Mary Balogh - Seducing an Angel

She was laughing, her face still turned toward him.

"You are quite right," she said. "Perhaps after all I have been saving her for this happy reunion with the love of her life. I think Mr.

Golding may well /be/ that. Today is not for gloom and guilt, is it?

Today is for a picnic. I have always associated that word with pure enjoyment. But there were never any picnics during my marriage. It is strange, that. I did not even realize it until today. I came here to enjoy myself, Stephen."

He sat with one knee raised, the sole of his Hessian boot flat on the blanket, one arm draped over his knee, the other slightly behind him, bracing his weight. They were sitting in the dappled shade offered by the spreading branches of one of the oaks. His hat was on the blanket beside him.

He watched, fascinated, as she lifted her arms, drew the pins from her hair, and shook it free over her shoulders and along her back. She set the pins down on the brim of her bonnet and drew the fingers of both hands through her hair to release any tangles.

"If you have a brush in your reticule," he said, "I will do that for you."

"Will you?" She looked back at him. "But I removed the pins so that I can lie back on the blanket and look at the sky. Perhaps you will brush it later, before I put it back up."

The strange thing was that she was not flirting with him. Neither was she using her siren's voice or eyes. Yet he felt the tension between them like a palpable thing – and doubted she did. She was as he had never seen her before, relaxed and smiling and without artifice.

He was dazzled.

She was far more attractive to him than when she was trying to attract.

She stretched out on the blanket, adjusting her clothes to make sure her dress decently covered her ankles. And she laced her hands behind her head and gazed upward. She sighed with obvious contentment.

"If only we could keep our connection with the earth," she said, "all would be well with our lives. Do you think?"

"Sometimes," he said, "we become so intoxicated by the strange notion that we are lords of all we survey that we forget we are creatures of the earth."

"Just like butterflies," she said, "and robins and kittens."

"And lions and ravens," he said.

"Why is the sky blue?" she asked.

"I have no idea." He grinned down at her, and her eyes turned toward him. "But I am very glad it is. If the sun merely beamed down its light from a black sky, the world would be a gloomier place."

"Just like before a thunderstorm," she said.

"Worse."

"Or like nighttime with a brighter moon. Come down here and look," she said.

He deliberately misunderstood her. He lowered his head over hers and slowly searched her face, his eyes coming to rest finally on her green eyes. They were smiling.

"Very nice indeed," he said. He meant it too.

"Likewise." Her eyes were roaming over his face as well. "Stephen, you are going to have wrinkles at the outer corners of your eyes when you are older, and they are going to make you impossibly attractive."

"When the time comes," he said, "I'll remember that you warned me."

"Will you?" She lifted her hands and set two fingertips lightly over the spots where the wrinkles would be. "Will you remember me?"

"Oh, always," he said.

"And I will remember you," she said. "I will remember that once in my life I met a man who is perfect in every way."

"I am not perfect," he said.

"Allow me to dream," she said. "To me you are perfect. /Today/ you are perfect. I will not know you long enough or intimately enough to learn of your weaknesses and vices, which are doubtless legion. In memory you will always be my perfect angel. Perhaps I will have a medallion made and wear it about my neck."

She smiled.

He did not.

"We will not know each other for long?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

"No, of course not," she said. "But that does not matter, Stephen. There is today, and today is all that matters."

"Yes," he said.

As far as he knew, there were no people walking in sight of them. If there were, they must already be scandalized enough. What difference would it make if he – He kissed her.

And she kissed him back, first cupping his face gently with her palms and then sliding her arms about his neck.

It was a warm, unhurried, quite chaste kiss that did not even involve their tongues. It was the most dangerous kiss Stephen had ever shared.

He knew that as soon as it ended and he lifted his head to look down into her face again.

Because it had been a kiss of shared affection bordering on love. Not lust. /Love/.

"And now," she said, "will you do as I suggested a few minutes ago and come down here and look? Upward? At the sky?"

She spoke softly, without smiling, despite the teasing nature of her words.

He stretched out beside her and looked upward – and knew what she had meant when she spoke of connection to the earth. He could feel it, firm and eternal beneath him despite the thickness of the blanket. And above him he could see the blue, cloudless sky and – connecting the two – the leafy branches of the oak tree.

And he was a part of that connection, that gloriously spinning place, as was Cassandra.

He reached over and took her hand in his. He laced his fingers with hers.

"If you could just step off into the sky," she said, "and be a new person, /would/ you?"

He gave the question some consideration.

"And so lose myself as I know me, and everything and everyone that have helped shape me into the person I am?" he said. "No. But temporary escape would be good now and then. I am greedy and want the best of both worlds, you see. Would you?"

"I can lie here," she said, "and dream of letting go and floating off into blueness and light. But I would have to take myself with me or the whole exercise would be pointless. And so nothing would really be changed, would it? If I had to leave myself behind in order to escape…

Well, I might as well be dead. And I think I would hate that. I want to live."

"I am glad to hear it," he said, chuckling.

"Oh, but you do not understand," she said. "It surprises me. For a long time I have thought that if given the choice without actually having to take my own life, I would choose death."

He felt a sudden chill.

"But you no longer feel that way?" he asked her.

"No," she said. She laughed softly. "No! I want to /live/."

He squeezed her hand more tightly, and they lay together in silence while he pondered what she had just said. What must her life have been like if she would have preferred death to life – and if the preference was so habitual that it actually surprised her now to discover that she preferred life?

Sometimes he forgot – or chose to forget – that her life had been so intolerable that she had killed.

But he would not think of that today.

He turned his head to look at her after a few minutes, and she returned the look. They both smiled.

"Happy?" he asked.

"Mmm."

He sighed and set his free arm over his eyes. He had not stepped out into space, but he had stepped into something new after all. This was not seduction. This was not even simply friendship. This was… He did not know what it was. But he had the feeling his life would never be the same again.

And he was not sure if the thought alarmed him or exhilarated him.

After a few minutes he drifted off into that pleasant state of being asleep and yet half aware too of everything around him.

STEPHEN was asleep. He was not exactly snoring, but he was breathing deeply in such a way that there was no doubt he was sleeping.

Cassandra closed her eyes and smiled – and felt a desperate sort of tenderness for him and for the stolen, carefree pleasure of the afternoon. She had decided to enjoy herself, and that was what she was doing. All her defenses, all her anxieties, all her mistrust of anyone outside her own tiny circle of friends, had been left at home, to be taken up again after the picnic was over.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

She allowed herself the cautious belief that perhaps after all there was one good man in the world, and he was lying beside her, his fingers relaxed about her own. She knew he was not perfect. As he kept reminding her, no one was. But he seemed as close to being perfect as anyone could be.

And if he did have character flaws or even vices, she would never know.

For, of course, she would not know him for long. Not beyond the end of the Season, at the latest. And if she was very fortunate, she would never hear any unsavory stories about him in the future.

She was going to live in the country again. She had decided that just now, while lying here. It was as if this little piece of the country, the earth beneath her, the sky above, the tree branches between, had cleared her mind of a dense, dark fog that had befuddled it for a long, long time. She was going to find a little cottage in a small village somewhere in England, well off the beaten track, and she was going to live there and grow flowers and embroider bright tablecloths and handkerchiefs and go to church every Sunday and help serve teas at parish functions and dance at local assemblies and…

Well.

She swallowed against a lump in her throat. Perhaps she had stepped off into the sky, after all. But it was not an impractical dream. Or an impossible one.

For something else had just struck her with overwhelming force.