Lucien's Fall Page 14

  Anna shook her head. "So much, Madeline. So much more than you can imagine. Peace and freedom, for one thing. We’re never free while we love."

  Freedom again. Why did that word keep coming up? Madeline looked at her plate. "I’ll keep your advice in mind, Countess. Thank you."

  And she managed to be polite for the rest of the meal, even when she was too aware of Lucien at the other end, drinking much and eating little. It was, in a way, a relief. She disliked the attitude that no lord could ever be too drunk. When a man reached this point, she found him singularly unattractive.

  She did have to admit to a sneaking admiration of his ability to remain upright, however. Considering all, it verged on the miraculous.

  And considering all, she was best off away from him. After supper, she found Juliette and murmured in her ear. "I am most unwell tonight. Forgive me."

  But as Madeline was about to exit the salon, Lucien smoothly put himself between her and the door. He said nothing, only gazed down at her with those haunted eyes.

  She sighed. "I dislike drunkenness, as I’ve already told you. Please, excuse me."

  "Do you so soon retreat?" he asked. "Did I frighten you so much today?"

  Madeline met his piercing look steadily. "Don’t play the doomed man with me," she said. "I lack the energy or the interest to save you."

  "Oh, it is no game," he said, and there was despair on his face.

  Before she could relent, Madeline pushed rudely by him. He grabbed her elbow as she passed and said against her ear, "Do not forget, Princess, that you owe me a kiss. I intend to claim it."

  She yanked from his grip easily and hurried up the stairs.

  Chapter Twelve

  I prithee send me back my heart,

  Since I cannot have thine.

  ~ John Suckling

  Madeline changed into her night rail and brushed out her long hair. A feeling of restlessness crawled in her limbs, and she wandered toward the long open French doors that led to the balcony beyond. On the stone floor there pattered more rain, and the heady scent of it blew in on a soft breeze, lifting the decorative muslin curtain. From below, she heard the rising flicker of voices and laughter. No doubt everyone would get quite drunk, once more, following Lucien’s example.

  She sighed. What would it be like when she was mistress of a house? Given the current standards, would she be expected simply to allow the drunkenness to go on? It wearied her—not so much the spirits themselves as the chaos they nurtured. More than once she’d seen the training of a lifetime overthrown when a man or woman indulged in too many glasses of port.

  Beyond the window, she thought she heard a noise, a soft scrape or scratch; thinking there might be a cat trying to climb the vines that clung to the wall, Madeline moved forward, putting her brush down on the dressing table as she passed.

  "Here puss!" she called softly.

  Lucien Harrow appeared in the doorway instead. "Will I do?"

  Madeline gasped softly. He was quite thoroughly drenched, his shirt clinging to his flesh, his hair dripping. his face covered with a sheen of moisture. "What do you want?"

  He took a step forward. "You"

  She backed away. "This is not—you are not to be—" she licked her lips. "Go. I don’t know how you got here, but you may take that route back and leave me."

  "No." He gave her a slow and stubborn shake of his head, and wiped rain from his face. "No, that I will not do."

  A flicker of fear whispered over her spine. In this mood he was reckless. Dangerous.

  A single candle burned on her night table. It illuminated his face in strange and exotic ways, shimmering along a cheekbone, skimming the line of mouth, shadowing the breadth of his shoulders, high and broad against the night.

  He moved again, forward. Madeline retreated.

  And yet, she wanted him. His beautiful face and dark heart. She wanted to touch the skin revealed below the wet cambric that clung to him. One dark flat nipple showed against the cloth, and a pattern of silky hair, and the line of ribs. She swallowed, and closed her eyes.

  Her back bumped the bedpost and she startled, instinctively raising a hand to keep him away. Her palm landed on his stomach, and it was unutterably flat and hard and strong. The cold fabric warmed instantly as it sandwiched between her skin and Lucien’s. "Go," she repeated, pushing against him.

  "No," he said, but he stopped in front of her, and lifted his hands close to her face. He turned them, palm out, so the backs of his fingers and the elegant rise of bones were next to her skin—though not quite touching. His eyes were heavy lidded and lazy, and carried a sultry expression.

