“Lady Catherine,” Lucy said, with all the dignity she could muster, “you’ll be relieved to know that the thought of mingling my blood with that of some accursed noble family is as repugnant to me as I am to you.”
“Repugnant? How could such a marriage be otherwise to you?” Lady Catherine asked. “Or to you, Dominic? You know nothing of each other!”
“We know enough,” Valcour interjected. “Lucinda knows that I am ruthless in getting what I want and I know enough to have a healthy respect for the toe of her boot.”
“Wh-what is that supposed to mean?” Lady Catherine’s hands knotted in the folds of her bedrobe. “Merciful God, Dominic, you’ve gone mad.”
“It would hardly be the first time a beautiful woman had driven a Valcour to madness, would it, madam?”
Hot spots of color stained Lady Catherine’s cheeks as she glanced up at Valcour’s impassive face.
“I just… there must be some way for you both to escape this!” Lady Catherine looked into Lucy’s face. “You must forgive me for being so blunt, child. But you cannot blame a mother for being dismayed at this whole affair.”
Lucy winced, suddenly jolted by the image of her own mother, the stricken look that would have been on Emily Blackheath’s face if she had been present at the announcement of this most unexpected marriage. The sudden stab of homesickness and grief must have been reflected on Lucy’s face. Lady Catherine’s voice filled with sympathy.
“Listen to me, prattling on, and you all but dead on your feet. Poor lamb, we will have the chance to make things right in the morning. Dominic should be ashamed of himself, dragging you about at such an hour. But the Valcour men have never been a patient lot, especially when traveling, and—”
Dominic interrupted. “Forgive me for pointing out that you continue to—how did you say it, madam?—prattle. Perhaps you could enlighten my bride as to the traditional vices of Valcour in the morning?”
Lady Catherine seemed to wilt as if his voice was a killing frost. Lucy was surprised to find herself bristling on Lady Catherine’s behalf, but Lucy was so weary, she could barely muster her usual defiance.
“I am very tired, my lady,” she said. “And you look as if you have not slept in days. I am sorry for any distress I caused you.”
Lady Catherine raised trembling fingers to her soft hair. “I am certain things can be made right somehow, Miss Black—”
“Lucy,” she interjected quietly.
“Lucy.” There were shadows in the noblewoman’s eyes: secrets, as if a dozen colored veils hid something from Lucy’s sight. Lucy’s heart twisted at the unhappiness that lurked behind that sweet heart-shaped face.
It was all too obvious that the source of the lady’s sorrow was her tall, dark-haired son, resentment barely hidden in the chill reaches of his eyes.
Suddenly Lucy wanted to shelter the older woman from that coldness. “I am well schooled in mounting insurrection, but I haven’t the slightest idea how a countess should behave. Perhaps you could help me learn.”
“I will do anything in my power to help you, child.” The noblewoman’s lips moved as if forming words, soft, so soft. “For his sake.”
Half an hour later, Valcour stood in front of the mirror in his bedchamber and dipped chill water from the washbasin with his cupped hands. He splashed the water over his face, as if to cleanse away the weariness that had seeped into his very bones. But he doubted the fabled Fountain of Youth could have rejuvenated him tonight.
From the moment the Valcour coach had rumbled away from Harlestone early that morning, Dominic had maintained a veneer of icy detachment. During the breakneck trip back to London, he had adopted an aura of frigid calm.
No one had suspected that the earl, astride his midnight stallion, had his gut in knots of roiling emotions he couldn’t even name, let alone control. No one had guessed that his eyes traveled time and again to the coach window to catch glimpses of his bride. Or that his mind was filled with images of his hands on the bodice of her rose and cream striped gown, unfastening the lacings, delving under the fabric to find more sensual textures beneath.
No one had guessed how much Valcour had wished he could just turn his stallion the other way and ride away from Hawkvale, the Lady Catherine and his truculent brother. How much he had wanted to take his rebel bride to some distant Valcour estate and try to make something good out of this disaster. Lucinda had faced the journey like a prisoner of war, determined to defy her conqueror to the bitter end. And Valcour had known exactly how much that pride had cost her. For she had seemed utterly dejected in the confines of the coach when she thought he couldn’t see her.
