Heather and Velvet (21 page)

Suddenly, his hand stilled against her. Sebastian caught her hair and forced her to look at him. Her vision gone misty with need, she smiled tremulously at him.

A black fury darkened his eyes. Her smile vanished. What had she done to anger him so? Icy needles of shame pricked her. Her wanton behavior must have disgusted him. How could she have been such a fool? She lowered her eyes, thankful for his mask as the heat of a blush stained her cheeks.

Growling, he sank his teeth into her swollen lower lip. She shuddered against him, expecting pain but finding only pleasure. Something in his grip had changed; it was now as
implacable and relentless as the dark passion that rose between them. His arm slid lower down her back, his hand curving around her rump, as his mouth plundered hers with punishing heat. His knees slipped between hers, parting her legs and lifting her to the balustrade in one smooth, balletic move. He dragged her against him, wrapping his arms around her as his palm was replaced by a greedier hardness rubbing against the soft folds of tartan between her legs.

She strained away from him as a fear deeper than that of discovery and stronger than the fragile strands of new desire beat frantically in her belly. She turned her face away. “Sebastian, please, don’t … I can’t …”

He caught her chin between two biting fingers and tilted her head back. The scattered light cast harsh planes across his features. His lashes swept down, but not before she caught a glimpse of the hungry Highland beast sleeping beneath his thin veneer of manners. An unreasoning terror swept her.

She shoved against his chest, near to swooning in the fear that he might shove the trews aside and ravish her right there on the terrace. How dare she condemn him for taking what she had unwittingly offered? Self-contempt for her own shameful surrender only enflamed her panic.

“Let me go!”

He caught her flailing wrists in one of his broad hands. The look in his eyes stunned her. It was pain, pain that haunted the hollows of his cheeks and deepened the grooves around his beautiful mouth. Pain of such a quiet intensity that a matching ache opened deep in her own heart. Her hands crumpled into loose fists and were still.

“What have you decided?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly cool and detached. “Are you safe with me?” She inclined her head. The mask absorbed the first of her tears. His warm breath touched her ear. “Don’t start the music, Prudence, unless you’re willing to dance.”

The light spilling from the terrace door dimmed. “Sebastian? Are you out there?” Tricia called hesitantly.

He freed Prudence and moved to stand a few feet away. The imprint of his fingers clung to her wrists like icy bracelets. She slid off the stone railing and smoothed the kilt
with trembling fingers. They had been in shadow, but she had no way of knowing how long Tricia had been standing there.

Sebastian stared down into the sunken garden with eyes gone as dark as the night. “I’m here, love. What is it?”

Tricia’s skirt swept the flagstones as she pranced to him. Her hand curled around his forearm. “Can you come in, dear? The guests are growing bored.”

“Of course.” His lips brushed her temple, but his gaze passed beyond her to Prudence. “Anything for you.”

They walked back to the door, then paused there, bathed in a golden pool of light. Sebastian leaned forward with deliberate grace and planted a tender kiss on Tricia’s lips. Prudence’s hands tightened on the balustrade. As they started into the ballroom, Tricia looked back, acknowledging her niece’s presence on the terrace for the first time. Prudence wondered if it was triumph or suspicion sparkling in her aunt’s eyes.

She tucked the pistol in her sash and trailed after them, knowing she could ill afford to burst into sobs as she longed to do. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. Her mouth felt bruised and swollen. She prayed the signs of Sebastian’s passionate lovemaking were not as obvious to others as they felt to her.

She slipped through the crowd and out of the ballroom, her head pounding in earnest. The carved gilt doors closed behind her, dulling the music to a low pulse.

The steady throb in her skull sharpened to piercing pain as Jamie popped out from a curtained alcove, wielding his arrow like a demonic cherub. “Congratulations, girl. Well done indeed. I’d say ye got his attention.”

She kept walking. “I certainly did. He despises me.”

