by Lydia Joyce
Victoria felt the blush creeping up her cheeks, and panic welled up from somewhere deep inside to choke her. Seduction, yes—she knew where she was with seduction. But his eyes still held a warmth mat was not entirely sensual, and it left her feeling tongue-tied and stupid. And afraid.
She jerked her hands back. "Your grace, I did not say it to please you. I said it because it's true." She turned and strode away, back down the length of the corridor.
Raeburn caught up with her at the head of the stairs. He grabbed her elbow, and she whirled to face him.
His gaze was hard and speculative. "Now I am beginning to understand," he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. He brushed a stray strand of hair from her face with a calloused finger, and she shivered.
"Let me go."
"All in good time," he countered, but he released her immediately. As they descended the stairway side by side, he turned the conversation back to the renovations as if nothing unusual had passed between them, his voice dropping back into a casual tone so easily that it left her feeling lost and disoriented.
At the base of the stairs, he stopped and looked at her, an ironic twist of his mouth telling her that his thoughts were in a very different place than his words. Victoria hesitated on the last step, returning his gaze levelly—or rather, at a downward angle, for with the advantage of the stair, she was a good two inches taller than he. But when he spoke, his words did not match the challenge in his expression.
"I must talk to Harter now, your ladyship. I will meet you at the carriage."
And thus she was dismissed.
Victoria glared futilely at his broad retreating back. He probably expected her to go out to the carriage now and wait for him. Rebellion stirred within her, and she strode across the width of the room to a door placed in the exterior wall. A small push opened it, and she was facing the back garden of the Dowager House.
Or rather, what might have once been the garden. Now a tangled, trodden mass of weeds reached up to the door, and Victoria could barely make out the shape of a neglected fountain among the mass of furze that choked it. Beyond was a tangle of brush where a copse of trees had gone wild. The sound of hammering and sawing was loud, but the workmen were out of sight around the corner of the house, and the stillness of the garden made it seem as if the noise was coming from another world.
Holding her skirts high, she stepped tentatively to the ground. Her scarlet-clad calves above her shoes were immediately soaked by the dew-weighted grass, but abruptly, Victoria didn't care. The rain-heavy wind touched her face, teasing her, and suddenly she wanted to run across the ruined garden, dash into the coppice, and shimmy up the nearest tree trunk as if she were ten again.
Madness. She knew it was madness, but she let it take her anyhow, laughing and twirling across the weeds, disregarding the damp and her fine skirts in the sheer exhilaration of unchecked movement. Raeburn's fine skirts, she reminded herself, her smile broadening. If he wanted to watch out for them, let him. She stopped and reached her hands toward the overcast sky, took in deep draughts of sweet air damp with the promise of rain. How long had it been since she'd done anything so spontaneous, so unrestrained? Except her daily rides at Rushworth, explained away by their constitutional benefit, she could not remember a time when she had just let herself be.
She ripped off her gloves, tore off her black bonnet, and threw them to the ground, turning her face to the sky to catch the first drops of rain. For fifteen years, she had been unassailably respectable, and what had it earned her? She'd had power of a sort—to shape the running of the earldom, to make and break social careers through a timely change to a dinner party list.
But influence at what price? Watching every word, every smile, staying in the shadows, hiding from unwanted suitors under grotesque dresses—unwanted not because she had become sexless but because she dare not indulge in even the most tame courtship. Knowing that she was a ruined woman, and that any whispered word might hurl her into infamy…
She clutched her skirt in both fists, the soft pastel silk bunching under her hands—the first of its kind she'd worn since the… travesty that had nearly torn her life apart. She couldn't call it a tragedy; it was not noble enough for that. She felt the fabric pull taut, and she paused, uncertain whether she wanted to revel in its sensuousness or shred it with her bare hands. She dropped the skirt. For six more days, it wouldn't matter what she wore. For six more days, it wouldn't matter what she did—except to Raeburn.
