreating deeper into her cloak and her thoughts as the tub was filled.
Once Bess had built the fire to a crackling height, she added one more extra-large, dry log from the grate next to the fireplace, and stood with a grunt. She reached in to test the water and flicked it off, wiping her hand with her apron.
“A strange trunk, that.” She nodded to the ungainly square case. “Not quite a trunk, I suppose, and not a satchel either.”
“It’s a camera.” Vanessa abandoned her empty teacup to the tray to stand over it. “I was to be on a winter photography expedition at Loch Ness before the storm hit. I left my trunk with my belongings on the abandoned coach.”
A camera? John squinted at the case. He’d never heard of such a thing.
Bess clapped her hands together in delight. “Och, aye? Now’s the time to find Nessie, if there ever is one! No doubt ye caught wind of the Northern Lights this year. We could see them snapping across the sky afore the clouds covered them. ’Tis, no doubt, the reason this storm is so powerful. All things are intensified during the Na Fir Chlis. And during the solstice, and Christmas after that…” She let the words linger, winking conspiratorially. “All things are possible, are they not?”
“That was my hope.” Vanessa smiled broadly, and John felt a catch in his throat, as if the very sight of that smile had stolen something from him.
“Well, here’s ye a toweling and some soap. Though perhaps not as fragrant and fancy as ye’re used to.”
“It’ll do perfectly,” Vanessa assured her with a kind smile.
John had always appreciated a woman who was kind to those beneath her in rank, stature, or wealth. It had been one of his greatest irritations when a shrewish lady was demanding or unfeeling to the help.
“I’ll leave ye, lass,” Bess said with a smile. “I’ll see if I canna find ye something to sleep in. Get warm and dry and then come to the common room for some supper.”
The moment the door latched, the woman, Vanessa, locked it and immediately grappled with the knot on her scarf. Unraveling that, she hung it close to the fire, pulled the pin from her hat, and discarded it, also.
John was stunned into stillness at the unfettered sight of her face.
Lord, but she was lovely. The structure of her visage delicate enough to be elfin, pale and sharp, even in the golden firelight. Her eyes, he was pleasantly surprised to find, were as grey as a winter sky. On many women, such dramatically precise features appeared to be cold and fathomless. But not so in this case. She seemed to glow with this sort of…radiant luminescence that was initiated behind her eyes and spilled over the rest of her like a waterfall.
What was the genesis of such a phenomenon? he wondered. What would he call it?
Life, he realized. An abundance of it.
As someone who hadn’t been alive in—well he couldn’t remember how many years, precisely—he was drawn to the way it veritably burst from her. Like such a diminutive frame could barely contain it all.
Damned if he didn’t find that alluring as hell.
After bending to unlace and remove her boots, she turned her back to him, facing the fire. She shucked her woolen cloak and hung it on a wall peg close to the heat to dry.
Then, she went to work on her blouse.
Bloody hell and holy damnation. This desirable creature was about to strip bare and bathe. Here. In the room that had been his prison for so damnably long.
Her movements were harried and jerky, as if made clumsy by exhaustion and the cold.
John had been bred a gentleman in his day. Over-educated and imbued with codes and creeds and ratified rules of behavior. That breeding tore at him now. He should turn away. He should leave her to wash and dress. This interloper upon his dark, abysmal existence—if one could even call it thus. This tiny creature of light and life.
He might have done the noble thing…
If he hadn’t hesitated long enough to watch her peel her blouse down her arms, uncovering shoulders smooth as corn silk and white as rich cream.
Lord, but he was transfixed. Even though he technically levitated above the ground, his feet were as good as pegged to the floor.
He watched her unlace her own corset that knotted in the front and wondered when that had changed over the years. Her chin touched one shoulder to glance behind her, as if sensing the intensity of his regard. She looked straight through him, which was a blessing, because if he’d been visible, she’d immediately notice that he sported a cockstand large and vulgar enough to offend even a courtesan.
His conscience prickled. He shouldn’t watch her…but in this bleak and lonely hell so far from home, she was an oasis of beauty. An English rose among Scottish thistle.
The firelight silhouetted the fullness of her slightly parted lips, the pert upturn of her nose, and the astounding length of her lashes in stark relief.
He was helpless to do anything but appreciate the vision.
Sighing and shaking her head slightly as if to ward off her own silliness, she fiddled with the buckle of a wide belt and pushed her skirt from her hips, drawing down a thin white cotton undergarment at the same time.
Had he knees, they would have buckled. Had he a fist, he would have bitten into it to stave off the hollow groan of longing fighting its way up his chest.
As she assumed she was alone, she was neither self-conscious nor was she self-aware. This was no slow, practiced uncovering of a mistress, meant to tease and titillate. And yet, the sight of her heart-shaped bare ass as she bent to step out of her clothing was enough to unravel whatever matter remained of him.
If she’d been facing the light and not away from it, he would have been granted a peek at the intimate cove between her thighs.
The gods were not so kind.
She straightened, peeling a simple white chemise from her body with a shivering stretch, and turned toward the bath in the center of the room.
Toward him.
A watering mouth was the first thing that alerted him to the fact that he would slowly, with infinite, infuriating increments, regain a semblance of corporality.
He would have welcomed the sensation, if he wasn’t so utterly distracted by the sight of her in all her nude glory.
Christ. She was a masterpiece, someone crafted by a loving artisan from some other material than the minerals and mud that forged the rest of man. Every other woman now seemed a clumsy clay attempt at the marble-smooth perfection of her.