The Countess Conspiracy (36 page)

Violet frowned, turning away from him. “Even if that’s true,” she said, “that’s only because they think you’re me. That’s a circle that keeps turning, Sebastian.”

“If you’d been the one delivering lectures, you would have managed to be a little more circumspect.”

“Maybe.” Violet shrugged. “Probably not. You’ve always been a dab hand at turning aside criticism with laughter. I saw what you did with that barrel today. It was brilliant. I don’t think one of them understood that pointed little comment you made about feeding the poor like good Christians.” She snickered.

“Violet.” He took her hands, pressed them between his. “Take this seriously. They will send you to prison. They’ll do it to silence you, to silence
me.
I can’t let that happen to you.”

Silence pressed all around them in the darkness, and suddenly she was that dark, still oak once more.

“Oh?”

“There’s something I don’t talk about much,” Sebastian said. “Something…well. Do you remember when my sister Catherine passed away?”

“Thrown by a horse,” Violet said.

“Yes. Well.” He took a deep breath. “I was the last one to see her. I was up in the hayloft examining a litter of kittens when she came into the stables. She was in tears, over what I don’t know. I sat up there watching her cry, thinking to myself that if I showed her the kittens, she would cheer up and smile.”

“Sebastian, you must have been five years old at the time.”

He shrugged. “I decided not to say anything for the most foolish of reasons: I was too occupied to climb down the ladder. If I called out to her, I would startle the mother. And they were just tears, after all. So I kept quiet and watched her go.”

“You cannot blame yourself.”

Blame? It was nothing so simple. He shook his head. “No, not that. But she was distraught and not watching what she was doing, not paying attention. If she’d been paying attention…”

“It was a terrible accident,” Violet told him. “You had no way of knowing what would happen. And even if you’d spoken up, it still might have gone the same way.”

“Maybe.” Sebastian turned away. “But then, maybe not. All I could think when I heard was,
next time, show her the kittens.”
He took a deep breath. “And so I suppose that’s what I have done ever since. If I can make people laugh, I do. I don’t like watching anyone walk away from me unhappy. It makes me feel all wrong. But if I can make someone smile, I will.”

She made a noise of protest, but he set his fingers on her lips.

“It bothers me,” he said, “to see one person frown if I can change that around. Violet, how do you think I will feel if you’re charged tomorrow? If you’re sentenced to a term of prison?”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Violet said. “The lawyers say that peeresses, so long as they remain unmarried after their husband’s death, cannot be charged with felonies except in the House of Lords.”

“The lawyers,” Sebastian said grimly, “also said they can still charge you with a misdemeanor.”

She was silent for a longer moment. “Well, if they do, there’s nothing I can do except respond to the charges, is there?”

He let out a breath. “There is something more. If you can’t escape this through whatever legal mumbo-jumbo Oliver and Robert and Minnie are cooking up, tell them it was all a joke. That I put you up to it. That you were foolish enough to trust me, but that I was to blame.”

She became very quiet and pulled away from him. She turned her face toward her own home, where a solitary window blazed with light. Her jaw twitched.

“What,” she finally said with a touch of scorn, “and have you sent to prison in my stead? As if I would do anything so craven.”

He’d known she would balk. He’d expected it.

“Besides,” she said, “that would merely implicate us both.”

“They’ll leap at the chance,” he said. “I’ll offer to plead guilty—to raise no contest at all—so long as they allow you to walk free.”

“That presupposes that I would tell a lie to save my skin.” She pulled her hands from his. “You know me better than that.”

“First,” he said, “it’s not a lie—just the truth, mangled only a tiny portion.”

“Stretched like taffy.” She snorted.

“Second.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the thing he’d brought along. “Second, Violet, for what it’s worth—no, I didn’t expect you to go along with my plan. And so…” He held out the marble he’d saved from Oliver’s wedding.

She stared at it glinting in his palm in the moonlight. “Even marbles have limits,” she breathed.

“The limits of friendship.” He stared at her, willing her to understand. “Between the two of us, Violet, how deep does our friendship run?”

She turned away from him, putting one hand to her forehead in distress.

“How many years have we known each other? All our lives. How many years have I loved you? More than I can count. It hasn’t been long since you’ve begun to…” He swallowed. “Since you’ve begun to return my deeper feelings, I know, but—”

“Longer than you might imagine.” Her voice was husky.

“If you care anything for me, let me make a difference. Don’t make me watch you get dragged away when I can change matters. Let me do this for you.”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “But I must watch
you
go?”

“Don’t think of it that way. They can’t hurt me if I know you’re safe,” he told her. “You are my heart, Violet. You’re the most important person in my life. Let them throw me in prison and I’ll go with a smile and a quip. I could not bear it if I had to watch you suffer.”

“But—”

He took the marble and pressed it into her palm. “You made the rules yourself, Violet. With a marble, I can ask for anything within the bounds of friendship. To betray this would blacken the name of everything that stands between us. Take the marble, Violet, and let me do this for you.”

She stared at the glass ball in his hand for a moment as if staring into the eyes of a snake. Then she shut her eyes and closed her fingers around it with a grimace.

“Thank God,” he said. “You don’t want to know what I would have had to do if you hadn’t agreed.”

She didn’t say anything, just slid the marble into her skirt-pocket.

“So.” He swallowed. “I suppose we should try to get some sleep.”

She set one hand on his chest. “Do you really think that after you told me that, I am going to let you walk away from me?”

He swallowed. His throat felt dry. “I don’t want to impose.”

“Impose.” Her lip curled. “That marble is an imposition. But you tell me you love me, that you’ll do anything to keep me safe, and you expect me to turn around and go to my bed alone? What kind of rake
are
you?”

“The kind of rake who loves you.”

