Blackstone's Bride (11 page)

“Thank you, Prince. I’m not going to faint.” She was distracted momentarily by Blackstone pulling an ugly wood fragment from the back of his hand.

“I recommend, gentlemen, that we adjourn for supper.” She gestured towards French doors that opened from the gunroom onto the courtyard.

Everyone continued speaking at once. Violet kept her arm in her father’s and her smile firmly in place, making Papa move towards the courtyard. The prince stepped around them and continued apologizing as he backed into the supper room.

* * *

Blackstone stood behind a potted palm as Violet led her guests to the supper table. The prince continued to apologize. As the story circulated in the room, other guests reacted with disbelief and little shudders of alarm. Violet continued talking to the prince and encouraging her guests to help themselves to supper.

Blackstone waited for his own shaking to stop. It wasn’t a visible trembling. It was somewhere deep inside him. He had stepped into the gunroom as the idiot prince idly lifted one of Hammersley’s old flintlocks. He had known by instinct it seemed that the gun was loaded. Without a thought he had spun Violet into his embrace out of the bullet’s path. He would have done the same for anyone.

She was alive. He could see her. In a few minutes he would take a seat beside her, just as soon as the wood stopped splintering next to them in his head.

He tried to make sense of the inner quaking. He had lain with other women since they parted, not as many as his reputation suggested, but enough. He had not returned to England to find Violet Hammersley again, in spite of the flash of memory he’d had on the
Redemption
. He simply didn’t want Violet dead. He certainly didn’t want her killed in a freakish accident.

He had returned to England to repair his fortune and restore his mother and sisters to their proper place in society. Once Blackstone Court was free and clear, he would withdraw in comfortable obscurity and let the world think what it would.

He saw her look about for him in her berries-and-cream dress. He had to step out of the shadows soon. He held out his right hand to judge his steadiness. Not yet.

* * *

At one, Violet found Blackstone contemplating Frank’s open luggage. Ten candles burned in branches placed on top of the upended trunk. Light seemed to catch Blackstone’s face giving her his profile in sharp relief. She couldn’t get used to it, his being there. He was himself and not himself. She had heard him laugh tonight. He’d caught her in his arms and saved her from a bullet, but he had been distant throughout the meal. And now his cold profile as he stared into Frank’s trunk reminded her of the other Blackstone, the stranger she had never known.

“What do you have to tell me about Frank?” Naturally he did not turn to her. She closed the door and came closer. Tonight he’d lit the coals in the grate, and the warmth drew her. She tried again. “The prince seems to be trying to kill us.”

“We’re meant to think so at any rate.” He shot her a brief glance and returned to his contemplation of Frank’s trunk.

“Generally, outside of Greek tragedy, I don’t think guests murder their hosts, and, in fact, we’re not dead, though we’ve each of us has had a close call. How is your hand?”

“A scratch.” He stepped aside. “Come and sit, Violet.”

She settled herself on the leather bench in front of the open trunk, which seemed to offer as little information as before.

Blackstone sat next to her, and for a moment it was necessary to remain perfectly still. Just that, his sitting next to her, made it feel as if the elusive closeness of their old friendship had returned. She waited for him to speak.

“I think the accidents are meant to distract us. Or they’re meant for the prince—he might have been riding Oberon this morning, you know. Your father’s pistol might have misfired.”

Violet felt that the important thing was not to look at him, not up close. She could feel his warmth, could see one wool-clad leg stretched out next to her. She straightened. “I grant you the horse, but one of Papa’s guns would never misfire. He’s obsessive about keeping his guns in good order.”

“Unless someone tampered with them. The prince announced his interest in seeing the guns, didn’t he?”

“Loudly, in front of his own retinue.” She did look at him then. “Oh. You think one of the prince’s own people might want him dead? Cahul, the bodyguard?”

“We can’t rule him out. He’s always nearest the prince, and as a bodyguard, he seems remiss. But I’d say that anyone in the prince’s retinue might want him dead, and three of his servants were here during the day. One of them could have tampered with the gun.”

Violet shook her head. “We, too, have servants about.” As soon as she said it, she realized her mistake. She and Blackstone had become experts at evading the staff. The recollection warmed her more than the fire in the grate.

After a time he answered. “I know.”

“What puzzles me is that as far as we know, neither the prince nor anyone in his party has actually read Frank’s report.”

