Lessons of Desire (28 page)

She could not blame him for that if it was hue. She had chosen freedom over him, after all. He had convinced himself lo accept the validity of those vows and no doubt had been instilled by her refusal to do the same. She did not think he would ever understand why-she could not.

She was beginning lo lose hold of why herself.

Just touching the letter gave her comfort. She had never felt alone in her life before, but she did now. She had never questioned that life in its essence either, but late at night, sick-hearted and lonely, she now did. She could not accommodate the misery this separation caused her. The pain just sat there in her soul, never easing.

She entered the reading room and retrieved the manuscript. She had come lo hate this daily chore. She carried the pages like the weight they were. She dropped them on the table and glared at them.

The air behind her subtly moved. A presence intruded nearby. Her heart flipped. She closed her eyes and savored the joy that spread through her like rays of the sun breaking through dark clouds.

She turned to see Elliot depositing a bound volume and a folio of papers on the table in front of hers. He favored her with a smile, but it was the kind one gave an acquaintance, not a person one had slept beside.

"Miss Blair, what a pleasure lo have this chance meeting. I did not know that you still labored here."

"I am almost finished with it all, Lord Elliot."

His gaze lit briefly
on
the manuscript that had brought them together. Then he gestured to his table. "I too am almost finished. I will not block the window's light if I sit here, will I? There are other tables if I will be intruding in any way."

"The sun is bright today. What light there it can be shared."

He said nothing more. He took his chair, opened his tome and his papers, and retreated into his mental exercises.

She sat with the manuscript in front of her. She kept her eyes on it and pretended to read. In truth she did not see her father's jottings at all even though Elliot did not block the light in the least.

She just felt him there, so close. She basked in his presence and the way it soothed her. She savored how her heart swelled with emotion. She marveled at how close to tears she was.

She had fallen in love with him. That was what all these emotions meant. The joy, the pain, the peace, and the confusion—they were the reactions of a woman who had lost her heart.

She did not know why that truth came to her now here, during this hour of distant intimacy. She thought she had been in love before, but those brief excitements had been nothing like this. She had misunderstood so many things about herself, and about the bonds that she had formed in this most special of friendships.

She did not know how long she remained like that feeling his presence and marveling al the contentment it brought her heart. His rising from his chair jolted her out of her sweet daze. He walked to the shelves, removed another book, and walked back.

She had to watch him. She could not release him from her gaze. He appeared so handsome in his elegant dark coats and crisp cravat and collar. If his eyes still reflected his intellectual absorption and his hair appeared mussed, that made him all the more appealing. It was not only the body that made the man.

He noticed her attention and his own emerged from his thoughts. His progress through the reading room seemed to slow. He came forward with eyes locked on her own. Desire burned in his gaze, quietly and subtly, hidden to everyone but her.

She responded as she always had. Like she always would. She imagined being old and gray and chancing upon him in town one day after being apart for decades. If he looked at her like this then, she would be reminded in a blink how much she had always wanted him.

He did not sit this time. He came to her table, one scholar calmly curious about another's work. He stood a bit behind her and hovered over her shoulder. She felt him there so clearly, so warmly. She gritted her teeth to control the impulse to turn her head and kiss his chest.

"There are only a few pages left," he said.

"I may need to go through it all again. It could be some time before it is in fit form for the press." She looked up at him. "I expect that you will need to come here often now too, to verify the details of your book."

"Normally there is quite a lot of that at the end."

"Then we might find ourselves sharing the sunlight again, Lord Elliot."

"That is doubtful. I will be leaving London tomorrow for a week at least. You should be well done by the time I return."

His eyes remained warm. Knowing. She saw his affection even if no one else would. She also saw those glints of steel.

"Do not delay long at your task, Miss Blair. You have chosen your course in this and other things, and I ant not interfering. However, it would be unwise for you to trust me to forever be convinced of such noble inclinations. I confess the scales in my conscience have been tipping of late."

His warning flustered her badly.

"I am expecting a final request regarding the content of this work," she said.

"Any requests will come in the next week if they come at all. After that make your decision. Either go forward or do not. But do not dally on the matter or I will question your resolve on this and other things. I am too aware, and too often reminded, that one word from me will settle everything regarding you very neatly in ways I would prefer."

He walked to his table, put down the book, and collected his papers. "It has been a pleasure enjoying your company today. Too great a pleasure, I have accomplished nothing for the last hour and a half except imagining you naked on this table, begging me to take you."

He glanced around the book-filled chamber, at the spectacled readers and sober-faced librarians. "Damn it, Phaedra. I will never see this library quite the same again."

Elliot had intended lo travel lo Suffolk to visit Chalgrove as Hayden had requested, but he had put it off for a variety of reasons. As he rolled through the countryside in his carriage, he admitted the real reason had been Phaedra.

Seeking her out in the reading room had been a weak capitulation to the melancholy that plagued him. He had sworn he would not sit near her. He had not even planned to let her see him. Then as soon as she walked in the door he had buzzed over so he could drink in her mere presence like a sol too long sober.

Knowing he was ridiculous did not stop the urge to make a bigger fool of himself. Love was hell, that was all there was to it.

