Hearts Beguiled (32 page)

❧

He lay facedown, one leg flung across her thighs. She relished its heavy weight, the warmth of his skin, slightly damp with sweat. Her heart thundered in her ears, keeping tempo with the beat of the rain against the window. The skin of her face and breasts tingled where it had been rubbed by his whiskers.

His leg moved off her. Unconsciously she held her breath, waiting to see what he would do, what he would say. Would he admit to the words that had spilled from him during the peak of his passion?

He leaned over her. She opened her mouth to breathe and he slid his tongue over her lips. He pulled back and surveyed the length of her body.

"Merde. There's blood everywhere."

Tension made her laugh too loudly. "Look at us. We're painted with red stripes like one of those savages from America."

He sat up and peeled off the blood-soaked shirt. He examined the wound. The flesh was red and pulpy, gaping open like a slice of raw meat, and she felt the gorge rise in her throat.

"Oh, Max . . . I'm so sorry."

"Hell, I deserved it." He looked up, giving her one of those adorable damn-it-all smiles. "No one likes being laughed at."

"Perhaps we should summon the doctor."

"So that I can be drained of even more blood? No, thank you. It's only a flesh wound. There's some brandy on that chest over there. Will you get it for me, please?"

She scrambled off the bed and ran to fetch it. She had started to pour some into a glass when she heard him laugh.

"Silly idiot. I'm not going to drink it."

"Oh." She hurried back to the bed with the decanter.

The ball had left a deep crease in the fleshy part of his muscle. He pulled the cut as far apart as he could stand it. "Pour it in there."

The room began to darken and spin before Gabrielle's eyes. She sucked in a deep breath and tipped the mouth of the decanter, pouring the brown liquid into the wound.

His arm jerked spasmodically. "Jesus God Almighty!" he roared, falling back against the headboard. Sweat filmed his face, his breath coming in hash pants. After a moment he opened his eyes. "That's good, ma mie. Now do it again."

"Oh, no, I couldn't ..."

"Just do it. Before I lose my nerve."

He didn't curse again, but his lips turned white. After she had finished, he took the decanter from her trembling hands and poured a hefty measure of what was left down his throat. He looked at her and smiled, reaching up to wipe the tears from her cheeks. "What are you crying for?"

She gulped back a sob. "I—I can't bear to see you suffer."

He stiffened and his eyes flared with sudden anger. The words hung in the air between them, like raindrops caught fast in a web.

Then he turned aside and pulled a linen slip off one of the pillows, ripping it in two. He tried binding his wound one-handed and using his teeth until she took the makeshift bandage away from him and did it for him.

"Max . . ."

"Leave it, Gabrielle."

"I can't. I can't bear loving you and having this . . . this great wall between us."

' 'What do you want from me? I can't make things the way they were before."

He flung himself off the bed. He paced the room, magnificent in his nakedness. A strong, lusty male animal—and she felt a primitive stirring in her loins.

"You could try to forgive me."

"It's not that simple." He gave a hollow laugh. "Do you know, in those hot, miserable nights after you first left me, I would lie in bed and dream of you crawling back to me, begging to be forgiven. Even the thought of revenge tasted sweet."

"I've begged, Max. I'll beg some more if that's what it takes to tear down the wall." She got up and went to him. His back was to her, and she pressed her face against it. "If it's revenge you want, my love, then take it."

He pulled away from her. For an eternity he said nothing, then he turned, and her heart broke at the anguish on his face.

"I no longer want revenge. But the hurt is still there, Gabrielle. It's like a canker. It aches and festers, and the only time I can forget it is when my yard is buried deep inside you."

She would settle for that. For now. There was some hope that if she loved him hard enough, long enough, he would love her once again.

"You're my husband," she said. "And I love you."

A muscle ticked in his jaw, and a corner of his mouth turned down. She thought he was going to say something, but he was interrupted by shouts and the jangle of harness coming from below.

He went to the bedroom window. "It's Percy!"

Grabbing his, breeches off the floor, he struggled into them. "Better put some clothes on, ma mie. If Percy saw you in that utterly delightful state of nakedness he'd do something foolish and I'd have to fight another duel."

Before she could ask him what he meant by that remark about a duel, he had bounded from the room. She heard his feet thundering down the stairs, the bang of the front door, and his voice bellowing, "Percy, you whoreson! What the hell are you doing here? Was Paris too boring for you without me around to lead you down the pathways of sin?"

