The Charm School by Susan Wiggs
Nineteen
Reproof on her lip, but a smile in her eye.
—Samuel Lover (1836)
True to his word, he bared all while she smoked the cheroot down to ashes and gaped like a ninny. She had always known he was perfection itself. She saw immediately that it was true all over. He had the strong muscular body of a Greek athlete and skin that was tanned—except in certain areas—and smoothly unblemished.
She was quite familiar with his broad, bare chest due to the long days at sea, but his thighs and buttocks and manhood were a novelty to her inquisitive gaze. “Oh, my,” she said.
“My indeed,” he said, staring back. He took her hand. “Shall we?”
“Shall we what?”
In answer, he turned, still keeping hold of her hand, and jumped off the edge of the rock into the lagoon. Isadora gasped at the cool silken shock of the water slipping over her. They went down, down, down, feet grazing the pebbled bottom and then they floated up, breaking the surface.
Isadora coughed violently, spewing out water. She flailed her arms, found Ryan and clung to him. “I remembered the other reason I shouldn’t bathe,” she said between coughs.
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know how to swim.”
He caught her against him, and she marveled at the feel of their flesh touching, sliding together, the water facilitating the movement. “Ah, Isadora. I adore-a you. Hold on to me, and I’ll show you.” Kicking out, he towed her to shallow water where her feet could touch the bottom of the lagoon. She loved the feel of the water gliding over her. In the sunlit places it was warm and buoyant; in the cooler shadows the dark eddies gave her a delicious chill. She was Eve, she was a wood nymph, she was a natural creature, never bound by the tight corset stays of convention. Here she was in this natural world with a man who looked like a god teaching her to swim. It was all a fantastic dream—the colors too bright for the mortal world, the lagoon too beautiful for ordinary humans.
“Take my hands,” he instructed her as they stood shoulder-deep in the water. “Let the current buoy you.”
The gentle downstream flow lifted her. He showed her how to flutter her feet, then held her at the waist while she moved her arms. She stood grasping a liana vine while he demonstrated a dive beneath the surface. She tried it, keeping hold of the vine but plunging in, feeling as sleek and weightless as a fish. She opened her eyes to a blurred sunlit world, then drifted upward, laughing as she broke the surface.
He swam over to her. “You are a quick study. I’ve never taught anyone to swim before.”
“You’re not teaching me to swim, Ryan. You are teaching me to live.” She leaned her head back, dipping in her hair, gazing up at the blue sky framed by towering branches and exotically shaped leaves. “In Boston, each day was the same. I got up, I had breakfast, I spent a few hours reading or writing correspondence. Sometimes there might be an invitation but it was always for more reading or conversation at someone else’s house.” She giggled. “It sounds so silly, yet what could be sillier than swimming naked in a lagoon in the middle of the jungle?”
She waved her hand absently in the crystalline water. “It’s not that I dislike Boston,” she said. “I think it’s more that Boston dislikes me. Society favors women who are witty, charming and amusing.”
He swam toward the cascade. “You are all of that. I never laughed so much as I do with you.”
“But you’re the only one.” She experimented with her hands. If she paddled them away from her, she drifted backward. “All the young women who are socially successful in Boston are not merely witty and charming. They’re also extremely pretty.”
“So are you,” he said.
She laughed. “Whatever it is that we smoked has made me quite drunk. But not nearly so drunk that I would believe that.” He started to speak. She held up her hand. “I am untidy and ungainly, with no sense at all of how to dress or comport myself. I have a unique gift for making others feel awkward. I—”
He dove beneath the water and surfaced in front of her, so close she could see the way the myriad droplets magnified his pores. “You are absurd. Absurdly adorable. Isa-dorable. I wish I could make love to you.”
She watched his face, his mouth, mesmerized. “I think you already are.”
“Not with mere words, love. With my hands. My mouth. My body.”
She drifted back, fascinated yet not frightened in the least. This was Ryan, after all. “You mustn’t.”
“I know that.”
She thought for a moment. “Why mustn’t you?”
“Because,” he said with excessive patience, “you must keep yourself chaste and pure.”
