Between the Devil and Ian Eversea (20 page)

Love.

He didn’t say,
There’s that word again.

He supposed it explained a good deal about Miss Titania Danforth and her quest for attention.

He’d always suspected Colin was his mother’s favorite. And that Genevieve and Olivia were his father’s. He didn’t suppose he’d cared. There was always enough affection—and affectionate contempt—to go around in their household that it didn’t matter to him. For selfish reasons, he would have happily gone to the gallows in Colin’s place. To spare himself from having to watch Colin die, and to spare his mother from having to witness Colin’s death.

Every day Colin had spent in Newgate had been a torment, though Ian had made sure Colin never knew this. He’d kept up the gallant nonchalance.

The fact that Colin had
escaped
the gallows was very like Colin.

“Your parents loved you, Tansy.” Surely this much was true. He felt as though he could make it true with the force of his words. “Perhaps they simply worried more about you than your brother.”

“Of course they loved me,” she said absently. “I know they did, don’t worry. Enough to threaten me—in their will, no less—with the loss of everything I’ve ever known or loved, unless I marry an amazing title and I’m taken care of for the rest of my life. And they didn’t quite trust me to get it right on my own. Thought I might do something rash.”

“I suppose they must have known you pretty well, then.”

A smile started up at one end of her mouth and spread to the other, crooked, wicked. Then she laughed. Pleased with herself. Her laugh was wonderful. It was mischief made musical.

And then she sighed contentedly. “It’s nice to be known,” she said wistfully.

“You lost them in a carriage accident?”

She nodded.

“What were they like?”

He wouldn’t know where to begin answering a question like that if anyone had asked it of him. And what she said would reveal as much about her as it did about her parents, he was sure.

She was quiet a moment, apparently giving it some thought. “Mother was always laughing. She loved to sing. She loved wildflowers. Columbine—I don’t know if they grow here. They look like little paper lanterns? And aster, the purple ones. Like purple stars. Chicory, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace. The blue ones reminded her of my father’s eyes. When I have a home, a permanent home of my own, I want to plant all of them in my garden to make it feel like home again. I promised Mama I’d bring a little of them home to England should I ever visit. She used to talk to them to make them grow.” She was smiling now. “She thought of them as her children, in a way.”

Suspicion dawned.

“Did your father smoke, by any chance?” He asked it almost disinterestedly. “Cigars, cigarettes?”

“He did! And my father . . . his laugh was the best sound you ever heard. My mother could make him laugh, but I was the best at it. His coat smelled of his tobacco . . . he rolled his own cigarettes with a particularly pungent brand he’d somehow gotten a taste for. My mother hated it.” Tansy smiled faintly. “And at night he’d sneak just a bit of whisky. She hated that, too. Or pretended to. He rather liked being scolded, I think. It makes you feel cared for, doesn’t it, sometimes?”

“I suppose it does,” he said softly. As in his head the tumblers of a sort of lock clicked into place.

What it must have been like for her.

She
was
lonely. And, given the circumstances, resilient as hell.

He reflexively squeezed her hand a little tighter, unconsciously sending some of his strength into her.

She squeezed it back.

“I dealt with the solicitor to take care of a few stray ends of business,” she said, “and I helped close up the house and pension off the servants, all but a few. A few to care for the house, a staff to care for the stables. I’d trust all of them with my life. But after that . . . do you know what it’s been like, Ian? It’s a bit like going to the theater. And the play we’ve come to see is my life. A wonderful play. But then it ends before you expect it to, and you’re forbidden to leave, you’re locked in the theater, and you’re left to stare at an empty stage. And for all you know, you’ll just sit there forever. Terrible word, forever.”

“They ought to ban it from dictionaries,” he concurred.

She smiled at that.

“And for quite some time it has felt like . . .” She turned to him earnestly, and he was treated to how her silvery eyes looked by lamplight, warm and hazy. “. . . It’s hard to describe . . . I’ve been to school and learned everything there is to learn, and nothing has the power to surprise me anymore. Or to scare me.”

He was stunned to realize that she was essentially describing what it was like to come home from the war.

