by Anne Stuart
If she’d hoped to goad him, she failed. “Very fitting,” he agreed. Her skin was warm beneath his hand, and he could feel the ripe curves beneath the lawn nightdress. The material might be opaque, but it did little to disguise the feel of her.
He was not a man who resisted temptation. Nor was he a man who prided himself on honor, decency, or fair play. He thought of her eyes as she had listened to the opera, and he tilted his head and pressed his mouth against the base of her throat, beneath the ring of bruises.
The pulse leapt beneath his mouth, hammering wildly. In panic or in longing? Or perhaps both? He didn’t care. He turned her in his arms, so that her front pressed up against his. She was a tall woman, taller than those he was used to, and he found she fit him quite nicely, her hips cradling his, her breasts against his chest, her neck within easy reach of his mouth as he traced his way along the abraded flesh. She shivered again, and he liked it. Releasing her face, he slid his hand down between their bodies, into the ripped-open front of her nightdress, and encountered soft female flesh, gently rounded, tantalizing, enchanting, mesmerizing. She was trembling in his arms, with fear, with longing, and the shiver that ran over her warm, scented flesh was irresistible.
He wanted her. Wanted to lose himself in her sweet body, wanted to kiss her mouth, her breasts. He wanted oblivion, hot and dark, but oblivion with her, and the hell with his plans, with waiting. He was going to swing her up in his arms and carry her over to the sofa, he was going to drag her upstairs to his bed and strip off her clothes, slowly, and then make love to her, making it last, over and over again, until they were both wet and shaking, and he wouldn’t let her escape for days. He would do her with agonizing slowness, he would do her hard and fast, he would take her and take her and never let her go...
The realization rang in his head like a death knell. He released her, suddenly, keeping a hand on her arm so she wouldn’t fall as she stumbled away from him. If she’d seemed shocked and vulnerable before, it was nothing compared to the expression on her face now. Her breasts were rising and falling rapidly beneath the ripped V of her gown, and her mouth was pale and trembling. He hadn’t kissed her mouth, he thought, almost in surprise. Thank God.
She was too shattered to notice that his hands were shaking. “Very nice,” he managed in a cool drawl, carefully schooling his own idiotic reaction to her. “You should have Darnley eating out of your hand in no time. With luck, you might not even have to bed him.”
He said it on purpose, to goad her. He wanted her rage, he wanted her fury. He wanted her to storm from the house with his diamonds, and this time he wouldn’t make the mistake of going after her. She was too damned potent for his peace of mind.
But she said absolutely nothing. She simply looked at him, with infinite sorrow in her honey-colored eyes. And then she turned and walked away.
He stood still, listening. Back up the stairs she went, her barefoot tread whispering along the walnut floors and the thick French carpets.
And then the closing of a door and all was silent.
Killoran turned to his bottle of brandy, plastering a cynical smirk on his face. And it took half the bottle to still the tremor in his hand. To wipe the memory of her warmth, her scent, from his restless mind. To put him into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.
Miriam DeWinter’s God was well trained. Indeed, she wouldn’t tolerate a deity who didn’t behave Just As He Ought. In the usual course of things she seldom read the daily paper, and she certainly didn’t waste her time with anything other than the financial and political news. Financial, because she loved money above all things. Political, because politics usually meant war, and war meant more money for the Langolet Ironworks.
But that Wednesday morning differed from her usual routine. Differed because she had dreamed of Emma, and that nightmare had roused in her such a fury that she was unable to do more than pace, back and forth, back and forth, in the small, dark salon where she conducted her business affairs. She had already taken out her fury on any hapless soul who had been unfortunate enough to stray within her orbit, boxing the upstairs maid’s ears, blistering the cook’s, excoriating the pale and stolid Pringle, her discreet and obedient secretary. She seldom gave into the heat of temper, preferring to dispense justice with chilly control, but once alone in the dark, stuffy room that suited her perfectly, Miriam DeWinter picked up a supremely ugly china dog that Horace had always doted on and smashed it against the fireplace.
