A Dangerous Beauty (17 page)

The girl almost wailed. “I am not.”

“No. Of course not,” Rosamunde said, her stomach unclenching with the silly exchange.

“Wha’da ya want?” the chubby little nymph asked baldly.

God love children and all their brutal honesty. “My brother Phinn. Is he here?”

“Ohhh, Lord Barton, the handsomerest of them.”

“The handsomest.”

“That’s wha’ I said, silly.”

Rosamunde pursed her lips to keep from laughing. “Is he here?”

“No.”

Rosamunde’s heart plummeted.

“I wouldn’t be allowed to get into trouble upstairs, as me mam says, if Lord Barton weren’t shooting grouse.”

Her heart climbed back on its perch. She had to ask. “My father?”

“He’s in Lon’on town with some of yer brothers. I wish I had a brother. Or maybe even a sister if she didn’t take my doll.”

“Yes, well, brothers can be a menace too. They have a penchant for drowning dolls. Take my word for—”

A tall figure rounded the doorway.
Phinn
. She drank in the sight of his laughing brown eyes and burnished gold hair that had darkened with age.

He looked at the little girl. “They only drown them when a sister melts their tin soldiers.”

“Phinn,” she breathed.

He squatted. “Emma, tell your mother”—he mouthed ‘Cook’ to her—“the lady who loves her poppyseed cakes more than anyone is here, and I’ll bet she gives you some too.”

The little girl disappeared and Phinn took two long strides and stood before her, looking at her.

They had always been the closest of all the siblings. Her father had said she was the male version of Phinn in reverse colors. Her black hair to his blond. Her pale blue green eyes to his brown. But they had the same heart, the same love of adventure, the same love for each other.

He grabbed her in his arms and she squeezed back her tears while basking in the comfort of his love. He smelled of plucked bird feathers and old leather, just like heaven.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered into her hair. “I don’t think I knew how much until I saw you in church. I’m sorry I never tried to see you. I would’ve if I hadn’t thought it might just kill Father.”

She nodded her understanding. The back of her throat choked with emotion and she couldn’t force any words past the constriction.

“Are you well?” he asked, refusing to let her leave his arms. “What’s wrong?”

She swallowed hard. “I think you know I wouldn’t have come unless I was desperate. It’s Luc. Luc St. Aubyn. The duke,” she stuttered. “He’s been unwell, like the others who took ill after the wedding. Did the sickness spread here, too?”

“No. We were fortunate. But our neighbors weren’t so luck—”

She interrupted. “Phinn, have you heard of any blindness?”

He paused to think. “Yes, maybe”—his hand tightened on hers—“What? Has he gone blind, then? The Duke of Helston?”

“You mustn’t tell anyone. But, Phinn, I need your help. I’ve got to go back to him. I’m begging you to help me find anyone else who’s been afflicted and find out if the blindness goes away.”

Only someone with relentless determination matching her own would immediately agree without further questions. He steered her toward the French doors in the adjacent morning room. She gave him a questioning look.

“You don’t really think I can take you out the front
door, do you? Why, I’m certain Shepherd is guarding the gates with his life. The old man actually
smiled
when he found me. Didn’t even know the old grouch had any teeth left. He’d flay my hide if he knew I was letting you escape.”

They sprinted across the wet grass and Phinn ordered fresh horses. They mounted and each turned from the raised block before Phinn promised to come to her by nightfall.

“Rosa,” he said from his gray gelding, “You called him
Luc
.”

He had never dared to question her eight years ago, and she was surprised he dared to question her now. She held up her chin. “And I call you Phinn.”

He smiled broadly. “So you do.” He patted the horse’s neck to calm the animal. “You know one day, you’re going to have to tell me what really happened. I never did—”

She interrupted. “And you never shall.”

He was staring at the horizon, and his nod was almost imperceptible. “You’re as hardheaded as Father, you know.” He turned to her then, his warm whiskey-colored eyes trying to cover the pain of losing the sibling he loved most.

She looked away. “Please don’t speak of it. I can’t bear it. He shan’t ever forgive me for going against his will. And I shan’t forgive him for turning away from me. For making a mockery of all those years I thought he loved me.”

“He’s never stopped loving you, Rosa. He’s just as stubborn as you are. And you never wanted forgive
ness. You’ve certainly never made an attempt at reconciliation.”

“Because Father would never meet me halfway, you blockhead.”

“I’ve never known you not to try for something you wanted, Rosamunde. What has happened to you? You’re not the strong-minded female I once knew.”

“Or perhaps I’ve learned the futility of attempting the impossible. I’m not willing to fight for something I cannot win. A body can only stand so much rejection in one lifetime.”

