Wanton Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (13 page)

      
“I hit him, but he got away down that alley.”

      
“Any idea who they might have been? The dead ones look like
lazzaroni
. ”

      
“The other did not seem so.” Derek replied.

      
Drum looked up to where a candle had finally been lit in a fourth-story window down the street. “We'd best be away lest we end up answering to the local constabulary—or worse, some of the king's Frenchie guardsmen.”

      
Derrick gathered up his cloak and they slipped quickly down the street. “The man who escaped looked familiar to me. Taller, muscular, clean shaven…there was something I recognized in the arrogant way he moved—Bourdin! I’d bet my last guinea on it. Your mention of Murat's guardsmen must have triggered the association.”

      
“The rotter from whom you rescued Miss Blackthorne? He'd certainly have reason enough,” Drum mused.

      
“If it was that simple, why not call me out? He's purported to be quite the deadly duelist.”

      
“You think he plays a deeper game, then? That would mean Murat is aware of your mission. Things could get rather sticky for us in Naples, old chap.”

      
“Perhaps he works for the king...or someone else... We won't be leaving Naples just yet—and I'll have to send a report to our contact via Sir Percival tonight. You'd best change into dry clothes before you set out, old chap.”

      
“How solicitous of you,” Drum groused as they trudged through the rain toward their apartments.

Chapter Seven

      
Beth sat back and looked critically at the scene she had just sketched. Her hours spent with Mr. Turner had proven invaluable. But then, so had the hours spent with Derrick, she thought as her mouth spread in one of the dreamy, foolish grins about which Vittoria continually teased her.

      
The warm golden days of autumn were now blending with the slight nip of what passed for winter in the Mediterranean. The weeks had flown into months and she had been painting more productively than ever. Perhaps having a lover was as conducive to her art as instruction from the famous J. M. W. Turner. She was deliriously happy...as long as she kept busy and did not think about the time when Derrick Jamison would return to England and their magic interlude would end.

      
“He is the son of an earl, and as such he will sooner or later be forced into making a suitable marriage,” the con-tessa had warned only a week ago as they were sharing an early evening meal at the villa.

      
“And you have made me more than aware that I am not ‘suitable,’ ” she had replied, striving for a light and unconcerned tone.

      
“
Cara
, it is never my intention to hurt you, but I do not want him to hurt you either.” Vittoria sighed. “Perhaps with a first love it is inevitable.”

      
“Do you still love Piero?” Beth asked softly.

      
The contessa sipped from her wineglass, considering her words. She had confided about her first lover, a goldsmith's son, deemed unworthy by her family because he was a commoner and a Jew. The unthinkable misalliance was quashed by arranging her marriage to an older nobleman whose vast estates adjoined their own when she had barely turned seventeen. Piero Torres had left Naples for America, and although she had never seen him again, a small part of the practical Vittoria would always mourn for what might have been.

      
“Sometimes I think of him and wonder if he prospered in your country...he had kinsmen there, I think.”

      
“You have not answered me,” Beth chided gently. “I asked if you still loved him.”

      
Vittoria shrugged and smiled. “Who is to say what that means, that much used word ‘love’. I prize many things and people...I do not think of love in the way you define it.”

      
“Oh, and how, pray, do I define it?”

      
“Being
in
love, completely wrapped up in one person upon whom your entire happiness depends, needing to spend the rest of your life together, bound by marriage vows and children,” Vittoria replied, studying Beth's expression.

      
“If you think that is what I want with Derrick Jamison, or with any man, you could not be more mistaken. I would have to give up painting and become someone who lives by society's rules, someone who is not me, someone I would grow to hate...and in the process I would come to hate my husband as well. No, I shall not do that, Vittoria.”

      
“Ah,
cara
, why do I fear that you have already taken the first step?” the contessa had murmured sadly, more to herself than to Beth.

      
Giving herself a mental shake, Beth returned to her sketching and tried to put that troubling exchange with her friend out of her mind. Did she truly, in her heart of hearts, want to spend her life with Derrick, bear his children?

“Well, it's not possible, so I’d best content myself with enjoying our time together, however brief. There will be other men after he is gone.”
Liar
, a voice deep within replied.

* * * *

      
“I simply cannot credit it! Our Elizabeth, behaving like a common…courtesan.” Quintin Blackthorne struggled for a word not quite so harsh as the one that first sprang to mind when he read Drum's letter.

      
His wife Madelyne, sitting calmly while he paced furiously, tried to soothe his raging temper, something she had spent the major portion of her life doing. “In the first place, Quint, Beth is not selling her favors to Mr. Jamison.”

      
“Oh, no? What would you call it, then?”

      
He threw down the letter, which she had read before he returned to Savannah, since it had been addressed to both of them. She had taken the time to read between the lines and consider what Alex's friend had really intended to convey. “Beth is in love with the Englishman, who is certainly from a good family. They do things differently in Europe than—”

      
“They damned well do,” he snapped furiously. “They are decadent lechers who would take advantage of an innocent's virtue and laugh at the consequences. Well, there will be consequences—consequences that the Honorable Derrick Jamison will not find amusing!”

      
“Now, Quint, calm down!”

      
“I am quite calm, darling,” he replied, moderating his tone with gritted teeth, as he pulled on his greatcoat.

      
“Where are you going?” Now Madelyne was alarmed.

      
“To the city to check Dev's sailing schedules. I will be on his next ship to Naples.”

* * * *

      
“Now, hold still—no, no, not like that. You look as if you've just taken a seat on a sharply pointed stick!” Beth burst into laughter as Derrick's face darkened thunderously.

