Guilty Series (41 page)

“What I like doesn't matter. You are the soloist. You are in charge. Now play.”

He began, and so did she. He made it easy for her, not deviating from the music as he had originally published it, giving her the freedom to do whatever she wanted with the violin. She played with every bit of concentration she had, sure that without the sheet music, she would forget and skip a section or two along the way. Within each cadenza, she used his notes, and added variations of other soloists. If she were a virtuoso, she would have invented her own on the spot, but she couldn't, not like this, not with him listening. She made do.

At the end, all she could do was sigh with relief that she was done, and wait for him to say something. He had promised he wouldn't make fun of her or shred her, so whatever he said would be nice and innocuous and terribly insincere.

“Grace, what was all that reluctance? You play beautifully. Though a bit more confidence in yourself would not go amiss.”

“Thank you,” she said, shifting her weight uncomfortably, “but you perceived how I borrowed each cadenza.”

“But you improvised within it.”

“To make it easier!”

Dylan shook his head, not believing her. “Play your cadenza of the first movement again.”

She complied, but in the midst of it, he stopped her. “Right there!” he said. “That is an example. You were improvising on Paganini's version. You did that little trill in the middle, and trills usually only go at the end. What you did was beautiful and just right. I love it there.”

She drew a deep breath. “You don't have to lie to me.”

“I'm not. You had a dozen of those little innovations, and each one is unique and right.”

Dylan rose from the piano bench and turned to her. She glanced sideways, not daring to look at him and see a lie in his eyes. “I think if you trusted yourself more,” he said, “you could invent your own cadenzas, and you wouldn't even need my notes to do it.”

“You are not just saying that?”

“Not even to get you into bed.”

She almost laughed, then something in his eyes stopped her. Neither of them spoke, and she felt a growing tension between them, thick and heavy. She could not seem to move. The clock on the mantel began to chime, but when the chimes had died away, she could not have said what the time was. She could not look away from those black, black eyes.

“It is getting late.”

His voice broke the strange spell. She swallowed and looked at the clock. Midnight. “Yes,” she answered, feeling awkward all of a sudden. “I should go up.”

He bowed to her. “Good night, Grace.”

“Good night.”

He walked with her to the closed doors and opened one door for her. She started to step past him and go through the doorway, but then she stopped and turned toward him. “I think you were wrong about yourself,” she said. “I think you could be a true friend to anyone, even a woman.”

He took her hand, kissed the gloved back of it, and slanted her a grin that was anything but good and true. “Are you saying you trust me?”

She smiled back at him. “Not for a moment.”

With that, she left him. As she went upstairs to her room, she realized she might be in worse trouble now than she had been before. She had invented the idea of being friends as a compromise with him. She had to stay a year, and the only sane thing was to keep distance between them, but she wasn't feeling sane.

She was feeling as if she were headed for the edge of the earth—where the dragons were, where she could believe love and a love affair were the same thing, where she could play with dragon fire and not come away scorched.

Grace closed her bedroom door behind her and leaned back against it. She had been right about one thing when she'd gone downstairs four hours ago. With this man, she was in way over her head.

T
he following afternoon, Grace discovered that Dylan Moore was not the only one who found it difficult to abide by rules. His daughter seemed to have the same problem. After an entire day of shopping, Grace could fully appreciate why Isabel was on her thirteenth governess.

“Isabel, we are not going to argue about this,” she said, pausing in the foyer as the two footmen who had accompanied them to the shops brought in armfuls of bags and boxes from the carriage. “You now have plenty of toys among which to choose. You do not need exotic pets from the Argentine. When you are in the country, you shall have animals to play with. In the meantime, if you want to see animals, we shall visit the zoo.”

Isabel's face bore a fierce resentment. “My other governesses let me have pets.”

“Good for them,” Grace countered and concluded from the child's scowling face that she was no longer considered too nice to be a governess. She handed her cloak, hat, and gloves to the maid waiting to receive them and turned to the butler, who stood by her in the foyer, awaiting her instructions. “Osgoode, the furnishings I selected are being delivered within the week. Would you see that they are placed in the nursery when they arrive?”

