The Deadliest Sin

by Caroline Richards

  “Certain death? That’s a trifle melodramatic.” Only it wasn’t.

  “Is it?”

  “You’re convinced that someone wants you dead. Now why is that?” Miss Woolcott knew far more than she was willing to disclose.

  “You can hardly expect me to believe Sir Wadsworth invited me to join in…in his…peculiar…gathering.”

  He decided to continue the game. “Why is that so improbable?”

  Heat emanated from her, from the masses of fabric, crinolines, and whalebone that encircled her body. She could be developing a fever, courtesy of the wound no doubt beginning to suppurate on her lower leg.

  “I am a woman of a certain age and disposition, hardly the sort to participate in…”

  “Participate in what, precisely?”

  “Whatever it is that you must keep me in good health for.” She took a step away from him and into the darkness. “Please let’s dispense with this unfortunate misunderstanding,” she added, suddenly all crispness and efficiency, lying to him and most of all to herself. “I shall tell no one about your involvement, rest assured. After all, I don’t even know your name or circumstances.”

  It would be better to keep her compliant, he decided. The truth would come, right at the end. He closed the space between them and took her arm. She flinched away from him. “Let’s have a look at the cut on your leg, shall we, before we decide upon anything else.”

  He pulled her none too gently behind him, his hand reflexively finding the seam in the wall a few feet before them. Sliding his fingers beneath the hidden hinge, he felt the clasp release. The door swung open, the soft light of dusk as harsh as the noon sun after an eclipse.

  He watched Julia Woolcott turn her face to the light pouring through the casement windows, her eyes squinting against the assault, and he wondered suddenly how he could have ever considered her plain. Her violet eyes were set wide and tilted between arced brows. She had a straight, assertive nose, a subtly clefted chin, and a mouth too wide for true beauty. Her features communicated a wary vulnerability and an unsettling intelligence. The mahogany hair that had been strictly scraped into a low chignon fell loose.

  She tried not to favor her leg but he could see the spasms of pain tighten her features. Soon, the pain would be gone, he silently promised her.

  “And now?” she asked, not bothering to struggle from his grip.

  There was no answer that she would want to hear. He knew she remembered what she’d attempted to forget—the women and the men in the glittering salon with its unforgiving chandeliers illuminating every dark corner of lust and licentiousness. It was important she be seen that evening, at one of Wadsworth’s infamous country-house weekends, that there be witnesses to her outrageous behavior as a more than willing participant.

  A spiral staircase waited at the end of the hallway, leading to a suite of rooms, a copper tub, appropriate clothing. He would ensure that her wound was taken care of, that she was costumed and prepared in a few hours’ time. There would be no more mistakes. No more struggles.

  He would see to it himself.

  Julia wished the staircase would go on forever, despite the jolts of fire at every step she took. She watched the broad shoulders looming before her, leading the way to what she was certain would be her doom. A large hand still spanned her arm, and she imagined those fingers could choke the life from the most powerful of men. Despite his voice and disengaged manner, she sensed a heavy undercurrent. His size alone prompted claws of fear to tear at her belly.

  A pulse pounded in the back of Julia’s eyes as she wondered what her sister would make of her present predicament. You’re ever so bookish, Jules. Put down your spectacles and come riding with me! Rowena, just a fortnight ago, exhorted Julia to rouse herself from her ink-stained studies. How many governesses had paled under the onslaught of that head-strong willfulness?

  What Julia would do to have her small, tightly constrained world returned to her. A life punctuated by visits to the vicarage or closely chaperoned outings to London with their aunt. She was the careful, patient, older sister who spent most of her time attending to detail, on the printed page or on her copper plates. In this, at least, she had some small advantage.

  Julia’s eyes swept over the broad back and the arrogant tilt of the head in front of her. Dressed simply in trousers and a white shirt, he was not what he seemed: a wayward rogue of Sir Wadsworth’s unsavory circle. She recognized the man was of another sort of Englishman, with his aggressive jaw, the slight hook of his nose, and the gray eyes whose intensity was unseemly. Built like a fortress but with the sleek movements of someone half his size, he was no ordinary man subject to a quotidian world.

