The Deadliest Sin

by Caroline Richards

  “That is a risk I’m willing to take”—her chin notched up a bit in the glass—“and something I am to decide. Besides which, you owe me some conciliation.”

  “You could have been dead today,” he said more harshly than he’d intended, then turned around to look at her. “That’s a fair exchange, I should think.”

  She took a step back and swallowed hard, her eyes large above faint blue shadows. “I am grateful for that, make no mistake. However, should I consider relinquishing what I know of Faron, I need to ensure your assistance.”

  Strathmore gave a deliberately enigmatic smile, his hand on the door. “Should you consider? What you might consider is that we’re even now. Your life and your virtue intact, Miss Woolcott, in exchange for the daguerreotype and your compliance.”

  His dismissive tone was deliberate, with enough disdain in his words to guarantee that her eyes darkened with anger. Well and good.

  “I hardly think that fair.”

  “Really, Miss Woolcott?” He hooded his gaze. “Your murder today would have been the least of it. I think they call ravishment a fate worse than death, no?”

  Scarlet suffused her pale cheeks. Her eyes darted to the chaise and back, wavering somewhere on his chest. “I should ask you…I should hope that we both will forget…”

  His response was a short laugh at the irony of such a possibility. Dark blue eyes lifted to his and, to his great disappointment, he was beset with an urge to snatch the rug from her shoulders and wrap her in it before sending her safely home to her bloody aunt.

  “At the very least,” she continued, her gaze holding his. Her voice rang with the curt tones of someone who had considered every possibility of escape and finally realized the futility of such a plan. “At the very least,” she repeated, “I beg of you to get word to Meredith—”

  “That’s not possible. It’s imperative that Faron believe you to be dead.”

  She gave a small shake of her head, as though to dislodge a recurrent nightmare. “I fail to see the logic in any of this. You are using deception for your own benefit.”

  Julia Woolcott was not far off the mark and he should be drowning in self-contempt. Instead, his only focus was on the stiffening of her body when he moved closer to her, out of fear or desire, he had no idea. The air seemed to vibrate between them with a collision of wills and something else that he was loath to identify.

  Christ, the attraction between them was bloody inconvenient and as primal as the ocean tides. It was impossible to deny, and yet Miss Woolcott was more than able to shut it out while he was fast losing ground to an inexplicable, uncontrollable hunger entirely out of character for him. He was closer to his goal than ever before and all he could think about was the heat in his groin.

  Enforced proximity didn’t help. He was done with discussion. “You may have the run of the house as long as you do not leave the premises. Baxter will to see to your comfort, Miss Woolcott.”

  The mirror reflected her growing anger, the straightening of her spine. “You intend to keep me here. Entirely unfair, Strathmore! While you,” she huffed, hoisting the rug more securely over her shoulders, “you go about your business. I warn you, once you secure my belongings, you have absolutely no right to go through my possessions without my consent.”

  All he wanted to do was get the hell out of the room and away from the temptation to seize her by her shoulders and kiss her into silence.

  “I bid you good evening,” he muttered. It emerged as a growl, and Julia’s eyes widened as he swung around and left the room. The slamming of the door in his wake did nothing to relieve the heaviness in his nether regions. He could only hope a brandy would be more effective in easing his confusion and guilt.

  “Now that was certainly anticlimactic, darling. Too much claret this evening, perhaps?”

  Beaumarchais did not glance away from the gilded four-poster bed in one of the many ornate bedchambers at Eccles House, despite the fact that Felicity followed him to his chair before sliding onto his lap and fastening her plump arms around his neck. The lace neckline of her wrapper gaped as she nestled closer against his chest and played deftly with the ivory buttons of his shirt. A long fingernail traced lazy circles over his chest.

  “It’s the business with Strathmore, isn’t it?” she murmured. She was pouting and coy, disappointed that everyone’s attention had been taken away from her and what she did best. Deliberately and provocatively, she pushed back a sweep of blond hair that fell to her rounded shoulders. “The little party just wasn’t the same after that splendid man left the scene.”

  “Hardly fit for civilized company,” Beaumarchais replied, lifting his glass, then scowling when he found it empty.

