The Temptation of Your Touch (9 page)

Although Max’s disappointment was keen, he could find nothing to complain about. It was standard English breakfast fare—a pair of poached eggs, a bowl of watery porridge, a limp kipper, three rashers of overcooked bacon, a piece of underdone toast. The food looked every bit as tasteless as it did colorless. There was no sign of the buttery, golden loaf that had haunted his culinary fantasies ever since he had caught the aroma of it clinging to Mrs. Spencer’s hair.

Without a word, the footman took his place next to the sideboard, staring straight ahead like one of the king’s guards.

The boy’s truculent silence was going to make for a long meal. A
very
long meal. Max took a sip of his lukewarm tea, wishing it were something much stronger, before asking, “Have you any newspapers I might peruse while I breakfast?”

The boy blew out a disgusted huff, as if Max had requested the Holy Grail be located without delay so his tea could be served in it. “I’ll see what I can find.”

Max had finished his bacon and was poking listlessly at his eggs with his fork when Dickon returned with a yellowing broadsheet tucked beneath his arm. Max unfolded the brittle pages to discover it was a copy of the
Times . . .
dated October 1820. Since Max had no desire to read what Queen Caroline had been wearing at her husband’s coronation sixteen years ago, he tossed the useless thing aside. It seemed he had escaped not only London but the modern world altogether.

He managed to choke down a few spoonfuls of the lumpy porridge before a combination of boredom and curiosity prompted him to speak again. “Dickon? It is Dickon, is it not?”

The boy shot him a suspicious glance. “Aye, sir . . . um . . . m’lord.”

“How long have you been in service at Cadgwyck?”

“Nearly five years now, m’lord.”

Max frowned. “Just how old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” the boy said staunchly.

What you are,
Max thought,
is lying through your teeth
. The boy didn’t look to be more than a day over thirteen. And that was a generous estimation. “Were you hired by Mr. Hodges?”

“No, it was An—Mrs. Spencer what gave me my place here.”

“Your Mrs. Spencer seems to wield an
uncommon amount of influence for a mere housekeeper,” Max remarked thoughtfully.

“She’s not
my
Mrs. Spencer. She belongs to no man.”

“Not even Mr. Spencer?” Max asked, amused against his will by the unmistakable note of pride in the lad’s voice.

“Oh, there is no Mr. Spencer,” the lad blurted out. When he saw Max’s eyebrow shoot up, a flicker of alarm danced over his face. “At least not anymore. Mr. Spencer died in an unfortunate . . . um . . . accident. Crushed by a . . . a wagon, he was. A very large, very heavy wagon.”

“How tragic,” Max murmured, wondering just how long the unflappable Mrs. Spencer had been a widow. Based on the way her breath had quickened and her lips had parted both times he had put his hand on her arm, it must have been a long time indeed. If the mere touch of his hand had stirred such a response, he couldn’t help but wonder how she would react if a man actually tried to kiss her. Shaking off the absurd and dangerous notion, he said, “It’s no wonder she ended up as a domestic. There are very few avenues open to a woman who must make her own way in the world without the protection of a man.”

Dickon didn’t even try to disguise his snort. “If
any man crosses Mrs. Spencer, he’ll be the one in need of protection.”

Before Max could stop himself, he had returned the boy’s cheeky grin, making them compatriots for the briefest of seconds. Then, as if realizing he was guilty of consorting with the enemy, Dickon jerked himself back to attention, staring straight ahead with his face set in even more sullen lines than before.

Sighing, Max returned his attention to his breakfast. Since he had no idea if anything more nourishing—or flavorful—would be forthcoming for lunch, he forced himself to finish every bite of the pallid fare before rising and leaving the boy to clear his place.

When he emerged from the dining room, he nearly collided with his stalwart housekeeper, who was hovering over a potted ficus tree just outside the door, watering can in hand. She might have been more convincing in her task if the tree had sported a single living leaf. Or if her watering can had so much as a drop of water in it.

Had she been lurking outside the door all along listening to every word of his conversation with young Dickon? Perhaps Max should have paid more heed to her warning about the cat and the bell. As long as she was relatively still, her ring of keys would not betray her.

Determined not to be drawn into yet another inappropriate exchange, he offered her a curt nod and continued on his way.

She fell into step behind him, her dogged pursuit shredding what was left of his frayed temper. “I wasn’t sure what you had planned for your first morning at Cadgwyck, my lord. If you’d like, I could take some time out of my duties to go over the household schedule and accounts with you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said without slowing his strides. “You’ve managed this long without me. Just continue doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

If she was taken aback by his words or the dismissive wave he aimed in her direction, the cheery jingle of her keys did not betray her. “I trust you found breakfast to your satisfaction, my lord. Will you be requiring—”

He wheeled around to face her, forcing her to bring herself up short or risk colliding with the immovable expanse of his chest. “What I require, Mrs. Spencer, is some decent coffee with my breakfast and a newspaper published in the current decade. Beyond that, all that I require is to be left to my own devices. If I’d have wanted to have my every need anticipated by some well-intentioned, yet interfering, female, I would have remained in London.”

With that, he turned on his heel and went stalking toward the nearest set of French windows,
determined to escape both the house and his meddling housekeeper.

Behind him, he heard nothing but silence.

I
T TOOK
M
AX ONLY
a brief turn about the grounds of Cadgwyck Manor to discover they were as neglected and unkempt as the interior of the house. Clumps of weeds had sprung up between the cracked flagstones of the terraces, while scraggly, untrimmed shrubs and dangling vines transformed every walkway into a shadowy maze. The lawn had long ago surrendered to the same rambling ivy that had clawed its way up the walls of the crumbling tower. An ornate bronze birdbath crowned by a mossy statue of Botticelli’s
Venus
sat in the center of what must once have been a handsome garden, its basin choked with stagnant water. An air of deserted melancholy hung over it all.

