"I promised Hector a day at the beach, Nadine." Etienne's smile was pleasant but detached.
Hmmm, Hazard thought.
His grandson before Nadine. The man showed good judgment at least.
"Did I hear Hector's name?" Appearing from behind a towering floral arrangement flanking the door to the ballroom, Jolie and Henri joined them.
"I was telling Nadine, Hector has a day at the beach planned for us. You know everyone, don't you?" the Duc said, the presence of his daughter and son-in-law a comfortable addition to the disproportionate number of Braddock-Blacks.
"But Etienne, you promised me as well. My picnic, remember, to Barkley lighthouse?"
"Forgive me, but Hector's too young to understand if his plans are altered. Perhaps next time I can join you."
A polite but definite dismissal, Hazard noted with satisfaction… or perhaps Nadine simply wasn't the Duc's style, he cynically reflected.
"I hope you haven't changed your mind as well, Empress," Nadine sulkily said, her full lower lip pouty.
"We'll be there. Trey's reserved me a day away from polo, and Daisy told me she's looking forward to painting the lighthouse. She's very good with watercolors."
"I could stop by later," the Duc quietly said, "when Hector goes in for his nap."
"Thank heaven for little boys' naptimes," Nadine purred, leaning into Etienne's side, "although big boys' naptimes can be heavenly too," she added in a low breathy whisper, meant for his ears alone.
"There's Daisy now," Blaze remarked, saving the Duc the necessity of responding to Nadine's sultry innuendo.
"She was upstairs!" Nadine muttered, her narrow blue gaze on Daisy descending the staircase, her mind swiftly attempting to sort out the possibilities of where and why she was upstairs. "Did you know that?" Her pale eyes critically assessed the Duc.
Although the others hadn't caught her words, her tone was decipherable. Nadine alone wasn't interested in the Duc's answer.
"No. Did I miss something?" Etienne inquired mildly, aware he was the cynosure of everyone's gaze.
"Good luck, Papa," Jolie whispered and when he turned to look at her, she winked like she had as a child when they'd shared confidences from the sterner discipline of Isabelle and numerous governesses.
He grinned back at her with an unburdened joy she hadn't seen in months.
Good Lord, Daisy thought, startled at the full array of family assembled in the hallway below. Was something of importance being discussed? Hopefully not, with Nadine in attendance. Mentally reviewing her appearance, she also hoped her dress was suitably composed, with no buttons left undone or chemise straps showing. Was her hair still properly arranged? Although distinctly nervous, faced with such a fascinated audience, she resisted checking, in the event her gesture caused comment.
She needed an excuse, she rapidly contemplated, stepping off the last carpeted stair, only fifty feet separating her from a certain inquisition. An excuse for Nadine at least. The others might be inclined to politeness. Unfortunately her mind was blank of suitable subterfuge, filled instead with graphic images of Etienne, her emotions pervaded with erotic sensation. Damn him, she couldn't think.
Fortuitously, at that precise moment, the entrance doors were thrown open by two footmen, and a sweeping cool damp breeze blew in from the ocean, bringing in its wake her uncle Kitredge Braddock with Valerie Stewart on his arm.
Attention was immediately diverted from Daisy.
Valerie! With Kit! The shock of their attachment registered in varying degrees on everyone's faces.
"Greetings!" Kit shouted, waving, his grin instant. "Well, darlings," he drawled as he strode nearer, his white tie slightly askew like his lopsided smile, "and the whole family's here now."
Wildness on the prowl was Daisy's first thought, with wanton sybaritic pleasure on his arm, she waspishly appended, taking in her brother's short-lived ex-wife, suitably unchaste in purple chiffon lined provocatively in blush silk. A sportive match, at least, without great need for conversation. Like Etienne and his darling Nadine, she peevishly noted.
Kit gave Daisy a smile and a brushing kiss on her cheek as they both reached the waiting group, then turned his sunny grin on the mildly shocked countenances observing him.
"Sorry I'm so late," he affably said to everyone in general, his dark brows rising slightly in the direction of his disheveled auburn hair, "I met Valerie earlier today at Bailey's Beach. Valerie, you don't need introductions, do you?" he casually added, swinging her hand in time to some inner music.