  Felicity purred her disagreement as she pressed her rouged lips to his neck. “So refreshingly unlike the typical Englishman, thank God. I’d forgotten just how much that appeals to me after a steady diet of milquetoast countrymen. I can’t imagine what he’s like in bed. I heard when Strathmore turned to learning India’s languages, he hired a tutor to instruct him by day and took mistresses to teach him by night.” She sighed theatrically into the linen of Beaumarchais’s shirt. “Such a shame I hadn’t the chance to sample the wares.”

  “You seem overly impressed.”

  “Wadsworth made it known that Strathmore has crossed the Arabian desert, lived in disguise among Arabs with a mixture of stamina, courage, and high intelligence seldom found among Englishmen. Then there’s that delightful translation of the erotic arts,” she murmured.

  “Only a fool would try such a thing. Deserts, explorations, and the like. Whatever for!” Beaumarchais snorted inelegantly, gesturing to the lavish appointments surrounding them, a jewel box boudoir with blush-pink watered silk wallpaper and profusion of gilt. “You’re surely not lusting after a man without a title. That wouldn’t be wise for a woman of the theatre. You do still act, Felicity? Other than on your back, that is.”

  Felicity knew enough to ignore the slight. “I have Wadsworth—and other paramours—to shower me with the trinkets I love,” she replied, as her palms slipped beneath his shirt and kneaded his ribs. “Besides which, I hear that Strathmore is very, very wealthy in his own right. Something about a trust that he came into when he reached his majority from a mysterious source.” She gave a tinkling laugh. “Surprise, surprise, it’s not his pay packet that I’m interested in, my darling.” Her fingers drifted over his belly to unhook the top of his trousers.

  Beaumarchais’ fingers halted her straying hand, interfering with the determined exploration.

  Felicity’s eyes narrowed. “You are preoccupied—perhaps it’s not the claret.” She wriggled more deeply onto his lap. “It’s that woman, isn’t it, the one with Strathmore.” Heaving a sigh, she thrust out her lower lip like a fussy child. “She spoiled everything.”

  Beaumarchais resisted the nearly overwhelming urge to thrust Felicity from his lap. “You’re hardly expected to understand, woman,” he said harshly.

  Felicity shrugged her shoulders, the movements of a voluptuary. “So she is dead—by her own hand, the silly thing. Although, I can understand how one might become overly covetous of a man like Strathmore.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Strathmore? Why ever not?”

  Beaumarchais stared at the ornate escritoire where he had one hour earlier penned a quick note to Lady Meredith Woolcott, informing her of the unfortunate demise of her niece and ward. With copious, painful detail, as per his instructions.

  Yet something was not right. “I simply don’t trust him—enough said.” Unceremoniously, Beaumarchais pushed Felicity from his lap, shoved himself from the chair and began tending to the opened buttons on his shirt.

  With feathers finally ruffled, Felicity made little effort to mask her pique. Her mouth thinned as she watched him dress. “I shan’t have it.” She gave a little stamp of her slippered foot. “An emaciated little nobody causing so much trouble.” She lowered her heavily kohled eyes, then readjusted a
stray blonde curl so that it wound wantonly against her splendid bosom. “Although, on the bright side, at least she’s out of the way, quite permanently, leaving Strathmore’s dance card somewhat more open.”

  Beaumarchais neatly tucked his shirttails into his trousers and snatched his swirling cravat from the back of a nearby chair, looping it around his neck. “You are so obvious, Felicity. It isn’t a wonder that Wadsworth keeps you in his stables,” he said, retrieving his coat and moving toward the door.

  Felicity accepted the comment as a compliment. “I do have my talents.” She tightened the sash on her wrapper, which only emphasized her impressive decolletage. “As you’ve just reminded me, we have unfinished business—if you’re up to the challenge, Beaumarchais. I’m certain Strathmore would be,” she added coyly with just enough cruelty to make it interesting.

  Beaumarchais made for the closed door. “Now is not the time, madam.” His tone was dismissive, yet all the while he registered the actress’s unbound enthusiasm for Strathmore. Her insatiable appetites might prove useful when the time was right.