She then tossed her thin, well-corseted frame down on the horsehair sofa, which immediately groaned in protest, and snatched up the newspaper, intending to scour the shipping news and look for trouble.
And that was when her own particular Almighty directed her attention to the society section of the paper. And the news of a mysterious, flame-haired newcomer.
“Pringle!” she screeched, her voice thundering through the gloomy halls of the old house.
Pringle, a funereal-looking man of indeterminate age, appeared promptly in the doorway of the salon. “Yes, Miss DeWinter?” he said in his sepulchral voice.
Miriam stabbed a thin finger at the newspaper. “I want you to find out who they’re talking about, Pringle,” she ordered sharply. “They simply say Lady X and Lord Z and Miss dot-dot-dot. I want to know the names. I want to know the directions of these people. And I want them today.”
Pringle moved warily into the room, as one might enter the cage of a man-eating tiger, and peered at the newspaper. “They don’t give proper names in the society section,” he observed cautiously.
“Why not?”
“I rather think the newspapers feel that everyone knows who everyone else is, at that level of society, and if you don’t, then you have no right to.”
Miriam picked up the newspaper and flung it at him. “There are seventeen people mentioned, Pringle. Seventeen people who attended the opera. Lady X’s ball, and Lord and Lady Q’s soiree. I want those names, Pringle. I want them now.”
Pringle deftly caught the paper. His mistress seldom threw things, but the disappearance of her cousin and the death of her father had tried her icy self-control most harshly. “I will endeavor to do my best, Miss DeWinter.”
“You will succeed, Pringle,” she said with a dangerous stillness.
Pringle swallowed. “Yes, Miss DeWinter.”
Jasper Darnley was on his knees, puking his guts out. He’d grown used to starting the day in such a manner—in the past year or so, his body rebelled after a certain amount of alcohol, but he had no intention of lessening his intake. He simply drank more, to drive the pain away, to make the nausea no more than a trifling inconvenience.
Killoran had known about the pain in his stomach, though Darnley couldn’t imagine how. Last fall, when he’d happened to come across him on a deserted stretch of road between London and Barnstaple, he’d assumed their altercation would be a duel. Instead the fight had been bare-fisted and bloody.
Darnley was still surprised at the outcome. He was much burlier than Killoran, with a capacity for taking punishment like a bear. But Killoran was faster, wilier, and taller, and he’d landed those killing punches solidly to Darnley’s gut, so that he’d reeled from the blows. And when he’d fallen in the road, unable to rise, Killoran had used his boot and kicked him, not in the head, where it might have killed him, but solidly in the gut.
He’d puked blood for a month.
Still, he’d been glad to see that Killoran had as few scruples as he did. In another lifetime they might have been friends. Well, perhaps not friends. Neither of them counted friendship as worth much. But they could have whored together. Though, in fact, they had ended up sharing the same woman.
It was all Killoran’s fault. If he hadn’t dared to aspire to a woman like Maude, Darnley might never have noticed. He hadn’t touched her in years, not since she was still in the schoolroom, and he might have forgotten if it hadn’t been for the upstart Irishman daring to court her. It had brought back all of Darnley’s possessiveness. He would have had no obj
ections to marrying her off to a decent English aristocrat, but there was no chance on this earth that he’d let a filthy Irishman put his hands on her.
Darnley stared down at the contents of the chamber pot, then slowly sat back on the floor, leaning his pounding head against the wall and breathing heavily. The dreams had come again. That seductive whore had lured him once more, and while he’d tried to beat the devil out of her, he’d been unable to resist. But this time, as he’d wrapped his thick fingers around her neck, it hadn’t been Maude’s blue eyes staring up at him. It had been her. Killoran’s half sister.