“I keep telling you, I don't want to be in the nursery!” Isabel wailed.

She had seemed to accept the nursery situation the day before, but not today. Impervious to this caprice on the part of her pupil, who was tired, hungry, and, most of all, cranky, Grace pulled two bags from the pile on the floor. “I'll take these,” she told Osgoode. “Have the rest of these packages sent up to Isabel's room in the nursery.”

“Yes, of course.” The butler proceeded with directing the efforts of the footmen who were bringing in the results of their shopping trip as Isabel began to cry. Grace took one shopping bag by its twine handle and went to the music room, deciding that she had had enough of this. Isabel followed her, protesting more loudly the closer they got to her father.

A footman opened one of the doors into the music room and Grace went in, the angry, crying child behind her. Dylan had risen from the piano and was halfway to the door, probably because he had heard his daughter sobbing. He stopped when they came in.

Isabel ran to him at once. “Papa!” she cried, flinging her arms around him. “Oh, Papa, I hate her! She is so awful. Please help me!”

Grace nodded to him, ignoring the infuriated child, who was clinging to him like a lifeline. She walked past both of them to the chaise longue and placed the shopping bag on the brown velvet cushion. “Good afternoon,” she greeted him sweetly as she pulled off her gloves and tossed them aside. She dug through the shopping bag and pulled out a handful of embroidery floss and a handful of ribbons. She turned to Isabel, one in each hand. “Which would you prefer to begin with, embroidery or trimming a bonnet?”

His daughter's loud wail caused Dylan to give Grace a long, thoughtful look, then he pulled Isabel's clinging arms from around his waist and sat her down on the piano bench so that she was facing Grace instead of the keyboard. He waited a moment, but when Grace remained standing, he sat down beside the child. “Stop crying, Isabel,” he ordered. “At once, now.”

The little girl's sobs died away to angry hiccoughs. She folded her arms and glared at her governess with a fierce scowl on her tearstained face. Not the least impressed, Grace ignored it and turned to put the floss and ribbon back in the shopping bag now that she had made her point.

“Mrs. Cheval,” Dylan said in the sudden silence, “I think you should tell me what this is about.”

“Certainly,” she said. “Isabel does not want to sleep in the nursery. She does not want to do her lessons. She does not want to learn to embroider cushions, or decorate bonnets, or speak German, or do mathematics, or read, or go to Hyde Park. She does not want to take her baths, or eat her meals on time, or get up in the morning. Her attempts to quarrel with me today have been futile, and therefore, she is angry. In short, sir, your child is having a tantrum.”

“I am not!” Isabel cried out, wiping away angry tears with her hands.

Dylan gave a sigh and raked back his hair, clearly appreciating the fact that Grace was placing the responsibility of his fatherhood directly in his hands.

“I don't want to learn embroidery and do bonnets,” Isabel told him. “Those are stupid things. I don't want to learn mathematics and German. All I want is to write my music and play games and have fun.”

An unexpected grin caught at Dylan's mouth, and Grace frowned at him. “Don't you dare encourage her.”

“But deuce take it, she is so much like me, isn't she?”

At this moment, Grace did not think that was necessarily something to be proud of. “Isabel needs a well-rounded education appropriate to a young lady. Music isn't everything.”

The grin vanished, and he gave her an apologetic look. “It is to some of us.”

Isabel, sensing support from her parent with that statement, tugged at his sleeve. “It's been the most horrid day, Papa.” She continued to stare at Grace with animosity as she went on. “She made me do multiplication tables this morning, over and over. Then we went shopping, and she was so mean. She wouldn't buy anything I liked.”

“Crimson is not an appropriate color for a young girl's dress. And you do not need a pet lizard.”

“She wanted the modiste to put lace on my dresses,” Isabel said with disgust.

