[Samuel Barbara] Lucien's Fall(Book4You) (16 page)

He’d seemed very drunk a moment ago, but Juliette thought he saw a lot for one as inebriated as he seemed. She looked at him steadily. "Thank you for not giving me away."

He took a breath and lifted the bottle, carelessly gulping it before he answered. ’If things were different, Juliette, I’d like nothing better than to devour that beautiful body of yours." He pursed his lips. "But you only offer yourself as sacrifice to save your virgin child, and I find that rather unarousing."

The heat in her neck crept higher. "Am I so transparent? I thought myself a good deal better courtesan than that."

Lucien shook his head. "You needn’t worry about Madeline, Juliette. She is only a child, and although she is charming, I have no wish to bed a trembling virgin." He examined the bottle in his hand a moment. "I’d rather have Anna, I think. It would be a pleasant diversion after so many years."

Juliette, flooded with a sense of relief, moved forward and took his hands. "Thank you."

His eyes, dark pools in his haggard face, were unreadable. "Think nothing of it."

He gave her a little shove. "Now go find Jonathan before I am tempted to take you myself."

With a brilliant smile, Juliette did just that. Grabbing her wrapper close, she ran for Jonathan’s room.

In sweet music is such art,

Killing care and grief of heart.

—John Fletcher

For several days, the workmen
hammered and sawed and made noises all the day.

Madeline flung her attentions into repairing the damage to her garden, thankful in spite of herself for the help of the men hired by Lord Esher.

To her surprise, Lucien even gave help himself, seeming to take great delight in the tasks she assigned him. He worked harder than she would have expected, and came back to the house in the afternoons as covered with grime as Madeline or any of the workmen.

She could not help contemplating the motives of both Lord Esher and the marquess. One wished to marry her—and sent men to fix the windows of the house. The other wanted to seduce her—and sent men to mend her greenhouse, which, while not practical, was the heart of her life. At low moments, Madeline wished Charles had been the one to make the extravagant gesture.

Foolish. What point to repairing the greenhouse unless the house windows had been replaced first? Charles, even more kind in the long run, had provided the necessities, so that Madeline might use whatever other funds she could muster to fix the greenhouse and gardens. Lucien, on the other hand— Annoyed, she forced herself to stop allowing the squirrels to chase themselves in her brain. One man was practical, the other was pleasure seeking. Not such a difficult tangle.

In spite of everything, she did find herself liking Lucien better for the fact that he was willing to come out to the garden, morning after morning, to work. His hands got as torn and scratched as Madeline’s own, and it would not be hard to mistake him from afar as a village farmhand. The fine cut of clothes gave him away up close, of course, but he worked as hard as anyone else. The men liked him as well, for he made jests all the day, his enormous charm drawing them in, his good-natured teasing easing their hard labor.

One morning Madeline commented, "I believe you really enjoy yourself out here.

Lord Esher."

He grunted, struggling with a shovel in a stubborn bit of ground. "Yes, I think you’re right. Perhaps I’ve missed my calling."

"It isn’t too late. Surely you have estates to tend— perhaps you could use your newfound talent on them."

"There are no beautiful young ladies to seduce at my estates," he countered quickly, a devilish shine in his blue eye. For an instant, Madeline thought that at last he would claim the kiss he held in hock from her, that it would be over with and she could stop wondering when it would come.

Instead, he only put his attention back on the shovel and Madeline drifted away, feeling slightly vexed. She wanted the kiss done. She hated it hanging over her this way.

When they were not working together in the garden, she went to great lengths to avoid him entirely.

A new party of guests had come in from London. Madeline finally realized Juliette’s genius at work once again. It was far less expensive to maintain this country estate and life, even with the entertaining, than it was to live in London and indulge the round of parties and dances and salons they would be expected to attend and present. By snagging the rather juicy prize of London’s most notorious rake in the body of Lucien Harrow, presently under a cloud of great speculation, Juliette had assured a fashionable flow of guests eager to be considered as bon ton as anyone else.

