Seduced by a Lady's Heart

by Christi Caldwell

  A sad light lit the woman’s pretty, brown eyes and the knot in Eloise’s belly grew. “He was…serious. Quiet.”

  Her heart spasmed. Of course he had been. He’d returned from war to discover his wife and his son, a child he’d never even met, dead and gone. Eloise clenched her eyes tightly. Would he blame her if he knew the truth? Would he see she’d failed Sara and Matthew and, in doing so, failed him? How could he not?

  “I do not know if you are aware of the losses he suff—”

  “I am aware,” she said, her voice rough with emotion. Eloise coughed into her hand. “Forgive me for interrupting.”

  Emmaline cocked her head and studied her. At the marchioness’ scrutiny, Eloise shifted in her seat. Only as the long-case clock ticked away the passage of silent moments, the resolve that had driven her these past six months stirred to life with a renewed vigor. She’d known when she ultimately found Lucien and presented the truth of his father’s circumstances, he’d likely flatly reject her request to return to Kent, to his family’s fold. Yet, she’d believed with every fiber of her being she could ultimately convince Lucien to see his father and brothers and again know a semblance of the peace—a peace they’d had before life had shown them the cruelties of existence.

  It was that resolve that allowed her to raise her head and meet Emmaline’s patient stare. “It is not my place to discuss the circumstances of Lucien…” She warmed. “Mr. Jona…Jones’, past. However, I have news of his family.” News he’d rather likely never care about hearing. “And I would not forgive myself if I somehow failed to bring him and his family together.” She knew that because she’d suffered too many losses where words had gone unfinished, pledges incomplete. Lucien might not believe he would ever move in a world with anything but anger and resentment for the father, who’d secured his commission, but the time would come…and he deserved that closure.

  Emmaline touched her palm to her mouth. “Oh, my,” she said softly.

  Yes, the loss of her husband had shown Eloise that there were never adequate words to capture an appropriate level of sympathy for death and impending death. Eloise longed to share the burden she’d carried these many years, but had been alone for so long, she oft forgot how to speak freely, and unfortunately with marriage to Colin, she’d been thrust into a society that did not value or welcome those honest, unfiltered words.

  So, the secrets she’d carried, the same ones that haunted her dreams and days, remained firmly buried beneath the surface seen by none, suffered only by her.

  “Whatever you or…” Emmaline looked to the door. “Mr. Jones may require, you need but ask.”

  It was a gracious, sincere offer from an equally sincere woman. “Thank you,” she said. Though she could not impose upon the woman’s kindness more than she’d already done. Any other noblewoman would have had her tossed out for her clear orchestration of a meeting with their lead servant. Eloise finished her tea and set the cup down on the table. She came to her feet.

  Emmaline immediately followed suit. “You must promise to visit again.” A mischievous sparkle reflected in her eyes.

  Eloise widened her eyes with a sudden understanding. And for a moment, the two practically strangers, forged a bond as two ladies who according to what she’d gleaned from the gossip columns, both had known a similar unrequited regard. She gave a slight nod. “Thank you.” She paused. “For everything.”

  Emmaline inclined her head and with a final smile, Eloise started for the door and then froze. She spun back around.

  A question reflected in Emmaline’s eyes.

  “It…I…my visit to the hospital, it was not solely about…” She flushed. “Arranging a meeting with you.” She’d needed to see the place Lucien had called home for too long. She’d needed to know about his life after war and Sara and Matthew. And she’d hated the glimpse she’d had into his world. All those words went unspoken.

  “I know,” Emmaline said simply. She crossed over and rang the bell. “I could tell that with a single glance of you at London Hospital.”

  Eloise wrinkled her brow. “How—?” The words on her lips died as Lucien appeared.

  Emmaline smiled. “Jones, will you please escort Lady Sherborne out.” She held Eloise’s gaze. “Again, I look forward to your continued visit.”

  Chapter 5

  He always possessed powerful, long legs. Unfairly long, she’d always said as a girl. He’d always raced faster than her, an unfair advantage made all the greater by the skirts she’d donned as a small girl.

