The Bride Wore Pearls (8 page)

Anisha’s toe stopped tapping. “Good, Geoffrey,” she said softly. “That’s very, very good. And may she lead you a merry dance. She will, I daresay. You look utterly besotted.”

“Well.” Bessett, always a little high in the instep, cleared his throat and snatched up his hat. “Well, I daresay she will. But first, ma’am, with your permission—?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, go!” Irritation sketched over Anisha’s face. “You need beg no permission from me, Bessett. I am exceedingly glad to be shed of you. And as I said, you never asked me to court you, and I certainly never meant to ask you. So yes, go make your proposal to this mysterious lady—this Miss de Rohan. I hope she says yes—but not, I trust, until she has made you get down on one knee to blubber and beg like a fool.”

With that, Geoff declared his undying admiration for Anisha, seized her hand to kiss it, then hastened off down the stairs.

Lazonby watched him go from one corner of his eye. “Good Lord,” he said again when the front door thumped shut in the hall below. “That was a bit of a shock.”

“To you, perhaps,” she retorted.

Trying to bestir his charm, Lazonby flashed his most beguiling smile. “Well,” he said softly. “Where does that leave us, old thing?”

“Well,
old thing,
” Anisha echoed, teeth gritting a little, “I daresay it leaves us just where we’ve always been. Absolutely nowhere.”

Chapter 3

Why, sir, for my part I say the gentleman

had drunk himself out of his five sentences.

William Shakespeare,
Merry Wives of Windsor

L
ate that afternoon, Lord Lazonby went home; home to his town house in Belgravia, Samir having left him little choice. Once sequestered in his upstairs suite, he stripped naked, tossed on a worn silk dressing gown, and, after uncorking a fresh bottle, made love to
La Fée Verte
for the rest of the night.

It was a bad habit; one of many that had followed him home from the French army. It was also a dreadful error, given his state of mind. Rage, frustration, and, yes, even lust were always magnified by absinthe. And as he sat alone opposite the cold hearth watching, almost rapt, as the water trickled through the sugar and silver, down into the green void below, he thought of Anisha, and wondered.

Was he a coward?

Well, he was afraid—which was the very definition of a coward, he supposed.

He thought again of how she’d looked this afternoon, so elegant and so beautiful and so angry. Nish, whose eyes often held a hint that her favors might be his would he but ask. And her kiss—
good Lord
. It had been the smallest thing. And yet it had been something else entirely.

He could not let himself think of what that
something else
might be.

And it would be such folly! Not to mention an utter breach of the promise he’d sworn her brother. Yet he considered her again and wondered what sort of red-blooded man would not want her to the exclusion of anything else in life, even honor. His duty to Ruthveyn, his hatred of Coldwater, the revenge he so desperately sought—all of it should have paled by comparison to that one simple kiss.

It almost did.

It
would,
if he let it.

And that, perhaps, was the most frightening thing of all.

Always, always there had been that ethereal something between him and Anisha. And he had known enough lovers to recognize that sidelong, simmering look a woman gave a man when she was sizing him up, so to speak. A few ladies of the
ton
had even found Lazonby’s rough edges and bad name intriguing enough to invite him to their beds—but never, of course, to their dinner parties.

Anisha, however, genuinely liked him—or had until today. But he was not free to love her, were he even capable of it.

Oh, he wasn’t imprisoned, precisely, nor likely to be. The reach of the
Fraternitas
in Britain had once again grown too strong—and, under Ruthveyn’s deft hand, too useful to the Crown. Until Lazonby actually
did
murder someone—today Bessett sprang to mind—and got caught in the act with blood on his hands, then Royden Napier dared not touch him.

Odd how little satisfaction that brought him tonight.

He would never be truly free until his name was cleared and honor restored to his family.
To his father.
And Coldwater somehow held the key. Yet after better than a year of dogged pursuit, Lazonby was no closer to that goal than the day he’d walked out of Newgate. He was frozen in time. Shackled by his own hatred. He could move neither forward nor backward with his life.