Shielding herself behind curtains of embroidered muslin, Gabrielle peered out the window to see Percy Bonville in a coat of purple velvet and a flowered waistcoat descending from a traveling chaise pulled by mud-splattered horses with dripping trace chains. The two men embraced and thumped each other on the back, then Max led Percy up the chateau's steps and into the great hall.

❧

"Paris is boring and Versailles is even worse. The peasants are starving and surly and about ready to revolt, and the marquise de Tesse pines for you. Are you going to give me something to drink or do I have to sing for it?"

Percy stood in the middle of the library, leaning on his cane to look around the room. Only the French, he thought, could take opulence to the point of decadence and get away with it.

Max pressed a snifter of brandy into his hand.

Percy gestured at the bandage around Max's arm. A spot of fresh blood was already seeping through the thin linen. "Did you fight another duel and lose this time?"

"Gabrielle shot me."

"Gabrielle!"

Percy studied his friend's face. He saw the clear eyes, the smiling mouth. He laughed. "If she shot you then, by God, you probably deserved it. Where is she?"

"Here. Upstairs."

Percy laughed again. Then he suddenly noticed that Max was standing before him in nothing but a pair of breeches. "Did I, er, interrupt the reunion?"

Max's mouth tilted up in a crooked smile. "No. We'd finished. For now."

"Finished! And it's only the middle of the morning. You must be wearing down in your old age." Percy chuckled and took a sip of the brandy. "That's wonderful about Gabrielle being back. Is she going to stay this time?"

The gray eyes clouded and the dark, handsome face stiffened, and Percy cursed his careless tongue. "I don't know," Max said.

Percy limped over to the fireplace where a thick, gnarled log burned invitingly. He set the glass of brandy on the mantel and held his hands before the flames. He looked up at the portrait above his head.

"I ran into your father the other day. I can see where you acquired that cutting tongue of yours." He turned to grin at Max. "I offered him a friendly hello and tried to strike up a harmless conversation about the weather, and he told me that if it was French I was trying to speak, I needed to be given lessons. I get the feeling he doesn't like Americans."

"He doesn't like people who like me. Why are you here? Has Tesse died?

"No. He's going to live. That's why I rode all the way out here in that miserable chaise, freezing my ass off. I've come to tell you you can come back to Paris if you like—we all miss you." The smile left Percy's face and he gave Max a hard, assessing look. "I can't pretend to have ever liked Tesse\ but he's pretty much the invalid now, can't leave his bed for more than an hour at a time. And you've scarred him for life."

Max gave Percy his cold, lazy smile. "My heart bleeds ... He pimps for the marquise his wife, did you know? He encourages her to take lovers and he makes her tell him all about it in great detail. Then when he tires of the game he kills the man in a duel. The bastard deserved everything he got."

Percy stared at Max in astonishment. Then he laughed. "By God, you do have a knack for knavery if nothing else. You made Tesse pay dearly for the privilege of watching you make love to his . . . wife." Percy's voice trailed off as he caught sight of the woman standing in the doorway.

She was wonderfully deshabille in a quilted dressing gown of blue silk, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders in fiery disarray. She looked stunning. And furious.

"Oh shit," Percy said.

❧

Max found her standing with her back to the door before the big tester bed. It was in a shambles, the counterpane stained with his blood and their lovemaking, pillows and clothing strewn around the floor.

"Gabrielle—"

"No! I will not listen to your lies!" She flung her head around. Two bright spots of color stained her cheekbones. Her eyes were hot with fury. He had never seen her angry like this before.

A lock of her hair had fallen across her face. She brushed it back with a shaking hand. "How could you have made love to another woman?"

"I wouldn't call what Claire and I did making love."

She sucked in a sharp breath. "She has a name!"

He almost laughed—except that it wasn't at all funny. "Of course she has a name."

She cradled her elbows with her hands and turned away from him again, but she couldn't hide the pain in her voice. "Do you love her?"

"No."

He thought of himself as he had been then—drunk half the time and hurting so bad he wanted to die. How could he ever explain the complicated feelings of pain, loneliness, and anger that had driven him into the all-too-willing arms of the marquise de Tesse? The final irony was that he'd had to close his eyes and imagine it was Gabrielle's lips, Gabrielle's hands, Gabrielle's body opening to him before he could even come.

