by Sophia James
‘Because he plays everything as safely as you do?’
She turned, but he caught at her arm, not gently either, the hard bite of his fingers making her flinch. ‘Perhaps you might wait till the findings of the police are made public before naming me guilty.’
‘Why?’ she retaliated. ‘If you keep the company of gamblers and card sharps and are often covered in the bruises and markings of a man who goes from one squabble to the next, why indeed should I give you any leeway?’
‘Because I hope you know by now, Lilly, that I am not quite as black as you would paint me.’ His accent was soft but distinct, the cadence of the new lands on his tongue.
‘Do I, Lucas? Do I know that?’
It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name and the warm glow in his eyes alarmed her. There was something else there too. A vulnerability that she had not seen before, an unprotected and exposed need that tugged at her because it was so unexpected.
‘Marrying one man because of the faults of another is not the wisest of choices.’
‘So what is it then you would suggest?’
He laughed, the sound filling the empty space around them. ‘Come away with me instead.’
The room whirled, a yearning ache in her body that she was completely astonished by. If only he meant it. If only the laughter that the invitation had been accompanied with did not sound quite so offhand. So casual!
‘And spend the rest of my life wondering when a noose would be placed about your neck?’
‘I had nothing to do with the death of Paget, if that is what you are implying.’
‘You were asked to leave Eton.’
‘I was a boy…’
‘Who stole a watch?’
Again he began to laugh. ‘Such a crime…’ But she allowed his amusement no further rein.
‘I am the only heir to Fairley Manor, Mr Clairmont, and in England we protect our assets by marrying wisely.’
He tipped his head and in the light of the room Lillian saw the beginnings of a reddened scar that snaked from his right ear into the collar of his shirt.
‘A long-ago accident,’ he qualified as he saw her uncertainty.
But she was transfixed. This was no simple wound that would take a day or two to mend. She imagined both the pain and the tenacity needed to recover from such an injury and in her conjecture also saw the wide and yawning gap that lay between them. Who had tended him in his hours of need, wiped his brow and brought him water? She had heard it said he had left for America as a boy, but there had been no mention of any family.
‘Did your parents go with you to the Americas?’
He looked puzzled at her change of topic. ‘My parents?’
‘The Earl of St Auburn implied that you were barely above fourteen when you left Eton and that you sailed from England very soon afterwards.’
‘I had an uncle there already.’
‘So you took passage alone?’
‘Worked my way there actually as a deckhand on the Joanna. Forty days was all it took between London and New York-the seas and winds were kind.’
Marvelling at his description, she imagined a child making his way across the world to a different shore, the mantle of being labelled a thief on his shoulders and alone. Why had his parents not gone with him? She sensed he wanted no more questions as he stood there, the candles above setting his hair to a shade of lighter brown amongst the ebony, curling long against his nape.
‘Wilcox-Rice will never make you happy.’ The words seemed dragged from him.
‘Whereas you will?’
He smiled at that. ‘There are things more important than a certain cut of cloth or which fork one uses at a banquet table, Miss Davonport.’
‘You think that is what defines me?’
‘Partly.’
She hated the truth in his words and the answering echo of it in her own mind. ‘The sum of my pieces must be awfully galling to you then, Mr Clairmont, just as the sum of your own is as equally trying to me. I think a passably good kiss in a man who seems to eschew every other moral principle would not sustain a relationship for even as long as a month.’
‘Do you now?’ Ground out. Barely civil.
Lillian stood her ground. ‘Indeed, for it has come to my ears that the whisper of friendship and respect is a most underrated thing in any marriage.’
‘Which unfulfilled brides have told you that nonsense?’
Shock held her rigid. ‘Perhaps it was naïve of me to expect that you might consider such a sentiment with an open mind.’
‘An open mind?’ He laughed. ‘When your own has just condemned me as a murderer.’
‘Paget was a man you seemed to have much reason to hate.’
‘I concede. Put like that my case seems hopeless and if a thought is as lethal as a bullet…’
When she allowed a smile to blossom he took the small chance of it quickly.
‘Stay the night with me, Lillian. See what it is you will miss if you marry John Wilcox-Rice.’
The shock of his question was only overrun by the stinging want in her body. ‘I could start with ruination-’
He broke into her banter. ‘I would never hurt you, at least believe that.’
She saw the way he looked about to make certain no person lay in earshot, saw the way too he kept his hands jammed in his jacket pockets and his face carefully bland. They could for all intents and purposes be discussing the weather should a bystander take the time to watch them.
‘If by some misguided logic I should chance to consider such a risky venture, where would you imagine this tryst to take place? I should not wish to shed my inhibitions in a dosshouse, after all.’
‘Someone has told you my address?’
The dimple in his cheek was deep and she tried not to let the beauty of his face daunt her.
‘Come away with me, then. I have a house in Bedfordshire.’
‘I could not possibly…’
‘You could buy a kiss when you barely knew me. Take that one step further.’
John Wilcox-Rice’s voice sounded behind her. ‘Lillian, I have been looking for you.’ His words were wary and distrustful.
