Gypsy Heiress (18 page)

There was a tiny crack of a branch behind me and I turned. A gray shaft of moonlight was falling through the trees. A mesh of leaves parted and a tall, black, cloak-draped figure stepped soundlessly into it. I drew back my hand and sent the knife slicing through the air. There was a solid thwack as it landed uselessly in an unseen tree trunk. I would not get another chance.

“What the hell?” said a male voice.

There is no one else in the world who can swear with the same fluid efficiency. Horror mingled with sweeping relief as I realized that I had just tossed a knife at Lord Brockhaven. My first thought was to thank God it was him, and not a ghoulish thing from the underworld. My second was to turn and flee like a thousand devils were at my heels.

Strong hands caught me from behind, pulling me back against his hard muscled body.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, shoving me against a tree with such proficiency that you would think it was a move he did every day. Holding my hands easily in one of his, he thrust his other hand under the folds of my cloak. “Let’s see if you have any more weapons where that came from.” Roughly, his hand explored my waist in a quick, searching motion and then moved higher. Suddenly it became a caress.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “A woman.” He began to laugh.

I shrank back until the tree’s rough bark dug into my back. It took me that much time to remember that I was masked, and please God, in the darkness there was nothing else about me that could tell him who I was. Hope pulsed within me that I might still, miraculously, be able to escape with my identity unknown.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he whispered huskily, his hands curving around my waist. “Why, you’re trembling. Were you afraid all alone in the woods? Is that why you threw your knife at me?”

His hands were a burning distraction, but I knew I had to answer, and, not trusting my voice, I nodded, hoping he would find that a sufficient reply.

“Poor little doe.” He lifted his hand across the slope of my shoulder and spread his cool fingers on the side of my neck, barely touching my skin. I shivered. “Are you waiting for your lover?” I nodded again, to avoid a lengthy explanation. At my answer, he let his finger stray over my lips for a moment, and then released me. “Nay, darling,” he said. “It’s no place for you out here. I can’t leave you by yourself. Come with me—we’ll find your sweetheart. No doubt he’s by the bonfire.”

I hung back, unpleasantly surprised by this spate of unexpected philanthropy. All it needed tonight was for me to be unmasked in front of the bonfire. He took a step, my arm in his hand, but stopped when he felt my reluctance to go with him. I thought fast, not wanting to give him time to think up any more questions, and said the first thing that came to my mind, trying to imitate the slur and rhythm of country speech.

“He’s—he’s gone off with—another girl,” I said. One doesn’t often have the good luck to know immediately when one has made a terrible mistake, but fortune smiled wickedly down on me this time. I had forgotten for a moment Ellen’s statement that no young lady of good repute would be abroad tonight. Brockhaven promptly placed the worst possible construction on my words, and my seeming desire to remain in the woods with him had only one logical possibility. If this were chess, I would have just put myself in check.

His tone was light and tender. “Well, then, what
can
I do for you, darling?”

I could have wept with frustration. Short of a long explanation, I couldn’t seem to think of anything that would get rid of him, and a long explanation would surely reveal me to him.

“Go,” I said, still trying to disguise my voice. “Please.” Even to me it sounded unutterably coy. I heard him laugh softly again, and he pulled me hard against the length of his body. I could feel his breath on my cheek as he bent over me, and then suddenly he placed a deep, searching kiss on my lips. My cheeks were cupped in his hands, and his fingers played with my earlobes as his mouth was on mine, probing, seeking, brutal, and erotic, his lips moving over mine, stroking, taking, and laying waste like a comet skimming too close to the breast of the fertile earth. It was not a kiss he would have used on a virgin, because the question it asked was a demand no man would make on an innocent girl.

His lips left mine, and I took a shuddering gulp of air. He leaned my head back against a large, slanting branch and found my mouth again. My knees were beginning to shake beneath me, and I was strangely grateful for the tree at my back, and the solid strength of his grip. When we had kissed before, in the glen, it had seemed the essence of heavenly love. There can be no heaven without the inferno, and this is what I experienced now—a match, carelessly thrown by Lord Brockhaven, on the dry, parched kindling of my attraction for him exploding us both into burning cinders. I hadn’t known the human body was capable of such a feeling, such a stretching of the possibilities, such a release of one’s soul in a thousand directions at once.

