To Seduce an Angel (19 page)

Privately, she supposed that Luc himself would turn against her when her whole scandalous past lay exposed. He was a gentleman above reproach, and her past was like the wretched furnishings of some tenement where the people had been turned out, everything ugly and cheap heaped in a cart and dragged through the streets. She could not bear to see his love fade, so she had sent him back to France.

She had never expected to see him again. One really could not refuse a man more than once. But just last week he had come to the house on Hill Street, her last remaining property, so much had been sold in the fight against Wenlocke. Luc had burst in, really, and declared his love and told her to put an end to his long wait. He wanted to grow old with her. They could live wherever she wished.

When she began to protest that he could not be serious, he did not know what he was asking, he did not know who she was, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her in that way he had, a man who knew his own mind. And she'd responded, come alive in his embrace like the wanton she had always been.

She was fifty, a grandmother. Really one was supposed to be over such desires and not to feel in one's breasts and one's belly the warm, rude stirrings of life. She had almost come to believe in her own respectability during the long battle with Wenlocke. She had lived a sober, discreet life for three long years, conscious that she hardly deserved the blessing of Kit's return and that she must do everything in her power to show that she was grateful, grateful, grateful to have him back. She was no longer wealthy. Though she did not think her sons would let her sink into poverty, she felt awkwardly dependent in relation to her major. He had vineyards and a chateau. A crumbling ruin, he claimed.

Her sons, the Sons of Sin, the papers called them, had triumphed over all her flaws and errors. They had become the men they were meant to be. She could not even regret her lovers, Candover and Oxley, because they had given her such sons. Xander, who should not have forgiven her, but had. Will, for whom in some way she had feared the most, and Kit, who remained a mystery to all of them, but who now as Daventry—she must remember to think of him as Dav—was more like his father than he would ever know.

And his dear sweet father. He had loved Sophie so differently from Candover or Oxley. She knew what her major wanted of her. He wanted her to put Granville in the past, too, the gallant young husband she had loved and sent off to India. Granville had seized love. They both had. But he had seized something more, the chance to be active in the world, as if his father had held him back for so long that once freed, he had to fill every moment with the chances longed denied him.

Her son could not know that the room he gave her for this visit was the very one in which she had spent her wedding night. She sank under the weight of her own past down on the silk-covered bench at the foot of the bed.

Granville's family had buried him at Wenlocke with little ceremony according to the papers. She had scoured them for an account of it and found only a few lines. At the time their marriage remained a secret, so she had received nothing of his, only the news that he was no more.

The house brought it all back. Rolling up that drive in Granville's carriage with his ring on her finger and his babe in her belly and the sun on the golden stones of his house, her future had seemed assured, her sorrows banished. On her long ago wedding day she believed she had sailed into a calm harbor. His people had welcomed her, and together they had visited his ancient nurse and left the treasured records of their marriage in her safekeeping.

Even now after twenty years it seemed a terrible injustice to cease to mourn him, to accept this new love that had come to her, to have her life filled with sons and grandsons. Someone ought to go on loving Granville as he deserved.

Tomorrow, her major said. Tomorrow. The little note ended.
Meet me in the stables at ten.
Tomorrow she would decide.

She rose and slipped the note into the bodice of her plum silk gown. She knew that it showed her fair skin and dark hair to advantage. She checked her mirror for gray. Finding only one strand, she tucked it under its darker fellows.

THEY were all at dinner. Below stairs and behind green baize doors, the staff rushed about, busied with dozens of serving tasks for the large party in the dining room and the guests to come for the evening's dancing.

The unfamiliar faces of extra maids and footmen made Emma uneasy, but Mr. and Mrs. Creevey seemed to have everything in hand. Emma herself passed unnoticed amid the bustle.

She returned to the schoolroom, and wrote again on each slate the words she had chosen for the boys. Her new plan, the best one so far, was to slip away at the exact moment Daventry's family left. Wallop and his men would watch the family's progress through the town. Emma would circle the other way and be a day, a night, and another morning on her journey before Wallop missed her and began to search for her. It was a sensible plan, but Tatty would say don't cry fresh fish before you've cast your net. Emma was not yet on her way.

The schoolroom door opened and closed behind her. Before she could turn, a pair of strong arms captured her and pulled her into a tight embrace.
Daventry
.

“Meet me on the roof tonight.” He kissed her under her ear.

“But your family, your guests.”

He loosened his hold just enough to let her twist to face him. “Don't let my family daunt you.”

“Mrs. Creevey advised me to stay out of sight, you know.”

“When everyone retires. You know the door. Wear something warm.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he stopped her words with a brief ardent kiss. “Be there.”

Then he was gone.

Emma put down the slate she still held. She should not meet him. She should sleep as soundly as she could in the last bed she was likely to sleep in for weeks. She should not let him think her a willing partner in madness. He should know that she at least was sensible. She should put the idea out of her mind and not think of her old cloak that Daventry had tied beneath her chin with his warm touch.

 

 

DAV lifted his glass and looked at his family. They had gathered in the drawing room for some time together. In half an hour Dav's guests would arrive, four local families, whose curiosity at least overcame their skepticism about his origins. Apparently his title made them willing to overlook his own dubious past but not his mother's. His neighbors would come to dance with the new marquess but would not dine with his scandalous parent. The thought of the snub to Sophie tightened his jaw.

