My Pleasure (29 page)

“And what of you, Miss Nash? What do you want?”

“To be known. To be valued. To have value.” He realized she’d spoken without thought, from the heart, by the way her skin grew dusky in the moonlight and by the way she averted her face, as if embarrassed by her words.

I know you. I value you.

He turned his face toward the doorway leading into the ballroom. Society beauties, speculative matrons, and, bedamned! even a few respectable ladies had spent the evening casting interested glances and coy smiles at him. And the only woman he wanted to give him those come-hither glances and inviting smiles considered him a womanizer and now knew him to be a fraud.

Beside them the two older women had finally grown weary of their innocent and public conversation and were re-entering the ballroom. He smiled, amused.

“You will be celebrated,” Helena said quietly. “You are being celebrated.”

“Yes. Strange, is it not?” he asked carelessly.

He did not look back at her. The desire to touch her, to pull her into his arms and force a response from her was nearly overwhelming. All night he had played the good heir role, speaking and bowing and scraping to people he didn’t give a damn for, just to see her, just to ease his own anxiety over the danger she might be in. Helena Nash was the only one he cared about and the only one who seemed not particularly impressed. How could he impress her?

Oh, he understood well that she responded to him physically. His sexual appetite was healthy, as was hers. But the magnetism between them frightened her, his attraction for her scared her. He must be careful, go slow. Be patient. Even if it killed him.

He looked around at her in profile. Her expression had resumed its serene beauty, but there was a tension in the fingers curled on her lap.

“We should leave,” she said, standing up with sudden deliberation. “If we are seen together much longer I will be supposed shockingly ambitious.”

No. He rose to his feet, following her to the door. No. She reached the entry and paused, and he took advantage, slipping to her side and reaching out, taking her arm and pulling her roughly to him, into the shadows.

“No,” he said as she stared up at him. “They will think I am overly base.”

“But you’re not. You are to be the marquis of Cottrell.”

He gazed down at her, feeling green and foolish and raw. And so damnably exposed. “And you are to be my grave little instructress in the niceties of social behavior? I see. Tell me, then, what does a newly found heir to a great title do when he finds himself alone in a garden with a woman he most ardently wants to kiss?”

He heard her swallow, saw the deep pools of her pupils swallowing the blue discs of her irises as she stared up at him.

“He releases her and walks away.” She didn’t sound confident, though, and that gave him hope.

“Well,” he said with a tender smile, “I am new to this role and thus bound to make mistakes.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her with a thoroughness that left her breathless. And only then did he release her.

But it was she who walked—no, ran, away.

Hidden in the shadows of the old musician’s gallery, Viscount DeMarc tilted his head against the wall and closed his eyes. But he could still see them, Munro dark and elegant as Lord Sin as he bowed above her, moonlight and gold spun into ethereal beauty so bright it hurt his eyes to see her. Helena! My Helena!

He kissed her. He kissed her as if he would drink her into his very body, and she yielded, for one long moment she flowed into his arms and then, abruptly, Munro released her and stepped back.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t even touch. They didn’t have to touch. They were touching so many other ways, his darkness seeping like a stain into her bright, pale beauty, and she opening to it, embracing it, absorbing his hard, dark soul. No. No, no, no. It was an abomination. A desecration of their union.

She belonged to him, damn her.

Did Munro think he was just going to give her to him? Did she think she could just leave him?

No.

Ram Munro loved Helena Nash.

The other man who’d been watching sighed, feeling a little wistful, a little sentimental. The poor fool actually loved her.

It would never work, of course. She did not trust him, and Ram Munro, well, he was as damaged goods as a man can be who’d crawled out of hell. Ram just didn’t know it. But he knew it. Aye.

In a very real way, he was doing Ram a favor in getting him killed. He wouldn’t have to suffer watching his beloved’s admiration turn to hate, realize that he was doomed to fail her, that he could never be what she needed. Never be what he’d promised to be, never fulfill the sacred oaths he’d taken, promises to old regimes and new…

The man frowned. He was getting confused. His head was swimming with memories and images, and it was hard sometimes to sort out which ones were real and which ones born during long hours of mental torment.