He stared at her rigid back and felt his own anger building as he remembered all over again the misery she had put him through. "You left me, Gabrielle, remember? As far as I

knew, you were never coming back. It's a little hard being faithful to a memory." There came to him suddenly the thought, Had she been faithful to him?

Her shoulders shook, and he thought she was crying. Then she whipped around to face him, and he saw she wasn't crying at all.

"That night you found me in the ditch," she said, "you were on your way here straight from that woman's bed."

"Yes." He gave her a tight, angry smile. "After a little detour to the Bois de Boulogne, where I shot her husband."

"She was your mistress."

"Yes. For a while."

"Then what you have done was utterly despicable. You let me humiliate myself, begging to be forgiven for making you suffer when you never suffered at all, did you? You had this Claire to comfort you. Were there others? Was there any night during the past year that you spent alone?"

"She was the only one," he said. He could feel his face hardening into the mask of indifference he always wore when he was hurting. "Although if you're going to damn me for it, then I'm sorry there weren't a dozen others. Sophie Restonne offered me a different girl for every night of the week. I should have taken her up on it."

Gabrielle sucked in a ragged breath and at last the tears came, falling in gentle drops, like dew, onto her cheeks. "Oh, God . . . I'll never forgive you for this."

He bowed mockingly. "Then it seems, madame, that we are now even."

T
he hunt thundered across the road, the baying of the hounds and the mournful wail of horns rending the air. Percy Bonville leaned out the window of his traveling chaise to watch it pass.

The dogs, following the deer scent, led the purebred horses with their purebred riders through a small group of clay-and-wattle farms. The horses' sharp hooves slashed through the moist earth, ruining the newly plowed fields. One nobleman, for sport, fired his musket at a cow, and the beast fell dead face first into the turf. The peasants cowered within the doorways of their cottages, a mixture of terror and anger on their faces.

One man, braver than the rest, stood beside a tottering hen roost and raised his fist in the air, shaking it. A horse and rider veered toward him. The rider swung out one brightly polished boot and kicked the man in the chest, driving him to his knees, and the horse's powerful shoulders knocked against the hen roost, toppling it. There was a flurry of squawking chickens, and feathers filled the air.

Shaking his head, Percy pulled back inside the body of the chaise. "You French aristocrats are an arrogant lot. It costs more to buy a loaf of bread than a man can earn in a day, the people are simmering on the edge of revolt, the philosophes are crying for liberty—and you all behave as if things will continue as they have for the next thousand years. Can't you see what's happening beneath your own haughty noses?"

"No doubt," Max said, obviously not listening. Gabrielle, sitting as far from Max as she could get, didn't bother to respond at all. The boy Dominique was asleep between them, his head leaning against his mother's arm. The tension between husband and wife was stretched so tightly it could almost have been plucked, like the strings of a violin. Percy reflected that for all the company he was getting he might as well have been traveling back to Paris alone, and he smothered a yawn in his scented handkerchief.

With the hunt having cleared the road, the chaise resumed its journey. As they passed the group of farms, Percy again looked out the window. He started to raise his hand to wave, then let it fall. Mistaking his carriage for that of a nobleman's, the peasants stared at it with hatred plain on their thin faces. Once, they would have cheered and doffed their caps. Now they stood insolently straight, their hands stuffed deep into their pockets.

"The trouble with France today," Percy said aloud, amusing himself, "is that ninety percent of the population is dying of hunger and the other ten of indigestion."

No one laughed at his joke. He doubted they had even heard him. He saw Gabrielle steal a look at Max, who was staring out the window with such a forbidding expression on his face it could have been chiseled from granite. There was a look of such love and anguish on Gabrielle's features that Percy wondered how Max could resist it. What's more, she looked positively scrumptious in a gown of pink tiffany with blond lace scallops topped by a short, fur-trimmed pelisse and matching hat. Percy had to sternly remind himself she was the wife of his best friend, and that he didn't like temperamental redheads.

Resigning himself to many more hours of this uncomfortable, taut silence, Percy leaned his head against the leather seat cushion and shut his eyes. They popped open immediately at the sound of Gabrielle's voice, sweet and clear, filling the chaise.

"Monsieur le Vicomte?"

Monsieur le Vicomte turned to regard his wife with upraised brows.

