He took her shoulders, barely refraining from shaking her. “I’m the same man I was when I labored in the garden. The same man you were so kind to when I was mute.”
“No, you’re not!” Her breasts were heaving now with the force of her ire. “That man was of my world. He was simple and… and kind and he wasn’t a bloody aristocrat!”
She balled her fist and hit his chest with the last word.
“You don’t know,” he choked. “You don’t know who I am.”
“Then tell me!”
He stared into her eyes—those beautiful green eyes—and something seemed to break inside him.
Four years of torment and loss.
Four years of being told what he was and what he wasn’t.
Four years of limbo. Of life suspended, lost, abandoned as he lay half dead in a stinking cell.
He wasn’t dead and he wasn’t going to lose any more of life.
“I’m everything you thought me,” he whispered, his voice broken. “The gardener and the aristocrat and the madman. I endured Bedlam and it was a crucible to my soul, burning what I was before and reshaping me. I wouldn’t have survived it had I not let myself be remolded.”
He looked at her helplessly and she stared back, her eyes wet, her lips parted.
He laid his forehead against hers. “In truth I don’t know what sort of man I am anymore, newly smelted, newly poured into some strange and original mold. I was still too hot to the touch for discovery. But I know this: whatever strange creature I have become, I am yours. Help me, Lily. Unmold me and take what form I am in your hands and blow the breath of life into me. Make me a living being again.”
He had no more words to convince her, so he did what he’d wanted to do since he’d first seen her this evening: he slid his lips down to her mouth.
THE KISS WAS so sweet, so tender, that for a moment Lily couldn’t think at all. All she could do was feel—the heat of his mouth, the puffs of his breaths on her cheek, the gentle touch of his palms on her face. He pushed his tongue into her mouth and she suckled it, wanting more.
She stood on tiptoe and thrust her fingers into his hair, pulling off the wretched tie and freeing his wild locks—freeing Caliban from Lord Kilbourne.
And then she remembered: no matter what he might call himself, she was still mad at him.
She pulled back and murmured, “I’m still mad at you.”
“Are you?” His wounded voice had descended into Stygian depths. He pressed open-mouthed kisses to her jaw.
“Yes.” She yanked at his hair in emphasis.
He grunted, but her grip didn’t prevent him from lowering his mouth to hers again. He nipped at her lips and then licked at them, softening the sting. “I’ll have to see what I can do to regain your good graces.”
His hands left her arms and seized her waist instead, and before she could think, he was lifting her bodily, walking with her as if she were as light as a kitten. He pivoted and then she was falling onto the bed, with him right on top of her.
He caught himself on his elbows before his entire weight could crush her, but she was still trapped, his legs and lower body pinning her to the soft mattress.
“And how,” she asked with awful dignity, “do you suppose this will help your case?”
“For one thing,” he replied, trailing his fingertips over her temples, “you can’t move.”
She arched her brows.
His lips curved as he plucked a pin from her coiffure. “It gives me time to argue, if nothing else.”
She let her hands fall beside her head in mock surrender. “I’m listening.”
“Will you agree that we found an uncommon accord in the garden?” She felt the loosening of her hair as he removed another pin.
“I didn’t know who you were,” she objected.
“Not what I asked.” He eyed her sternly. “Do you agree or not?”
She blew out a frustrated breath. “I agree that I had an uncommon accord with the man I thought you were, but—”
“Ah. Ah.” He stretched over her head to set the pins on a side table, then resumed his position atop her. “We both are in agreement that we shared an uncommon accord. The problem, as I see it, is that you are under the delusion that I am somehow not the same man as I was then. I may not know exactly what I have become since Bedlam, but I know this: whatever I was in the garden I am now, new clothes or no.”
“You aren’t!” She parted her legs to give him more room, thinking she really oughtn’t to feel as comfortable as she did.
“Am I not?” He thrust his fingertips into her hair, massaging her scalp. “In what way am I different?”
Lily had to fight to keep her eyes open. The feel of his hands on her scalp after a day with her hair pulled tight was simply heaven. “Your name, for one.”
“But what’s in a name, truly?” he murmured, dipping his head to trail his lips over the sensitive skin below her ear. “You called me Caliban, but had you called me Romeo, wouldn’t I still be the same man? My mother named me for a god renowned for male beauty, but does it make me any more handsome? My mirror tells me daily, no.”
There was definitely something wrong with his reasoning and if she could only draw breath to think, she might figure it out.
“Cheat,” she growled, her voice weaker than she liked.
He pulled back enough for her to see the amused quirk of his lips. “Temptress.”
He bent to lay his mouth on hers, thrusting his tongue lazily past her lips until she sucked on the thick length.
“Are they any different?” he whispered against her mouth, “my kisses? Have they changed so much with my name?”
She cracked her eyelids to look at him and murmur into the humid heat between them, “I can’t tell. Perhaps you should demonstrate again.”
He licked at the corner of her mouth. “A scientific study, you mean?” His mouth trailed up her cheek, soft as a moth.
“Quite,” she breathed.
“As you wish.”