  Felicity was correct, he thought crudely, slamming the door behind him. She did have her talents.

  Chapter 6

  Julia was mad with worry. After a night of fitful sleep, she awoke with anxiety in her heart as heavy as the dampness that coated the windows of her bedchamber. Barely aware of the pale green damask walls and feminine furnishings of her surroundings, she made quick work of her ablutions with the help of a silent maid. Requisite garments had miraculously appeared through the quietly efficient auspices of Baxter. She smoothed down the rich velvet nap of a morning dress that protected against the chill. It was a trifle short, skimming her ankles, and required a few tucks from the needle of the maid around the boning of the bodice. It was a lady’s dress and Julia wondered briefly to whom it had belonged. One of Strathmore’s mistresses?

  What did it matter? Clearly she had no moral compass at all, wasting precious time thinking about such silliness when she should be concentrating on Meredith and Rowena. A feeling of helplessness washed over her, an awareness as sharp and piercing as the pain in her lower leg. They would be distraught with grief and unprepared for what was to come.

  The Wadsworth debacle was Faron’s opening salvo, Julia was convinced, and there was no place left to hide, not even at Montfort. She had been kept in the dark far too long, complicit in the secrecy that Meredith deliberately cultivated to keep her wards safe. But the stratagem was no longer working.

  To calm her jagged nerves, Julia spent the next several hours exploring the London town house, searching for something that would give her a hold over Alexander Francis Strathmore. But there was nothing in the house that reminded her of the man. Not the delicate cornices decorating the high ceilings nor the rather pedestrian collection of books in the library, which featured no exotic literature from the mysterious east, no vast atlases marking the furthest reaches of the world.

  The room of clover-shaped and sashed windows overlooked a quiet residential street. Through a gentle rain, she could see the discreet entrances of similar dwellings, the comings and goings as regular and unthreatening as the sun rising each day. She could hardly rip open the sash and careen out the window, or hail a passerby with screams and exhortations.

  She was as much a prisoner there as she had been in the dark, cork-lined room at Eccles House.

  The library was meant to be impressive, with shelves upon shelves of books with their gilt-edged spines. Despondent, she settled halfheartedly into an armchair with a collection of poetry when the door opened. Looking up, she saw Baxter framed in the doorway, his long arms holding two familiar bandboxes.

  “Your luggage has arrived, madam,” he gravely explained, depositing the packages on the table just inside the door.

  Julia dropped the book in her lap and then picked it up again, smoothing the pages nervously with her fingers. “Thank you. And the rest?”

  “In the carriage house,” he replied.

  Her camera and its accompanying apparatus had arrived. She rose from the chair and lifted one of the boxes from the table, knowing without looking what was inside.

  “Will that be all at the moment, madam?” Baxter courteously asked, reaching for a tray of tea things to carry back to the kitchen.

  “Thank you, yes.” She hesitated a moment. “Would you please have these two boxes sent to my room, Baxter?”

  “Most assuredly, madam.”

  “And Lord Strathmore? Where is he?”

  “Occupied at present. In the drawing room with Lady Strathmore,” he acknowledged, smoothly rearranging the china neatly in the center of the table before sweeping up the two boxes as requested and withdrawing.

  Julia felt the heat race up her spine and down to the pit of her stomach. Strathmore was married. He had a wife. The knowledge settled into the pit of her stomach. As if the situation were not sordid enough already, her skin smoldered at the memory of his touch.

  Strathmore was married. The words hammered in her brain. She felt on fire, mortification and shame blending now with her nerves, already taut as wire. How could it have happened? How could he have allowed it?

  Images spiked through her brain, triggering lascivious memories and shivers of emotion. Adultery had never crossed her mind. Her life had been sheltered, calm and ordered, but now she found herself thrust into a world which called for an immorality that made her head spin. She took a deep breath to calm herself. Gathering her skirts in one hand she strode from the library, through the high-ceilinged hallway toward the drawing room. Her mind a blur, she became aware of the voices, one high and feminine, the other distinctly Strathmore’s. The wide double doors of the drawing room stood open and she hovered on the threshold.

