The Beguilement of Lady Eustacia Cavanagh: The Cavanaughs Volume 3

by Stephanie Laurens

His smile took on an edge. “I rest my case.”

  Her head was spinning; not only was she feeling giddy but also as if the world as she’d known it had shifted beneath her feet. Exasperation wasn’t far from her surface. “Men like you,” she insisted, “aren’t supposed to readily embrace love.” She uncrossed her arms and flung up her hands. “You’re supposed to need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to it. Instead, you appear to have taken falling in love in your stride.”

  “Don’t be fooled.” His tone sharpened. “I had my moments of resistance, but your brothers seem to thrive on the curse—I couldn’t see any reason why they should be unique.”

  She felt her lips involuntarily twitch and slapped her fingers across them. She stared at him. She didn’t want to think of what lay ahead—of the glorious future filled with happiness that would not now be theirs, of the forever they would now not have, due to the darkness that lived inside her—but she had to be realistic. For his sake, for the sake of the child she carried, she had to face her reality and act, before it was too late. Now she knew he truly loved her, her inner malevolence would inevitably rise and blight everything—just the thought was enough to shred her heart.

  Holding his gaze as those thoughts—that certainty—filled her mind, she quietly stated, “You don’t understand.”

  At the sight of all Frederick saw in her eyes—the rising anguish, the expectation of pain, the hovering shadows of despair, defeat, and devastation—he stopped playing and, fisting his hands, fought not to leap up and seize her and hold her. Instead, he evenly replied, “Don’t understand that you fear that you will use me loving you to manipulate and emotionally attack me, causing me infinite pain and grief?”

  When she blinked, clearly astonished, he simply arched his brows.

  After a long moment of staring, her lips firmed, and she nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly what my mother did—she drove my father to his grave by breaking his heart again and again, just because she could. She couldn’t resist exercising the power his love for her gave her over him.”

  He’d thought long and hard on the best way to challenge and overturn a long-held belief and had concluded that unrelenting logic was his only real option. “Your mother was an arch manipulator, and she used those skills to harm your father, correct?”

  She frowned, then nodded.

  “And you believe you’ve inherited her manipulative traits.”

  “There’s no belief involved. I’ve been manipulating others since I could talk—and arguably, even before that. It’s second nature. My only saving grace is that, to date, I’ve striven never to harm others by doing so.” Her face set, resolution and determination writ large in every line. “I made a vow on my father’s grave, one I’ve held to unwaveringly ever since. I will never become—I refuse to become—my mother.”

  He allowed a gentle smile to curve his lips. “Please know I’m relieved to hear that.”

  Temper lit her eyes, and she lost her rigid composure and hotly—a trifle desperately—declared, “It’s no laughing matter! And you shouldn’t be relieved! There’s nothing to say that, earlier in her life, Mama wasn’t as I have been, and that her…unquenchable desire to hurt Papa only surfaced after she realized he loved her—when she learned she could hurt him in that way. I’m exactly like Mama in so many ways. How do I know—how do you know—that one day, I won’t find the temptation to manipulate you and hurt you purely because I can too much to resist?”

  At last! “I know because I know you. Because I see you as you truly are, not as you fear you might become.” He held her gaze levelly. “There’s so much in your view of yourself that’s wrong, I’m not sure where to start my rebuttal. But perhaps we should cut to the heart of your worry—I’ve loved you from the first, yet how successful have you been in manipulating me?”

  Stacie scoffed; he was a typical, misguided, arrogant male. “If you recall, I manipulated you into performing for the ton again, entirely against your wishes.”

  His smile returned, his expression confidence personified. “Think again, sweetheart. It’s a well-known fact that you can’t manipulate someone who knows all about manipulation themselves.”

  “Then why did you agree to do it?”

  “I believe I mentioned I was in love with you—I was also deeply attracted to you. I decided complying with your wishes was the easiest way to get what I wanted—to spend more time with you. That music was your price only made the decision easier.” He paused, then spelled it out for her. “I only ever did what I wanted to do. You never successfully manipulated me—I merely allowed you to think you did.”

