Lords of the Isles

by Le Veque, Kathryn

  She had never expected such praise from Valcour, intoxicating phrases in that husky, seductive voice.

  “As long as your bed is open to me,” Valcour said, “I won’t find it a hardship to abandon all others.”

  His thumb skimmed her lower lip, as if testing its texture. His gaze heated, as if he were anticipating tasting something sweet.

  “Don’t look at me that way, my lord,” Lucy protested, uncomfortable with the tiny bursts of excitement the mere brush of his gaze was igniting in her breasts, her lips, and other places more secret still.

  Valcour braced his hands on either side of her, trapping her against the tree with the sinewy circle of his body. “I’m your husband. Call me by name.”

  “I can’t,” Lucy said, the absurdity of it all making a nervous smile tug at the corner of her lips.

  “Don’t be stubborn, girl.”

  “I can’t,” Lucy repeated. “I don’t… know your name.”

  Valcour chuckled, a sound like whiskey warmed in the sun. “Dominic. Dominic Braxton St. Cyr, sixth earl of Valcour. Say it.” His mouth was a breath away from hers. If she trembled she would touch it, taste it.

  “Say it,” he urged again.

  “I—I can’t,” Lucy stammered. “I can’t remember past the first two!”

  “A woman should know her husband’s name, to whisper it in the darkness, to cry out when he buries himself inside her.”

  She raised her gaze up to his, felt herself falling into something so compelling she couldn’t stop it.

  “Dominic,” she murmured.

  Those fire-hot masculine lips brushed hers, tantalizing, tempting, then left her needing.

  Of their own volition, her fingertips touched the hard wall of his chest, felt the unsteady beat of his heart. “Dominic,” she said again, her voice quavering.

  He rewarded her with another kiss, the moist heat of his mouth lingering a moment longer before he drew away.

  Lucy’s head whirled, her breasts heavy and aching, her center soft with a heat that made her squeeze her thighs together, long for Valcour’s hands to touch…

  For a heartbeat Lucy wanted more, to explore those illicit fires of seduction that had dizzied her in the Wilkeses’ garden. But the next moment reality crashed in about her, reminding her exactly how much this man had just cost her.

  As if reading her thoughts, Valcour pulled away from her, his fingers curling into a fist. “I have said I will give you time, and I shall keep my word. As you shall keep yours, Lucinda.”

  Lucy would have flung back a suitable retort, but she was still struggling to breathe.

  “The first matter I demand your complete honesty in is this: You will tell me exactly what your purpose was in traveling to the d’Autrecourts. Everything, girl. To the last detail.”

  “I thought that Aubrey had—”

  “The boy gave me some garbled mash I could barely decipher. I know that you were going to the d’Autrecourts, and I know that the miniature you wore the night of the ball wasn’t some trinket to amuse you. It was a picture of your father, Lord Alexander d’Autrecourt, third son of the duke of Avonstea.”

  Lucy’s cheeks burned, her eyes flickering away from Valcour’s. The idea of confiding any of this to him was daunting. How would anyone believe such a wild tale? She could scarcely believe it herself, and she had opened the box of Alexander d’Autrecourt’s belongings, seen the misty-eyed face above the stairs in the gaming hall.

  “Lucinda.” There was real gentleness in Valcour’s usually strident tones. His fingers took up hers, the new wedding ring glinting against the edge of his thumb.

  “Don’t be afraid. I don’t hold it against you. I figured out the truth before I even got here, while I was riding on the road.”

  The man had deduced that her father who had supposedly been dead for seventeen years—was alive and had been living above a gaming hell? No wonder Aubrey was more than a little afraid of his brother. No, she was being ridiculous. Valcour couldn’t know.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, Lucinda. I am a man of some arrogance, I know. But I hope I am not such a monster that I blame the helpless for other people’s sins.”

  Now she was totally confused. “Other people’s—I don’t understand.”

  “I just want you to know that it matters not at all to me. The fact that you are… baseborn.”

  Lucy almost laughed aloud with relief. “You think me a bastard?”