"I have been thinking," Gabrielle said.

"It's about time," Max retorted, and Percy stopped himself from snickering just in time.

"I have decided that you may have all the mistresses you like-"

"Thank you, but—"

"—and I shall take lovers."

Percy's eyes opened wide at this remark. "By Christ, I'll see you dead first!" Max snarled, predictably.

"We shall have an accommodating marriage."

"I'll accommodate you black and blue if I so much as catch you looking at another man."

She lifted a haughty chin into the air, and Percy grinned. "Hunh!" She sniffed. "Your threats don't frighten me."

Max gave her a wolfish smile. "I'll thank you to remember that you are mine. I'll keep you chained to my bed if I find it necessary, but you will be a lover to me, Gabrielle, and no other."

Percy broke into a sudden fit of coughing. He smothered his entire face with his handkerchief, while dark gray and violet eyes sent sparks flying at each other across the confining carriage.

It was obvious to any fool that those two were madly in love with each other, but Percy wisely kept such an opinion to himself. After dinner yesterday at the Chateau de Morvan, he had tried to get Gabrielle alone long enough to undo some of the damage caused by his earlier tactless remark. He thought to convey some of the torment his friend Saint-Just had gone through during her absence, but she had seemed unmoved. Then he had made the supreme error of mentioning that a man like Maximilien de Saint-Just had certain physical needs that could be suppressed for only so long.

"And, pray tell," she had said, opening wide those great purple eyes, "what needs are those?"

Percy could feel his face burning hotly. "Well, uh, that is

... a man who's never had trouble finding a woman whenever he gets the urge becomes used to the, er, regular physical release."

"Ah. So that then is the reason why Max took a wife. So he could have the convenience of regular physical release without taking the trouble, however small, to look for it."

Percy had once fought a skirmish against the redcoats in a swamp in North Carolina, but this ground he now tread felt far more dangerous. Sweat trickled down his cheeks, and he struggled hard to come up with just the right words that wouldn't further damn his friend.

"A man can take a woman without feeling any affection whatsoever, and think nothing of it," he finally said, "but I Would stake my life that Saint-Just not only loves you very much, but that you are the only woman he has ever loved."

Gabrielle lifted her head, and he could see plainly how hurt had marked her face. "I would die before I let another man touch me. If Max loved me at all he wouldn't have been capable of making love to another woman."

Percy had no answer for that. Women, he decided, were made differently than men in more ways than the obvious. It was why life with the opposite sex could be so delightful, and so maddening.

He had tried to explain this theory to Max later that night as they got drunk together over port and brandy in the library.

"Women," Max had responded, sounding as surly as he looked, "are good for only one thing. And the man who forgets that is a fool."

Percy sighed. "It's only because Gabrielle loves you so much that she can't forgive you for—"

"Love!" Max sent his glass crashing into the flames, and the spilled brandy caught fire in a whoosh of blue light. "How can she claim to love me and have thought me capable of such despicable acts? If she loved me, she would never have been able to leave me—no matter what she saw or thought she saw."

Percy, who had earlier been told the full story of the reason for Gabrielle's flight, tried to think it through from her point of view. "She was frightened—"

"If she was frightened, why didn't she come to me for help? Why keep it all hidden from me?" Max pounded his fist so hard on the delicate arm of the chair that it cracked. "As my wife she had an obligation to tell me."

"I don't know why she didn't tell you, although I can guess. That perpetual sneer you wear on that handsome face of yours doesn't do a lot to encourage confidences. What I fail to understand is why the pair of you are now putting yourselves through all this added misery." Percy waved a hand in the air. "It's obvious you're still in love with her—"

"I'm not."

"Horse manure. And she still loves you. You should both swallow your damnable pride and go to each other, admit your mistakes, and build a life on the love you share, rather than tormenting each other by denying your feelings."

Max thrust out a square and stubborn chin. "I'll admit Claire de Tesse was a mistake—when Gabrielle admits she drove me to do it in the first place!"

Thinking back now on this conversation, Percy leaned against the leather seat of his chaise and used his handkerchief to smother a sigh. He was glad he had thus far escaped the misfortune of falling in love. It turned even the most reasonable of men and women into utter idiots, and wreaked more havoc than a plague of locusts.