He remembered returning . . . it was as if he’d used up every emotion he ever had, because he’d felt nearly everything there was to feel at such a pitch for so long that ordinary life felt rather flat and muted and painfully slow. He’d been willing to do nearly anything to
feel
something. And to forget.

Fortunately, Ian thought, God created French actresses and young women with flexible morals. That rather took care of the forgetting. Climbing up trees and through windows and being ushered out of those windows at pistol point took care of the excitement part of it.

“It’s a bit like that when you come home from war, too,” he said slowly. He’d never said such a thing aloud to anyone. “Your senses are so accustomed to being constantly engaged and abused . . . that real life seems, for a time, inadequate and unreal and very dull. Almost stifling.”

She was watching him in a way that made his heart turn over strangely. Soft and sympathetic and ever-so-slightly shrewdly.

“Is that why you have a host of mistresses?”

She was teasing.

He laughed drowsily. “
Never
a host. They’re
far
too much trouble to deal with them in quantity.”

She laughed softly, and suddenly he was suffused with an admiration that was almost painful. That she should
see
so clearly. That she could laugh and not judge. That her heart was accepting. That she’d confronted the utter destruction of her life with relative grace and looked forward with hope, not bitterness, not regret.

And there was a moment when he couldn’t breathe, because he suddenly wanted to be worthy of her, and he quite simply didn’t know how that was possible.

He’d been . . . such an ass.

“There will be a new play, Tansy.” How ridiculously inadequate it sounded.

“When I marry and have my own home and family.” It almost sounded like a question.

“Yes. Then.” He made it sound like a promise. As if it were up to him, he’d make it happen.

And if it were up to him it would.

He was suddenly violently, irrationally yanked between two poles: The wish that she should have everything she ever wanted. To be safe and loved best of all by someone.

And the wish that she wouldn’t, so this particular moment could be suspended in time. So this particular play, whatever this was, would never end.

They were silent for a time. And then she glanced down at his bare torso—his “beautiful” torso—and with a single finger, tentatively traced that scar. Delicately. Following it down, down, down, to nearly where it disappeared beneath the sheets.

He ought to stop her.

His muscles tightened with the pleasure of her touch, and with imagining what he could do to her, where he would touch her, how he would take her, how he would begin. His cock stirred. She
must
know what she was doing to him. She was still a devil, still a taker of risks, for all of that.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she said softly. Her finger was so very near the border of the sheet, and in a moment his arousal would elevate that sheet. How he wanted to turn to her. Peel off her night rail. He could see the shadows of her nipples pushed against it, and he imagined drawing one into his mouth, imagined the little helpless sound of pleasure she would make when he sucked.

His cock stirred a little more.

“Tansy,” he whispered. He slipped his fingers through her hair and drew it out, luxuriating in the silk of it, in the colors, every shade of gold there was, as her gentle fingers traced his scar. “Tansy.”

“Yes?”

“You need to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Out the door, and not out the window.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m certain.”

“They’re both dangerous routes.”

She didn’t need to tell
him
that. “Staying is far more dangerous than either of those. I meant what I said the other night. If you don’t leave, Tansy, I
will
make love to you. It will be all, or it will be nothing. And I cannot warn you again.”

The hush that fell was velvety and taut. Her wandering finger froze.

She studied him, gauging his mood, and whether to test him, and whether it was what she wanted. She had only an inkling of the pleasure that could be had. If only she knew what a razor thin line of control he walked. Knowing her, she would have risked pushing him over the edge. Because she’d just endured her own personal war, and risk and sensation were helping her to forget.

He would give nearly anything to kiss her right now.

And if he kissed her, he wouldn’t stop until he’d taken everything he could.

Stay
. It took every fiber of his control not to say it. It took every fiber of his control not to tear that night rail right from her body and lose himself in her.

“Because men are brutes?” She said this almost lightly. On a whisper.

He looked down at her. At the soft point of her chin, at her clear eyes, the generous mouth.

No, he realized. Because I want to make love to you. To
you
. Not just for surcease. Or to chase pleasure to its ultimate peak. Because I want to give
you
pleasure, to hear
you
cry out, to be inside
you
, to talk to
you
when we’re quiet and spent.