"I don't know everyone." Valerie murmured. Like Nadine, a connoisseur of masculine beauty and sensual pleasure, Valerie focused on the Duc de Vec, who hadn't previously come into her predatory range.
"I see why you didn't show up for dinner," Trey murmured, while Valerie flashed a pretty smile at the Duc who was being introduced to her by a sulky Nadine. Trey's brows were raised in masculine understanding of Kit's delay.
Kit grinned. "Your ex-wife is…"
"… Accomplished," Trey said, his smile discerning.
Kit's grin broke into a wide smile. "Definitely a woman of accomplishments."
"Just as long as you don't have something she wants."
"Oh, I think you've financed her sufficiently to leave me and all her other 'interests' free from her avaricious instincts. Thank you, by the way." Kit chuckled.
"A cheap enough price for my freedom. You're more than welcome." The intervening years and the contentment of his life had mitigated his resentment toward Valerie. She'd also had the good sense to keep her distance from Belle, the child she'd left for him to raise.
Taking in the massed array of family, Kit quietly inquired, "Have I missed anything?"
"Only a possible case of one absent sister. You arrived opportunely and saved her from everyone's avid regard."
"Daisy?"
Trey nodded.
"Absent with… from?"
"With… I believe." Trey's eyes moved in the direction of the Duc.
Kit's brows rose again, his green eyes wide with interest. He and Daisy had been the last holdouts against the heated tempests of love—for quite opposite reasons. On his part, he'd always found the delectable choices too limitless to narrow down; Daisy's critical selection process, on the other hand, eliminated most of the male population.
"You're looking well, Trey," Valerie said, transferring her attention from the Duc who had been engaged in conversation by a protective Nadine, to her ex-husband.
"And you're looking… healthy, Valerie." A mildly sardonic intonation took into account the precarious state of her bountiful bosom alarmingly close to popping out from the immodest confines of her low-cut gown.
She was pleased he'd noticed, recognizing his lazy, assessing scrutiny. She would have kept him if she could have, Valerie thought, taking in her former husband, dark and beautiful as sin with those silvery eyes she could still remember smiling at her from very close range in those long-ago days when they'd still been lovers. But Trey Braddock-Black had been elusive, even within her marriage trap.
"No hard feelings?" she inquired, he voice dulcet and inviting.
"Not after two years," he said with a cultivated civility. But his pale eyes took on a hard edge for a moment when he considered how she'd almost ruined his life. Reaching out, he took Empress's hand in his and pulled her close.
Turning from her conversation with Jolie, Empress quietly said, "Hello, Valerie." She leaned into Trey's shoulder, sure of his love, secure against Valerie's style of attraction, confident of her husband's faithfulness. "Was the beach busy?" she asked, Kit's comment about Bailey's Beach piquing her interest since she knew Valerie wasn't the athletic type.
"Not early in the day." Valerie smiled at Kit. "The water was cold."
"We went out for a sail instead," Kit offered. Which explained to everyone the lateness of their arrival. Kit's sailing craft, specially designed for ocean travel, had all the luxuries—including an extremely large stateroom.
W
ith Daisy too close for comfort and Valerie's capricious attention a possible threat, Nadine abruptly declared, "I want to dance." Unshy and assertive under the most benign circumstances, with the Duc's strong arm beneath her hand and her husband sleeping peacefully off in the far west wing, she was avowedly determined to keep the Duc for herself. "Right now," she added, firmly, gazing up at the Duc.
"Excuse us," Etienne said. He had no choice short of publicly embarrassing his hostess by refusing, although he knew his leaving with Nadine would be disastrously misconstrued by Daisy. Hell and damnation, he heatedly thought, there were times when a lodge on the prairies held great appeal. How many times in his life had he been gracious under duress?
After Etienne left with Nadine, Daisy found herself wretchedly dispirited with all the subtle and not so subtle machinations surrounding the Duc. Wherever he went beyond the privacy of his home, women fawned over him, made demands of him, wanted him to entertain them in a thousand individual ways. She was weary of the competition—Isabelle a serious contender, in a class by herself—and she could no longer deal with the universal ardor. She was no better, she realistically admitted, her behavior tonight in his bedchamber as eagerly passionate. "I'm tired," she said, her voice suddenly curt. "Excuse me, but I'm leaving."
