mean?”
She stayed on her knees. At first Solomon thought she looked as dazed and heated as he did, but when she looked up, her gray eyes were mocking. “Too squeamish for that, too?”
“I’m not interested in strange women.”
Her head snapped back as if he’d punched her. “Oh no?” she said venomously, dropping her eyes to the unmistakable evidence of his interest. “What’s that, then?”
“That’s for you,” he said fiercely. “I don’t want you to be a strange woman, Serena.”
She rocked back on her heels. “There’s not much you can do about that at this late date.”
“I mean that I don’t want you to be a strange woman to me. Is that all I am to you? A—a customer?”
She rose to her feet, leaving her robe in a silken puddle around her ankles. She did it gracefully, but he still thought of an animal with its leg mangled in a trap. She looked as if she’d claw and spit at him if he came close.
“I don’t care if you’ve slept with half the men in London,” he said, too loudly. “That has nothing to do with how I feel. I said I liked you. And when I said that I meant I wasn’t trying to get anything. Can’t you understand that? Don’t you like me too?”
She frowned.
He tried to ignore his hurt at her lack of an answer. He knew she liked him, damn it; but he wanted her to be able to say it. “Serena, all I want from you is you. If you don’t want to give me that, fine, but get out of my room.”
She looked at the ground. “I can’t imagine why you would want that.”
“Right now, I can’t either.” He strode to his lab table and pulled the bottle of Madeira out from behind a crucible in which he’d been trying to match the color of Serena’s eyes. Bluish-gray liquid sloshed about in it, looking like dishwater. He took a shaky swig; wine burned away the taste of strawberries. “Listen, Serena. I find it equally difficult to imagine why you would want any part of me, so I can’t be too critical. But don’t do this again.”
She pressed her eyes shut for a moment and ran a hand through her hair. When she opened her eyes, the act was gone; she just looked like herself. It was funny how much less graceful she was when she wasn’t thinking about it. “Christ,” she said. “Solomon, I—Christ, I’m such a harpy.”
He held out the Madeira.
She took it and knocked it back expertly. “I really wasn’t drinking before, you know.” She rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth.
“I know.”
“Would you like some strawberries?” she offered, uncertainly and intently.
He swallowed, almost choking on the desire that swamped him at the words. Would he ever be able to taste strawberries again and not think of Serena pressed against him? “Have you got some?”
“In the kitchen. Come on, we’ll get some. If—if you want to.” She didn’t seem to have ever learned how to apologize, and yet she always tried, in her own way. She fought herself, too, when she had to. He nodded.
She smiled, transparently relieved. Solomon felt almost all right. “Just let me braid my hair.”
He watched as she deftly wove her black hair into two plaits. Then she picked up her robe from the floor and wrapped it around her, fastening it securely. She picked up the candle from his bedside table and lit it at his lamp, the light briefly illuminating her face. When she walked past him to open the door, he saw that without a comb, her back part zigzagged crazily.
She opened the door and then, with her hand on the knob, she turned and said over her shoulder, “Oh, and Solomon—I never threaten to kill my father for people I don’t like at least a little.”
The kitchen felt strange without the blazing heat and light and the clamor of upraised voices and turning spits and, from outside, London. Moonlight streamed in through the now-closed sash windows along the high ceiling, silvering the long rows of copper pots.
To his surprise, Serena went, not toward the door to the ice room, but to the opposite corner of the kitchen. She bent and began tugging at something on the floor.
“What—” Then he saw. She pulled on a great hoop fixed into the floor, and a section of floor about four feet square swung up with a smooth gliding of gears and hinges. Serena pulled it back