While she found the London set trying—their idle chatter boring, their simpering and flirting coy and unsettling—she was thankful that Lucien was so very popular with them, for it gave him less time to pursue her.

For pursue he did. Relentlessly, cheerfully. And Madeline, drawn to him for reasons she could not name, resisted by hiding herself away.

And for once, Madeline could look for no help from Juliette, for it was plain to all the woman had fallen in love. She and Jonathan were the buzz of the day. They did not leave each other’s side, there was a flushed and dewy glow to them, and they disappeared at regular intervals. It was almost embarrassing, Madeline thought, and she heard the mean, pointed comments about the disparity in their ages. Sooner or later, Jonathan would tire of his aging mistress and move along to more supple prey, they said, and fretted over what such an end to the thing would do to the countess.

It was not Madeline’s concern. She thought her stepmother was a good sight more resilient than the catty lords and ladies did, for one thing. And Juliette was known to do exactly as she pleased.

No, Madeline didn’t worry about Juliette. She worried about herself, and the omnipresent seductive presence of Lucien Harrow. She threw herself into her garden, and prayed Charles would finish his business and return to Whitethorn.

The sooner, the better.

For the most part, the weather cooperated with the workmen, but toward the end of a fortnight, a spell of rainy, windy weather set in. The workmen could not come in from the village; the guests could not go out and ride or walk, but were trapped in the rooms of the house trying to entertain themselves. Cards and books passed the long afternoons and evenings, with one or another often taking up instruments to play and sing. Juliette had a particularly strong voice, and entertained them with bawdy ballads and long, sorrowful folk songs.

The Thursday marking three weeks after the big hailstorm, Madeline was restless by noon. The drinking had gone late the night before, and few were about yet, nor would they be. Often the guests kept to their rooms almost till dinner, nursing hangovers and applying beauty treatments—perhaps even making love; Madeline didn’t know.

The only other person prowling about was Lucien. As unsettled as she felt, Madeline didn’t want to be anywhere close to him. He was as out of sorts as the rest, and she knew he almost never slept. He went from drinking late in the salon to pacing about in the maze and gardens, to working in the mornings with her. The lack of rest showed in his face a little, though it made him no less handsome—he looked even more dangerously beautiful, as if the frivolous had been whittled from his face.

To escape him, escape her growing attraction to him, Madeline spent long hours in the music room. He never followed her there. Protected by music, Madeline found a measure of peace.

The Marais concerto she was working on defied her every attempt to get it right.

There was a trill of notes through the middle she never quite mastered no matter how she practiced, and today she took up the instrument with the intent of doing so. Surely if she just did not give up, the errors would smooth away— she’d be able to understand just what she was doing incorrectly.

She stood before the long, Elizabethan windows of the room, watching a soft gray drizzle wash the landscape clean. The verdant carpets of lush grass were almost painfully bright to look upon, and in combination with the gray sky, somehow poignant. Madeline sighed and tried her piece again, listening carefully for the mistakes she so often repeated.

She played it from the beginning, straight through, then practiced the middle section that was proving so frustrating, then started over from the top again.

She was deeply engrossed when a voice came from the doorway, rough and unexpected, startling her. "That is not a flat there."

She turned to find Lucien coming into the room, looking tired but otherwise magnificent. His face was cleanly shaved, his hair brushed into a neat, glossy queue tied with black ribbon. His coat was freshly brushed, his boots polished to a high gleam. In the grayish light, his blue eyes blazed.

"Pardon me?" she said.

He crossed the room and took the bow out of her hand, then the violin. Not a

"May I" or "Do you mind," just summarily took it. Madeline frowned at him.

Lucien caught the frown. "It’s been weeks you’ve been massacring this piece, and I never liked it to begin with. If I show you where you’re going wrong, perhaps you’ll move on, hmm?"

She crossed her arms. "Or perhaps I’ll play it all the more."

"No, you won’t." He smiled. "I know musicians better than that—no one is ever content to stay with the one they’ve mastered."