He snorted. “And yet you were willing to come here, to face him, to ask Father’s help just now.”

She tried to stare down her brother and failed. She looked away, flustered.

“You never were any good at hiding anything from me,” he continued. “Does
he
love you?”

The very question had burned a path in her mind these last two days. “Why should I bore us both with an answer since you can read minds?”

He chuckled. “Poor man.”

“Remind me why I like you.”

“Because of my good looks and charm. And because of my humility, of course.”

“You’re about as modest as a prized peacock. And by the by, are you losing your hair?”

He sputtered. “I am
not
losing my hair. Why, I—”

“Got you,” she shouted. And before he could muster a retort, she galloped down the drive, cutting across the vast lawn like the old days, Phinn blistering her
back with a plethora of pithy names. It was wonderfully comforting.

There was no question he would scour the rest of the countryside for her. For that was what family did for one another. She had nearly forgotten the sense of security familial love brought. It made her throat ache with repressed emotion.

The sensation did not cease until five o’clock in the afternoon, when a note arrived from Phinn. She had kept herself busy organizing the household staff, who were trickling back into Amberley as threats of the plague proved false. And she had bathed, gone to the garden, and arranged flowers for Ata and Luc, anything to avoid his room before she had an answer.

Rosamunde picked up the vase for his room and rushed up the stairs while reading the note, nearly tripping the two footmen who were easing a copper hipbath from his room. She stumbled inside, only to find Grace reading aloud, sitting arched and elegant, a book in one hand, Luc’s hand in her other. Rosamunde nearly dropped the vase.

Forgiveness,
n.
A stratagem to throw an offender off his guard and catch him red-handed in his next offense.

—The Devil’s Dictionary, A. Bierce

T
he beautiful widow paused in mid-sentence and searched her face. “Rosamunde, we have been waiting for you.”

We
. How she loathed the word. She had had no idea how exclusionary it was until this very moment. “Yes, well, I didn’t want to intrude until I had something to relate.”

Both of them turned and again she noticed how handsome they were together. His barely contained raw power and her petite prettiness. She swallowed.

“And?” they asked simultaneously.

“I’ve a note from my brother.” She forced her eyes back to the paper. “He mentions Auggie Phelps’s
friend, Theodora Tandy, who apparently became blind and is recovering.” She emphasized. “Her sight is improving.”

“He has seen her? He knows this is certain?” His voice was hoarse with strain.

Rosamunde stared at Grace’s staying hand on his chest. He was like a caged panther, trying to escape the confines of his comfortable prison.

Grace’s calming voice floated in the air, “Wait, let her finish.”

“He’s on his way to see her himself. He says he’ll send an express as soon as possible.”

Luc sank into the pillows at his back. He was at least acting like the black devil he had been in the past. She glanced at his hands and noticed the redness had lessened.

Grace looked from Luc to Rosamunde with a pained expression and stood up before straightening his pillows. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll look in on Ata and then rest.”

He grasped toward Grace and she placed her hand in his. “Thank you,” he said warmly.

“It was my pleasure,” she murmured and then brushed by Rosamunde’s skirts on her way out the door.

Rosamunde felt like a gawky scarecrow, all angles and elbows to Grace’s petite soft curves and blonde curls. Oh, what was wrong with her? Was she to always fall in love with someone who favored another? This was everything ridiculous.

Grace Sheffey could give him an heir. In a sudden
rush she could see them hosting enormous, elegant garden parties and picnics, with two or three perfectly dressed children following a prim governess. Her cursed imagination even conjured up a small spaniel gamboling behind, biting at sticks that would be thrown and retrieved.

Rosamunde could only drive him to distraction. She could not deliver Ata’s wish in swaddling clothing. She could not be the proper duchess of legendary popularity Ata would like.

Rosamunde would vastly prefer to walk the rocky beaches of Kenneggy and Praa Sands, or follow hounds on a scent, or climb mountains, swim lakes—anything but the tedium of hosting fashionable events and becoming a
tonnish
patroness. It was impossible. Why, no one would even come to any events with her name on the invitation.

And to make it thoroughly worse, she had had the audacity to beg him to make love to her. And he had taken pity on her and then condescended to do precisely what she asked. It had only made her realize all the more how much she had gone ahead and foolishly fallen in love with him. Now she would be forced to walk away from the only man who had ever shown her joy.

He flung his arm over his eyes.

“Can you see anything yet?” she whispered, her feet still glued just inside the doorway.

“No, not even a shadow. Come here,” he commanded.

She crossed to his side, and placed the bouquet on the bedside table.

