Page 13 of The Sea Siren of Broadwater Bottom
In fact, when he went to present his translation, he found that Thomas Postlethwaite, the Master of Trinity College, had also turned up.
He felt queasy, but read out what he had written, both the Greek verse and his English translation.
When he finished, both men remained silent. Then Dr. Postlethwaite stood and asked if he might take the manuscript with him. All Edward wanted was to hurry back to his rooms and throw the cursed thing straight into the fire, but he could hardly refuse his head of house.
The next thing he knew, all the fellows of Trinity College had read his detested work, then it was all the fellows of every college, and then half the undergraduates as well. And everyone, absolutely everyone, was pestering him about when he was going to publish it.
Edward flipped a page, and noticed that Elissa had marked a passage toward the back with a slip of paper. He shuddered when he saw it was the triumphant ending, which was his own original verse. This was the section he hated the most. Even now, he couldn’t stand the sight of it. He shut the book a bit more sharply than he had intended and slid it back into place on the shelf.
Some papers on her desk caught his eye. He realized with a start that she was working on a translation of the Roman poet Catullus:
Let us live,my Lesbia, and love,
And value at one farthing the talk of crabbed old men.
Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has set,
Remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then another thousand…
It was obviouslya work in progress. Not only was it incomplete, but many times a word was scratched out, or even a whole line, its preferred replacement scrawled in the margin.
But even in this rough form, Elissa’s talent all but burst off the page. Anyone could perform a literal translation of the words, but she had captured Catullus’s voice, his unique ability to be ardent and irreverent at the same time.
He thought of the ride home, and how nimbly she had deployed classical quotations in order to tease him. Talking to her had made him feel exhilarated in a way he hadn’t felt in years. She had always been clever, but he was starting to suspect she might bebrilliant. How he wished he could talk to her, just for an hour.
Although… an hour would never be long enough. An afternoon? A week? A month?
A lifetime?
Gad, he needed to stop his thoughts from running away with him. But then there was the fact that she was translatingCatullus. Although this particular work was a conventional love poem, many of Catullus’s works were salacious in the extreme. Had she read those? What had she thought of them? Had the same becoming blush she’d worn this afternoon stained her cheeks as she read the more lascivious passages?
His hand itched to leaf through the pile of papers on her desk to see if he could discern the answers to his burning questions. Instead, he curled his fingers into a fist. He needed to stop snooping. He spun away from her desk, but this turned out to be even worse, because now he was facing herbed. He knew he shouldn’t, but he found himself crossing the room. He gently lifted her pillow and brought it to his nose, and the scent of honeysuckle washed over him.
Suddenly all he could picture was Elissa lying on this bed, wearing a chemise even more transparent than the sodden dress he’d seen her in that afternoon. Images began to flash across his mind—the rosy outlines of her peaked nipples. Her gorgeous legs as she had slipped into the pond. The way her body had fit against his as he swam them to shore. Her delicious curves just inches from his longing hands as he settled her on his lap. The sweet weight of her arms around his neck—trusting and timid in equal measures. And now he was picturing her naked on this bed, her red hair a riot of curls beneath her, and then he was imagining himself naked on the bed with her, his hands cupping her delicate breasts, their mouths tangling together, her legs parting for him as his body covered hers…
That was when he heard it—the faint but unmistakable sound of a splash from the room next door.
The room in which Elissa was bathing.
Now all he could picture was Elissa groaning with pleasure as she leaned back, naked, in that tub of warm water set before a roaring fire. And the knowledge that she really was naked on the other side of that wall…
Suddenly he could take no more. He loosened the falls of his borrowed trousers as he crossed the room, seizing a handkerchief. He shoved the trousers down just enough to pull his cock out as he sank into Elissa’s chair. As he began stroking himself, he again caught the scent of honeysuckle.
He knew this was wrong. Not only because abusing himself in a young lady’s bedroom (in her favorite reading chair, for Christ’s sake!) was the height of disgraceful behavior. But because Elissa St. Cyr was wrong for him in every possible way.
Which was not to say that he agreed with Elissa’s mother that no man would want her. Elissa St. Cyr wasdelightful. Were he the second son, with a little more latitude, he’d have asked for permission to court her already.
But he wasn’t the second son. He was the heir to an earldom, and his family expected him to marry the daughter of a peer. Someone with impeccable bloodlines and a large dowry. Someone who had been born to the life he was expected to live, and whose connections would enhance his family’s influence. Someone who would make the perfect hostess, who would never set a toe out of line.
He absolutely could not marry the penniless daughter of his tutor, a girl who went around with pond weed in her hair. A girl who had never attended a proper ball in her life, much less planned one. A girl who could not so much as read a book without instigating an elaborate series of catastrophes.
It did not matter one whit that she might be the only woman in the British Isles with whom he could have a meaningful conversation about the things that really interested him. It didn’t matter how beautiful she was, nor did it matter that she could not have looked more like his feminine ideal if some ancient god had sculpted her from clay and brought her to life especially for him, from her red hair to her delicate-yet-tantalizing curves to the delightful, open-book expressions she was prone to making. It didn’t even matter that she had made him laugh so hard he cried, that she had made him feel happier than he had felt in—
God. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d felt that happy.