  His right hand skimmed over her face, so close the path of his fingers disturbed the tiny invisible hairs over her skin. She fisted her hand and turned her face away from that elusive, arousing touch.

  Undaunted, he moved his hand down the side of her neck, over her shoulder, down her arm, never quite touching her, but all the nerves in the path he followed were alerted to pleasure and urged her closer to him.

  She pushed again with her fist. "You must go, Lucien. Now. I will not have my reputation put in such jeopardy. Do you want me to be poor as a church mouse all of my life?"

  "Of course not. I only came for the kiss I hold in hock."

  "Tonight?"

  "Yes." He bent close, so close his breath swept her lips and made her breasts taut. His mouth hovered over her own. "Would it be so terrible to be kissed, Madeline?"

  She clutched the bedpost behind her for strength. He stepped in, and their bodies touched, his stomach against hers, his chest against her breasts, his manhood pressing thickly against her thigh.

  For one long dangerous moment, as he moved ever so slightly against her, Madeline ached for him. She wanted to reach for him and put his hands on her body, and tug his head down and have him put his mouth against hers, and taste at last the sweetness his devilish smile promised. He smelled of port and rain and horse, a combination as heady as freshly turned earth. Tighter and tighter Madeline clutched the post, tighter and tighter as his hair fell on her shoulder and his mouth skimmed over her cheek. "One kiss, Madeline. You owe it to me."

  She did owe it to him, but tonight, like this, it would not be one kiss. One kiss and she would tumble like a neat stack of dominoes to his allure. And in the morning, she would be ashamed and sorrowful and ruined.

  It took all she had to turn her face again away from him. "I am too small to force you to do anything against your will," she said. "But I ask you again to leave me."

  Ever so slightly, he moved against her, and he ran his hands over her face, down her arms, his thumbs skimming her breasts. "Please Madeline," he whispered. "One kiss."

  "Go, Lucien."

  He stood there one more minute. Madeline looked up and caught a fleeting, sultry desire in his eyes before he turned away. "As you wish."

  Into the rain and night he went, as suddenly and completely as he’d come. Madeline waited until he was gone to let go of the bedpost, and sank to the floor, trembling violently.

  After a long moment, she managed to pull herself into her bed and settle the covers close around her. Please, she thought urgently. Charles, hurry back!

  * * *

  Lucien did not know how he managed the climb back down the vines outside Madeline’s room—but then, he didn’t much know how he’d managed to climb up, either.

  Without conscious thought, he moved over the grounds toward the door that would lead to the stairs that would take him to his chamber. He skirted the salon where gaiety and candles held the line against the night and the weather. He stopped momentarily to watch them all, glittering and resplendent like richly plumed birds, their laughter a bright exotic call. Standing in the rain, Lucien watched them and heard music ringing through him, the same notes— doomed notes—as haunted him in Madeline’s garden, in her greenhouse, and in her room, just now, blazing and loud and undrowned even in however many bottles of port he’d drunk now. He’d lost count.

  Unm
oving, unmindful of the rain drenching him, he stared at them, remembering another time when he’d stood on the outside—had he not always been on the outside?—and watched the dancing, hearing music like knives in his veins, tearing him to pieces.

  His mother had seen the music in him, and nurtured it, giving him ways to find his way inside it. She gave him Russia, and Saint Petersburg, and finally Vienna, where it was no shame to hear music and play it and be consumed with it; she’d given him teachers who heard it, too, and helped him leash the sounds. For nine years, from the time he was six until he was fifteen, he’d been on the inside, been a part of something larger than himself.

  The joy of those years seemed all the more rare for the way they were wrenched from him. Lucien’s mother died. His father, probably grief stricken and not altogether reasonable, had forbidden Lucien to play or compose his music, and beat him severely when he did. Such pursuits, the earl said, were the realm of foreigners and men of unnatural tastes. It was time Lucien took his place as an Englishman, and the future earl of Monthart.

