by Evie Dunmore
“We fell asleep here,” he said. “Together.”
“We did.”
He gave a slight shake, as if to rid himself of a private confusion. “Why here? And on the floor?”
“My bed is too narrow,” she said absently.
A bare-chested Tristan was impressive to behold when tempered by shadows and firelight. In the morning sun, with the blanket slipped down to his hips, it was intimidating to look at him but also impossible not to.
In the light, the inking covering his right pectoral stood out in vivid detail. An intricately patterned circle the size of a saucer in different shades of blue, and at its center, a long-haired female dancer, waving . . . multiple arms? Studying it gave her some time to think, what to say, what to feel, as they sat closely together, smelling warmly of lovemaking and sleep.
The tattoo was remarkable: the dancer’s expression was serene, her body caught mid-motion in a graceful turn. She was naked, but to Lucie’s surprise, strands of her hair fully covered her modesty.
“It’s charming, I suppose,” she said.
“Charming? It’s Pierre Charmaine’s finest handiwork.”
She raised her eyes to his. “Who is he?”
“Monsieur Pierre was a former officer of the French Foreign Legion. For reasons he never disclosed, he found himself in London a few years ago and now charges outrageous prices in a secret tattoo parlor in Mulberry Walk. I suspect a woman was behind his fall from grace.”
“Aren’t we always,” she said dryly. “Why does the woman have four arms?”
“Because she is inspired by Lord Shiva.”
“Right. And who would he be?”
The arms quivered when Tristan chuckled. “Shiva is one of the three principle deities of Hinduism, also called Mahadeva. He is the Lord of Divine Energy, creator of the universe, the god of transformation and destruction. He holds more roles and names, depending on which sect of Hinduism you study. It is complex. He is often depicted with blue skin, four arms, and a snake around his neck.”
“A god of destruction.” She was bewildered. “But naturally, you then go and ink a woman onto your skin.”
He gave her a grave look. “I’ll have you know that when I stayed in General Foster’s house, I had conversations with the Pujari, the temple priest, after which I considered it wise not to tattoo all powerful deities onto my thoroughly debauched English body.”
More rules and principles. And his debauched body had now thoroughly debauched hers. If she continued to blush so fiercely, her face would soon stay permanently pink.
“Mulberry Walk?” she said. “I was expecting a tale involving a sailor, a drunken wager, and a back street in Kabul.”
He shook his head. “When I left Asia, my scars were still healing.”
It took a moment before different pieces of information, collected and stored over recent months, linked together. He had been shot when saving his captain.
She peered more closely at the inking. The small podium beneath the dancer’s pointy-toed right foot was not as smoothly executed. The texture of the skin was puckered, and the purple tinge wasn’t ink. It was the color of scar tissue.
“How . . . awfully whimsical,” she blurted.
“Isn’t it just,” he crooned.
She didn’t think. She leaned in and pressed her lips to it.
It startled him as much as it startled her. When she glanced up, his features were oddly frozen.
He recovered quickly enough. “I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said lightly, and, when she was silent with confusion, he dipped his head. “To the majority ownership of London Print.”
She blinked. “Of course. Yes.”
She pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. From the corner of her eye, she spotted her robe, stretched out limply at the foot end of their makeshift bed. Next to it was the small wooden box.
She looked away. “I have to speak to the Investment Consortium before I can transfer the sum in full,” she said. “It may take a few days.”
“There is no hurry.”
Discussing the transaction was the first thing since their coupling to make her feel like a trollop. He must have known it would have this effect. A rather distancing effect.
Hoofbeats sounded outside her window, and the fine hairs on her arms rose with a sudden bout of nerves. “My housekeeper will return soon,” she said. “I gave her leave for the night, but she could be back any moment now.”
Tristan was already sliding his shirtsleeves over his head, and she turned her head to give him privacy when he rose to reach his trousers.
She did steal a glance when his back was turned. The shirt was long enough to cover his backside. After touching it last night, she would have quite liked to know what it looked like.
“I shall pay the price you paid for the shares, rather than what they are worth now,” she said.
He paused in the process of adjusting his braces. The look he gave her back over his shoulder was unreadable. “You drive a hard bargain, my lady. More fool me for not insisting on a contract beforehand.”
She crossed her arms, and he turned to her fully.
“I jest,” he said. “Considering that you have been shortchanged, it’s perfectly acceptable.”
“Shortchanged?”
He shrugged into his waistcoat. “You experienced the agony of bliss just once, didn’t you.”
The agony of bliss. The white heat wave that had overtaken her during their second joining.
“It was all new to me,” she said.
His eyes softened. “It was not a reproach. Not in the slightest.”
Her smile was a little evil. “But it would make for a most unflattering rumor, wouldn’t it. Ballentine, infamous seducer, fails to satisfy.”
His gaze narrowed. “Possibly.”