He stared out al the farms but really saw him with her in the years ahead. Visiting her in that little house. She probably would not even accept the normal sorts of girls that a lover gave his beloved. Days would go by when he did not see her at all. No matter how long the affair lasted, no matter if they declared undying love, she would not truly be a part of his life.

The man in him rebelled al the notion. So did the besotted lover. She may have grown up learning that such a relationship was normal, but he could not reconcile his head or heart to it.

Worse, the suspicion had lodged in his mind that she could accept such a life because she truly did not want him in hers. Which raised the question of whether he had stupidly fallen in love with a woman who did not in turn love hint.

They had never spoken of love. He had ignorance as his excuse, but she might have a very different reason.

The carriage aimed off the road onto a lane, and he turned his mind to the meeting ahead. This would be the more welcome of his duties while out of London, but he still did not look forward to it. He could not influence Phaedra where the memoirs were concerned, least of all for the Earl of Chalgrove.

Chalgrove s estate showed the evidence of a lord in residence. The fields appeared productive. The manor house looked well kept. Hayden said that his friend s finances were not in order, however. Inherited debts and losses during the recent bank crisis had Chalgrove placing his boots very carefully while he walked a precarious financial line.

He received Elliot in his study. It was a well appointed chamber. If some rare volumes had disappeared and a few walls had lost some paintings, no one would guess it.

Chalgrove was a big man with an athletic build. As a man-about-town in his younger years he was known as a Corinthian. He rarely came to town anymore, and had been notably absent through most of the last season.

They sat in the study, spirits in hand. Chalgrove's deep-set gray eyes barely reflected his concerns, but his presence bore the sobriety of a man with more responsibility than he desired.

"Your brother wrote to me. It was good of you to come," he said.

"I do not know if I can be of any help. I have not read the manuscript."

"The publisher has, however. That woman, Miss Blair." He rested his boots on a stool and relaxed with his drink. The boots showed bits of dried mud, as if the earl had been out in those fields today. "I was approached by Merris Langton prior to his death. Richard Drury, it seems, included my name in those memoirs incorrectly."

Elliot guessed that everyone named and not praised would insist Richard Drury made a mistake. "Was it a personal matter?"

"Political. Drury greatly exaggerated my relationships with certain radical factions while I was younger. It is nothing illegal or seditious even in his telling, and I was little more than a boy, but it would be embarrassing. I prefer the error not be indelibly put into print. You understand, I am sure."

"I regret that it is unlikely that I can help you. Miss Blair promised her father to publish it as it stands. You are in a long line of people who want changes and she is not entertaining the requests."

"Damnation." Chalgrove's dark eyebrows lowered over an angry glare. "The man just did it as revenge. That is all posthumously published memoirs are, usually. A chance to settle scores from the grave and suffer no ill effects from the effort."

"I have never heard your name linked to his. Did you even know him well enough to create a score to be settled?"

Chalgrove scowled over his glass while he drank a good deal of the spirits. He set the empty glass on the floor and gave his guest a long, hard look.

"I barely knew him, but we had one conversation that did not go well. It was about eight years ago. I was young and in love and despite my expectations and birth the lady's family would not have me. No doubt her father comprehended the limitations of those expectations in ways I had not yet discovered."

He gestured to the chamber, the house, and all beyond it. His weary exasperation spoke to the financial burdens better than any verbal explanation.

"I had found myself included in Artemis Blair's circle on occasion. So I knew Drury, of course. At a dinner party one night he favored me with a lecture about my disappointment."

"Foolish of him. A man disappointed would not appreciate that."

"
His
 
man did not, I assure you. He treated me to a long, boring explanation of how I was better off, how marriage ruined love, how much preferable it was to love freely, etc."

"It was the philosophy that he lived."

"To hell with his philosophy, I became angry at how he pontificated on his superior and enlightened views. So I told him he was a poor example of what he preached since Artemis Blair had taken another lover." He vaguely grimaced, and shrugged. "As I said, I was very young."

"He would not have liked that thrown in his face, but you were not the only one who knew. I do not tit ink it created the score—"

"He
did not know yet. I was the one who made him aware of it. I am certain of this. He was shocked. Angry-I thought he would call me out for suggesting such a thing. Soon after, however, it was clear how he stepped out of her life. Once his eyes were opened he had no trouble determining who the man was, I suppose. Or perhaps he just asked her."

"Did you know who it was?"

"I believe so. I had some dealings with the man, I think. He was a scoundrel. A thief. He was selling antiquities that were frauds. He liked to approach green young men like me with them."

Chalgrove's expression remained placid. If his eyes reflected any anger it remained inwardly directed. Elliot considered letting the topic die, but it sounded as if he and Phaedra had been too generous in interpreting Thornton's activities.

"You speak as if you bought some of these frauds."

"I have no proof that he knew they were frauds, although I think he did. In either case I will not slander him through gossip. I chose not to lay down information years ago, and to do so now—"

"Of course. Actually, I believe I know who it was. I merely sought confirmation."

Chalgrove thought it over. He stood. "Come with me. I will show you something."

He led the way out of the study, toward the front of the house. "I fancied myself a collector even while at university. Roman coins to start. A few fragments of the past later. It was that which attracted me to Miss Blair's circle, and led to my brief inclusion. So when offered a great prize privately, from someone who should know about such things and who had Miss Blair's friendship, I felt secure in paying a good deal of money"