With a hiss of despair, he yanked off his glove and dug in his pocket for the thin penknife he always carried to help him focus. To help him concentrate. It was a trick he’d learned long ago in France. With a sigh of relief he jabbed the needle-sharp tip into the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb. At once, his thoughts cleared. Another little twist and lucidity returned, and with it sweet reason.

Ram was trying to remake himself. A man couldn’t remake himself. Wasn’t that what the Church taught? A man must die before he could be reborn again? Like he’d been reborn. Unfortunately he’d been reborn into a world still populated by those who’d known him as another. He couldn’t allow that. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his new life looking over his shoulder.

So they must die. All of them.

It wasn’t as if this was easy for him. He looked at Ram Munro and he was filled with admiration, an almost paternal sense of pride. He’d done that. He’d been responsible in part for that proud bearing, that lethal skill with a sword, that hard, determined heart.

Was it any wonder he couldn’t bring himself to kill them? But he couldn’t. Not himself. He’d taken vows, too, after all.

And he wasn’t a traitor.

VOLTA:

a turning or rotation of the fencer’s body

“GOOD. Now, follow the line.”

Fired to greater efforts by Ram’s infrequent praise, Helena straightened her arm, her blade subtly angling downward. It was her seventh lesson at the salle over the last two weeks, and each time her pleasure in them grew. She liked the physicality of the sport, and under Ram’s formal tutelage had come to appreciate it as a game not only of ballet-like artistry and precision but of cunning.

After that devastating kiss in the garden, she’d been hesitant to venture here again. But now she was glad she had. He had greeted her without any hint that his kiss had been anything more than a momentary aberration, and she had come to assume that it had been more an angry thumbing his nose at the situation in which he found himself than an impulse engendered by her irresistibility. Slowly, she had relaxed. And so had Ram.

He had made no further attempt to seduce her. Yes, he laid his hands on her, and often at that, but his touch was impersonal. Worrisomely, she could not claim the same indifference in her response. But every time he wrapped his fingers around her wrist to position her blade, or clasped her shoulder to turn her body, or tilted her chin with his thumb, no matter how inconsequential or fleeting his touch, her body reacted as though she was being caressed by her lover. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.

Added to her pleasure was the unexpected boon of Lord DeMarc’s disappearance. For over a week now, she had not seen him at Lady Tilpot’s soirees, nor had she caught any glimpse of him lurking about waiting for her to appear. She was relieved, if not yet confident, that he had finally come to his senses. He’d sounded anything but sane that night he’d caught her in the mews behind Lady Tilpot’s townhouse.

Still, as a reprieve it was a welcome one. But Helena realized that even if DeMarc should never appear in her life again, she would be loath to give up these hours spent with Ram. They were stimulating, amusing, and wholly satisfying.

Only after the lessons had ended would he discard his instructional manner. Then he insisted she stay for tea and charmed her thoroughly as they were being served by his grim, one-eyed factotum. He amused her with stories about growing up in the Highlands and made her pensive as he told her about being orphaned and brought to St. Bride’s.

And he asked her questions. Questions about her sisters, about her life with Lady Tilpot. He led her into expressing her opinions on the latest brouhaha in Parliament, the Irish question, and the latest fashions. He challenged her on whom she admired and what she did not. And always, he listened as she spoke, as if what she said really mattered to him. She liked their growing friendship, a strange term for one’s relationship with a handsome rake, but she could not think to call it anything else.

But he did not look at her with that lazy sexual awareness she knew signaled a man’s interest, and he did not make any attempt to touch her. Indeed, he seemed to have lost all interest in her as a woman. She should have been glad. She should—

“No! Where have you gone, Miss Nash? Because clearly you are not here.”

Her blade had dipped during those last uncomfortable thoughts. She blushed, and with an impatient sound he slapped away her blade, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her arm straighter.

