Dark Temptation

by CHASE, ALLISON

  ‘‘Tell me what you meant about truth,’’ he demanded in a tone that brooked no debate, granted no quarter, ‘‘and my need to familiarize myself with the concept.’’

  He had forced those words from her with his condescending notions of safety, with his infuriating arrogance. She had felt justified in speaking them. Now, however . . .

  ‘‘You all but called me a liar.’’ He leaned over her, his elegant features rearranged into a scowl as black as a gathering storm. ‘‘Why?’’

  His fingers claiming her still, he perused her length, lingering on her state of undress, on the burning, tingling expanse of bosom straining against her camisole as she struggled to breathe air that was suddenly thick and sweltering. A sudden fear squirmed inside her.

  Out on the headland he had stolen her breath and shaken her to her very core with his impassioned, punishing kiss. Yes, punishing. He had been furious with her; the pressure of his lips had communicated the magnitude of his anger and left her trembling, confused and not nearly as in control as she would have wished.

  And yet . . . in between all his shouting, and beneath the fierceness of the kiss, she glimpsed a very different emotion . . . one she felt fluttering inside herself whenever she beheld his face. But where had that regard gone now? He was like a chameleon, ever changing, his moods ever shifting. As though two entirely different men inhabited the one.

  She stood very still, no longer making any attempt to free herself from his grasp. ‘‘You lied to me,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Never.’’

  ‘‘Yes. About when you arrived in Penhollow. You said it was the night we met. But you were here before that. I saw you. Here in this very house.’’

  ‘‘That’s impossible.’’ The sheer bafflement that tightened his features raised a smidgen of doubt.

  Doubt she immediately dismissed as the memory of that day returned. ‘‘I was in the garden. I saw you looking out at me through the library window.’’

  He released her hand so suddenly that she flinched. His own dropped to his side. ‘‘You’re wrong about that. Dead wrong. I arrived exactly when I told you I did. And I assure you, even if I had been at Edgecombe sooner, there is no way in hell you would have seen me in the library.’’

  So adamant. Still so angry. Could she have been mistaken?

  ‘‘Then tell me what you know about the harbor lights and the ship I saw. What does it all mean?’’

  ‘‘I have no answers for you. I was attempting to find some this morning when circumstances forced me to cut my errand short and rescue you. It seems you have a penchant for interrupting me at the most inopportune moments.’’

  He referred, of course, to yesterday morning, when she had surprised him on the cliffs at the base of his gardens. He had been looking for answers then too.

  A nagging conviction persisted that he had left something of great significance unsaid. To protect her? Or did other reasons motivate his reticence?

  ‘‘I’ll find you a cloak,’’ he said, ‘‘or whatever else may be stored away upstairs.’’ Looking suddenly weary, he moved past her and started up.

  She watched him go, then surprised herself by hastening to follow. It was this place. The chill. The damp, slanting shadows and the ghost of his anger shuddering in the air.

  ‘‘Lord Wycliffe?’’

  He seemed equally surprised to discover her behind him on the winding stair. He stopped at the half landing and waited. A dusty stained-glass window behind him draped him in a murky rainbow.

  ‘‘I . . . didn’t wish to wait alone,’’ she stammered, realizing how foolish she sounded but not caring.

  He regarded her blandly, as if the altercation of moments ago hadn’t occurred. ‘‘My father always kept a full wardrobe here. My mother visited only occasionally, but perhaps she left a thing or two as well.’’

  Sophie trailed him into a bedchamber appointed with dark furnishings and heavy draperies. Catching a glimpse of herself in a dressing table mirror, she experienced a moment’s shock. How scandalized—and how deaf to her explanations—her family would be to see her now, keeping company with a man while in her underpinnings. How deeply they would lament her ever being the proper young woman they wished.

  He opened the double doors of a wardrobe. ‘‘We might find something for you in here.’’

  The room was dark, the contents of the wardrobe indiscernible. She went to the window and drew the curtains aside. In the distance beyond the gardens the sea flashed silver in the sunlight. She stared out at it, caught by a singular realization: if not for the earl, for Chad, she would be out there now, drifting on the tide, fodder for the creatures that lived beneath the waves.