“No one admits reading it, but we must assume that Frank’s kidnapper has committed a crime that he or she thinks Frank’s report will reveal.”

“She? You suspect the dainty countess then?”

“I don’t rule her out. For all her apparent helplessness, I’d say she’s as delicate as an ice pick.”

“So according to your theory someone has done something he or she does not want exposed by the report. If there had been a murder, that might make sense, but we don’t know of any murders, do we? If Frank had witnessed a killing, the murderer would want to silence him.”

Blackstone did not answer at once, as if her comment had started some train of thought. She glanced sharply at him. “Has there been a murder?”

He didn’t answer.

Violet nudged him with her elbow and instantly regretted the touch and the sensation it stirred in her. “Blackstone, has there been a murder?”

He faced her then and spoke plainly. “Two, in fact, but we have a note in Frank’s hand that suggests that he’s alive.”

He did not say
or was alive
. Violet blinked hard against the sting of oncoming tears. “What could Frank possibly know that’s so dangerous?”

Blackstone offered her a plain male handkerchief, clean and warm from his body. She held it in her lap. “You suggested from the first that the money had gone astray. It’s likely that Frank’s report spells out where the money went.”

“Where’s the worst place the money could go?”

“To the Russians. If the money intended to build up the Moldovan army actually ended up in Russian hands, England would be financing her enemy.”

“And if Frank discovered a plot to funnel the money to Russia, he would be in grave danger?” She pressed Blackstone’s handkerchief into a ball between her palms.

“Are you going to tell me what you see in the trunk?”

“I wish that I did see something. As a precaution, Frank worked out a system to communicate with us, me and Preston. He could make patterns with the design of the silk by altering the arrangement of the drawers. We would know a message was from him by the order of the contents. That order never changed. But whoever searched his trunk couldn’t know that.”

“If your brother is in the habit of anticipating danger, that’s a good sign, Violet. He may manage his own escape. I have something for you.”

“So you said.”

“Open your hands.”

Violet let the crushed handkerchief fall into her lap. Blackstone cupped her right hand in his and into her open palm he dropped a horn button about an inch in diameter attached to a bit of blue superfine wool. Her fist closed around it. Her throat ached. Her eyes stung again. Foolish drops filled them. The button was so small. It could not be all she would ever have of Frank again. She reached for Blackstone’s crumpled handkerchief, but he was ahead of her. His hand captured and held her chin. He turned her face to his while he pressed the clean linen to her brimming eyes.

She stiffened but she had no strength to shake him off. She could only turn her face away.

“Is it Frank’s?” He released her chin.

She nodded. “Where did you get it?” Her voice was thick, her throat tight.

“An associate found it in a pawnshop off the Wapping Highstreet.”

“Does it mean that Frank is dead?”

Blackstone took hold of her shoulders and turned her to face him on the bench. Her skirts billowed over his leg. Her knee pressed against the muscle of his thigh. “Actually, we think it means that he’s alive. If he were dead, they would strip the body and sell the clothes. If he’s alive, someone has charge of him, someone who wants to profit from guarding him.”

“I don’t suppose we can just knock on every door in Wapping.” She brushed the moisture from her eyes.

“
You
can’t.”

She pulled back in his hold. “Where did the
we
and
us
go, Blackstone?”

“You would be noticed in Wapping. We are searching, Violet. If he’s concealed there, we will find him.”

He lifted a hand and pushed it into her curls, capturing her head. He was looking at her with an absorbed look, a purposeful male concentration that released a flood of memories.

“When did you change your hair?” His gaze on her mouth seemed to have its own magnetic pull. A pause held her suspended, as if she had pumped herself high on a swing and hung in the air before the downward plunge.

I don’t know. I . . . Don’t look at me . . .
she offered an unspoken plea, but she knew that only her eyes protested. Her throat was closed. Her foolish body was yielding, moving towards the pull of his attraction. But he did not kiss her. Instead he drew her closer and pressed her head against his chest and held her. And she let him, let his arms encircle her, let herself breathe him in.

He smelled of wool and linen and soap, English things, things taken from the fields and refined into plain elegance that suited his person. There was no mistaking his strength or his steadiness. There was no impatience in his hold. She did not imagine that he offered forgiveness for the past. He resented her. He was bitter still, but his quiet hold acknowledged that Frank mattered to her.