‘Mr Clairmont has just extended an invitation to us to call in at his house in the country.’ She watched as amber flared, catching her glance in a hooded warning.
‘I doubt we shall be in the district, Clairmont, and I thought I had heard it said that you were taking passage home very soon.’
‘Unless the police have need to keep me in London.’
John stuttered at such nonchalance. A challenge. A provocation. A carefully worded gauntlet thrown into the ring between adversaries and John with no notion at all as to what he fought for.
Her!
The beat of Lillian’s heart thickened in the dawning realisation that she was the prize, a situation that she had not had the experience of since her first year of coming out, and the band of white gold and diamonds on the third finger of her left hand felt tight, a small message of control and limit that constricted everything.
Oh, for the chance of another kiss? No, there wasn’t the possibility for any of it, especially here with her father and aunt close and a fiancé who allowed her not a moment’s respite. If only she might lay her fingers in those of the American opposite and simply walk, now, away from it all.
Like her mother had!
She shook her head and the moment of madness passed, evaporated into expectation and duty. Lillian or Lilly. The white and careful promise of obligation and discretion counterbalanced against the wilder orange flair of excitement and thrill.
The very same choices Rebecca had mismanaged all those years before and look where it had taken her: a deathbed racked with self-reproach and contrition.
She inclined her head as she allowed John Wilcox-Rice to take her arm and lead her out into the ballroom proper, the music of Strauss settling her fears as it swirled and eddied about them. Many in the pressing crowd smiled at them, the illusion o
f a wondrous young love, not such a difficult one to pass off after all.
John leaned in as they performed the waltz, the ardour that had been apparent at the St Auburns’ the night he had escorted her to her room as obvious here.
She felt his fingers splayed out across her back.
‘This is the dance of lovers, Lillian. Appropriate, don’t you think?’
It took all of her composure not to break his hold and pull away.
‘If you could give some consideration about naming a date for our nuptials, and preferably one in the not-too-distant future, you would make me the happiest of men.’
Lillian faltered. ‘With all the Christmas preparations I have been busy’
‘What of February, then?’
‘I had thought of the summer,’ she returned and his face fell.
‘No, that is too long.’ The forceful tone in his voice surprised her. ‘It needs to be earlier.’
Nodding, she retreated into silence. Earlier? The very word was like a death knell in her heart.
‘If you don’t approach her soon the night will be gone, Luc.’ Hawkhurst’s voice was insistent. Already the clock was nearing the hour of two.
‘I think I made myself more than clear to Miss Davenport an hour or so back, Hawk.’
‘And she wanted none of you?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, that’s a first. So you’re going to give up just like that?’
‘I am. She intimated that she thought I had some hand in the death of Paget.’
‘You are here for a month and life becomes interesting again. To my mind, however, Lillian Davenport seems downright miserable and the stuffed shirt of a fiancé looks as though he is hanging on to her arm for dear life. Even her father looks bored with his conversation and that’s saying something.’ He stopped, and Luc didn’t like the way he smiled. ‘Her aunt on the other hand is eyeing you up with a singular interest.’
‘She probably wants to chastise me on behalf of her son.’
‘No, the glance is one more of a measured curiosity.’
‘Then perhaps she was a particular friend of Albert Paget and is trying to work out how I did away with him.’
‘Well, no doubt we will discover the truth in a moment. She seems to be heading this way.’
‘Alone?’
‘Very.’
‘Mr Clairmont.’ Jean Taylor-Reid’s voice carried across the room around them and, ignoring Hawkhurst altogether, she went straight to the heart of what was worrying her. ‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you. There are many here who say that the misdemeanours of your youth would make it difficult for you to fashion a future here in London.’
‘Is that what they say, Lady Taylor-Reid?’ He looked around pointedly. ‘England has long since ceased to frighten me with its obsession with the importance of family name and fortune.’
‘Then you are inviting problems for yourself.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Ignoring his perplexity, she carried on. ‘The protection offered by a family name is irrefutable and the name of Davenport is one I should wish to keep untainted. If my son Daniel has done anything to offend you…’ She swallowed back tears and stopped, and Luc, who could not for the life of him work out where she was going with this, remained silent.
‘I would plead with you to ignore him. He may not be the easiest person to like, but if he should die…’ Her voice petered out, but, taking a breath, she continued more strongly. ‘I would, of course, offer you something in return. There are whispers, you see, that you are more involved in the Paget death than you let on. Perhaps this might be a wise time to simply return to America-slip out on the next tide, so to speak. There is a ship leaving for Boston in the morning that has a berth which is paid for.’ She pressed a paper into his hands. ‘You will find all the details here, Mr Clairmont, and the captain is amenable to asking no questions.’
‘Leaving both your son and niece safe from my person?’
‘I think we understand each other entirely.’
She did not wait to see if he agreed, but moved away, back to the side of Lillian’s father who watched with open anger. A small greying woman with a slight stoop and the iron will of a doyenne who would do anything to protect the reputation of her family.