So sharply uttered was her declaration and so obvious her dejection, Blaze instantly suggested accompanying her. "I've had quite a long-enough day; it must be after midnight."
"Twelve-thirty," Empress offered, checking the small diamond brooch-watch on her bodice. "I'm tired too." Empress preferred rising in the morning with her children, although they had nannies enough.
"I'm going to stay for a short time more," Hazard gruffly stated, intensely aware of his daughter's unhappiness. "No need to send the carriage back, I'll walk."
"Since I generally sleep until afternoon," Kit said with an amiable smile, "the evening's just beginning for me. Do you want to dance, Valerie?" Half drunk and cheerful, his life held nothing more urgent than an occasional junket off to some distant corner of the globe when the mood struck him and the winds were favorable.
Valerie had even less to concern her; she didn't sail, her junkets pertaining to pleasure of another kind—less lengthy and of the boudoir variety. She was amenable.
Jolie and Henri had excused themselves when the Duc left to dance with Nadine, so after the ladies had their wraps brought to them, Hazard and Trey escorted their wives and Daisy to their carriage.
"Are you sure you're going to be all right?" Blaze asked Daisy as the horses drew away from the brightly lit entrance portico. She was pale beneath the golden bronze of her skin.
"You miss him, don't you?" Empress sympathetically declared, the visible evidence before her eyes conclusive.
"No," Daisy harshly replied, "not with Nadine hanging all over him."
"She can be a problem." Blaze sighed. "Although he doesn't seem smitten," she kindly added.
Daisy snorted in derision. "Etienne's never smitten. It would take too much emotion. It's so much easier to casually play the game—an effortless endeavor for him after all his years of practice," she tersely concluded.
"You're too hard on him," Empress rejoined. "He obviously was only being polite to Nadine."
"And he certainly knows how to be… polite, doesn't he?" Daisy's elaborate sweetness cut like a knife.
"Oh, dear," Blaze murmured, concerned with Daisy's unhappiness. "Can we do anything, darling?" she softly inquired.
"No, nothing really, I'm fine. Absolutely fine," she declared, fixing her gaze on the fog outside. She wasn't though, she was miserable, desperately, unbelievably miserable. During the months away from Etienne, she'd conditioned herself to a measure of equanimity and peace. And in only a few brief moments, he'd completely destroyed all her hard-won tranquility.
"I'll be in the billiard room," Hazard was saying to Trey at the same time Daisy was grieving the loss of her carefully wrought serenity. "When de Vec's finished dancing with Oliver's wife, would you ask him to join me?"
From the tone of his father's voice, Trey understood one dance would be the limit of Hazard's patience. "Are we concerned with Nadine's wishes?"
Hazard's dark brows rose in ironic response. "She can have him back when I'm finished with him."
"He doesn't threaten." Trey recalled his last meeting with the Duc in Empress's Paris home two years ago. When he'd threatened to kill him, the Duc de Vec had only quietly said, "You can try."
"I've no intention of threatening him. I'm simply going to ask him a few pertinent questions concerning his intentions in regard to your sister."
"Daisy won't like you asking."
Hazard glanced at his son as they stood in the loggia near the billiard room, the sound, of the waves breaking on the shore out-side the arched windows distinct, the wind off the sea pelting the dark gleaming glass with spray. "Daisy won't know."
"He might tell her."
"I'll see that he doesn't." In that precise tone, Hazard had told the chiefs of his enemy, the Lakota, years ago, that he'd come for his son.
A short time later, the Duc de Vec walked into the billiard room, stood for a brief moment surveying the large chamber, and on seeing Hazard seated near the fireplace, proceeded toward him. Since the French team was lodged at Nadine's, several of the men at the billiard tables were friends and teammates, occasioning an interrupted progress across the room.
"Hell of a game, Etienne."
"Great lift on your backhanders, de Vec."
"That last shot was a ball-breaker."
He acknowledged their remarks with only a smile or a nod or a brief thank you. Intent on presenting himself to Daisy's father, he didn't wish to be waylaid.
"Are you up to Nadine, de Vec, with your bruised body?"
He silently groaned. The masculine ribbing was expected with Nadine's attention so obvious, but the timing could have been better. He was about to face a wrathful father.