  She frowned at him. “Why would I believe that?”

  His smile turned wry. “Aside from knowing in your heart that it’s true? If you seek further proof, all you need do is ask anyone who knows me well—George, Percy, my mother, my sisters, even Emily. All will tell you that I am not, and never have been, susceptible to manipulation, that it’s utterly impossible to make me do anything I don’t wish to.” He held her gaze. “Never. Not ever.”

  She continued to frown at him as she tried to work her way through his assertions, tried to see where he was leading her…

  At that very moment, he was endeavoring to manipulate her.

  Before she could properly grapple with that insight, he leaned on the piano and, still holding her gaze, stated, “In a nutshell, I’m not your father. I’m more akin to Ryder, and you know how successful your mother was with him.”

  Not at all. She knew that was true.

  But Frederick wasn’t finished. “Even more importantly, my one and only love, you are not your mother.”

  She opened her mouth to protest the obvious, but he raised a staying hand.

  “No—hear me out.” The gaze he leveled on her held a degree of understanding she’d never encountered in anyone else. “I understand your fear has been there since you were a child, steadily growing through all you saw of your mother’s machinations and the effect those had on your father. I know that fear has been constantly fed by all those who incessantly tell you how like your mother you are.”

  He paused, then more gently said, “You are like her on the outside, but inside…?” He shook his head. “No. Your fear has blinded you to that critical truth. Your mother never loved anyone in her entire life. Not her husband, not her children—not even her closest, oldest friends. And yes, I’ve checked with her oldest erstwhile friend and with Ryder. Lavinia loved only one person in the entire world—herself. That was why she was as she was—no one else ever mattered to her.

  “But that’s not how you are. Not at all. You love others—you care about others.” He paused, his eyes searching hers as if gauging the impact of his words, then stated, “The strongest and most inviolable bulwark against you ever harming me is the simple fact you love me.”

  She would have sworn her heart gave a little leap, and a tiny kernel of hope kindled.

  As if sensing it, he tilted his head and, his eyes on hers, asked, “You do love me, don’t you?”

  She’d wanted to hold that secret close, her cross to bear once they parted, as she’d assumed they soon would, yet…there was a shadow of vulnerability in his eyes that tugged at her and made it impossible not to respond, “Yes.” She frowned anew. “But—”

  “But nothing. I’ve learned a lot about love over recent weeks, and one thing I now know is that the poets had it right: Love conquers all—everything else.” He held her gaze, and she could feel his confidence—the confidence he was trying to instill in her.

  “It truly does,” he averred. “Always.”

  He rose, and she watched him round the piano and come to her. She straightened and faced him, and he took her hands, one in each of his.

  His gaze trapped hers, and softly, he said, “Place your trust in love—yours for me and mine for you. Love, that combined love, will hold us safe, even from ourselves. Because of that love, I won’t ever attempt to manipulate you other than for your own good, and you, my love, won’t e
ver harm me—in your heart, you know you never will.”

  He was utterly, unswervingly certain; she read that in his eyes. Lost in the promise carried in his gaze, she drew in a breath and told herself she might be able to…

  She exhaled. “I…still don’t know.” She clutched his fingers. “I can’t see—can’t be sure—that our lives and our marriage will continue as they have to date, that the path ahead will remain one of sunshine and roses.”

  His expression was the epitome of understanding and support. “Sunshine and roses every day will probably grow boring.” Without releasing her from his gaze, he raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed. “Better, I think, that we take our future one day at a time. We’ll wake up in each other’s arms, live side by side through our day, and come together again at night. Life is like a symphony—it has its various movements, all with different cadence and rhythm, yet in reality, it’s played one note, one chord, one beat at a time.”

