Closer To Sin (40 page)

But what the hell had induced Liliane to coming looking for him at that time of night? Not that he would have been averse to resuming their earlier activities. But he wanted more of her; he wanted all of her.

He ran a hand back through his hair, sweeping it from his eyes. ‘Liliane,’ he said cautiously, standing and rounding his desk to cross the room to her. ‘I was about to go in search of you. I think we need to discuss last night.’

She held up her hand to stop his advance. ‘No, Sin, I think all that needs to be said has already been said. What you do, and with whom you choose to do it, is entirely your concern and no business of mine. And quite frankly, the less said, the better.’

‘Where did you sleep last night?’

‘Excuse me? Are you accusing me of—?’

Blast it
. He was getting this wrong! She had every right to be angry at him, but surely he also had the right to explain. To make her see that what was hurting her was hurting him just as much.

‘Damn it, Liliane. I came looking for you, to explain, but you weren’t in your room. Where did you go?’ Images of her running into the arms of Albert Dudley coursed across his mind.

‘Not that it’s of any concern of yours, but I slept in Yvette’s room. She received some upsetting news and I chose to keep her company. I came here this morning on another matter, two other matters actually.’

Sinclair watched as she perched herself upon the edge of the chaise lounge, ramrod straight. Any other woman would have subjected him to a storm of tears and accusations. Instead, she had drawn an impenetrable veil of dignity about herself, effectively cloaking any emotion she may be feeling. If only her silence didn’t cut deeper than her words would ever have done.

But there was more troubling her than Francesca’s maleficence. Whatever she had to say, she was fearful of his reaction. He couldn’t imagine what she could possibly have done now that would incur his ire. For all of the rash decisions she had made prior to the commencement of the Season, he had not seen her put a foot wrong since.

Reluctantly he came to sit before her. ‘What is it you need to speak with me about?’ He watched her eyes flicker to the envelope seated upon her lap before she picked it up and passed it to him. If anything, her back straightened further.

‘I think you need to read this. It’s the letter you gave to Yvette yesterday. The letter from Solange.’

He accepted the letter and unfolded it, reading it hurriedly, and then again, to be sure he hadn’t misunderstood the first time. With each reading, his anger and frustration grew. With it came a sense of apprehension; there was something they were overlooking, all of them. More so, it was something obvious and therefore more potent.

He looked up to see Liliane studying him intently. ‘I swear, Sin, I had no idea Yvette had written to Solange. But, surely this reaffirms my supposition, that the Cousin’s Legacy concerns the Lyon and Allard families, for who else would be following Solange, if not Henri Lyon?’

Who else indeed? ‘This letter certainly gives merit to that theory. I’ll send a rider to Sir Avery tonight.’ And also a messenger to Gaston, but she didn’t need to know that. Seeing she was not going to contribute any more, he sighed inwardly. ‘You said there were two matters troubling you?’

‘Quite so.’ She fidgeted briefly with the gold chain about her neck before unfastening it and sliding something from it.

An icy premonition ran through him. He wanted to leave the room, delay the words he knew were coming. He almost flinched as she cleared her throat.

‘I need to return this to you.’ She held out her hand and opened it to reveal the ring he had placed upon her finger not four months ago. ‘It’s not mine to keep.’

Sinclair watched Liliane intently, saw the flush spread across her features as she held her hand towards him. He stood and moved around the coffee table to sit on the chaise beside her, crowding her into the corner. Casually laying one arm behind her, he took her outstretched hand and enfolded it back onto her lap. She turned to look at him, her sapphire eyes wide and glistening with unshed tears.

‘You will need it, for when you remarry,’ she stammered.

He gripped her chin, turning her to face him. ‘I have absolutely no interest in remarrying.’

He held eye contact with her, watched her lips quiver as he shifted the hand behind her head so that he could gently caress the back of her neck, drawing small circles across her shoulders with his thumb. He lent in to kiss her but she turned her head from him.

‘Don’t, please.’

The angst in her voice gave him pause and he sat back to give her the space she so obviously needed. ‘I want you to keep the ring, Liliane, I have no further use for it.’