  She turned back to the room, her attention seized by the tug of his shirt across his shoulders as he closed the wardrobe doors and moved to a dresser. It barely contained him, that shirt, especially now, with the fabric tight and stiff with dried seawater. The linen seemed to have shrunk to his proportions, adhering like a second skin to every line and muscle.

  Without warning he turned. A quirk of his eyebrow told her he had caught her staring, though his gaze remained shuttered, indefinable. She blinked and groped for something, anything, to say.

  ‘‘Was this your father’s room?’’

  ‘‘My mother’s.’’

  That surprised her. She drifted to the bed, wrapping her hand around one of the thick, carved mahogany posts. There was nothing the least bit feminine about this room. ‘‘No wonder your mother rarely came to Edgecombe. It is a man’s place through and through, isn’t it? I suppose your father must have enjoyed coming here to hunt and enjoy the peacefulness of being alone.’’

  ‘‘Wait here while I search the other rooms,’’ he said with a sharp look. Tight-lipped, he disappeared into the hallway. With a sigh she perched against the edge of the bed to wait for him.

  The down mattress proved too tempting. In defiance of the dust coating the coverlet, she stretched out. A stack of pillows lay piled at the headboard. She tossed the topmost ones to the floor and laid her cheek upon a relatively clean one beneath. Her limbs trembled with fatigue. Her back ached with it. Her eyelids felt weighted with lead. The climb. The fear. They had taken their toll. Just for a moment she would close her eyes.

  When she opened them again, stars winked timidly above her from behind a sheer veil of cloud. Frigid water lapped at her body, tugging like an impatient child at her skirts, her hair. She was drifting in the middle of a vast, black ocean, with no point of reference but the impossibly distant pinpoints of the harbor lights. In a surge of panic she tried to sit up and was swallowed by the swell.

  Chad nearly gave up his search after opening an empty wardrobe in the third bedchamber he tried. He hadn’t bothered rummaging through his father’s former chamber or the one he himself had chosen for his stay. But in the sixth and final room he came upon a small assortment of gowns he felt reasonably certain had never belonged to his mother, or to any other woman of his acquaintance.

  As he contemplated the collection of dresses, a vague uneasiness crept through him. His mother had not been as tall as these dresses suggested. Nor did they in any way reflect the styles she had regularly commissioned from her personal modiste.

  He rifled through cheap muslins and satins, regarding each with growing resentment. The sensation in his gut now resembled the queasiness often brought on by cheap brandy and stale cigars. He went to the dressing table and scoured the drawers. There wasn’t much in them. Ribbons and hairpins. Stockings and garters. A brightly embroidered shawl. A crystal bottle of some earthy, musky scent, nothing his mother would ever have worn.

  He kicked the stool back into place and glared into the mirror, breathing heavily, gritting his teeth.

  With a favorite hunting hound in tow, Franklin Rutherford used to ride off from Grandview claiming he needed a week or two at Edgecombe to relax, hunt and smoke his pipe without offending his wife. Chad’s mother had never complained, had always seen him off with serene smi
les and sincere wishes that he enjoy his time away.

  As a youth Chad had accompanied his father on many of those respites, but as the years passed his visits here had become less frequent. Chad had felt guilty about that, but had his father been secretly relieved, happy to be able to steal time alone with . . . ?

  His mistress. Or whore, judging by those dresses. Chad glared at the wardrobe, then sank onto the edge of the bed and dropped his head in his hands.

  Had Marianne Rutherford ever guessed the truth? Or had Franklin remained an honest husband until after his wife had succumbed to fever six years ago? By Christ, Chad prayed it was the latter. To think of his father as the kind of man who would betray his wife pierced him to the core, as did picturing his dignified mother as a woman who would have silently borne it.

  But those were answers he would never have. If only he had remained close to his father in those final years and not allowed such an indifferent, if cordial distance to grow between them. Perhaps Franklin would have confided in him.

