Haunted Hearts (17 page)

“
Monsieur
,” Ewald greeted him as he closed the door behind himself. He looked around, clearly discovering the simple room held no chair. After Georges had stood and bowed to him, Ewald had waved him to be seated again and had remained standing himself, folding his hands together before him.

“I have yet to receive the instructions from Sir Terrence.” Georges grunted at the information. “You are well? Do you require anything?”

Georges could not much complain. The room was ever a little cold, but his meals were faithfully supplied, the linens were clean, and Ewald had provided a handful of books in French from his library. Georges had been given wine from the cellars to drink. He was a little drunk now, in fact, because besides the room being cold his one complaint was boredom, and the wine helped a little with both.

“I am well, zank you, my lord,” Georges murmured. As agreed, he’d secluded himself in the small room, with meals brought by but one footman, and his chamberpot carried away by the same; the idea was to allow the other servants to forget he hid among them. It was good advice, as both he and the viscount waited for Sir Terrence’s notice that a ship with a reliable captain was ready to receive Georges and bear him away to greater safety.

“Your evening was pleasant?” Georges asked, making an effort to be a cordial, if confined, guest.

“Yes, quite,” Ewald said. “The play was well, and Madame Catalani sang. She’s remarkable.” He was clearly making conversation. Georges appreciated the man for trying to relieve in at least a small way the tedium of waiting, to say nothing of providing this temporary sanctuary. “Lady Stratton and Miss Lyons were quite taken with her voice.”

Georges stopped breathing as Ewald chatted about other performers.
Miss Lyon? Lisette Lyons!
The very woman he’d seen at Lord Quinn’s masquerade.
She keeps company with Ewald?

He only half-listened as Ewald went on to give him some news of the day, instead pondering with narrowed eyes why Ewald would tell him about Lisette Lyons?

He wouldn’t, not if the man was her confederate.

No, and so Lord Ewald couldn’t know he held a viper to his breast. A viper which might not strike at the Englishman but would certainly strike out at Georges if she got any hint where he was sheltered.

When Ewald left his side, Georges went down to his knees, reaching under the short-legged servant’s bed to retrieve his traveling bag.

Chapter 14

Under heavy gray clouds, Ian drove his curricle before her home, where he saw Lady Stratton--
Olivia
--through the windows of her front salon. Her head was bent, probably at some bit of stitchery, her golden-flame hair piled high. She looked up as the sound of his wheels rattled to a stop, and when she rose he caught a glimpse of a golden gown that took its cue from her hair color.

He tossed the leadstrings to the boy who came from the mews, and descended. Ian walked up the steps that led to her front door, and knocked. Her butler opened the door, gave him a bow, accepted Ian’s shake of head denying a surrender of his three-caped coat, and escorted Ian into the large, airy chamber that served as Olivia’s salon.

She came from a small room off to the left, obviously used as a cloakroom. Her gown was now hidden by a fur-lined soft gray pelisse, and she wore the new and fashionable Prussian helmet cap, black, ornamented with silver tassels. Her gloved hands carried a fur muff against the November chill. She looked utterly appealing, and her smile was welcoming. He had to fight to keep his own smile impartial.

“My lady. You’re prepared.”

“Prepared for cold.” She glanced out the window. “And rain? I cannot like the dark edges on the clouds.”

“Only the heartiest of souls will be out,” he agreed. “Happily, my curricle boasts a hood should rain come.”

“Then let us go see who is as mad as we,” she agreed, taking his offered arm and making him smile despite himself.

Hyde Park was dismal in its late autumn grays and browns, but they found they were not utterly alone in taking advantage of a less crowded park. As Ian drove his curricle, they met the Duke of Dorset on his white horse, and a younger set stopped to chat for several minutes, but mostly it was a simple drive where they didn’t halt much, merely nodding to acquaintances as they passed.

The fashionable hour came and went, and still they lingered, circling the park again. Ian had thought to bring rugs, which they pulled up from folds around their feet, against the cold.

It was not until the setting sun was particularly direct in his vision that Ian realized how much time had gone by.
Her company is an easy, comfortable thing,
he noted with a sigh.

