Yes, because it’s safe there.
“My attention has not wandered, I assure you, Miss Carsington,” Lisle said. “At present it could not be more firmly fixed.”
He’d like to fix his hands on the throat of the fiend who’d given her this face and body—as though she needed any more weapons. It must have been the devil. A trade of some kind, sometime in the five years since Lisle had last seen her. Naturally Satan, like anyone else, would have had the worst of any bargain with her.
In a corner of his mind, the voice that warned him of snakes, scorpions, and cutthroats lurking in the darkness said, Watch out.
But he already knew that, because he knew Olivia.
She was dangerous. Beautiful or striking, with or without breasts, she exerted a fatal fascination. She easily captivated otherwise intelligent men, most of whom had already seen her destroy the peace of other equally intelligent men.
He knew that. Her letters had been filled with her numerous “romantic disappointments,” among other things. He’d heard other stories since entering this ballroom. He knew what she was like.
He was merely temporarily unhinged because he was a man. It was a purely physical reaction, completely natural when one encountered a beautiful woman. He had such reactions all the time. This was disturbing only because he was reacting to Olivia.
Who was his friend and ally, practically his sister.
He’d always thought of her that way.
And that was the way he’d continue to think of her, he told himself.
He’d had a bit of a shock, that was all. He was a man who encountered shocks nearly every day of his life, and thrived on them.
“Having fixed my attention for the moment,” he said, “perhaps the lady would be so kind as to grant the next dance.”
“That’s mine,” said one of the men hovering at her shoulder. “Miss Carsington promised.”
Olivia snapped her fan shut. “You may have another, Lord Belder,” she said. “I haven’t seen Lord Lisle this age, and he’ll soon be gone again. He’s the most elusive man in the world. If I don’t take this dance, who knows when I should have another? He could be drowned in a shipwreck. He could be eaten by crocodiles or bitten by a viper or a scorpion. He could succumb to plague. He’s never happy, you know, except when risking his life to advance our knowledge of an ancient civilization. I can dance with you anytime.”
Belder looked murder at Lisle, but he smiled at Olivia and yielded his claim.
As Lisle led her away, he finally understood why so many men kept shooting each other on her account.
They all wanted her and they couldn’t help it; she knew it and she didn’t care.
Chapter 2
The gloved hand Olivia had taken was warm, and stronger and firmer than she remembered. When it clasped hers, she grew warm everywhere, which startled her—and that was by no means her first shock this evening.
Had she ever taken Lisle’s hand before? She couldn’t remember. But it had been instinctive to do so, to go with him, though he wasn’t the young man she used to know.
For one thing, he was much larger, and not simply physically, though that change was impressive enough.
When he first drew near, moments ago, he blocked her view of the rest of the room. He’d always been taller than she. But he wasn’t a lanky youth anymore. He was a man, exuding virility to a dizzying degree.
She wasn’t the only one he made dizzy. Among the hordes of men about her were a few women friends. She’d seen the way they looked at Lisle when he entered her circle. Now, as he and she passed into the crowd proper, on their way to the dancing area, she saw heads turn—and for once it wasn’t only men, and they weren’t all staring at her.
She’d stared, too, when she’d first spotted him, though she knew him so well. He captured one’s attention because he wasn’t like anybody else.
She studied him surreptitiously, sizing him up as she sized up everybody, as any Dreadful DeLucey would do.
The Egyptian sun had darkened his skin to bronze and lightened his hair to pale gold, but that wasn’t the only way he was different.
The black coat hugged his broad shoulders and lean torso, and the trousers outlined his long, muscled legs. His linen was immaculately white, his evening slippers glossy black. Though he wore the same impeccable evening attire as other men, he seemed not fully clothed somehow, perhaps because no other gentleman made one so forcefully aware of the powerful body underneath the elegant attire.
She saw other women taking him in, pausing in their conversations to study him or try to catch his eye.
They saw only the outside. That, she admitted, was exciting enough.
She knew he was different in other, less obvious ways. His wasn’t the usual gentleman’s education. Daphne Carsington had taught him all and more than he would have learned at public school and university. Rupert Carsington had taught him survival skills few gentlemen had need for: how to handle a knife, for instance, and how to throw a man out of a window.
All this she knew. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the change in his voice: the tantalizing hint of a non-English lilt in the aristocratic accents, and the way the sound conjured images of tents and turbans and half-naked women languishing on Turkey carpets.
He didn’t carry himself in the way he used to do, either. For nearly ten years he’d lived in a complicated and dangerous world, where he’d learned to move as quietly and smoothly as a cat or a cobra.
The deep gold skin and golden hair made one think of tigers, but that didn’t quite capture his otherness. He moved like . . . water. As he threaded his way through the crowd, he sent ripples through it. Watching him pass, women fainted mentally and men contemplated killing him.
As one who’d learned to be acutely aware of his surroundings, he’d sense this, she was sure, though his face gave nothing away.