"With Oliver getting up so early in the morning," another man said, sportively, looking at the case clock in the corner, "you'll have to give Nadine an abbreviated version of your skills, de Vec. It's almost one o'clock."
"I'm not interested, Charles," Etienne disavowed, skirting a British player making a bridge shot. "I'm here to play polo."
"Maybe you haven't made that perfectly clear to Nadine," a young man lounging against the table bumper said, his smile wide. "She looks as though she's taken a sincere interest in you."
"Feel free, Abercrombie," the Duc offered. "She's all yours."
Hazard was standing when the Duc reached him, his expression grim, and Etienne felt he should apologize somehow for the comments about Nadine. It wasn't a propitious beginning to what was probably going to be—at best—a difficult conversation.
But he only said, "You wished to see me?" because it was impossible to say he was sorry about Nadine with any simplicity.
Hazard didn't immediately answer, gazing at the Duc in silence for a long moment, as if judging him against some internal assessment scale, before finally saying, "The smoking room will be less busy." Turning, he touched a hidden panel at the side of the fireplace, opening a door concealed in the paneling.
"Oliver has his eccentricities," Hazard explained, shutting the hidden door once they were in the smoking room. "This leads outside past that alcove."
For a fleeting moment Etienne wondered if he was going to conveniently disappear through that outside doorway until he noticed two men seated in the room smoking and enjoying a brandy.
"Could we have some privacy?" Hazard quietly said to the two men comfortably disposed in plush armchairs, and despite the softly spoken request, there was no mistaking Hazard's voice of command. The sight of Hazard's stern expression augmented his dictatorial tone; both men immediately scrambled up, stammered their excuses, and exited through the outside terrace.
"Excuse the excess," Hazard apologized, his voice serene, as though men jumping up and going out into the damp night to accommodate him was
normal. "Oliver had this room reproduced from the Alhambra, which isn't the problem so much as the decorator from New York who 'improved' on the original."
The proportions of the room duplicated royal magnificence, the vaulted ceiling rising more than forty feet, its moorish arches and supporting walls covered with exact reproductions of the rare mosaics in the Alhambra. A magnificent glass chandelier hung from the elegant dome, illuminating furniture upholstered in red velvet or tiger skins, glistening above elaborately carved tables, enhancing the subtle lustre of four Yamoud Bokhara carpets specially ordered from Turkestan. As added decor, enough potted palms to shade an oasis punctuated the enormous chamber, lending a shadowy quality of exotic locales.
"This could almost cause one to stop smoking," the Duc said, casting a sardonic eye about the room, his attitude as calm as Hazard's. Too long a de Vec to be intimidated, he only questioned what position Hazard would take.
"A foul habit anyway. Sit down."
For a man who had ordered the world to his perfection for decades and was comfortable with authority, the Duc experienced an odd deference. Hazard Black manifested a quiet unusual strength beyond the physical; a mystical power reminding him potently of the shaman magic he'd seen in his travels with Georges. An intense and capable force Etienne couldn't help but admire.
"Would you like a drink?" Hazard asked, moving toward an ornately carved ivory table holding various bottles. At the Duc's affirmative, he poured them both a bourbon neat. "Some of Oliver's private stock from his Tennessee farm," he added, handing the Duc his drink. "And smoother than most." Lifting his glass, Hazard smiled for the first time. "So you've become friends with my Daisy."
Etienne choked marginally on his swallow of liquor at Hazard's politic word for the flame-hot passion between himself and his daughter.
"Don't drink it too fast," Hazard cautioned with a grin as he seated himself across from Etienne on one of Oliver's tiger-skin club chairs. "It has more bite than brandy."
Under the charming influence of Hazard's casual grin, the Duc recognized a portion of Daisy's appeal was inherited from her father. He had an astonishing warmth, charismatic and unaffected. And his dramatic physical presence in the overdecorated, flamboyant room brought with it a clean, fresh sense of majestic nature. Maybe his exotic long black hair or the small painted shell-earring hanging from his right earlobe contributed to the image of open-sky wilderness, or perhaps the fine lines evident near his eyes, brought on by years of gazing over the open plains, bespoke a man of the outdoors. He embodied an unmistakable spirit of nature, a tangible essence of forest and mountain and freedom, despite his stylish evening clothes and urbane manners.
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