“Oh,” she said. “For Chad?” She hadn’t thought about him in days. At the moment she couldn’t even recall what he looked like. “Chad. What sort of name is that, anyway? It sounds like a fish or perhaps a skin condition.” She paddled on her back to the waterfall and let it beat upon her head. The water was cold; it created a delicious shiver when it mingled with the warmer water of the lagoon.
“I think you should do it anyway,” she said suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Make love to me.”
He started to laugh as if she’d made a joke. Then he narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Why?”
“Because... I’ve never done it before. Like smoking the hemp leaves. It is my last day in Brazil. We are completely alone.” She swam out from under the waterfall and looked at him directly. “No one ever need know.”
He lunged through the water, pulled her toward him. She studied his wet face, his slicked-back hair, his soft blue eyes as he guided her to calmer waters. A smile lifted one side of his mouth. “No one ever need know, eh?”
“No one’s ever wanted to before, so you understand I’m curious.”
“Curious. About what I’d do when—if—I were to make love to you.”
“Yes.”
He grinned wickedly. “I really like your question, Isadora.” He moved back and swam in a slow, deliberate circle around her. “If I were going to make love to you, I would start by undressing you.”
“You’ve already done that.”
“Then I’m already making love to you.”
She felt a jolt of awareness deep in her belly. “Oh, my. Then it’s too late for honor?”
“It might be.”
“Oh, my,” she said again. “What would you do next?”
“I think perhaps I would start with your hand. You have very expressive hands so I thought I might—here—it’s easier to show you.” He grabbed her hand, held it gently in his. “I’m glad you stopped chewing your nails.” He kept his gaze on her face as he slowly lifted her hand to his lips. “If I were going to make love to you, I would do this.” He kissed one finger after the other, lavishing attention on each as if it were a sacred relic. No, a profane relic, for he was not at all reverent. He slipped a finger in his mouth and sucked at it, eliciting a gasp from her.
“Would that offend you if I did it?”
She felt light-headed, woozy from smoke and desire. “It would make me wonder what you’d do next.”
“I’d pull you against me. Like this.”
She found herself in his arms, bare breasts against bare chest, her mouth almost touching his.
“If we were actually making love,” he said, “I would hope that you wouldn’t be offended by this.”
“By what?”
He shifted his hips.
“Oh!”
“That’s merely an indication of how much I’d want you if we were making love.”
“I’m feeling—that is, I would be feeling—some indications myself,” she confessed.
“Very good. And then, of course, I’d kiss your lips. Like this.” He lowered his head.
Ah. She was lost, lost in his kiss. She had the irrational yet undeniable feeling that every moment since she’d first laid eyes on him—dissolute, with a half-dressed doxy in his lap—had been moving her toward this encounter. She felt an upsurge of dizzying emotion, and she clung to him, digging her fingers into his bare shoulders, amazed to feel the silky ripple of muscle beneath her touch.
He lifted his mouth—his warm, sweet, soft mouth—from hers and whispered, “Oh, love, yes, if indeed we were making love, you would touch me like that. And I—” he kissed her again, slowly, lavishly, writing poetry with his tongue “—I would touch you like this.”
He caressed her most private, most feminine places. Places she was forbidden even to put a name to or think about, but she thought about them now, about the trail of fire that blazed through her, unslaked by the cool water. She understood that she was addled from smoking the hemp leaves and so was he, yet she was glad. Grateful. Pleased that there was a substance that would make it all right for her to bathe naked with a naked man.
“And finally,” he whispered in her ear while his hand still did those magical things, “finally I would have to bring you onto dry land so I could finish what I started.”
“What you started...” she whispered.
His hand slid between her thighs. “I want to be where the water is.”
Oh, my.This time she couldn’t even find her voice, could only nod a mute, fascinated assent. Hand in hand they waded to the shore and fell back on the soft heap formed by her fallen petticoats.
“I knew these things were good for something,” he said, then laughed, bracing himself on one arm to gaze at her. “Look at you, all wet and glistening.” He bent and drew his tongue in a circle around each of her nipples. And she was too shocked and thrilled even to breathe. “You’re a goddess, and if I happened to be making love to you for real, this would be a form of worship.”
