Lucien's Fall Page 5

  "Do you mind so much?" he asked quietly enough for her ears only. "Jonathan desperately wants to ingratiate himself with Beauchamp for a business proposition."

  "You mistake me, Lord Esher," Madeline replied, her chin high. "It is always a pleasure to share the day with guests who might not be accustomed to our country lanes."

  His grin was crooked and knowing. "Perhaps I was mistaken, but didn’t you call me a savage only a moment ago?"

  Steadfastly, Madeline avoided the lure of looking at him. "You’re improperly dressed for a gentleman."

  "Ah, but I am no gentleman. And even when I pretend to be so, I am not very proper about it."

  Madeline lifted an ironic brow. "At least you’re honest."

  "Only when it suits me."

  For a moment, Madeline regarded him. If he used honesty like any other tool in his quest for seduction, then he must believe somehow she needed to know he planned to seduce her, that a direct approach would be more effective than another method. What benefit could there be to it?

  She frowned a little. It seemed important to stay abreast of his motives as well as she was able; he was too clever by half and she was rather too sharply attracted to him. A slight carelessness and Madeline could easily be lost.

  As if he’d been waiting for her conclusion, he looked at her with no expression at all, and said not a word. She flushed and faced forward.

  The road, following the river, broadened. With relief, Madeline rode up beside the marquess and Jonathan, who were discussing again the Italian countryside. Madeline seized upon a bit of overheard conversation from the other two men. "Have you been to Pompeii, Lord Esher?" she tossed over her shoulder.

  "Yes."

  She glanced at him, but he seemed disinclined to say more. "You did not care for it?"

  "On the contrary, I cared very much for it." He turned his head. "It moved me as much as anything I’ve seen in my life."

  A bitter applause was on Madeline’s lips—wasn’t that just the sort of calculating thing a rake would say to engage the emotions of his quarry?—when Jonathan let go of a derisive laugh.

  "It put him on the melancholy, he means. I vow he was drunk for days and never did gather his courage to go back."

  "Madeline said it affected her the same way," the marquess said. Madeline heard in his offering the soothing oil of justice of one who dislikes conversation to belittle anyone else. She admired his fair-mindedness. "Only a moment ago," he went on, "she was suggesting that perhaps there’s some lingering impression there, left by those so suddenly killed."

  Lord Esher looked at her, his eyes very still. "So you are not the pragmatist you’d have us believe."

  "Oh, but I am. Why cannot there be some scientific explanation for the strong emotions some people feel there?" she said. "You felt them, as did I—at different places and at different times."

  "Please!" protested Jonathan, blustering. "Surely you can’t mean there is some magic force at work, holding the emotions of fifteen hundred years past in thrall. If that were true, why wouldn’t all who enter the ruins feel the same things?"

  Madeline frowned, looking toward the treetops of waving green fronds and into the pale blue English sky. In her imagination, she saw ash-whitened columns, the forgotten gardens, all buried alive one violent day and thus frozen for all time.

  "I think," she said slowly, "one must be tuned to it, or not. Yes," she said, "perhaps that’s just what I do believe. There was such trauma that day that it has left behind a lingering cry to echo through the ages, but only if you have a certain sort of—" she struggled with a word that would sum up her feelings, "openness will you notice it."

  "I believe Lady Madeline has the soul of a poetess," Lord Esher said. The words did not seem to be ironic.

  "No poetess," she said. "Only a simple woman who mourned those poor people, torn from the middle of their lives so violently."

  "Would you not agree, my lord?" persisted Lord Esher, his eyes upon Madeline.

  "Perhaps she does." With a kindly smile, he winked at Madeline, a jest for the pair of them. As she returned the smile, she wondered if it were luck or accident that he had thus thwarted Lord Esher’s attempt to flirt with her.

  "Does that make you a poet, too?" she asked Lord Esher, and immediately wished she could call the words back.