On the heels of that came an even more alarming realization.

He suspected he wouldn’t mind settling for simply holding her hand all night.

That was an . . . interesting . . . notion.

A very, very
unwelcome
notion.

“Yes,” he agreed softly. “Because men are brutes.”

She sighed and stretched. “Very well.”

She slipped her hand out from his.

She shoved her hair out of her face, slid off the bed and treaded delicately as a fawn across his soft carpet, apparently enjoying the feel on her bare feet, which made him smile.

“But you can leave the night rail,” he called softly after her.

She laughed softly.

She winked and blew him a kiss.

He watched her open the door, peek out, and disappear.

He’d never hated the sound of a door closing more.

He groaned and dragged the pillow over his face. It was cool. Perhaps it would lower the temperature of his feverish thoughts.

Unconsciously, he closed his fingers, as if he could capture and hold the sensation of her touch in his palm.

And that’s how he fell asleep.

Chapter 20

“Y
OU’RE ALL LOOKING UNUSUALLY
dazzling this morning, ladies.”

His sister and Tansy and Olivia were dressed in what he recognized as their finest. Colors that set off their eyes and hair and presented bosoms and arms and the like in their best possible light. He was the brother of two sisters, and he’d known myriad women; he knew
far
more than he wanted to about such things and had been tortured by questions about fashion more than once.

“Why, thank you. You’re looking remarkably alert this morning, Ian.”

“You flatter me, surely,” he said dryly.

“Why are you still in Sussex?” Genevieve was shrewdly suspicious.

“I’ve business,” he said smoothly. “And I promised Adam I’d help keep the motley crew of workers organized while we finished the repairs to the vicarage. Where are you off to? Because I gather from your finery that you are off to someplace other than town.”

“We’ve been invited to tea. Lord Stanhope is a guest of Lord Henry’s family.”

Stanhope.

The Duke de Neauville’s heir.

The one said to be looking for a wife.

Clearly, Ian’s message had been successfully conveyed and enthusiastically received.

Which ought to have made him rejoice.

And yet somehow his mind blanked, as if he’d heard news of a murder.

He realized he’d gone still, fork hovering in the air in the vicinity of his mouth. He’d forgotten whether he intended to put it in his mouth or set it down. He decided to set it down.

“Ah, the Duke de Neauville’s heir. I’d forgotten there were other dukes besides yours.”

“Ha,” Genevieve said.

Tansy hadn’t yet looked at him. She was stirring the marmalade pot as if it were one of the witches in Macbeth. Slowly, and with great focus.

“What are you hoping to find in there, Miss Danforth? I haven’t heard whether you can read marmalade the way you can read tea leaves.”

She stopped, looked up. There was a peculiar clutch in the vicinity of his heart when her eyes met his.

She blushed.

Slowly, beautifully.

It didn’t irritate him in the least.

Which worried him a good deal.

T
HEY DEPARTED, AND
Ian paced to and fro, feverishly, for a time.

And then he found himself heading toward the stable. He saddled up and rode out through the woods along the little tributary of the Ouse, back the way they’d come the other day. He followed the stream she’d knelt next to, slowing his horse to a walk.

He scanned for hoofprints and footprints and brush and shrubbery that might have been pushed aside or crushed. He didn’t know quite what he was looking for. Anything unusual. His father had taken all of his sons out hunting at an early age, and tracking was second nature to him.

A glint caught his eye. He pulled his horse to a halt.

Something lavender and shiny.

He swung down from his horse, looped the reins into a hawthorn, trod toward the glint and stopped.

Thoughtfully, he plucked up a bonnet; trailing from it were lavender satin ribbons. He held it gingerly. He shouldn’t doubt her.

Why did it matter so very much?

He strode forward, ten, twenty feet, and came to a little clearing he hadn’t ridden through since he was a boy. A nondescript place, but it had inevitably changed over the years; one of the old oaks had been split by lightning and now lay on its side, and the others had grown into behemoths around their fallen comrade.

