Page 58 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

The laughter faded from Mordaunt. Something in him had extinguished, too. The boyish happiness from earlier was gone. Where the moon touched him, it lay like a frost. He sat unmoving in the darkness, half man, half ghost.

They still hadn’t spoken of the kiss.

Aurienne, wishing to clear the air, attempted it. “About what happened earlier—”

Mordaunt had been waiting for this. He was quick to interrupt. “Another crime of passion.”

In the face of this dismissal, Aurienne, too, retreated into the safety of the facetious. “Right. I am a safe flirt, after all.”

“You really are. Too afraid of the risk of pain to risk feeling anything else.”

“Is it wisdom or cowardice?” asked Aurienne.

“It’s—understandable.”

“That was some deep flirting. With tongue.”

“I told you—I am nothing if not immoderate. I hope you didn’t take it to mean anything—”

“No,” lied Aurienne hastily. “You were going to say something at the lake, and then you didn’t. What was it?”

“I don’t recall.” Mordaunt shrugged. “It can’t have been important.”

“No. I suppose it wasn’t.”

There was a lie-filled silence. Aurienne straightened a spoon upon the white tablecloth. Mordaunt cleared his throat. Aurienne spun a curl of hair around a fingertip. The remaining candle, suffocated by the enormity of the lies, extinguished itself.

Mordaunt’s gaze was drenched in mourning.

He straightened and refilled their glasses. He held his up. Aurienne confusedly raised hers, too, not sure what they could possibly be toasting.

“To things that could never be,” said Mordaunt.

Aurienne smiled a sad smile.

She touched her glass to his, and they drank to impossible things, and the wine tasted like twenty summers.

12

Biological Urges

Aurienne

Aurienne and Mordaunt lingered at the table until the delicious evening ripened into night, and the bottle of sweet wine stood empty, and their glasses held only moonlight. The moment was soft, carefree, terribly romantic.

Mordaunt rang the bell, whose effect was to summon the white-gloved flurry again to take away the dinner things. The table and chairs were swept off the balcony and replaced by the chaise longue, which Aurienne and Mordaunt immediately, and inebriatedly, bickered over possession of.

“What happened to ladies first?” asked Aurienne.

“I’mthe invalid,” said Mordaunt.

They both dived for the chaise and landed on it together. They squirmed and wrestled. It was dangerously exhilarating to be pressed up against Mordaunt, to feel his firm chest under her palms, to have her knee caught between his as he rolled her over. He lay on top of her, laughing, asking if she really thought she could outmuscle him, and sheasked if he really thought she couldn’t, and there was great pleasure in it. Play fighting. Pushes that were excuses to touch.

She wriggled out from under him. He permitted himself to be flipped over so she was on top. His eyes were a soft, dark grey. His cheek was rough with the day’s stubble. Champagne and wine and hormones churned, and lit Aurienne from within. Result: inhibitions—minimal; judgement—questionable; impulse control—gone.

Aurienne’s body thrilled with the same happiness as at the lake. Their mouths were drawn near each other’s again. Dangerous, thought Aurienne as she looked into his laughing eyes, as her hands trailed up his arms to his shoulders. Her chest pressed against his. He lifted her with his breathing, up and down and up and down in rhythm as his heart thundered against her breast. Her hair fell in a curtain around them and shielded them from the world.

Their eyes locked. Mordaunt stopped laughing. They both went still.