He knew she couldn’t be his sister. It was too coincidental, too irresistible, but he wanted to believe it. He’d looked across his mother’s ballroom at the two of them, seen Killoran’s long, possessive hands on her body, seen the indecent veil of red hair, and thought he’d gone mad. Word of the Earl of Killoran’s long-lost sister had already reached Darnley—there wasn’t much in gossip, particularly gossip that touched his nemesis, that he wasn’t apprised of early on. But no one had mentioned that Killoran’s sister looked like Maude.
Maude was shorter. Maude was weaker. Maude was thinner. And Maude hadn’t fought him, at least not so wildly. He was a mass of aches and pains, there were scratch marks on his cheek, and damned if she hadn’t aimed a well-placed knee dangerously close to his privates. He would make her pay for that. He would enjoy it. And he would make Killoran watch.
He had no notion how he was going to accomplish that. In the past few months his brain had grown increasingly muddleheaded. A certain amount of brandy would clear it, combined with just the right dose of laudanum. But he had a tendency to overdo, and the moments when his mind was sharp were not as frequent.
His head ached abominably. His stomach was in an uproar, but there was nothing left to spew. Clutching his gut, he leaned forward, moaning. He would have to moderate his indulgences. Just for a short while. Just long enough to take Killoran’s remarkable sister, and to finish up with that Irish bastard. There was a reckoning due between them, long overdue, as a matter of fact. The sooner Darnley finished with him, the sooner he could get on with enjoying life.
A few weeks’ relative abstemiousness wasn’t too high a price to pay, surely? His stomach and head would thank him for it. And the rewards, in the shape of Killoran’s ample, redheaded sister, would be remarkable.
She could feel his mouth at her throat. Emma lay in bed, the curtains drawn, the gloomy winter weather shut out, and touched the side of her neck lightly. Remembering his caress, the heat of his long, hard fingers against her flesh. The dreamy, lost expression on his face as he brought his mouth to her neck. And the sudden, chilling withdrawal that left her cold and shaken.
Why? Why had he done that? That, and no more? She was surely too stupid to deny him, and he must know that full well. But then, why should he want someone like her when he had Lady Barbara Fitzhugh for a mistress?
Odd, though, he never took her to bed in the house on Curzon Street. And he never seemed to spend enough time away to partake of her notorious pleasures.
Perhaps it was out of kindness for the clearly besotted Nathaniel, but Emma doubted it. Without question Killoran was a better man than he fancied himself, but that wasn’t saying much. And he was not the type to restrain his animal urges for the sake of an impressionable young man who had the poor sense to have fallen in love with his host’s mistress.
It must be part of the elaborate game Killoran was playing. He probably thought he needed to buy her participation, with diamonds, with caresses that went so far and no further. If so, then he wasn’t nearly as good a judge of human nature as he cynically professed himself to be. She would do exactly what he wanted.
Her reasons were myriad, and they had nothing to do with diamonds or caresses. Well, at least not much to do with caresses, she amended with brutal honesty.
She would do what he wanted because she had the sense that no one ever had in a long, long time. No one had simply done for him, with no thought of gain. If he wanted her to pose as his sister, to move through society, to entice his enemy, then she would do that. She suspected she would even bed his enemy if Killoran asked her to.
Lord, she was mad, there was little doubt. And she knew what caused it. She, who had spent the majority of her life cloistered away, never seeing or speaking to any personable young man, had fallen completely, desperately in love with the very first man she had met.
And the fact that that man was neither young nor personable but was, in fact, the darkest, blackest, most cynical of gentlemen, titled and moneyed and decadent, didn’t seem to have any effect on her good sense. He was dissolute beyond her wildest imaginings, and her imaginings were wild indeed.
She’d always considered herself a reasonable young woman, and as she lay in the darkness, she considered the predicament in which she found herself. It wasn’t so odd for her to develop an irrational passion for Killoran. After all, he’d appeared out of nowhere, like a knight in slightly tarnished armor, and saved her from certain death. That his motives were far from pure didn’t particularly matter. He’d saved her, and he was wickedly handsome. It was small wonder she was both enchanted and repelled.