  Had he been even a year or two older, Lucien might have been able to resist the change that he’d known, vaguely, would destroy him. But at fifteen, dizzied by his mother’s death, needing desperately to find a new place for himself, he capitulated to his father’s wishes. Bitterly, but completely. When the music seduced him, he squashed it with derision or drowned it with liquor.

  And to his surprise, he learned he had another talent— -women loved him. He learned to flirt and flatter, to dance and tease, to kiss and caress. If not for the countess of Heath, he might have gone on quite happily debauched for years.

  The memory galled. Rain streamed over his face as he stared at her, remembering the painful lust that had consumed him. He’d thought himself so very sophisticated and polished, all grown and experienced at the age of nineteen. She was older, more experienced, and taught him all manner of new and astounding things. For one whole winter, they were inseparable, and quite the talk of the town.

  Much as Jonathan and Juliette were now.

  Love made Lucien’s music live. He composed for her—sonatas and ballads, light and lively little pieces he played in private. It amused her.

  Inside the salon at Whitethorn now, she danced with one of the squires come in for the evening from the outlying farms in the district. Her powdered face was as flawless now as it had been when Lucien was nineteen, and her body as dangerously curved, but Lucien felt only hatred when he looked at her. The memory of her betrayal stung deeply—his earnest composing, her laughter when he dared to give tribute in public.

  Even ten years later, the emotions lingered. He’d been humiliated and pained, and even though he understood how that she’d been trying to calm her husband, the facts gave no help for the damage she’d wrought. It didn’t help that he’d further humiliated himself with a challenge to duel her husband, who’d managed to just graze the flesh of an overwrought boy.

  It didn’t bear thinking on. That night, his music had died—he’d stuffed it deep into a reinforced trunk in his mind and left it there. And there it had stayed, with rare outbursts of need that he wrote deep in his cups and burned before he slept.

  Until now. Until Madeline and her blasted gardens and her blasted eyes.

  With a soft whooshing roar, the rain doubled in intensity and Lucien was driven within. He took the stairs to his chamber, stripped off his sodden boots, and dried his hair.

  The music that had been dancing at the edges of his mind now rushed forward, as if to torment him, loud and insistent—and beautiful. So beautiful and seductive and sorrowful. He slammed a fist on the table and buried his head, covering his ears to shut out the sound, but it came from within and did not cease.

  Sweet and light, so easy at first, then darker and darker it grew, until the light moments were blotted out, as if stomped, squashed—

  With a groan, he found his pen and sharpened it roughly, and began to write, humming, dreaming, listening. Once he gave in, the pressure in his chest eased and he could breathe, and his head did not ache. But he wrote with sorrow, wrote the sound of the last days of Pompeii, so light, then dark, and at last destroyed in a great, inescapable violence. Pompeii. Pompeii.

  He wrote until dawn crept into the room. He filled page after page with the notes he could not escape. When the first full fingers of sunlight broke over the eastern horizon and splashed onto his composition, Lucien halted in surprise. All night he’d written. All night. There was in his body a curious lightness, as if he were unwell, and he stared at the dawn with a feeling of confusion. All night.

  With a sigh, he stood and gathered the sheaves of paper and carried them to the fire. It had fallen to embers, but they burned well enough once he stirred them. The paper caught with a satisfying blaze.

  Suddenly into his daze broke the memory of Madeline standing in this room, humming the notes she’d read on the paper, fighting with him to keep the papers out of the fire—and the taste of her a few moments later, heated and unwilling, aroused and furious. He had been almost mad with want of her in those moments, and yet she had resisted him. There was an immovable integrity about her he wondered if he could crack. He wondered if he would, after all, be able to seduce her.

  Idly, he poked the sheaf of burning paper, smelling the acrid scent with a sense of relief.

  And with the audible click that so marked inspiration, he saw the answer that had been eluding him all along—music was the key to seducing Madeline. It was the only tool against which she had no defense. He frowned, thinking of her face as he’d played her violin yesterday—overwrought, overwhelmed, wide open.