  Even in profile, Lady Strathmore looked every inch the aristocrat, resplendent in a plum satin morning dress with fringed shawl, her only ornamentation two strands of magnificent matched pearls. Her honey colored hair was immaculate under a plume of trembling ostrich feathers.

  “My dear, the least you could have done was let me know you were in the country, never mind London.” In the harsh morning light, her skin was slightly creped, irritation marring a smooth, high brow. Her posture was perfect, her gloved hands elegantly importuning.

  “I didn’t realize that you cared,” said Strathmore tonelessly. He was standing at the window seeming to examine the low hedge framing the town house.

  Julia hadn’t seen him since the previous evening and her gaze was mesmerized by his physical presence. The delicate appointments of the room seemed dwarfed by the breadth of his shoulders beneath his coat, his musculature a compelling reminder of his strenuous physical life. He didn’t belong in the town house. He was an outsider in his own home and, clearly, to his wife.

  “Of course I do, darling.” Lady Strathmore curved her lips into a smile.

  Despite the civility of the exchange, the tension in the room was explosive and thick. It was not unusual for married couples to live separate lives, but there was something very wrong, more like fissures than cracks in a smooth façade. Julia’s eye for detail focused on the rigidity of Lady Strathmore’s narrow back and Strathmore’s tight jaw line. She struggled to make sense of it while her stomach pitched. Her inventory of sins was ever expanding, adding eavesdropping and adultery to the growing list. Hanging back, she wondered whether it was imprudence or a sense of self-preservation that kept her from announcing her presence.

  “Spare me the bromides, Madam,” said Strathmore. “I should ask you to leave.” It was an order that disregarded entirely any familial connection.

  “I haven’t seen you in over five years and this is how you receive me?”

  Strathmore’s shoulders moved in a negligent show of dismissal. “I wasn’t the one who let you in. I believe it was Baxter who displayed such lack of judgment.”

  Lady Strathmore’s mouth arranged itself into a grim, straight line. “This is outrageous,” she accused. “I am your mother. Nothing can change t
hat.”

  The hard knot in Julia’s stomach loosened. Mother. She craned her neck closer, ashamed at the tide of relief flooding through her. Lady Strathmore was a beautiful woman—and far older, on closer inspection, than the man standing across from her. His silence bordered on rudeness.

  “I beg your pardon,” she finally said. “This is hardly the reception I should expect from my son, gone from his home for an indecent period of time.”

  Strathmore turned from the window, his glance withering. “Hardly a home. And you’re the last one to speak of decency.”

  Lady Strathmore smoothed the fringes of her shawl in response to the implied criticism. “Your concerns are bourgeois beyond belief, Alexander. Mine has never been the hand that rocks the cradle.” She gave a little flutter with a delicately gloved hand. “I married a duke. I am now a dowager duchess who will not countenance being asked to justify her behavior.”

  “You give yourself too much credit, madam. Your behavior past and present interests me not in the least,” Strathmore said. “As for my bourgeois sensibilities, I have traveled much of the known world, where I have seen more evidence of familial connection in the most primitive tribes than in our own illustrious family.”

  “Really, Alexander! What an insulting comparison!”

  Strathmore raised a disparaging brow. “This discussion is now beyond tedious. And I am far beyond willing to dredge up the past.”

  Lady Strathmore bristled. “Whilst we’re discussing family”—she sighed dramatically, clearly eager to make a point—“not even an inquiry from you about the duke, who is, after all, your brother, or the duchess, his wife.”

  “They’re keeping well, I’m sure.”

  “As one would expect,” Lady Strathmore said. “William does not spend his time gallivanting the world over in search of lord only knows what. It’s positively humiliating, what with all your highly irregular obsessions. One moment it’s strange rock formations and the next, a peculiar tribe from some desperate place. You were always a strange one, even as a boy—this fixation with sciences and physical geography—positively unseemly, and quite vocational.” She spoke with total iciness. “Unlike well bred young men, Greek and Latin were not enough for you at Eton or Oxford. How often were you thrown out until finally—”