Lady of Seduction (8 page)

This island, with its secret passages and treacherous paths, its caves and dead housemaids, was getting to her. It was pushing
the real, practical world farther and farther away, until this windswept rock was the everyday reality and Dublin the fantastical
dream.

And Grant’s kiss felt like the most real thing of all.

Caroline reached inside the neckline of her dress and drew out her locket. The tiny emeralds set in the engraved shamrock
twinkled in the candlelight, glimmering despite the scratches of the ordeal it had gone through. But the tightly closed hinges
protected what was within. She opened it and gazed down at her niece’s painted little face. She tried to remember Lina’s and
Daniel’s childish laughter. Her mother and sisters. She had to focus on getting back to them.

She snapped the locket shut. What were they all doing now? Before she left Dublin, the city was abuzz with rumors of a planned
French invasion. It was said that Robert Emmet himself was returning from his long sojourn in Paris with new allies and old
ones ready to rally around him again—as well as a French army at his back.

Caroline had scoffed at those rumors and dismissed them as mere hysterical gossip. Even though the Rebellion was years ago
now, and Ireland’s official Union with England had happened two years ago, the old fears of war and chaos lingered, as did
the distrust between the Ascendancy and their Irish tenants and servants. There was always simmering panic that could bubble
to the surface and explode at any moment.

Ireland was constantly in danger, of course, but from its own population and overlords. An occupied nation was never safe.
But Caroline was quite sure France must have better things to do than waste their Grande Armee invading Ireland.

A knock suddenly sounded at the door, loud and insistent.

“Come in,” Caroline called. She half-feared—or hoped—it was Grant.

But it was Mrs. McCann, looking even sterner and more disapproving than usual after Caroline’s “escape.” She wondered how
the housekeeper came to be employed here at such a ramshackle old castle in the first place. “I hope you’re feeling quite
well, my lady, and that you have not caught a chill from the rain.”

“I am very well, thank you, Mrs. McCann,” Caroline answered. “The hot bath was a great improvement.”

“Then if you please, Sir Grant has asked that you join him for dinner in the dining room.”

Caroline sipped at her wine as she studied the room. It seemed all stone—rough stone walls, flagstone floor covered with a
faded old carpet, a carved fireplace that was big enough to roast an ox. The only furniture was the old table and x-back chairs,
and a sideboard that held only dusty bottles of wine and no silver plate. She remembered again his fashionable Dublin dining
room, with its graceful French furniture, delicate Murano glass chandeliers, and yellow satin draperies and cushions.

Oddly, she much preferred
this
room, with all its antique mystery. It had an austere elegance that suited this new Grant, the Grant who sat beside her at
the head of the massive table.

“It’s very interesting in here,” she said. “I almost expect a row of chanting monks to walk through at any moment.”

Grant laughed. “It’s not very la mode.”

“Neither am I, I’m afraid. I prefer something with more substance, more interest to it than what is fashionable. Something
that speaks of the past.”

“Muirin Inish is full of the past. It’s also cold and damp.”

“And haunted?” she asked.

He glanced at her, his eyes hooded. “So they say. But isn’t every old house and grove in Ireland said to be haunted?”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Grant?”

“Not in the spirits of the dead.” He paused to pour more wine into their glasses. “At least I don’t believe they walk the
corridors at night, moaning and clanking chains. They stay with us in ways that are far more subtle and insidious.”

Who haunted Grant like that? Caroline wanted very much to know. Who lingered in his heart and his memory,
giving those terrible sad shadows to his eyes? But he said nothing more, and she didn’t know how to ask without driving him
away. She had never been as adroit with emotional matters as she wanted to be, as her sister Anna was.

“I’d like to see more of the island’s history,” she said. “I read about the monastery before I left Dublin, and I heard there
was an ancient Celtic ring fort.”

“There is, though there’s not much to see there now. The stones were used to make a new fort in Cromwell’s time, and that
was destroyed soon after. The monastery is much more extensive in its remains, but it’s not safe for you to go there alone.
I can take you tomorrow, if the rain ceases for a time.”

Caroline looked at him in surprise. “You would go with me?”

“Someone obviously has to keep you from falling into a hidden pit or stumbling over ledges,” he said. “Someone has to see
to your safety.”

Caroline laughed. She never felt less safe than when she was with him. She never felt less like herself, less in control.
“And you have appointed yourself my keeper?”

He leaned toward her over the corner of the table. His gaze was suddenly quite serious and intense. “I don’t see anyone else
here to do it. And you Blacknall women seem to bring trouble in your wake wherever you go.”

Caroline thought of how he once wanted to marry a Blacknall woman—Anna. She sat back in her chair, away from the warm lure
of his body, and took another gulp of wine. “The wine is very good.”

“Unlike the food?” Grant slumped back in his own chair and pushed away his untouched plate. “It should be good, it’s French.”
He rose from his chair to restlessly prowl the room.

“French? How did it come to be here at Muirin Inish? Are you not in the blockade?” It had to be smuggled. Brought in at the
secret cove? Along with what other contraband?

“I must have
some
comforts here in my monkish life, Caroline.”

She couldn’t quite picture him as entirely monkish, despite the austere castle and his reclusive ways. She had glimpsed the
old, rakish Grant in that charming grin, the man who loved the sensual pleasures of life like wine, fine clothes, fast horses—and
pretty women. She felt her cheeks flush hotly as she remembered the desperate, hungry passion of his kiss, and her equally
hungry response to him. She could feel that hunger rising up in her now as she looked at him across the table.

