Hearts Beguiled (13 page)

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Max had never intended to hurt her; he only wanted some answers. He hadn't expected her to run from him, and when she did, it set off his hot temper like a match to gunpowder. He was tired of her teasing games. She would tell him who she was and why she was spying on him or, by God, he would—

She fell and he hauled her to her feet, furious enough now to shake the truth out of her if necessary. But the moon picked that moment to burst free of the clouds that covered it, and there before him was the haunting white beauty of her face, the depthless purple pools of her eyes, and her lips, those lips, whose softness was a memory and a promise . . .

Suddenly it seemed he wanted only one thing from those lips, and it had nothing to do with truth. He lowered his head and wrapped his hands around her neck to bring her mouth within reach of his.

She punched him in the face with her balled-up fist, striking his cheekbone and sending a shock of pain from the top of his head. She hit him again, the blow landing on his throat this time, and he choked. She seemed to have as many arms as a giant squid; no sooner would he capture one than the other would land a blow somewhere. She could hit damned hard for a girl.

"Dammit, Gabrielle, I'm not going to—Jesus!" he swore as she kicked him.

He managed at last to get both arms pinned between her back and the tree. He held her slender wrists easily in one hand and pressed his pelvis and thighs against her body so she couldn't do any more damage with her feet.

"Why did you run? I wasn't going to hurt you."

"Liar!" she spat at him.

Her fichu had pulled loose, and the short sleeves of her dress had slipped off her shoulders. She was panting heavily and the soft swell of her breasts rose and fell, rose and fell, straining against the thin calico of her bodice.

There was an achingly hard bulge in his breeches. She had to feel it, to feel him, and she did, for he saw the answering passion flare within her as her eyes darkened. She opened her mouth . . . and he covered it with his own.

He let go of her wrists to grip the sides of her head. Her hair was a golden-red halo set ablaze by the pale moonlight, a waterfall of liquid fire. He tangled his hands in it, bending her head back so he could probe her mouth with his tongue, and she sucked on his lips, tasting him, drinking him.

Desire was in the tight, exquisite feeling in his chest; the hard, urgent need in his loins. Passion was in the trembling of her woman's body in his arms, the low moans in her throat, her roaming hands that were touching him, burning him, claiming him . . .

His lips left her mouth to kiss her neck. He found a spot she particularly liked, on the side, below the gentle curve of her jaw, and he lingered there, feeling the swift pulse of the blood beneath her skin, feeling her hot, harsh breathing against his ear. There was a tangy scent to her—of salt and apples—and underlying it the faint and evocative scent of sexual arousal.

He pulled the sleeves of her dress further down her arms, yanking at the tight bodice a bit too roughly so that it tore, freeing her breasts. They were small but firm and round, just filling his hands, and he teased the hardened nipples with the backs of his fingers, then lowered his head to take one in his mouth. He heard her sigh his name as she shuddered in his arms.

He pulled up her skirts, reaching under her chemise until he found the bare flesh above the tops of her stockings. Soft. She was so incredibly soft. He stroked the length of her thigh and up, trailing his fingers along the rounded curve of her buttocks, drifting across her hipbone to penetrate the nest of curly hair between her legs . . . slipping inside her. She gasped, arching against him. He probed deeper, stroking the slick inner heat of her, and his other hand, which still cupped one breast, tightened. She writhed against him, planting kisses on his face, his neck, and he searched out her mouth again with his.

He captured one of her roaming hands and pressed it against the hard ridge of his arousal. "Feel that, Gabrielle. Feel how much I want you," he said through clenched teeth as his control began to slip. "Gabrielle, Gabrielle . . . oh, God, Gabrielle ..."

He was fumbling with the buttons on the panel to his breeches, so he didn't feel her hands come up to push against his chest until she had shoved him away from her. He stumbled a half step backward, letting go of her.

She slapped him hard across the face. "Damn you, Max. If you're going to make love to me you'll do it properly. Not standing up against a tree like some cheap . . . cheap putain!"

Dazed and breathing heavily, Max stared at her for a long moment in astonishment. His cheek stung where she had hit him. If you 're going to make love to me you '11 do it properly . . .

He laughed aloud, shaking his head to clear it of the roaring blood still pumping hard through his veins. What an incredible woman she was. He doubted there was another like her in the world.