God knew, Valcour felt equally morose. But nothing had prepared him to face the scene that awaited him inside Hawkvale’s doors.
His mother’s face was shrouded with a depth of torment he had only seen one other time as a frightened boy. Tonight her eyes had been the same, wide and wounded, when he’d told her Lucinda was his wife.
He’d expected relief, astonishment. He had not expected Lady Catherine to gape at him as if he had made the girl his whore.
Valcour delved into the water again, holding it against his beard-stubbled cheeks. For God’s sake, the woman had wanted him to fix things, hadn’t she? And there was no other way to make Lucinda Blackheath right in the eyes of the world except to give her his name.
He had done what was necessary, what was expected of a gentleman of honor. What he hadn’t expected was that Lucinda would stir such a fierce protectiveness inside him, make him feel raw, somehow, by touching him deep in the hidden reaches of his heart.
She had barreled into his life only a month before, turning it upside down with her insane mischief. She was the apocalypse that had shattered his hard-won peace. But she was so damned brave, so damned defiant in the face of disaster. There was such strength in her, such fierce determination.
Through those traits, she reminded him of the boy he had once been, sword clutched in his trembling hand, confronting crushing odds, heartbreak beyond bearing. But this time Valcour was playing the villain. He was the one forcing her to bend to his will. Valcour, and that mysterious madman who had brought her to England with his lies for some devious purpose the earl couldn’t even begin to contemplate.
Valcour unbuttoned his shirt, his jaw set, hard. No one would hurt Lucinda, no one would break her, the earl resolved. Not even Valcour himself.
Valcour closed his eyes, remembering Lucinda in the bed at Harlestone, the elegance and grace of her supple body, the eagerness in her fingers as she touched him.
God, how he wanted to open the door between their rooms right now and drive away her misery with his kisses. Bury his own pain at the betrayal of the ruby ring by losing himself in Lucinda’s beautiful body.
God, how he wanted to forget.
Valcour swore under his breath. The girl had looked ready to collapse despite the brave front she’d put up. He might be a bastard, but he wasn’t enough of a beast to ease his own tension by bedding a woman so exhausted she had barely been able to stand. Better to get into the bed his valet had hastily prepared for his use and try to sleep, forget.
He was stripping his shirt from his shoulders when he heard a soft rap upon his door.
Valcour froze for a moment, his pulses taking a sudden wild leap at the thought it could possibly be Lucinda. The thought of his countess seeking him out, coming to his bed, was more arousing than he could ever have imagined.
“What is it?” he called out, his voice strangely tight.
“Dominic?”
Lady Catherine’s voice.
Valcour’s jaw knotted. “I would prefer to be left alone, madam,” he began, but the door was already swinging open. An ashen face was illuminated by the single candle clutched in Lady Catherine’s birdlike hand.
Valcour winced as the light revealed reddened eyes, swollen from crying. She was painfully thin, drowning in a bedrobe of primrose satin. He wanted to press sweetmeats into her hands, to sit in the g
arden and have the sun kiss roses back into her cheeks. Instead, he pictured the tower room at the castle and the ring of ruby fire that would taunt him forever from his new wife’s finger.
“Dominic, I—I have made certain the child is settled in the rose room.”
“Lucinda is no child, madam. She is my wife. The bishop himself presided and all was conducted quite respectably.” Valcour arched one brow. “I should think you would be delighted.”
“Delighted? How could you even think such a thing?”
“The St. Cyr bloodline will be assured. You will have feminine company.” Valcour crossed to where a decanter of Madeira stood on a table at the far side of the room and poured himself a glass. “By God, I could almost believe you are stunned by what has happened.”