  Valcour’s brow furrowed. “I tell you it is immaterial—”

  “I’m no bastard, my lord. I’m Lord Alexander d’Autrecourt’s true-born daughter.”

  Valcour drew back, his eyes flashing, every muscle in his body seeming to reverberate with warning. “His only true-born daughter died when she was three years old, and he died with her. I’ve warned you that I’ve no tolerance for liars.”

  “I’m not lying. My mother was the daughter of the vicar on the d’Autrecourts’ estate. She and my father grew up together, best friends. When my mother’s family tried to force her into marriage with a cruel squire, my father rescued her. Married her out of hand. They were disowned and came to London, where my father worked as a music teacher and composer. I was born a year later and—”

  “No!” Valcour hissed between gritted teeth. “I saw the grave.”

  “By the time I was three years old they were a whisper away from debtors’ prison. My father was desperate. He was walking in the rain, Mama says, and… and got sick. She took him to his family, hoping they’d take care of him, and of me. They took the two of us, but my mother… they wouldn’t even let her in the door.”

  Lucy’s voice cracked, the image of Emily alone and desolate, one of the few that could break Lucy’s heart. “When she came back to get me, they showed her the grave.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “I don’t think Jesus was listening to either my mother or me. She was insane with grief. And I was terrified, alone. It seemed the d’Autrecourts didn’t want any inconvenient reminders of their son’s mésalliance. The duke gave me to a sea captain to carry away from England forever. I was never even to know my own name.”

  “How did you ever discover the truth?”

  “My mother heard me singing the melody my father composed for me when I was a baby. No one else had ever heard it.” The tears were threatening again. Somehow telling the tale to the earl of Valcour was leaving her raw and aching.

  “My God, how could Avonstea do such a thing to his own granddaughter? A helpless child?”

  “That’s partly what I was going to Avonstea to find out.” For an instant she considered telling Valcour the rest, pouring out the truth—that Alexander d’Autrecourt might be alive. But Valcour gripped her shoulders, the intensity in his eyes suddenly terrifying.

  “You planned to go confront them alone? With no one—not even the Wilkeses—having the slightest idea where you had disappeared to?” Blue sparks of fury lit his dark eyes. “Do you have any idea how much danger you would have been in if you had succeeded in this crazed escapade and arrived at their door? The instant the d’Autrecourts knew who you were you would be at their mercy. If they did something so villainous to dispose of you before, who knows what they’d be capable of doing to hide such a heinous deed now.”

  “I’m not a helpless child anymore, my lord.”

  “No. You’re a fool. A beautiful, brave little fool.”

  His hand skimmed over her straw-spangled curls, his harsh features filled with something she had never seen in them before. A savage tenderness, fierce outrage. And guilt. Lucy’s brow furrowed in astonishment. Why would Valcour feel guilt?

  His hands were trembling just a whisper. She felt it to the core of her soul.

  “You are my wife now,” Valcour bit out, smoothing her hair back from her cheek. “You are the countess of Valcour. They cannot touch you.”

  It was as if this man—so fiercely arrogant, ruthlessly powerful—were seeking reassurance not for her but, rather, for himself.

>   He drew away from her, rubbing his fingertips against his eyes. “My God. An empty grave… when all these years…”

  “My lord, did…” She paused to suck in a steadying breath, almost afraid to ask. “Even in the Wilkeses’ garden the night of the ball, when you saw my father’s face, it was as if you had seen it before and it caused you pain.”

  Valcour turned away from her, and she could feel him drawing deeper into the closed places inside himself.

  “Valcour, did you know my father?”

  “There was a time I believed that I did.”

  The cryptic answer made Lucy’s fingers tighten their grasp until the ring cut deep into her tender skin. “Tell me. Please. Anything about him. I… I can’t remember him at all, except through his music.”

  “He was my music teacher for a time.” Lucy sensed that Valcour was giving her only the barest answers, so much more lying hidden in his simple words.

  “It was you! The music was for you. Of course!”