  It was not he that replied, but Jonathan. "Don’t you know his painful history?" There was again tension in his words, a sharp glitter in his eye that said he knew his words would hurt or embarrass his friend. Madeline looked from one to the other, wondering what caused the enmity. "The great Lucien’s prodigal talents?"

  "Jonathan," Lord Esher said. The word carried deep warning.

  Heedless, Jonathan rushed on. "He was nearly as famous a prodigy as Mozart when he was ten. Played Vauxhall and Bath."

  "Really? What did you play?" Madeline asked.

  "That’s enough, Jonathan," Lord Esher said. His posture was deceptively relaxed.

  "Played everything!"

  Madeline sent a questioning glance toward the marquess, who shrugged in bewilderment.

  "The antics of a trained monkey," Lord Esher said dryly. "No more."

  A dark burn of annoyance or anger colored his cheeks. Madeline watched him in some wonder, surprised to see such deep emotion in him.

  "It’s that passionate Russian blood, y’know," Jonathan said.

  Real fury flashed in the jeweled eyes. To forestall the fisticuffs she could see brewing, Madeline rode between them. "Are you Russian, Lord Esher?" she asked lightly.

  "Half. My mother was Russian, from Saint Petersburg. My father met her on a diplomatic trip." Along his jaw, the muscle pulled tight, but he took a long breath as if to calm himself. "I spent much of my childhood there."

  "How romantic," she said, again playing the flirtatious hostess attempting to hold her raucous guests at bay. The marquess gave her an approving nod. "Do tell us a little of it."

  "It’s been too long," he said dismissively.

  "Oh, surely you remember something."

  He turned to her, and even as Madeline watched, he seemed to take on some wild power from beyond himself, gathering a wide appeal from the very air. The power centered in his face, on his mouth and in his eyes, and he focused it with particular intensity upon Madeline. "I remember," he said, and there was the faintest rolling to his r’s,"the white nights and the ladies in their dazzling gowns dancing in the soft bright midnight."

  Madeline swallowed. "It sounds lovely."

  "There was music," he said, his voice rougher, lower. "Everywhere. Everywhere," he repeated. "I remember the snow, too, falling from a dark cold sky, dancing like diamond feathers on unseen winds."

  His gaze moved from her eyes to her lips as he spoke, and he lifted a finger to touch his own mouth. Transfixed, Madeline watched his long, lean finger move on his firm lips, and found herself leaning ever so slightly forward...

  "Why that’s rather poetical, too, isn’t it?" the marquess said. "Bravo, Lord Esher."

  "Indeed," said Jonathan.

  Startled by their voices, Madeline realized her posture, realized her lips were slightly parted and her breath came between them in hurried fashion, and that Lord Esher smiled, an ironic and triumphant gleam in his eye.

  Abruptly, she straightened, feeling a warm flush crawl in her cheeks. A distinct tingle remained in her lips as she tried to recompose herself, and she bit down on them hard, trying to drive away the oddly aroused sensation.

  He was very, very dangerous. It would take every shred of skill she’d accumulated to resist him.

  As they neared the house, he rode close enough to brush her calf with a hand, discreetly so neither of the others would notice. "I won that round," he said, his voice inaudible more than a foot away. His fingers caressed her leg as if in promise, then he let her go.

  With a wicked, free laugh, he rode away from them, coaxing his horse into a hard run. They moved together as one creature, Lord Esher low over the horse’s n
eck, his hair and the horse’s mane flying out on the wind, his shirt a billowing flag of white.

  "By God, he’ll kill himself," the marquess said, aghast as Lucien rode for the hedges at a dead run.

  "No," Madeline said.

  The trio paused to watch. The wind picked up, blowing a scurry of leaves into the path, but there was no other sound until Lord Esher cried out into the darkening day, "Go!"

  Horse and man leaped and flew and hung against the sky. Madeline’s heart swelled. Barbarian beast he might be, but she doubted she’d ever met anyone so free as Lucien Harrow.

  How in the world could she ever resist his ploys to bed her?