But she, who’d known him for so long, was aware that he wasn’t as coolly contained and detached as he seemed. The logical, pedantic surface hid a fierce, obstinate nature. That, she suspected, hadn’t changed. Too, he had a temper—which, the set of his mouth told her, had been sorely tried recently.
She tugged his hand. He looked down at her, his grey eyes glinting silver in the candlelight.
“This way,” she said.
She led him past a cluster of servants bearing trays, dropped his hand to take two glasses of champagne from one of the trays, then passed out of the ballroom into the corridor and thence into an antechamber. After the briefest hesitation, he followed her in.
“Close the door,” she said.
“Olivia,” he said.
“Oh, please,” she said. “As though I’ve any reputation to lose.”
He closed the door. “As a matter of fact, you do, though I’m sure you ought to have been ruined ages ago.”
“There isn’t much that money and rank can’t buy, including reputation,” she said. “Here, take one of these, and let me welcome you home properly.” He took one of the glasses she offered, his gloved fingertips brushing hers.
She felt the spark of contact under her glove, under her skin. Her heart sparked, too, and its beating grew hurried.
She stepped back half a pace, and clinked her glass against his.
“Welcome home, my dear friend,” she said. “I was never so glad to see anybody as I was to see you.”
She’d wanted to launch herself at him and throw her arms about his neck. She would have done it, too, whatever Propriety said, but the look in his silvery eyes when he first caught sight of her stopped her in her tracks.
He was her friend, yes, and only Great-Grandmama knew her better than he did. But he was a man now, not the boy she used to know.
“I was bored senseless,” she went on, “but the look on your face when you discovered my bosoms was pr
iceless. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.”
He looked there now, and the heat started where he looked, and spread outward and deepened. In an instant she was in a sweat again, the way she’d been a little while ago, when he first looked at her. That was all the warning she needed: This was one fire she’d better not play with.
He studied her bosom critically, the way he might have examined a line of hieroglyphic writing. “You didn’t have them the last time I saw you,” he said. “I was completely flummoxed. Where did you get them?”
“Where did I get them?” Gad, that was so like him, puzzling over her breasts as though they were a bit of ancient pottery. “They simply grew. Everything grew. Very slowly. Isn’t that odd? I was precocious in every other way.” She drank. “But never mind my bosoms, Lisle.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not a man. And I haven’t got used to them yet.”
And she hadn’t got used to what happened when he looked at her in that way. She laughed. “Well, look, then, if you must. Great-Grandmama told me the time will come all too soon when men won’t be interested in looking there, and I ought to enjoy it while I can.”
“She hasn’t changed at all.”
“She’s frailer, and tires more quickly than she used to do, though she still gets about. I don’t know what I’ll do when she’s gone.”
Great-Grandmama was her confidante, the only one who knew all of Olivia’s secrets. She couldn’t possibly tell Mama or Step-Papa everything. They’d done their very best for her. The truth would only distress them. She had to protect them from it.
“I don’t know what I should have done tonight without her,” Lisle said. “She took my parents prisoner and let me escape.” He dragged his hand through his hair, turning it into a wild tousle that would make women swoon. “I oughtn’t to let them trouble me, but I can’t seem to master the art of ignoring them.”
“What can’t you ignore this time?” she said.
He shrugged. “The usual madness. I needn’t bore you with the details.”
His parents, she knew, were the cross he had to bear. All their world revolved around them. All others, including their children, were merely supporting players in the great drama of their life.
Great-Grandmama was the only one who could cut them down to size effortlessly, because she said and did exactly as she pleased. Everyone else was either at a loss or too polite or kind or didn’t think it worth the trouble. Even Step-Papa could do no more than manage them, and that was so trying to his temper that he did so only in extreme circumstances.
“You must tell me all,” she said. “I dote on Lord and Lady Atherton’s madnesses. They make me feel utterly sober and logical and rather sweetly dull by comparison.”
He smiled a little, a crooked upturn of the right side of his mouth.
Her heart gave a sharp lurch.
She moved away and threw herself carelessly into a thickly cushioned chair by the fire. “Come, get warm,” she said. “The ballroom was as hot as Hades, but not to you, I know. Away from that crush of warm bodies, you must think you’re in an ice house.” She waved a hand at the chair opposite. “Tell me what your parents want from you now.”
He came to the fire but he didn’t take the chair. He looked at the fire for a long time, then at her, but briefly, before reverting to the fascinating flames.
“It’s to do with a crumbling wreck of a castle we own, about ten miles from Edinburgh,” he said.
“How very strange,” Olivia said after Lisle had summarized the scene with his parents. He knew she could fill in the histrionic details herself. In the last nine years, she’d spent more time with Father and Mother than he had.
“I wish it were strange,” he said. “But it isn’t in the least odd for them.”
“I meant the ghosts,” she said. “How strange that workers keep away on account of ghosts. Only think of how many haunt the Tower of London. There’s the executioner chasing the Countess of Salisbury round the chopping block.”
“Anne Boleyn carrying her head.”
“The young princes,” she said. “That’s only a few—and it’s only one building. We’ve ghosts everywhere, and nobody seems to mind. How odd that Scottish laborers should be afraid. I thought they liked to be haunted.”
