How To School Your Scoundrel (19 page)

He slid on his undershirt and drawers, without the slightest concern. “But so much easier, if he has no other father to poison his ears against me.”

“Roland wouldn’t do that.” Her voice was muffled.

“Wouldn’t he? He had no scruples when it came to running off with my wife and son in the first place.”

She didn’t answer. Somerton went on buttoning his shirt, drawing on his riding breeches, fastening his waistcoat. He drew his jacket from its hanger and slipped it over his shoulders.

“My boots, Markham.” He turned. “Since my valet is elsewhere.”

She was sitting upright in the armchair, watching him. God knew how long. “This sickness inside you,” she said quietly. “This is not the cure.”

“You’re quite right. There is no cure for me. But justice is a dirty business, my dear, as you’ll soon learn when you’re attempting to rule a country by your shining upright principles. My boots?” He held them out to her.

She made no move, only sat there in her chair with her calm dark eyes, Princess Luisa on her throne, regarding a subject whose fate she had to determine.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Very well. I suppose I can manage myself.”

Markham rose from the chair and took the boot from his hand. “My lord.”

She held the boot firmly while he inserted his foot, kneeling before him while her gaze stayed fixed on his knee. The top of her head shone ginger in the light from the electric lamp next to the bed. The supple leather slid up his calf, a perfect fit, and Markham nudged his ankle into place with an expert twist of her long-fingered hands.

When she had fitted him into the other boot, she dropped her palms to her thighs and looked up at him. “After this is over, whatever the outcome, what do you intend to do?”

“I intend to accompany you to Germany and roust out these regicidal rascals, which have given my good friend Olympia such a great deal of trouble.”

“And after that? If we succeed.” Her gaze was direct, straight between his eyes.

Somerton’s heart made an unexpected lurch in his chest. Perhaps it was that extraordinary word
we
, dropped so carelessly into a short and commonplace sentence.

He stood abruptly and stared down at her, on her knees in the carpet before him.

“Then our association, Markham, must necessarily come to an end. Did your governess never tell you?” He reached for her hand, drew her up hard to her feet, and leaned in close to her lips. “Princesses can have nothing to do with scoundrels.”

T
he sun was high overhead when Lady Somerton’s pale figure finally appeared through the crowds of people crossing the Ponte Vecchio, a rose among the wilted ragweed. She was riding a horse, and looked as if she were ready to drop from her saddle.

For a few seconds, Luisa only stared at her, fighting back a tide of unreasonable anger that swamped her without warning at the sight of all that breathtaking beauty. Anger, or jealousy? The countess had known the dark magic of Somerton’s body on hers, had conceived a child with him. Had been married to him for six long years, and had never once appreciated the gift she had been given. Had not known what to do with a man like Somerton.

And then her ladyship’s eyes turned in Luisa’s direction, and Luisa saw the panic in them, the agony of a mother who has lost her child, and her anger dissolved.

He really was a scoundrel, after all.

She stepped forward. “Your ladyship! Lady Somerton!”

The countess’s face jerked to attention. “Markham!”

Luisa grabbed hold of the horse’s headstall. The animal was dark with sweat, the saddle leather foaming at the edges against his gray coat. Lady Somerton slid from the saddle and grabbed the lapels of Luisa’s jacket.

“Where is he?” she demanded hoarsely. “Where’s Philip?”

“He’s safe. I promise you. He’s safe, he’s well.” Luisa drew the folded note from her pocket and held it before Lady Somerton’s dusty face. The countess snatched it away and opened it with shaking fingers. “Whatever else he might do,” she said quietly, “his lordship would never harm his son.”

Lady Somerton scowled over the edge of the paper. “You will forgive me, Mr. Markham, if your words are little comfort to me.”

A hot reply rose to Luisa’s lips, adultery and abduction and faithlessness. She bit it back. The countess’s grief was too genuine.

Already Lady Somerton was folding up the note with sharp strokes of her fingers. “Are you to accompany me to this villa of his?”

“Yes.” Luisa nodded to the hackney waiting by the curb.

Lady Somerton held out the reins. “Is there somewhere nearby I can stable my horse?”

A quarter hour later, they were crossing the Arno in the hackney, enjoying—if that was the word—the relief of the draught that rushed against their faces. The sky was hot and blue, and the air laden with spiciness by the dark green cypress trees lining the dusty road toward the villa. “He should not have taken Philip,” Lady Somerton said suddenly. “He should leave the boy out of it.”