  “What?”

  “I received a box full of my father’s things while I was in Virginia. The miniature, his pocket watch, and a musical score he had written for a Master St. Cyr of Harlestone Castle. It was a gift for your tenth birthday.”

  “My birthday.” Valcour walked to the stone fence, resting one hand on the rough surface. “I remember. In the end, he gave me a far different sort of gift.” Bitterness, edged with the echoes of remembered pain.

  “Valcour, please. I can tell this is upsetting to you, but since I was a child of ten I’ve been trying to find the father I lost. You must know something of him that you can share.”

  Valcour’s fist knotted on the wall, and Lucy was stunned to see a smear of blood on his knuckles.

  “You’ve hurt yourself,” she said, crossing to where he stood. She took his hand in hers. A sharp edge of stone had bitten into his skin, leaving a small but rather deep gash. Valcour looked as though he didn’t feel it at all. Why? Because she had let loose far deeper pain?

  A cold veil of foreboding settled about her heart. “Tell me,” Lucy demanded. “Whatever it is.”

  “Your father is dead, Lucinda. You are alive, by some miracle. Alive. You have his music. Let it be enough.”

  “I did what you wanted. I married you. I’ve even agreed to bear a child. Don’t you think that you owe me the truth?”

  “The truth?” Valcour wheeled on her, the uncharacteristic tenderness she had sensed in him earlier having vanished, leaving the harsh earl made of ice she had known before. “Your father was a mediocre composer at best, with a few rare sputters of brilliance. He was a fool, unable to look in the mirror and see what everyone else knew. That he was as substantial as mist, as naive as a babe in its cradle, and as full of grand delusions as any madman in Bedlam.”

  Lucy flinched at the venom in his voice. “No. I don’t believe you.”

  “Feel free to dismiss everything I said. After all, you can hardly think that I would be privy to the secrets of a lowly music teacher. Your father’s marriage had effectively banished him to the bare fringes of society, while I was the heir to Valcour. The son of one of the most powerful noblemen in England. What possible gateway could an outcast like Alexander d’Autrecourt pass through to enter so deeply into my world?”

  His contempt filtered through Lucy’s veins, poisoning the fragile empathy she had shared with this man so briefly before. Worse still, his words cut to the quick of her own doubts about her father, left her with raw images of the man in the gaming hell, the stories of the harlot Josy.

  Valcour’s dismissal of d’Autrecourt as weak blended far too well with the notion that he could still be alive, and the far more unthinkable notion that he had allowed his wife to believe him dead all these years. That he had abandoned his tiny daughter. Why? So that he could retreat once again to the wealth and security of the duke’s household?

  No. That idea was absurd. Even if Alexander d’Autrecourt had wanted to surrender to his parents’ will, erase all memory of his former mistakes, he would not have staged his own death. He could never have entered society again. He would have had to stay hidden away so that no one would discover his guilty secret.

  It made no sense. But did an empty grave make any sense? A child cast to the winds of fate? Did the arrival of the mysterious box make any sense, especially after so many years without a single word from England?

  Lucy’s head throbbed, and she was stung into rising to the defense of the father she had dreamed about for so many years, that figment of her imagination that had been as beautiful inside as the “Night Song” he had left behind.

  “My father was a genius in his compositions,” Lucy burst out at Valcour. “You were just too much of a blockhead to appreciate his music! Some dolt of a boy dragged to the pianoforte by the scruff of his neck, kicking and screaming. I wager teaching you anything was pure torture.”

  Valcour’s mouth tightened. “Since it is evident that you know everything regarding your father, and regarding me, there is no further need for us to discuss the matter. Except for this: You will not, under any circumstances, contact the d’Autrecourts without my knowledge. Is that understood?”

  The tension that had been building inside Lucy from the moment she’d entered the gaming hell that final time was bubbling inside her, all her doubts, her fears, her frustrations dangerously near the surface. “I understand you completely, my lord. Please be informed that I am going to Avonstea the instant I can hire something to ride.”