He rotated slowly, scanning the place, for . . . what, he wasn’t certain. Flattened grass, from lovers rolling about? A man’s footprint, a woman’s footprint?

But the clearing was mostly dirt; no moss grew. It wasn’t the sort of place one could comfortably tryst. Then again, he’d managed to tryst up against trees. Where there was a will to tryst, there was always a way.

Perhaps she came here the way Polly did. To contemplate nature’s wonders in solitude. It didn’t really sound like something she would do; then again, he’d had the blinkers ripped from his eyes recently.

Suddenly he stopped. And peered.

What appeared to be two little stakes were poking up out of the ground.

Next to two little mounds.

As though something
had
been buried.

Good God.

Even though he’d jested about it, now he was ever-so-slightly worried. He was beside the mounds in two steps.

He crouched and peered.

The earth was dark and disturbed, but in an orderly way. Not as though an animal had dug for something or churned it with hooves.

As though something had been planted.

A scrap of what appeared to be foolscap was affixed to the first stake.

In exquisite, copperplate handwriting was written the word:
columbine.

And on the other:
asters.

He sat back on his heels.

She’d likely planted them as a tribute to her mother.

“Damn.”

The word was really more of an exhale.

He closed his eyes as a wave of something roared through him, like a dam broken.

It felt like a torrent of sunlight, and it hurt, and it felt glorious.

He knew then that the punching sensation he’d felt in the vicinity of his heart last night was really the locked gates of it being kicked open.

T
HE FIRST SURPRISE
about the heir to the Duke of Neauville was that he wasn’t
very
handsome.

Oh, he was handsome enough. He was appealing in an even-featured-possessed-all-his-limbs-and-teeth way. He was tall and long-limbed. His hair was a sandy color and his gray eyes twinkled and his complexion was free of spots. His manners were as exquisite and polished as the silver—ancient silver, passed down through generations and worth an untold fortune, no doubt—upon which they were served luncheon. Everything in the room gleamed: crystal, porcelain, utensils, upholstery, his admirably complete set of teeth.

He possessed the sort of subtle remote self-consciousness of those who knew they were very important and who were accustomed to stares.

Until he really took a good look at Tansy.

Gratifyingly, he gawked like any green lad.

Which made her cast her lashes down. Then up again.

It was a reflex, really.

“A p-pleasure indeed to meet you, Miss Danforth.”

Ah, a bit of a stammer. She loved it when she made men stammer.

He was charming, really. Or really, it was what she should have been thinking.

Somewhere along the line she’d begun to interpret charm a little differently.

As challenge. Impenetrable confidence.

Occasional charmlessness, even.

He bowed low, very low, over her hand, and held it like a Frenchman, and slowly righted himself again.

“Everything I’ve heard about you is true.”

Ah! So she was a legend already.

One day she might even be as talked about as Ian Eversea.

“
W
HAT THE DEVIL
are
you
doing here?”

Ian whirled. Colin was standing in the doorway of the family’s library with his mouth agape.

Ian surreptitiously tucked the book he’d pulled from the shelf and tucked it under his arm.

“Is it really such a shock?”

“The last time I can remember you coming in here voluntarily was when Father acquired a book featuring medical illustrations, and you thought there might be a naked woman or two inside.”

“There
was
,” Ian pointed out. “I was right. My suspicions were rewarded. Even though her internal organs were sketched inside her. And I never forgot how inspiring the experience was.”

Now go away
, he silently bid Colin.

No such luck.

“What are you holding, Ian?”

“Nothing.”

“It appears to be a book.”

“If you knew what it was, why did you ask?”

“Is it an anatomy book?”

Ian snorted.

Colin flung himself down in a chair and peered out the window. “I’m glad Genevieve will be living close. They’ve about settled on purchasing the estate. I’m certain you’re glad your nemesis will be close, too.”

“He’s not my nemesis,” Ian said. Rather to his own surprise.

“Inconvenient reminder that you possess a conscience, then.”

“Perhaps,” he said curtly.

He didn’t want to continue looking through his book until Colin left. And he very much wanted to continue looking at the book. He’d visited a section of the library shelves he’d never before seen, and it had taken him quite some time to find it.