  A harsh truth struck him a sickening blow. He had never truly known his father, neither as a man nor as the friend Franklin might have become. Had Chad only deigned to spend more time with his aging parent, for good or ill, at least he might have understood what drove his father, what motivated and inspired him.

  What had prompted him to imbibe so much brandy one night that encroaching flames had failed to wake him?

  Like splintering ice, pain crisscrossed Chad’s chest, leaving soul-deep fissures. He gripped the bedpost, pulling as though to rip it from the frame. The past could not be changed. Only he could change, become a better man.

  His mind filled with thoughts of Sophie, and the pain lifted. Sophie in her corset and petticoat, her rich brown hair blown about her lovely face. Sophie, small and vulnerable and brave. Brave enough to stand up to him. To call him a liar because for some reason she believed it to be so.

  He was almost glad she believed it. Most women of his acquaintance concurred with his every opinion, his every wish. Not because they thought so highly of him, but because he was the Earl of Wycliffe, titled, landed and, they assumed, exceedingly wealthy. An excellent catch for the lucky young miss who finally managed to hook him.

  He returned to the wardrobe. There may have been one . . . yes, the mossy satin with short puffed sleeves and a pleated skirt. The most decent of the bunch. The color wasn’t far off from the one he had cast out to sea, and with luck Sophie’s family mightn’t notice the difference. He tossed it over his arm.

  ‘‘I believe I’ve found something suitable. . . .’’ He left off as his gaze fell upon the four-poster in the room where he had left her.

  She lay on her side, cheek plumped against the pillow. Her eyes were closed, her lips softly parted. Her petticoat had tangled around her knees, revealing shoes and stockings encrusted with salt, ruined, yet somehow unable to detract from the sleekness of her legs, the enticing contour of slender ankles and small feet.

  But it was the view higher up that arrested him, that sent his senses reeling. Her breasts had all but spilled from her camisole, the valley between them a deepened, darkened promise of velvet heat, sumptuous heaven.

  His lust fired. He went to the bed and stood over her. She was all sweetness and warmth and soft, sensual curves. He could hear her breathing, little sighs catching in her throat in response, perhaps, to a dream.

  She was a dream, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He wanted to place his hands on her, on all of her, wished to strip away his clothing and hers, take her in his arms and forget . . . everything.

  She must be exhausted. Of course she was, after fighting her way up that cliff so bravely, only to become the brunt of his ranting anger. Yes, she had endangered them both, but he should have shown more forbearance. He should not have shouted.

  Nor, he saw now, should he have grasped her wrist downstairs. Reaching out, he touched a fingertip to the pale pink imprints that had resulted from his boorish behavior. Oh, he hadn’t gripped her roughly, had used nothing of the full strength he possessed. She simply was that delicate, her skin that tender.

  Perhaps it was those marks, or simply that she slept so peacefully beneath his roof, within his protection, that wrapped itself around his lust, turned it on end and transformed it into overwhelming tenderness.

  ‘‘Reckless, Sophie,’’ he whispered, ‘‘to so let down your guard with me.’’

  His throat tight, he removed her shoes and placed them carefully on the floor. He gazed down at her for a moment longer, allowing his eyes the pleasure he denied his hands—hands that did not deserve her. Then he circled the bed and eased into the overstuffed chair by the window, from where he could watch over her while she slept.

  The little girl, no more than six or so, swung Chad’s hand back and forth in hers as they walked along the road. She chattered away, giving a tug whenever he lagged to survey the surrounding miles of heather and gorse.

  ‘‘Come on, come on!’’ she urged. Her bright auburn hair was parted in the middle, plaited into braids and held with bright blue ribbons that matched her eyes. She grinned up at him and started to skip, forcing him to lengthen his strides. ‘‘We’ll be late if we don’t hurry.’’

  ‘‘Late for what?’’ he asked, wondering where they were going and who she was. And why she seemed to know him, to trust him so completely.

  ‘‘Oh, you know, silly.’’

  ‘‘I don’t. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me.’’

