Her Dearest Sin

by Gayle Wilson

  “Do you love him?”

  “What a child you are,” she said, her voice touched with the same bitterness he had heard then.

  “Does he love you?”

  She turned her head, watching the flame from the torch move in and out among the trees.

  “Marriages like ours seldom have their basis in love. Nor do they in England,” she added.

  “So his actions that day were the result of.. .jealousy?” he asked. “Pride of possession?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I find that it matters a great deal to me.”

  “He’s a proud man. I had humiliated him by running away. At first, he believed you’d helped me.”

  “At first?”

  “If he had really believed that, he would have killed you no matter what I said.”

  “And I have you to thank for convincing him otherwise? Are you expecting my gratitude?” he mocked.

  “I’m expecting you will continue to play whatever game you are playing until he finds us here and kills you. Other than that, I assure you I have very little expectation of anything.”

  The bitterness was there again, more open than before. Despite the anger he had cherished toward this girl during those long months, something about her claim touched a nearly forgotten chord of chivalry.

  The same emotion he’d felt the first time he had encountered her, he reminded himself. It had proven to be misplaced.

  “No one can force you to marry him,” he found himself saying, despite the too-clear remembrance of the last time he had attempted to intervene on her behalf. And of the price he had paid, a price he would carry to his grave, for that attempt.

  She laughed, the sound abruptly cut off. She turned, again watching the flame stream through the darkness.

  “You are a child,” she said again, her voice carefully lowered. “And now, you and I will return separately to the palace, and we will act as if none of what happened tonight has occurred. If you see me or Julián again while you are in Madrid, I would advise you to pretend that you don’t.”

  Before he could react, she slipped past him. Staying within the shadows cast by the building, she made her way to the foot of the stairs leading up to the balcony. As she stepped onto the bottom one, she turned her head, looking back to where he was standing, hidden by the shadows. One hand on the balustrade, she hesitated, her face illuminated by the flambeaux above her.

  Their light glinted off the track of tears on her cheek. Then, lifting the hem of her gown, she began to climb, eventually disappearing from his sight.

  “You’re sure it was the same girl,” Harry asked when they had finally achieved the privacy of the coach and could talk openly.

  Sebastian had returned to the ballroom only a short time after the torchbearer and his helpers had left the garden, but he hadn’t seen the girl again. His eyes had searched the perspiring mob gathered under the glow of a thousand candles, but neither of the faces he sought had been among them.

  “The instant I saw her.”

  “It’s been nearly a year,” the viscount reminded him hopefully.

  “I’m not likely to have forgotten either of them. Besides, she didn’t bother to deny it.”

  He hadn’t told Harry the whole. There was no reason to repeat everything that had been said—and done—during those few moments he and the girl had spent together in the garden.

  Sebastian couldn’t explain to his own satisfaction why he had kissed her. He was unwilling to try to produce an answer to his friend’s inevitable questions about his motives in doing so.

  “It wasn’t the girl who cut your face, Sin,” Harry reminded him. “Actually, from what you said—”

  “She knocked my pistol aside. If she hadn’t—”

  “If she hadn’t,” Wetherly interrupted reasonably, “we would more than likely have found you dead with a ball in your back.”

  “And you believe I prefer this?” Sebastian asked savagely, touching the mark on his face.

  The resulting silence lasted long enough that he knew with regret there could no longer be any pretense after tonight that he didn’t care about the scar. Of course, this was Harry, who knew him well enough to understand the purpose behind that long charade.

  “It was checkmate,” Sebastian said stubbornly, trying to cling to his anger, “until she interfered. He could have ordered them to shoot me, but I would still have taken the whoreson to hell with me.”

  “Let it go, Sin,” Harry advised gently. “Pursuing him won’t change what happened. It won’t change anything at all. You must know how Wellington will feel about your carrying out some personal vendetta while we’re here. Especially with the delicacy of his mission.”

  “Which everyone knows is doomed to failure. I know his name, Harry. I can hunt the bastard down and—”

  “And do what?” Wetherly interrupted. “Kill him? What will that change?”

  “At least it will free her,” Sebastian said.

  And it was only when he heard the words spoken aloud that he realized their implications. As did the viscount, of course.

  “Bloody hell, Sin. Is that what this is about?”

  Harry asked incredulously. “You’re still playing knight errant?”

  “I knew then there was something wrong. She was running away because she’s terrified of him. I saw it in her eyes when that bastard sent his horse down the incline. But still she stood up to him. And then tonight…it was as if she were someone completely different. All the life and fire and spirit had been sucked out of her. And she was even more terrified of him.”

  “I’m not saying she isn’t, Sin, but…he’s her guardian. Soon to be her fiancé. They have some peculiar notions here about the sanctity of that pledge. My God, man, if they’re betrothed, she’s as good as married to him. Nothing you do can change that.”

  “If they’re betrothed. They aren’t. Besides, she’s only marrying him because he’s threatening her. She as much as told me that he’s holding something over her head.”