They had met because of Frank. Frank and Blackstone had met at university and liked each other, and when Blackstone had been reluctant to go home for a long vacation, Frank had invited his friend to Hammersley House. No one imagined that Blackstone would take an interest in plump, hoydenish Violet.

“You’ve lost an earring, Violet.” His warm rough thumb stroked her lobe.

He pulled back, and she reached up to touch her ears. Her left ear was empty. In the moment of her confusion, he stood and crossed to the door.

She did not know whether she had wanted his kiss or not, but he had stopped, not she. She straightened on the bench. She had been the weak one, tempted to give in to their past.

He looked back, his hand on the doorknob. “Tomorrow we keep looking for Frank.”

“And entertaining the prince.”

“Did you promise him an outing?”

“I meet with Dubusari in the morning to make plans. The prince still has much of London he wishes to see.”

Chapter Eleven

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Violet sat at her desk in a rose silk wrapper, her morning chocolate cooling into a chalky sludge in the bottom of the cup. She was missing an earring, Frank, and her balance. Blackstone could do that to a woman.

The earring would turn up she supposed, a thing of garnet and pearls. She had the mate. It would be easy enough to have another made up if the missing one could not be found, but most likely it would be found. Wembley, Violet’s excellent lady’s maid, would make a diligent search of all the places an earring could get itself to—the folds of a shawl, the bottom of a wardrobe, even the inside of a slipper. Finding a brother—that was more difficult. Recovering her balance, she had to find a way.

A sharp rap on the door made her start, and as she turned, Blackstone entered.

“You can’t be here.”

“You see that I am.” He crossed the room before she could gather her wrapper about her and attempt to rise. He put a hand on her shoulder to keep her in her seat. “Let’s look at your calendar, Violet.”

“My calendar?”

He brushed aside her failed attempts at a letter to Penelope. “A woman of your many engagements keeps a calendar, I’m sure.” He found the black leather volume from Letts and opened it, leafing through the pages, making them flutter and rustle.

“What a number of ladies’ societies you belong to, Violet. Are you president of all of them?”

“Of course not. Why are you doing this?” The closeness of the night before had vanished. Perhaps Blackstone had recovered his own balance.

He didn’t answer. His hand, lean and brown and distinctly masculine, went on turning the pages, exposing her neat entries.

“Rushbrooke figures prominently here, I see. He thinks you a paragon of womanly virtue, Violet. Are you going to snatch him up?”

“I should be ‘Miss Hammersley’ to you.”

His hand paused. “We’ve been naked together, Violet.”

She could not speak. Her body reacted to the words with an instant flash of heat. He returned to turning the pages. “I don’t remember.”

“You can’t forget.” He let the book fall open. “Nor can I.” The quiet admission shook her. Violet stared at the day of her life that he’d laid bare. She wanted to recover the sensible, well-regulated life on that page. That day she had attended two meetings with Mr. Rushbrooke, a meeting about her sewing schools project and another about a cricket team for poor boys sponsored by the bank. He stood next to her fully clothed in gray and brown layers of male elegance, but she remembered other times.

“You didn’t tell Rushbrooke that.” Her body, in its thin covering of cambric and silk, quickened and thrummed with awareness.

“Violet, you’ve never heard anyone accuse me of betraying a woman’s secrets.”

Except for showing the world a painting of your Spanish mistress
. “Rushbrooke is a sensible man.” She tried to mean it. She counted Rushbrooke as one of the better men of her acquaintance.

“He’s a prig, and he’s well aware of your fortune.” He slid his lean brown fingers down the white page, a light grazing that made her skin expectant.

She didn’t understand him. He had come back into her life to find Frank not to undo the order she had made in his absence. “Mr. Rushbrooke is a friend of mine. I won’t have you being unkind to my friends.”

“You need better friends.”

“He’s an avid beekeeper.”

“Admirable.”

“At least the . . . admirers that I attract are decent people.”

“Ah, you’ve heard rumors about me.” He lifted his hand from the book. “And you are always ready to listen to my detractors.”

The accusation stung. Violet swung around. He had no right to be angry at her friends. “Not to your detractors, but to women who frankly admit they are curious about your carnal appetites and would welcome your attentions in bed.”