Although he stalked from one end of the grounds surrounding the house to the other, Max encountered no gamekeeper, no gardeners, no stable boys. Of course, why would stable boys be required to tend a stable populated only by rustling mice and the swallows that had darted in through the gaping holes in the roof to build their nests in its sagging rafters? For the first time, it occurred to him he was practically a prisoner in this place.

His restless ramblings finally led him to the edge of the cliffs. Savage gusts of wind tore open his coat and whipped his hair away from his face. Propping one booted foot on a rock, he leaned into its battering force, grateful to finally find a worthy opponent with whom he could do battle. Someone besides himself.

At the foot of the cliffs far below, the wind churned the peaks of the waves into foaming whitecaps before driving them to their death against the jagged rocks. The ceaseless roar of the sea was much louder here. A towering wall of clouds brooded on the horizon, their ever-present threat sharpening the very air with the scent of danger.

Despite his growing misgivings about coming to Cornwall, Max had to admit the landscape had a raw, seductive beauty, a wildness that was as stirring to the blood as a swallow of fine whiskey or a beautiful woman. It was as if he were standing on the edge of a storm that could break at any minute, sweeping away everything in its path and making all things new.

Off to the left, he could see a shallow cove cut into the cliffs, where the rocks grudgingly gave way to a half circle of sandy beach. When he was a boy, such a sight would have sent his imagination soaring with dreams of smugglers and the shuttered glow of lanterns dancing along the beach beneath a
moonless sky, of secret passageways winding their way deep into the stony recesses of the cliffs, and heaps of shimmering treasure buried in long-forgotten caves. But those dreams had long ago been replaced with ledgers full of endless columns of figures and long, dull board meetings where he presided over a bunch of gouty old men more interested in fattening their own coffers than in steering their company—and their country—toward the future.

The back of Max’s neck prickled. Even with his gaze fixed on the sea, he could feel the inescapable shadow of the manor behind him, its windows gazing down upon him like watchful eyes. He wondered if other eyes were watching him as well—mercurial eyes with a maddening tendency to shift when a man least expected it from the glossy green of leaves in deep summer to the rich brown of burled walnut.

He hadn’t lingered long enough to see if his curt rebuke had made those eyes darken with hurt.

Seized by a fresh restlessness, Max turned away from the sea and began to stalk along the edge of the cliffs. As he studiously banished his housekeeper from his thoughts, another woman intruded. And not the woman he had expected—the woman who was now happily wed to his brother.

No, this was a mocking little minx, her lustrous brown hair piled carelessly atop her head, her lightly blushed cheek poised on the verge of dimpling. Max
slowed his steps as he picked his way over the rocks, wondering just how many times Angelica Cadgwyck’s dainty feet might have trod this very path.

And at precisely which spot she had chosen to end her life.

As he reached the very tip of the rugged promontory that jutted out over the sea, his question was answered as surely as if he’d spoken it aloud. Here, the wind was even more relentless. Nearly staggering against its force, Max drew close enough to the edge of the cliff to watch the roiling sea break over the jagged, glistening blades of the rocks below.

Had moonlight glinted off those same rocks on the night Angelica died? Or had clouds shrouded the moon and tricked her into believing that if she took flight off the bluff, she would drift gently down into the arms of the sea?

Max lifted his eyes to the distant horizon. He could almost see her standing there—a young woman blinded by tears, about to be cast out of the only home she had ever known. The ruthless wind would have stripped the pins from her hair like the fingers of a jealous lover until it danced in a cloud around her beautiful, tearstained face.

Her lover was dead, her brother carted off to prison, then banished from these shores, never to return, and her father driven mad by grief. Which one of them had she mourned the most in that
moment? Had she given the brash young artist both her body and her heart or held one in reserve for some future love? A love she would never live long enough to meet.

In the fraction of time before she had stepped off the edge of that promontory, had she been fleeing her destiny or rushing forward to embrace it with open arms?

Without warning, the thin shelf of rock beneath Max’s feet began to crumble. He jumped backward just in time to watch what was left of the shelf tumble toward the sea in a dizzying spiral before shattering against the rocks below like so many grains of sand.

Chapter Nine

A
S
M
AX WATCHED THE
swirling sea swallow the pulverized rocks just as it must have swallowed Angelica Cadgwyck’s broken body all those years ago, his chest heaved with delayed reaction. Despite the violent pounding of his heart—or perhaps because of it—he hadn’t felt this alive for a long time.

When he had arrived at Cadgwyck last night, he had foolishly assumed the chief dangers a man might encounter in such a place were a loose chimney pot or a rotted banister. He had never dreamed the cliffs themselves might try to lure him to his doom. Had he been possessed of a more suspicious—and less practical—nature, he might even have suspected foul play. But common sense told him the shelf of rock at the tip of the promontory had simply been weakened by time and the elements. He had no one
to blame for his near fatal plunge into the sea but himself. He should never have wandered so close to the cliff’s edge.

Shaking his head, Max turned to give the windows of the house a rueful look, wondering if anyone else had witnessed his folly.

He half-expected to see Angelica herself laughing merrily down at him from some shadowy attic dormer, but there was nothing ghostly about the flicker of movement he glimpsed in a second-story window.

A
S
L
ORD
D
RAVENWOOD’S SHARP-EYED
gaze swept the back of the manor, then returned with eerie precision to the exact window where she was standing, Anne ducked behind the velvet draperies. Her mouth was dry, her heart still racing madly beneath the palm that had flown to her chest when he had stumbled back from the edge of the cliff, only inches away from a plunge into nothingness.