  “The bloody hell you are.”

  “What are you going to do? Skewer me the way you did Sir Jasper? Knock me senseless the way you did Aubrey? Your knuckles are tender, remember? And murdering your bride half an hour after the wedding could prove rather awkward to explain.”

  “You don’t have the slightest idea the kind of people you are dealing with.”

  “Don’t I? I was the one stolen away from my mother! I was the one cast aside like a pair of slippers that pinched! There is a grave in their family cemetery with my name on it. I’ll be damned before I let those sadistic, selfish, pompous sons of Satan sit in their accursed castle and pretend that I never existed!”

  There were years of anguish in those furious words, and pain that Lucy thought she had buried long before. Her fists knotted, and she wanted to hit something—anything. Preferably the man standing as stony and implacable as cliffs beaten by a raging sea.

  He was silent for a long moment, his gaze so hot, so intense, it seemed it must melt her flesh away.

  “So be it,” he said at last. “But when you confront your demons, it will be as the countess of Valcour, with me at your side.”

  Dominic stared into her dawn-kissed features, features more bold and courageous than those of any man he’d ever faced across a dueling field, more lovely than spring’s first violet, cupped in a white lacing of snow.

  And he wondered if his new bride could possibly know that she hadn’t just cast forth her own demons to be purged. She had flung open the portal to the earl of Valcour’s private hell.

  Chapter Nine

  Butter-colored slats of sunlight pierced the windows in the private parlor at the Hound’s Tooth, glittering on the remains of Dominic’s half-eaten breakfast. He grimaced, acknowledging that it was damned difficult to fill your stomach when you were about to break a seventeen-year-old lad’s heart.

  Aubrey stood on the other side of the room, looking as if he’d been dragged down Fleet Street beneath his horse’s belly. Lank wheat-colored hair straggled about his puffy face, his skin the color of dirt-smudged paste. There was a decidedly greenish cast about his lips, and his eyes were feverish pools above the clumsily tied cravat.

  But in spite of the evidence of last night’s drunken spree, there was a certain quality of maturity about Aubrey that Dominic had never seen before. As if the boy had been able to muster all that was best in himself in order to champion Lucinda Blackheath. No, Valcour corrected himself. Lucinda St. Cyr, wife of the earl of Valcour. />
  Dominic took a drink of scalding hot coffee, his gaze studiously avoiding the purpling bruise that shadowed Aubrey’s jaw. He gestured to the chair opposite him. “Sit down, boy, before you fall down.”

  “I prefer to stand.” Aubrey’s bloodshot gaze skittered with pure revulsion across the remains of runny egg yolk swimming in a pool of steak juice. “I only came down here to tell you that nothing has changed since last night. I still intend to marry Lucy as soon as possible.”

  “That may prove a trifle difficult,” Dominic said slowly, turning the coffee cup in his hand. “You see, the lady in question is already wed.”

  “Wed?” Aubrey echoed hoarsely. “What the devil?”

  “It seems she preferred becoming a countess to being the wife of a scapegrace boy.”

  Valcour thought he had prepared himself for the expression on his brother’s face. The reality was far more disquieting.

  “You didn’t!” the boy cried in disbelief. “Lucy wouldn’t have… have married… She despises you! I know she does!”

  “She would not be the first woman seduced by a title.”

  “I don’t believe you! I’ll see her at once!” Aubrey wheeled, obviously intending to charge out the door.

  “That would be rather awkward, brother. My countess is currently making her toilette for our bridal trip. I would assume she is in the bath I ordered up for her an hour ago. Of course, she might be able to flash her ring at you above the rim of the tub.”

  “You can’t be wed! There wasn’t time! Barely eight hours have passed since you arrived!”

  “It is astonishing what an earldom can do to reduce such minor complications. The bishop of Lothshire was only too happy to accommodate me with a special license. And of course, officiating at the wedding of the earl of Valcour is a great honor.”

  The boy was ghost white. “Why, Dominic? Why would you wed her when I told you… I told you I loved her, damn it!”