Velvet (24 page)

Gabrielle stood for a minute in her boudoir, looking out the uncurtained window into the night. Rain lashed against the panes, dreary English rain that crept into one’s bones. She drew the curtains tightly, then threw another log on the fire. Hugging her breasts with her crossed arms, she stared into the fire. For the first time in this crusade of vengeance, serpents of doubt raised their heads and hissed softly in her mind and in her heart.

If Nathaniel had not been responsible for Guillaume’s murder, would she still be willing to betray him? She’d been involved in French intelligence for five years. But a courier’s work hadn’t involved direct contact and her adversaries had been nameless and faceless. This was very different.

She closed her eyes, seeing Guillaume’s face in the red glow behind her eyelids. She could hear his voice, quiet and level, telling her that the end justified the means. That in the land of shadows where they worked, ordinary ethical considerations didn’t apply.
Nathaniel Praed didn’t operate by those considerations, and one must meet fire with fire. She was carrying on Guillaume’s work because her loyalties lay first and foremost with his memory.

When she returned to France at Talleyrand’s bidding six years earlier, she’d left England and the DeVanes with deep reluctance, but her godfather had insisted that her father would have wanted her to take her place in French society, reconstituted after the chaos of revolution. England and France had just signed the Peace of Amiens, but the peace had not lasted long and soon Gabrielle had found herself with an emotional foot in both camps. Then she’d met Guillaume, and had buried her English loyalties deep, even the abiding friendship and gratitude she owed the DeVanes.

When Nathaniel joined her in bed that night, she welcomed him with a fierce eagerness for their fusion, desperate to blind herself to all but the physical contact, the explosive satisfaction of the lust that nothing could blunt between them.

Nathaniel awoke first the next morning. He lay in the dim light of dawn, preparing himself for what he was about to do. He turned his head toward the dark one on the pillow beside him. Paper-thin, blue-veined eyelids shielded the sometimes passionate, sometimes mocking, frequently challenging charcoal eyes. Black lashes formed dark crescents against the white skin, where just the faintest bloom of sleep tinged the high cheekbones. The retroussé nose wrinkled slightly, and her mouth tightened suddenly as if her sleeping thoughts disturbed her in some way.

And so they should, he thought bitterly, such an accomplished spy, she was. The concealed message in the letter to her godfather had been a masterpiece.

He wondered how best to wake her. She preferred a slow awakening, so …

He drew his knees up, catching the sheet and blanket on his feet, and then thrust out his legs, kicking the covers to the foot of the bed, baring Gabrielle’s naked body to the chill morning air and his own gaze.

Gabrielle was so deeply asleep that the abrupt change in temperature caused only an instinctive response. She rolled onto her side, curling her body as she reached blindly for the covers, searching with innate animal impulse for the lost warmth.

Nathaniel tapped the curve of her buttocks thus presented to him. “Wake up, Gabrielle.”

Gabrielle rolled onto her back and her eyes flew open. She covered her breasts with her arms. “I’m cold! What’s happened to the blanket?”

“I kicked it off.”

“Brute!” She sat up, reaching down for the covers, still too muzzy to question what he’d said. “Oh … that’s better.” With a sigh of relief she fell back on the pillows, dragging the blanket up to her neck and closing her eyes again.

“I said wake up!” Firmly, he unhooked her fingers and again stripped off the blanket. “You have a debt of honor to pay.” He raised an eyebrow as Gabrielle blinked in bemusement.

“Today’s the day I have a handmaiden for twenty-four hours,” Nathaniel announced. “I believe I win the wager.”

Gabrielle closed her eyes to hide the rush of speculation at these words. Curiously, she’d forgotten the wager, she’d been too busy concentrating on discovering his secrets and winning his confidence. But it didn’t surprise her that Nathaniel had remembered. It was the kind of thing he would remember. And if today was Sunday, and, judging from the pealing church bells outside, it seemed that it was, then the two weeks were up
and Nathaniel Praed had not recruited her into his spy network.

Maybe a day of passionate lust would chase off the demons of depression that dogged her at the moment.

“Well, now,” she drawled, still keeping her eyes closed. “As I recall, we agreed it was a wager as well to be lost as won.”

“You’ll have to tell me about that this time tomorrow,” he murmured. “For now I can concentrate only on the privileges of the winner.”