“You don't like lace?” Dylan asked her, looking bewildered, and that earned him a groan of exasperation from his daughter. He turned to Grace for enlightenment.

“She says it itches,” Grace told him.

“Then,” Isabel went on as if Grace hadn't spoken, “when I said I was hungry, she wouldn't let me have anything to eat.”

“As I told you before, Isabel, you would not have been hungry if you had eaten your meal before we went out.”

Isabel folded her arms again with a great show of indignation and leaned back against the piano behind her, causing the keys to clang. “You see, Papa? She's mean and stingy and she's going to starve me. She is just like the nuns.”

Dylan looked over at Grace, and those lines of laughter returned to the corners of his eyes. “She isn't like a nun,” he told his daughter. “She just seems like one sometimes.”

Grace found no humor in that. She gave Dylan a pointed look that said more clearly than words he was not helping the situation.

“Papa, you should have seen the nannies she interviewed at the agency today. I saw them lined up outside the door, and I was scared to death thinking one of them might be tucking me in at night. It was a jolly good thing she didn't hire any of them. I said I'd run away if she did.”

“Don't be absurd, Isabel,” Grace said smoothly. “That would not be sensible at all. If you ran away, your father would have to send one of Peel's constables to drag you back, and they are much more frightening than any nanny could be.”

“Why do I have to learn embroidery?” the child demanded. “I am sure I should hate it!”

They had been at this all day. Lord, the child was stubborn. Grace drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly, counting to ten. “You have not even tried it. You cannot hate something you have not yet tried.”

“I tried sewing once, and I hated that. I know I'd hate embroidery just as much.” Once again, she appealed to her father, who had listened to this exchange in silence. “Please, Papa,” she implored. “I don't want to stitch samplers and read stupid poetry and learn German, and I am hungry, really. Mrs. March has lovely comfits, but she”—Isabel paused and pointed at Grace—“she told Mrs. March not to give me any. She wouldn't let me have any dresses I liked, and I haven't been able to play piano all day.”

“One cannot play piano and eat candy all the time.” Grace turned to Dylan. “Unless that is what you wish me to do with her?”

He looked at his daughter, who was gazing back at him as if Grace's regimen were the most barbaric of tortures.

Dylan was not impressed. “I understand your passion for music, Isabel, better than anyone, but Mrs. Cheval is right. Young ladies need more education than the piano. In the mornings, you will do your mathematics, geography, German, and embroidery—whatever Mrs. Cheval deems appropriate. In the afternoons, you may play your piano until your dinner.”

Isabel began to protest, but he cut her off. “That will be enough,” he said, in a voice that dismissed any further argument, and Grace gave a sigh of relief. “You are sleeping in the nursery,” he told his daughter, “and you will obey Mrs. Cheval's instructions. If you do not, she has my permission to punish you by whatever means she sees fit. Is that clear?”

Isabel did not reply. Instead, she bit down on her quivering lip and allowed the tears to spill down her cheek again. She seemed the perfect picture of misery.

The quirk of a smile at the corner of Dylan's mouth made it clear what he thought of this emotional display. “It seems you have something in your eye,” he teased her gently. “Would you like a handkerchief?”

Any other child would have responded with frustration that the ploy didn't work, but Isabel was cleverer than that. She switched to a different battleground. “I'm very hungry, Papa,” she moaned, still looking as pathetic as possible. “I didn't eat before we went out because shepherd's pie has peas in it, and I hate peas, and it's two whole hours until dinner. Can't I have something to eat?”

“Heaven help us,” Grace muttered, pressing her fingers to her temples. “She never gives up, does she?”

Dylan glanced up with a grin. “I told you she was just like me. I hate peas, too.” He looked back at Isabel again. “You are going to do what Mrs. Cheval tells you, aren't you?”

There was a long silence.

“Yes,” she finally answered.

“Promise me.”

Isabel sighed, giving in. “I promise. I promise.” She gave him a hopeful look. “Can we have something to eat now?”