Fire Along the Sky
Page 209

She and Simon had come deep into the forest to bathe in a little pond that Lily had always favored. It was cool here in the grove of beeches and white pine, as cool a place as there was to be found on an August afternoon, outside the caves at Lake in the Clouds.
Thinking of the mountain generally produced a wave of homesickness in Lily, but today the heat took even that out of her. This pond—as children they had called it the frog pond—was only a quarter hour's walk from their cabin. She could come here as often as she pleased, with or without Simon.
Her husband. Sometimes she said that word to herself, just to hear it. She had a husband; she was a married woman. An idea so very odd that it made her turn and hide her face in the blanket.
Not that she had any regrets, Lily told herself firmly. She had married a good man, a reliable man, a man worth loving. A man who made her breath catch in her throat and her heart gallop, who made her laugh. And if there was something missing, maybe it was something she didn't really need anyway.
Lily had been thinking about it for a long time now, and she had come to the conclusion that the tenderness she had felt toward Nicholas Wilde—something that was absent when she looked at Simon—had less to do with love than it did with pity. If Nicholas ever came back to Paradise, something Lily tried to imagine now and then, she had the idea that it would be far harder for him than it would be for her.
Simon worried about Nicholas, she could almost smell it at times when she caught him looking at her in a certain way. But he would not raise the subject, out of pride and most certainly out of fear at what she might say. And because he was wise enough to let sleeping dogs lie.
Lily raised her head from the blanket and watched Simon floating on his back like a log. A strangely dappled log, Lily observed. Stripped down, Simon presented an odd picture. He was darkly tanned on face and neck and arms, and since he had been working without his shirt—something he had hesitated to do at first—his back and chest were now almost as dark.
But from the waist down he was milk white, because he had refused to give up his breeks for a breechclout, even in the unbearable August heat. Lily teased him about this unmercifully, but he never wavered.
“I've shaved my beard for you,” he would say. “But I will keep the other bits I hold dear out of the public eye. I don't like the way Missy Parker looks at me as it is.”
His modesty surprised her and at the same time it was endearing. And it was true that women watched him. Lydia Ratz had stopped Lily in the village shortly before the wedding, not to ask about Stiles, as Lily had been dreading, but to voice an opinion.
“You never were mean, Lily Bonner, not like some. I hope you won't be the kind who won't let her husband dance with other women. He's a good dancer, is your Simon.”
“As long as it's only dancing you're talking about,” Lily had answered with her sweetest smile. “And dancing where I can see you, forbye.”
She used some of Simon's expressions, now and then, because they amused her and it irritated him, though he tried to hide it. They spoke quite a lot about his past in Scotland.
“Did you never wear a kilt, then?” she asked him, and realized too late that she had invited a history lecture. If she protested he would remind her that she was half Scots herself, and plough ahead with his story.
There were benefits to be had to letting Simon go on with these occasional lessons. While he talked of the indignities visited upon the Scots by vengeful England, including the banning of the kilt, she could watch him walking back and forth, the play of muscles in his throat, the broad turn of his wrist when he raised a hand to make a point.
Sometimes she wondered if being married had damaged her ability to reason. Certainly she found herself contemplating things so strange that she had no words to describe them. And neither was it necessary, she told herself firmly. There were other things in the world beyond the physical fact of her husband's presence, the mechanics of the male body, and the things they did together.
Important, interesting, engaging things. Except it was hard to keep her mind on any of them just now, in the first weeks of her marriage.
Watching Simon float, Lily wondered if she could make sense of her thoughts if she picked up paper and pencil and let herself draw what she was seeing. It was an idea that came to her quite often, and every time she was startled, as she was now, to feel herself blushing so fiercely that she felt it deep in her belly.
Lily sat up suddenly and pulled her chemise about herself. “It's getting late!”
Simon opened one eye and peered at her without changing his position. “Late for what? Are you lonely over there, Lily my love?”
“Late in the afternoon,” Lily said. “Late in the day. Late for tea, late for supper. Late because in case you didn't realize, my mother's threatening to make a cake.”
“I like cake,” Simon said, his arms moving through the water in long sweeps as he propelled his way to the bank.
“Not my mother's cakes,” Lily said. “Even the pigs have a hard time working up enthusiasm for my mother's cakes. The only person who ever choked down a whole piece—” She stopped herself.
Simon came to stand next to the blanket, shaking himself like a dog so that the cold water rained over her. She should scold him, but now that she had raised the topic of her brother all the playfulness in her had drained away.
“Your brother,” Simon said, falling down beside her. “Shall we talk of Daniel now?”