Her eyes opened. “So, make your wishes known, my lord.”

“Well, first, I’d like you to understand that for twenty-four hours every inch and every cell of your body is at my disposal—and that includes your tongue, madame, which I wish you for once to keep under control.”

Reaching out, he ran his flat thumb over her mouth. “And since I don’t want to put too great a strain on your powers of compliance, I’ll help you by imposing a rule of silence. As of now.”

Gabrieile’s eyes spoke volumes as she absorbed this statement. Surprise and a shade of resistance leaped out at him from the deep gray pools. Automatically, she opened her mouth to demand further explanation and Nathaniel’s thumb pressed firmly against her lips.

“Now,” he said softly. “You had better disappear next door while I arrange matters here. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

Something didn’t feel right. But it was a game they’d both agreed to play. Gabrielle slipped off the bed and went toward the connecting door.

“Oh … and Gabrielle …” His voice arrested her as she turned the knob. “Don’t get dressed.”

Now, what did he have in mind? His instructions so far indicated he intended to hold her to the very letter of the wager as well as its spirit, and she couldn’t help her initial response, that little spurt of annoyed resistance
coming on the heels of a vague stirring of unease.

Gabrielle wrapped herself in a cashmere shawl against the morning cold and sat on her accustomed seat in the window to await his summons. As she relaxed, little prickles of excitement began to stir the downy hairs on the nape of her neck and flutter in the pit of her stomach. Twenty-four hours was a long time … and Nathaniel was an inspired lover with an extravagant sense of fantasy.

Silence, she was to discover as the long morning moved into afternoon, had the most powerful effect on the senses. It facilitated an extraordinary concentration on touch and feel, on taste and sight and smell. She imagined it was like moving in the womb, as Nathaniel rolled her beneath him with a fluid maneuver of her body that didn’t disturb the union of their loins, and she felt the coolness of the sheets against her back, where before there had been the softness of the fire-warmed air of the bedchamber, and his body pressed into hers, molding the planes and concavities of his torso to the softer curves and indentations beneath him.

And in this closed world of silent concentration, she found herself focusing intensely on Nathaniel, and she could feel currents in his body that disturbed the smooth rhythms of their lovemaking. Sometimes, she detected a distance in him, as if, while his body played on hers, he himself was absent, was looking down upon their twisting, sinuous forms with a cool objectivity. The realization would chill her and then he would move over her again, would make some quiet demand that intensified their mutual pleasure, and the disturbance would pass.

Passive compliance, she also discovered throughout those long hours, had the same effect as the silence, or perhaps the one facilitated the other. She had only to
be
in this coupling. Her self didn’t have to inhabit her
body; indeed, her self was only an ever-shifting pool of sensations. She obeyed the authoritative touch, the soft-voiced command, and only once or twice did an uneasy resistance rustle through her, a tiny disturbance like a light breeze in autumnal leaves, when the body on hers felt as if it belonged to a stranger.

It was dusk before Nathaniel broke the spell. He was sprawled on the long couch beneath the windows, Gabrieile’s bright head resting on his belly as she knelt on the floor beside the sofa, one languid hand stroking intimately between his thighs.

His gaze fell on the Chippendale clock on the wall above the fireplace. It was six o’clock. He moved his hand down, twisting his fingers in the dark red curls, turning her head on his belly so that she was looking toward him. Her eyes were heavy with fulfillment, her features somehow smudged, no longer sharply delineated on the pale, translucent skin.

“Enough, now,” he said quietly, and yet his voice sounded shockingly loud after the long hours of silence in the firelit intimacy of their love chamber.

Gabrielle smiled dreamily, her eyes asking a question.

“You may speak,” Nathaniel pronounced.

“I think I’ve forgotten how to. Perhaps it’s tomorrow rather than today.”

Nathaniel shook his head and said nothing.

Again Gabrielle felt that dart of unease. His eyes were unreadable as they looked down into her face, and she was used to seeing warm tenderness, a languid glow of satiation in their brown depths after such an excess of sensual joy.

But perhaps she was imagining it. They had been strange hours, eliciting new responses. Nathaniel had led them into uncharted territory, and unfamiliar emotions were to be discovered in such a landscape.

