Page 51 of Ravishing Camille
“Don’t go,” she pleaded with him.
He glanced over his shoulder. She lay on the bed like a cat, her hand to the midnight blue coverlet and her mellow eyes inviting his return.
“I think Brisbane should be back with the ice and—” He strode toward his sitting room, anywhere to get away from the manic temptation to consume her.
“Pierce?”
He stopped and should not have. One hand to the door frame, he stared at the floor and saw only the urge to turn back and take everything she offered.
“Don’t you think I should have a proper education in the arts of making love?”
“A woman should be taught them by a man who adores her.”
“I agree.”
And three raps came at the far door.
* * *
She consoled herself that he wouldn’t make love to her. He first would minister to her swollen cheek. Brisbane’s tray full of broth and tea and brandy had included the chipped ice and wool cloths to wrap them in.
As Pierce approached with it, she turned to her back and closed her eyes.
His application was gentle.
Her appreciation great. She put her own hand to the compress and sighed. “I can do this.”
“Do you feel like eating?”
“I’d like the brandy. Then the broth.”
“I’ll set a table for us here.”
She lifted the corner of the cloth and peeked at him at his duties over one small table in the corner. “Will you tell me about the woman you wished to marry?”
He stilled and turned his gaze to hers. After the moment’s pause, he strode to her and reached out his hand to help her up. She went, clutching his robe close about her.
They sat at the small round Chippendale table and were well into the brandy and then hot broth before he spoke. “May Macfarlane was twenty-two when I first met her five years ago. She was Lee’s young sister, his only sibling. At her father’s insistence, she was educated in Western history and algebra from age five. But she also had a traditional education in the Chinese arts of the fan, calligraphy and ancient Chinese literature. Her father was the oldest son of the Scotsman Ian Macfarlane, who’d gone to Hong Kong in eighteen-twelve to run gunpowder and opium. May had lived in the Shanghai British Quarter all her life, but she spoke Mandarin and Ningpo, the local dialect. She was also fluent in English and French. She could add a column of thirty figures in a minute and predict your profit or loss just by asking you when the source products were due to arrive.
“The first day I met her, she was pruning chrysanthemums from her private garden, singing an old Chinese opera ditty. She would have managed the Macfarlane factories equally with Lee. Their father decreed it. Lee had never quarreled with his decision. She was a strong woman with a determination to be her brother’s equal. Any man’s. I respected that. Valued it.” He caught her gaze. “I had asked to marry her before she became ill. It’s ironic that she died of cholera. For years, she had worked to modernize the water supply and sewerage system of the city.”
Camille could understand Pierce’s admiration. “I hope she loved you.”
He nodded but his attention was on his tea cup. “She did. Not as many women would think of love. But then she was not like others. She was part this, part that, everything female, yet nothing like any other. She was of the Chinese past, of the British present and of a future for China that she wanted, but few others can envision. She wanted equality for women. A parliament. And education for the peasants. None of that is remotely a possibility for China now or, if you ask me, for decades to come. I loved her, but not…”
Camille searched his features and waited.
“Not as you might expect. I saw her as my equal. One who would be my partner. But I worried that she might never accept me as I completely was. A man of the West. Of America and England and France. She told me she was born in the sign of the snake. I was a horse. We could not work well. We would argue.”
Camille idly stirred her broth. “And did you agree with her assessment?”
He sat back and inhaled. “I did. She was aggressive. Whereas I love the journey, to conquer the road. In any communication, I value the discussion, the debate, the arbitration more than I do the triumph. Lately I wish for fewer decisions about a multitude of projects. I wish for fewer details and more simplicity.”
That gave her pause. For that was precisely what the two of them were doing here. Discussing the way forward. Toward simplicity. One good solution. She surrendered to it, aware it was best.
“And when she died, I let her go with a grief that marked my own death to the knowledge that I was best working with Westerners and only tangentially with Chinese. I didn’t know it then, but I do now. I was preparing to come home.”
“And will you return?”