“Stunned? I am that. And horrified. My God, is this some kind of twisted vengeance? A way to make us both pay for sins long past? Do you truly want to condemn us to spending the rest of our lives seeing Alexander’s daughter every day? Do you want to share a bed with her? Have children with her, when every time you see her face, you must remember—”
“God’s wounds, you’re being as overly dramatic as Aubrey about this infernal affair. Lucinda, Aubrey, and I were stranded overnight. She would have been ruined. She could not wed that idiot boy. You must have known what action I would take.”
“I should have known what would happen! Should have guessed!” Lady Catherine set the candle down on the desk tucked in the corner of Valcour’s room. “But it never occurred to me that you would do such a thing! I know there have been other women who attempted to trap you into marriage. You evaded them so easily that—”
“Lucinda was hardly trying to ensnare me, madam. I all but had to haul the girl to the altar trussed like a partridge.”
“Why would you take her to the altar at all? Especially if she didn’t want to marry? Dominic, it makes no sense!”
Valcour turned away, hating the gnawing uncertainty that ate inside his gut at her words. What had his motives been? He didn’t know any longer. It had all happened so fast—the scene with Aubrey, the confrontation with Lucinda in the stable. He had been so damned determined to take her to wife he’d barely had patience for the bishop to go stammering through the wedding vows.
He told himself he had acted to preserve his honor, and to save Lucinda from ruin. That it was a marriage of grim necessity.
But it wasn’t duty that had made him think of her time and again during the weeks since he’d kissed her in the garden. It wasn’t a feeling of responsibility that had driven him into Lucinda’s arms last night. It wasn’t a sense of obligation that inflamed him, drove him to take her, knowing in his heart that by possessing her body he was shattering the last, faint hope that the marriage could be dissolved.
Resentment welled up in Valcour toward Lady Catherine, who stood there, forcing him to confront feelings he had tried so damned hard to deny. How dare she look so accursed broken when he was the one bleeding inside?
“Oh, why did I send you after them?” Lady Catherine choked out. “I should have gone myself!”
“You have great delusions of your own abilities. I would never have allowed you to distress yourself that way.”
“No.” Lady Catherine gave a sick laugh. “You’d not let Aubrey fight a duel. You’d not let me be distressed. You’d not let this girl be ruined. But you would sacrifice yourself in marriage to a girl you did not love. A girl who could do nothing but remind you of—”
“It is done, madam. There is no point in tearing yourself apart with regret. As earl, it is my responsibility to—”
“To what? Pay eternally for other people’s mistakes?”
“To protect my own.”
“There is still time to avert this disaster! You barely knew the girl. Despite the cold facade you show to the world, I know you, Dominic. You are a good man. Gentle. Surely you did not consummate a marriage to a frightened girl. Get an annulment and she could go back to her family.”
“I took Lucinda to Harlestone and claimed her as my wife in the most physical sense of the word. With some effort, you will be dandling the Valcour heir on your knee by next Christmas.” His lips firmed, a burning sensation in his chest. Why was it that the thought of Lucinda ripening with his child filled him not with a sense of duty accomplished but, rather, with a kind of yearning he didn’t dare examine?
“Don’t you realize the fate you’ve condemned yourself to?” Lady Catherine raised a trembling hand to her face. “The rest of your life, without love, without hope… for you could never love her, no matter how brave and beautiful she is. You could never forgive her for being Alexander’s daughter.”
“I have forgotten it already.” Dominic snapped his fingers in dismissal. “Alexander d’Autrecourt is dead. She is Lucinda St. Cyr now. And as for love, I have never desired to be torn apart by the emotions that destroyed my father.”
“What have I done to you, Dominic?” Lady Catherine’s voice broke. “I never intended to hurt you.”
“Didn’t you, madam?” Valcour drained the glass of Madeira then crossed to where the fire licked hungrily on the hearth. “If you did not mean to hurt me, why, pray tell, did you give me that ring on my twentieth birthday?”
“What?”
“You remember. The rubies. The legendary love token you said was steeped in romantic tradition. The ring that could only fit the finger of the giver’s true love.”