All her life she had been made to understand that she was unworthy. That no one—particularly no man—could possibly want her. Yet all those lessons—beaten into her not with a hickory cane but with the far more brutal cudgel of verbal logic—suddenly flowed away on a raft of sweet words from this laughing, red-haired man.
He had declared her a goddess. She reclined in an ecstasy of amazement as his lips drank the spring water from her breasts and shoulders and belly, as his fingers, probing with exquisite tenderness, parted her thighs to explore the damp folds of her womanhood.
“Shall I go on with my explanation?”
“What...explanation?” Rather than sobering up, she was growing dizzier and more intoxicated by the moment.
“Poor Isadora. Shall I continue?”
“Please...do.”
Her breathy assent seemed to amuse him. He slid his fingers provocatively over her most sensitive spot. “The next thing I would do...”
She lifted her hips slightly, the motion far beyond the control of her will.
“...is kiss you right...here.”
“No!”
“Ah, you know your part well. For I would expect from you a slight squawk of protest at this point.”
“Protest?” Even as she spoke, her hips shifted under the delicate torture of his touch. “Of course there would be a protest. It’s unnatural.”
“What could be more natural than wanting to bring the ultimate pleasure to my goddess?”
“It’s sinful.”
“Have you seen it listed along with the seven deadly sins?”
“I don’t even know what it’s called.”
“Then surely it doesn’t exist.” He slid his mouth down her neck and along her arm, up again and then down...lower, over her belly, sipping spring water from her navel. “So you have nothing to fear.”
“We shall burn in hell.”
“Not so.” He nibbled her thigh. “We shall burn now.”
His tongue traced the curve of her hipbone. And he gave her the deepest, most tender kiss she had never dared to imagine, and she had the most extraordinary reaction. As if she had drunk a great swallow of curaçao...only this was sweeter. As if she had inhaled a huge breath of herbal smoke...only this was lighter. As if she had dived into a spring of perfectly clear water...only this was more buoyant.
She had never flown like a bird, but that was how it felt. She had never burst into flames, but that was how it seemed. She had never seen stars with her eyes closed, but that was how it looked.
When the shattering sensations subsided, he made a leisurely meandering path of kisses northward. She felt stunned. And curiously, achingly incomplete.
“Ryan?” Her voice was a broken whisper.
“Mm?” He suckled soothingly at her breast.
“Is...is your...explanation over?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On what you would expect from an encounter like this.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, if I were to make love to you, would you expect a fine physical release similar to the one you just experienced, or would you prefer a deeper, more spiritual joy?”
“You mean, there’s a difference?”
He chuckled, his hand cupping her hip. “Oh, love. There is.”
“I think,” she said, winding her arms around his neck, “that I need a further explanation.”
“It would take a far more serious commitment on your part. A sacrifice, you might call it.”
“What sort of sacrifice?”
“Your heart and soul. Your will. Would you give them up? And your purity—well, I suppose you could say that’s already gone. But your chastity. Technically speaking, that’s still intact. Would you give that up?”
“For the spiritual joy you offer?” She shrugged. “Why not?”
“There’s a more practical consideration. In an actual lovemaking situation, you would lose your virginity.”
“Well, thank God. It has been an unwelcome encumbrance for far too long.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re not concerned that, should you marry, a husband might expect an explanation?”
“I would have to tell him I was hopelessly seduced in the middle of the jungle by a pirate who mistook me for a goddess.”
“That was no mistake.”
Boldly she touched him. There. And smiled wickedly when he caught his breath. “Neither is this.”
“Then you want it. The rest of the demonstration, that is.”
“Yes.” She could not get over the remarkable hardness of him. “Is this painful?” she asked.
“Not...in the way you’d think. It’s quite...normal, I assure you.”
“Then you should definitely continue. What would happen next?”
“Well, since we are about to take a step I never take lightly, I would kiss you some more.” He did so, and now his kisses were more yielding and soft and moist than ever before, flavored with the forbidden essence of passion.