Without moving her position or ceasing her stroking
attentions, she attempted to reassert the comforting realities of every day. “I seem to be hungry.”

To her relief, Nathaniel responded in the same tone, and the ordinary contours of the room reappeared and she was conscious of the prickle of the carpet beneath her knees and the dampness of his skin under her cheek.

“Me too,” he said briskly. He caught her busy hand and put it away from him. “Now move your head, woman.” He heaved himself upright and swung his legs off the sofa, looking around the disheveled room, where a bathtub of long-cold water still stood before the fire, and a table bore the remains of a cold chicken and a bowl of fruit.

Bending, he caught Gabrielle beneath the arms and hauled her upright. She swayed and leaned against him, nudging at his thighs with one knee.

“That’ll do,” Nathaniel instructed, taking her waist and moving her aside. He filled two glasses from a depleted wine bottle and handed one to her. “Drink this.”

Gabrielle sipped and regarded him with a quizzically raised eyebrow. “So what now, Sir Spymaster? You’ve another twelve hours to enjoy your prize.”

“No,” Nathaniel said. “I’m declaring a moratorium.”

“Oh? Why so?” She was puzzled and taken aback.

“Because it doesn’t seem entirely fair,” he said, reaching for a dressing gown and shrugging into it. “I won the wager under false pretenses.”

“What?” Gabrielle became suddenly conscious of her own nakedness as Nathaniel wrapped the robe around himself, tying the girdle securely. The atmosphere in the room was fractured in some way, and she felt an overwhelming sense of vulnerability.

“I’ve decided to take you into the network,” he stated calmly. “So, one could say that I cheated you out of your winnings.”

Gabrielle stood very still, trying to make sense of
this. “Then you didn’t play fair,” she said finally in tones of hurt confusion.

“Fair play, my dear, is not to be expected in the world of espionage,” he pointed out in a voice like sere leaves. His eyes raked her face, looking for a conscious flash in her eyes, a hint of color in her cheeks, but there was nothing. Gabrielle de Beaucaire knew the underworld and the many dark faces of man, and she wore the velvet cloak of deceit as easily as he wore it himself.

“No, I suppose it’s not,” she said, suddenly matter-of-fact, going toward her own door. She paused, her hand on the latch as an explanation occurred to her for the strange, disturbing moments. “Was there some kind of test embodied in the last hours, Nathaniel?”

“I wanted to see whether I could trust you to play with the team,” he said casually. “Whether you could control your own vigorous responses and follow the direction of a leader.” He smiled. “It seems you can … in bed, at least. I’m willing to assume you’ll be able to do it in other situations.”

Gabrielle went into her own room. Distaste nibbled at her soul at the thought that all the while he’d been watching her, assessing her, as she lay open to him, her defenses down, utterly trusting in the loving congress that had always been inviolate, untouched by her own muddled emotions. He’d used sex to discover something about her. Surely he could have chosen some other arena.

But she’d succeeded. That was the important thing. Coldly, she concentrated on that fact. From now on she’d have access to the spymaster’s world.

Nathaniel found himself staring at the closed door. Despite the ruthless pragmatism that had lain behind the scenario he had engineered that day, he was as stirred by her as ever. She had been more exciting in the role she’d played at his direction than he could ever
have believed possible. Absorbing herself into the fantasy with her own brand of erotic magic.

Gabrielle de Beaucaire was a woman unlike any other. She could meet him and match him on every level—from hasty, lustful tumbling to exquisite love games; from angry challenge to witty retort; from analytic discourse to novel opinion. And on the back of a hunter, honesty obliged him to admit that Gabrielle probably had the edge.

His eye fell on the rumpled bed, the piled cushions on the floor where their game had led them at one point, the straight-backed chair where Gabrielle had—

Helen hadn’t cared for hunting. The thought burst through his lascivious reverie. She’d been like Jake, timid on horseback. She’d not been playful either. A quietly smiling, grave woman of sweet disposition, she’d lent herself to him willingly, but he remembered now how once or twice he’d had the nagging suspicion that she’d found the sweaty antics of entwined naked bodies faintly ridiculous at best, distasteful at worst. He hadn’t dwelt upon the suspicion, of course … had dismissed it as silly. Helen was too sweet and compliant to make such feelings overt, and what man wanted to see himself as ridiculous in the eyes of an adoring wife?