Lady Catherine stilled, a haunted light in her eyes. “I gave it to you because it was precious to me.”
“I used it to wed Lucinda. Imagine my surprise when we stopped to visit her villainous relatives at Avonstea and the dowager duchess demanded to know how my wife had gotten hold of the fabled love token that had been in the d’Autrecourt family for generations.”
Lady Catherine flinched. “Dominic, I…”
“You what, madam? Thought it would be a pretty jest that I used as a wedding ring some trinket from a man I hated?”
“You adored Alexander d’Autrecourt.”
“I was a boy. A blind, foolish boy who knew no better. But he taught me well, did he not? A lesson I have never forgotten.”
“You will not let yourself forget! People aren’t perfect, no matter how much we might want them to be. Call me a fool, but I believed in the magic of the ring. I wanted so much for you to.”
“And I suppose the tower room at Harlestone was preserved for my benefit as well? Fitted out like some infernal shrine? My God, madam, do you know what it was like for me to go there, to see it?”
A shimmering, desperate light shone in Lady Catherine’s eyes. “Dominic, you—you went to the tower room?”
“My bride had gone prying about. I had to drag her away from the pianoforte there. I ordered that room locked years ago. By God, I should have had everything inside it piled in the center and burned.”
“You didn’t,” Lady Catherine begged faintly. “Tell me you did not.”
“I burned enough. The music left there. Lucinda was playing it when I found her.”
“You destroyed the musical scores, then?” Lady Catherine asked faintly.
“More of my twisted vengeance against you, no doubt,” Valcour said bitterly. “What did you expect me to do when I discovered the chamber intact? Rejoice?”
“I don’t know. I just…” She turned away and walked to the window, so forlorn that Valcour’s anger wavered. “I lost you there, Dominic. Perhaps I hoped I might find you again someday.”
“The boy who played in that tower died the night his father placed a pistol to his head.”
Lady Catherine spun to face him, her eyes meeting his. “Why don’t you say it all, Dominic? What you truly feel? That I am the one who pulled the trigger. I am the one who murdered my husband, my son.”
“I am alive.”
“Are you? The Dominic I knew vanished. I cannot find him.”
“I would never say it was your fault, madam.”
“Of course not. You never spoke a
word of reproach to me. Never told me how you felt. There was a time when I shared all your most precious secrets. Do you remember? You would bring me pretty stones and feathers you found in the meadow. You would cry on my lap when your father was harsh. You would sing for me, and play—”
“Enough!” Valcour roared.
Lady Catherine swayed. She stood there, bruised and trembling, and Valcour could see how hard she fought to keep back the tears.
Valcour tried to gentle his voice. “You have another son. He can give you what I cannot.”
“Children are not interchangeable, Dominic. Much as I love Aubrey, he does not dull the ache of grief inside me. He doesn’t make up for the fact that I lost you.”
Valcour sucked in a deep breath that burned his lungs. “I would not want you to lose any more than you already have, madam. If anything you wish to retrieve remains in the tower chamber, I would advise you to travel to Harlestone and do so within the week. I left orders for it to be dismantled and everything destroyed that you have not claimed. It will be as I wish.”
“Will it? I wonder.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Only that I can’t believe you will destroy everything. It would be as if you were destroying the last vestiges of your soul.”
“I have no soul. I have made certain of that. Now, will you go to Harlestone?”
“Yes. As soon as I see Lucy settled.”
“Agreed. Now, if you will pardon me. Between racing to find Aubrey and the girl, the difficulties of a somewhat ill-timed wedding and providing my new countess with a bridal night, I am somewhat tired.”
“Dominic—”
Valcour turned his back to her, not wanting to risk her seeing the emotions he knew were simmering far too close to the surface. “Goodnight, madam,” he said stonily.
Lady Catherine hesitated for a moment, then she slipped out the door so quietly he almost failed to hear the tiny, watery sound of her stifled crying.
Valcour’s fists knotted, but he turned and stepped out into the corridor, watching his mother melt into the shadows.
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