“What have you brought?” His nose twitched. “A funereal arrangement?”

“Come, there is hope,” she urged. “Remember my brother’s note. And you must show—”

“If you say ‘patience,’ I may have to kill you.”

There was something about the horrid urge to laugh that was similar to the urge to cry uncontrollably. “No. I was about to say that you must show a bit more tolerance toward your visitors or they might think you want to kill them.” His lips pursed in annoyance or humor, she dared not guess which one.

“Is there anything taciturn in that bouquet of yours?”

“No, the teasel wasn’t in bloom. But,” she wondered if she dared, “there’s a bit of fumitory for spleen.”

His lips twisted. “I suppose I deserved that. What else?”

“Laurel for perseverance—”

He interrupted, “Another deadly boring trait, except perhaps when facing privateers or the French.”

“And gloxinia signifying a proud spirit.” She dared not tell him the rest.

“And what is that familiar sweetness?”

“The tuberoses, perhaps?”

“And you chose those for…” His question hung in the air painfully.

“Um, for your pleasure.”

“My pleasure? What in hell does that mean? What sort of pleasure?”

“Oh all right,
dangerous
pleasure.”

“Ah, vastly more entertaining,” he drawled.

She thanked the Lord the rare hothouse red tulip, which was a declaration of love, had no scent.

“Any more?”

She blanched. “I’ll be forced to add hemlock and nightshade if you ask me any more questions.”

“It’s such a comfort to have you so near.”

“I try,” she replied archly.

“Rosamunde, you’ve never said why you love”—her heart lurched—“flowers so.”

“Because they don’t plague me with demands and questions, I suppose. And,” she hesitated, “they’re a gift of peace and beauty in a sometimes ugly world. They’re a reminder of the possibility of rebirth each spring. And they can sometimes thrive in harsh conditions with little care.”

He kept silent.

“Would you like me to read to you?” she asked. “Grace left the book here.”

He pursed his lips. His blank immobile gaze toward the ceiling left her discomforted. She opened the book to the marked page and uttered a line or two of prose. He leaned over and fumbled before gripping her arm.

“No,” he said harshly.

“I had thought you would like…Grace read to—”

“That was different,” he interrupted her.

“I see,” she said, not seeing at all. Or perhaps, she saw very well. A bubble of hurt arose within her.

“No, you don’t see.”

“No, I think I do,” she countered.

“Look, Rosamunde, I won’t have your pity. No, don’t say a word. I can hear your sympathy in every syllable.”

“That’s absurd,” she raised her voice. “I of all people do not pity you. It’s just the reverse. Don’t you think I see and hear it? ‘Poor Rosamunde, she only has her flowers, she only has her sister, and a ghastly dead husband who left her without a farthing and a father who refuses to acknowledge her. Oh, and yes, she even had to beg me to touch her.’” She stopped and felt lightheaded. There, she had said it. Everything that should not be said.

“Beg me again,” he said so quietly she wondered if she had imagined it.

“What?”

“You heard me.” He turned away.

“But I—”

“For Christ sakes, Rosamunde, I can’t ask you to give yourself to me.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both. Either. Whichever it takes to get you to climb into this bed.” He ground both fists into his eye sockets. “God, I can’t stand this.”

He was begging her—imploring her to help him forget the bleak helplessness he felt, if only for a moment. He, the man who had probably never begged anyone to do anything in his life. And there was nothing she could say that would make him understand that she would take more comfort from his arms than he ever would from hers.

A plume of longing curled through her breast. He
was giving her the chance for one last taste of heaven before she would have to leave.

She had the presence of mind to cross the room and lock the door.

“Rosamunde?” His arm rested over his eyes again.

“I’m still here.”

She removed her gown and stays, then hesitated before removing her stockings and even her shift. She would never have been so brazen if he had been able to see her. She shivered in the cool, still air. “Shall I help you?”

He growled. “I can manage.”

She watched with unabashed curiosity as he yanked the nightshirt over his head, still damp from his bath. She hadn’t had the nerve to look at his naked form when they had been in his boat cabin. She had had to clamp her eyes closed through most of it to gain courage. But now, oh now, she could drink in the beauty of his physique without fear or embarrassment.

He was simply the most starkly beautiful man she had ever seen. And he wanted her. She could die from the tension and exquisite feelings coursing through her.

Her eyes drank their fill of the breadth of his impossibly wide shoulders and the corded muscles along his rib cage and below. Her eyes widened at the narrow trail of dark hair that led to his groin still hidden under the covers. She stared until apprehension seemed to swirl around them both like the static before a storm.