He kissed her eyelids, a mere brush of lips, before seizing her mouth again, swallowing her moan. His hands moved until he’d intertwined his fingers with hers, still at either side of her head. She opened helplessly beneath the surge of his intent, accepting his tongue, his heavy desire. His chest crushed her breasts and she wanted all the material between them gone so that she could feel his skin against hers. She arched under him, attempting to get closer, wanting to rub her naked nipples against him, but the stiff fabric of her stays prevented even the illusion of touch.
She sank back, whimpering.
He rose to his knees at the same time, eyeing her with an obnoxious twist of his lips that she’d have slapped away if she didn’t want him back so much.
“The same?” he asked, and at least his voice shook just the tiniest bit. He wasn’t unaffected, either.
She tilted her head against the coverlet, trying to catch her breath. “I suppose.”
She’d tried to sound nonchalant, but by his sudden grin she knew she’d not been entirely successful.
“I am the same man I was in the garden,” he said into the silence of the bedroom, his grin fading to something solemn, almost severe. “My limbs move as they did then, my lungs fill with air exactly the same, and my heart…” He paused as if to swallow, continuing lower, “My heart beats constant and true, and if you believe nothing else, Lily Stump, believe this: my heart has changed not at all since the garden.”
She stared up at him. His words were beautiful, but she’d had nearly a lifetime’s distrust of the upper classes. Such a thing wasn’t vanquished in moments.
He nodded at her silence as if she’d made a rebuttal—and then he shrugged off his coat. “Did you fear Caliban?”
She shook her head slowly.
He flipped open the buttons on his beautiful waistcoat. “Caliban and Apollo are the same.”
“No,” she husked. “Caliban is dead.”
“Do you truly believe that?” he asked nearly indulgently. “I am Caliban and I am Apollo. We are the same.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He stripped off his waistcoat.
“There never was a Caliban to begin with.” She felt sad, as if she truly mourned for that gentle giant, that enigmatic mute man she’d apparently made up from whole cloth.
He actually laughed, the cad. “Do you think I pretended to dig holes and hack down trees? I am Caliban and I am Apollo and I am Smith.” He pulled his shirt over his head, laying his chest bare. “Is this not the same body you saw emerge from the pond?”
She couldn’t help it. She did now what she hadn’t been able to do then—she touched his chest, running her fingertips lightly over his shoulders, down into the wedge of short hairs between his nipples.
He took her hand and moved it so her palm lay over his left nipple. “My heart beats here,” he said, pressing until she could feel the steady thump. “The same heart, the same beat as in the garden.”
He lifted his hand, but she kept her palm there, feeling the pulse beneath his warm skin. Slowly she curled her fingers until she could trace lightly around his nipple. It puckered beneath her touch, a tiny brown bead, and she felt a sudden urge to feel it beneath her tongue. Instead she raised her other hand and circled the corresponding nipple as well, fascinated by how his flesh responded. It wasn’t until she heard the sharp inhalation that she looked up and realized what she was doing to him.
His head was thrown back, his throat rippling as he swallowed again and again, and his mighty shoulders, so strong, so broad, actually trembled at her simple touch.
Her being lit with awe that she’d moved such a powerful man. That he literally shuddered beneath her fingertips.
“Caliban,” she whispered. “Can I call you that?”
He tilted his head down to look at her, his brown eyes half-lidded. “Caliban, Apollo, Smith, even Romeo, it matters not. I am the man that I am and always will be.”
She nodded at that, for with this she could at least agree: what she called him had never been the problem.
He arched away from her suddenly, and she was forced to let her hands fall. “Let me show you.” He stood and stripped out of shoes, stockings, breeches, and smallclothes, until he was entirely nude. He spread wide his arms, and turned before her. “I am as God made me, no more, no less. Take me as I am.”
He completed his turn, standing proud before her, and she couldn’t help but like what she saw. He was tall and well-made, with a narrow waist and muscular thighs. The hair on his chest was repeated in a knot around his navel and traveled down in a thin line into the tangle about his groin where his cock had half-risen, thick and straight and bold.
He was masculine, not beautiful. Compelling. But more importantly, with the stripping of his clothes he’d discarded all that she disliked and become merely the man she’d met in the garden.
She held out her hand. “Caliban, Apollo, Smith, Romeo, you. Come to me, you that you are.”
He took her hand, but instead of climbing back on the bed, he drew her up instead. “I have an urge,” he murmured in her ear as he drew her against his nude body, “to make you as I am. Then, truly, shall we be equals.”
So he patiently unlaced, untied, and unclothed her, his fingers working deftly on delicate material and tight cords. Reverently he drew off her bodice, her skirt, her petticoats, her stays, her chemise, her slippers, and laid them neatly aside until he knelt at her feet to unroll her stockings. She placed her palm on his shoulder as he set her foot on his knee and untied her garter. Her stockings were her best, but even so they’d a mended hole at the heel. He unrolled them as carefully as if they’d been lace, pausing to kiss her instep as he pulled them off. Then he set that foot down and picked up her other, drawing her so close that his bent head nearly brushed her bare mons.