The Corrupt Comte (29 page)

Gaspard was a spy, but he was first and foremost a man, and it was time Claudia recognized the fact. Men possessed weaknesses and strengths in equal measure, as did women, and she was coming to realize that Gaspard’s weakness was his inability to own his identity.

She wondered if he knew who he was on the inside, and if that identity would ever be reflected on his outside, unfettered. They might spend their entire lives together without ever truly being
together
, and she didn’t know who would leave this world less confused: Gaspard or his reluctant wife.

And as the reluctant wife, it would be for the best if Claudia began erasing her own confusion. She needed to…accept. Accept her future. Accept her fiancé.

Accept who she was, and who she would be, with him.

“Gaspard,” she murmured cordially, greeting him.

“
Chaton.
”

Amaury snorted.

“S-so we have s-s-some m-money left over, do we?”

“Plenty.”

Amaury cleared his throat. “Plus shares in her mother’s family’s business, do not forget, when you have your first son.”

Something twisted in Claudia’s stomach, but Gaspard didn’t rise to the bait. “Indeed.” His clever gaze assessed the old man standing between them. “Monsieur Pascale,” he murmured, bowing respectfully.

“Gaspard Toussaint.” Her grandfather watched her fiancé through squinted eyes of a duller brown shade than Claudia’s. He slunk forward to poke at Gaspard’s arm, much as he’d poked Claudia moments earlier. “You’re no
comte
, are you?” Amaury asked, creaky tone accusatory.

Gaspard didn’t answer, nor did he look to Claudia to come to his defense. In
her
defense, she knew Amaury had lost his tenuous grip on reality years ago. Strange conversations were to be expected of mental deterioration.

Amaury didn’t disappoint. He dipped his head to Gaspard’s coat sleeve, sniffing at the iridescent satin. “You reek of commonness. I can smell the coarseness on you.”

Far from being insulted, Gaspard appeared intrigued. “Can you, now?” His French was so much quicker and easier on his tongue than his English, the English he always spoke to her.
For her?
“That’s an interesting trick.”

Another snort, this one more amused than derisive. “You’re marrying my granddaughter for her money.”

“Among other reasons.”

“My son told me about you.” Amaury stared up at him, a genuinely curious glint in his eyes. “You don’t bed women.”

Her lungs seized.

Those broad shoulders lifted in a negligent shrug. “I wouldn’t be so certain of that.” And then he looked at her, and she saw that he wasn’t cold or indifferent at all.

He was the heated memories of their nights together, personified. He was the promise of more nights, each and every night, of touch and touching and— “The furniture is c-coming this afternoon,” she blurted out. She, who never blurted anything.

Other than
I love you
.

“Wonderful,” he said in English, and the grooves bracketing his mouth softened to better match the warmth in his gaze. “How are you today?”

She hated herself for blushing. “Well, thank you.”

“That is also wonderful.”

Ignoring the exchange, Amaury began to circle Gaspard like a carrion beast. “You know who I am, yes?”

“I—”

“Or should I say, who I was?”

Gaspard nodded once, decisive.

Her grandfather dropped his voice then, and Claudia strained to hear his low, rapid French. “Once upon a time, I knew every secret there was to know in the court of Versailles. Do you know why?”

Gaspard’s French was equally quiet. “Why?”

“Because I could smell a secret from a league away, rotting the very skin of its bearer. I know lies when I hear them, and liars when I see them.” The old man paused, then stepped close to the
comte
, until they were nearly toe to toe. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

Another nod. “But not quite so prolific.”

Amaury wheezed out a cackling laugh. “Prolific. Yes, I was prolific. So prolific that eventually I learned the one secret guaranteed to see me tortured into sharing with those who should not know such things. I barely escaped.”

Secrets, always secrets. But this was more than Claudia had ever heard about her grandfather’s life before he’d whisked his only son to England—and relative safety—thirty years earlier, and she had to keep listening.