She held her breath and slipped beneath the layers of soft bed coverings, his body suffusing the sheets with delicious warmth.

He lay back, his head and chest propped up by large pillows. His pure blue eyes stared beyond her shoulder, unseeing.

The expanse of his bronzed chest fascinated her. She dared to shyly raise her finger to trace the scar that slashed from his shoulder to his waist.

He exhaled sharply and grasped her wrist.

“No,” she said. “Let me touch you, as you touched me.”

He released her arm and shuddered as the pads of her fingers brushed his skin and encountered one of his perfectly symmetrical crests. When it contracted slightly under her touch, she felt her own constrict to tight points. Mesmerized, she leaned in and tentatively swirled the sensitive place with the tip of her tongue.

“Oh God,” he choked out an exhalation.

Emboldened by his response, she instinctively nibbled on the tiny nub and tweaked the other with her fingers.

His hands flew to her hair and dislodged half the hairpins as he ran his fingers through her locks.

“Come here,” he rumbled and hooked his hands under her arms to pull her to his lips, stopping short of kissing her. He seemed to understand that she wanted—needed—to take her time.

In the shadows of the approaching gloaming hour, she stared at the firm contours of his full lips, which were every female’s dream and every father and husband’s nightmare. She shifted and brushed her mouth against his with gossamer-light kisses endlessly, until he groaned and took full possession of her mouth. She
shyly opened at the touch of his tongue against the seam of her lips. Pure heat swept through every pore of her body as he deepened the kiss and she felt herself drugged by the raw, protective power of him.

Tremors of desire licked her insides as his broad arms gripped her frame fiercely to his chest. She pushed away breathlessly. “Wait,” she implored.

“What is it?” he murmured in her ear.

“Let me touch you…”

“And?” he whispered. “I sense an ‘and.’”

“And
…look at you,” she choked out, embarrassed beyond measure.

His hands stilled and the pupils of his eyes dilated, making the irises almost disappear into the dark mystery of his being.

His large hand swallowed her wrist in his grasp and he slowly moved her fingers to the corner of the covers that were bunched around them. In heartbreaking tension, she drew down the sheets, exposing his hard sculpted physique to her curious eyes.

She froze.

She’d never had the opportunity or courage to actually look at this part of any man. Her breathing quickened and he blindly grasped the sheet to recover himself.

“No,” she blurted out, pushing his hand aside.

“Rosamunde,” he said harshly, “now you are frightened again.”

“I’m not,” she whispered. She tentatively touched him, and felt him pulse and surge forward, now no longer resting on his muscled thigh. He felt rather like
an iron bar covered with satin and as she traced the length of him, he groaned and his hands flexed, then tightly fisted.

“Am I hurting you?” she asked, her mouth dry.

“No, but you’re killing me.”

A rush of delight bolstered her courage and she joined her palms together to span his width and caress him before coming to a rest when he gasped and stayed her hands.

His breath was labored and she could see a faint sheen on his brow. She streamed a light path of kisses down his chest using the faint trail of hair as a guide. He smelled of soap and the achingly familiar cologne that she had come to know as his signature. She stared hard at the length of blatant masculinity before her and wondered if he would like her to…

“Should I—” she whispered very quietly.

“Only if you like,” he gritted out.

What she would like to do was kiss every inch of this man who had shown her the beauty in what had always been an act of degradation. The man who had made her truly understand longing and love and almost forgiveness for everything in her past that had gone wrong. If she had to endure the last eight years to arrive at this moment in time with him, then it had been worth it.

She kissed the tip and then paused, unsure. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her up. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said in a strangled voice. “This is madness.”

His chest rose up and he moved to cover her be
fore he paused. His large hands spanned her waist and lifted her to straddle his great hulk before she could utter a word.

His hands were everywhere then, stroking her hair, her shoulders, her breasts, until he reached her most intimate place of all and she trembled with longing. A surge of dampness rushed between her limbs and she felt anew her embarrassment.

But he seemed so happy. For the first time since the illness had descended, his lips were curled at the edges.

His voice rumbled with pleasure, and his hands moved to grasp her hips firmly to raise her in a position above him. She watched with nearly unbearable yearning as he teased her until she was sure she would die from the pleasure. She wanted him so badly.

“Easy,” he ground out as she attempted to take him inside of her.

She felt so hesitant and inexperienced.

“Relax your muscles,” he murmured, his hands easing her up and down just the slightest bit. “That’s it. Now just a little more.”

For long moments he touched her, guided her knees to open wider, encouraged her to take more of him inside her, and all the while the heat of their passion whirled around them, cocooning them together in the silken strands of pleasure as he patiently helped her.