"Gabrielle . . ."He reached for her.

She pushed his hand away. "No, Max. I've had enough of this. Of you." She was having trouble speaking around her panting breaths, her bared breasts heaving as she fought for air. "First you try to strangle me ---"

"I didn't try to strangle you—though there have been times, like now, by God, when I've been tempted! I was only—"

"And you've done nothing since we first met but try to seduce me."

"If I have, it's all your fault." The pounding in his head was receding, and his chest was no longer pumping like a blacksmith's bellows, but he still wanted her with a hunger that was a heavy, hollow feeling in his gut. "You're just too damned desirable. You don't know what you do to me."

She was trying to straighten her clothing, but her hands, he noticed, were shaking. He saw her mouth tighten as she fought to hold back some emotion, but whether it was a frown or a smile, he couldn't tell.

"I'm sony," he thought to say, tiying out his best little-boy grin and wondering why it wasn't earning instant forgiveness. He was suddenly afraid there would be no forgiveness, ever. The thought appalled him, and it wasn't because of the unrelenting, unrelieved ache between his legs. Or not only that. If physical hunger was all it was, then he could walk away from her now and find release in the arms of another woman. He had left before and always there had been another woman, in the next room, the next city, the next bed. But not this time. He couldn't leave this time because he realized in one sudden, painful instant that there was, and would always be, only one Gabrielle.

Desperate circumstances require desperate measures, he thought—and he threw himself on his knees at her feet.

"Madonna, madonna, forgive me," he crooned, clasping his hands over his heart.

He was rewarded with her laughter. It came bubbling from her throat, soft and curled around the edges like rose petals. Then she covered her mouth with her hands and looked around self-consciously.

Her gaze came back to him, gentle and brimming with amusement, glowing golden in the moonlight. "Get up, you . . . you . . . Oh, Max, what if someone sees you? You're making an utter fool of yourself."

He stood up and held out his hand to her.

She didn't take it, not at first.

Not until he promised that her hand was all he would touch of her for the rest of the night.

But as for tomorrow ... He made no promises about tomorrow.

"
S
o now you see, monsieur, why we must lose no time CU in finding this whore with golden-red hair who calls herself Gabrielle. For if she is the same girl and she has a living child ..."

The man's voice trailed off and he leaned forward in the gilt and velvet chair, his hands flat on the knees of his coarse black breeches. The flickering light from the many candles in the library's crystal chandeliers shimmered off his spectacles and glazed his sweat-sheened face, making the purple scar on his cheek look like a raw wound.

"In all confidence, monsieur," the man continued, "Monseigneur le Duc has not been at all well. And he is desperate to be united with his only grandchild, and heir. Are you quite sure—"

"Quite sure. I certainly have no idea where the girl can be found," Abel Hachette lied smoothly.

Hachette sat behind his rosewood desk, resplendent in a satin suit of a vivid blue color known as the king's eye. He toyed with his quizzing glass while he studied the lawyer Louvois from beneath lowered lids, which concealed his eyes and his thoughts. It was a trick he'd learned from his Black Angel, who had certainly used it to great effect often enough on him.

Hachette wanted to hide his surprise that his inquiries to the minister of police had produced a visit by this man Louvois—who claimed to be procurator to a man of such significant stature as the duc de Nevers.

But in spite of the high connections the lawyer claimed, he was obviously of humble birth and, to Hachette's considerable disgust, he seemed to be doing little to hide it. Instead of a powdered wig, he wore his coarse black hair long and loose. His suit was plain, of rough black wool, and his shoes were scuffed and worn down at the heels. Hachette, who wore chicken-skin gloves to bed every night to keep his hands white and soft, was horrified to see that Louvois's nails were bitten down to the quick, and as for the disfigurement on the man's face, Hachette was barely able to repress a shudder of revulsion.

Louvois cleared his throat impatiently. "Perhaps if I could speak to this Englishman—"

"Quite impossible. The man has since returned to England," Hachette said, embellishing his lie. When and if he delivered the girl to this lawyer Louvois, he wanted to be sure he had first considered all the consequences. A greedy seductress, a rebellious son, a lost heir—the lawyer's tale was almost too preposterous to be believed. And there was something else here . . . something that flickered deep within the man's strange bulging eyes. Louvois, Hachette suspected, wanted to find this girl and her child for reasons that went far beyond pleasing his master the duc.