“But you did escape.” Gaspard leaned casually on a walking stick she hadn’t noticed before, his demeanor unthreatening, but she could see he listened as intently as she. “You have a life here.”

Amaury’s lip curled. “What sort of life do you imagine I have, boy? One of ease, or comfort, or safety?” He cut off Gaspard before her fiancé could respond. “I’ve been hunted for decades, always looking over my shoulder, waiting for the knife or the noose. Or worse, the hood and shackles dragging me back to France.” He spun to pierce Claudia with a fierce stare. “Do you remember the man in the garden, child?”

Ten years ago. It had been the last time she’d seen her grandfather, until he’d knocked on their door this week. She nodded, even as Gaspard stiffened, coming instantly alert. “What man?” He gripped the walking stick in one hand, the other bunching into a fist shrouded in the neat fall of lace from his cuff.

But Amaury had switched his attention to her, and for the first time in her life, she was scared of him. He didn’t look like the man who had taught her about the plants in the garden, how to cultivate them and extract their scents. He looked like…like…

Like a spy. A cold-blooded, deadly, dangerous spy.

Nervous, she held her ground.

Amaury crossed the empty parlor to her, arms over his chest. He didn’t seem to care that Gaspard followed, quick on his heels. “Do you remember what I did to that man?”

Neck snapped in the space of a breath.
“You k-killed him.”

Gaspard’s walking stick clattered to the floor. “You
killed
a man in front of Claudia?” There was thunder in his expression, violence in his voice.

“I protected her, when my life put her in danger,” Amaury retorted. “My idiot son opened a perfumery here in London—Pascale’s—and not even a week after the open-house announcement in the
Times
, there were agents hunting me again.” Every word was for Gaspard, though his gaze on Claudia never wavered. “I left London the day I killed that man. I drew every one of them away from my family, and led them on a wild chase across the Continent for years.
Years
, boy.” He turned his attention to Gaspard. “What will you do when your secrets threaten my granddaughter’s life?”

Gaspard insinuated his big body between them, a physical show of aggression, of protection. “Any danger to me, and to her, stayed in Paris. I made sure of that.” But Claudia heard the seed of doubt her grandfather had planted, and her unease multiplied.

“Fool.”

“
Grandpére
,” she murmured. “P-please. Be k-kind.” She settled a hand on Gaspard’s upper arm to move him aside, and a
zing
of tension shot through them both at the contact. They froze.

Amaury noticed and hummed under his breath. “Well, now. That’s interesting.” One bushy brow arched halfway up his forehead. “I suppose this changes things.”

As Claudia let her hand fall, Gaspard frowned. “Changes things how?”

“What will you give my granddaughter, boy? It’s her wealth and her house, is it not?” He shook his gray head. “We’ve established she’ll never be safe with you, not really. So what are you offering her?”

Gaspard’s mercurial gaze clashed with hers, and she read the concern there. “A title.”

Even as disappointment wracked her, Amaury shook his head. “I taught her better than to want that. Try again.”

His jaw clenched. “An escape from her parents.”

Amaury acknowledged this with a nod. “Better. I would have rescued her from those monsters years ago, but there’s no place for a little girl when you’re running for your life.”

Her heart tripped at that. “I c-could have s-s-stayed in Hampshire with you.” She would’ve been happy there, and safe—from her parents, if not from French assassins.

Amaury gave her a pitying look. “I was never in Hampshire, child. Do you understand? The cottage was there, but I was not.” He shook his head and spoke to Gaspard once more, ignoring her as she reeled from this revelation. “Is that escape all she gets, boy? When she’s giving you so much, is that the only thing you’re good for?”

Gaspard’s irritation thickened the space around them. “What do you want from me, old man?”

With dreadful certainty, Claudia knew what her grandfather was going to say the split second before he opened his mouth, and she prayed he wouldn’t.

“Do you love her?”

