The Pursuit of Pleasure (2 page)

At least that was what the local authorities said. But Marlowe knew better. Frank was murdered. And he would prove it.

Lizzie’s murmur brought him back. “My condolences, for what they’re worth.” She ran her palm up and down her other forearm as if she were chilled. Lizzie had never been at ease with open emotion. “Anyone I knew?”

“Lieutenant Francis Palmer.”

“Frankie Palmer?” For a moment she was truly affected. Her full lips dropped open in an exhalation. “From down Stoke Fleming way? Didn’t you two go off to sea together, all those years ago?”

“Yes, ten years ago.” Ten long years. A lifetime.

“Oh. I am sorry.” Her voice lost its languid bite.

He looked back and met her eyes. Such sincerity had never been one of Lizzie’s strong suits. No, that was wrong. She’d always been sincere, or at least truthful—painfully so as he recalled—but she rarely let her true feelings show.

“Thank you, Lizzie. But I didn’t lure you into a temptingly darkened room to bore you with dreary news.”

“No, you came to proposition me.” The mischievous little smile crept back. Lizzie was never the sort to be intimidated for long. She had always loved to be doing things she ought not.

A heated image of her sinuous white body temptingly entwined in another man’s arms rose unbidden in his brain. Good God, what other things had Lizzie been doing over the past few years that she ought not? And with whom?

Marlowe quickly jettisoned the irrational spurt of jealousy. Her more recent past hardly mattered. In fact, some experience on her part might better suit his plans.

“Yes, my proposition. I can give you what you want. A marriage without the man.”

For the longest moment she went unnaturally still, then she slid off the chair arm and glided closer to him. So close, he almost backed up. So close, her rose petal of a mouth came but a hairsbreadth from his own. Then she lifted her inquisitive nose and took a bold, suspicious whiff of his breath.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“I have,” he admitted without a qualm.

“How much?”

“More than enough for the purpose. And you?”

“Clearly not enough. Not that they’d let me.” She turned and walked away. Sauntered really. She was very definitely a saunterer, all loose joints and limbs, as if she’d never paid the least attention to deportment. Very provocative, although he doubted she meant to be. An image of a bright, agile otter, frolicking unconcerned in the calm green of the river Dart, twisting and rolling in the sunlit water, came to mind.

“Drink or no, I meant what I said.”

“Are you proposing? Marriage? To me?” She laughed as if it were a joke. She didn’t believe him.

“I am.”

She eyed him more closely, her gaze narrowing even as one marmalade eyebrow rose in assessment. “Do you have a fatal disease?”

“No.”

“Are you engaged to fight a duel?”

“Again, no.”

“Condemned to death?” She straightened with a fluid undulation, her spine lifting her head up in surprise as the thought entered her head, all worldliness temporarily obliterated. “Planning a suicide?”

“No and no.” It was so hard not to smile. Such a charming combination of concern and cheek. The cheek won out: she gave him that feral, slightly suspicious smile.

“Then how do you plan to arrange it, the ‘without the man’ portion of the proceedings? I’ll want some sort of guarantee. You can’t imagine I’m gullible enough to leave your fate, or my own for that matter, to chance.”

A low heat flared within him. By God, she really was considering it.

“And yet, Lizzie, I think you may. I am an officer of His Majesty’s Royal Navy and am engaged to captain a convoy of prison ships to the Antipodes. I leave only days from now. The last time I was home, in England, was four and a half years ago and then only for a few months to recoup from a near fatal wound. This trip is slated to take at least eight … years.”

Her face cleared of all traces of impudence. Oh yes, even Lizzie could be led.

“Storms, accidents, and disease provide most of the risk. Don’t forget we’re still at war with France and Spain. And the Americans don’t think too highly of us either. One stray cannon-ball could do the job quite nicely.”

“Is that what did it last time?”

“Last time? I’ve never been dead before.”

The ends of her ripe mouth nipped up. The heat in his gut sailed higher.

“You said you had recovered from a near fatal wound.”

“Ah, yes. Grapeshot, actually. In my chest. Didn’t go deep enough to kill me, though afterward, the fever nearly did.”

Her gaze skimmed over his coat, curious and maybe a little hungry. The heat spread lower, kindling into a flame.