Reaching a decision, Hachette stood abruptly, signaling an end to the interview. "You may tell Nevers that I've initiated inquiries. If in fact the girl exists, I shall find her for him. The child as well, of course," he added with a smile.

Louvois scooted his thin buttocks forward in the chair. "If you are able to restore his grandson to him, I am sure you'll discover Monseigneur le Duc to be quite overcome with, shall we say ..." He raised his head, fixing the older man with his protruding stare. "Shall we say gratitude, Monsieur Hachette?"

Shall we indeed, Hachette thought, allowing his smile to linger, although he said nothing. The duc de Nevers was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, and it certainly couldn't hurt to have such a man in his debt. On the other hand, it could hurt a considerable amount to have such a man as an enemy. A man who possessed blank lettres de cachet signed by the king—arrest warrants with only the name of the victim left blank. With one stroke of a pen the duc de Nevers could have him, Abel Hachette, consigned without trial, without hope, to the deepest, darkest dungeon in the Bastille, and all the money in the world couldn't buy his way out again.

The lawyer Louvois had started for the door, but he paused, turning. "We have a lot in common, you and I, Monsieur Hachette."

Hachette's lips puckered into an involuntary frown. "Do we?"

Louvois smiled knowingly. "Oh, but we do. We do, indeed. I, too, come from peasant stock, Monsieur Hachette. And though we were born on a land rich and fertile, still my sisters and I starved because our crops were ruined by the seigneur's pigeons, pigeons we didn't dare to shoot. And till the day he died, broken and old at thirty-three, my father bore a scar on his face from the lash of a riding crop because he failed to doff his hat to a visiting lord. Yes, we have a lot in common, you and I."

For a moment Hachette was back in the sod hut in Brittany where a cold wind blew through the cracks in the eaves and he slept among the chickens and the goats on the floor because his bedding had gone to pay the tax, and he felt a pang in his belly that was like hunger although he had eaten a full meal only an hour ago. "But that is the way of it," he said. "It's always been so—"

"Oh, yes, they think they rule the world and they do, these fine aristocrats, with their dun blood and their haughty ways." Louvois's protruding eyes blazed with fervor behind his spectacles. "But their time is soon finished and ours is yet to come. Someday the streets of Paris will flow with their noble blood and they will pay for their false pride. They will pay."

"The giri Gabrielle . . ." Hachette said.

Louvois blinked. He touched the scar on his cheek. "Yes, her. Her, first of all." He blinked again and turned abruptly, seeming suddenly to realize he had perhaps said too much. "You will inform me directly should you find her."

"By all means," Hachette said.

He rang for a servant to escort the lawyer to the door, then settled back behind his rosewood desk. He was tired and his bones ached, and Louvois's last words had stirred up old and bitter memories he would sooner forget. He yawned, remembering just in time not to rub his eyes. Such a thing, he had been told, caused wrinkles. He shuddered at the thought, then shuddered again at the memory of Louvois's scarred cheek. How could the man, a mere lawyer, have come by such a wound? Hachette wondered. Had he, like his father, failed to accord proper respect to some irritable aristocrat?

Hachette looked up, studying the many reflections of his own face in the mirror-paneled walls. There was a sallow cast to his skin tonight. He would have to remember before retiring later to smear it with the special balm mixed with wine that bleached the skin, giving one the "convent complexion" so indicative of the wellborn. Abel Hachette might be the grandson of a serf, but no one, he vowed silently, was ever going to know it by looking at him.

Sighing, he fought off another yawn. He couldn't go to bed just yet. He had a lot of things to consider. What, for instance, did this girl Gabrielle have to do with his Black Angel? She had powerful enemies. She could mean trouble, not only to Max, but to the cabal and their cause.

Lettres de cachet or not, Hachette thought, he might just dare to doublecross the duc de Nevers. He had, after all, risked and gotten away with far more before this. But dare he play such games with his Black Angel?

Dark and dangerous . . .

He thought of the first time he had encountered Maximilien de Saint-Just. It was over eleven years ago now. He had been traveling in his coach at night on the road between Calais and Paris. He had wakened from a doze to find the nasty end of a pistol pointed at his face through the window of his carriage, and to hear a drawling voice, muffled by a black silk mask, telling him to deliver up his valuables.