When his lips left mine this time, my own felt scarred, swollen, and the harsh panting of my breath seemed forced out of my lungs with each chest-wracking pump of my heart. His lips searched gently for the pulse in my throat, and I was sure that if he found it, he would cause it to stop.

“Sweet, darling, so sweet,” he murmured. Among his many talents, I discovered in Brockhaven a gift for the understatement. His hand reached behind my head, roaming with searing tenderness through the swimming net of my hair. “Hush—don’t let it frighten you. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I whispered the word, swallowing painfully.

“That’s fine, my love.” Through the material of my gown, I could feel his palm as he touched me intimately. “Don’t be afraid—I’ll be good to you.” His kisses tasted me deeply, and I felt intoxicated, my blood flowing like wine, burning and heady through my veins. My earlobe tingled under the caress of his breath as if in anticipation of the nip that followed, and, like a warm blanket, his hand covered my breast. And there was the pressure of his body on mine… I looked up at him. His face wavered before me, and I could see his half-closed, heavy-lidded eyes in the moonlight.

I summoned my waning strength and tried to pull away. Prevented by his hand on my back, I gasped, feeling my heart skip as he brought me back to him, and suddenly I felt powerless, my head falling back, my hair streaming as I could no longer keep my mouth from his. Far away, like drowning echoes, I heard him speak.

“You’re so charming, love,” he murmured. “I need you tonight, need you to help me forget someone—a lady… You smell so sweet”—He kissed my throat—“like wild bluebells, like—”

He stiffened all at once, looking down at me in the moonlight, and I could only gaze back. “Like Liza,” he finished. His body was still now; the insistent pressure had stopped; and, to my horror, he reached up his hand and untied the mask. I heard it fall with the slightest of rustles to the grass at our feet. Still in his arms, I tried to control the shiver I could feel beginning to overtake me.

“How far would you have let it go before you stopped me—before you told me who you were?” he asked, his voice husky, strangely uneven.

The silence caused by my inability to answer him was broken only by the hooting of a faraway owl. Finally I summoned my voice, and said, though I could manage but a whisper, “I knew you’d be angry.”

“I see. Complicated, isn’t it?” Slowly, with an almost painful deliberation, he pushed me away. “Never fear, sweetheart. I won’t disappoint you. In a moment I’m going to be madder than hell at you, but right now I’m only…” He didn’t finish his sentence before pushing me to arm’s length, holding me there, staring back at him dumbly. “I’m trying to function with only half a mind,” he finished.

“Half?” I couldn’t keep the fright from my voice.

“The other half wants to carry you to that bed of leaves and love you until sunrise,” he said dryly. “Do you think you could help a little?”

“What should I do?” I asked, looking at him in helpless misery.

“Lace yourself up, for God’s sake. With the moonlight on your skin, you look damnably irresistible.”

I tried to do as he requested, but my hands were shaking so badly that he had to do it, though he swore and said I was an incompetent little fool. At his words, the tears that had been shimmering in my vision overflowed, and I felt them run down my cheeks.

“Don’t, Liza.” His voice was raw. “Don’t start that. Don’t make me take you in my arms again. I don’t think I could rip myself from you a second time.”

I took two steps back from him and rested my hand against the rough bark of the tree behind us.

“Who is the lady you need to forget?” I asked in a low voice, hating myself for asking. “Is it Isabella?”

“Isabella?” he said wearily. “Don’t be ridiculous. It didn’t mean anything; and I didn’t know I was talking to you.” A breeze ran through the branches over our heads, sending a few old leaves somersaulting to the ground. “Or maybe I did. Your body was so strangely familiar,” he said softly.

I said, “Like an old shoe you thought misplaced.”

“And would still like to slip into,” he said. “Don’t let’s flirt, sweeting. This is Thursday, and on Thursdays I never seem to have much self-control.”

Anger shot through my chest like an explosion of icy splinters. “No, I suppose not, accustomed as you are to taking your pleasure where you please.”