  Eloise grit her teeth, quickening her steps to keep up with the deuced pace he’d set for them. He stalked purposefully through the enormous townhouse. She drew to a stop and waited for him to note her absence.

  He turned right at the end of the corridor.

  Filled with annoyance at his high-handedness, she tapped the tip of her slipper on the thin, red carpet and folded her arms across her chest.

  Lucien came back around the corner, a thunderous expression on his face.

  At the menacing stare trained on her, a desire to flee this fierce, scowling stranger consumed her. Eloise dug her toes into the carpet, refusing to be cowed. This was Lucien. He continued, coming closer. The boy who’d taught her to bait her hooks and fly fish. Gone were all traces of the grinning person he’d been.

  He stopped with five feet of space between them. “My lady,” he bit out.

  Eloise searched for Lady Emmaline before realizing… “Are you referring to me?” she snapped.

  “What else would you have me call you, my lady?” She flinched at the coarse, clipped tones of his speech. Gone were the smooth, polished tones perfected by a nobleman’s son. “What?” he taunted. “Do you wonder what has happened to the fine gentleman you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said with a bluntness that momentarily froze him. She quirked an eyebrow. “Come, now? Surely you’d not believe I would not note this transformation in you.” A transformation she didn’t like but certainly understood. When life robbed you of innocence and introduced you to ugliness, you either retreated into yourself, or allowed it to destroy you. She’d retreated. Eloise passed a sad glance up and down his beloved frame. Lucien had been destroyed.

  She shook free the chill of that thought. No, she had to believe there was still…

  “I see the look in your eyes,” he spat. “I know what you are thinking.”

  “Do you?” she tossed back, not knowing where she found the courage to hurl a rejoinder at his harshly beautiful face.

  “You wonder what happened to me.” He continued as though she’d not spoken. “You see the boy of your youth. A viscount’s son.”

  She sucked in a breath. “That isn’t fair,” the child’s words tumbled from her lips, unheeded, unchecked. “I never cared about that, Lucien,” she said wounded by this charge. “It never mattered to me if you were…”

  “A nobleman or a servant,” he said, his lips curled up in a jeering smile.

  Ah, he saw her as a lady now. One who surely valued her new station and likely spurned the life he’d crafted as a servant. Then, he’d been gone many years now. He did not know she’d entered into a glittering world to which she’d never, nor would ever, truly belong. Wedding an earl didn’t make a young lady who’d not left the countryside until her eighteenth year a lady or hostess. It merely made her a countess. Eloise took a step. “Do you imagine I would judge you for being a servant?”

  His body stiffened at her question.

  She advanced toward him. Did he, too, have a desire to flee? Yet, the man she knew him to be possessed too much courage to leave. Eloise stopped with a mere hairsbreadth between them. She tilted her head back and looked up his impossibly tall, powerful form. “I was never that woman, Lucien. You may now spurn my presence here, but you know that. And you may be mean and angry and hurt, but you are no liar.” They stood so close she detected the slight, nearly imperceptible narrowing of his steel gray eyes.

  Had he always been this blasted terrifying? She
swallowed hard and when he remained silent, she asked, “Did I say mean?”

  “You did.” The ghost of a smile played on his firm, sculpted lips.

  Or did she merely imagine the slight grin there? She tipped her chin up. “Because you are. Mean.” Hurling that ineffectual charge at him did not eliminate any of the unease around this new, harder version of the young man she remembered.

  “And angry,” he pointed out.

  It didn’t escape her notice that he’d omitted the very key word of hurt.

  “It seemed worth mentioning twice,” she said, her voice breathless with an awareness of him.

  His chest moved up and down in deep, rapid breaths and he slowly dropped his gaze to her mouth. Some emotion flashed in his eyes. Her heart pounded wildly. He desires me. Or were those merely her own yearnings? Then, Lucien moved his eyes lower and he settled his stare upon her décolletage. She closed her eyes a moment. There was a place reserved in hell for her, because in this instance, she didn’t care that his heart had died with Sara. She wanted him and she would never forgive herself if she moved through the remainder of her lonely existence never knowing the taste of him.