He tipped up his chin and tied his cravat with the careless fluidity that came only with years of practice, a purely masculine gesture; surprising, too, since he had a valet, and it made her pulse flutter a little faster. He must have sensed it, for he slid a wholly indecent gaze over her rumpled appearance and said: “You could, of course, allow me to redeem myself.”
Her heart gave an appallingly eager little pounce. Another night with him?
There was pause as reason grappled with older, baser instincts.
“I suppose I could,” she finally said, not quite meeting his eyes. “I give my housekeeper leave every Friday night.”
Another pause.
“Friday is tomorrow,” he said, sounding casual.
“Correct.”
“How convenient.”
A sinking feeling took hold as she watched him pick up his cane and his topcoat. He would leave now, and she’d be here, alone with the enormity of what she had done. And with what she was about to do again.
He put on his hat and was fully transformed back into nobleman, albeit a rumpled one. The look he gave her went straight through the blanket she was still clutching like a damsel.
“The same time, the same place?” he asked.
She could only nod.
A wink, a bow, and he was gone. A moment later, she heard the kitchen door fall shut, the old windows rattling in their pane.
* * *
Normally when sexual stupor faded, a sense of well-honed detachment returned. Today, it didn’t. He was waiting, but the feeling did not come, and by the time he had walked twenty minutes and reached Banbury Road, he was shaken. He had finally bedded the woman he had had an eye on half his life and walked away from it feeling shaken. His head swam, from the summery air or a daze wholly unrelated to the weather, and it took several attempts to hail a hackney.
In the dark heat of the cab, the night returned with full force. Lucie naked. Lucie flushed. Lucie flat on her back, gazing up at him with nervous anticipation. Eve
ry image seared onto his mind in brilliant colors, as though they had been his first taste of an erotic education.
His head dropped back against the battered upholstery, sweat sliding down his back. He never stayed until morning. He’d learned early that it created expectations, which created complications. He had not only stayed, no, he had asked her for an encore and he had to laugh at his foolishness. He had expected to bed exactly one virgin in his life—his wife, a faceless woman in a nebulous future. The carriage walls were decidedly too close.
Lucie’s hands on him, with the feral curiosity of a kitten. He could see now that she had very much chosen him to dispose of her virtue, to use her ungallant turn of phrase, and he was at a loss as to how he had earned such trust. The urge to fling the precious, breakable thing away rolled through his body in waves. A deeper, darker part of him wanted to stash it at the very back of a cave and guard it possessively until kingdom come.
Another issue forced itself to the surface of his mind: if he wished to be a man of his word, he had a problem. Because she would insist on her bloody shares, and then she would go and do something harebrained and progressive with the periodicals, and, in consequence, hurt London Print and thus, his bank balance.
He was calmer by the time he arrived at the front door of his lodgings on Logic Lane. Naturally, it would require a second encounter to satisfy more than a dozen years of endured slights and boyhood fancies. And of course he would find a way of keeping his source of income intact.
“Good morning, Avi.”
“Milord.” His valet unconvincingly pretended not to see him wearing yesterday’s hopelessly crinkled attire.
“I’m in need of a bath. A hot one, if you please.”
“Certainly, milord.” Avi was following him up the stairs. “I placed the train tickets and the bouquet for her ladyship onto your desk, as milord requested.”
He had no idea what his valet was talking about, until he remembered that he had promised his mother the gossip from the house party. He was traveling to Ashdown. Today. The real reason for a visit being, of course, that he had to assess her suitability for a sea voyage and decide how to best abduct her from the house.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, and then: “Stop making disapproving faces behind my back, Avi—you knew when you accepted this position that I was going to spend my days philandering and cursing.”
“Yes, milord.”
“It won’t change, mark me, it won’t.”
“Of course not, milord.”
A letter was on his desk next to the train tickets, without an address of the sender, but he recognized Blackstone’s painstakingly even handwriting at a glance. The man could destroy people and apparently find out his address on a whim, but still wrote like a child practicing his ABCs. . . . The rest of the note was much in the way of Blackstone, too, congratulating him on paying off the first rate of the loan, and confirming that publishing was a solid investment these days. It read friendly enough, but it was above all a reminder that Blackstone kept an eye on his whereabouts.
Tristan dropped the letter in the bin. He should have handed his former partner his ledger of debts and secrets in full as payment and let it be done with. Let the investor deal with the tedium that came with collecting gambling debts and the delicate maneuvers required for extortion. He had not used it in years. But the mere thought of giving the ledger away made his gut twist in protest. And his instincts never betrayed him.
Half an hour later, he folded himself into the steaming copper tub, wondering whether his instincts had betrayed him for the first time last evening when they had urged him to spend the night between Lucie Tedbury’s pale thighs. Muscles he hadn’t known he possessed were aching, because he had slept on a hardwood floor. And he had woken up one company share poorer.
He sluiced soapy water over his chest. Pressed a testing finger onto his bullet scar, and it responded with the same dull ache as always, as though she hadn’t kissed it better.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax into the pine-scented warmth swirling around him. The tension remained tightly coiled in his limbs, because although one might as well lay claim to the wind, a feeling returned and returned: she is yours now. She is yours.