  “Her family, maybe. If it’s an arranged match, they would suffer if she cried off.”

  “They deserve to suffer if they’re forcing her to marry a man she’s afraid of.”

  “That’s nothing to you. Let it go. There’s not a thing you can do for her. Best for everyone concerned if you forget any of this ever happened.”

  “Except I’m reminded every time I look into a mirror,” Sebastian said, his voice intense.

  “Did she ask you to intervene?”

  She hadn’t, of course. Her advice had been the same as Harry’s. The same Wellington would give, if Sebastian were to lay the situation before the duke.

  They were guests in a foreign country, one whose customs were very different from their own. Even in England, women were compelled to marry against their wishes. Some of them managed to make a success of their arranged matches, and the others, he supposed, eventually learned to be content with their lot. He had never before thought about the role of a woman bound in marriage to a man she not only didn’t love but was frightened of.

  He isn’t a man.

  For some reason the words and the bitterness with which they had been uttered echoed in his brain. There were so many possible connotations for them he couldn’t possibly know what she had meant.

  All he knew was that she wasn’t in love with the man to whom she was about to be betrothed. And that he was her guardian and she was afraid of him.

  “Sin?”

  “She didn’t ask,” he admitted shortly. “She didn’t ask me to do anything.”

  There was a small silence, unbroken except for the sound of the carriage wheels on the cobblestone street.

  “Leave it,” Harry urged again, his voice serious as it rarely was. “For all our sakes. This isn’t the time or the place for your damned heroics. Besides, if she don’t want rescuing—”

  “Then I suppose I must leave her to her fate.”

  “Exactly,” Harry said, obviously missing the sarcas
m. He sounded relieved that Sebastian had been so easily persuaded to see reason. “Not really our affair, you know.”

  It wasn’t. And it was always possible that in dwelling on what he thought he had seen in her eyes, Sebastian was simply looking for an excuse to seek out the man who had marked his face, despite the delicacy of their mission. A reason for doing so that would carry more weight with his conscience and his commander than his thirst for revenge.

  Besides, Harry was right about Wellington’s probable reaction. Dare’s, too, he supposed. Considering the distance between them, his brother’s disapproval seemed less meaningful than it had while he was growing up.

  Of course, despite Dare’s carefully cultivated cynicism, he and Ian had been the ones who had taught him the values by which he had lived his life. Honor. Love of country. Courage in battle and in sport. And a willingness to offer his strength and his skills in defense of those who were unable to defend themselves.

  You have only yourselves to blame, he mentally apprised his absent brothers. And then, in spite of the depths of his genuine, almost murderous rage, his lips curved into a small, secret smile at the thought of their probable reactions to that assertion.

  “I told you,” Pilar said, drawing her hairbrush slowly through the entire length of the strand of hair she held. As she did, she held her guardian’s eyes in the mirror above the dressing table, assessing the depth of his rage.

  She had dismissed her maid as soon as Julián opened the door to her chamber. She had understood very well what was about to happen. There was no need to try to delay the inevitable.

  “Tell me again,” he demanded.

  “My head was aching from the heat and the crowd and the music,” she went on. “I sought out an anteroom for a few minutes of peace and quiet. Someplace where the smell of a hundred perspiring bodies covered in stale scent wouldn’t sicken me.”

  “But you didn’t think to inform me.”

  “You were attending the king. I thought it best not to disturb you.”

  He caught the hairbrush on its downward stroke and wrenched it from her hand. In the same movement, he put the fingers of his other hand on her shoulder, pulling her upper body around so that she was facing him.

  His thumb and forefinger fastened around her chin, lifting her face to him. And then, the brush raised menacingly in his right hand, he looked down into her eyes for a long, silent moment.

  She concentrated on letting nothing of what she was feeling be reflected in her eyes or in her expression. No fear. And no defiance.

  She had learned that the best—indeed, the safest—way to deal with Julián, no matter his mood, was to present him with a facade of absolute calm. She made no further attempt, therefore, to convince him that what she had told him was the truth.

  “Where were you?” he asked again.

  “I have told you where I was,” she said evenly. “And I have told you why I had taken refuge there. Do you wish to hear the explanation again?”

  “What I wish to hear is the truth.”

  He did not raise his voice, but after all these months in his control, she could no longer be lulled by the fact that he might appear to be reasonable.

  He wasn’t. There was nothing at all reasonable about his anger.

  She eased a breath, swallowing carefully before she opened her mouth again. “The heat and the stench in the ballroom—”

  He released her chin, and then, without releasing her eyes, he hurled the hairbrush at the mirror. Not heavy enough to shatter the glass, it fell onto the dressing table, overturning several of the pots and bottles arrayed there.

  One of them was a perfume, the same scent she had worn to the palace tonight. As the smell permeated the heavy air, he paced away from her, his angry stride carrying him halfway across the room before he turned.

  “Was your English friend there tonight?”

  Her heart leapt into her throat, beating strongly enough that she prayed he wouldn’t see it pulse beneath the thin silk of her robe de chambre.

