Nicholas took the glass in one strong white hand. “You’re absolutely right. Gentlemen don’t fight over doxies. But since the lady in question happens to be my intended bride, I think we might agree that the issue differs.”
Wrexham looked frankly appalled. “By all means, old boy. Must have been mistaken. My apologies…”
“Not good enough,” Nicholas said, and flung the contents of his glass in Wrexham’s florid face.
The room went still. Wrexham pulled a heavily laced handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his dripping face. The color had faded, with good reason. He couldn’t apologize again, not after so great an insult, one witnessed by a gossipy group of his peers. He looked up into Nicholas’s face, and knew he was going to die.
“I await your pleasure,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly.
Nicholas had planned to finish the business quickly, savagely, returning to Ghislaine’s arms before she even knew he was gone. He’d done his best to exhaust her, her own tormented emotions had contributed their share, and he had little doubt she’d sleep late into the day. He’d lost count of the duels he’d fought, some of them for trifling reasons. He disliked a man’s coat, he disliked another man’s voice. He’d killed, of course, the late Jason Hargrove being one of those. None of the men he’d fought, none of the men he’d killed, had deserved to die as much as my lord of Wrexham.
And therein lay the problem. Hatred blinded him. Rage weakened him. Savagery overwhelmed him. Venice was more relaxed about such affairs. If two English gentlemen wished to settle their affair of honor then and there, the tables were pushed out of the way, seconds were chosen, and the business commenced.
There was no satisfaction in the one-sided nature of the battle. Even half-mad with rage, Nicholas suffered not even the slightest scratch. He fought like a man possessed, and his skill with the sword, always estimable, took on a new power.
But Wrexham didn’t die well. It took too damned long, there was blood everywhere, and the damned coward wept at the end, his tears horrifying everyone.
“Damned bad ton,” Hopton, an acquaintance of Blackthorne’s who’d offered to serve as his second, had murmured when it was finally over. “He was bad ‘un, we all knew it. Never thought you’d be the noble avenger though, Blackthorne.”
“Amusing, isn’t it?” he said in a hollow voice, staring at the blood on his hands.
His friend glanced back at Wrexham’s body and shuddered. “Not terribly,” he said. “Death, even a deserved one, never amuses.”
Nicholas followed his gaze. “No,” he said. “It never does.” And he moved out into the Venetian dawn, with bloodstained hands, and bloodstained soul, to find absolution.
The room was murky when Ghislaine awoke, a greenish-blue pattern of light dancing on the ceiling. She lay still in the bed, absorbing the warmth and softness of the mattress, absorbing the unimaginable feeling of well-being that washed over her. She was alone in the bed; a sorrow, but one that couldn’t overtake her sheer animal pleasure.
She rolled over on her back, wincing at the unexpected discomfort between her legs, and stared at the pattern on the ceiling. The reflection of the canals outside, mixed with the light of dawn, made the room a shadowy, magic place.
Except that it was the glow of twilight, not dawn, she realized when she pulled the heavy linen sheet around her body and walked to the window. She’d slept the day away.
It wasn’t until she was sinking into a hot, scented bath that she looked down at her body. The dried streak of blood. The marks of his possession. She looked at her body, and she grew hot all over again. And she wondered where he was.
The servants had been busy. More rooms had been made habitable, including a formal dining room, now scrubbed and gleaming. She dressed simply, in an ivory day dress that clung to her body and moved with grace. It was odd, she thought, curling up on a settee in the main salon. She ought to be wearing crimson. After the most erotic night of her life, she suddenly felt almost virginal again, as she hadn’t felt in more than ten years.
Where was he? She wouldn’t, couldn’t believe he’d abandoned her, finally released her, after all her pleading. It would be vengeance indeed, to finally break through her defenses, only to cast her aside.
He’d told her he’d never let her go, and she found she believed him. Even though he insisted he was without honor, she believed him. She would be with him forever. Or she would die.
Taverner was worried. He insisted he had no knowledge of Nicholas’s whereabouts, but there was no disguising the anxiety in his swarthy, pinched face. That anxiety traveled straight to Ghislaine’s heart.