“You took him away! Without leaving word, without saying where you’d gone. Philip is Lord Somerton’s son, too. He doesn’t belong to you exclusively.”

“He’s never shown an interest in him before.”

“Because you never let him. You’ve guarded the door to Philip’s heart since the moment he was born.”

The countess knotted her hands in her lap. “Because I know what my husband is like. You don’t know what a brute he is. How easily he could hurt Philip, or turn him into another version of himself.”

Luisa hesitated. “Yes, he can be brutal. But he has also the capacity for great devotion. And you never knew. You never gave him a chance, did you? You never opened your heart to him.”

Lady Somerton turned away and watched the cypress slide by.

The Palazzo Angelini stood alone between the road and the river, at the top of a hill that sloped down gradually to the brown green width of the summer Arno. Luisa had sat up waiting in the drawing room the night before, Quincy at her feet, until Somerton arrived in a carriage shortly before sunrise, carrying the sleeping Philip in his arms. She had led them both to Philip’s room on the third floor and woken Mrs. Yarrow to care for the boy, and then she had followed Somerton to his own magnificent bedroom, the master’s room. His eyes were rimmed with exhaustion. “He went right to sleep in the carriage,” he said, and there was an odd sort of joy in his face, amid the heavy lines. “He’s a good lad.”

The valet entered the room at that point, shrugging on his jacket as he went. “Get some rest,” Luisa had replied, and she had taken Somerton’s carriage back to the Grand Hotel, leaving Quincy behind to curl on Philip’s bed until the boy woke. As she looked back, the pinkness of dawn turned the brick chimneys bright red.

Now, under the white midday sun, the old stones of the villa blazed in pale Palladian splendor at the end of the graveled drive. The fountain rustled calmly in the center of the outer courtyard. Luisa leapt out of the hackney first and held out her hand for Lady Somerton.

“Thank you,” the countess said coldly. She looked up at the white portico. “Where is my son?”

Luisa glanced at the third-floor windows and down again. “He’s well. Lord Somerton would like to see you first.”

“Naturally.” Lady Somerton’s voice was bitter.

She followed Luisa into the villa and up the curving marble staircase to the room Somerton had set aside for the purpose, furnished with a pair of chairs and an escritoire. When the countess had settled into her chair, Luisa went to Somerton’s chamber and knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

He was standing before the window in his trousers and shirtsleeves and an immaculate waistcoat of gray houndstooth, drinking a cup of coffee from a small blue and white cup of nearly translucent delicacy. His black hair was brushed, his cheeks faintly pink from a recent shaving. “How is she?” he asked, without turning.

“Exhausted. Upset. But in good health, considering the circumstances.”

He drained the coffee and set the cup aside in its saucer with a distant clink. “Then we had better get to it, hadn’t we?”

“You can still put an end to this,” she said. “You can still bring about a sensible resolution. You have allowed her divorce petition to proceed without protest.”

He turned. His necktie was folded in precise creases that echoed, somehow, the strict austerity of his features. His eyebrows lifted slightly. “And how did you come by this information? Olympia, I suppose?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really. But you must know that the decree is only preliminary.”

“You can’t possibly intend to reconcile.”

Somerton drew a charcoal tweed jacket from a nearby chair and shrugged his arms inside. “Of course not. But it remains a chip with which to bargain, does it not?”

Luisa shook her head. “Can you not simply forgive each other and part as friends? Must you destroy her?”

Somerton adjusted his cuffs and walked to the tray of liquors next to the armchair. He poured himself a glass of brandy and drank it in a single smooth gulp, and then he walked with great calmness to the door. Just before he reached it, he lifted his hand and covered Luisa’s cheek with his broad palm.

“My dear, you look tired. When all this is finished, you must endeavor to rest.”

She couldn’t stand it. Her heart felt as if two strong hands had grasped each side, and were rending it down the middle. “Don’t hurt her,” she said.

His hand dropped away. He opened the door and paused, staring into the open hallway. “It is not Lady Somerton I intend to hurt,” he said.

•   •   •

T
wenty minutes later, the click of boots on marble startled Luisa out of a reverie, as she stared through the French doors at the back of the entrance hall, all the way down the length of the precisely trimmed garden to the high green hedges of the maze at its rear.

She turned. The Earl of Somerton stepped toward her, every hair still in place, every fold of his necktie still precisely laid, except that his face had drained of blood. “It’s done,” he said. He held out a folded paper. “She wrote the note. Now take my carriage, and make haste. He may already have arrived at the hotel.”

Luisa took the note and slipped it into her jacket pocket. “Yes, my lord.”