Jamie’s face fell, then he brightened. “Don’t take it to heart, lass. Me mum and da hated each other fer years. And look how dandy I turned out.” She continued on toward the stairs, and he called after her, “There’s a man outside in a fancy coach askin’ after the daughter of Livingston Walker. Might that be ye?”

Prudence stopped. Her shoulders slumped. Not now, she thought. Not tonight. Her pride was in tatters. She
couldn’t bear to discuss silver compounds and saltpeter with some rabid inventor. At the moment, she didn’t care if they all blew themselves up, the mysterious French viscount along with them.

She turned back to Jamie and straightened her shoulders. “Tell him I’m not here. Tell him I emigrated to Pomerania. Tell him I died.”

Jamie scratched his head with the arrow. “Ye want me to make him go away?”

“Yes, Jamie,” she said with weary patience. “As far away as possible.”

She missed his gleeful grin as he notched the arrow in his bow and bounded out the door.

Prudence pulled off the mask as she climbed the stairs. She rubbed the scrap of silk against her cheek, hearing again Sebastian’s husky whisper of warning.

Don’t start the music, Prudence, unless you’re willing to dance
.

The music from the ballroom floated up the steps, the haunting melody of a song begun too late. As Prudence crumpled the silk in her fist, her delicate features hardened into a mask of their own.

Sebastian stood in the darkness at the library window, listening to the muted spray of gravel as the last of the revelers’ coaches departed Lindentree. His nostrils twitched as he drank in the rich, fallow aroma of the meadow beyond the window. Like an animal scenting freedom, he longed to step through the open window, to escape the man he had been, the man he would become. But there was no escaping the man he was; Brendan Kerr’s blood coursed through his veins like poison. He closed his eyes against the mocking wink of the fireflies, feeling again the frantic tattoo of Prudence’s fists against his chest.

He had only meant to teach her a lesson, to show her he was no affable Arlo Tugbert to dally with. What would be the harm of a stolen kiss? What cost a few lazy caresses? But the cost had been higher than he had anticipated.

His eyes flew open. He dug his fingers into the window
casement, remembering the warmth of her silly, wistful smile, the loving caress of her hands against his throat. The painful honesty of her love had unleashed a wild tide of desire in him, a spiraling agony of want that bordered on madness.

He had frightened her. When he had looked at her and found her pupils dilated with fear, her hands shoving him away, he had felt himself receding, curling into that quiet, still place where he had once gone to escape his father’s shattering bellow, and the repeated thud of fists against his mother’s flesh.

Let me go
, Prudence had pleaded. Sebastian shook his head to rid it of the haunting echo.

His father had not let his mother go. He had not let her go when she shoved him away, not when she begged, and not when she screamed. It was only when she stepped up to the window of Dunkirk’s tower, her body thick with their second child, that Brendan Kerr had been forced to let her go. He had tried to hold on, had hurled himself across the tower, grabbing frantically for her skirts. But the child in her belly had given her courage. She’d spread her arms and stepped into the sun, disappearing forever into the heathered abyss below Dunkirk.

Sebastian could still see the peace on her face in that moment, as the sun slanted across her golden hair. He had hugged his knees in the corner of the tower, tears coursing down his cheeks, and hated his mother for flying to freedom and leaving him behind.

Sebastian groaned and ruffled his hair. He could ill afford to probe old wounds. He had more pressing concerns, such as why D’Artan had returned early from London.

He couldn’t believe the crafty old man had dared come to Lindentree. Now that he had learned of Sebastian’s plan to marry, they both knew their next rendezvous would be their last. D’Artan might sulk for a while, but Sebastian prayed his appointment to the House would absorb most of the blow. D’Artan would have his own pension, his own entrance into London society. He wouldn’t need his grandson anymore—not for money and not for secrets. He could
work on liberating France and blowing up England all by himself.

Sebastian hoped their parting could be an amicable one. He suspected D’Artan was fond of him in his own stilted way.