  That he was sent by Montagu Faron was a certainty. The name soured on her tongue. Unbidden, Meredith’s alarms rang in her head.

  The man stopped, on the landing, and she nearly tripped on her skirts and catapulted into his broad back. She froze and moved as far away as his grip would allow. She was gazing up at an enormous hall, two storeys high, with vast oriel windows facing gardens on both sides. Four colossal fireplaces framed priceless chairs and banquettes, richly panniered in dark red velvet. It was the room she had glimpsed the evening before. Luscious silk damask curtains, lined in bronze and white brocade stripes, had been tied back with huge silk tassels to better frame entangled limbs and flashes of skin. It was empty but she sensed they were far from alone.

  Walking down corridors she realized the house was ostentatious, even by the standards to which she was accustomed at Montfort.

  Moments later, after being abruptly left alone by her captor, she surveyed the vastness of a room dominated by a raised four-poster bed. He had left her there without a word, and she reveled in the luxury of being alone and unobserved. A fire roared in the corner in front of which a mobcapped maid filled a copper tub with water. Not meeting Julia’s eyes, she carefully placed folded linens on the rosewood vanity table. The young woman looked vaguely familiar and Julia wondered whether she had glimpsed her freckled countenance in the debauched scene the evening before. Dismissing the thought as unproductive and heeding the need to collect herself, she watched the maid’s plump backside retreat from the room and then quickly divested herself of her soiled clothes, ripping at the stays pinching her ribcage, struggling out of her sorely used chemise. Layer after layer was removed and thrown in a heap, until she stood in her plain white cotton shift and silk stockings.

  Leaning on the edge of the tub, she carefully peeled down her stockings, wincing as the gossamer fabric clung to the crusted gash on her calf. She shuddered at the memory, at her loss of control, at the recollection of lost hours in that hideous, cork-lined room. Where had it come from, that feral panic, so unlike her customary calm demeanor?

  She lingered but briefly in the fresh, warm water, as she had no desire to be interrupted by the man she was convinced had been sent by Faron. She would be able to think more clearly when she’d bathed and had something to eat. Swallowing more nervousness, she wondered why the strange man, as she now called him, would leave her to her toilette for so long. Darkness would come soon, she saw by the fading light spilling through the tall, mullioned windows. The fire had made the room overly warm and she longed to throw the windows open wide but was certain they were locked.

  She dried herself quickly and took up the fresh muslin shift the maid had left on the four-poster bed. Her leg began to throb again, weeping a thin stream of blood, as the shift dropped over her head and skirted her legs. Fresh weariness invaded each and every muscle of her body. Lowering herself to the edge of the bed, she smoothed a palm over the cool sheets. Perhaps she would allow herself just a moment to close her eyes and sort out the madness of the last twenty-four hours.

  None of it made any sense. The pulse continued to pound behind her eyes like a hammer on a blacksmith’s anvil. Even if he were connected with Montagu Faron, why would Sir Wadsworth invite her to a sordid country-house weekend? Meredith had been frantic with worry at the invitation, urgin
g Julia to ignore the summons with its elaborate script and aristocratic seal. Questions crawled into every corner of her mind, forming a thick web of confusion. And fear. Pulling the feather pillow over her head, Julia buried her face, and her uncertainties, in the softness.

  When she opened her eyes again, it was dusk, the air thick, heavy, and eerily still. For a moment, she thought she was back in that horrid place, Sir Wadsworth’s perverse chamber. She wasn’t certain what had awakened her. She lifted a hand to sweep aside the tangle of her hair, then froze.

  She surged upright, fists twisting into the sheets, unwelcome pain shooting through her calf. “What are you doing?” she asked, knowing very well whom she was watching—certainly not a serving maid, but him, dark hair falling across his brow, as he finished winding a clean linen bandage around her bare calf. “How dare you!” She tried a fresh assault while attempting to pull her leg beneath the counter-pane, despite the numbing pain.