Hachette was rich even then, but he couldn't bear the thought of giving so much as a single sou to a scruffy band of thieves. "Go to hell," he had snarled, sounding braver than he felt.

"I intend to," the drawling voice replied with a laugh. "But unless you cooperate nicely, you'll be preceding me there. And I, at least, will have the joy of spending all your money before I follow."

Hachette tried to peer out the window. The flambeaux fastened to the roof of the carriage cast only a small pool of light that couldn't pierce the dark shadows of the brush that lined the road. Strangely, there was no sign of his coachman and postilions and, what's more, Hachette felt alone.

The brigand, too, appeared to be solitary. He sat easily astride a dark horse, the pistol balanced against the wrist of the hand that rested on the saddle pommel. It seemed absurd to Hachette that one man could have dispatched five others, who had been armed against just such a possibility.

"Where are my men?" he demanded.

"With mine," the voice said, then laughed again. "I have more men than you do, and they're nastier than yours. They wait for me down the road." The pistol moved closer to Hachette's face, pointing between his eyes. "I would like your money and your other fine things, Monsieur Hachette. If you please."

Hachette started. "How do you know who I am, and who the devil are you?"

The pistol clicked as it was cocked. "Your money, Monsieur Hachette . . ."

Hachette made a pile of his valuables beside him on the leather seat—a purse bulging with gold and silver louis, his diamond cravat pin, several rings, a snuffbox, and a quizzing glass. Then to the pile, and with visible reluctance, he added an intricately carved, and very valuable, silver pounce box. "Please don't take this. It belonged to my father," he lied.

The pistol disappeared out of the window, but the carriage door was pulled open and the masked stranger was suddenly inside. He seemed to fill the interior of the coach, and Hachette pressed back into his seat.

"I have a business proposition, Monsieur Hachette," the silken voice said.

Hachette laughed shakily. "You must be mad. Or you must think I am. I don't do business with brigands wearing masks."

"Come now, Monsieur Hachette, don't turn squeamish on me. You're as much a thief as I. Only I do it openly."

Intrigued in spite of himself, Hachette leaned forward. "What is your proposition? Brigand."

Six months before, the disembodied voice explained, the English colonies in America had revolted against the crown, and now the rebel American army was desperate for weapons and ammunition, desperate enough to pay almost any price. If Hachette would finance the initial purchase of the guns and a ship, the masked youth promised he could get them to America, where a guaranteed profit could be made.

"Damn my eyes, you must be a bloody madman!" Hachette exclaimed, reverting in his astonishment to a peasant's rough speech. "Do you think I'd trust a brigand with the ready to purchase a cache of arms and then watch him sail off in a bloody ship that I had paid for, by Christ?"

"I won't cheat you."

"Bloody hell you won't. Why should I trust you?"

The brigand reached up and pulled the black kerchief down around his neck. From the light of the flambeaux flickering through the open carriage door, Hachette could make out the face of a young man with sharp cheekbones, hooded eyes, and a hard mouth.

The youth met his eyes and flashed a smile full of mockery. "I can swear on the honor of my name."

"And what name is that, brigand?"

"Saint-Just. Maximilien de Saint-Just."

"You lie. I know a comte de Saint-Just, but it is an old, proud name and both his sons are officers in his majesty's army."

"This son isn't."

"This one is a thief."

The boy said nothing, merely met Hachette's scrutiny with a steady gaze.

"Very well," Hachette finally said, astonished that he was really doing this. "I'll think over your proposition. Come to my house on the Rue Royal this Friday at noon. I'll give you my decision then."

The boy said nothing more. One moment it seemed he was in the coach, the next moment Hachette was alone in the night with only the chirr of the insects for company. His purse, jewelry, snuffbox—everything was gone. Even the silver pounce box.

Abel Hachette began to laugh out loud. He hoped the boy would be fool enough to show up at his house on the Rue Royal that Friday, for Hachette would arrange to have the gendarmes there to greet him. Still, there was something oddly appealing about this Maximilien de Saint-Just. He had a certain elan, a flamboyant bravado ...

Qualities the boy would need, Hachette had thought then with another laugh, when the day came for him to mount the scaffold steps.