  Yes. He pursed his lips. Yes, music would woo her to his bed—even against her own will. But could he do it? Could he twist even that to his lust? Was he willing to sacrifice his last holiness? He knew with utter certainty that it would also destroy him. And that he would do it anyway.

  * * *

  Madeline worked in the gardens the next morning. No one joined her, for it was Sunday and the workmen did not come. Nor did Lucien appear, which was no terrible surprise, considering how deep in his cups he’d been the night before. She doubted he’d leave his bed at all today.

  It was a relief. Mainly. A tiny shudder passed through her every time she remembered the look of him last night in her room—tall and soaked and wild. He was so fierce and free. It was almost impossible to imagine such a life. She wondered, as she weeded, if he appreciated it.

  By the time the scents of breakfast began to tease her, Madeline had finished a considerable amount of weeding. All four of the lace beds were now cleared and properly trimmed. She admired the yellow daisies blooming amid circles of silvery lamb’s ears. Exquisite.

  Beyond the lace gardens and the tall dark edges of the maze, the rose gardens, too, were neater than they’d been two weeks before. She—with Lucien’s men and his own hard work—had made much progress.

  Walking now back to the house, she puzzled over that. Why he bothered. The obvious, that he meant to seduce her, was only a part of it. He seemed to take great pleasure in doing, in being busy, challenging himself. He possessed an almost inhuman level of energy, which was a large part of his charm.

  Her stomach flipped. Charm. Yes. He had more than his fair share.

  Last night there had been one terrible, illuminating moment in which she wondered if it would really be such a disaster if she allowed him to have his way with her.

  The thought made her feel vaguely faint and flushed. She saw a sizzling memory of his cambric shirt clinging, wet and thin, to his chest, and his dark male nipple showing through.

  It didn’t bear thinking of. To touch Lucien Harrow, to let him touch her in return, would mean betraying Charles in a most vile manner. She would not do it.

  In the safety of her room, she washed her face. The troublesome attraction she felt toward Lord Esher and the alarming moment at which she’d nearly capitulated to his seduction might not have been so terrible if it hadn’t been for Charle
s, actually. She’d never been married to virtue for the sake of virtue; it just seemed the liaisons she’d witnessed were unclean somehow, distressing in ways she didn’t really understand.

  Charles would be a good husband to her, a man she could trust. One on whom she could depend not to be out on the town or in a carefully appointed house with his mistress, or chasing opera dancers. Madeline could not bear a life like that.

  So, until Charles returned, she had to stay as far from Lucien Harrow as possible—which might, considering his persistence, mean hiding if necessary. It could not be much longer, after all. Perhaps she ought even contract some vague illness and take to her bed until Lord Esher was gone or Charles returned.

  No. That was too cowardly. She’d simply avoid him.

  This sensible plan seemed reinforced when a footman gave her a letter as she entered the dining room. It was from Charles. Because it was still not yet eight, there was no one else about. Madeline settled in a delicate chair by the long Elizabethan windows, in the good light. The windows the hail had broken were now replaced, and the clear light coming through was ideal for reading. She broke the seal.

  My dear Madeline,

  I cannot express the Joy your letter gave. If it were my choice, I’d rush back to you this very instant, instead of sending my man with this letter, but I fear I am obliged to stay here. The hailstorm devastated our Fields, as well as many homes and other buildings. I am quite desperately needed here for the moment.

  If you were another sort of woman, I’d worry that you might misunderstand my values, but you are too close to the Land yourself to hold this against my suit, Nor I think would I be the man I am if I did not stay here. Unlike Lords Esher and Lanham, I have already taken the reins of my Responsibilities and cannot turn my back on them.

  As soon as my Business is complete, I will return post haste to Whitethorn, and we can then discuss our plans for the Future.

  Yrs ever,

  Charles Devon

  Blinking back stinging disappointment, Madeline folded the letter aright and stared dismally at the gardens. Behind her came the clink and shuffling of another breakfaster, but Madeline didn’t dare glance at whoever it was just yet.