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Authors: Theresa Romain

BOOK: Season for Surrender
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Chapter 12
Containing a Most Seductive Fiction
When Xavier returned to Clifton Hall after the Christmas morning service, he found himself a drink. After luncheon, he found another. All through dinner, with roast goose and much merriment, he plied himself with wine, and once the meal was over, he changed to brandy.
Truth was never found in the bottom of a bottle, he knew, but he hoped it could be drowned there.
It could not, though. Not today; not this Christmas. By the time his guests had begun to trundle off to various bedchambers, he'd failed to exorcise the knowledge that had crept into him along with the chill of the church.
That is: he'd become trapped in his role.
Only one person had ever noticed this before. He'd resented her prying eyes, her unanswerable questions. But today, he'd realized she was right to ask them. In courting the London scandal sheets, he'd neglected his tenants. They had abandoned the very notion of a family pew—for better or worse, almost as sacrosanct a space as the altar—as a pointless fiction. They simply never expected to see him.
This was not their fault. It was his. And there weren't enough drinks in the world to dissolve the pain of that thought.
There was one place, though, where it might hurt a bit less. So he gulped water to clear his head, straightened his neckcloth, and turned his feet in the direction of the library.
The oiled hinges moved silently as Xavier opened the library door a sliver. Good. Louisa was here, just as he'd hoped. She had spread out the encoded ledger on the mahogany table by the windows. In the pool of light shed by a Carcel lamp, she was trailing her finger over some scrawled-upon piece of paper, referring to the ledger, jotting letters down.
She didn't look up from her papers when he entered.
He cleared his throat.
He nudged the door shut and gave it a
thwack
with his boot heel.
She
still
didn't look up.
So he gave way to annoyance. “Good God, Louisa. What's so fascinating?”
She lifted her head, squinting into the dimmer light by the door. “Alex? You sound as though you're in a charming mood.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I'm always in a charming mood,” he muttered.
“And I'm the most popular woman of the
ton
.” She shrugged a shoulder, her bronze silk gown whispering against the mahogany desk. “What good storytellers we are. Now, do come and take a look at what I've deciphered.”
She hooked the chair next to her with an ankle and shoved it back.
So easily, she dismissed his irritation. He strode over to the table but pointedly remained standing.
She looked up, her expression puzzled, and then she smiled. “Of course. With your weak close vision, you can see the pages better while you stand.”
Xavier sat.
Louisa gave him an odd, narrow-eyed look, then turned her attention back to the ledger. “You seem out of sorts, especially for a man who's about to be treated to a scandalous tale about his forebears.”
“You mistake the matter, I assure you.” He shifted his weight in the spindly Windsor chair, drawing back his chin until the ledger and her scrawled papers came into focus. “What have you found, then?”
She studied him for a long moment, and he began to feel as though she was poking at a bruise. When she spoke, though, she was all business. “
Purgatorio
was indeed the key to the early part of the ledger. Once I created the Vigenère tables, I could begin uncovering your family's dramatic history of misdeeds.”
She slid a loose sheet of handwritten paper over to him. Crossed and blotted and block-lettered, it was almost impossible to interpret. “What is this? It's as obscure as a cipher itself.”
She grinned. “Impressive, no? It's my sheet of notes. Since the cipher doesn't have any breaks between the words, the answer takes a bit of figuring, even with the key.”
“That seems an ungodly amount of trouble. Have you learned anything that's made it worthwhile?”
“I should say so.” She pulled back her blotched, scribbled-on paper and scanned it with knit brows. Lamplight gilded her face and shadowed her lashes.
Xavier's stomach gave a painful twist. Too much brandy today, and too many disappointments. He made a fist and shoved it against his abdomen as Louisa began to speak.
“The history begins in Tudor times, though it appears to have been written down much more recently than that. If I'm reading it correctly, your ancestor was originally given a viscountcy for a very, ah,
personal
service granted to one of Good Queen Bess's favored ladies-in-waiting.”
“A persuasive service, was it?”
“More persuasive than any foreign tongue could be. I can hardly wait to discover how the viscountcy became an earldom some few generations later.”
“Hmm.” Xavier pressed his knuckles more tightly against his rebellious body. She wasn't trying to tantalize him. There was no need for these tumbling insides.
“What I'm not sure of yet,” Louisa continued, “is why it was necessary to encode the whole book. Can it matter at this distance in history whether a family became noble because of lovemaking skills as opposed to, say, lining the queen's purse?”
He wished she would not keep using words like
lovemaking
and
tongue
. This late in the day, his manners were ragged, his whole body in a rebellion of sensation. “It always matters,” he ground out. “The
ton
has a terribly long memory, especially for scandal.”
The
ton
didn't even have to rely on its memory where Xavier himself was concerned. The betting book at White's had recorded a full and complete history of his indiscretions—some real, many false—from the time he'd reached his majority.
Now it seemed his family's peccadilloes had been treated the same way from the very beginning.
What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh
. Wasn't that the saying? It ought to be a family motto.
He let his hands drop to his sides. Suddenly he felt very still inside, and rather cold.
“Yes.” Louisa looked at him with those big cocoa-brown eyes, half her face bright and half in shadow. “I had not much to do during my London season but stand at the fringes of ballrooms, noticing things. And I certainly noticed that.”
