The Beautiful Ones - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,121
but she is a liar and was surely trying to scare me, though her point about having to speak to the druggist, to ensure one doesn’t have a babe at the first opportunity, I think was true,” Nina said, frowning. “I don’t think I’d like to have a child now. But I didn’t think it was too awful.”
“Not too awful,” he repeated.
“Don’t take it like that. I hardly know what to say.”
He put both hands on her face, and she looked up at him.
“You can say, ‘Hector, you fool, you were too impatient’ or too unkind or anything at all. It is the way it gets better, if you correct whatever inadequate notions I may have.”
Nina considered this with care, her fingers twisting around a corner of the bedsheets.
“What?” he asked.
“We could try again, and I can keep better mental notes next time you seduce me and discuss the results of this experiment with you later.”
He laughed loudly, where before he had been speaking almost in whispers. “What a lovely creature you are,” he said.
She kissed him and undid the buttons of his vest.
“I think you seduced me and not the other way around,” he said as she eased him from his shirt.
“You might be right.”
He had not kissed her for a considerable length of time, but now he kissed her slowly, over and over. He wasn’t greedy on this occasion—there had been a volatile impatience to him, as though he’d thought she’d vanish from his arms—and she thought it pleasant, the weight of him on her and even more pleasant later as she gripped his shoulders.
Nina had spent the previous night in the darkness of his room, feeling startled, her eyes wide open as he slept next to her, the thought that the priest from her church and the martyrs on the stained-glass windows would have been cross with her. In the morning, though, she had sneaked into his bathroom, and lying in the tub all that came to mind were the songs she sang whenever she went by the river, the water reaching her thighs. Then he’d walked in as she sat in the tub, and even though there was her immortal soul to consider and also the scandal, she’d shoved those concerns away. They didn’t seem important anymore.
It wasn’t dark this time. She could see him as he lay next to her, his chest rising and falling, and it was a substantially more attractive sight than the images of martyrs. Not that she was ever worried about damnation; it had always seemed an abstract concept.
Other, more practical matters did disquiet her.
Hector toyed lazily with her hair, wrapping a strand around his fingers.
“We could run away,” she said.
“From Luc Lémy? I am certain he meant what he said, that he’d give chase.”
She folded her arms across her chest, and fear filled her, as water fills the lungs of the drowning swimmer. “We could get on a ship. He is not going to chase us all the way to Iblevad, is he?”
“Perhaps we’d evade him. And you’d spend the rest of your life as an exile.”
Nina did not reply. It was heartbreaking having to picture her family lost, her mother and her sister and her cousin turned into a distant memory. But it was the logical choice.
“Never to set your eyes on Oldhouse again. Do you think that would be correct?” he asked.
She knew the answer even before he spoke, resolution sharp on his face. There was no convincing him. He would not relent. Matters of honor were paramount to gentlemen, and he was more stubborn than most.
“No,” he said. “Besides, I accepted. I gave him my word. A man is his word.”
Nina nodded and squeezed his hand.
“But I appreciate your generosity,” he said, his voice growing softer, “and know myself lucky that you’d give up everything you treasure for me.”
His gaze pinned her down against the pillows, steady and true.
“I love you, Nina Beaulieu.”
He had not said this yet, and his proposal had been almost an afterthought. It was perhaps silly how her breath caught in her throat when he spoke, given how obvious it was that he cared for her, but it was wonderful to hear it. The fears that, perhaps unreasonably, still dangled in a corner of her soul, were lifted with those few words.
“Would you say it back?” he asked rather timidly.
She bit her lip and then smiled.
“I love you,” Nina said, laying her hands on his chest, and she giggled when he spun her