Oh, but he had, and treasures lay within. At least they were treasures to him.

Colin showed no signs of leaving. He swung a booted leg, gave the empty brandy decanter a disconsolate shake.

“Well, then.”

“Colin, may I ask you a question?”

“Why on earth are you asking permission to ask a question?”

Ian steeled himself.

“Why do you love Madeleine?” He asked it casually.

But Colin’s mouth dropped open.

Even when Colin was in Newgate, pale and shackled, they’d never discussed life or death or love or loss. Ian had brought the best of the broadsheets to him. In one issue, Colin had been depicted wearing a pair of horns. He’d had it framed for Colin. Because that’s what brothers were for. Every other memory was too precious to be aired in that prison cell.

So obviously Colin was surprised. “I see. I assume there’s a context for this question?”

“Consider it . . . research.”

Ian could see that Colin was skeptical. He could feel his brother’s eyes on his back speculatively. A strange little silence passed, and Ian went still, his heart beating with a deeper thud.

“Well . . . she’s the strongest person I’ve ever known.” Colin sounded as though he was thinking about it for the first time. “She’s fascinating and fearless, but she’s fragile, for all of that. She sees right through me and loves me anyway and has from the first, though I’m not certain she’ll ever admit to that. Because she’s not as strong as she thinks she is, but she’d needed to be strong for so long that it made me want to be strong for her, a better person for her. She’s so beautiful to me it hurts, sometimes, to look at her. And no one has ever before needed me, and she does. She really does.”

And no one has ever before needed me, and she does. She really does.

It was quite a speech.

Ian stood motionless, moved and, truth be told, astonished, beyond words.

In the ensuing awkward silence, he realized there was a world of knowledge and experience his younger brother possessed that he did not. Just as Colin would never know what it was like to nearly die on a battlefield, as he had. Colin had survived unscathed. Then again, nearly going to the gallows had likely shaved years off his life.

“
And
she’s as interested in the raising of cows and sheep as I am lately,” Colin added.

“I guess someone needed to be. Are you sure she isn’t pretending just to make you happy?”

Colin snorted. “Miss
Danforth
is interested in cows.”

“If she said that, Miss Danforth was lying.”

“I know, but at least she made an effort to do it, which is flattering.”

There was another little silence.

“Did you come to the library today for a reason, Colin?”

Go away now, Colin.

“
I was looking for you. I’d like to buy a mare for Madeleine as a surprise for her birthday and I’d hoped to persuade you to come with me.”

“Here’s my advice: if you’re not buying the horse from the Gypsies, then your judgment is probably sound.”

Colin gave a short laugh.

And still he didn’t leave.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re wondering these things, Ian?”

Bloody hell. His younger brother rivaled their cousin Adam for the ability to peer into his soul.

Ian was torn between wanting to talk and not knowing precisely how to articulate what there seemed to be no words for, primarily because it was new. A big amorphous knot of emotions and impressions, one of which was panic, another of which was glory, and there were dozens of subtler ones in between. He wouldn’t even know where to begin unraveling it.

He tried.

“Colin . . . do you believe in destiny?”

“Certainly.” Though Ian suspected this was a lazy answer to avoid a philosophical discussion.

“I think my destiny might be to be murdered by the Duke of Falconbridge.”

Colin lifted a dismissive hand. “He can’t murder you. He’s family. Family doesn’t do that sort of thing. At least knowingly,” he added after a moment, somewhat cryptically.

“Tell that to Othello.”

“A Shakespearean reference, Ian? Did you . . . actually
listen
at school?” He sounded aghast.

“Perhaps I had a knack for remembering only the things that prove enlightening later.”

“Why do you think the duke will . . .”

He stopped, frowned faintly, as a suspicion began to form.

“Noooooo . . .”

“No?”

“No. No no no no no. Tell me you didn’t . . . not Miss Danforth! Tell me you weren’t that mad!” Colin leaped up and reached for Ian’s lapels and gripped them. “Tell me you’re not that suicidal! What is the
matter
with you, when there are so . . . many . . . women in the world?”