Teresa Medeiros (17 page)

He lashed out a fist, toppling it. It crashed to the parquet floor in a satisfying explosion of terra-cotta. Someone behind him politely cleared their throat.

Smythe, Gerard thought, his temper briefly sated by the reckless offering. Of course it would be the Admiral’s loyal henchman, the all-knowing, all-seeing Smythe.

He swung around, his unrepentant posture daring the man to challenge him. “Terribly sorry. I must have bumped it in the dark.”

Smythe’s mild tone held no hint of reproof. “Understood, sir. It might have happened to anyone. I’ll fetch a broom.”

Gerard scowled as he watched the butler’s nightcap bob back into the shadows, wondering if he had an ally or an enemy in the Admiral’s enigmatic servant.

No one came banging on Gerard’s door the following morning. After spending half the night gazing into the dying embers of his fire and the other half tormented by dreams, he slept until ten, waking to discover a slim envelope had been slipped beneath the
gatehouse door. Torn between relief and regret, he ripped it open, fully expecting to find his dismissal.

Instead, he discovered a note from Smythe informing him that his services as bodyguard would not be required for several days as Miss Snow would not be venturing out. However, the Admiral would appreciate his continued assistance in organizing his memoirs. A terse postscript in his employer’s own handwriting notified him that the price of the bust he’d so clumsily shattered would be extracted from his wages each month in modest increments.

Gerard would have smiled at the last had his eyes not drifted back to
Miss Snow will not be venturing out …

Was the Admiral’s daughter to be imprisoned in her room like a medieval princess in disgrace? he wondered, crumpling the note in his fist. If so, why should he give a damn? Lucinda Snow was not his concern. If she chose to spend her life writhing beneath her father’s tyrannical thumb, who was he to interfere? Yet he was haunted by his glimpse of another woman—a spirited, laughing woman who had stuffed sweetmeats in her pockets like a mischievous child.

His desperation to be free of Ionia and its young mistress grew as the next few days drifted by in a monotonous stream. He’d never been a man given to loneliness, having long ago learned to tolerate the bleak solitude of his own company, but now a yawning emptiness gnawed at his gut. As the last stubborn leaves surrendered to the ravages of impending winter, he began to wear thin on his own nerves. Each day it grew harder to be civil to the Admiral just for the opportunity to rifle through his personal correspondence or spend a few unguarded moments in the library. His deferential replies hung in his throat, stymied by self-contempt.

He slept poorly, rising before dawn each morning with no prompting to stalk aimlessly across the grounds. He’d forgotten how merciless London’s late autumn could be, but he preferred its frigid cold to the familiar chill seeping through his soul. A chill caught in a twisting warren of alleys along the river and nursed beneath layers of damp stone a world away.

Although he kept reminding himself that the Admiral’s daughter was a distraction he could ill afford, his ambling journey always led him to the sprawling old oak that stood like a battered sentinel beneath her window. He would lean his shoulder against its grizzled trunk, turn his collar up against the wind whipping off the river, and search the shrouded window for a flutter of curtains or a flash of white.

Lucy huddled in the velvet cushions of her window seat, her icy feet tucked beneath a quilt. She peered through the crack separating the lace and damask draperies, watching her bodyguard watch her window. She couldn’t pinpoint the moment when his presence had become a comfort instead of an annoyance. She only knew that whenever she crawled out of her cozy bed to find him there, she felt safe, protected from harm by the glowing talisman of his cheroot.

The wind whipped his hair and tore at his coat. Lucy shivered in empathy. As he thrust his hands deep in his coat pockets and turned to trudge toward the kitchens, Lucy pressed her palm to the cold glass and whispered, “Good morning, Mr. Claremont.”

Five grueling days had passed since Lucy’s banishment from polite society when Gerard arrived in the library one morning to discover the spacious room deserted. Seizing the rare moment of privacy, he captured the Admiral’s chair and began to rifle through a
yellowed stack of ship’s logs. He started guiltily when Smythe appeared in the doorway.

Shoving the logs beneath a sheaf of perfumed letters from a married countess who had once believed herself enamored of the Admiral, Gerard said, “If you could learn to do that in a puff of smoke, I do believe we could get you a job on the stage.”

“I’ve always fancied the circus myself, sir. The elephants, you know.” Smythe continued to stand there, humming tunelessly beneath his breath.

Eager to continue his search before his employer trundled in, Gerard drew on the rapidly failing reserves of his patience to gently inquire, “May I help you, Smythe?”

The butler snapped to attention, clicking his heels. “I came to inform you that Admiral Snow has stepped out for the morning.”

“The morning?” Gerard echoed cautiously. “As in the
entire
morning?”