She might have forgotten him eventually if he hadn’t reappeared just when she needed him most. And in truth, she was still a little scared, a little uncertain, still reeling from those days spent in the worst part of London, and from the memory of Uncle Horace lying dead at her feet.
If she didn’t fight these feelings, they would doubtless pass soon enough. Killoran was far from admirable, and while he was quite the most mesmerizing creature she’d ever set eyes on, given a few weeks in London society as he’d planned, she’d probably find even handsomer gentlemen, men who weren’t loath to admit they were possessed of honor and decency and kindness.
She might even marry one. A far-fetched idea, of course, but she had a very great deal of money, and the gentlemen of the upper classes were notorious for needing heiresses. Assuming there was any way she could pry her inheritance away from Cousin Miriam’s grasping hands, there might very well be a happy ending for her.
Except for the small, stubborn part of her that couldn’t quite imagine a happy ending that didn’t include Killoran.
Chapter 10
“There are flowers,” Nathaniel said abruptly.
Emma lifted her head from her somnolent perusal of her plate. She’d barely managed more than a few hours of sleep, and by late afternoon she was fairly dragging. Even tea served in Killoran’s exotic sitting room couldn’t wake her up, particularly since she was doing her best to ration her intake of cream biscuits. At least her host was nowhere to be seen. What little sleep she had managed had been haunted by the most disturbing visions of her enigmatic savior. Though perhaps “vision” wasn’t the right word. The dreams had been filled with much more tactile sensations.
“There are always flowers,” Emma replied. “I don’t know how he manages to secure them at the very end of winter, but woe betide anyone who fails to do his high-and-mighty lordship’s bidding.”
Nathaniel laughed. “Not much in charity with him this afternoon, are you, Emma? Not that I blame you. What happened at the Darnleys’ ball? Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Not particularly. Everyone stared at me, no one spoke to me, and I don’t know how to dance. Not that Killoran would have let me.”
“Then why did he take you?”
“To be seen, I gather. I didn’t like it much.”
“And what did you think of Jasper Darnley?” Nathaniel inquired in the most innocent of voices.
All of Emma’s drowsiness vanished, and she put a hand up to her high-necked gown. “How did you know I met him?” she countered.
“The flowers,” he reminded her. “They aren’t Killoran’s usual. They’re for you, and they come from Lord Darnley.” He jerked his head in the direction of the window.
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said, rising and moving over to examine the floral tribute thr
ough her nearsighted eyes. She recoiled in horror. The blooms were ugly—overblown almost to the point of rot, with deep reds and purples that looked like blood. The smell was thick and cloying as well. She took a step backward, unaccountably shaken.
“They’re ghastly,” she said in a flat voice. “What makes you think they’re for me?”
“They arrived while I was breakfasting with Killoran. He looked quite pleased when he read the note, which surprised me. There’s bad blood between the two of them, something that goes way back. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be happy to have his old enemy sending flowers to his sister.”
“I’m not his sister,” she said through gritted teeth, resisting the impulse to knock the flowers onto the floor. Now that she’d noticed it, a noxious odor seemed to permeate the room, and she couldn’t rid herself of the absurd notion that those overblown flowers seemed somehow evil.
“It’s a losing battle,” Nathaniel remarked. “So what did you think of him?”
“What did I think of whom?”
“Don’t be deliberately dense, Emma. I know only too well what you think of Killoran.”
“I’m glad you do, because I am not in the slightest bit certain.”
“You’re in love with him, just as all the ladies are.” Nathaniel couldn’t control the bitterness in his voice. “Women are fickle creatures, valuing danger and the lure of a rake above decency and honorable intentions.”
“I don’t think Lady Barbara is in love with him, Nathaniel,” Emma said gently.
“And who’s talking about Lady Barbara?” he shot back, affronted.
“You are.”
Silence reigned for a few moments, while Emma contemplated the impossible hand fate had dealt her, and presumably Nathaniel did the same. “You said you can’t dance?” he said suddenly. “How can that be?”