“This is no way to teach swordsmanship,” he muttered. “No footwork, no foundation, simply slashing and jabbing and poking. I am appalled that I agreed to do this. You have brought me to a new low, Miss Nash, are you pleased?”

“I’m sorry.”

“In fact,” he said, suddenly fierce, “this could well get you killed.”

“But…”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Nash. An attacker will come fast, and he will not be abiding by any rules.”

Of course he was right. She had known all along that her goal was unachievable. But knowing even a little had given her some measure of confidence. At least she had not simply been waiting to become a victim.

“I know,” she answered in exasperation. “But I have to do something. I can’t just…I have to do something!”

He looked at her with an unreadable expression.

“Passata sotto,”he finally said. “It might be construed as a sort of secretbotte, except there is no such thing.” He went on, his tone vexed. “The only advantage a vulnerable person has when being attacked is that he is vulnerable. His attacker will not expect him to fight. The passata sotto is ungainly, difficult to recover from, and easy to parry, but only if one expects it. Let me demonstrate. Lunge at me, straight at me.”

He held his blade in a casual line, the tip low. She hesitated. Oh, she knew Ram could parry anything she presented, and her blade tip was well buttoned, but she did not like the idea of purposely lunging at him in his current defenseless stance.

“Do it.”

She did it. She lunged forward as he’d taught her, but Ram, rather than forcing her blade aside, lunged even deeper, at the same time canting sideways and dropping, his free hand flat on the floor, so that his back extended leg, torso, and sword arm formed one long, contiguous line, the end of which, the tip, lay against her ribcage. It could have been embedded in her lungs just as easily.

She looked at the tip dinting her gown. “But that’s marvelous! I had no idea you could do something like that.”

“It tends to be the last point in a bout,” Ram said dryly, rising and dusting his hand off on his pant leg. “One either wins with it or loses.”

“Will you use it in the tournament this weekend?”

“I have decided to withdraw from the tournament,” he said. “There are other preparations I have to make. Time is essential, and my lack of means is no longer so pressing a concern.”

“Preparations to meet the guard from the French prison?” she asked soberly. She could not dismiss a little disappointment. She would have dearly loved to see Ram duel.

“Yes,” he said uncomfortably. “Now, take off your dress.”

She blinked.

“You can’t execute a passata sotto in a dress, Miss Nash. I shall have Gaspard find something. Sometimes the younger patrons leave items, and Gaspard cleans them.”

He looked very grim. Far from the gentleman who’d nuzzled her neck and told her to relax into his arms. He yanked on the bell pull and then paced to the window and stood looking out at the street below, his hands clasped tightly behind his back.

That something had angered him was obvious, but as she had no idea of what it could be, she, too waited. It was not long before Gaspard appeared and, hearing his master’s rather odd command, left without batting his eye in search of the requested garment.

“Do you have any idea the extent to which I would go to fulfill my pledge to your family?” Ram finally asked without turning.

“As far as teaching me a passata sotto?” she asked, attempting to cajole him from his present mood. Ram Munro did not have “moods”; his sardonic demeanor was as integral to his character as his Lucifer good looks and skill with a sword.

He turned around. He would not be cajoled. “Can you not at least find it in you to confide in me? Have I ever done anything that demonstrated to you that I am not to be trusted?”

“No!” she said, and then, slowly, “The day after I came to your salle the first time, do you recall it?”

He nodded, his gaze watchful.

“Was that the same day you fought duels with eight consecutive men in order to defend a lady’s name?”

She’d caught him off guard. No one was supposed to have known about that.

He stiffened. “How sad that honor means so little amongst the better classes these days,” he said calmly. “I see I shall have to revisit the gentlemen in question and—”

“No,” she interrupted. “That won’t be necessary. No one knows the lady’s name. Only that a now-famous duel was fought. A man, supposedly so drunk he never even heard the original slight, was roused enough to witness it.”

“I see.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “Was that lady me, Mr. Munro?