“I made the same point to my parents, but logic is a language they refuse to understand,” he said. “Not that this has anything to do with ghosts or castles, really. It’s all about keeping me at home.”
“But you’d go mad here,” she said.
She’d always understood, from the day they’d met and he’d told her of his determination to go to Egypt. She’d called it a Noble Quest.
“I shouldn’t mind so much,” he said, “if they truly needed me here. My brothers need me—they need somebody—but I’m at a loss what to do. I doubt my parents would miss them if I took them to Egypt. But they’re too young. Children from northern climes don’t thrive there.”
She put her head back a little to gaze up at him. When those great blue eyes turned upward to his face, things happened inside him, complicated things, involving not merely animal instincts and his reproductive organs. The things jumped about in his chest, and there was a kind of pain, like little stabs, when they did it.
He looked away, into the fire again.
“What will you do?” she said.
“I haven’t decided,” he said. “The so-called crisis broke minutes before we were to set out this evening. I haven’t had time to consider what to do. Not that I mean to do anything about the castle nonsense. It’s my brothers I need to think about. I shall have to spend more time with them, and decide then.”
“You’re right,” she said. “The castle isn’t worth your troubling about. A great waste of your time. If you—”
She broke off because the door flew open and Lady Rathbourne entered. Dark haired, her eyes not quite the same blue as her daughter’s, she was a great beauty in her own right.
Lisle could regard her with equanimity, though, and with affection, and without bewildering feelings.
“For heaven’s sake, Olivia, Belder’s been looking everywhere for you,” she said. “You were supposed to be dancing. Lisle, you ought to know better than to let Olivia lure you into a tête-à-tête.”
“Mama, we haven’t seen each other in five years!”
“Lisle can call on you tomorrow, if he doesn’t mind fighting his way through the hordes of besotted gentlemen,” said her ladyship. “At present, the other young ladies are clamoring to dance with him. He is not your property, and your prolonged absence is making Belder agitated. Come, Lisle, I’m sure you don’t want to end the party by fighting one of Olivia’s jealous swains, poor fools. It’s too ridiculous for words.”
They left the antechamber, and Lisle and Olivia soon parted ways, she to Lord Belder and her other admirers, and he to the scores of young ladies who could not have been less like her had they belonged to another species.
It wasn’t until later, when he was dancing with one of them, that he remembered what he’d seen, in the instant before Lady Rathbourne interrupted the conversation: the gleam in Olivia’s too-blue eyes before their expression turned inward in the way he’d learned to recognize so many years ago.
Thinking. She’d been thinking.
And that, as her mother could have told anybody, was always dangerous.
Somerset House, London
Wednesday 5 October
It was not an official meeting of the Society of Antiquaries. For one thing, they usually met on Thursday. For another, their meetings did not begin until November.
But the Earl of Lisle did not return to London every day, and he would likely be gone again by November. Any scholar interested in Egyptian antiquities wanted to hear what he had to say, and the event, though arranged on short notice, was w
ell attended.
The last time he’d returned, though merely eighteen years old, he had presented a significant paper dealing with the names of the Egyptian pharaohs. Technically speaking, the decipherment of hieroglyphs was Daphne Carsington’s specialty. Everyone knew this. Everyone knew she was a genius. The trouble was, she was a woman. A male had to represent her, or her discoveries and theories would be mercilessly attacked and mocked by the large and noisy element who feared and hated women who had any intelligence, let alone more than they.
Her brother, who most usually represented her, was abroad. Her husband, Rupert Carsington, though not nearly as stupid as everyone believed him to be, would never be able to read a scholarly paper with a straight face—if, that is, he didn’t fall asleep while reading it.
Since Lisle and Daphne had collaborated for years, and since he had the highest regard for her abilities, he was more than happy to stand in her place and present her latest paper with the seriousness it deserved.
But one person in the audience thought the whole thing a great joke.
Lord Belder sat in the front row next to Olivia, and he was mocking every word Lisle uttered.
If he was trying to impress Olivia with that technique, he was barking up the wrong tree.
More likely, though, Belder merely wanted to provoke Lisle. He’d made sure to be in the way yesterday, when Lisle had called on her. But half the world was at her parents’ house, and Lisle hadn’t a chance to exchange more than a few words with her. He’d told her about the paper he was presenting, and she’d said she would attend, and Belder had said he’d escort her: He wouldn’t dream of missing Lord Lisle’s “little lecture,” he said.
Lisle’s temper was easily ignited at the best of times. At present he was seething on Daphne’s account: Belder was mocking her hard work. Still, the idiot wouldn’t be let to continue for much longer, Lisle told himself. Belder wasn’t at Almack’s or a ball, and the present audience had little patience with this sort of behavior.
Sure enough, Lisle had scarcely thought it when one of the scholars spoke up. “Sir,” the gentleman said coldly, “perhaps you would be good enough to reserve your wit for a more suitable milieu: I suggest your club—or a coffee house or tavern. We came to hear the gentleman at the lectern, not you.”