Page 74 of The Familiar

He should say no. He should rise and go, spend his desire in his hand. For the sake of his heart and her life he should do these things. But in the end, after so many lifetimes, he was only a man.

He leaned forward. Her lips were soft, her mouth sweet, and when he felt the press of her tongue, he knew he could make no more arguments. He lifted her from the bath, soaking his sleeves to the elbows and noticing not at all. He dried her gently and laid her down upon the bed.

“Undress for me,” she said. “The only man I’ve seen without clothes was wrinkled as a walnut.”

“If it will please you.”

It seemed she had awakened his vanity alongside his desire. He took pleasure in the way she watched him disrobe, in the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, the spreading flush on her cheeks, the shift in her body like the soft swell of a dune.

When she had looked her fill, he lay down beside her and she turned to him. “It’s not too late,” he said. “If you ask me to go, I will.”

“Is that what you want?”

“In all these many years I’ve never wanted anything less.”

She cupped his face, let her hand trace his jaw, his neck, the planes of his chest. His breath hitched when she reached his stomach and moved on, her fingers fastening around him, all hesitancy gone.

“Then kiss me again, Santángel,” she said. “It was too late for us before we ever met.”

That night Valentina woke bathed in sweat, her head swimming with the memory of a strange and beautiful dream. The air was sweet with oranges and she had been walking with Quiteria Escárcega, who had let her borrow her crimson velvet jacket. But now her room seemed too still, and in the moonlight, she saw the shadows lengthening, long-clawed demons coming for her bitter, grasping soul. She told herself to return to sleep, to drink a little wine to settle her nerves, to stop being foolish. But she felt fretful and uneasy, as if a fire had been lit beneath her skin.

It was less that she rose from her bed than that she was driven from it, and she found herself tapping at the door that connected her bedroom to Marius’s chamber. She expected no answer and so she was surprised when he called softly, “I am awake too.” She was even more surprised when she opened the door to find him striding across the room to her, and her bafflement only grew when he took her in his arms and tumbled her onto his bed.

“I dreamed of orange groves,” he said as he buried his face in her neck.

She had time to think How strange that he should dream that too, and then she was so overcome with befuddlement and other unnamable emotions, she couldn’t think at all.

In the gardens, one of Pérez’s guards turned to the man he’d stood watch with for the better part of two years and said, “Don’t you think it’s time we stopped pretending?”

They slipped into the shadows of the hedges where the cold ground caught up their whispers and moans, and where the next day the gardener would find a mysterious patch of white blossoms.

Down in the kitchens, the cook and her husband made love on the table beside a regiment of leavening loaves. The morning bread tasted of sweet oranges.

Beneath the scroll of his silver angels, Antonio Pérez wept for his loneliness, his head full of a dream of orange trees, then he rose from his bed and tried to return to his correspondence, but only love poems emerged from his quill.

If any of them had listened closely, they would have heard birds rustling in the branches, and somewhere in the walls, the amorous squeaking of mice. But their ears were too full with whispered words of love.

As dawn broke and Luzia felt for the first time the joy of waking in a lover’s arms, she experienced a kind of desperate hope too. “There must be a way to break the curse,” she said. “And we will find it together.”

Santángel wanted to tell her that Víctor de Paredes had already offered him a way. But he drew her closer and said nothing.

CHAPTER 34

Luzia woke to the sound of screaming and Santángel shaking her shoulder.

“Get up,” he commanded. “I’ll help you dress.”

“Who is crying out?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pulling on his clothes. “The Inquisition’s alguacil is here with his men. They’ve come to arrest someone.”

Luzia was still trying to climb out of the night’s happy haze, but those words were enough to yank her into awareness. The tribunal’s constable was here.

She scrambled into her corset and skirts, awkward with Santángel now in a way she hadn’t been before, aware of every place on her body he had touched. She should be ashamed, she knew, frightened. But she wasn’t sorry for any of it. If she was to die, then she would die with memories worth keeping.

He helped her with her laces, then sat her before the mirror and fixed her hair in a tight braid.

“Where did you learn to braid a woman’s hair?” she asked, watching his pale face in the mirror, the concentration there.