Her hands pressed against her fluttering abdomen. Oh, how she wished he hadn’t loosed that question, that possibility, into the ether! If he hadn’t said it, Gaspard wouldn’t feel compelled to answer, and if Gaspard was compelled to answer, she knew there was only one possible answer he could give.

She’d laid bare her soul the night of their engagement ball—she knew it, Gaspard knew it. The way he watched her now, her grandfather’s demand hanging in the air between them, nauseated her, turning any hope she had into dust that clumped heavily in the pit of her stomach.

He didn’t want to say no, because he didn’t want to hurt her. But he couldn’t say yes. She saw it, recognized it, and in a fit of self-preservation, she turned the tables on Amaury. “Do
you
love m-me,
G
-
Grandpére
?”

The old man sputtered. “What? I— Claudia. Child. Don’t be silly. We’re family.”

“That d-doesn’t m-mean anything,” she said bluntly. “Look at m-my father.”

Amaury spat on the floor. “What about him?”

“You heard what he s-s-said at s-supper last night.” Auguste had been drunk, regaling their guests—a number of merchants who had accepted her parents’ invitations to the wedding, likely hoping to squeeze in a couple of business dealings during the festivities—with his thoughts on marriage…and, more specifically, the daughter he’d rid himself of.

Never thought we’d get ’er married off. Pretty enough, and with tits out to here
—at which point Auguste had groped a gigantic pair of invisible breasts hovering over his own chest—
but we should’ve just cut out her tongue the minute we figured it didn’t work proper-like. Man’ll take a mute wife over one that sounds like a strangled cow every time.

The merchants had laughed. Heartily. As though completely oblivious to the fact that Claudia the Strangled Cow sat in the same room, sipping soup from a spoon that had shaken in her grasp. “T-tell m-me those are the words of a father who loves his d-d-daughter.”

Amaury said nothing. He couldn’t refute the truth, and the truth was that her parents wished she’d never been born.

She sighed. “I c-can’t change who I am,
Grandpére
. M-my s-s-stutter will never fade.”

“I know this.”

“I accepted m-my c-condition a long time ago. Now I’m j-just waiting for everyone else to accept it t-too.” Her breath hitched, and she squeezed her eyes shut to ward off her pained tears. “I’m j-just waiting for s-someone to love m-me.”

The silence that fell stifled her, until she could do nothing but laugh wryly at her own folly. How many times could she throw herself on her sword for the
comte
’s jaded amusement? No more. No more, or she wouldn’t survive their marriage a week, acceptance be damned. “Never m-mind. Never m-mind m-me.” Turning her back on the pair of spies, she wandered over to the window, gazing out on the gray skies and brown lawn once more. “Th-thank you for the house. It’s lovely.”

Her grandfather’s shuffling gait sounded behind her. “I have something else for you,” he mumbled. A rustle of paper on fabric, and then a sealed letter appeared over her shoulder.

She took it from him, cracking the wax with a soft
snap
, and scanned the contents. “Vermillion House? You’re giving m-me the c-cottage?” The empty cottage, she remembered. The cottage that had never been lived in. She turned. “Don’t you need it?”

Amaury stared past her out the window. “I cannot be in England again, once you’ve wed.”

“Why not?”

His hesitation, when he’d never been anything less than forthright, worried her, and her nausea returned when he said, “Your time in Paris…it renewed some interest.”

“Interest?”

The
comte
answered for him. “He is being hunted again.” Gaspard remained in the middle of the empty parlor, a shaft of tepid sunlight slowly shifting its way across the floor as though drawn to him, and to the power he exuded.

She envied that sunlight and resented that power. She wasn’t equipped to resist the
comte
’s pull, and it had proven her downfall. She would continue to crumble before him, again and again—because even though he’d let her take the lead during their last sexual encounter, they were completely imbalanced, the two of them.

The worst part was realizing that she didn’t necessarily want to correct that imbalance. Not when they were in bed, and not when his power sinuously stroked against her senses, as it did now.