Although they’d avoided rainfall, the cold had made her nose turn pink, and she’d long since tucked her gloved hands inside the muff. “You are feeling the cold,” he said.

“I am,” she admitted. “I see why near-winter rides are not usually all the rage.”

“My apologies.”

“Oh, not at all! I am glad for it.” She looked away. “I have spent far too much time tucked away inside my house.” He heard the wistfulness in her voice. Here he was looking for a home and wife, and she was looking to be free of her house and her mourning.

He was not wholly easy with his turn of thought, and randomly changed the subject. “I say, Miss Lyons was quite pleasant last night. I’d had the feeling the two of you were not bosom beaux, but she didn’t seem to know it. Or am I all the way mistaken?”

Olivia did not try to hide how her mouth tightened, although her expression lightened in a moment. “I’ll not say a word,” was her tartly humored response, but instantly made a lie when she said, “Though I do find she says the oddest things.”

“Such as . . . ?”

“Such as asking if we share common acquaintances.”

“That’s a very old diversion. How is it you object?”

“Oh, it’s not the asking that disturbs me. But why she would insist I must tell her the direction of a gentleman I have never met? Is this something the French do? Some sport of theirs?”

Ian checked his horses, slowing their progress a little, his old habits making him at once note that something was out of place. He scowled. “No. I think not. What sort of man does she ask after?”

“I don’t know,” Olivia said with a dismissive motion of her hand. “A Frenchman. With a hooked nose. Georges...something? I am unsure if that is a Christian or surname.”

His hands tightened on the reins, accidentally causing his horses to come to a halt. He rattled the strings and clucked to them to get them moving again, and cleared his throat as he thought.

“If anyone would know such a Frenchman,” she went on, “surely it would be she? Or is she somehow trying to boast of an acquaintance? Well, I am an inadequate person for that game, if so. I know scarce enough of society to be impressed.”

It was too much of a coincidence. What connection did
Mademoiselle
Lyons have with Douzain? Why would she be asking after him?

Perhaps Miss Lyons was only what she seemed: a displaced aristocrat trying to make her way in an unsettled world--yet it was not in Ian’s training to accept the apparent facts, but rather to garner for himself the particulars of any situation. He could not dismiss this flagrant incongruence as coincidence unless proved otherwise.

“You have gone quite silent,” Olivia said at his side.

He glanced up and realized his horses were again scarcely moving because the leathers had gone lax, and that the sun was invisible behind the houses, only a thin yellow haze of twilight showing it had not completely disappeared yet. He called to the horses, rearranging the strings in his hands to make sure he got a bit more speed out of them.

“My apologies,” he said to Olivia. “We’ve been out too long. I didn’t mean to freeze you half to death.”

She shook her head, unconcerned. “We will amuse my neighbors when they see I have the predicament of being frozen to my seat.”

Her house was just ahead, so it was only half a minute later when he pulled up on the reins, bringing the horses to a halt. He half-turned to her. His eyes moved over her face, noting the soft smile playing around her mouth, the frank gaze she returned to his own. “You’re in no danger of being in a predicament with me, my lady.”

“None at all?” she asked with a pretend sulk and a stage sigh.

His breathing stopped for a moment, as if the gloaming that gathered around them had somehow entered his lungs and paralyzed them. She was merely making a small joke, he knew it, but there was a part of him that refused to understand, that wanted to take her words as a gentle rebuke. There was nothing a gentleman could do, after all, if he were rebuked except to offer an apology. And his apology seemed to want to take only one form, that of a kiss. Perhaps it was the playful pout of her lips. Or maybe it was that one minute of magic, which floats in the twilight just before the day is done and the night fallen, that made him lean forward and press his mouth ever so lightly to her own.

She jumped a little, but after a long moment she leaned into him, accepting his kiss.

When they parted, scarce a heartbeat later, he didn’t reach for her hand, as every instinct told him to, and he didn’t lean further into her in return, as his body screamed at him to do. Instead he just sat very close, his mouth two inches from hers, trying to understand why he’d done it when he knew he shouldn’t. It wasn’t fair to play with her, a woman who could easily find another man to suit her.
A man like Quinn…?