Below in the hall the hired musicians tuned their instruments. Two or three of the rooms in his mother's town house would easily fit in his drawing room. But his brother's growing families and his own boys peopled it quite nicely.

On a gold sofa his mother had Will's drowsy twins on either side of her looking at a picture book. Her major was playing chess simultaneously with Lark and Swallow. It occurred to Dav briefly that his mother was avoiding her admirer, who had just returned to England.

Nate Wilde, Will's reformed thief, who outdid them all in sartorial dash, was teaching the other boys and Xan's oldest the finer points of lottery tickets amid much nudging and some shouting. The smallest babe was in bed, and Dav knew that his sister-in-law Cleo would leave soon to check on him. His grand house made her uneasy at times to be so distant from her offspring. But at the moment what he could feel was the awareness vibrating in the air between Helen and Will and Cleo and Xander. The four of them were listening to a story a rather sheepish Charlie Spencer was telling. But that pull between his brothers and their wives felt to Dav like a palpable thing, reminding him of the one person absent from the room. The thought that he'd kept at the edge of his mind, refusing to acknowledge it, shoved its way to the center.
Where could he make love to Emma?

The trouble with entertaining his married brothers, he realized, was that it reminded him of his solitary state and his empty bed. Everyone else had a room, except his mother and her major, an extraordinarily honorable fellow. His mother's sons possessed her passionate nature.

Xan's gaze caught his, and Dav roused himself to attend to Charlie's story. Constables had arrested the boy for distributing Plaice's leaflets on contraception to workingwomen on Bread Street. At seventeen his young brother-in-law was eager to transform the world. He idolized both his sister, Cleo, who now served on the board of Evershot's bank, and who had become quite a financial expert through the bullion crisis, and Xan, who continued to push for more light and more clean water for London.

Charlie shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, I'd do it again. Besides, it's not uncommon to be arrested in our family. Xan's been arrested, after all.”

“Maybe there's a better way,” Xan suggested.

“The rights of women will be the subject of my first speech in Lords, you may be sure,” Charlie proclaimed.

“Bravo, Charlie.” Helen Jones raised her glass to him.

“Let's get you through university, first, before you take your place in Lords,” Cleo advised her younger brother.

The gold clocks on the mantel chimed the hour, and the family party broke up. Will clapped a hand on Dav's shoulder and told him, “The first applicants for your hand are at the door. Do the family proud, brother.”

Dav thought of the roof and Emma.

 

 

D
AVENTRY did dance. Emma stood behind three maids watching the elegant couples below.

The men wore black evening dress. The women's gowns shimmered in pale colors, and light flashed on pearls around white throats and jeweled combs in dark hair. It was a scene such as Tatty had described long ago when they had practiced dancing in their cell.

Below the gawking maids was one avid watcher of the scene, her dark head bent to take it in, a gentleman at her side.

In a moment the woman turned her face up to the gentleman, and Emma saw her dark expressive eyes full of intense pleasure. His mother had wanted to see him dance. She grasped her companion's hand and bright tears sparked in her eyes and trembled down her cheeks, and she laughed and dashed them away and laid her head against her companion's side. Emma thought she had never seen such perfect joy. It wounded her to see his mother's yearning for Daventry's happiness.

Three hours later the house was quiet again. Emma took no light. She could count her way to every door and stair in the north wing. In the little room, she reached for the door, opened it, and stepped out into a night so cold under a bottomless indigo sky that she reeled a little and felt the roof slope under her and her body tilt alarmingly when a strong grip caught her and pulled her back to a level surface.

“Steady, love. The roof slopes there.”

He was nearly invisible, as dark as the night itself. “What are you wearing?”

“An old coat of mine.”

He pulled her into an embrace, and she felt the velvet of it as he pressed her head against his shoulder. She recognized the scent of cold fires and stone from the day she had searched his closet. She knew what it meant. He had sipped a taste of his future tonight when he danced with his eligible young neighbors. Now the ragged coat and open roof pulled him back into the grip of the past.

He broke their embrace, but Emma held his arm for steadiness. “My legs are shaking.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Come just a few steps. We'll sit and look up at the stars.”

He took her hand and extended it to where she could touch the wall and led her from the shadows to the open roof. He lowered himself to sit, leaning his back against the upper wall and pulled her down to nest against him between his legs. He pulled his old coat up around them and leaned her head back against his shoulder. “Now you can look at the dizzying stars and not fall down.”

He was right. With his body around her and his warmth at her back, Emma felt anchored even if the stars seemed to swirl in the blue black depths above them. The illusion was of falling backward, but he was there to catch her, heat at her back.

Emma did not remember ever looking across such a distance. She counted steps and measured a path from one thread-marked doorknob to the next while he gazed from his towering roof into infinite distances.

“You can find your way anywhere by the stars,” he said.

You
can,
she thought.

His hands moved on her hips, settling her more deeply against him. His warm palm flat against her empty pocket paused.

“You didn't find your brother's keepsake?”

She swallowed the lump in throat. She hadn't found it or shamed the boys into returning it. “No.”