Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,73

pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thy happiness,

As he recited that poem, his melodious baritone curling like smooth silk around every word, Faye stared on, captivated by whatever spell the quiet inflection of his voice now cast upon her.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Just then, Tynan looked up from the book he held between the longest, strongest, most masculine fingers she’d ever beheld, and his eyes caught with hers. He did not, however, stop speaking, proving he’d committed to memory the verses of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and that only added more intrigue to this man.

“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” he murmured before returning to reading.

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

She told herself to move. To cease gawking at him like a lovestruck fool. For she wasn’t that thing. She was cool and composed and wholly unmoved by any such sentiment where a man was concerned. And yet, God help her, she could not. He had, in this moment, bewitched her so thoroughly that her pulse raced. In her ears, her breath came in quiet, little spurts, that sound melding with the tinkling clink, clink, clink of his sister stirring her tea and Tynan’s voice.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

He finished, his voice fading to quiet, his eyes trained on Faye. The remnants of his words, the deep, solemn melody that was his voice all hovered in the air, thrumming, vibrating within her. And everything melted away, leaving just the two of them there, locked in whatever this poignantly powerful moment was.

His sister shattered the moment. “You must forgive, Tynan. He is hardly a lover of the romantic poem and sometimes has to be reminded to read the ‘light.’”

His lips quirked in a wry grin, and he lifted that book to his forehead in a teasing little salute.

“Oh, no, I quite disagree,” Faye said before she could call the words back in a response that sprang as an automatic reply to the young woman’s critique. Faye, who’d always despised poetry, that romance of lovers, as her elder sisters and brother had oft said, found herself a resurrected lover of those captivating stanzas. “It is beautiful,” she explained softly, her eyes straying once more to Tynan. “It is about human life, and the nightingale, he does not die. Keats isn’t writing of death as we tend to think of it.” That state that she’d recently taken so much time to ponder after she’d learned her parents had played with lives, like they were the reaper himself. Faye sat forward. “The poem, it represents the conflicting nature that is the human existence. There is life and death. Sorrow and joy. Pleasure and pain. Mortality and immortality. Real… and the ideal.”

“I never quite thought of it in those terms,” Sara said in a contemplative murmur that broke the spell as Faye forced her focus away from Tynan and over to his younger sister. “When you think of it in that light, it really is quite lovely.”

“Perhaps Miss Poplar would care to read one?” Tynan extended the book her way. That same volume he’d previously wrenched from her fingers he now offered, and a ball of emotion lodged in her throat at the powerfulness of that tendering.

She didn’t want to read aloud. As a rule, she kept private to herself, eschewing the rare attention paid her. And yet, she could no sooner rebuff that gift than she could find pride again in the Poplar name.

Clearing her throat, Faye took the leather volume. Her fingers brushed his, and a little electric shock radiated from those digits, racing up her arm. “I… do not read with the same inflection as Mr. Wylie,” she warned her small audience as she carefully turned the yellowing, well-loved pages Tynan had entrusted to her care.

“Nonsense,” Sara protested. “I am sure you are a splendid reciter