‘Perhaps Davenport learned the art of getting his own way in everything from the unlikely breast of his mother.’
Luc laughed at Stephen’s reflection, though Lilly pointedly looked away from him, the tip-tilt of her nose outlined against the wall behind.
Beautiful. And careful. A woman whose life was lived and measured by the right thing to do. He should take note of Jean Taylor-Reid’s warning, should leave Lillian Davenport to the faultless standards of an exacting ton and to a fiancé who would for ever be circumspect and judicious. But he could not, not when she had whispered her feelings to him after she had fainted and her guard was down, not when she had admitted that her favourite colour was orange when it was so plainly not.
He finished his glass of lemonade and placed the container on a low-lying table beside him. If he did not act tonight, tomorrow might be too late, the aunt’s proclivity to interference worrying and his own problems with Davenport throwing him into a no-man’s land of wait and see.
He had never let anyone close, his wife’s death a part of that equation in a way he had not understood before. Lillian was drawing something out of him that he thought was gone, shrivelled up in the miserable years of both his youth and his marriage. But it had not. Tonight as he watched her across the room in her white dress and with the candlelight in her hair, the hard centre of his heart had begun to thaw, begun to hope, begun again to feel the possibility of a life that was…whole.
Swearing to himself, he turned away from Hawk and strode out on to a balcony near the top of the room.
The strains of Mozart rent the air, soft, civilised, a thread of memory from an England that had never quite left him. A great well of yearning made him swallow. Yearning for a home. Yearning for Lilly and her goodness, and sense and trust and honesty.
In the window of a salon downstairs he could see a Christmas tree glowing, the candles on its bough promising all that was right and good with the world. Elizabeth had never fussed with such traditions, preferring instead an endless round of visiting. A woman who found solace in the busy whirl of society.
He ran his hand through his hair. If he was honest he had married her for her looks, a shallow reason that he had had much cause to regret within the first year of their life together. But he had been nearly twenty-seven and the land he had spent breaking in with Stuart had taken much of his time since first arriving in America. When she had come after him with her flashing eyes and chestnut curls he had been entranced.
He had never loved her! The thought made him swear because even in his darkest hours he had not admitted it to himself. Why now, though? Why here? He knew the answer even as he phrased the question. Because in the room beside this one a woman whom he felt more respect for than any other he had met in his life laughed and danced and chatted.
‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you.’
The old woman’s voice rang true in his conscience as he opened the door and searched the space inside, and as luck might have it Lilly separated herself from her family group and retired to a small alcove at one end of the room. Had she seen him coming? Lucas did not know. All he knew was that he was beside her in the quiet dimmed space and that her warmth beat at his coldness, living flame in her pale blue eyes. He could no longer be circumspect.
‘Your aunt has just warned me away from you. She thinks I may be a corrupting influence.’
‘And are you, Lucas? Are you that?’
He shook his head, her very question biting at certainty. He wanted to say more, but found himself stymied; after all, there had been much he had done
in his life that she would not like. As if she could read his mind she faced him directly.
‘I do not understand what this thing is between us, but how I wish that it would just stop.’ She laid her hand across her chest as if her heartbeat was worrying her, and the sensation building inside him wound tighter, dangerously complete. There was no room left for compromise or bargain.
‘I want you.’ Sense and logic deserted him as his thumb traced a line down the side of her arm, the silver of her hair falling like mist across the blackness of his clothes.
Fragile. Easily ruined.
Even that thought did not have him pulling away, not tonight with this small chance of possibility all that was left to him. Now. Here. Only this minute lost in the luck of a provident encounter and a hundred-and-one reasons why he should just let her go. Her fingers joined his thumb and he chided himself, the thin daintiness of white silk sleeves falling over his fist like a shroud. Hidden.
‘Lord.’ He pulled back as he closed his eyes and swore, a softer feeling tugging at lust and settling wildness.
‘Lilly.’ Her name. Just that. He could not even whisper what it was he desired because even the saying of it would take away the beauty of imagination and, if memory was all he was to be left with, he would not spoil even a second of it by a careless entreaty.
He had both power and restraint. The disparity suited him, she thought, as the heat inside her crumbled any true resistance and the incomprehensible fragment of time between separation and togetherness ended. Like a dream, close as breath. Melding simply by touch into one being. She heard the echo of his heartbeat, fast and strong, felt the tremble of his fingers as they trailed down silk and met flesh beneath the lace at her elbows. Her own breath shallowed, roughly taken, the very start of something she could no longer fight, no words to deny him. Anything. She had had enough of denial and of pretending that everything she felt for him was a ruse.
Tears welled as she swallowed. ‘If you kiss me here, I shall be ruined.’
There was no choice left though, for already her body leaned across, breasts grazing his shirt beneath an opened jacket, nipples hardened with pure and simple desire. He was her only point of connection in the room, her north to his south, balanced and equal. Even facing havoc she wanted him, wanted him to touch her, to kiss her as he had before and show her what it was that could exist between a man and a woman when everything was exactly as it should be.