Elizabeth turned back to her more immediate problem, the identity of the mysterious man who had touched her so intimately and then let her go. She would ask her brother about the other houses along that stretch of coast. Even if the stranger did not live right on the beach, he had to know it pretty well to have found that cave.
The cave… That magical cave. He had made her give her word not to tell. Had been most insistent upon it, judging from the more harsh, grating quality of his tone as he had urged her to swear she would never breath a word about it to anyone.
Well, there was no chance she would be telling a living soul about it soon, Elizabeth thought with a rueful twist of her lips as she put the finishing touches to her coiffure and went in search of a shawl. No, the shadowy cavern and what had nearly happened there was not something she was about to blurt out in this lifetime.
The bell rang for dinner. Elizabeth started and picked up the train of her gown. She took one last look at herself in the mirror, noting her high color, and decided she would lurk on the edges of the company that evening so as not to be the center of attention.
The last thing she needed was for her astute brother to see her blushing and flushed as if she had spent the day with her lover….
Chapter Four
The tall man labored on in the dark, dank cave, sweat plastering his shirt and linen trousers to his limbs and back, until he stripped down to his sodden drawers, and then finally tugged off their cloying confinement.
He hardened all over again as he thought of the lovely woman who had so completely unmanned him like a schoolboy. She hadn't even laid a finger on his most sensitive flesh, and he had lost control.
He was more grateful than he could say that he had not tried to make love to her fully after all, for he would not have lasted one second inside of her thrumming secret core.
He shook his head. He had never imagined anyone like Elizabeth Eltham could ever exist. Let alone that such a one could possibly be in his arms in this God-forsaken cave. She was an alluring combination of innocence and desire in the most perfect and voluptuous form.
He had loved his wife, but she had not been breathtaking, and certainly not responsive. He had been young, eager; she had been more worldly, yet very very Catholic. According to her, flesh was sinful, desire something to be ruthlessly controlled. Rules, regulations, saint's days, feast days, her difficult monthlies which had left her indisposed for eight to ten days at a time, all of them had been barriers to any sort of intimacy developing during the short time they had been wed. The final straw had been her work as a partisana.
He felt disloyal for even thinking of her religion and her cause so resentfully. After all, had they not all contributed to making her the woman he had loved and admired?
Admired, certainly, he admitted with a rare flash of candor. She had been fiery, passionate for freedom. But it was almost as if the slaughter of her family at the hands of the French at Burgos, and his assisting her, had opened up the floodgates of her passion, though it had not been for him.
He could not help wondering if her willingness to marry him had been only gratitude, pure and simple. And perhaps his own willingness had been not much more than a desire to at last lose his own virginity safely and cleanly, with no fear of disease or consequences, upon another virgin.
Wedlock had solved both their problems, he had to concede. She had got a protector who could help provide her with weapons and ammunition to defeat the devils who had ravaged her country and very nearly her own short stocky body. He had got an outlet for his yearnings and a promise to settle down and have a family as soon as God and the Emperor willed it.
Or Wellington, he remembered with a fond smile. Next in his pantheon after the Almighty. Napoleon of course had been Lucifer, the fallen angel. He sighed as he recalled the youthful idealism that had had him longing, with his family, for all of the depravities of the corrupt monarchies of Europe, including the British one, to be swept aside. For a new world order to be forged out of the principles of egalitarianism, equality and fraternity.
Instead they had had Robespierre's bloodbath and the rape and pillage of a Grande Armee bent on conquest, led by a little corporal from a tiny island which most people had never even heard of.
He shook his head, stripping off the last of his clothes until he was completely naked, and returning to his back-breaking labor, made all the more difficult by the limited mobility of his left shoulder and the low ceiling of the cave.
Or his own lofty head, he thought with a smile. Whoever had used this cave in the past must have been quite a bit shorter, he reflected, looking at the ragged planks of wood which had collapsed in a corner. They still bore some resemblance to a bed.