Chapter 25
Rochester must have been lying in wait after learning of his arrival, for he came sailing at him with great purpose the moment he entered the Great Hall.
“Tristan—a word, if you please.”
He faced his father with a polite mask in place. If Rochester had but a sniff of his private turmoil, he’d root for the cause like a hound for blood, and nothing good would come from it.
The earl fell into step beside him, staring ahead, his hands clasped behind his back. The eyes of a dozen long-dead ancestors followed their silent track along the portrait gallery until Rochester said: “I want to commend you.”
Now, that put him on edge impressively fast.
“I heard you made a full success of Montgomery’s house party,” Rochester continued. “The prince, the matrons, everyone was pleased.”
Considering all these were good things in Rochester’s world, his eyes were oddly flat when he finally looked at him. “Wycliffe has signed the marriage contract as a result.”
Everything inside him went quiet. Lucie was looking back at him, her usually pointy face trusting and soft. His knuckles cracked into the silence.
“Congratulations,” he said, sounding bored.
Rochester halted. “It has also come to my attention that you are financing a business with Blackstone money.”
And there was the reason for his father’s mood.
“In part, yes,” he said.
Rochester’s pupils narrowed. “The man is dangerous.”
“Is he,” Tristan said mildly. “It must have escaped my notice.”
There was a pause, where Rochester was deliberating. “Blackstone was one of the reasons I had you enlist in Her Majesty’s army,” he then said, and, when Tristan’s face must have shown his surprise, he nodded. “I don’t know what crimes you were involved in precisely, but it was only a matter of time before something would have besmirched the reputation of our house or seen you dead. And he may count as a reputed businessman now, but Blackstone has deliberately ruined the lives of peers before—mark me, he is ruthless.”
“He is utterly ruthless,” Tristan said, “and dangerous, and intractable—and quite beyond your reach, I presume.” Precisely the reason why he had borrowed from Blackstone.
Rochester took a sudden, small step toward him. “I do not know yet what your game is,” he said softly. “But I know that you are playing. And I am watching you.”
Tristan tilted his head in acquiescence. “I would expect no less.”
It was why he hoped he’d find that his mother was improving as he climbed the stairs to the west wing, because he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were running out of time sooner than expected.
His hopes were answered when the lady’s maid admitted him to a sun-flooded bedchamber. Mother was sitting up in bed, supported by several large pillows, her braid tidy and her eyes promisingly lucid. Her gaze lit on the bouquet he had forgotten he carried, pink hothouse peonies with big fluffy heads.
The maid scurried to take the flowers and to procure a vase as he approached the bed.
His mother raised a white hand toward him, and he bent over it.
“My dear boy, I’m cross with you,” she said in a mildly chiding tone.
A hint of alarm sizzled up his spine. No, she could not possibly know about what he had done with Lucie.
He pulled a chair closer and sat. “What have I done, Mother?”
“You should have told me.” She nodded at a letter on her cluttered bedside table, several pages crammed with erect and narrow penmanship. “Lady Wycliffe tells me you and Lady Cecily are engaged.”
“No,�
�� he said, and, when her brow crinkled at his abruptness, he added, more gently: “I haven’t signed any papers yet. Nothing has been announced.”
“I see,” his mother said, her frown easing, and then the corners of her mouth lifted. “No announcement is required. I can tell the change in you—there is a dazzling brightness about you.” Her fingers made a fluttering motion toward his head, and he could not blame this on any of her tinctures, because it was the kind of thing she would say even when she was well.
“Still,” she continued, “I should have liked to hear it from you, rather than have Rochester confirm it. How terribly unorthodox in any case, to leave the matchmaking to the lord of the manor instead of the mistress. But I suppose I’m not much of a mistress these days.”
“Do not worry about it,” he said quickly.
“Oh, I do—but I am so pleased for you, Tristan.”
He blanched. “You are?”
Her lashes lifted, and the warm glow in her eyes nearly took his breath away.
“Of course,” she said. “I badly wish for you to be happy. And a wife might settle you.”
“Ah,” he said, amused. “But I’m hardly unsettled.”
“All officers are lost after the war, my dear. Like fish on the dry. Now. Tell me everything. Because while the girl was obviously besotted with you since she wore braids, I confess I never noticed any particular affection on your part.”
She was looking at him expectantly while he processed the revelation of Cecily’s enduring attachment to his person. Meanwhile, the maid was moving about with the vase, her head bent, her cheeks flushed, more mouselike than usual. She was all ears, wasn’t she?
“Well,” he said. “Rochester certainly recommended her wholeheartedly.”
“Your father doesn’t have a heart, darling.”
“I cannot possibly comment on that,” he said slowly.
There was something different about his mother today. Glimpses of her old gumption were shining through, possibly revived by the prospect of a wedding. Well, hell.
“Who would have thought such a demure girl would attract your attention?” she mused. “But then it’s always the quiet ones who make for a good wife, I suppose.”