  He ignored her and leaned forward to strike flint to steel and light the bedside lamp. In the dim glow, his features were drawn, pulled taut across his cheekbones and shadowed by a day’s growth of black stubble. “I dared,” he said, “in order to keep the wound clean. It didn’t require stitching. Consider yourself fortunate.”

  In the lamplight his eyes were brilliant, and she could see they were an unusual shade, more gray than green, but not decisively either color. They were deeply set in a long face punctuated by a wide, spare jaw. Her eyes swept closed when she again felt the gentle pressure of his fingers on her leg, where a pulse throbbed fiercely and with rhythmic intensity. Not exactly in pain but something else. She couldn’t stop time by closing her eyes so she stared at the opening of his shirt, the same one he’d worn earlier. She fought the urge to leap from the bed and seek haven in the farthest corner of the room. She was a woman nearing her third decade, educated better than most men, but nothing had prepared Julia for this.

  She was all but naked and alone with a man for the first time in her life. She bit her lower lip to halt her traitorous thoughts and to keep from crying aloud. The last thing she wanted to admit to herself was what she’d always known. Her life with Meredith had been a prison, albeit a gold-plated one, built to keep evil out, to contain a malevolence that threatened, however subtly, every waking hour. It had required a watchfulness as unrelenting as the queen’s royal guard. Against all good judgment and dire warnings, Julia had forced her way out, providing the crumb on the trail that had allowed the man—and Faron—to find them.

  “Sir Wadsworth’s invitation was a ruse, wasn’t it?” she blurted out. Heat swept up her neck and flooded her cheeks.

  He released her leg, placed it back under the sheet with cool efficiency, and settled into a chair by the bed with a confidence that Julia found appalling. “You are searching for answers, but you will find none, Miss Woolcott. You’ll discover I’m a man of few words, a predilection which, trust me, works in your favor. Now, would you like something to eat?” he asked, gesturing to a tray at the foot of the bed.

  She would get little from him, that was clear. She tamped down her anger with herself by pretending to eat, picking at the morsels, eyes lowered to her plate of chicken, cheese, and bread. The situation was untenable. Impossible. Rage seeped into her consciousness against the backdrop of guilt and self-recrimination. She would simply not allow it. She chewed mechanically, the food in her mouth tasteless.

  He was quiet for the moment, watching her profile, watching her eat. Lamplight cast half his face in shadow.

  Suddenly, she wanted to lash out. “Would you at least tell me your name?” she demanded when she could stand it no longer, lifting her eyes to his. “It doesn’t have to be real—I would not even expect it to be.”

  She was pretending to brush the crumbs away from her lap and into her cupped hand when he abruptly stood. She jerked her head up to see him move to the fireplace mantle and pour two glasses of wine from an opened bottle. Because she was too anxious to keep her thoughts from straying, she found herself distracted by the way his shoulders moved beneath his shirt, and by the stretch of his back narrowing to his waist in perfect proportion to his long, muscular legs.

  With an impartiality that surprised her, she conceded that her captor was a beautiful man. Her eyes, so accustomed to peering through a lens, were startled by reality. Her mind raced ahead, searching for something of use. He moved with an expansiveness that was unfamiliar to her, fluid but powerful, as though more accustomed to the outdoors than confinement in drawing rooms and parlors. His tones were educated and well modulated but told her little more than that he was not from the lower classes.

  He turned toward her, placing a glass on the tray. “Drink your fill. You appear as though you need it.”

  Her fork clattered against her plate, her nerves stretched taut. “Need it for what, sir? You prevaricate, and your insinuations are becoming tiresome. Name or no name, there is little you can do to convince me of this charade involving Sir Wadsworth. It’s simply preposterous, your keeping me here against my will.”

  He inclined his head a fraction of an inch, fixing those pale gray eyes upon her. “Alexander,” he said.

  At last, like a wretched bone thrown to a dog. Surname or Christian name, it probably didn’t matter.

  “You’re the one making insinuations,” he said softly, watching her carefully.

  She pushed aside the tray, leaving the wine untouched. Her fingers moved unsteadily to the high neck of her shift. “I have little enough information. While you—”

  “Really?” His tone stilled her fingers on an ivory button.