  There was only one way. She’d stay away from him as much as she possibly could until he tired of chasing her. And tire he would. Another woman would catch his fancy, a chambermaid or a matron at a party or some heiress from town.

  She simply had to wait him out.

  But that might make her seem as if she were more of a challenge. She frowned. That wouldn’t do—he’d only pursue her all the more, and she couldn’t bear a full assault. Even she, with her impatience for matters of the heart, would fall to the concentrated sensual powers of an accomplished rake like Lord Esher.

  What, then, would she do?

  The real trick would be to seem not much of a challenge, or to make it seem as if she were chasing him. A shudder touched her. Too dangerous.

  No, she’d simply have to spend as much time as possible with the marquess and hope that when she had to greet Lord Esher, she’d be filthy from the garden.

  Soon or late, he’d tire of the chase.

  Chapter Five

  No springing beauty scapes my dart

  And ev’ry ripe one wounds my heart;

  Thus while I wound, I wounded am.

  ~ Charles Cotton

  Lucien believed there was no woman who was completely immune to seduction. Some could be wooed with flowers or sweet words or food. Some only needed a slight encouraging push; some a good deal of cajoling flattery; still others needed to be plainly ignored.

  From the beginning, that first night on the balustrade when she surprised him with her bold talk, Lucien had known Madeline would prove to be more difficult than most to woo. Not only had she been raised by the countess of Whitethorn, who was nearly as notorious as Lucien himself, but Lucien also sensed an innate goodness about her, and a sensibility not easily ruffled by the usual sleight of hand of good looks, flattery, and charm.

  He watched her. Experimented a little with a bit of flirting, a little flattery, a little of the promised watching—which served to unnerve her, make her blush, but little else.

  Until now, Lucien believed all woman had a need to save the unsalvageable rake—to be the one woman who could redeem the most hardened heart. But not even that singular motivation seemed to hold much sway over Madeline. She was not vulnerable to the call of a rake’s lost soul, sensibly concluding it was a loss of his own making.

  And after all, saving souls was for the vicar and the church and God. She made no pretension to being any of those.

  He’d met difficult cases before. There was always a weak point, and a clever man could use such a point to gain a woman’s trust.

  Lucien observed her.

  She was not invulnerable to him. A pulse in her throat beat faster when he smiled at her, and her pupils grew larger, her lips softer—women gave themselves away with a hundred tiny details.

  Mornings were invariably spent in her gardens—as long as she dared, for he also learned it was not a pursuit Juliette particularly approved. If Madeline had been ladylike, taking a bonnet and gloves and prissily clipping a flower here, a flower there, it might have been all right, but as with everything else she did, Madeline took to the gardens with a wholehearted gusto Lucien found surprisingly erotic. Such passionate attention in the bedroom might be interesting indeed.

  From the garden, Madeline changed and ate with whatever guests happened to be present in the dining room, sampling tidbits from the constant feast laid out at the sideboard—kidneys and eggs and rashers and bread. Afterward, she escaped to her greenhouse if she possibly could, otherwise she allowed herself to be drawn into promenades about the grounds or she read in the study or she played the spinet in the music room.

  The greenhouse was her first choice, however, and he watched her through the windows as she made notes like a scientist on various plants she grew. At such times, she donned a pair of spectacles from her pocket.

  She posted a great many letters, and Lucien bribed a servant to learn where they were going. She carried on a lively correspondence with several renowned naturalists, and exchanged chatty letters with two friends, one in London, another in a hamlet to the north; girls she’d evidently met on her travels. Another correspondent was less clear: a Sir Julian in London. He waited to see what that might mean, but Lucien thought it must be another of her botanical friends.

  At night, she played the piano and sang a little with the others, politely laughing and conversing; at such times she seemed the very epitome of the graceful lady—her unruly hair neatly tamed and dressed with ribbons or jewels, her creamy bosom proudly displayed in one dazzling gown after another, her cheeks dusted with a discreet brush of rice powder. The powder amused him. For all the care she took with her hats and long sleeves, her skin had taken on a ruddy warm glow from the sun, and bright streaks ran through her hair like veining in black marble.

