“This is your room?” Adam asked.
“It was. I took over the marriage bed. Irony, you know.”
She kept her tone light, but the state of her old bedchamber disturbed her. She had not been in this room since returning home. Had her father and stepmother never moved a thing? How strange, to preserve a shrine to a daughter you’d made clear was as good as dead to you.
She unlocked the door leading to the balcony and looked over her shoulder at Adam.
“It’s just out here.” She reached up to the shelf beside the door and found the stack of oilcloths she used to keep there for just this purpose. She took one down and draped it over her hair like a cloak, then stepped outside onto the ledge, beckoning for Adam to follow her.
Instantly, despite the cloth, rain smacked her face. She buried herself deeper under the cloth and shivered. From this height, you could see the dark gray slashes of rain descending from the sky in columns, see the breakers crashing fifteen or twenty feet up the edges of the cove.
It was violent, but it was beautiful.
She held up the corner of the oilcloth so Adam could join her. He ducked beside her, holding the cloth up with his taller frame. He did not touch her but she was conscious of her hair blowing in the wind, coming loose from her pins and whipping against his neck.
She didn’t care.
Perhaps it was the wine, but the rain and wind felt cleansing. She took her free hand and held it out into the downpour.
It battered her hand with such force that she yelped and snatched her fingers back. She heard a low rumble beside her. Adam, laughing.
She glanced up at him, to see if the beauty of the storm moved him the way that it moved her. There was a smile in his eyes and on his lips. It made her want to stand on her toes and kiss him.
A gust of wind sent a bale of rain directly at them, drenching her. Adam turned toward her, using his body to protect her from the wind.
“You’re cold. Let’s go inside,” he said. He had to shout to be heard above the storm.
A stronger gale whipped at them. She shivered again. “No, let’s just stand here a moment longer.”
Up here, looking at the world lit up with the squall, she felt apart from the concerns that weighed on her. The posters, the bird, Elinor, her damned unwritten book.
She tipped back her head to feel the rain ripping across her face. It felt so good, so cold and pure, like it could abrade her of the sick dread that had taken root around her liver.
She dropped her side of the oilcloth and stepped out into the rain.
Cold, hard drops beat down upon her face and hair, blinding her.
She lifted up her arms and let herself be taken by it, by the darkness, by the roar.
It felt bracing.
Like being, for just a moment, fully and vividly alive.
Adam watched as Seraphina Arden stepped into the storm and became the image from his dreams.
Drenched gown, hair whipping in wet tendrils, head thrown back, arms held aloft to the sky. She looked like a goddess awaiting anointment from the heavens.
A streak of lightning cut across the cliffs behind her, slashing the horizon into fifty purple tendrils. Seraphina looked beautiful against the flashing sky, and he had a weakness for beauty.
But that was not a good enough reason to let her be killed in a storm.
“Come in, you’ll be struck.”
She only lifted her arms higher and threw back her head.
As another crack of lightning burst through the sky, he pulled her toward the shelter of the eaves. She twirled around to look at him, her face lit up in a smile that transformed her. She laughed, so purely and happily that it was catching, and he laughed, too. He placed a hand on her back to guide her under the shelter of the eaves. Her foot slipped as she moved near him. He reached out to catch her. Suddenly they were both falling toward the open door behind them. His hand slid over the wood as he tried to catch the frame, but he missed, and then they were in a heap, tangled, half inside, half out, her body pressed on top of his.
She was shaking with laughter. Her entire body quaked with it.
Normally he would be horrified to be pressed so intimately against a woman, but the chaos of them falling in the rain like children was so absurd he found himself chuckling as well.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she gasped. She wriggled, trying to right herself, but tangled beside him in the narrow doorway, she had to wedge her knee in between his thighs for purchase.
Suddenly it was not funny.
He could tell she felt it the same moment he did. The moment a childish pratfall became neither humorous nor juvenile, but something unmistakably adult.
They both stayed completely still, and if either of them breathed, he could not feel it.
The only thing he could feel was his own arousal, swelling to attention.
God damn it.
He leaned back on his forearm to unwed himself from her but her hand came down and stopped him.
“Stay, if you like,” she whispered.
It was insanity not to put himself to rights immediately. And yet, his cock was asserting its own version of what was rational, and Miss Arden was twitching her generous, generous hips along its dimensions, as if to help plead its case.
He didn’t move.
“The rain always makes me feel . . . refulgent,” Seraphina whispered. “Like my flesh is not large enough to possibly contain the things I feel and want. Like I am not constrained by rules or time.”
The lightning struck again, setting the entire sky alight. It cast a glow upon the dreamy expression on her face. He imagined that face below him, rapt in pleasure, and shuddered.
“Will you be angry if I ravish you?” she whispered.
He looked up into her eyes, which were dark with desire.
“I’ll be angry if you don’t.”
Immediately her mouth came down on his.
Her lips were cold and wet with rain. He caught her chin, held her still, and kissed away the droplets. She tasted tart, of wine. Her fingers moved up, wending through his hair. She untied his queue, smoothed his hair, and deepened the closeness of her mouth to his.
He plunged his tongue into her mouth and her hand went to his cock, which was as hard as he could remember it ever being, straining obscenely through the wet fabric of his breeches.
“Oh, but you are splendid, aren’t you?” she said, rubbing the dimensions of it slowly, expertly, in a way that caused heat and friction. He sucked in his breath, too overcome with the erotic pleasure of it to be embarrassed by the naked need of his reaction.
Her hand climbed up and snaked inside his breeches, unhooking the falls. “Why, Mr. Anderson,” she said.
She was not a dainty woman but even still the size of his straining erection looked brutish in her hand. She didn’t seem to mind. She was smiling like a cat. “What a lovely surprise,” she whispered, rubbing him in a way that made his vision go black.
He could feel her desire, feel her body melting into his. He should do something, get up, but her hands rubbing places where he had not been touched in years was making him insensible. He groaned and buried his head in the hollow of her neck.
“Oh yes, darling,” she whispered. “Oh yes, you do want this. I thought so.”
Her hand found a steady, competent rhythm around his prick—brisk, no girlish tease to it. She touched him the way he might touch himself. He felt tremors rising in his thighs—he was going to come with a few more strokes.