“Do you want to see?” He was being rash, he knew, but he’d done this for her once before, taken off his shirt on a dare. And he wanted to remind her. He’d lived off the promise of that day for years.

She gave him a saucy smile. “You mean I don’t have to dare you this time?”

Marlowe felt his mouth turn up in a grin as he peeled off his cravat, shucked the coat, unbuttoned his waistcoat all the way, and flipped open the close of his shirt at his throat. He tugged the linen open to reveal the motley spray of bullet scars across his otherwise smooth chest. Daring her to look this time.

Oh, but she looked. Her eyes widened in the dark as she leaned forward, inching her inquisitive gaze closer. So curious—always had been. Like a nearly wild barn cat sniffing at a pot of cream. She couldn’t seem to help herself.

Ah, but he would help her. He took her right hand and placed it flat against his skin.

A mistake.

Marlowe sucked in a breath through his teeth. Her cool, nimble fingers danced tentatively across his flesh. Sweet God, such open, agile curiosity. It was unbearably erotic. His nipples contracted, and his eyes threatened to buckle shut. Her touch had propelled him from want straight into compulsion. God help him, less than twenty minutes in her presence, and he was desperate to have her, to bury himself in her heat.

He should have known. He should have been prepared for the rush of desire skittering like a hot, searing wind across his exposed flesh. There had always been something about Lizzie, and only Lizzie, that got under his skin. Maybe it was the way she looked at a body, all teasing, insolent dismissal, or the way she smiled behind her eyes. Though it didn’t really matter how she did it. It only mattered that she still made his skin prick and his gut clench and his pulse race. It only mattered that his fingers itched to trace the long, white line of her nape and kiss the impudent little smiles from her face.

Please God, let her say yes, and he could finally have her in his bed, beneath him, at least for a few days. Lizzie was bound to be good at that. She was made for hedonism.

Marlowe anchored his hands to his side to keep from pulling her to him. It would put her off to do anything uninvited, but her simple touch was pleasure so painful it was nearly unbearable, and he didn’t want the sweet torture to stop. So he endured her featherlight strokes and tried to remember to breathe.

“Well,” she whispered at last, “I don’t know when I’ve been more surprised.”

It was pure Jamie. She’d always thought him a bit of a bully trap—a boy whose mild, self-effacing manner masked his deeply honorable, courageous soul. Too honest and honorable for his own good. Cheerfully going off to be killed and showing her the probability of his death scattered across his chest.

And it was shockingly nice, his chest. And so unexpected. Smooth and warm and sleekly muscled. Heat seeped off his skin to singe her fingertips. He’d always seemed so slight and unassuming as a boy, but now he was tall and handsomely made. Very, very handsomely made. The years had changed him into a man.

She had tried so hard, so very hard, not to think of him during the past ten years. And she had failed. But she had always thought of him as a boy, as the boy she’d known. Her playmate, her friend, her conscience, and her tormentor. Her companion. To her, he’d been everything she thought good and right with the world, until the day he had left her behind without a backward glance, gone to seek his fortune in that world. The world of men. The one place she could not follow.

And yet she still had missed that boy. Desperately. It was impossible not to want to see if he still remained inside this formidable man.

But perhaps he was not so formidable. She could feel him tremble beneath her palm. Or was it her own hand that trembled? Lizzie stole a peek up at him. His clear gray eyes looked right through her pose, as he always had done, pinning her like a butterfly to the truth.

Her hand quivered in earnest, now. But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t seem to resist touching his skin. Because he was Jamie. He was like a lodestone, pulling her to him without even seeming to try. She simply couldn’t resist him. And she liked the astonishing feel of his chest rising and falling ever so slightly under her hand. His body gave off a crackling tension, like the air before a thunderstorm, as she drew her fingertip from one scar to the next, connecting the dots that littered his chest.

His breath blew out in a rush, a warm breeze against the back of her hand. He smelled like sweet, mellow whisky. And she wanted to taste him. To taste Jamie.

Lizzie snatched back her hand and turned away to cover the piercing stab of attraction. How much did he remember? Good Lord, but she’d been a forward little girl, sure of her secure place in the world.