“And then,” he whispered, his lips moving to her ear, “and then I would probably tell you that I love you.”
Time stopped. Movement, heartbeat, wind, water. Everything stopped. Finally Isadora found her voice. “And would you mean it?”
“Probably not in the sense most ladies prefer. It would be a sort of ‘If I don’t have you now I’ll explode’ declaration. As opposed to the ‘I will commit to you for life’ declaration.” He rippled his hand over her breasts. “And of course at this point such distinctions wouldn’t matter much.”
“I don’t suppose they would,” she conceded. But she could not deny that his words had carved out a small, ridiculous, hopeful spot in her heart. “Then what? What would happen next?”
“Hold on to me, and I’ll show you.”
She clung to his shoulders. She wondered if he realized he’d said the exact same words before teaching her to swim. He sank down, probing, pushing and in an age-old motion she’d never been taught but had always known, she raised her hips and wrapped her legs around him. There was a brief pressure, a flash of pain and between clenched teeth he said, “Ah, Christ, I’m sorry, I—”
“I’m not,” she whispered, lost and loving it; lost in his embrace and loving the sensation of being covered by him, filled and possessed by him, their bodies sliding and straining together in a rhythm that was as natural to her as breathing, yet as new to her as the rainbow thrown up by the scintillating light through the waterfall. She could see it beyond his taut shoulders, could open her eyes and see a burst of sun-shot color, and it was a wonder to her, for it was the perfect wordless expression of the fantastic pleasure rising higher and higher within her, filling her chest, her throat, her flushed delighted face and finally coming out in the form of a sound she’d never heard before, a burst of awe and ecstasy, a single note that said, in one rush of joyful clamor, everything that she was feeling, everything that was inside her.
A moment later Ryan went motionless, arms braced and straining, face curiously intent as, for precisely one heartbeat, he stared down at her. And in that brief pulse of time she became swiftly terrified, terrified that it was over, that this moment would end and the magic would disappear, taking the joy with it.
Yet it didn’t happen that way. He spoke her name, no more, and she felt the startling rush of his release. A thrust, a ripple, a spasm. His eyelids lowered to half-mast and his expression mellowed to one of unfettered bliss. Finally he sank down slowly, very slowly, while the long dream stretched out like sunlight across the water, and the illusion was more real to her than life itself. She waited, feeling the pressure of his weight atop her, smelling his scent of spring water, then something dark, musky, evocative. Haunting.
And finally, he spoke. “Oh, Christ. What have I done?”
Even as he swore, he pulled away from her, pulled back, and for the first time since they’d dived into the lagoon, she felt her nakedness, felt ashamed.
“I wanted you to,” she said in a small voice, snatching up her chemise and holding it like a shield in front of her. “A moment ago you looked at me and you saw a goddess. Now what do you see?”
“The biggest mistake of my life.” He hid his gaze as he tugged on his smallclothes and trousers, negligently buttoning them. “I took shameless advantage of you. Made you inebriated and then seduced you.”
“Ryan.” Her voice rang crisply across the water, startling a flock of hyacinth macaws. “What precisely is your point?”
Without even looking at her, he handed her the corset. “I have no idea why women insist on wearing these contraptions.”
She put it on, tugging absently at the front laces, feeling her hypersensitive breasts press against the top edge and wondering how he could so quickly dismiss her. She had experienced the greatest pleasure of her life, and he said it was all a mistake.
She thought suddenly of the whore he’d been with back in Boston. And the one in Rio that first day ashore. Of course. He took all such encounters quite casually.
“I think I understand,” she said, stepping into her petticoats. The damp fabric held the faint scent of their love; she forced herself to ignore it. The blurred elation imparted by the smoking began to dissipate, mist driven back by a cold wind. “When you are inebriated, I’m a goddess. Then when you sober up, I’m a mistake.”
He paused in dressing himself. Reaching out, he brushed his finger over her mortified cheek, once, so tenderly that she wanted to weep. “Ah, Isadora. I’m the one who made the mistake.”