He reclined now like some indolent pasha upon a tufted chaise by the window—an almost feminine piece of furniture his estate agent had acquired along with everything else in the house—and felt the lethargy melting deep into his bones.

He could go, he supposed, to Mrs. Farndale’s for the evening, to watch her girls prance and laugh and feign an interest they did not have. But it was hard to take much pleasure in it when a man could sense with his every fiber that the desire was just a bought-and-paid charade. That in truth, such women were as jaded and mired in
ennui
as he was. It required a lot of alcohol—or a lot of
something
—to deaden his intuition and take from them a physical pleasure that was hardly pleasure at all.

He rarely ever bothered anymore. He did not bother tonight. Instead, he watched as the sun slanted low across the roofline opposite. Leaning into the glass, he savored the coolness that radiated from it. Up and down in the street below, he could see the bankers and the barristers alighting from their carriages and going up the steps to kiss their children or take a glass of wine with their wives.

Soon, however, the doors and carriages would fall silent. Then, in another hour, the Commons would recess for dinner and a second wave would begin. It was upper-middle-class Britain at its most industrious—which was to say, not very—and Lazonby had no more part in it than he did in his own so-called class.

He had lived too long in a different world, forgotten the comforts and petty follies of an ordinary life, and become more comfortable there than here. He belonged with people more like himself; the self he had become after long years spent, both emotionally and literally, in the desert. He’d been twice imprisoned, and in between those years, he’d steeped himself in blood and debauchery. He did not belong with someone like Anisha—or her two impressionable young children.

So it was easier, then, to simply not think of what might have been and live only with what
was
. What had to be done. And as he swirled about what was left of the cloudy green liquid in his glass, he forced his attention to the fact that he never had made it to Quartermaine’s.

For a moment he considered dressing and heading back across Westminster for the evening. Though he was no longer the infamous gamester he’d once been—Hanging Nick Napier had cured that habit—Lazonby still felt drawn to the hells. To the elegant atmosphere. The hope and desperation. The faces feverish with excitement, or deathly pale with dread. And then there were the women, so beautifully befeathered and beribboned, and trained to urge a chap on; to encourage him to part with just another sou—for this one,
this one,
would surely be the charm.

But he did not go.
L’heure verte,
along with its inevitable languor, was upon him now, and Lazonby could think of nothing save Lady Anisha Stafford. Of the hopelessness of it all.

He drained the glass, his fourth, perhaps, then plucked another lump of sugar from the silver bowl and perched it delicately atop the pierced spoon to begin the process again. He watched the liquid emeralds drip through it to pool like sweet poison in the bell of his glass. Then came the water, and the swirling nebulousness that reminded him of life itself; so sharp and clear one moment, so utterly obscure the next, all its many truths hidden in a milky, celadon haze.

He drank it down, knowing, of course, that the absinthe had already affected him, and that what seemed a brilliant insight was little more than the ramblings of a madman’s mind. But he scarcely cared. In time, the bottle became half empty, his carafe of water the same, and Lazonby had no memory of the glass which followed—or the one after that.

When he did not go down to dinner, a servant brought up a tray, which sat forgotten. Vaguely he recalled hearing a clock strike midnight. He must have gone to bed thereafter, for at some point he began to reemerge into pitch darkness, caught in the tentacles of an all-too-familiar dream.

He was on the gallows again, the noose growing tighter and tighter. And this time there was no brace beneath his collar. No trick knot to slow it. He realized in a panic that Sutherland was not there. That the priest wore instead a hooded cloak, eyes burning like the coals of hell. He fought to force his lungs to work and failed. He felt death slip nigh.

And then the noose softened, relented, and became something else altogether, and he was floating above, looking down at himself. He lay naked across a bed, caught in a tangle of sheets as he stroked himself. The rough rope had become a silken cord. Coldwater lay naked beside him, his hand slowly drawing down the knot, watching Lazonby’s face almost lovingly as he choked the breath of life from his body. And yet there was no pain, but only the sense of an extreme, blinding pleasure. A pleasure not unlike sexual release, and yet it shimmered all about him as his vision began to darken.