  Eloise leaned up on tiptoe.

  His body jerked erect. “What are you—?”

  She brushed her lips against his. She kissed him as she’d longed to for too many years and then with the dream she’d always carried, his lips reluctantly met hers in a hesitant meeting.

  Yet he did not pull away. Emboldened, Eloise twined her arms about his neck, twisting her fingers in the thick, black strands of his silken, soft hair. “Lucien,” she whispered against his lips. I have missed you. Only, if she breathed those words into existence, he would pull away.

  Lucien stiffened at her use of his name and then he folded his arm about her, drawing her close. He slanted his lips over hers again and again. Gone was the hint of warmth, instead replaced with this blaze of fire. He plundered her mouth with his and she welcomed the swift, hot invasion as she met his bold thrust and parry with one of her own.

  He drew back and Eloise moaned her regret, but he merely trailed his lips down the side of her cheek. “Lucien,” she pleaded. Her words may as well have had the same effect as a bayonet piercing his skin.

  He pulled his arm away and retreated…one step…two…and three, eyeing her like she was a two-headed serpent come to destroy. “What are you doing here?” he asked now in total for a third time.

  The truth hovered on her lips—the pledge she’d made to his brother, Richard. No, that wasn’t truthful. If she couldn’t be honest with him, at least she could manage honesty to herself. I love you. “I—”

  “You found a titled lord, did you, Ellie?” he asked, using her girlhood moniker, though it wasn’t as warm or teasing as it once had been. “What would Lord Sherborne say to his wife kissing the Marquess and Marchioness of Drake’s servant?” His words, cruel and mocking, lashed against her heart.

  Eloise fisted the fabric of her gown. “My husband is dead,” she managed.

  Lucien opened his mouth and closed it. He opened his mouth once more. “I didn’t know,” he said, gruffly, in his stranger’s voice. Not the gentle friend she’d once known.

  Eloise shrugged, feigning indifference, though she was anything but. Tension hummed through her body with the knowledge of his kiss at long last, if even from this dark, unyielding man. “How would you?” she asked softly. The man he’d been would have taken her in his arms and cradled her close. He would have allowed her to cry and helped drive back, if not completely erased, the guilt that dogged her. “You left.” Me. You left me, as though I was as guilty as your father for that damned commission.

  The man he was now did none of those things. The harsh, angular planes of his face remained set in an inscrutable mask, as though she were a nuisance he’d be glad to rid himself of.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his voice painfully detached. He slashed his hand through the air. “I’ve created a life for myself and I’ll not go back to the life of indolent gentleman.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, to ward off the chill of his eyes, not knowing where she found the strength to say, “No, Lucien. You shouldn’t be here.”

  He lowered his head, so close his coffee-and-mint breath fanned her face. “Why, because there is no value in the work I do?” She fixed on the one familiar scent, one unfamiliar because it was easier than focusing on the vitriol in his eyes.

  Then isn’t that what he’d become? Two men combined into a person who was both stranger and a friend of her past?

  “I never said that,” she said firmly. “I would not pass judgment on you—”

  He snorted.

  Eloise buried a finger into the hard wall of his chest and he grunted. “Very well, I’ll be honest with you if you’ll not be honest with me—”

  “How have I not been honest—?”

  “You’ve hidden yourself away from me,” her cheeks warmed at the veiled look he gave her. “Your family,” she hurriedly amended. “Where is the honesty in that?”

  His cheeks turned a mottled red at her charge.

  Good, he should be ashamed of the way in which he’d shut her out of his world. “And when I do see you, you’re nothing more than a snarling, sneering, brutish beast I don’t recognize.”

  “That is who I am,” he spat. He’d respond to that, then. Why? Was that the safer question? What had he hidden from?