"Lady Victoria."
Abruptly, the duke's voice broke into her contemplation as if summoned by her thoughts. Victoria turned to face him, and she felt herself blush, abashed and chagrined to be caught traipsing bareheaded among the weeds in a private moment she'd meant for no one else to share.
But there was no censure in his expression as he stood, close-wrapped, in the doorway. There was desire, and amusement, and something akin to sadness or envy, but no condemnation.
"I thought I might see what progress you had made in the garden," she offered as an excuse.
Raeburn nodded, not in acceptance of the claim but in acknowledgment, and motioned for her to join him. Suddenly subdued, she scooped up her bonnet and obeyed. She realized this was the brightest light in which she'd ever seen him, and she took the chance to study him as she linked her arm through his proffered arm and stepped through the doorway. His face seemed older than it had in the shadowed rooms of the Dowager House and the even darker chambers of Raeburn Court. There were deep lines down the sides of his cheeks, and the skin across his nose was rough. From his avoidance of the sun, Victoria would have expected his face to be smooth and pale for his years, but instead, he looked as weather-beaten as any shepherd. Oddly, it enhanced his idiosyncratic attractiveness instead of detracting from it and accentuated the contrast between him and the parlor gentlemen she was used to associating with. Certainly no parlor gentleman's arm had been as strong, no step as sure as his was. But he made her feel neither small nor weak but energized, as if his vitality were a challenge and an inspiration wrapped into one, and at the same time strangely attuned to him, both as a man and as a person. That discovery should have troubled her, and she knew it would when she considered it later. But at the moment, she floated in a bubble of calm, and she did not want to prick it too soon.
They walked through the house side by side, and at the front door, she stopped to tie her hat primly on her head again.
"No," Raeburn said, lifting away the bonnet as soon as it touched her curls. "No. I like you better without."
Victoria started to remonstrate, paused, and thought better of it. It seemed ridiculous to worry about such a small point of propriety when the entire week was a massive breech of almost every rule polite society had ever known. So she dropped her gloves into her bonnet and allowed them both to hang from the crepe ribbons as the duke escorted her into the waiting carriage.
This time when she settled back into the darkness, there was no feeling of awkwardness between them. The carriage rocked as the footman climbed onto the back, then jolted as the horses stepped forward, away from the Dowager House. A house that had been planned for the footfalls of children, for the comforts of a husband and wife and their blooming brood.
"You planned the house when you still wanted to marry her, didn't you?" Victoria said softly.
"Yes," the duke said. His answer was brief but not abrupt.
Victoria allowed the silence to stretch between them.
Finally, Raeburn sighed. "We were to be married as soon as it was finished. She did not like the plans, I fear—she thought the house too modest for a duchess, and she never cared for the sensibilities of the aesthetes. I did not know how much she disliked it, though, until it was far too late, and even then, I never had the desire to change it. It seemed right somehow."
"You must have loved her very much." To love and lose—wasn't that the way of the world?
His laugh was bitter. "Leticia? Never. She was—is—beautiful, and I admired her, certai
nly, in the way a man might admire a fine piece of art. 'For earth too dear…' But no, I didn't love her. I loved the idea of her, perhaps, or her image, but not the woman. I don't think I've loved anything as concrete as a woman for nigh on a dozen years."
So he had loved, once. Victoria wondered what had happened. Now, though, he seemed to want to pretend he was incapable of emotion. And Victoria could not believe that.
"You love the house," she pointed out, the easiest defense. "It is hard to find something more concrete, even if it is inanimate."
"Houses do not judge, nor do they despise. It is easy to love a house." His manner was offhand, but there was a pain beneath the words that cut her.
Impulsively, she reached out and found his hands in the darkness. They were cold through his gloves, but his grasp was sure.
