Sweet Enemy

by Heather Snow

  “It’s not that, Geoffrey.” She tilted her head. “Do you think I would hold you responsible for your uncle’s actions?”

  Panic squeezed his chest. If that wasn’t the reason…“Then why?”

  Liliana’s face crumpled and she turned away from him, taking with her his very heart. “Do you know why I convinced your uncle to take me to the folly today?”

  Geoffrey gave a slow shake of his head, as sound would simply not squeeze past the constriction in his throat.

  “Because I knew that was my best chance to be rescued. I knew once you discovered I was gone you would immediately assume I’d betrayed you again and doubled back to get those letters.” Everything in her posture, from the defensive way she wrapped her arms around her torso to how she slunk back from him, cried out her hurt.

  Geoffrey closed his eyes so she wouldn’t see his shame.

  “There can never be love without trust, Geoffrey, and you don’t trust me.” Her voice broke. “Therefore, you will never love me.” He heard a rustle of fabric and then her hand slipped into his, and she gave him a gentle squeeze.

  He opened his eyes, staring down into shimmering violet pools.

  “And life is too short to live without love,” she said. “For both of us.” She sighed, and a watery smile crossed her face. “I never knew I wanted love in my life until I met you. And I thank you for teaching me that.” She took a shuddering breath. “And I’m sorry I lied to you. My intention was never to hurt you, but I did and I was wrong. You deserve better.”

  Liliana let go of his hand. “I hope one day, a woman comes along who earns your trust and your love.” She moved to walk away from him.

  Geoffrey couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t just let her leave.

  He dropped to his knees, snagging her hand as she brushed by.

  She stopped and turned her head, doubt and hope mingling in her face.

  And that hope gave him hope. Dear God, she did love him, he knew it. And yet she was just as certain he didn’t love her. Simple words of love would never suffice after the things he’d said to her. What could he say to make her believe him?

  “I lied to you, too,” he said.

  The corners of her kissable lips turned down in confusion.

  “When I told you that love didn’t matter.” Geoffrey knew that nothing short of baring himself to Liliana would make her understand, would make her trust his love. He swallowed the emotion clogging his throat, desperate for his words to come through strong and clear. “When I told you that I’d never love you—that I didn’t love you—it wasn’t true.” He drew in a deep breath. “I didn’t want to love you, but I couldn’t help myself.”

  Liliana didn’t move, only stared, her eyes glassy and disbelieving.

  “I told myself you were selfish and manipulative like my mother, but I could feel regret radiating off of you. My mother doesn’t have a remorseful bone in her body. I was a fool to think you were anything like her,” he murmured. “Some things can be faked, but not the core part of a person, not who they are underneath. And your intelligence, your spirit, your passion for the well-being of others—all of the things I love about you—I knew to be real. But in my anger and my hurt, I didn’t want to see it.”

  Geoffrey reached out and took her other hand, and his hopes leapt at her tight grip, as if at least some part of her didn’t want to let him go. If he could convince her of the truth of his feelings for her, maybe she wouldn’t feel she had to.

  “Later in life, my father admitted he’d known who the countess was on the inside. He’d just foolishly hoped his love could change her. But I don’t want to change anything about you. Certainly, I’d like to change the circumstances that brought us together. I wish you hadn’t felt the need to lie to me, but I understand why you did. And I forgive you.”

  A tremble ran through Liliana, and a single tear slipped from her eye, but she didn’t release her grip on his hands. “You say you love me, but by you going immediately to the folly, your actions show me differently. There can be no love without—”

  “Trust?” He blew out a breath, knowing he was on shaky ground. “I won’t lie—the thought did cross my mind. So much has happened in the past few days, so many pillars of my life upended. But I think you’ve got it backward. With love, there can be trust. It will grow. It’s already started.”

  She said nothing.

  Geoffrey’s chest squeezed. Had he been too late in declaring his feelings? Had he lost her?

  He pulled her hands to his lips, brushing her petal-soft skin against his mouth. “Dear God, Liliana,” he whispered, “I love you so much.” His voice caught, as if it alone understood that by admitting his love, his vulnerability, she could use it to push him around like so many pieces on a chessboard. But he no longer cared. It was more important to show her that he trusted her to do with his love as she pleased. “I love you. And I’m sorry, more than I can say. Please, forgive me. Marry me.” A hot tear slipped down his cheek. “Love me.”

  And he gave her a little tug. Nothing that would upend her if she didn’t wish to come, but enough to let her know that she was wanted, needed. Another tear followed the first when she dropped to her knees along with him.

  “I do,” she whispered. “Oh, Geoffrey, I do.”

  He moaned, clasping her to him with all of his strength. A part of him registered that she held him equally tight. “Liliana,” he said, pulling back so that he could see her eyes, but he couldn’t long resist the need to kiss her, nor to run his hands over her hair, her face, anywhere he could touch to assure himself she was real, was here, had chosen to stay with him. She tasted of apples and honey and salty tears…and of happiness and promise and love.