The chaise bullied its way slowly down a Quai des Tuileries that was congested with traffic. They had left Percy at his lodgings in Versailles and continued on by themselves to Paris, borrowing the chaise. Max, Gabrielle had just learned, no longer leased the apartment in the Palais Royal, but lived instead in a grand hdtel on the Rue de Lille that he had inherited with his title.

Dominique sat on Gabrielle's lap and leaned out the window, offering a running commentary on everything he saw. "Look, Maman!" he exclaimed loud enough for all on the quay to hear. "All those ladies have big, fluffy white feathers in their hats."

Gabrielle looked. Indeed, it seemed every hat she saw sported an ostrich feather—obviously the dernier cri in millinery fashion this winter season—and she made a mental note of it.

Dominique screeched in her ear and pointed at a fat woman who sat wedged tightly into a sedan chair that had been dumped into a pile of kitchen rubbish while her bearer indulged in fisticuffs with a clumsy carter. "Maman, that lady curses even worse than Agnes!"

Beside her she heard Max swallow a laugh. Unconsciously she turned to him, and they both shared a smile until they each remembered their anger and looked away. But the smile eased some of the tension between them, enough so that she could say, "Paris seems different somehow."

"Percy would say it is the sedition you smell in the air," he drawled, and his smile caused her heart to give a little leap.

It was a dark, drizzly day, and the city seemed as gray as the weather. Piles of frozen garbage lined the streets, and surely there were more beggars than usual sheltering beneath the stone parapets that lined the river Seine. Many of the shops along the quay had their green wooden shutters pulled down tight, although it was only midday. There were long lines outside the bakeries, and in the gutter beside a butcher's shop Gabrielle spotted a skeletal old woman stuffing a handful of raw animal innards into her mouth.

But as the chaise crossed the Pont Solferino and entered the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, the look of the city changed. Here the tree-lined streets were quiet and swept free of refuse. Looking at the stately carriage entrances to the great stone houses, it was easy to believe, as Percy had said, that things would continue as they had for a thousand more years.

The chaise rolled up before a porte cochere with the shield of the house of Saint-Just carved into the stone arch over the gates. They were pulled open by a pair of lackeys in silver and blue livery, and the chaise continued forward along a short white-pebbled drive.

A valet ran up to open the door of the carriage and let down the step, and more servants were there to hold open the front door of an enormous mansion that seemed to be all windows and marble facing. Max stepped into the hall, letting fall his greatcoat and hat into the hands of a porter without even bothering to look around to ensure the man was there to catch them. If Paris was, indeed, seething with sedition, Gabrielle thought, then the disease had yet to infect the household of Saint-Just.

The huge entrance hall was the most magnificent Gabrielle had ever seen, with so much gilt scrollwork it made her feel slightly dizzy. The majordomo magically appeared to lead them up the sweeping marble stairs—first to the nursery, where a sleepy-eyed Dominique was put down for a nap, and then to what was termed "madame's room," where unseen minions had already deposited the many trunks filled with all the clothes and accoutrements Max had bought for her.

"Madame's room" was decorated in soothing green and mauve colors, and separated from "monsieur's room" by a connecting door. She could hear Max's voice speaking on the other side of it, and she stood in the middle of the splendid room wondering whether she should go to him, wishing he would come to her, and regretting the need to think about it at all.

Instead she went to look out one of the room's three velvet-draped windows.

The Hotel de Saint-Just backed up to the Quai d'Orsay. She could see the river from here. For the first time in her memory it had frozen over solid enough for skaters to cross back and forth on their swift, sharp blades. Chunks of ice had caught against the pilings of the bridges. Cookfires burned orange on the ships that were locked into their moorings, and the cries of the peddlers on the quay carried far on the cold air.

The view blurred as shameful tears filled her eyes. Five days and nights had passed since Percy Bonville had come to the Chateau de Morvan, and Max had not touched her once since then.

Gabrielle tried to convince herself she didn't care, that— husband or not—she would never let him take her as he would a whore, without love. She felt so betrayed by him. In some ways it was worse than when she thought he had sold her to Louvois. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Max with a faceless woman, their limbs entwined in passion, and she felt a bitter and angry hurt that throbbed in her breast like a raw wound.

Yet still . . . still . . . One look at his dark, sensual face, at his hard, demanding body, and she knew she would accept him back into her bed on any terms. When it came to Maximilien de Saint-Just she had no pride, no shame, no sense.