  “You know my name,” she snapped, thinking of the invitation that had arrived at Montfort. “Of that, at least, I’m certain.”

  He arched a brow. “Miss Julia Woolcott, amateur botanist, photographer, and recently published authoress of a monograph entitled Flowers in Shadows: A Botanical Journey.”

  Julia could not keep herself from flushing. She was inordinately proud of her work. It was unseemly, indeed. Had she been able to hold her pride in check, she would not be there, at that moment, with that man. She tamped down her frustration. “A mere trifle, as you are most likely aware. There are possibly hundreds of women devoted to this respectable pastime. I am someone of no rank or importance. A country mouse.”

  An unidentifiable expression crossed his face as he leaned forward to clasp the back of the chair. She found herself unaccountably staring at his hands, large and long fingered. “Ah yes,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Botany is an acceptable womanly pursuit that fits within a woman’s sanctioned role as helpmeet of man, educator of children. Botany poses no danger of inflaming the imagination, unlike, shall we say, a radically new creation like photography.”

  Julia would curse the moment of weakness later, but she couldn’t deny the pull of curiosity. “And what do you know of it? I believe that dabbling in the fine arts is generally acceptable among ladies of leisure,” she countered. He wore no rings and carried no timepiece, she noted, before returning her eyes to his.

  “Daguerreotypy requires a special knowledge of chemistry and a certain manual dexterity, hardly ladylike accomplishments.”

  That had not stopped any number of women from completing outstanding series of photograms of plant specimens. “And what of it?” She sat up higher in the bed, pulling the sheet closer around her shoulders. “This discussion is not helpful in the least. It brings us no closer to resolving this situation.”

  He smiled slightly.

  More impatient than ever, she pressed on. “If it’s money you want in exchange for my freedom, I can arrange—”

  His gray eyes widened speculatively, the pupils flared.

  Julia froze. Dread filled her chest. Trying to keep calm, she studied the man the way she would any of her projects, placing him in an imaginary frame, looking for useful details, but finding none.

  “You should not have changed the subject,” he said, his tone even. “There is no possibility
of negotiation.” His gaze stripped away every last layer of reserve she possessed. “It’s for your own good,” he said softly.

  The lamp glowed low, throwing his solid, hard body into shadowed relief on the wall. Unwillingly, she inhaled his scent of smoke, forest, and desert. An exotic, contradictory combination and far outside her ken. Who was this man sent by Montagu Faron?

  Julia swallowed the thickness that welled unexpectedly in her throat. Memories of a childhood spent in blissful but willful ignorance, cocooned in the warmth of Montfort, flooded over her. She blinked rapidly at the pain in her heart, at the sense of sudden, poignant loss. At that moment, it seemed the entirety of her life was a palimpsest, fragile truths built upon layers of secrets and lies.

  Meredith’s warnings rang in Julia’s ears. Meredith had never before spoken directly of her past, or of the shadow that Montagu Faron had cast over her life. It was the unholy power of secrets—what was left unsaid.

  Julia had made a fatal error in ignoring the threats. But Faron would get no closer to her aunt or her sister despite her own lack of judgement, her uncharacteristic impetuousness. Staring into the shadowy depths of the room, Julia had never been surer of anything in her life. Meredith, who had given her shelter, given her back her life, was under threat of this man. Faron. Her gaze rested on the bank of windows, each and every one surely locked against her, and she came to a decision.

  “I shall do it,” she said abruptly, bracing her back against the pillows, bracing herself for battle. “I shall attend this debauchery.” Her words shattered the silence like stones dropped into a pool.

  Alexander’s eyes narrowed, his gaze holding hers. “Why the sudden change of heart? It’s difficult to believe you’re suddenly keen to accept Wadsworth’s invitation.”

  “My motivation should be of no interest to you.” She was tired of hiding—she, her sister, and her aunt so fearful of stepping out into the world. There was always a threat, something, someone—Faron—holding them back. She remembered the argument with Meredith, her aunt’s insistence that publication of her photographs would lead to unwanted attention. Guilt and then a fierce protectiveness flooded Julia’s heart.