  Her tongue delved past his lips and desire flooded him, raging through his body nearly as fiercely as his love. Yet he reined it in. After the events of the day, Liliana must be exhausted. And they had their whole lives…“Sweet, you need your rest—”

  His bold little scientist cut him off with a voracious kiss of her own, her hand trailing down his stomach and caressing him. “I need you more than I need rest,” she said, breaking her kiss. “I need this—to make love with you knowing that there is nothing between us. No lies, no secrets, just need.”

  “Just need,” he whispered. Dear God, there was that. He let his reins go, setting his hands free to roam over her. His lips trailed to her cheek, which had flushed with heat. He could feel her excitement, smell it radiating from her skin, and it spurred his own.

  “One day,” he gasped, pulling at her skirts as her own hands tore at the fall of his trousers, “I’d like to actually make love to you in a bed.”

  Her throaty chuckle sent a shiver racing down his spine, and the touch of her hand on his bare cock sent it racing back up again. He shifted from his knees to a sitting position, spreading Liliana across his lap.

  “Don’t you think a bed would be rather conventional for your lady chemist wife?” she teased.

  Geoffrey’s only answer was a harsh groan as he slid inside her wet heat. He held her tight to him, fully seated, fully surrounded by her for as long as he could stand it. Then he lifted her hips and started the rhythm he knew would bring them both to fiery completion.

  “My lady chemist wife,” he said when he could breathe, and hugged her tighter to him. Liliana certainly filled his life with chemistry of the very best kind.

  And he would do his very best to fill hers with love.

  Epilogue

  June 16, 1817

  “Q

  uite a day it’s been, hasn’t it, my love?” Geoffrey wrapped his arms around his wife’s soon-to-be-expanding waistline, discreetly caressing the life that lay within. Liliana pushed at him. “Not in front of all of these people,” she whispered, blushing to the roots of her chestnut locks, which glowed with the sheen of impending motherhood. Or happiness. He liked to think both. “What if someone should guess?”

  He chuckled, moving his hands away from her middle. He knew she intended
to keep her condition secret for a few weeks longer—at least until after they traveled to Penelope’s surprise wedding.

  Just this morning, Liliana had been by his side as the Poor Employment Act of 1817 was signed into law and commissioners were appointed who had the authority to loan money for up to three years to those who could demonstrate they would use it to create employment opportunities.

  And now here they were, surrounded by their family. Liliana and her aunt had made both amends and apologies and seemed to be settling into a comfortable relationship. As for he and his mother—well, she’d attended the wedding and, to his surprise, had even come along this morning. Though he couldn’t ever foresee great warmth between them, perhaps there was hope for peace.

  “I wish they could be here to see this,” Liliana said, and Geoffrey knew she meant their fathers.

  He looked out at the assemblage—scholars, scientists, philanthropists and the curious alike—eagerly awaiting a glimpse of Cleopatra’s corselet, which had been the talk of the town when Liliana had worn it in their wedding, and which had then been generously donated to the British Museum by Lord and Lady Stratford.

  As the director of the museum began his speech, filled with half-truths about how the corselet came to be in British hands, and dedicating the donation to Lord Edmund Wentworth and Sir Charles Claremont, Geoffrey watched his wife.

  He sent up silent thanks to their fathers. Without their having met, he’d never have found Liliana. Geoffrey kissed the top of her head, hugging her to him.

  “Your father would have been very proud of you,” he said.

  She turned in his arms. “And yours would have loved to see the man you’ve become.”

  Geoffrey smiled, content. Yes, his father would have been happy, for his son had finally learned what it meant to love and be loved.

  Author’s Note

  I

  hope you enjoyed reading Sweet Enemy. The spark of idea for this story came from my visit to the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri, which was hosting an exhibition on Napoleon’s scientific expedition to Egypt. While perusing the fascinating display, I learned that Napoleon abandoned his scientists there and that the British, while rescuing them, also confiscated their findings. I started to wonder, What if? What if a French scientist had been able to sneak out a valuable treasure…Then I had to decide who that French scientist would try to enlist to help him fence said treasure, which led me to an English scientist—Liliana’s father—and a story, and his daughter was born. Of course, while creating the character of Liliana, I had to delve into the chemistry of the time, to really discover what made her who she was. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were exciting times in the world of chemistry. Arguably the two best-known “fathers of modern chemistry” were the English scientist Joseph Priestly and his French counterpart Antoine Lavoisier. Lavoisier, however, distinguished himself above all others and is credited with starting the Chemical Revolution in 1789 with the publication of his paper “Elements of Chemistry.” Moreover, he encouraged modern chemists to begin investigating and disproving the long-held hypothesis of the ancient Greeks, and he conducted some of the first truly quantitative chemical experiments, a crucial jump that would lead to the rapid advancement of chemistry in his age. Tragically, his life was cut short upon the guillotine in a political move during the Reign of Terror. A year and a half later, Lavoisier was exonerated as wrongly convicted as a traitor, but the world had lost a true genius.

