I mean? Is it always so—so intoxicating? Inflaming?’ she asked, daring to meet his gaze now.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never had an accomplice before.’
‘The painting—it’s not damaged, is it?’ Deborah asked anxiously.
Elliot unrolled the canvas and shook his head. ‘See for yourself.’ She came closer to inspect it. Her hair was perfectly straight, hanging well past her shoulders. If he looked, he would see the outline of her breasts under her shirt, for she had not put her coat back on. With a huge effort of restraint, he stopped himself.
‘Such an ugly man,’ Deborah said softly after a while of staring at the portrait. ‘I would not like to have this on my wall. Is it valuable?’
‘It’s by Velázquez. I should hope so.’
‘Will you sell it, then?’
Elliot began to roll the canvas back up, carefully this time. ‘Yes,’ he said tersely, ‘I’ll sell it.’
Deborah opened her mouth to ask what he did with the money, then thought better of it. Tiredness washed over her. Her shoulders began to ache. Anticlimax in every sense weighed like a heavy blanket, muffling her. ‘It’s late,’ she said wearily.
‘Yes.’ Elliot hesitated. He was edgy with frustration. She had been so aroused, he was sure he could easily rekindle the flame between them, but something held him back. Is it always like this? ‘It wasn’t the housebreaking that made me turn to you like that,’ he said, running his hand down the smooth cap of her hair, ‘it was you. Ever since we met, I’ve wanted you. You must know that, Deborah.’
She jerked her head away. ‘It will be light soon.’
‘I see.’ He didn’t see at all. Rebuffed, puzzled by the extreme swing in her mood, and too tired in the anticlimax to make sense of it, Elliot picked his hat up and, shrugging into his greatcoat, tucked the painting into a large inside pocket. ‘Did it work?’ he asked. ‘Did it do as you hoped, banish the black clouds, make you feel alive?’
Deborah smiled tremulously. ‘While it lasted. I shall keep a look out for reports of our heinous crime.’
‘And paste them in a keepsake book?’
‘Something like that.’
He kissed the fluttering pulse on her wrist, telling himself that her vulnerability was simply exhaustion. ‘Goodnight, Deborah.’
She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘Goodbye, Elliot. Be safe.’
The door closed softly behind him. The parlour clock struck three. Only three. Wearily, Deborah picked up her man’s coat and made her way up the creaky wooden stairs to her bed.
Outside, Elliot made his way home by a circuitous route through alleys and mews. She was like a chameleon, changing so quickly that he could not keep up with her. Her kisses. He groaned and the muscles in his stomach contracted. Such a delightful mixture of raw passion and innocence. Hot, burning kisses that even now made his blood surge and pound, yet they were neither knowing nor experienced. Deborah kissed with the savagery of a lion cub.
Elliot stood in the shadow of a stable building as the watch passed by, informing the empty street that all was well. It had frightened her, her passion; she had been far too eager to blame it on the extraordinary circumstances, as if by doing so she could distance herself from it. What kind of marriage had she had with that bastard of a fortune hunter?
He stepped out of the mews and made his way across Russell Square, letting himself in silently. A candle stood ready in the hall, reminding him of the clatter of the candlestick from the table at Deborah’s house. The evening had been full of surprises. He should not have allowed her to come down that rope, but the sight of her dangling over him had been …
Mounting the stairs, he tried to put if from his mind. He was exhausted. Carefully stashing the painting, he willed himself to think of the chain of events he must set in train to dispose of it, but as he climbed into bed, the memory of Deborah—her mouth, her hands, her breasts, those long legs, that pert derrière—climbed in with him. He was hard. Persistently hard. Lying back against the cool sheets, Elliot surrendered to the inevitable.
Deborah jerked awake, exhausted from lurid dreams in which she was always in the wrong place, with the wrong person, in the wrong attire, at the wrong time. Dreams in which she was endlessly chasing the shadow of the man who had made a shadow of her. Dreams in which no one could see her, no one would acknowledge her, in which she existed only to herself. When she spoke, the words were soundless. Time and again, she tumbled into the room where he was, only to have Jeremy look straight through her.
In her dreams, she was sick from her failures, sick from knowing that no matter how hard she tried, she would fail again. The familiar weight of that failure made the physical effort of rising from her bed a mammoth task. No amount of telling herself that it was just a dream, nor any reminder that it had no basis in reality, could shift that lumpen, leaden feeling, for the truth was that Deborah believed she had failed, and it had been her fault.
Long experience had shown her that hiding under the covers and willing fresh dreamless sleep had no effect whatsoever, save to nourish the headache which lurked just under the base of her skull. Slowly, with the care of a very old woman afraid of breaking brittle bones, Deborah climbed out of bed and went through her morning ablutions, blanking her mind against the lingering coils of her monochrome nightmares, forcibly filling her head with colourful images from her adventures last night.
She winced as she soothed a cooling lotion on the chafe marks at her knees and thighs, but as she folded away the male clothing she had worn, out of sight of the daily help, her mood slowly lifted. By the time she sat down to take coffee at her desk, she was smiling to herself. Bella Donna, that vengeful, voluptuous creature of the night, would not be confined to history after all. At last, after several barren months, she had her inspiration for the next story.
What would Elliot think if he knew he was her muse? Deborah paused in the act of sharpening her pen as a lurid image of herself atop the hall table, her legs entwined around him, flooded her body with heat. Closing her eyes, shuddering at the memory of his lips, his hands, the rough grate of his jaw on her skin, she was astounded at the speed and intensity of her arousal. Had the painting not fallen, had she not fetched a light and broken the mood, she would have given herself to him. As she recalled raking her nails on his skin, urgently pressing herself against the hard length of his manhood, she turned cold. What on earth had come over her?
It would be a salve, to persuade herself that she had become so caught up in Bella Donna’s character as to have forgotten her own, but it would not be the truth. Bella Donna took her pleasures in a calculated way. Bella Donna used and discarded men as she used and discarded her various guises when she had no further use for them. Last night, Deborah had wanted, needed, desired with a purity of feeling which left no room for anything else. It frightened her. The intensity of her feelings, her lack of control, terrified her. She did not want any of it.
Ever since we met, I’ve wanted you, Elliot had said. But the circumstances in which they met were coloured each time by danger. It was surely that which made him want her, as it made her want him? Only the thrill of defying the rules, the edge which recklessness and daring gave to fear, could explain the strength of their mutual desire in its wake. Nothing else, surely, could explain why she had forgotten all the inhibitions her marriage had taught her and allowed an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed to drive her.
No, last night, she had not been Bella Donna, but neither had she been Deborah. She could not reconcile that vivid, bold creature with the one sitting at her desk in her grey gown in her equally grey life. But then, wasn’t that what she had wanted from last night’s adventure? To shed her skin, to step out of the tedium of her day-to-day existence, to escape from herself