My Dearest Enemy (26 page)

Avery couldn't concentrate. He flung down the magazine that carried his latest serialized story and stared broodingly out of his bedroom's rain-lashed window. She danced through his thoughts; she overwhelmed his sanity; she played havoc with his reason. She was simply there. In his mind, in his blood… in his heart.

When she'd lain beneath him today, her eyes de-vouring his soul, her hips pressed intimately between his thighs, and asked him in that throaty, breathless little voice if he was going to take his potshot, he'd almost done it. Only his stellar code of conduct had saved her—for all of three minutes.

Because as soon as she'd whispered her taunt, he'd taken that flimsy excuse and the equally bogus one of reciprocation and taken his kiss. Her body had been as good as naked. His own had been rock-hard with urgency.

As soon as she'd struggled he'd let her go, afraid of what he would do next, of what he would say, and fled.

He never did see the Camfield chits and their dear friends. He'd been on his way to clean up in the kitchen sink when he'd heard an enormous crash heralding Lily's arrival. He'd raced to the front hall where she stood wild-eyed and dripping mud, then the others had arrived.

At dinner she'd avoided his eye, keeping her lovely, fierce countenance lowered to her plate, testing his resolve to behave in a civil manner. She was in his blood far more intimately than a mere fever. She was like malaria, lying dormant and seemingly harmless for weeks, months, and sometimes years before recurring with virulent, devastating intensity. And like malaria, he doubted he'd ever be cured. He could only hope for some measure of control.

He rose from his chair and prowled restlessly to the window, looking out. Two stories below light spilled from the library window. He pulled Karl's gold watch from his pocket. Even this, which should have been a reminder of his dear friend, reminded him more of her.

He closed the gold lid. Who would be up at this hour? Bernard? The boy had once mentioned how he liked to read late into the night. Perhaps he wanted company. Avery would welcome some distraction from the uneasy path of his thoughts.

He pulled his shirt on without bothering to button it and headed out the door and down the staircase. He didn't light a candle. He'd excellent night vision.

At the bottom of the stairs his attention was drawn to another, fainter light coming from the sitting room. He frowned. Was the whole blasted family nocturnal? Perhaps it was Lily. Cautiously, so as not to startle her, he looked in.

Francesca lay half-sprawled in the corner of the divan, one arm tucked beneath her cheek, her mouth open, gently snoring. On the table before her two candles flickered uncertainly in a pool of wax. Her hair had come undone and her expensive gown was crushed and twisted. On the floor next to the divan stood a half full decanter and beside that a crystal wineglass lay on its side, a small dark stain on the carpet beneath.

He angled his head, studying her. Even in sleep she looked worn and exhausted. Once, not so many years ago, she'd stood up to Horatio's expectations and criticisms and stipulations with a valiance he couldn't hope to emulate. Now he saw what it had cost her and he wondered if she counted the price worth it.

Oddly, in her faded dishevelment he found her much more appealing than he ever had when she'd played the naughty, wild, and irresistible siren even his schoolmates had whispered about.

He approached quietly and bent down and picked her up. Gently, he bore her down the hall past the library and into the apartments she used. Even more gently he deposited her on the big down-filled bed and lit a candle so that if she woke disoriented, she wouldn't be afraid. He pulled a blanket over her shoulders and brushed the hair from her face.

"Good night, Miss Thorne," he murmured and turned.

Lily stood in the doorway, her dark eyes reflecting the candlelight. He raised a finger to his lips and moved by her, taking her wrist and pulling her into the hall. Quietly, he closed the door behind them before leading her back into the library.

"Is she like this often?" he asked.

His voice was soft, not a whit of censor to it, only sadness. She'd never known, never even imagined, that a man could have so kind a heart. She'd watched as he looked down at his cousin. She'd waited for the sneer of contempt for someone older and weaker than himself, at the very least an expression of frustration or disapproval. But there had been only tenderness.

He filled her with dread. Power
and
compassion.

"Is she?" he asked again. He was standing close, so close she could see the tiny flecks of copper forming a starburst at the center of his eyes.

She shook her head, as much to clear her thoughts as to answer him. "No. Not often. The summer storms seem to bring on these moods."

He ran his hand through his hair and for the first time she noticed that his shirt was undone and hung open over his chest. It said much about his preoccupation with Francesca that he himself did not appear to notice his unclad state.

