“I am the same man I was in the garden,” he said into the silence of the bedroom, his grin fading to something solemn, almost severe. “My limbs move as they did then, my lungs fill with air exactly the same, and my heart…” He paused as if to swallow, continuing lower, “My heart beats constant and true, and if you believe nothing else, Lily Stump, believe this: my heart has changed not at all since the garden.”
She stared up at him. His words were beautiful, but she’d had nearly a lifetime’s distrust of the upper classes. Such a thing wasn’t vanquished in moments.
He nodded at her silence as if she’d made a rebuttal—and then he shrugged off his coat. “Did you fear Caliban?”
She shook her head slowly.
He flipped open the buttons on his beautiful waistcoat. “Caliban and Apollo are the same.”
“No,” she husked. “Caliban is dead.”
“Do you truly believe that?” he asked nearly indulgently. “I am Caliban and I am Apollo. We are the same.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He stripped off his waistcoat.
“There never was a Caliban to begin with.” She felt sad, as if she truly mourned for that gentle giant, that enigmatic mute man she’d apparently made up from whole cloth.
He actually laughed, the cad. “Do you think I pretended to dig holes and hack down trees? I am Caliban and I am Apollo and I am Smith.” He pulled his shirt over his head, laying his chest bare. “Is this not the same body you saw emerge from the pond?”
She couldn’t help it. She did now what she hadn’t been able to do then—she touched his chest, running her fingertips lightly over his shoulders, down into the wedge of short hairs between his nipples.
He took her hand and moved it so her palm lay over his left nipple. “My heart beats here,” he said, pressing until she could feel the steady thump. “The same heart, the same beat as in the garden.”
He lifted his hand, but she kept her palm there, feeling the pulse beneath his warm skin. Slowly she curled her fingers until she could trace lightly around his nipple. It puckered beneath her touch, a tiny brown bead, and she felt a sudden urge to feel it beneath her tongue. Instead she raised her other hand and circled the corresponding nipple as well, fascinated by how his flesh responded. It wasn’t until she heard the sharp inhalation that she looked up and realized what she was doing to him.
His head was thrown back, his throat rippling as he swallowed again and again, and his mighty shoulders, so strong, so broad, actually trembled at her simple touch.
Her being lit with awe that she’d moved such a powerful man. That he literally shuddered beneath her fingertips.
“Caliban,” she whispered. “Can I call you that?”
He tilted his head down to look at her, his brown eyes half-lidded. “Caliban, Apollo, Smith, even Romeo, it matters not. I am the man that I am and always will be.”
She nodded at that, for with this she could at least agree: what she called him had never been the problem.
He arched away from her suddenly, and she was forced to let her hands fall. “Let me show you.” He stood and stripped out of shoes, stockings, breeches, and smallclothes, until he was entirely nude. He spread wide his arms, and turned before her. “I am as God made me, no more, no less. Take me as I am.”
He completed his turn, standing proud before her, and she couldn’t help but like what she saw. He was tall and well-made, with a narrow waist and muscular thighs. The hair on his chest was repeated in a knot around his navel and traveled down in a thin line into the tangle about his groin where his cock had half-risen, thick and straight and bold.
He was masculine, not beautiful. Compelling. But more importantly, with the stripping of his clothes he’d discarded all that she disliked and become merely the man she’d met in the garden.
She held out her hand. “Caliban, Apollo, Smith, Romeo, you. Come to me, you that you are.”
He took her hand, but instead of climbing back on the bed, he drew her up instead. “I have an urge,” he murmured in her ear as he drew her against his nude body, “to make you as I am. Then, truly, shall we be equals.”
So he patiently unlaced, untied, and unclothed her, his fingers working deftly on delicate material and tight cords. Reverently he drew off her bodice, her skirt, her petticoats, her stays, her chemise, her slippers, and laid them neatly aside until he knelt at her feet to unroll her stockings. She placed her palm on his shoulder as he set her foot on his knee and untied her garter. Her stockings were her best, but even so they’d a mended hole at the heel. He unrolled them as carefully as if they’d been lace, pausing to kiss her instep as he pulled them off. Then he set that foot down and picked up her other, drawing her so close that his bent head nearly brushed her bare mons.
ok her shoulders, barely refraining from shaking her. “I’m the same man I was when I labored in the garden. The same man you were so kind to when I was mute.”
“No, you’re not!” Her breasts were heaving now with the force of her ire. “That man was of my world. He was simple and… and kind and he wasn’t a bloody aristocrat!”
She balled her fist and hit his chest with the last word.
“You don’t know,” he choked. “You don’t know who I am.”
“Then tell me!”