Though Victoria's action had been ingenuous, his grip's solidity in the blind void of the carriage was so potently sensual it sent a sliver of warmth shimmering through her, followed by a sudden tightening awareness of his body, invisible but so close. She heard Raeburn catch his breath as he felt it, too. For a single, breathless moment, they sat frozen, hands clasped, and then Raeburn pulled her to him.
Blindly, their mouths met. Victoria's crinoline flattened against Raeburn's legs, but she ignored it. There was only room in her mind for the stubble-roughened cheek under her hand, for the hard-softness that were his lips on hers, for the warm taste of his tongue teasing her mouth. Her forehead bumped against the brim of his hat, and she pushed it back impatiently. Her fingers snaked beneath the silk scarf to twine in the dark curls on the back of his neck. They were fine and silky, like the locks of a child, and Victoria made the comparison with the feeling of one who'd had a revelation.
The carriage jerked to a stop. Victoria allowed her momentum to push her back into her seat, but she did not remove her hand from Raeburn's even when the footman opened the door and let down the steps. The duke twitched his scarf back into place and adjusted his hat, then he let her go—was it her imagination, or was he reluctant?—and stepped out of the carriage into a misting drizzle. Victoria followed, taking his arm, and he led her quickly across the three paces into the manor.
There, the lingering, tenuous sense of affinity was severed by the approach of the housekeeper.
"Yer were gone such a time!" she cried as she bustled up, a drably clad maid in her wake. "Did thoo keep thy hat on, thy grace? Only thee knows how I do worry, silly old woman that I am." She threw her hands up. "And look at her ladyship! The skirts! The bonnet! What has happened to yer both?"
"Nothing at all, Mrs. Peasebody," Raeburn said dryly, handing his coat, hat, scarf, and cane to the maid.
"Peg, thoo ought to have seen to her ladyship first," Mrs. Peasebody scolded, taking Victoria's bonnet from her hand and tugging the wrap off her shoulders without waiting for Victoria to give it to her.
"It's quite all right," Victoria assured her, but the woman continued scolding the maid as they both retreated into the inner recesses of the house.
She stood awkwardly next to the duke, nothing remaining of the tie between them but the awareness that it had been there, half relieved and half regretful that it was gone.
Raeburn raised an eyebrow, his expression perfectly neutral. "I have work I must do. I fear there is little in the way of diversion in this house, but if you summon a maid, I'm sure she shall be most happy to show you to the library."
"Thank you," Victoria said, for lack of a better reply.
He frowned. "You can find your chamber on your own?"
Victoria wondered what he'd do with her if she lied and claimed not to, but she answered truthfully enough. "Yes, though it is, perhaps, the only room about which I could make such navigational claims."
Raeburn nodded curtly. "Then I shall send Fane to escort you to supper. Until then, Circe." He turned on his heel and left.
* * *
Chapter Eight
Byron knew he was close; so close he could almost taste her secrets. Just a little more time, and the solution for the puzzling woman might be in his grasp.
And yet, did he really want to know?
He glared at the door in front of him. If Victoria's character could be explained away by some dull tale from her past, if all her complexities were given a simple solution, he would be… disappointed. Once there was no mystery, there would be no reason for interest, and the remaining days of her stay would stretch out into pleasant if routine debauchery.
But his curiosity was not diminished by that possibility, only stimulated by the chance that there was more to her than could be reduced to insignificance by whatever old pain she held inside, more to her than the embittered consequences of a drama that had played out years before.
But it was not a desire for entertainment that had caused their last conversation to haunt him all afternoon, that had now driven him to her door, unable to wait to see her until the evening. He felt something between them, a connection that was different from lust and growing stronger with every hour in her company. It was a feeling entirely foreign to him, but one that he was becoming accustomed to of late.
For more than a decade, he'd haunted every seedy pub, attended every questionable party, and patronized every dingy brothel of London's fast set. He'd kept a succession of mistresses in a little flat on Baker Street, and he'd dressed and behaved with the flamboyance of a born reprobate. Mysterious rumors surrounded the heir presumptive of Raeburn, as he'd known they inevitably would, but instead of shying away from them, he deliberately exaggerated them until his long cloaks and eccentric hours became as much a part of his image as his roughened features and black hair. Until Leticia had shattered his world.