  Something inside her shifted, and she felt the hovering darkness thin, then wisp away, and her heart—her hopes—started to rise. “And what of love?” she felt compelled to ask. “What part does love play in life’s symphony?”

  Frederick smiled; he knew he’d won—this round, at least. There might be more battles in the future, but this had been the first and most difficult. “Love is the emotion each player brings to the performance—the feelings with which you imbue each note, the touch you infuse into each chord. In life, love provides the most powerful joy that buoys and fills and lifts our hearts.”

  He let his smile deepen and, once again, raised her hand and brushed his lips to her fingers. “We’ve already started our symphony, you and I—all we have to do to see it through to a glorious end is to devote ourselves to it and keep playing.”

  Stacie stood on the cusp of her personal paradise, with the dark cloud of her fear receding—dissipated by him, by his confidence in her, by his love for her and hers for him—and with her most treasured dream blossoming before her. “I want you.” She clutched his fingers and heard the words fall from her lips. “I want us—our marriage, our children, our home, our shared life.” She gripped tighter. “I’ll try.” A lingering tendril of doubt intruded. “But if we strike a sour note—”

  “We won’t.” His certainty was absolute. “Trust me, my love. Sour notes are not in our repertoire.”

  She couldn’t hold back any longer, not against the plea in his eyes, not against the emotion he’d evoked that now charged the air between them. She stepped forward into his embrace and, as his arms closed around her, murmured, “I’ll place my trust in love and in you. You might outclass me as a manipulator, yet from the first, I trusted you, and I always will.”

  Although triumph shone in his smile, there was a serious light in his eyes as he said, “I swear to you, here and now, that I will never let you—let us—down.”

  Frederick started to lower his head.

  A flicker of movement outside the window had him glancing that way.

  He dived to the floor, taking Stacie, already in his arms, with him.

  BANG!

  The glass in the window shattered, and a bullet plowed into the parquet floor at the far end of the room.

  Frederick didn’t waste breath swearing. He shoved Stacie under the piano. “Stay there!” He scrambled up, raced across the room, hauled open the French door, and charged after the man racing up the side lawn, making for the stone wall fronting the street.

  The man flung himself at the wall. He reached the top and dropped to the street as Frederick laid hands on the thick ivy.

  He hadn’t forgotten how to climb. He scaled the wall, swung over the top, and dropped to the pavement.

  Just in time to see an older carriage careening up the street, one door still hanging open. The carriage slowed for the turn into Park Lane, and a hand reached out, caught the door, and slammed it shut.

  Then the carriage turned the corner and was gone.

  He glanced up and down the street, but there were no lurking hackneys to commandeer.

  Stacie rushed out of the house and down the steps. She fetched up beside him, one hand gripping his arm as she scanned the street. “Are you all right?”

  The breathlessness in the question had him jettisoning any inclination to upbraid her for not staying safely in the house. If he wanted her love—and he did—he had to put up with the consequences. “Yes.” He focused on her. “What about you? Did the fall jar your wound?”

  She shook her head. “Kitty bound it up tight this morning. The bandage didn’t shift at all.” She looked toward Park Lane. “Did you see anything useful?”

  “Enough to be sure of the sort of man our villain is sending against us.”

  When she looked at him questioningly, he took her hand and turned back to the house. “The man was a rough sort—the type of man one hires from the taverns down by the docks.” That whoever was behind the attacks refused to face him openly—to do the deed himself—only fed Frederick’s fury.

  Also his frustration. “Using such men leaves us little chance of identifying who our true villain is. That said”—he felt his jaw clench—“I’ve had enough.”

  Hand in hand, side by side, they climbed the steps to where Fortingale stood by the door, alert and watchful.

  As they reached the porch, Frederick vowed, “One way or another, we’re going to get to the bottom of this—whatever it is that’s going on.”