  In those lazy evening hours, he admired her, and amused himself with pleasant images of disrobing her. Over the festive suppers—at which Lucien found himself always seated very far from Madeline and very close to Juliette—he toyed with images of kissing a particular freckle high on her left shoulder.

  But for all that she was enchanting in the evenings, it was the mornings he awaited with eagerness, when she came from the gardens after her early work. Her hair was mussed, falling loose from her cap, her clothes askew, her hands dirty. Often she smelled of light sweat and the earth and a peculiarly arousing perfume of sunlight that seemed to come off her in waves. He wanted her deeply at such moments, and did not want to take her comfortably in a bed or after she’d washed—he wanted her just like that: musky and overheated and tasting of her work.

  The power and violence of his wish surprised him. It should have warned him.

  It did not.

  * * *

  Madeline told herself she should be wary of the cheerful Lord Esher when he joined her at five of a drizzly Friday morning. He was dressed for working in a pair of scuffed boots and sensible woolen trousers. His head, predictably, was bare, showing the wealth of thick, dark hair that adorned his well-made head. She thought he might be vain about his hair, the way he never covered it.

  "Good morning!" he said in greeting.

  Madeline glanced up, as if she’d just seen him. "Good morning." She was working in the rose gardens this week, going from the middle outward, clipping rose hips and dead blooms and pruning out deadwood. It was her third day at the chore, and she’d only managed to make it to the middle pink tones. "What brings you out here so early?"

  "I’m here to help you," he said, spreading his hands.

  "What do you know of gardening?"

  "Nothing at all." His grin was crooked and unrepentant. "But I’m easily bid. Tell me what you need done, and I’ll do it."

  "Why would you drag yourself out of bed so early to do such a thing?" She brushed a lock of dampening hair from her face so she could see to cut a withered stalk from the middle of an ancient bush. "It’s tedious work and not to most people’s liking."

  "True," he replied, "but I’m here to win your good favor."

  Madeline paused. For a moment, she took his measure, from the top of his head to his boots. "I suppose it doesn’t matter what your motives are. I am not foolish enough to dismiss help when I can get it." She pointed out a pair of pruning shears. "Take those. But watch me first. I don’t want you butchering the good wood."

  Agreeably, he picked
up the shears and watched carefully as Madeline illustrated the process of pruning. "If you’ll cut off the dead branches, I can trim away the rose hips and old blooms."

  With a neat precision she would not have expected, Lord Esher did as she’d shown him. "Like so?"

  She smiled her approval. "Yes."

  They quickly developed a pattern: Lord Esher trimming the bush of its worst deadwood and old branches, Madeline following behind to neaten the overall appearance. She was glad of his help; the work was less tedious when there was someone to talk with, and whatever else his failings, he was an intelligent man.

  They chatted lightly about books and horses and dinner parties. Madeline learned he like poetry, and that his taste ran to the lusty works of a hundred years before, but he didn’t like the current crop of romances.

  "Why not?" Madeline asked in challenge. "One is just a longer version of the other—love and drama."

  His crooked grin flashed. "And carefully described moments of passion."

  "Sex you mean."

  "Yes" His dark blue eyes glowed with approval.

  "Still, I think those poems appealed more to men, less to women, as novels appeal more often to women than men."

  "Perhaps."

  It surprised her that he didn’t seem to need to be proven right on every statement. In that way, he was unlike most of the men of her acquaintance.

  "I like this one," he said, touching the velvety blossoms of a dark rose bud, still curled tight and beaded with silvery rain. "The color is extraordinary."

  "Yes. I like it, too. It’s particularly compelling in this light. I’m not sure why, but there are some of them that seem to have greater intensity in lower light. This cloud cover brings out the vividness."

  He wrestled a thick, dead branch from its stranglehold. His mobile mouth turned down at the corners. "Hmmm. Perhaps it’s like your theory of Pompeii."