She had dreaded this meeting, ever since Somerton had first outlined his plan to her, on the overnight train to Milan from Paris. As the carriage bore her back into town, she dreaded it even more. True, she hadn’t seen Roland in a decade, not since she was an awkward carrot-haired girl on the brink of adolescence and he was a young man at Eton, golden and glamorous. He hadn’t noticed her then, and he would hardly be searching out the features of that unremarkable second cousin Luisa in the face of the young personal secretary to his archenemy, the Earl of Somerton.

But she would know him. His charm, his good looks, his magnetism. Above all, his status as the beloved grandson of her own uncle, the Duke of Olympia.

How could she remain indifferent?

If he hasn’t already arrived
, Somerton had instructed her,
wait for him in the bedroom.

Luisa had wondered how Roland would know which rooms were theirs, and how he would gain entry.

Somerton had laughed at her.
My dear girl, he’ll be up in a trice, never fear
.

As Somerton had told her, she had the carriage pull up to the rear entrance. Sartoli was waiting for her there, his collar glowing white in the shadowed vestibule. “Has the English lord arrived yet?” she asked breathlessly.

“No, signore,” he said. He handed her the room key.

“Very good. When he does, you’re to tell him that Lord Somerton checked out of the suite an hour ago, alone.” She handed him a guinea.

He made a slight bow. “The service stairs lie to your right, signore,” he said.

“Thank you.” Luisa wrapped her fingers around the cold metal key and hurried up the stairs to the second floor, until she came to the suite of rooms she and Somerton had occupied the day before. The space was empty now, of course. What few personal articles she and the earl had brought yesterday had gone with Luisa to the Palazzo Angelini, soon after Somerton had departed for the Tuscan castle to which his wife and Lord Roland Penhallow had been traced. The gilded furniture, the heavy drapes might have belonged to any luxury hotel in Europe. Luisa closed the curtains in the sitting room and crossed to the bedroom, where she performed a similar act, enclosing the room in a murky dimness.

Just in case.

After all, the less Roland saw of her face, the better.

The clock on the desk chimed the hour in two delicate pings. Luisa settled herself into the armchair while her eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness.

•   •   •

T
he Earl of Somerton paced across the length of his bedroom in measured strides, brandy in hand. A small bowl of roses had been placed inexplicably on his bedside table—the bedside table of a bed he had never slept in—at some point during his absence, and the scent reminded him of Northamptonshire, and Markham standing in his study, about to be kissed.

He came to a stop in the center of the floor and stared at the empty glass in his hand. His fingers curled around it, as if to splinter the crystal into his calloused palm.

Now came the reckoning. He had sent Markham off to fetch Roland, had trusted her with the blind and reckless faith of a man hopelessly in love.

Would she return?

The afternoon sun coursed through the windows of the room, which faced west, toward the river breezes and the red-tiled rooftops of Florence, away from the road and the courtyard. Upstairs, his wife played with their son within a well-appointed room, locked from the outside. If he stood quite still and strained his ears, he could hear the rapid click of claws on the polished wooden floorboards, as Markham’s damned dog chased a ball for Philip’s amusement. That was something, anyway. Some piece of Markham left behind.

The clock on the mantel chimed two thirty. He took out his watch from his pocket to be certain. Yes, two thirty. Markham and Penhallow should have arrived by now, unless there had been some delay. Unless she had decided not to return after all, that her throne wasn’t worth her cousin’s life. Or that the talents of her uncle the duke—and Somerton had to give Olympia his due, the cunning old puppet master—were sufficient to secure her birthright from the anarchist assassins who had overthrown her.

He set the brandy glass down on the tray with a crash. By God, he would wring the necks of every last one of those damned bloodthirsty revolutionaries, once his business here in Italy had concluded. Whether or not Markham asked him to.

And then his head bowed.

If
she asked him to.

What would he do if she didn’t?

He should have made love to her in the Northamptonshire study while he could. Or any one of a dozen opportunities between then and now: the sleeper train compartment, the house in London, the hotel in Paris. The dulcet early evening in the Grand Hotel, before he had left to spirit his son away. Now the chance had fled. Markham had fled, and he might never have the chance again. Might never know the feel of her skin against his, the kiss of her, the life of her.

As it should be
, his conscience whispered.

A roar rose up in his throat. He forced it down and lifted the brandy decanter.

But as he drew the stopper from its neck, another sound drifted faintly through the half-open door.

Footsteps. Voices.

He set the stopper back and placed the decanter on the tray once more, right next to the dark ruby port.