  After calming the staff and Ernestine—thankfully, his mother and Emily had yet to come downstairs—Frederick and Stacie repaired to the study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ernestine refused to let them out of her sight; while Frederick sat mired in thought behind the desk and Stacie fell to pacing—also deep in thought—across the windows of the alcove, Ernestine sat poker-straight on one of the chairs before the desk and watched them both.

  Frowning, Frederick picked up a pencil and let it slide through his fingers, twirled it, and let it slide down to tap his blotter—a habit from his schooldays that helped him think. Eventually, he said, “It occurs to me that, while hiring a thug from some dockside tavern makes it more difficult to trace the man and so learn who hired him, it still tells us something about our villain—namely that he knows dockside taverns well enough to find the right man to hire to kill someone.”

  Stacie paused in her pacing, then drifted closer and perched on a corner of the desk. “So our villain is someone who knows dockside taverns well.”

  Frederick nodded. “That seems a reasonable bet. And given how many unsuccessful attempts have thus far been made, I think we can also conclude that our villain, whoever he is, isn’t able to pay for a quality assassin—someone who actually knows what he’s doing.”

  He glanced at Stacie and, when she frowned at him in puzzlement, explained, “If he came to Brampton Hall to kill either you or me, then he made a poor fist of it. Breaking into the house in the dead of night—if you hadn’t walked in on him in the kitchen, how would he have proceeded? Even if he knew which room we were in, it’s a huge house to go tramping around in.”

  She nodded. “Especially in the dark, walking through areas with which he would have been totally unfamiliar.”

  “And if he had found his way to the room we were sharing, what then?” Frederick shook his head. “I suppose he might have had a pistol on him, but even so, attacking both of us at once in a large house full of servants would have been a huge risk.” He paused, then went on, “Next, he tried the rocks on the track—that had to have been the same man.”

  Stacie nodded. “Or men.”

  Frederick narrowed his eyes. “I think just one—if there had been two, there would have been two in the kitchen, and more and more, I’m inclined to think our villain is cash-strapped—that he walked into a dockside tavern and found a thug willing to do the deed for what our villain was able to pay.”

  “Hmm.” Stacie folded her arms and frowned. “The rocks on the track—overturning a gig is hardly a certain way of killing someone.”


  “True. But if he’d been hiding in the woods, waiting to finish us off… He would likely have assumed only one of us would drive out in the gig.” Frederick tipped his head. “That might have worked.”

  “Except it didn’t, and we came back to town,” Stacie said, “and he shot at us in the park.”

  “What?”

  With Stacie, Frederick glanced at Ernestine, who he realized had been hearing of the earlier attempts for the first time.

  Looking shocked and pale, she stared at them. “Some blackguard has been trying to kill you both all this time—ever since you married?”

  Frederick, hearing what might be the critical point clearly stated, nodded. “Indeed.”

  Ernestine shifted her gaze to Stacie, then waved a hand before her face and rose. “If you will excuse me, my dears, I believe I need…my smelling salts.”

  Stacie smiled understandingly. “Yes, of course.”

  As the door closed behind Ernestine, Frederick returned to their review of events. “Actually, that attempt in the park tells us quite a bit about the hired thug’s capabilities. He was about twenty yards away from us, standing still and steady. We were right in front of him, and even though we were moving, we weren’t moving fast, and there was nothing more than a light breeze. Anyone familiar with a pistol should have hit one of us, and if not one of us, then at least one of our horses. That he managed to miss us entirely suggests he’s not used to handling a gun.”

  Stacie’s brows rose. “Perhaps that’s why, for his next two attempts, he opted for a knife.”

  “Very likely. A thug of that type would be comfortable with knives.”

  Stacie drew in a breath that wasn’t entirely steady. “He nearly managed to kill you on the way back from the Broughams.”

  Frederick reached across, caught one of her hands, and gently squeezed. “If it hadn’t been for you—then, and again, outside St Martin’s—he might have succeeded.”

  Stacie met his eyes. She held his gaze for several seconds, then, as if drawing strength from the contact, filled her lungs and said, “So he came with a gun today.”