It was
le petite mort
at its most literal.

At its most exquisite.

And then he could not breathe, and true death was upon him, and Lazonby knew that he had been tricked. Enticed. That Jack had finally seduced him and taken his revenge. . .

On a guttural cry, Lazonby came bolt up in bed, clawing desperately at his throat.

His cock was so rigid and the room so black that for an instant Lazonby
believed
himself dead; that this time Jack had finally found what he’d so long sought. But when his hand came away from his throat, Lazonby clutched only the silk tie to his dressing gown. The death-erection was just an ordinary cockstand, and the rest of the garment was entangled about his knees.

Strangled whilst frigging himself.

And by his own robe, no less. An ignominious death indeed.

But he was not dead. The hollow sound of his breath sawing in and out of his chest reaffirmed it. Flinging off the robe and linens, Lazonby rolled up onto his elbows, eyes darting about in the gloom. The windows. The shadows. All were just as they should have been.

Aye, he’d cheated the hangman for yet another night.

Still, he worried about himself. He truly did. In a thousand lifetimes, he would never have guessed that a life of hard living and licentiousness could leave a man so jaded. To dream such things. Sometimes night after night . . .

And why was Jack Coldwater always mixed up in his nightmares of execution and eroticism? Good God, he was sick to death of thinking of him. What was it about the man that obsessed him so? He could feel the malice radiating from the man’s every pore—that much Lazonby did
not
mistake—and yet when he was near the man, he felt a sick, twisted, almost sensual awareness.

And he feared others saw it. That
Anisha
saw it. That it had given her a disgust of him.

Suddenly hinges squalled and a bright, wavering light cut across his face.

“My lord?” The whisper belonged to his new valet. “My lord, are you quite all right?”

Yanking up the sheets to cover his waning erection, Lazonby lifted one arm to block the light.

Good God, he must look like a madman, sitting thus in the dark.

“Yes,” he finally managed. “Thank you . . . Horsham, is it? Quite all right. Just a bad dream.”

Horsham cleared his throat sharply. “It’s the absinthe, sir, if you’ll pardon my saying,” said the valet. “The devil’s in that green bottle.”

“Aye.” Lazonby’s breath was calming now. “Aye, I think I met him tonight.”

The servant still held his lamp aloft.

“Thank you, Horsham,” Lazonby rasped. “You may go.”

There was a moment of hesitation. “Sir?”

“Yes?” Lazonby said a little impatiently.

To his dismay, the fellow came fully into the room and set the lamp down on the night table. In the flickering shadows, consternation was writ plain on the man’s face. He reached out as if to touch Lazonby.

Lazonby drew away. “Damn it, Horsham, don’t mollycoddle,” he said gruffly. “I’m a man of bad habits. Said as much when I took you on. Go the hell back to your bed.”

Horsham shocked him then by seizing his wrist and lifting his hand from the tangle of sheets. “But sir, your hand is bleeding.”

“The devil!”

Then Lazonby looked down. Horsham had forced his hand over to reveal a gash from the base of his ring finger straight down his palm. Lazonby turned to see his bolster slip streaked with blood already going brownish-red against the freshly starched linen.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

“Probably, sir.” Horsham let his hand drop. “And all the sooner if you bleed to death.”

“Hmm,” said Lazonby. “An honest man. I like you better and better, Horsham.”

But the valet had vanished below the edge of the bed. Lazonby leaned over to see the man on his knees, picking glass out of the Turkey carpet. “You crushed it, sir,” he said, the thick wool muffling his voice a little. “You must have gone to sleep holding it, and suffered a nightmare.”

“The devil,” Lazonby said again.

But Horsham was right. The empty bottle lay on its side by his night table. The silver sugar bowl was upside down, the lid and spoon nowhere to be seen. Only the stem of his glass lay intact.

Horsham picked it up, and the lamplight caught it, sending shards of light through the room. It was antique Venetian
cristallo
—another of his estate agent’s luxuries—and he had crushed it. Ruined it, just as he had every beautiful thing in his life.

I daresay you would do nothing but disappoint . . .