Louisa furrowed her brows, and she tapped the ledger with the barb of the quill. “What I can't figure out is the
why
of this ledger. Why bother to encode ancient escapades? Alternatively, why write them down at all, if there was so much fear of their discovery that a cipher had to be applied?”
Xavier tried to don a Numbered Expression, but it simply slid off. “Some kinds of scandal are tolerated, and some are not. A single gentleman of good fortune can engage in scandalous behavior without detriment to his name, but women cannot. And, in truth, married men ought not either. It reflects poorly on the children.”
“Such a stringent moral code from the Earl of Xavier?” Louisa looked back at the papers scattered over the table and began neatening them, lining up corners, wiping pens, capping the bronze inkwell. “I suppose I ought to be surprised.”
“Never mind,” Xavier said. He was wishing he hadn't come into the library to talk about codes and scandals with a woman who noticed everything. What did it matter if he was trapped by his reputation? Why should he start regretting that now? Soon enough he would return to London, and he'd slip back into his old, riotous circles like a hand into a glove.
The idea seemed tepid, at best. But at least it would be familiar.
“But I'm
not
surprised.” Her hands stilled on a row of quills. She spread out her fingers as though checking for flecks of ink in the lamplight. “I've noticed things about you, too, Alex. You don't enjoy scandal as much as your reputation would suggest.”
He shrugged, a tolerable simulacrum of unconcern. “Rumors. One can never credit them.”
“Indeed not. Rumor would have me believe that you betrayed a friend intentionally, yet you told me you did not. Rumor would have me believe you've bedded Signora Frittarelli, but I've never seen you look at her with any particular warmth.”
His spine went stiff. “You've heard rumors about
la signora
and—” He cut himself off, shaking his head. He hadn't known this. The fires of gossip were now blazing without any fuel, and he—yes, he was trapped indeed.
She gave a little shrug, still not looking at him. “I hear a lot of things. I don't believe anything without evidence.”
Her slim arms slid out, stretched forward on the table; then she folded them and laid her head down upon them. The lamp turned her skin golden, her hair the dark of ebony. The expanse of uncovered skin above the bronze silk back of her gown seemed endless and defenseless.
He wanted to run his hand over that skin, to test it and protect it and understand it. How could a woman with a knife-sharp mind have such satin-fine skin? The combination was devastating. There was no possible armor against it.
He watched the movement of her lips as she spoke.
“Alex, you trusted me with the truth when I first came to your house. I'll do the same for you now. You come from wicked stock, perhaps, but that's no matter. You have a—well, I needn't describe your reputation to you. But it doesn't matter, either. Nothing matters but the choices you make. Rumor and reputation will follow.”
His reputation. It felt like a manacle. “It's not so easy as you seem to think. When I attended this morning's service, no one could stop fidgeting and staring at me.”
She shut her eyes. “The effect of novelty, that's all. The first time I saw a lion in the Royal Menagerie, it seemed wondrous and frightening. The second time, it was nothing more than an imposing creature tugged from its rightful element.”
Was this how she saw him—an imposing creature, caged?
Then . . . what was his rightful element?
“I see,” he said. But she was the one who saw. When her eyes opened, sweet and slow, her face like a sculpture on her folded arms, he felt as though she'd read his every thought.
And still, she'd pulled out a chair for him to sit at her side. That was a Christmas gift in itself.
He wanted to understand
how
she knew these things. How had she seen what he had just realized himself?
“Did you . . .” He trailed off. Shook his head. Began again. “The lion. You visited it twice, you said. Would there be any point to your seeing it again?”
Her mouth softened at the corners; the lamplight gilded the fine hairs that had pulled loose from her coiffure. “The lion wouldn't know or care if I saw it again. My opinion of the lion does not matter to it. It simply
is
, itself.”
Xavier mulled this over. “You think it does not notice if the crowds thin around it? Or if the exclamations turn to jeers?”
“It might. But does that matter? It exists in the best way it can. There's very little anyone can do—be they animal, vegetable, or mineral—to influence a crowd.”
No. That wasn't so. He'd gambled his entire adult life on the idea of influence. “I disagree with you.”
Louisa unfolded herself. Lamplight played over the bronze sheen of her gown as she shifted, as her curves flexed into brightness and dark.
Xavier's mouth went dry. He did not permit himself to shift and squirm in his seat.
She leaned back in her chair, her face passing into shadow. “You have the right. But I'm the one who saw the lion.”
He shook his head. “The
ton
. I know you're talking of them. Do you truly believe they cannot be led?”
“Of course they can be led. You lead them every day, don't you?”
Before his quick squeeze of relief had time to spin through his body, she continued, “But their passing attention is all they can give. The polite world as a group—you'll hold its notice only as long as you fill the scandal sheets.”
Her fingers played on the arm of her chair. “A person is different from a group, though. Only make a connection with a person, and he or she will gladly look beyond the surface.”
“You assume I want that?” He folded his arms to cover the thud of his heart. Yes, he wanted that, and desperately. He was a bottomless pit of need, unable to stay away from the fleeting regard of the world. Powerless to deny the harsh seduction of her honesty.
An honesty that came wrapped in sleek curves, a wry mouth, and the high, serene brow of a Botticelli beauty.
He could have groaned. But he did not permit that, either. Instead, he jammed his hands tighter into the vise of his folded arms, hoping the pressure of his own limbs would remind him not to reach out for her. Or anything else that was foolish.

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