Too late she realized her mistake. In her own hand was the notation of her morning call on Penelope Frayne. His knowing eyes understood too well that she had already heard the gossip.

“You have the advantage of such ladies, Violet, and can let them in on the truth.”

“What do I know that other women don’t know better?” She tried to make light of it.

“It’s true. I might know a thing or two more now than I did at twenty-four. Curious?”

“Never.” She lowered her gaze. She had kissed Blackstone a hundred times, a thousand times. She was not curious. She had no need to know what his lips would feel like against hers, how it would feel to be pressed against that lean, hard frame, how he would taste, how she could move him until he surged against her desperate for their union. That knowledge was part of her.

“Violet, you are more curious than Eve and Pandora combined.”

“Not about you and your carnal practices.” She managed to stand and move away from him, hugging her wrapper tightly around her. “The only thing I want from you is help finding Frank.”

He pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it.

“That’s what I’m here for, but you are going to have to put my name in your book, or our watchful Moldovan friends will not believe the fiction of our betrothal.”

“How can my private calendar serve our fiction?”

“I left Dubusari at breakfast. He intends to confer with you this morning about your plans. I’d best appear more often than your friend Rushbrooke.”

Violet studied a patch of the carpet where the sun through her window made a golden square. The hard brightness of the clear March morning made her blink back tears.

“Fine.” She returned to her desk and took up her pen. For Frank she would put Blackstone on every page of her calendar. “I will put you in. You returned to London when?”

“A month ago.” He came to stand behind her, again so close that any incautious move would bring them in contact. She dipped her pen. Her hand shook a very little, scattering a few black drops on the fresh page.

“And we’ve been meeting where and when?”

“Here, of course, privately.” His finger pointed to a day as if he could rewrite her life. “I came to see you as soon as I returned to England.”

“Oh, that’s helpful. This is a calendar, not a diary.”

“Well then, we’ve been . . .” He flipped back through the pages, his arm brushing her shoulder. “Here you could squeeze me in between the Ladies Committee on Housing the Poor and your afternoon call to Augusta Lowndes.”

“Where did we go?”

“To see the marbles, I think, appropriate for a Greek traveler, like me. I explained to you where they came from and how Elgin acquired them.”

He was so close, so warm. If it were a past meeting between them, she would lean back, her head would collide with his belly, and his hands would drop to her shoulders, an acknowledgement of how helpless they were against desire.

“And you’d best put me into your plans for today, the beehive demonstration, and tonight and tomorrow and the day after that. What’s this entry?
A worthy endeavor
?”

Violet tried to pass it off with a laugh. “It’s a subscription ball to raise money to train former silk workers as seamstresses and
modistes
. Nothing could be worthier, you see?”

He flipped back through the book to the page that listed the dress fitting the patronesses would have at Penelope’s house.

She brushed his hand aside. “If I put you in the book, I think we should agree to forget the past.”

“To behave as strangers?”

“Think of the advantages. Strangers know nothing of each other. Words between them are just words. There’s a reserve.”

“Playing strangers would never do for you, Violet. You’re too curious. You see too much.”

“Then we should court amnesia. We should act like a pair of people who’ve fallen on their heads and have porridge for brains. We’re lucky to remember our names and where we live. If I look at you in a dazed fashion it is because my brain has gone fuzzy.”

“You think amnesia would spare you. There’d be no awareness of me? I could do this”—he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the place where her neck met the slope of her shoulder—“and you would not tremble as you do now.”

Whatever he intended he did not stop. He slid the silken wrapper down her shoulder and found the thin strand of hair that secured her nighttime braid. He tugged to release her hair, using his fingers to part the strands and let them tumble over the shoulder he had bared.

Violet meant to twist away, but the twist turned into a stretch that gave him greater access. His hands slid down her arms. Her head fell back against him. He spun her around on the bench and hauled her up into his arms and his mouth descended on hers, and she was kissing Blackstone, opening her mouth, pressing up to meet him, tasting heat and need.

Blackstone kissed the dusky pink mouth he had watched for two days and two nights. Violet’s mouth was haughty or generous, never prim. While he had her mouth occupied, he tugged at the tie of her wrapper so that it fell open, and he could press his whole aching self against the thin barrier of her chemise, not so much a barrier, as a sheer curtain. He knew the tips of her breasts would be the same dusky pink of her lips and just as ripe and ready for him, but at the moment he was preoccupied with her mouth.