He'd told the truth when he'd said he hadn't loved her. That was the most ironic part. No, it was not passion but insulted pride that had caused his furious, precipitate flight from London, riding hell-for-leather north for three nights without so much as a single manservant for company. Then, still half-mad with fury, he'd sent the rash letter that dismissed his entire staff…
He shook his head to clear it of those memories and knocked.
"Come in." The reply was immediate, and Byron pushed open the door.
Victoria was sitting in the window, holding a piece of paper up to the light of the drizzling afternoon. The sharp features of her face were softened by the tendrils of hair that had escaped during their trip to the Dowager House and now curled in a wispy halo around her face in the gray, oblique sunlight that filtered into the room. Sitting, without the advantage of her height, she looked less solid, more delicate, but just as damnably desirable as she had been in the blackness of the coach. She straightened when he crossed to her, as if sensing her vulnerability.
Byron said nothing as he reached past her and twitched the curtains closed. He caught her sideways look, but she kept her silence for a few long seconds. Then she sighed in the dimness and waved the paper.
"My mother," she said. "She wrote it the day I left."
"Oh?"
She shrugged. "The usual response when I have done something that she doesn't like but that her sense tells her is for the best. Apologies tempered with a splash of indignant self-pity." She hesitated, then passed it to him. "There is nothing private, and you might find it amusing."
He skimmed the letter, his eyes well accustomed to reading in partial darkness. My most darling daughter… I should not have remonstrated so strongly… I am an old woman, you know, and sometimes we are a bit silly… We all miss you terribly… your loving Mamma. When he reached the end, he gave a snort, but when he raised his gaze to meet Victoria's, he found that she was smiling softly, almost tenderly, at the piece of stationery.
"You really do love her, don't you?" he said with a pang of envy. His own mother had been kind but distant; he hadn't spoken to her since his great-uncle's funeral, when he assured her that her income and house would remain intact for her lifetime. His father he could scarcely remember.
"She's my mother," she said sim
ply. Then she added, with a brittle kind of lightness, "She's not in half the need of me that she pretends, but I think it's her own way of consoling me, of giving me a purpose since I never wed."
"And why didn't you?"
Victoria gave him a sharp look, but he returned it levelly, keeping his rising sense of anticipation carefully locked away. This was it: the moment when she would confess all or shy away, most likely for good.
"You of all people should know," she said finally.
Byron sat on the stone bench built into the wall across from hers. All he wanted to feel at that moment was the excitement of a challenge, but the expectancy that thrummed through his every muscle had no edge of thrill in it. Instead, he felt a sympathetic kind of tension, as if the forces that had held Victoria captive for however long now seized him, too, and the only way to dispel their power was to know their source.
He reached across the space that separated them and touched her cheek. Her eyes were round, luminous, and filled with a pain that went into his gut.
Victoria closed her eyes, leaning into his touch—grateful just to let herself go, if only for a little while. He brushed his thumb across her cheek. The caress had no hint of seduction in it, yet she felt her body respond to him, and for once, she was glad of its disobedient impulses, of its freedom that broke past every restraint. If only this moment would never end…
"Who was it?" Raeburn asked softly. "I know that you want to tell me, whether you choose to acknowledge it. You invited this subject too blatantly for me to believe otherwise. So tell me, who was first?"
The world came crashing back, jarring Victoria from her false repose. She jerked back and opened her eyes, looking into Raeburn's unreadable face.
Lord, but he was right. She wanted to tell him—to tell someone at last—but it was so, so hard. The old bitter caution took advantage of her vacillation, seizing her tongue before she could stop it. "First, your grace? How delicately you put it. How many lovers do you think I've had?"