She wasn’t twelve anymore. She gathered her composure like a shield and turned back to face him, armed with her most flippant demeanor. “You’ve convinced me you’re likely to die, but why else should I marry a junior captain? I’ve no want to be left with your debts.”

When he finally spoke, his voice sounded strange and winded. “No debts, I can assure you. You can write up all the settlements yourself, if you like. And there is a lovely house, Glass Cottage. Up along the cliffs above Redlap Cove. With several hundred arable acres. There’s a steward to mind that.” He shrugged his coat back over his broad shoulders.

“A cottage?”

“A house. Not too big, not too small, with eight principal bedrooms, or so. Lovely view down to the sea. It’s nothing to Hightop, but it could be yours.”

“And you own it? The rector’s son has certainly come up in the world.” But she’d never doubted he would.

“Prize money, Lizzie. Didn’t anyone tell you? I’ve made my fortune off the Spanish Dons.”

She felt the genuine delight of a conspirator. “How very enterprising of you.”

“How very,” he agreed with a laugh. “Of course, if you don’t marry me, when I do die, the whole thing will go to my useless cousin Jeremy, who as you must recall is a prize prig.”

“Wroxham? I thought he’d taken himself off to Oxford or London.”

“He did. But he’ll either come back here and play lord of the manor, or he’ll sell the place, which I can’t have. That’s my only stipulation, Lizzie. You mustn’t sell. No matter what. You can’t live there, of course, but neither can you sell the place.”

“Rather sentimental of you, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps, but then I don’t mind being sentimental. I owe it to the blood of the honest, true men who toiled and died winning that money, Lizzie, and I’ll be damned if I let a snuff-eating toad like Jeremy Wroxham have any bit of it.”

She wrinkled up her nose at the mention of Wroxham. “Bloody Oxford men—think they own the world.”

“And that, my dear Lizzie, is why
you
must have it instead. You must see it. It’s beautiful and covered with roses that Wroxham hasn’t the wit or temperament to appreciate. And I’ve enough money too. That would be yours as well. You could do anything you wished with it, once I’m dead.”

She tossed up her shoulder to show him she’d changed. She wasn’t about to count his money to find out how much “enough” was. It had always seemed an unbridgeable gulf between them, money and status. Between Lord Paxton’s daughter and the rector’s son.

“And what about you? My father has offered an enormously vulgar amount for someone to take me off his hands.”

“No takers?”

“No one I’d take. Gorgers, the lot of them.”

He laughed at her blunt description at the sort of overfed, self-satisfied young sportsmen who strutted through Dartmouth’s version of the marriage mart. “Well, if you marriedme, your marriage portion would be yours straight away. And when I die, you’ll have my entire fortune.”

It was all so tempting. Such a perfectly simple and straightforward way to gain true independence. But far too good to be true. She slid another glance over his tall, lean form. So slight and unassuming—that’s what she’d always thought. With his brown, tousled hair falling over his pale, open eyes, he still looked younger than his twenty-four years. But she was wrong. There was something more.

There were many men of her acquaintance, even some of the men who had tried to court her, who were far better looking. Not that Jamie was homely. Not at all. He just looked so … familiar. Until you got to those eyes. Translucent, pale, sea gray. Stormy. Like a wolf in winter, sleek and persistent. The vivid image of him as a hungry predator took her by surprise. He had changed from that gangly, pale, laughing boy. He was still lean and lanky, but there was now something hard, honed, and tensile, something almost dangerous lurking beneath the easy smile and sly, intelligent humor. He was a man who had been tested.

Her fingertips still tingled from the feel of his chest beneath her hands. “Are you really going to die?”

“More like than not. At the very least, I shall be gone for eight long years.” His mouth quirked into a deprecating half-smile, but his eyes looked solemn. For all his dry acceptance, she thought he wasn’t quite as ready to die as he pretended.

“Hmm.” A sound hummed out of her throat, tight and husky.

“Don’t tell me you’d miss me?” His voice teased her.

He wouldn’t believe her even if she said so. And she would never say so.

“Not in the least.” She winged up a shoulder for emphasis. “I mean, I’d mourn you properly, of course. Wear crepe. Shed a tear or two, because you were a nice enough child, but then your memory would … fade. I don’t suppose you’ve had a portrait made I could put over the fireplace to remember what you looked like?”