He fought to hide his own anguish as she took the ring and pressed it into his hand.

‘Sin, why didn’t you tell me you had been married, that you had a wife?’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘That whole story you told me about your grandmother giving you her ring, wearing it close to your heart so that one day it would bring you love. I can’t understand how, having lost your wife, you could be so disrespectful of its symbolism. How you could so casually place it on the hand of a complete stranger. Did that love mean so little to you?’

Sinclair buried his head in his hands.
Cornelius.
A delightful chap, but sometimes a little too liberal with the family history.
Damnation.
How was he to explain this? No wonder she didn’t want to discuss Francesca with him. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I didn’t ever disrespect the symbolism of this ring. And I didn’t entrust it to a complete stranger. When I married Carolyn, it didn’t even occur to me to give her this ring. I was only two and twenty and, at that time, I wore this ring to keep me connected to my grandmother, not to bestow it upon my bride—especially not a bride who was chosen for me.’

He closed his eyes and images of the Braxton estate came flooding back. The chapel where generations of Braxtons had been married beforehand, the alter bedecked in an array of spring flowers, the village turned out to see the darling of the family wed to the heir to the Esselton marquisate. And Carolyn, with her ice blond perfection. Ice, he soon learned, that flowed through her veins and encased her heart. As she had walked down the aisle, her eyes had been cold and distant, refusing to look at him. In the marriage bed, that night and every night thereafter, she had been unemotional and frigid, disdainful towards the man to whom she was forever wed, until he had stopped visiting her, unable to subject himself to the nightly torture.

‘My marriage to Carolyn was not a love match, Liliane, and that was made known to the whole world when she chose to forsake me in favour of my groom. My wife resented me and she saw her actions as a means to equal the score.’

Sinclair leaned towards Liliane, placing a hand upon each of her shoulders, desperate for her to understand—to understand what perhaps he didn’t really understand himself yet. ‘I gave you this ring because I wanted you to have something that was precious to me. When I slid that ring onto your finger, I knew you better after just three short days than I had ever known Carolyn in three years of marriage. At the time, I thought that fact beheld some significance.’

He saw the tears slide down her cheeks as he slid the ring back onto her finger. ‘We can’t erase what has gone between us, but I would like to think, buried somewhere among the deceptions, there was some honesty, Liliane. Please, keep the ring, my grandmother’s ring.’

Wordlessly she stood and removed the ring from her finger and put it on the coffee table before them. Tears flowed unchecked from her eyes. He wanted to grab her and pull her back onto the chaise, into his arms, but she walked silently to the door, wiping the moisture from her cheeks. At the last moment she turned to him.

‘I shall be leaving in the morning, returning to Martinbury House and then probably to Manning Grange.’

She quietly pulled the door shut behind her. The dull click of the lock was the only sound to fill the room. Sinclair scrubbed his face with his hands. The woman who had just walked away from him bore little resemblance to the courageous and sensuous Valkyrie he had first fallen in love with. She had ensnared his heart when she’d unwaveringly faced danger at his side, as his equal.

This Liliane was that Valkyrie and more. More complex, more compelling. Her courage and sensuality was balanced with poise and elegance and, above all, honour and dignity. The woman who had just walked away from him hadn’t just ensnared his heart; she had taken it with her.

He walked to the window and looked out over the park.
Love
. That word he had avoided naming, the only word that adequately defined the protectiveness he had felt towards her in France, the longing he had felt in those days since and the despair he now felt for the loss of all that had gone before. She completed him, nurtured his soul with her wit and intellect, and nurtured his body with her passion. But she wanted the freedom to choose her own destiny, and if that was what her happiness depended upon, he would ensure she had it. On his grandmother’s ring, he swore it.

***

Liliane leaned her back against the door to Sin’s study and dropped her chin to her chest. Her hand still gripped the handle, oblivious to the pain as it bit into her flesh. It was the only thing holding her upright, its cool wood a counterpoint to her heated emotions. Sin’s words echoed through her head, but she couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t sort them from what she thought she knew about him.