“What do you want, my pet? An all-inclusive apology for the impure course of my life?” he said. “Or will it content your blushing vanity if I hold you like this”—his fingers seized my shoulders and pulled me against him with unthinking brutality—“and let you feel what it’s like to have a man want you? And I do want you, Liza. Would it interest you to experiment with all the facets of that? Let’s see, what was it that you wanted to know? Ah, yes, about Isabella. Would you like to learn how to play with the style—” His hands traveled over me with savage fluid strokes and his lips took mine with expertly erotic cruelty.

When at last he let me breathe, the air came from my lungs in a frightened whimper. He heard it, and I was released instantly. A minute passed as I stood listening to his breathing surrender back into the bands of his iron control. Finally, he said, “That was a damnable thing to do. Forgive me, Liza.”

My blistered heart was too heavy with grief to listen to his apologies. I heard myself yelling, “Why ever, my lord? I’m flattered that you find my half-breed countenance acceptable to your cultured tastes, especially since I remember a time when you found it none too appetizing, so you said when you first found me in the library with Robert.”

“Does that rankle still?” he asked tersely. “I suppose you would rather I encouraged him. If only I’d known! I could have said, ‘Yes, she’s a beauty, and if I were you, I’d waste no time in having her. Fetch me when it’s my turn.’ ”

“No! No!” I cried, letting the old, unburied pain of it spill from me like boiling water from cracked clay. “You would have left me with Robert, if you hadn’t noticed my father’s medallion and decided to use me against Vincent. You’ve had me scrubbed and shod and taught the difference between a fish fork and a fruit fork, and you’ve dressed me in gorgio clothes, and now I’ll do for Thursdays.”

Sorting through this in remarkably short order, he said, “I wouldn’t have left you to Robert, even if I hadn’t seen the medallion.”

“Then you would have had me hung for poaching your foxes!” In spite of myself, I felt a tear splash, cold and wet on the curve of my cheek.

“The word is hanged. No, I wouldn’t have. Do you think I believe in killing children for misdemeanors against my property? However little you seem to feel that I cared what happened to you, you know damned well that I care too much for Robert to let his excesses run to self-destructive acts like taking terrified peasant girls by violence. As for finding you unappetizing, we’ve already covered that subject more thoroughly than we should have, when one considers that I’m supposed to be acting in the capacity of your guardian. What else have you on your list? I’m fascinated!” Taking my hand, he brushed his lips softly across my palm. He said, “Hang it, Liza. Are you drunk?”

“No! Why do you ask?”

“Your hand reeks of spirits.”

“It must have been the satchel. The book said it had to be soaked in wine, you see, and Ellen was adamant.”

Like an actress answering a cue, her breathing short and sharp as if she had been running, my friend appeared at the edge of the clearing twenty yards away. With a cry that lay between a sob and a gasp, I heard her call, “Liza!”

Because she was so distraught, and because I was so relieved to see her, I ran toward her into the moonlight, crying, “Ellen! Ellen!” without thinking how Brockhaven must have looked to her, standing black and threatening under the dark roof of the trees.

“Liza! The werewolf!” Ellen screamed, her voice cutting through to a new plane of terror. “It’s after you!” Before I could tell her it was Brockhaven, she said, “The meat! I’ll throw it the meat!” She grabbed wildly in the satchel, pulled out the joint of beef, drew back her arm with the grace of a discus thrower, and sent the opium-soaked meat soaring across the clearing to land with a soggy crash two feet from the polished tips of Brockhaven’s boots.

I’m not sure whether it was his encounter with me, being called a werewolf, or having a heavy object hurled at him in the dark, but the meat toss put the final nudge to Brockhaven’s toppling temper. I had never seen anyone move so fast. In less space than it takes an acorn to hit earth, Brockhaven had us collared and dragged back to the hideously oozing pile of red meat.

“What in the name of heaven is
that
?” he rapped, pointing.

“Th-that? That is opium s-soaked b-beef to d-drug the werewolf,” Ellen said, shakily but succinctly.

Brockhaven looked at her incredulously. “I’m crossing you off the very small list of people I know who aren’t complete idiots.”

I had to admire Ellen’s spirit as she looked him full in the face and replied, “Well, you d-didn’t catch it, d-did you?”

“What you are going to catch, Ellen, my dear,” he said with silky sweetness, “is not a werewolf. In my life I have heard of some hare-brained escapades, but this one defies description. Are you two out of your minds?”