  “Was he one of those bastards with Wellington?” he demanded.

  He doesn’t know, she realized in relief. If he had seen the English soldier whose face he’d ruined, the tenor of this questioning would have been very different.

  If Julián had known with certainty that man had been in attendance at the ball, he would not have waited until they’d reached the house. He would have dragged her from the carriage as soon as they had left the lights of the palace behind. This confrontation would have taken place in the street and not in the privacy of her bedroom.

  “My…friend?” she repeated as if puzzled by the reference.

  “The gallant Englishman you met by the river.”

  “You think…you think that a common soldier would be invited to the king’s reception?”

  She was pleased with the tone of her disclaimer. Disbelieving. Holding almost a note of ridicule.

  “Hardly a common soldier,” he said, closing the distance he had opened between them.

  At his approach, her heart began to pound again. She knew it would be disastrous to let her fear gain control. Julián delighted in making people afraid. Then he delighted in using that fear to destroy them.

  That was something she had sworn on her father’s grave she would never let him do to her. With the thought of her father, it seemed that she could smell the acrid richness of the cigarillo the Englishman had been smoking in the garden.

  The taste of it was suddenly on her tongue and her lips, along with the memory of his kiss. No one had ever kissed her like that before. No one had ever kissed her at all except Julián. And his kisses were nothing like the Englishman’s.

  “What is it?” Julián asked, his voice sharpening with suspicion.

  He crossed the few feet that separated them and caught her chin in his fingers again, gripping hard enough that she flinched from the pain.

  “What were you thinking?” he demanded.

  She had let down her guard, something she could never afford to do. No mental excursions into more pleasant circumstances. Especially when he was like this.

  “The scent is bringing back my headache,” she lied.

  “I saw something in your eyes,” he said.

  She shook her head, brow furrowed as if in confusion.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There was something in your face when I mentioned the Englishman.”

  Deliberately she widened her eyes, shaking her head again. “You’re imagining things,” she said.

  “It should be easy enough to ascertain if you’re lying.”

  His voice was no longer threatening. It was almost caressing, instead. And she knew from bitter experience that this was when he was most dangerous.

  It would be easy for him to procure a list of the officers who had accompanied Wellington to Madrid. Those would be only names, however, and unless he saw the Englishman’s face—

  “Tonight’s isn’t the only entertainment planned for the English envoy,” he went on, destroying that comforting hope. ‘ “There will be half a dozen activities at which Wellington and his staff will be expected to make an appearance. It’s so fortunate I was wise enough to arrange it so that I should instantly know that particular officer again.”

  Hearing his mockery, she hated him with a renewed swell of emotion, an indulgence she had not allowed herself in a long time. The memory of the thick, reddened scar with which he had marred the visage of the man who had tried to help her was too clear. As was the pain that had been in the Englishman’s eyes as he had watched her examine it.

  “If I find you have lied to me about his presence in the envoy’s party,” Julián warned, “you know what will happen.”

  Despite the threat, she said nothing. She had learned that with Julián the truth often served her no better than a lie. His punishments were as capricious as his rages.

  If she confessed what had happened in the garden tonight, the punishment he threatened might still be car
ried out in retaliation for the clandestine meeting. Just as swiftly as it would be when he discovered she was lying. And it was always possible that he would never discover that.

  Anything is possible, she thought, clinging to the thinnest thread of hope. Maybe the Englishman would take to heart what she had told him. Maybe he would heed her warning and avoid the entertainments Julián had mentioned. Maybe—

  “The truth,” Julián demanded again.

  Without a heartbeat of hesitation, her choice made for her by her previous experiences with his sense of fair play, she lied to him once more, “I have told you the truth.”

  His lips lifted into one of his rare smiles.

  “Have you, my dear?” he asked softly. His thumb released her chin to trace across her mouth. “I wonder.” His smile widened, his thumb moving along a line that matched the one he had carved in the English soldier’s cheek.

  “Shall I send for your maid?”

  Her heart stopped, but she controlled her face, fighting that fear. “There is no reason for that,” she said. “Please, Julián, I swear on my father’s grave that I have told you the truth.”

  Perhaps she would go to hell for that, but it was better than sending someone else.

  His eyes held hers a long moment. “Almost I wish…”

  She didn’t ask, because she knew what he wished for—some excuse to vent his rage at her. Now he would have to try to suppress it at least until he had proved her a liar. And when he had—

  He bent, putting one hand on the top of the littered vanity and slipping the other beneath the fall of her hair. With that one, he gripped her neck strongly enough that even had she dared, she would not have been able to turn her head. His mouth fastened over hers, his tongue demanding entrance.

  She didn’t respond. She never did, because it made no difference to him. He preferred her impassivity. Or even, as she had learned very early in their relationship, her resistance. That was a mistake she had never made again.

  As her guardian kissed her, the movement of his mouth hard, almost brutal, tears burned at the back of her eyes. Unwillingly she remembered the touch of another man’s lips. Another man’s kiss. Another man.