She turned the marble around in her palm, watching it roll in the moon. She didn’t say anything—didn’t respond to that declaration, didn’t take his hand. She simply stared at the marble, as if wondering what to do with it.

“Sebastian,” she finally said, still not looking at him, “if you were to have intercourse with me and you absolutely did not want to get me with child, what would you do?”

A shot of heat went through him. He wanted to grab her to him. But she still wasn’t looking at him.

“I’d use a sheath.” His voice rasped in his throat. “They’re not completely effective, so I’d also pull out before the moment of crisis. Even that has risks. They’re not large, but…” He groped for sanity. “Violet, I don’t want…” But he
did
want. He wanted with an intense hunger. “If you didn’t wish to—you said…”

And now she did look up at him. He wasn’t sure what he saw in her eyes. Sadness. Hunger. She smiled at him, a long, slow, tremulous smile that seemed to wrap around the very core of his being.

“I’ve been afraid,” she said in a low voice. “So afraid. Afraid that because that one act was a slap in the face from my husband, that it could not be an act of love from you. That it would always be beyond me.”

“Violet.” His whole being had caught on fire. He wanted to draw her to him, to kiss her, but if he did, he didn’t know that he could stop.

“Take me to your bed,” she whispered, “and prove all my fears wrong.”

Chapter Twenty-four

“I
DIDN’T ASK TO SHOULDER THE BLAME
to get your gratitude,” Sebastian was saying as they made their way back to his house.

In the dark of the night, little brambles caught at Violet’s skirts, tugging her backward as if even the shrubbery wanted her to know that this was a terrible idea.

“I did it because—”

Violet turned to him. They’d come to the edge of the trees that separated their estates; up a wide, grassy hill she could see his home. She held up a hand and laid it against his lips.

“Sebastian,” she said.

He halted. “I’m trying. Violet, I don’t want to cause you harm, not in any way.”

“I can’t live my life without any risk,” she said. “I tried. A life without risk is one where I tell myself I’m not worthy of taking a chance. It’s a life without hope for the future.”

Tomorrow, he’d remember that she’d said those words. He’d put quite another cast on them. But for tonight…

“If things go as planned”—and planned by whom, Violet deliberately did not say—“I might not see you, not for a long while.”

“Surely that’s overly dramatic. At most they’ll ask me to enter a plea; the trial itself will come somewhat later, and in the meantime…”

“Telling me that we have one night or three makes no difference. It’s still not enough. Not enough for me.” She took a deep breath. She hadn’t felt so vulnerable in the lecture hall when she was about to change the world. “Sebastian, I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”

He’d asked her to let him shoulder the blame in the name of their friendship, in the name of everything that lay between them. She reached up to him, putting her hands on his shoulders. He was tall, his flesh warm under her palms, and he bent to her.

He’d never asked her for a kiss. He’d never asked to take her to bed. The only thing he’d ever requested of her was that she let him keep her safe. She wouldn’t tell him that she loved him—not when she was on the verge of denying him the one thing he’d begged of her.

“Tomorrow—” he began. She set her fingers on his lips.

“No talk of tomorrow. I want tonight.”

He let out a heated breath and pulled her to him. “God, Violet. I should say no. I should—”

“You should take me to bed.”

He didn’t, though. He took hold of her elbows and pulled her to him. His lips found hers and they kissed in the dark. She was hungry, and yet nothing satisfied her. He tasted absurdly of coffee and cream: rich, bitter, sweetened with a generous helping of sugar. Like coffee, his kiss didn’t steal her senses. It enlivened them, made her aware of the crackle of little twigs under their feet, the cool night breeze that tickled her neck.

She was all too aware of his hands, sliding slowly down her spine, cupping her buttocks and pressing her to him. Through her gown—thank God she’d changed to something informal, something that needed no crinoline—his hips found hers.

He was hard with want, and the thought of his taking her…

Just a hint of fear, quickly banished. Sebastian had never been one to take—just to give and give and give. Well, there was one thing she wouldn’t let him give her.

She’d take his sweet, tender kisses, his lips enfolding hers over and over. She’d take the brush of his hands against her body, skin on fabric, warming her to the core. But she would never let him give her safety, not at the expense of her own heart.

“Violet, love,” he whispered to her. “My most wonderful Violet.”

“Sebastian.”

No, he wouldn’t be the only one to give. She pulled away—but only to take his hand and lead him to his home. They crept through it like criminals, sneaking through his study door and then up the servants’ staircase, avoiding the lights of the library where their friends were no doubt still awake and arguing. They slipped into his bedchamber, hand in hand; when he’d swung the door shut, he kissed her again.

“Stop me,” he said. “Stop me any time you wish—”

“I don’t.”

He undid her gown with a few twists of her buttons, sliding the cloth past her shoulders, down her body to land on the floor. Then he kissed her again. But this time, it wasn’t just his mouth on hers, his hands sliding down the fabric of her gown. This time, his hands made their way up her chest, leaving trails of electricity. Her corset laced in front; his fingers were deft against her skin, loosening, undoing, until that garment also fell away.

Then only her shift lay between his hands and her breasts. His fingers rose, cupping her bosom, and twisting cleverly, doing something that sent a spark of pure lust through her. He did it again and again, and then, when she was just coming to expect that rough friction, he leaned down and took her nipple in his mouth through the fabric.

Her knees buckled. “Sebastian,” she whispered, grabbing hold of him. “Oh, God. Sebastian. You haven’t taken off your clothing.”

“Well,” he whispered back, “that’s your task, isn’t it?”

She tried. Oh, she tried. But his trousers stymied her in the darkness. Her fingers scarcely had a chance to grip before he was removing her petticoat. Cool air touched her legs—momentarily—and then, before she could manage to undo even the first button, he pulled away.