      
“Mock me, will you? And yet you dare to ask that I sit for a portrait.” He reached over and grabbed her sketchbook from her hand. “Let me see if—”

      
“Oh, no, you don't,” she cried, seizing back the pad and shoving him firmly down onto the ancient oak limb lying across the mossy floor of the glade. “Now, lean back as I showed you, there's the way...just relax...” Her voice faded as she tried to concentrate.

      
Beth recalled vividly when she'd finally worked up sufficient courage to ask him to pose for her. One morning she had awakened in his bed, drowsy and sated from a long and lovely night of making love. She had observed him as he slept, bathed in the soft, golden glow of the rising sun. He lay on his side, facing her,one powerful leg thrown possessively over her thigh, a hand warm against her breast. She had eased slowly away, careful not to awaken him so that she could study the sheer male beauty of his naked body.

      
Thank God, the superficial nicks and cuts he had received during the attempted robbery outside that gambling den had disappeared weeks ago without adding to the scars he already bore. Still, even those scars only added to his virile allure. His long lean frame filled the bed, skin dark against the pristine whiteness of the sheets. How, she had wondered, did an Englishman living in cold northern climes get so deeply tanned? Her fingertips traced the pattern of black hair on the back of his hand and forearm, marveling at the slim strength and beauty of his hands, hands that could control a powerful team of horses or caress her flesh with consummate skill.

      
He had stretched and rolled over onto his back, affording her a better view. His shoulders were wide, his chest thick and powerful, covered with an even heavier growth of black hair, which then tapered into a narrow line toward his navel and arrowed to the black bush where his phallus lay dormant in repose. His body was contoured with lithe muscles that rippled more than bulged when he moved.
 

      
But most of all she loved his face. The shadow of his black whiskers should have given him a piratical air, and would have had he been awake. But asleep his expression was younger, almost boyish, as she brushed that always errant lock of inky hair from his brow. She studied the arch of his eyebrows, the high planes of his cheekbones, the straight clean line of his jaw, but most of all, his mouth. The heat of it had the power to scald her. When he kissed her it had the power to draw her very soul from her body.

      
The ancients, so she had read, believed that when a person's likeness was captured in a picture, a part of his soul was owned by the one who possessed the likeness.
You own my soul, Derrick...why should I not claim at least a small part of yours?
Her disturbing and bold thought had been interrupted at that very instant when he awakened, capturing her wrist in his hand. He brought her palm to his mouth and kissed it. Before she could lose her nerve, Beth found herself blurting out, “I want to paint you, Derrick.”

      
He had refused at first, but she had cajoled and teased until he finally agreed to allow her to do some sketches. To her surprise and secret amusement, the bold, self-confident Englishman was decidedly uncomfortable about posing as an artist's subject. One of the reasons he had finally given in was that she had bribed him with the promise of a picnic in this secluded woodland glade, beside a small stream with a waterfall and a pool.

      
The moment she had described the background she wanted to use for the portrait, he had asked if she knew how to swim. Beth had been raised in the Georgia backwoods where being unable to swim was tantamount to courting death by drowning. Everyone, female as well as male, swam in the Blackthorne family. Derrick was pleased. He would pose for her during the morning in return for her spending the afternoon in the pool with him.

      
Just thinking about that swim made her hand tremble as she focused on her sketch. “This is going to be wonderful...if I can only capture...”

      
“You're mumbling as though you have a mouthful of feathers, puss,” Derrick could not resist teasing. Her look of intense concentration was arrestingly erotic in a strangely innocent way. He loved the way the tip of her tongue lightly glossed those lush pink lips, the way small white teeth bit the lower one when she was deep in thought. Her eyes flashed to him, then back down to her work, and a long coil of dark red hair bounced back and forth over her shoulder.

      
She's still an innocent...in spite of me.
That thought had considerable power to disturb him, and he had been plagued with it often. Beth had known full well what she was doing when she had come to his bed. Good family or no, she was American, living the unfettered life she had chosen, far from the strictures of the proper English society in which he had been raised.

      
And what would happen to her when he left? For all her youth and trust in the goodness and beauty of the world, she was a strong woman who would accept the inevitable and get on with her life. He had reassured himself of that repeatedly whenever his conscience—usually a Greek chorus of one, namely Alvin Francis Edward Drummond—chided him for their liaison. What he refused to consider, kept buried in the deepest recesses of his heart, was what would happen to
him
when he must go.

      
And go he would, all too soon. He had used a variety of means to intercept correspondence between the Murats and Napoleon. The exiled emperor was planning an escape. As soon as Derrick learned his destination, he would deliver the critical information directly to the heads of state assembled in Vienna, then await orders that, he hoped, would at last allow him to purchase a commission in the army and fight openly.

      
“Your expression has changed again, Derrick,” she scolded. “Such a brown study. Perhaps I could capture that pensive quality in the finished oil,” she mused more to herself than to him.

      
“Enough. My leg's gone to sleep and my neck most probably will never turn to the right again,” he said, standing up and stretching, then striding over to her. “Put down the charcoal and paper,puss. 'Tis noon.” He pointed toward the sun high overhead. “Time for a nice, cooling swim.”

      
“Tis unseasonably warm today, I agree, but the water will be a bit more than just cooling, I warrant.”

      
“The bold Georgia frontier woman, afraid of a bit of cold water?” he teased, pulling her into his embrace. “Then I shall just have to warm you up first...‘til you're so warm you'll be burning...eager to plunge into the depths...” He punctuated his words with kisses, running his hands over her body, slipping the drawstring at the neckline of her blouse and freeing her breasts.