Sebastian’s only concern now was Prudence. His jaw tightened as he remembered the predatory look on his grandfather’s face when he had seen her. The old man knew she was the girl in the crofter’s hut. Sebastian reminded himself that, in two days’ time, he would be powerful enough to protect her. As the penniless niece of a scatterbrained countess, she was vulnerable to D’Artan’s machinations. But when he was master of Lindentree, he would ensure a disappearance or untimely accident involving
his
niece would not go unnoticed by the King.

Sighing, Sebastian latched the window. The knowledge that he would be able to protect Prudence did not give him the peace he sought. He climbed the stairs with a heavy tread. Since he had come to Lindentree his sleep had been mercifully free of nightmares, but he feared tonight might be different. Pausing outside Prudence’s chamber, he touched the burnished oak door, as if he might somehow reach through the cool wood to the gentle warmth of her embrace.

Would he ever trust himself not to push open her door, lay his mouth across hers to muffle her protests, and bury himself in her tender, young body? His hand clenched into a fist and he hastened down the darkened corridor.

As he rounded the corner into the blessed privacy of the west wing, he saw that his door was cracked open. The soft glow from a single candle fluttered in the corridor. He cursed under his breath, in no mood to fend off Tricia’s cloying advances.

He pushed open the door, and his jaw dropped at the sight before him. It was not Tricia, but Prudence who sat in his chair.

She hefted the crystal decanter braced between her legs. “Good evening, Mr. Dreadful. Would you care for a spot of brandy?”

S
ebastian could not have looked any more shocked had she blown a cloud of cigar smoke in his face, Prudence mused. Under other circumstances, she might have found it comical. As he continued to stare at her, she gripped the decanter. The crystal cut against the tender pads of her fingers. Sebastian started to close the door, then propped it open, then pushed it shut. He circled her as if she were a wild beast, deserving of his utmost caution.

Prudence bowed her head. She had brushed the sausage curls out of her hair, and it lay like a heavy cloak across her shoulders.

He pointed at the half-empty decanter. “Did you drink all of that?”

She gave an apologetic shrug. “I accidentally kicked it when I heard you coming. I’m afraid Old Fish will be displeased.”

He glanced at the darkening circle beside her chair with obvious relief. She lifted the decanter to her lips to take a nervous sip, but he plucked it from her hands.

“Must you be fortified with brandy to converse with me?”

“I didn’t come here to converse with you.”

He made an odd noise, as if his throat had suddenly gone dry.

She pointed to the garments folded neatly on his satin wood bureau. “I came to return your plaid.”

Sebastian turned his back on her, gulping a swig of brandy before setting the decanter on the mantel.

He addressed the andirons. “Did it ever occur to you what might happen should Tricia find you here?”

“She won’t.”

He swung around, gazing suspiciously at her. “How can you be sure?”

She blinked at him over the rim of her spectacles. “Tricia is in the habit of lacing her nightly toddy with laudanum. I took the liberty of adding a few extra drops.”

He threw back his head with a pained shout of laughter. “You’d make a fine lady bandit.”

“Better than you. I wouldn’t go getting shot and falling off my horse all the time. You should give serious consideration to another livelihood.”

“I have. The husband of a wealthy countess.”

She looked down and smoothed her night rail over her knees.

He sighed. “You sit there like the most innocent of angels and tell me you’ve poisoned your aunt. I’m afraid I can’t help you hide the body. Murder isn’t my forte.”

She gave him a wounded look. “Nor is it mine. You know I’d never hurt Tricia.” She glanced away, unable to meet his gaze. “Not deliberately anyway.”

He knelt in front of her, covering her hands with his. She clamped her knees together to keep them from trembling.

“Prudence, I want you to listen very carefully. I am not a nice man. I am a reprehensible criminal and a duplicitous scoundrel. I would sell my proverbial grandmother for a chance at a woman with a title. My uncharacteristic bursts of morality and self-control where you are concerned are liable to lapse at any moment with grave and lurid consequences.”
He chucked her chin upward, favoring her with one of his most beautiful smiles. “Are you listening?”