The need to run and hide propelled her. She had to get away from the house, from prying eyes that would be sure to remark upon her agitation, away from Lady Dennison and her serpent cunning, just away. The park beckoned, and Liliane picked up her skirts and ran.

Unseeing, she ran past the neatly manicured gardens, past the elm tree where only last night Sin had taken her from her body and shown her the true meaning of bliss. She ran until she reached the edge of the woods and kept going. Sticks and low lying branches tore at her skirts, scratching her legs. She kept going until she broke through a line of trees and found herself standing on the sloping grassed edge of a lake. It wasn’t the manicured pond closer to the house that gave access to leisurely boating and swimming excursions. This lake was isolated, secluded among the trees, untamed and elemental.

She stumbled to a stop at its edge, breathing heavily, choking on the great sobs that racked her body and gave into the emotions that she had, for days, no—for weeks, tried so desperately to suppress. Without a care for the state of her dress, for her tear-stained face, for her tangled hair, she sank to the ground. Curled up in a ball, the heat of the sun was a salve upon her cold skin, the warmth of the earth soaked into her, a balm to the ache that had gripped her since last night.

Slowly the shivering eased and the sobs receded to be replaced by forlorn emptiness. She had to go home, home to Manning Grange, somewhere where she could lick her wounds and not have to face the scrutiny of others. She sat up and wrapped her arms about her knees. The peacefulness about her was a sedative for her wounded soul—she didn’t want to think, didn’t want to feel. She watched the dragonflies skip busily across the water, envying them their freedom.

And that was the greatest irony of her life. She had gone in search of freedom and had instead been so thoroughly bound in chains that there was little possibility of escape.

A flicker on the far side of the lake caught Liliane’s eye. A movement; probably just a deer, especially as Sin had sentries posted throughout the park. Since the incident in Kensington Gardens she’d been jumping at every shadow and leaf that fluttered across her path and her overactive imagination was starting to drive her to distraction. Gracious, even Marianne had commented that Liliane was as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof. Obviously it was about time she pulled herself back together and started making plans for the future instead of seeing phantoms where there were none.

Picking up a flat pebble, Liliane tossed it onto the lake in a futile effort to skip it across the surface. Typically, it sunk straight to the bottom just as a second movement caught her eye. Studying the spot more intently, she realised it was person moving carefully through the trees. As she watched, a woman came to a stop in a clearing. Sun flickered through the branches, casting a shadow across her features, obscuring her identity from Liliane.

Liliane’s mouth dried and a trickle of unease snaked through her to curl tightly in her chest. With her heart beating loudly against her ears she quietly moved back into the woods behind her. As she stood beneath the foliage she realised that a preternatural stillness hung over the forest. The birds had stopped singing and even the symphony of crickets seemed to have silenced. Liliane’s skin prickled. She was a long way from the house and no one was likely to be missing her.

A rustling noise caused her to suck in a deep breath and spin around. Liliane pressed her back to the tree and looked about. She was just being ridiculous. Squaring her shoulders, she clenched her hands into fists until her nails dug deeply in to the palms of her hands, and stepped away from the tree.

She screamed. The sound, a high pitched screech, was torn from her throat as a grouse flew out from the bushes at her feet. She jumped, her heart pounding an erratic rhythm through her chest, and threw herself back against the vast trunk. Clutching a hand to her mouth, she hauled in a calming breath. She must be losing her mind, between a hapless little bird and a guest taking an afternoon stroll, she’d be jumping at butterflies next. The need for solitude had definitely passed; she really needed to return to the house.

With a self-depreciating little laugh, Liliane stepped away from the tree and stopped short. She opened her mouth but all sound lodged like a ball of cotton in her throat as the breath rushed from her lungs.

De Bois, a sneer masking his otherwise handsome face, stood before her. Her eyes dropped to his hand and her throat constricted tighter still. A pistol, it’s hammer cocked, was aimed unwavering at her belly. Liliane absorbed the hard calculating look in De Bois’s eyes and was overwhelmed by a surge of realisation.