Falling Stars Read Online Free PDF

idealists generally are—he’d half-believed still.
    During the fortnight preceding Julius’s wedding, the clear night skies had been filled with star showers. On one such night, a week after Christina’s arrival, she had slipped out to the garden to meet him. She was warm, flushed with dancing, and one corn silk tendril had slipped from its pin to dangle at her ear. He’d brushed it back with his thumb, and she’d shivered. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he’d caught the flash of a star, tom from its moorings, taking fire as it plummeted to earth. The fiery journey would consume it, he knew—as love would consume him.
    If it was a warning, it came too late. He was already bending close to brush his mouth against her ear, and trembling at his own daring. She trembled, too, but that was all. She didn’t push him away as he’d feared. And so he took courage and wrapped his arms about her and, whispering love, touched his lips to her silken cheek. Then he breathed her name, and brought his mouth to hers... and died of happiness and lived of it, in that first sweet, stolen kiss.
    The chime of the hall clock yanked him back to the present, and to the pair of fair-haired angels gazing innocently at him. “I’d better say good night,” he said, “or I shall be very late for dinner.”
     
    ***
     
    Christina wore the diamond pendant Arthur had given her on their first anniversary, and wished she hadn’t. The cold stone burnt her flesh. There were moments when she could almost believe this was because it had caught fire from the one flashing opposite in Marcus’s neckcloth. There were other moments when she suspected the heat came from elsewhere: the smoldering gaze that slid from time to time to the pendant dangling between her breasts, and seemed to brand her deeper each time.
    It was the gown, she told herself. It was too risque. Yet it wasn’t, either, for countless other gowns were cut as low or lower, and thoroughly respectable women wore them. Fashionable gowns were part of her new-won freedom, part of the pact she’d made with herself during the last months of mourning. She’d kept that pact and assumed control of her life, extricating her children, her home, her activities, and her wardrobe from the suffocating grasp of her sisters-in-law.
    The struggle had been long and painful. She was entitled to enjoy her victory and her freedom.
    She wished she’d worn a shawl.
    She wished she were not so conscious of the man opposite. Every time he looked her way—as he must, when they conversed—the vast dining room grew correspondingly smaller and hotter, while her throat constricted and her muscles tensed another degree. By the time dessert was served, she was taut as an over-wound watch spring, ticking off the seconds until she and Penny could withdraw and leave the men to their port.
    When Penny finally did signal that it was time to leave, Christina sprang up from her chair like a jack-in-the-box.
    She had just stepped over the threshold and was drawing a breath of relief when she heard Marcus’s voice behind her: “You are not going to make me sit and swill that awful stuff, Julius. I never could abide port, any more than I could the tiresome rite of exchanging the same bawdy stories our ancestors told each other six centuries ago.”
    “What you could never abide,” said Julius, “was keeping away from the ladies.”
    “Which is only logical,” came the light answer, very close behind Christina now. “They’re infinitely more aesthetic than a room full of drunken men.”
    He’d moved quietly, and far more quickly than she, Christina discovered, because he was at her side even as he uttered the last words.
    “What enigmatic name, I wonder, have the modistes given the color of your gown?” he asked, dropping his voice. “I should call it russet, but that isn’t fanciful enough. Terre d’Inde, perhaps.”
    “I believe she called it brick red,” Christina said.
    “I remember you always in