The servants retired for the night. Taverner went out in search of him, though he insisted he was simply going for a stroll. Ghislaine wandered through the palazzo like a lost soul, waiting.
It was past midnight when she went upstairs. The house was still and silent as she passed the door to her tiny room and headed straight for the master bedroom. The taper she carried cast little illumination, and she set it down on a table inside the door, reaching blindly for the candelabrum she knew provided most of the light.
“Leave it.” Nicholas’s voice came out of the darkness.
She wanted to weep in relief. She trembled for a moment, closing the door behind her and leaning against it. The one taper barely penetrated the shadows, and she could just see him, standing by the window, staring out into the starry night.
“Have you been here long?” she asked.
He turned and rested his back against the wall, and she could see the cool, mocking smile on his mouth, something she’d hoped never to see again. “Not long. He’s dead.”
For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. He was dressed in dusty black, his dark hair was tangled, and his face was pale with exhaustion and something far worse. “Who is?”
“Wrexham,” he said. “I’ve avenged your honor, my dear. Now who will avenge the harm I’ve done you?”
“You killed him?”
“Could you doubt it?” He made an abrupt, airy gesture. “I’m a man who knows how to kill. I seem to be outdoing myself though—two men in less than a season. Don’t look so distraught. It was in a duel. Plenty of witnesses to attest to the fairness of the situation. We won’t be hounded out of Venice.”
She could hear the despair in his voice, a despair she couldn’t quite understand. She moved across the room on silent graceful feet. And then she knew. Her wicked, heartless, half-mad Nicholas was human after all.
She came to him, reached up, and took his face in her hands. “Nicholas,” she whispered, “I am so sorry.”
He tried to jerk away from her gentle touch. “Sorry? Why should you be sorry? One more death, more or less, doesn’t make a whit of difference, and if anyone deserved to die, Wrexham was the man. His reputation was legion—you were neither the first nor the last of his victims, and hardly the most damaged. He deserved it. He deserved to die badly, to lie in his own blood and squeal for mercy, even as his life was draining away…”
“Oh, God,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck. “Nicholas…”
He pushed her away from him. “I find I’m not in the mood,” he said with a brittle laugh. “I’m not very good company right now. I kept away for as long as I could, but the amusements of Venice are not to my taste. I’ll relieve you of my presence…”
She caught his wrist, halting him. “Nicholas,” she said. “I love you.”
“Don’t,” he snapped at her, but he didn’t break free. “Don’t you understand? Haven’t I proved it, time and time again? I’m a monster, not worthy of love, not worthy of anything at all…”
“I love you,” she said again, catching his other hand, pulling his arms around her, pulling his tall, tension-racked body tight against hers. “I love you.”
He made a strange, choking noise, and dropped his head on hers. She felt the tremors shiver through him, and she held him, gently, as she would hold a wounded child, as she would have held her long-lost brother. And then the holding changed, and she moved her head up, and touched his mouth with hers.
He let her kiss him. He started to kiss her back, but she restrained him, unfastening the bone buttons on his dark shirt and pushing it from his shoulders. She found the tear she’d inflicted in his flesh, and she ran her lips down the length of the long scratch. She kissed his shoulder, his flat male nipples; she ran her mouth down the corded strength of his belly, and then she pressed her mouth against the fierce swell of flesh beneath his breeches.
He caught her shoulders, pulling her up close against him, and this time he kissed her, hard and deep, a kiss she answered. Her dress ripped as he tore it off her; his breeches ripped as she tore them open. She touched him, felt the silken strength of him, and he groaned, deep in his throat, pushing against her hands. His skin was smooth, hot, and she wanted him, needed him in ways only instinct told her. Before he could realize her intent she sank to her knees on the pile of scattered clothes and took him in her mouth. His hands dug into her shoulders, and he groaned again.