  She was a pretty child, with a pert slope of a nose and a smattering of freckles that made her eyes glow all the brighter. ‘‘Today is my birthday, of course. We mustn’t be late for my party.’’

  ‘‘Where is your party to be held?’’

  ‘‘Oh, you know.’’

  ‘‘I don’t.’’ As they topped a rise an endless vista fell before them, edged in the distance by the jagged peaks of a granite ridge. ‘‘Is it nearby?’’

  ‘‘You are silly. We’re almost there.’’

  ‘‘But who are you? Won’t you tell me your name?’’

  ‘‘Oh, you shouldn’t tease a lady on her birthday.’’ Releasing his hand, she skipped around him. He became a little dizzy as he tried to follow her flouncing movements. She veered off to the side of the road, returning a moment later with a handful of roses. ‘‘For you.’’

  Gathering the flowers from her outstretched hands, he gazed out onto miles of soft purples and browns and fading golden gorse, but detected no sign of the bloodred blossoms she’d gathered. ‘‘Where on earth did you find roses?’’

  ‘‘Roses are my favorites.’’ She tipped her small face to his, her gaiety and laughter fading into vacant darkness, hollow despair. ‘‘She shall bury me with roses.’’

  The odor of brine wafted beneath his nose. He pulled back with a start, heart knocking against his ribs.

  ‘‘We’ll be late,’’ she whispered. ‘‘Too late.’’ Her gaze rose to a sky that had suddenly lost its brilliance, that growled now with an approaching threat. ‘‘A storm’s brewing. Come!’’

  She darted away, pink skirts and snowy petticoats swirling madly as she bounded not down the road but across a rock-strewn headland. Chad took off after her, shouting for her to stop, pumping his legs in a desperate attempt to catch up to her, to stop her before . . .

  He didn’t know what. He only knew he must reach her. Rain began falling, a pelting downpour that drenched him instantly. The drops splattered in his eyes. He raised a hand to wipe them away, and when he looked up again the child was gone.

  Panic clogged his throat. He pushed on furiously, skidding to a stop at the edge of the promontory. Where was she? Had she fallen? Shielding his eyes from the rain, he searched the thrashing waves, dreading to find a glimmer of pink in all that churning blackness. A deathly chill stole over him. His breath frosted before his lips.

  Somehow—he didn’t know how—he slid down the bluffs, landing unscathed at the bottom. Waves lashed at his feet, his a
nkles, sucking, dragging, reaching to pull him in. God, where was she? Where?

  A thin arm rose up from the water. Then another. Groping, floundering against the surf. Her head pierced the surface, her lips gaping. She went under again. He staggered forward into the raging water, surrendering to its force and letting it haul him out.

  Almost there. So close. Hold on, little one!

  She came up again, and the shock of it racked his bones. Limp, lifeless, she was sapped of color; her lips were blue, her dress torn to rags. And her eyes, her once bright eyes, stared vacantly back at him, filling him with despair and hopeless remorse.

  His hands closed around her wasted frame. His strength draining into the heaving, malevolent sea, he towed her to shore, spurred by a single resolve: the sea could not have her. He would not let it. He was shivering, quaking, his grip on her slipping. . . .

  He pulled her to him. Tears stung and blurred his vision, blocking out the storm, the waves, everything but those eyes. Those earnest gray eyes . . .

  No longer the little girl’s bright blue eyes. No longer the little girl at all. The howl of disbelief and rage erupted from the deepest part of him, from his core, his soul. It was Sophie in his arms, Sophie he hugged to his chest, Sophie he cried out to, a ferocious wailing that tore through the snarl of the waves and the pummeling thunder of the storm.

  Consciousness exploded through Sophie’s mind. A shout rang in her ears. She bolted upright, hands gripping her throat. She sputtered for breath, choking, trying to draw air into lungs gone sodden and heavy, as if filled with frozen seawater.

  Where was she? What had happened? She trembled all over, grappling with her skirts as she tried to disentangle her legs and make sense of the images even now flashing grotesquely behind her eyes.