Caroline turned her head away from the sight of him, from her vision of him as a fierce warlord of old Celtic tales who would
ravish her, his captive maiden, in front of the fire. Her stare caught on a pair of portraits hanging on the wall over the
sideboard.

They seemed out of place in these medieval surroundings. They were far more modern images of a man with long, powdered hair
and a bright satin coat and a young woman in a white, billowing gown with a bunch of roses in her hand. She looked so very
much like Grant, with the same sharp cheekbones and bronze-colored hair falling in curls over one shoulder.

“Is that your mother?” she asked, gesturing to the painting with her glass.

“Yes. In her younger, happier days before she met my father,” Grant said. “You remember her story?”

Caroline studied the lady’s painted face and thought
of her tale. How she was the daughter of the last Duke of Adair. How she was the pampered, beautiful daughter of a proud,
well-to-do, staunchly Irish Catholic family. When she married Grant’s father, a handsome wastrel, and worse, an Anglo Ascendancy
Protestant, she was cast out of her family. So when her husband turned out to be a penniless gambler, who had counted on her
family’s money and grew cruel when he did not get it, she didn’t know what to do.

When Grant’s father’s debauchery caught up with him and he died young, Grant and his mother were alone. She was turned away
by her brother when she took her young son to Adair Court to beg for help, and Grant’s hatred for his mother’s family took
hold of his heart and turned it hard and bitter.

Caroline felt a pang of sadness as she studied the woman’s pretty, youthful smile and her hopeful expression. No one could
see the future or the heartbreak that awaited. No one knew what fate their choices would bring. Maybe that was a blessing.

“She was beautiful,” Caroline said. “You look a great deal like her.”

A bitter smile twisted Grant’s lips. “So people used to say. But I fear my heart was never tender like hers. It is more like
my father’s.”

Caroline went to stand beside Grant under the gaze of his self-deceived and ill-fated parents.

“I don’t think you are like either of them,” she said. “You are much stronger than them. You knew you could change the direction
of your life, that you could make yourself better.”

He stared down at her with those fathomless eyes,
almost black now in the firelight. “Do you really think I have changed?”

The darkness around them, the crackling fire, and never-ending rhythm of the rain, and the wine all combined to make her feel
light-headed and not at all herself. The past seemed so close and yet so far away, like a half-remembered dream.

Surely he would vanish again, this new Grant, this stranger who so disturbed her.

Caroline gently laid her hand on his chest, and her gaze moved to his face, to the tracery of scars that stood out pale over
his elegant bones. He was still the most handsome man she had ever seen, so handsome he surely could not be part of the human
world. This place did suit him far better than the city’s theaters and assembly rooms ever could.

She couldn’t stop herself from touching those scars. When her fingertips caressed the long, crooked lines that snaked over
his jaw, he drew in his breath with a hiss and jerked his head back. But she would not be deterred. She stretched up on her
toes and kissed the scar. It was rough under her lips, and he tasted of soap and salt and wine. She wanted more of him, more
and more.

“Caroline, you were surely sent here to drive me to madness,” Grant groaned.

“Then we are both mad.” Caroline rested her forehead on the curve where his neck met his shoulder. She closed her eyes and
inhaled deeply of his clean, spicy-dark scent, drawing it down into herself. A bittersweet longing swept over her, overwhelming.
She longed for
him
, and also for something deep and desperate she couldn’t quite grasp. Yet she sensed it was something of vital importance.

She curled her fingers into the front of his shirt and
kissed the pulse that beat at the base of his throat. She parted her lips and spread a line of kisses along his throat, his
jawline, the spot just below his ear. His skin was hot and smooth, and the slight roughness of his whiskers abraded her lips.

She tore open the lacings of his shirt and at last touched his naked chest. How had she gone without this for so long?

She pressed her mouth to that heartbeat and felt the rhythm of it on her lips. She traced her tongue around his flat, hard
nipple and reveled in the moan of his response. He wanted her, too, she knew that. She wasn’t alone in this madness.

His fingers twined in her hair and pressed her against him. “Caroline,” he said, and his voice sounded rough and desperate,
the fine English accent and cool distance gone. “I tried to fight against this, whatever this is between us…”

“I know,” she whispered. “Oh, I
do
know!”

“I’ve never known a woman like you,” he said. “It’s as if, when I’m with you, I see only you, as if you’ve cast a spell over
me, over this whole island.”

Caroline looped her arms around his neck and stretched on tiptoe until her body was pressed flush to his, hip to hip, breast
to hard chest. “
You
are the sorcerer, I fear.” He was sent to beguile her away from her purpose, to trap her in this heated pleasure until she
could see nothing else. She didn’t
want
to see anything else. If this was to be her downfall, then she welcomed it.

For tonight anyway. Tonight was part of the spell, and tomorrow was very far away.

His hands closed hard on her waist, and he bent his head to capture her lips in a hard, hungry kiss. She opened
her mouth to him in eager welcome, and his tongue touched and twined with hers. He tasted of wine, and of that darkness she
craved so much.

His kiss was full of desperation, and it made her desperate, too, made her fall deeper and deeper into the humid, hot abyss
of longing. She needed him; she needed to be closer and closer to him until she could no longer tell where she ended and he
began.

His clasp tightened on her waist and drew her down with him to the floor. He landed hard on the old carpet over the flagstones
and dragged her over his lap until she straddled him. Her hands braced on his shoulders as they slid back into the hard rhythm
of their kiss.

She felt his open palm slide roughly over her hip until he grasped the hem of her dress. Slowly, enticingly, he pulled her
skirt up until her right leg was bare. The heat of the fire and the cold draft washed over her naked thigh at the top of her
stocking, and she shivered.