  She shook her head, dislodging a blonde curl. It fell unchecked over her brow. “No. No, it’s not.” And because she’d somehow dug deep to find the courage to challenge him, she pressed ahead. “You are the Viscount of Hereford’s son,” she reminded him.

  The slight stiffening of his body indicated the volatile tension running through him but damn it, she had waited years to say her piece to him.

  “And that matters because he is a noble.”

  “It matters because he is your father,” she returned.

  “My father is dead.” He spoke in such deadened tones, her body chilled over.

  “No, he is not,” she said when at last she managed to speak. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from pointing out that soon he would be. In his fury, that truth likely wouldn’t make a difference to Lucien. Eloise reached for his hands and went still as she belatedly registered the loss of that precious limb. An aching pain pressed on her chest, but she buried those futile regrets. He’d never accept or welcome her sympathies and he deserved more than those useless emotions anyway. “It is time you return to the life you left. Your father, your brothers.” Me.

  A hard, mirthless grin marred his lips, a cruel rendering that said he’d noted her misstep. “You do not approve of my new station, Eloise?”

  She took his remaining hand between hers and ignored the nearly imperceptible narrowing of his eyes. “I would never, ever demean the work you do. I think it is admirable.” How many gentlemen would forsake the comforts known, even as a third born son, and instead embrace a life of servitude? That was the man of character he’d always been—the man she’d fallen in love with. Eloise turned his palm over, the large, callused hand, a hand that no longer belonged to a gentleman. Different. And yet, the same. The same hand that had caught her as she’d jumped from a fallen birch tree into the lake upon his father’s property. The same hand that had plucked the splinters from her fingers when she’d landed in a bush of thorns.

  “I don’t need your lies or platitudes,” he spoke into the quiet and reluctantly she released her hold upon him. Lucien looked back and forth, of course the one who registered the place in which they discussed these intimate matters. He flexed his jaw. “If this is about me,” it was, “then do not come back. Let me live now as I would.”

  They studied each other in silence; him icily aloof, she seeking signs of the past etched on the harsh planes of his face.

  She touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “You were never indolent. You were…” Kind. Gentle. Loving. All things good. “You were never
indolent,” she repeated instead, knowing he would only reject her words of regard. She pressed her fingertips against his lips and cut off whatever spiteful reply he’d toss at her. “It is time you come home.”

  With that she marched down the hall, him trailing silently behind her, strangers once more.

  Chapter 6

  Lucien stared at the wide, closed double doors Eloise had just departed through. He had relied on his intuition to serve for the four years he’d spent on the Continent. The one time he hadn’t used his intuition had seen him with a Frenchie’s bayonet in the flesh of his left arm. It was a wound that, ironically, ultimately festered after he’d returned from battle. The loss of that arm had taught him the perils of not trusting his instincts.

  It was that same intuitiveness that indicated there was more at play in Eloise being here. Now.

  Something had brought Eloise into his life, once more.

  And if he remembered at all the gap-toothed, grinning child with sun-reddened cheeks and an unfortunate tendency of repeating back anything he and his brother, Richard, had said, he’d be wise to be wary about the woman she’d become.

  He gave his head a clearing shake and started down the corridor, the memory of Eloise and her damned, perfect mouth and her bold kiss emblazoned on his mind. His body still thrummed with a hot awareness of the feel of her in his arms. He blamed the surge of desire still coursing through him on the fact that he’d not had a woman since he’d left his wife and gone off to battle.

  Lucien entered one of the marquess’ parlors. He came to an abrupt halt. Two maids, at work glanced up from their tasks. Annoyed that he’d be prevented even a moment’s solitude, Lucien waved them back to their work. The young women hastily averted their gazes, but not before he detected the flash of fear in their eyes. Over the years, he’d been an object of fear, pity, and sympathy. He tightened his mouth and wandered over to the window. Then, people had good right to fear him. Life had transformed him into a foul, sneering beast. There had been only two individuals who seemed unfazed by his presence, the marquess and marchioness. He frowned. No, that was no longer true. Now, there was a third person uncowed by his miserable presence. Eloise.