“No, Ghislaine. God, yes… yes!” he said, unable to control himself, thrusting into her sweetly questing mouth. And then he caught her, pulling her up, up, into his arms, moving back against the wall, positioning her there before he filled her, shoving himself in deeply. She held on, her eyes tightly closed, absorbing his fevered thrusts, unable to do more than shiver in pleasure. He turned and leaned back, supporting himself against the paneled wall as he held her, her legs wrapped around his back, and lifted her, up and down, faster now, faster and faster, deeper and stronger, and his lips were pulled back against his strong white teeth, and sweat covered their bodies, and suddenly she exploded, her body shattering into a million pieces. She heard his cry, and she kissed him, drinking it in, as her body drank his essence.
He managed to carry her over to the bed, collapsing with her on it, careful to support her weight as they fell. She wouldn’t, couldn’t let go of him. She felt lost, frightened, more moved than she had been in her entire life. It was as if he drained everything from her, will and power and anger and strength. She existed only for him. She cradled him in her arms, smoothing his long tangled hair, and she cried for him. And she could feel his own tears against her skin.
It was a dream, an idyll, soon shattered. They spent days in bed, learning each other’s bodies, making love, having sex; with heat and passion, with sweetness and tenderness. They used the bed, the floor, the table, the hip bath. They did it standing up, sitting down, frontward, backward, sideways. He couldn’t get enough of her, drowning himself in her body. And she couldn’t get enough of him.
Ghislaine knew it would come to an end. Knew it with the beat of her heart, the throb of her blood, the salt of her tears that had finally returned to her.
Sooner or later her past would catch up with her—through her drugged fog at Madame Claude’s she had seen a roomful of men bidding for the prize of deflowering her. Wrexham had won, but there would be others who remembered.
And Nicholas would have to kill them.
She couldn’t live with that. The destruction of a group of dissolute noblemen bothered her not one whit. But the destruction of one particular dissolute gentleman would kill her.
She’d thought he was so strong, so cold, so impervious to emotions other than his own rages. She’d imbued him with superhuman qualities, the better to keep her distance.
Instead she found herself caught in ways far more permanent than her recent captivity. The beautiful young man she’d once loved was still there, but so was the tormenter. The rake, the betrayer, the lost soul, the sulky little boy who needed her love so badly he didn’t even recognize his need.
She wanted to give him that love, to cradle his head against her breasts and comfort the dark torments of his soul. She wanted to be his lover, his mother, his partner, and his child.
But her presence in his life would be his final destruction, the one he’d courted and avoided for so long. He’d changed since Wrexham’s death. Opened to her, in ways she wouldn’t have believed possible.
The moments were small, unimportant, and therefore even more precious. The morning they lay in bed, the sunlight sending dappled shadows over their bodies as he tried to teach her piquet, only to have her beat him soundly once she’d mastered the intricacies of the game. The afternoon he coaxed her into a gondola, teasing her unmercifully as her complexion turned from white to green and back again before he finally made the gondolier pull over to the side of the canal. He’d carried her home then, through the streets, and if his gallant gesture made her even more seasick, she hadn’t told him.
There was the evening they ate cold chicken beneath the stars, and danced in darkness, Nicholas humming beneath his breath an old English country tune, as she relearned the waltz.
And there was the night she held him in her arms as he lay, sleepless, tormented, as the ghosts and guilts of a lifetime visited him once more.
She heard about it all without flinching. His boyhood pranks that grew steadily more serious, his father’s rejection and death, the young man he’d killed in a drunken duel.
She heard about the women he’d ruined, the fortunes he’d won and lost, the heedless, soulless pursuit of pleasure and forgetfulness. And one of the things he’d most wanted to forget was a fifteen-year-old French girl with her heart in her eyes.
She heard it all. And she loved him. Knowing it was not enough.
She’d been brought up in the church she’d abandoned to believe that confession was good for the soul. It truly seemed so for Nicholas. Once he’d told her every dark, hideous thing he’d done, a weight seemed to lift from him. He could look at her and smile, without a trace of mockery. He could even laugh. Which made her decision all the more devastating.
She would have to leave him. She had no choice, none whatsoever. When she left, he would rage once more. But there was a chance, just a chance, that he might find someone else, someone more worthy to love. And his own darkness would pass forever.