“Take yer leads there, m’lord?” a voice interrupted.

Ian wheeled away from Olivia, seeing a groom standing gazing up at them uncertainly. Tossing the strings down to the lad, Ian leaped to the ground with an alacrity the lady might find unflattering, the skin of his face blazing scarlet as it hadn’t done in years. He came around, offering a hand to Olivia, who hesitated then placed the very ends of her fingers on his hand as she descended.

He understood her reticence. She’d been merely teasing, and he’d not responded in kind. Add to that, there was no social contrivance for acknowledging intimacies of connection that had come far before their usual time; what did it say that she always accepted his kisses, especially when any true, ordinary,
real
courtship wouldn’t have included them so soon?

What did it say that he continued to flout his own advice and to take kisses from her?

Ian climbed back onto the curricle, receiving the strings from the groom. He paused a long time, letting the dusk’s wind soothe his reddened face as he watched as the one-time Lady Cat made her way inside.

Attraction. Wife. Home. Suitability
. The words seemed to clash.

He sat a long time, until the groom asked again if he required anything. As he absently shook his head in response, Ian found the idea that had been eluding him, that had made him stay and stare at the Widow Stratton’s house: what made a home? He, who had so often moved from abode to abode, country to country, was one man who absolutely knew that a home was not made from things or bits of land, but from people.

Further, he was utterly certain one person could make a little piece of the world completely un-foreign. He knew true sanctuary could be,
was
, found not in the space of a nation, or a house, or even a room, but in the touch of a loved one’s arms.

But…was there a right kind of love? Or, conversely, a love that might grow and pull and demand, but in the end fit all wrong?

He took a deep breath, set the horses to their paces, guiding them not toward his home, but toward Westminster. He knew to whom in the foreign office it would be most auspicious to speak, to finally bring the matter of the French informant--and a possible Frenchwoman spy--to a close. For close it he would, so that the rest of his life could begin.

Chapter 15

Two nights later, Olivia tried to hide behind her sister. Lord Ewald had just been announced and was casting his gaze about the room. She shouldn’t have come with Phoebe to Lady Mackleby’s ball, but she’d thought it might serve as a diversion to her muddled, tumbling thoughts--thoughts of the very man from whom she hid.

Phoebe gave her younger sister a speaking glance, and followed it with a rather caustic observation. “What is this missishness of a sudden?”

“I’m tired. That last dance…” Olivia mumbled.

Phoebe clicked her tongue. “Now, Olivia, what are you about these days?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. One week you’re never to be seen, the next you’re at every ball and rout in London, and keeping company with London’s most talked-about people. Now you’re wilting like a frightened schoolgirl.” When Olivia didn’t answer, merely taking on a disgruntled look, Phoebe went on. “Look at yourself. You’re dashing! You’ve been dressing in every vibrant color of the rainbow. This rich blue silk is quite fine on you, I must say. Did you order the gloves with matching embroidery, or did you find them in a shop?”

“Sampson’s Warehouse,” Olivia muttered.

Phoebe rallied from her temporary distraction. “Never mind that. You smile, you dance, you flirt--or at least you did until ten minutes ago. What am I to think, with such rapid changes in your mood? And if your own sister cannot fathom what you are about, then you can only imagine what the tattlemongers will have to say.”

“I don’t lend an ear to gossip, and neither should you,” Olivia snapped.

“And what of these men you dance with? Mr. Turrell? Mr. Newlin? Captain Russell? Lord Quinn? Some of them are rackety fellows at best, my girl, and I have to think you know it.”

“But it’s merely a dance shared, Phoebe,” Olivia said in some exasperation. She couldn’t like this newfound habit of her siblings attempting to oversee her social life.
Where were you when I had none?

“I hear it is more than that. I hear you were at a late meal at Lord Quinn’s house, and came home even later. And you had strong words with Lord Ewald on your doorstep. See there, you do not deny it.”

Neighbors and their chatter!
“Oh, Phoebe. How you do go on. I’m no longer a child, and none of that is truly shocking.” She was not about to say that it had, in fact, been rather shocking to her as the evening had worn on, for that would just be more grist for Phoebe’s mill.