Lord of Fire (10 page)

As though he felt her gaze on his powerful, V-shaped back and lean, muscled derriere, he slowly looked over his shoulder and met her stare in raw longing. Neither of them spoke for a moment, swept up in a totally unexpected, unsought, unwanted attraction of dizzying power.

“Shall I come to you tonight?” he asked very quietly.

She gasped and tore her gaze away, her heart pounding. “No!”

Heaven above, the sooner she collected her sister-in-law and left this wicked place, the better. First thing in the morning, she would race home to
Glenwood
Park
and forget everything she had seen here tonight—including him. Especially him.

She heard his vexed, long-suffering sigh, then a
snick
as he turned the lock.

The minute he opened the door, Caro launched into the room and threw her arms around his neck. “Darling!”

Alice
’s eyebrows shot upward at the sight of the haughty baroness, tipsy and disheveled, her hair wet from the pool, her brown robe falling over one bare, white shoulder. She clung to Lucien, unaware of
Alice standing at the other end of the room.

“Did you miss me? Did you need me, my bad boy?” She thrust her hand between his legs, caressing him where
Alice had not dared to. “Were you jealous? You should be,” she chided with a drunken laugh. “I’ve been coming my brains out down there. I’m quite addicted! But I have a plan, you see. I’ve been building up slowly, saving the best for last. That’s you.”

Alice
’s greeting wilted on her tongue. Shocked, she watched her sister-in-law rubbing against him, riding her leg up the side of his thigh. Caro slipped her hand inside his open shirt and pulled him closer.

“Take me, Lucien,” she panted, biting his earlobe.

Alice
clapped her hand over her mouth. Good Lord! No wonder Lucien had scoffed when she had said that she had come to rescue Caro from him. What a sickening display! If anything, Lucien needed rescuing before the baroness devoured
him
.

He cleared his throat and plucked her roaming hands gingerly off his body. “Er, Lady Glenwood, there’s someone here to see you.” He turned and gestured toward
Alice with the detached interest of a spectator at a polo match, as though merely curious to see what would happen.

Caro followed his gaze and discovered
Alice standing there. The lusty mirth drained instantly from her face, which took on a waxy pallor. With a stricken look, she lifted her hand automatically to smooth her damp, tangled hair. “
Alice! W-whatever are you doing here?” the baroness stammered weakly.

Unable to meet her sister-in-law’s gaze,
Alice looked at Lucien in misery, wishing the ground would open up and swallow her. A flicker of some guarded emotion flitted through his deep gray eyes, but he offered not a word to ease the excruciating silence. He did not care about all this, she realized. What was left of her family was being finally destroyed before his very eyes, and he probably found it amusing. How she wished she had stayed home with Harry and held onto her willful ignorance about the full extent of Caro’s debauchery. Clearly, it had been a mistake to come.

“Harry has the chicken pox,” she replied at last in a leaden voice. “You must come home. We leave at dawn.”

Caro gazed helplessly at her, her façade ripped away as though, through
Alice’s eyes, she had peered into the most painfully truthful of mirrors. She turned to Lucien, at a loss. He rested his hands on his waist and just looked at her.

There was a long, hollow, excruciating silence.

Then, without warning, Caro lashed out at them in explosive rage.
“How dare you come here?”
she screamed at
Alice, her face twisting with fury. She started toward
Alice like she wanted to claw her eyes out, but Lucien grabbed her arm, holding her back. “Get her out of here, Lucien! How could you let her come in here? I swear to you,
Alice, if you say
one word
to me, I’ll throw you out of
Glenwood
Park
! You’ll never see Harry again!”

“Calm yourself,” Lucien ordered curtly.

“Let go of me!” Caro called him a dozen filthy names as he pulled her roughly back to the door and handed her over to the guards.

“Lady Glenwood has had too much to drink. Escort her back to her room and lock her in,” he ordered them curtly.

“You bastard! Fiend! Let go of me, you swine!” she raged at the guards. “Don’t you dare smirk at me, you little witch!” she screamed at
Alice, fighting her guards as they tried to bring her under control. “Do you think you’re so pure? He made me do it—and he can make you do it, too! Then you’ll see you’re no better than me! Show her, Lucien! Do what you do best! At least you can do one thing as well as Damien!”

Lucien slammed the door in her face so hard that it shuddered on its hinges.

Alice
pressed her hand to her forehead, shaken. The room was too hot, and it was altogether possible that she might cry.

Lucien, too, was silent. His back was to her, but she could feel the fury that thrummed through every taut line of his powerful body. “She’s drunk. Don’t listen to her. She spoke only from shame.” When
Alice said nothing, he turned around and slid her a guarded look. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t even know why I came,” she whispered, her chin trembling with the threat of tears. She fought them for all she was worth.

“Why did you come?” he asked in a low voice.