"But as you’re too well aware, I’m no musician."

"You’re fair," he said. "Unschooled rather than untalented, really. You must come by it from Juliette."

He touched the bow to the strings, lightly, testing, and made an adjustment to the tuning. Rainy light came through the windows, bathing him in translucent, silent beauty.

There was in the way he held the instrument an exquisite grace, even with the scratches and marks the work in the garden had left on his hands. His fingers were long and elegant, and perfectly sure. Experimentally, he bowed again, adjusting, frowning, adjusting again. Madeline could barely distinguish the small changes he made.

When it was tuned to his satisfaction, he looked at her. "This is what you’re playing," he said, and illustrated, exactly, down to the sour notes she couldn’t quite cure.

"Do you hear?"

"Yes, of course." It embarrassed her a little, but she had been trying to master it for a long time and was weary of it. She shifted, putting her hands on her hips. "How do I fix it?"

He smiled. "So simple." He showed her, and the change was only a few minor things, adjustments that cleaned and clarified. "You’re not quite hitting the notes through this section. Slow down a little. Your left hand is moving too quickly for your right." He played, illustrating, and it was perfect. "You try."

Madeline accepted the instrument back from him and played the song hesitantly, then a little more surely. "Like that?"

He nodded, but she could tell by the hard look around his mouth it was still not quite right. He moved suddenly, and came behind her, putting his hand under her left elbow, another on her spine. "Straighten your back," he said.

She did so, all too vividly aware of his touch. One hand touched her shoulder, and her neck. "Posture is everything with a violin," he said.

Madeline wondered if he heard the deepening of the Russian sound to his voice when he spoke of music, and it gave her a secret pleasure to notice. Probably when he’d spoken of music or been taught, it had not been in English. Knowing something so quietly intimate about him made her relax a little. Madeline let her body straighten, pull into the lines it should have for this.

"Good," he said, and ran a palm over her spine. She tried not to react, but a tiny trembling touched her limbs. He stepped close and kept one hand below her elbow, just barely touching it. The other roamed on her side, on her ribs, very close to her breast. His breath fell on her ear. "Try again."

Madeline ignored his proximity and played. She played it wrong, on purpose, just enough wrong that it seemed she knew what he’d told her and only just missed. He let her go, as she’d known he would, and took the violin from her hands.

"Like this," he said, and played it. The sound rolled from the instrument, rich and vibrant, utterly unlike the small quietness of her own hesitant bowing. She crossed her arms hard across her chest and watched him.

He played the trill of notes that troubled her, then stopped a moment, his gaze on the violin. His face held an odd intensity. For the first time since she’d met him, his attention was wholly fixed on something besides herself. "This violin has a beautiful sound," he commented quietly, more to himself than to Madeline.

She dared say nothing to disturb the moment. He ran an open hand along the curves of neck and body, sweeping around them as sensually as if they belonged to a woman. There was longing in the gesture, a hesitant and pained hunger. Below that, there was more, too—a swelling wildness that frightened her.

"Lucien, perhaps—"

He began to play. The notes were, at first, light and full. Free. Madeline thought of Lucien racing across the lawn the first moment she’d seen him, and that feeling of heedless liberty she’d sensed about him.

He played with the deft, rare control of a natural musician, and in the gray cold light, he seemed a dark flame. The music swirled and danced and doubled back upon itself, changing now, becoming overlaid with something else, something dark and ominous, something terrifying that stomped away the light gaiety of the first section. It roared out now, quick and harsh and overwhelming. Madeline backed up a step.

Lucien did not notice. It was plain he was lost, lost in his music, lost in the power of expressing it, lost in the sorrow and the swelling potency of the emotion he unleashed from the body of her violin.

She heard one section of notes that she recognized—it was the piece he’d thrown in the fire that morning of their picnic.

What happened to his music?

It was here, plucking painful chords within her, circling and swooping and unerringly striking emotions she did not wish, at this moment, to feel. It was stormy, passionate, filled with a rage so vast Madeline wondered how he bore it.