  It was during this time that Liliana’s father would have been working as a chemist. Charles Claremont started out in the fields of eudiometry and pneumatic medicine, philosophies that believed that there were “bad airs,” which were detrimental to the health and safety of the public and could be measured around marshes, sewers, cemeteries and the like, and “good airs,” which could heal a body through their inhalation. Claremont would have naturally carried his studies into the quality of water, as well.

  By the time Liliana would have come into her own as a scientist, the field of eudiometry had been mostly debunked. However, she took her father’s dreams to better the health of humankind a step further, trying to isolate the chemicals within living things so that they might be re-created and reproduced medicinally. She would have been just a little ahead of her time…Between 1826 and 1828, a German chemist, Johann Andreas Buchner, and a French chemist, Henri Leroux, did just what Liliana was attempting to do—isolated salicin from willow bark. Salicylic acid would later become the main ingredient of aspirin.

  I chose to use the modern names for some of the chemical substances you read in the story. While sodium chloride and sodium sulfate, for example, were well-known, experimented with and easily produced, they would have been called by different names you mightn’t have recognized. Therefore, for the ease of the modern reader, I put the more familiar names in the book.

  Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, was indeed the first woman allowed to attend a meeting of the Royal Society—and only once, in May of 1667. The first paper written by a woman to be presented at the Royal Society was by an astronomer named Caroline Herschel in 1798. Another wouldn’t be presented until Mary Somerville’s paper on magnetism in 1826. Of course, neither woman was allowed to present the papers herself—they were read to the Society by Herschel’s brother and Somerville’s husband, respectively, as women were not allowed to attend meetings of the Royal Society.

  As for Liliana’s hope to become the first woman member of the Royal Society? Sadly, she wouldn’t have lived to see it. The first woman was not admitted until 1945, though Queen Victoria was made an “honorary member.”

  Don’t miss the next novel in the

  Veiled Seduction series,

  SWEET DECEPTION

  Available in August 2012

  from Signet Eclipse

  Derbyshire, August 1817

  T

  he medieval tower rose high and proud above the bilberry heath covering the castle’s grounds, its vibrant red bricks proclaiming it a foreigner among a plateau of white limestone. Derick Aveline, Viscount Scarsdale, exhaled with a snort—he certainly knew what that felt like. If there was one place on earth he’d hoped never to set eyes upon again, his northernmost family estate was certainly it. He supposed that would surprise most people, given the dangerous and often unpleasant spots he’d been to over the years. But these lush rolling hills and deep, narrow valleys of his childhood boded ominously and more treacherously for his well-being than even the filthiest of French prisons that had once held him.

  With a sharp tap of his heel, Derick directed his steed down the knoll and onto the lane as a wealth of memories he’d thought long locked away assailed him. The restless boy he’d been, roaming the hills and dales of White Peak, with endless summer days stretching out before him. His mother’s red-rimmed eyes, looking at him with alternating sadness and indifference. The last day he’d seen this patch of England, the day his identity had crumbled away like the ancient limestone the area was named for.

  Gravel crunched beneath his stallion’s hooves as they entered the stable yard, shaking Derick from his thoughts. He’d been a fool to come back. If not for this last mission for the Crown, he would have never returned. But he always did what must be done for love of country.

  Even when it wasn’t his country to love.

  “Boy!” Derick called out, throwing his leg over his saddle and dismounting. He rolled his shoulders, stretching knotted muscle. He’d had to race to stay ahead of the weather and felt every rough mile bone deep. If God were merciful, a hot meal, a warm fire, and a clean bed waited within. He scanned the yard for a stable hand.

  The lane leading up to Aveline Castle was in clear view of both the stables and the main hall. It was inexcusable that no one waited to greet him, particularly as he’d sent word well ahead to expect him.

  Several moments passed, yet no one appeared.

  “Damnation,” Derick grumbled, turning up his colla
r against the chilly wind. The clime this far north had yet to recover from last summer’s unimaginable cold, and with dusk fast on Derick’s heels, there was little sun left for warmth. He’d only managed to beat the coming storm by minutes, he guessed. He led his horse to the deserted stable, secured the mount, and promised the animal he’d send a groom straightaway to brush him down.

  Derick strode along the north side of the fifteenth-century castle, his gait far from the languid, leisurely manner he usually affected. He would slip into his ne’er-do-well persona once there was someone about who might observe him.

  He climbed the front steps two at a time. When he reached the stoop, he found the massive door half-open. Had the staff lost all discipline since his mother had died? The place was drafty enough without them carelessly leaving the door unlatched. He pushed it wide, the ancient carved English oak giving way with a groan.