She did not want to tell him, but the words rushed out as shocked, angry tears flooded her eyes. “Because I promised my brother on his deathbed that I would look out for Harry and for her—and this is my thanks! She is ruining my life! I love my nephew, but—” Abruptly cutting off her impassioned words, she spun around, turning her back to him as the tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them away with shaking hands, then pivoted back to him, for this was all his fault. “What did you do to her?” she demanded in shaken ire. “She said you did something to her. What did you do?”

He lifted his chin, giving her a hard look. “She did it to herself.”

“Why did you have to go and ruin everything between her and your brother? Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? You saw how she behaved. I did it to protect him.”

“Lord Damien is a grown man!”

“He’s no good with women.”

“And you are?”

“Sometimes.”

“Then where’s your wife, Lucien? Where’s the person who loves you?” she flung out.

His face fell, and for a moment, she glimpsed him exactly as he was behind his many masks—lost, scarred. Desperate for someone to reach him. He held her in a stark stare, then dropped his gaze. “Why, I don’t have one, Alice,” he said with only a remnant of his former sarcasm.

“My point exactly.” Exasperated by the twinge of guilt she felt to see how her sharp words had struck their mark, she quickly wiped her tears away and attempted to soften her tone. Lost soul that he was, perhaps he simply did not
know
any better. “Love changes people, Lucien. That’s what it
does
. If you had let them be, perhaps Lord Damien could have helped Caro change for the better. And then maybe Harry would have had a bit more security in life, a father to teach him how to become a man in time.”

His sharp, angular face suddenly flushed with angry guilt. “That’s not my problem! For one thing, Lord Damien’s head is in shambles and for another—God!” He laughed scathingly at her. “Do you really presume to lecture me on love? What do you know of the matter? I’d wager my house that you’ve never even been properly kissed!
Damn
it!” Without warning, he closed the distance between them in two strides, yanked her roughly into his arms, and claimed her mouth before she even had time to gasp.

The first, harsh, scorching contact of his lips obliterated her girlish visions of idyllic kisses from gentle swains. His left hand tangled roughly in her hair while the right crushed her to him. He kissed her like he would consume her, his hot, hungry tongue thrusting her lips apart. It was an act of possession, suffocating her with his fiery demand. She pushed weakly against his chest; he nudged her feet wider apart and moved his knee slightly between her legs, while his hands moved up and down her back. Stiff and bewildered, she clung to him merely to keep from swooning, engulfed in the radiating warmth of his lean, muscled body. She tried to turn away, to refuse the dangerous pleasure he wanted to make her taste, but as he ran his hands up and down her back, her response was difficult to hide, impossible to fight.

Trembling and uncertain, she ceased struggling by degrees and opened her mouth wider, slowly, hesitantly met his tongue with her own. Lucien groaned low in his throat, his forceful embrace softening at once. His kiss deepened and slowed, and she melted into his arms.

He went still after a long moment and ended the kiss, but his fine mouth still lingered near hers. He rested his forehead against hers, his chest heaving against her breasts. She could feel the soft warmth of his heavy breathing against her moist lips, while his palms grazed along the length of her arms.

“What about you, Alice?” he whispered raggedly. “Who loves you?”

She lifted her lashes, meeting his tempestuous stare uncertainly. “A—a lot of people.”

“Who?” he demanded roughly.

“It’s none of your business—”

“I gave you my answer; now give me yours.”

“There’s my nephew—Harry,” she stammered.

“He’s a child.”

“He’s someone!”

“Let me come to you tonight.”

“Are you mad? Let go of me!” She wrenched out of his arms and backed away, wiping his kiss off her mouth with the back of her hand.

When he saw her wipe his kiss away, hellfire leaped into his eyes. He looked so outraged that for a moment she did not know what he would do to her. For a moment, he bristled like an angry wolf, frightening her with the intensity in his angular face and the sheer need burning in the depths of his luminous eyes; then he stalked past her to the door and snapped his fingers rudely at the guard posted outside.

“See Miss Montague safely to her chamber.”

“Yes, my lord,” the guard said with a short bow. “Miss, if you will follow me.”

Alice
looked uneasily at Lucien. He was watching her with a glitter of hostile lust in his eyes that did not worry her half so much as the sly, rather bitter half-smile that crept across his lips.

“Good-
bye
, my lord,” she forced out in bravado. With any luck, she would flee this place tomorrow morning without having to face him again.

He slid his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the door frame, watching her every move. “Good
night
,
chérie
.”

She turned away, feeling his burning gaze on her body as she followed the guard across the anteroom. When the black-coated man started down the narrow spiral stairs, she glanced back over her shoulder one last time at Lucien. He was still standing there, his tall, powerful figure cloaked in shadows, a gleam of calculation in his light-tricked eyes.

Rollo Greene of
Philadelphia, known in the Grotto as Orpheus, blotted the sweat from his bald pate, his chest heaving with too much wine and excitement. He’d be lucky if his heart didn’t fail on him in the roasting, humid heat of the Grotto, he thought. He tore his stare away from the nude dancing girl nearby as Lucien Knight came back out from his secret headquarters inside the carved dragon. He had seen Lucien carry off the lovely young blue-eyed nymph a short while ago, just as Orpheus had warned her he would.