“The entire morning, sir. He requested that we not wait lunch for him.”

Gerard eyed Smythe suspiciously. Why had the butler taken such pains to inform him of Snow’s extended absence? Was this some sort of trap? Was the Admiral going to spring out of the chimney and yell “Ah ha!” to catch him at some perfidy, real or imagined? His grim fantasies were only fueled when Smythe made it a point to draw the carved teak doors shut behind him, enclosing Gerard in the hazy gloom of Lucien Snow’s sanctuary. The distinctive fragrance of the Admiral’s pipe smoke lingered on the air.

Stroking his freshly shaven chin, Gerard paced like a cat left to guard the cream, too skeptical to believe his good fortune. The immaculate surface of the Admiral’s desk beckoned to him, the polished brass of the hourglass winking a naughty temptation. The secretary
towered over him, its shadowy cubbyholes begging to unfold their secrets. He might never have another opportunity such as this.

Drawing off his boots, he eased open the library doors, edged his way through the deserted entrance hall, and bounded up the curving staircase to the second floor.

Gerard’s knuckles hung poised in the air, an inch from Lucy’s door. He slowly lowered his hand to the brass knob. Why give her an opportunity to refuse him? He’d already concocted a lame fable about a suspicious character lurking about the lawn beneath her window. He had no intention of telling her the suspicious character was him.

He turned the knob, prepared to tactfully, if grudgingly, withdraw if he caught her in some alluring state of dishabille. But as the door swung open, granting him entrée to the deserted room beyond, he wasn’t sure he could have retreated had someone held a gun to his temple.

His weighted steps lured him in like a man who had wandered in a barren desert for decades only to stumble upon an abandoned harem, a perfumed bower ripe with the memories and promises of sensual pleasures. His starved senses reeled beneath the subtle assault.

Lucy’s refuge was the antithesis of the spartan masculinity that pervaded the rest of the house. A welcoming fire crackled on the brick hearth. Swags of ivory lace draped the testered bed, enveloping the rumpled bedclothes in a gauzy veil. The furniture was inlaid with satinwood, its delicate lines curved and embellished with fanciful curlicues. Plush rugs of dizzying varieties overlapped the floor as if every rug that had ever dared to mar the Admiral’s polished planking had found its way here, rescued by Lucy’s generous hand.

Gerard grinned as he circled the room, delighted by his discovery—the flawlessly groomed, impeccably coiffed, never-a-ribbon-out-of-place Miss Snow was an abject slob! Captivated by the room’s untidy charm, Gerard ran his palm over the unmade bed, tweaked the toe of a pink stocking slung brazenly over the canopy, buried his fingers in the seductive waterfall of silk and lace spilling from the half-opened drawers of the wardrobe.

An abject slob with decidedly decadent taste in undergarments, he mused, caressing the creamy silk of a champagne blond chemise between his forefinger and thumb. He surrendered it with lazy reluctance. It would hardly do for Lucy to return to find him fondling her intimate apparel.

Pausing at the cluttered dressing table, he brought the unstoppered mouth of a cut-crystal bottle to his nostrils, dizzied by the clean, lemony fragrance that was so distinctly Lucy. A wheeled tea cart, tarnished with age, crouched near the window seat, its surface littered with miniature clay pots overflowing with a profusion of blooming gloxinia.

Gerard stroked one of the fuzzy, veined leaves, thinking how like their mistress they were, prickly in appearance, but sheer velvet to the touch. A patchwork quilt lay abandoned in the window seat. He fingered its frayed hem, smiling to imagine Lucy engulfed in its cozy depths. As he let the edge of the quilt fall, a fat sketchbook tumbled to the floor.

Gerard squatted to examine it. He shuffled through page after page, the shame he should have felt at such blatant prying suppressed by pure amazement.

No insipid watercolors these, but charcoal sketches, etched in bold, passionate strokes. He’d never dreamed the delicate blooms of a gloxinia could be
reproduced with such sensual violence. He laughed aloud to discover tucked among the floral sketches a crude caricature of a Royal Navy officer worthy of Hogarth in his heyday. Lucy would undoubtedly deny it if he pointed out how much the bloated prig resembled the Admiral.

His laughter faded as he flipped the page to find a young woman, little more than a girl, with the same bell-shaped flowers twined in her dark hair. Her mischievous smile was marred by an aura of indefinable sadness.

The sketchbook was snatched from his hands. “Mr. Claremont! What in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

Lucy stood over him, her hair damp, her silk negligee clinging to her body in all the wrong places. She hugged the sketchbook to her chest as if to shield both it and herself from his hungry gaze. Gerard’s excuses failed him, driven from his mind by that haunting sketch and the lemon-scented musk of Lucy’s freshly washed skin.