She was responding to him, kissing him back with all the ardent fire of her nature, as if she, too, had stepped back into the past.

Violet was lost. She reveled in the sensation of being pressed, crushed against Blackstone’s unyielding person. She knew how to tilt her head and press just so and open to him. He’d taught her years before, and the first touch of his mouth to hers had been like that joyous moment of a dance starting when musicians summoned a note out of the air and happiness itself claimed her as a partner.

Her body felt the imprint of his through linen and wool. Heat seemed to fuse them together. His hands slid down to cup her bottom and lift her to fit them together. He bent his knees and pressed his full erection against the apex of her thighs. But she was not nineteen. She knew where they were headed, and it was not towards happiness. She had learned that lesson, too, from him.

“Blackstone, stop.”

That was a first. He heard it though, clear and plain. She flattened her palms against his ribs and shoved hard. He stumbled back a step.

He stepped back further. For a moment he’d been lost in the wonder and the joy of it. There was no concealing his state or hers. They stood breathing harshly. His cock, at full throbbing attention, strained against the civilized bounds of his trousers. Through her near-transparent chemise he watched the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. “Apparently, amnesia is not our disorder.”

“No,” she said, pulling her wrapper firmly around her and twisting her loose hair into a tight knot at the base of her head. She did not excuse herself. “No, we’re simply bedlamites.”

“You’re right. Perfectly deranged.”

“No more than half a brain between us. Maybe that’s all we need, one person with sense enough to step back. Next time, it’s your turn, Blackstone.”

* * *

Next time
. Blackstone could not stop the words from echoing in his head. He retreated to the inner courtyard and the uncensorious company of potted palms. He had not intended to kiss her. What rational man would willingly kiss a woman who thought so little of his honor that she believed the most idle report over the evidence of her own experience of his character? Last night he had congratulated himself for pulling back from temptation. At twenty-four he had believed he could endure the shock of discovering that his father had a second family, of discovering that he had a half brother, of whom his father was genuinely fond, on whom his father in fact doted, a boy he read to and laughed with. He had believed he could endure London’s condemnation. But Violet had been his love and his friend. Violet should not have turned on him.

Now he’d done it. He’d let himself have a taste of Violet. And his groin ached to prove it. He needed a monastery, a frigid cell on a mountaintop, a spot on a polar expedition. Curse him.

And Goldsworthy and lost brothers.

What he wanted, had begun to want from the moment he saw Violet on the stairs, was to make love to her again in all the places he’d made love to her before in her father’s ridiculous mansion. They’d made love in the room assigned to him as a guest, in the billiard room, in the long gallery, in one of the stillrooms below stairs among the jams and jellies, and in the old attic schoolroom. He had imagined in those days a future in which he would make love to her in a bed, his bed. He had told her about it, tempted her with a description of that bed.

He should not be thinking of where they could make love, since it was impossible that they ever would make love again. He had not been a schoolboy when he’d first made love to her, but close to it. He had thought about protecting her from the consequences of their affair only because Violet, with her usual curiosity, had made a careful study of cundums and knew where to get them. And he’d made love to her fully intending to marry her. He had proposed before they made love and almost immediately after and then had spent long naked hours persuading her that his offer was based on love not convention.

She had changed her room entirely since he had last seen it. It was plain and businesslike, stripped of the pretty green paper he remembered. She liked pretty things. Her black leather calendar was another change from her taste.

Those changes pained his conscience more than their interrupted embrace pained his groin. He’d read that calendar. It was plain from every page what she had been doing since she’d broken their engagement, making herself into a paragon of propriety, her days filled with meetings and good works. The only ball in that whole leather-bound wasteland of respectability had been listed as a “worthy endeavor.” Rushbrooke might appear on every page, but the change had not been Rushbrooke’s fault. It had been Blackstone’s.

He remembered how fearless she’d been as a lover. Apparently, he’d not only killed that quality in her, he’d made her think herself so wicked that a lifetime of saving seamstresses and orphans would never make up for loving him. For a moment he thought they’d both remembered what that other time had been like, but she didn’t want to remember, and he would be wise to follow her lead. He could give her back her brother—that’s what he could do for her. He could not be the man to restore her to fearless love.