He was beautiful. His chest was broad, covered with an inverted triangle of fine dark hair. The skin cleaving tightly to hard muscle beneath was fine-grained and clear except for four thick, ragged purple lines running roughly parallel up his left breast and disappearing beneath his shirt.

She touched the scar before she realized what she was doing. He flinched back as though she'd stroked him with a white-hot poker, his hand flashing up as though to ward off an attack. She ignored his hand and his step back, moving forward and touching the raised, damaged flesh again. This time he went utterly still.

"There really was a tiger."

"What?" He looked down at her fingertips pressed lightly above his left nipple and prayed for composure. "Tiger. Yes. There really was a tiger."

"And he really did maul you."

"Yes. She. It was a she."

She had to take her hand from him. He couldn't think. The scent of her, always a pleasant, illusive thing, thickened in his nostrils, making his head spin. He could damn near
taste
her scent. It filled the small space between them, using up the air, underpinned by another subtler fragrance. He backed up again and this time she didn't follow.

"Why did you do it?" she asked, returning to her desk chair and sinking down on it wearily, as if she'd just given up a fight.

He shrugged, finding her problematic and enigmatic and wholly desirable. "I don't know," he answered honestly. "There was nothing much else to do. It was a way to fill the time, I guess. I couldn't see sitting around London for five years waiting for Mill House. I'd already waited long enough."

She clasped her hands between her knees, allowing the guilt she'd held at bay for five years to finally surface. She'd known, of course, that somewhere in England a young man's inheritance had been ruthlessly wagered away by an old, egocentric man. But she'd never let herself think of what he must have felt when he heard what Horatio had done to him. She did now. Even if she still had every intention of fighting for and ultimately attaining this house,
her
home, she had to acknowledge the monumental unfairness—no, the
wickedness
of it. If only there were some way both of them could win.

"I can't… I won't let you have it, you know," she said tiredly, meeting his eye.

"I know," he said. No ranting, no invectives, a sim-pie acknowledgement of their positions on opposite sides of an unspannable breach. "And I wouldn't let you have it if I could possibly stop it."

She nodded. He began buttoning his shirt as he wandered toward the desk, his gaze traveling over the furnishings and paintings with the same tender expression with which he'd looked at Francesca.

"You love it, too," she said.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Mill House is like a friend you knew as a child and aren't sure you'll still like, but then you meet again and you discover that the changes the years have wrought in both of you rather than separate you, draw you even closer together. When I arrived, it wasn't to the house I remember visiting as a boy. That was a palace set in a green park. But the Mill House I've discovered since I've been here is even better than a fairy tale castle.

"It's real." He glanced at her to see if she understood. "It's like a person, with quirks and oddities— the ivy that refuses to give up its place above the front door, the way a northeast wind causes the sitting room fire place to hum. It even has its own affectations like the oriel window and that ballroom on the second floor." His smile was wry.

"It's simple and well-built, solid and enduring, without the weight of too much heritage pressing down on its tenants, or the sheen of newness masking its underlying quality. It's a place where one can live and work and rest." He shrugged. "A home.

"I never had a home. I never had a family," he went on. His tone held not the least bit of self-pity; it was a simple recitation of the facts. "Mill House is going to be both. My home and my legacy. A place to raise my children and for them to raise theirs."

She didn't take umbrage with his assertion. She would have used the same words. "You want a family?"

"That surprises you? Oh, yes. I want children. Many children, enough to take the dust covers off all the bedrooms up there."

She smiled.

"Every child should have an older brother to emulate and a younger one to teach," he went on, "one sister to admire and one to tease and a baby to coddle. I used to listen to the lads at school complaining about their siblings and I'd curse them for fools I was so jealous. I wanted a family so damn much."

He looked over at her. "And you? You're an only child, too, aren't you?"

She spoke before she thought, the words, like her guilt, finding voice after what seemed a lifetime of silence.

"No. I have a brother and a sister I've never met."

"I don't understand," Avery said.

It was too late to recall the words, too late to smother the hurt that came from a lifetime of witnessing her mother's torment.

"My mother was married when she was sixteen." At Avery's expression she shook her head. "Not to my father. To Mr. Benton, a bookbinder. She had two children with him, a boy and a girl, Roland and Grace. She left him when she was nineteen."