Celeste Bradley - [Royal Four 04]

by Seducing the Spy

  At that moment, Wyndham burst into the bedchamber so hard that the door bounced back off the wall and slammed itself behind him. Alicia leaped up, startled.

  Her words of surprise and admonishment died on her lips as she took in his black expression of rage and self-disgust.

  “You are my worst nightmare,” he growled. “You are the woman who sails in and wreaks havoc on all around her, then sails away again laughing at the carnage.”

  Alicia backed a step away. “I—”

  He moved closer, leaning forward, his eyes gone dark like a predator ready to strike. “You will not wreak havoc on me!”

  Alicia’s back hit the corner post of the bed, making her realize her own cowardly retreat. Her spine straightened and she gaze back at Wyndham with equal fury.

  “You pretend that you didn’t want me, but I am no virgin, Wyndham! I know when a man lusts!”

  “I imagine you do,” he said harshly. “I imagine it is your signal to do your worst!”

  She lifted her chin. “I did nothing to you but tell you the truth every moment we’ve spent together. If that isn’t enough for you . . . well, then nothing is. And nothing is precisely what you’ll get!”

  He grabbed both her shoulders in his big hands, not hurting but not gently either. “You’re right. I do want you. I want to see inside of you, to get to the truth of you—but you refuse to let me in!”

  He tightened his grip and then she did let out a small sound of pain, for her shoulder still stung from her encounter in the garden.

  He eased his hands but he did not release her. “If you will not lower your gates,” he said, his voice low and dangerous, “then I will have to storm the keep myself.”

  He pulled her close then, dragging her into him and bringing his mouth hard down on hers. Alicia kissed him back, just as angry, just as lost—just as alone.

  Wyndham released his grip to take her fully into his arms and she wrapped her hands around the back of his neck, pulling the kiss deeper yet.

  Then the floor was hard beneath her back and the carpet prickly against her bare bottom as he yanked up her skirts.

  A swift adjustment at the front of his trousers and then he threw himself upon her. She tossed her head and keened when he invaded her so harshly, but she was already slick with need and he caused more pleasure than pain.

  She clung to him as he thrust violently into her, storming her gates again and again. She was swept by pleasure and longing and a wicked, shocking gratification in being conquered, in being helpless in the grasp of a virile male, her powerful lover—in being in his control.

  She let him in, she let herself be his, half-naked and shamed and eager, but he could not see beyond his own walls.

  She gave herself over and over again, being his goddess and his whore, his love and his creature of lust, desperate to show him that there was no other Alicia, that he had all of her there was to have—but he would not see.

  He thrust into her a last, shuddering time with a deep gasping roar of self-hatred, then he rolled from her before she could breathe against the weight of him. He rose and fastened his trousers with his back to her.

  Alicia pushed her skirts down and stood, raw and soul-bared and rejected, and took a deep breath. “Did that solve something for you? Did you see inside me?”

  He rubbed his face with his hands, but he did not look at her. “There is nothing inside you to see.”

  She jerked back, the pain like ice stabbing her soul.

  He went on. “The deal is cancelled. I will pay you for services rendered. I want you on your way within the hour.” He turned to the door, then paused. “Have you nothing to say to that?”

  Alicia moved before him, blocking his exit with her back to the door. “Oh yes, you had best believe that I have something to say to that.”

  28

  Alicia narrowed her gaze and reinforced her spine. She might be in love with the handsome idiot, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t let him see one more side of her—her red-headed temper! “I have been trying to translate every move you make and every word you say and don’t say—and I am through. You don’t truly want me to leave. If you have something to say to me, you’ll have to find your own words.”

  He stood in rigid silence. She relented her stance slightly, reaching to trace her fingertips down the buttons of his weskit.

  “The only word you need is ‘stay.’ ”

  He wanted to—God, he wanted it more than anything— except that if he did, if he chose to believe, if he asked—

  What if she didn’t love him? What if, someday, once the physical ecstasy faded, she turned from him? He was not courageous enough to survive being left by a woman like her. What if he couldn’t keep her flame alight, burning only for him?

  Stay.

  Yet the words, not even the one, wouldn’t come. Her eyes, full of wary hope and ready to promise him so much, slowly went flat. The green of spring turned to cold jade as he watched, helpless to stop her pain. No. She wasn’t real.

  “How can you look into my eyes and not believe?” she whispered. “How can you know so much about me and not know that I love you?”

  She backed away. “You’ve become so dependant on this sense of yours that you do not trust your others.”

  So she knew that, too. “What other senses would you suggest I trust?”

  She looked up at him, trying to put her heart in her gaze. “This one.” Going up on tiptoe, she kissed him with all the aching tenderness and longing she had within her. His mouth remained unresponsive beneath hers. With the pain of repressed tears in her throat, she gave up, pulling her lips away, dropping down on her heels, allowing her forehead to rest upon his immobile chest in defeat. “You’re a right bastard, Lord Wyndham,” she whispered.

  She took a deep breath and straightened, meeting his gaze without trying to hide her pain. “You can believe anything you like about me, my lord. It doesn’t change a bloody thing about the truth. I only hope you figure that out someday, if not about me, then about some other woman. Otherwise, I fear you are destined to always be as alone and troubled as you are now.”

  She raised her hand to his face, but halted as he stiffened. Tilting her head, she smiled slightly, ignoring the tears that were beginning to fall. “You deserve better than that.” She stepped back and turned away, then looked back over her shoulder. “Most of the time.”

  “Where will you go?”

  She took up her spencer and shrugged into it. “I am going. That is all I am going to tell you. After all, this quest of yours is a fool’s errand, remember? My little snipe hunt, arranged purely for your humiliation, isn’t that right?”

  Then she turned abruptly. “You will keep an eye on his highness, won’t you? Just in case?”

  Wyndham gazed at her coldly. “The Prince Regent is well guarded, as always.”

  Alicia almost let her shoulders fall, but the ice in her lover’s eyes only seemed to strengthen the steel in her spine. “Then there is nothing more to say. You may send the money to my family. Goodbye, my lord.”

  Somehow she did it. Somehow she opened the door and walked through it, though she felt the pull of a thousand bindings in her heart, tying her to him. Somehow she kept her feet moving down the hall and down the stairs, until she stood blinking in the bright light of day on the steps of the grand house.

  A footman approached her. “May I assist you, my lady?”

  She turned to smile at him, though she could not see him well through the blurring of her vision. “I shall need a carriage back into London.” Then she laughed damply. “I believe Lord Wyndham’s is available.”

  She would go back to London and to Millie. Then she and Millie would disappear from Wyndham’s long reach.

  Just as he wished.

  She wasn’t real. She never had been.

  But the pain was. It stole Stanton’s breath until his vision darkened. He forced his lungs to work, forced his legs to walk, forced his voice to normal lack of emotion instead of
the animal howling that tried to work its way from his throat.

  She wasn’t real.

  But the damage she had done would be with him forever. He could feel his need for her clawing its way up through his chest, shredding the barrier around his heart in the process.

  No. Letting it out would leave him open to everything he’d fled his entire life. Everything he was, everything he’d created and named “self” would change, alter, slip away.

  A man like him would never fall in love with someone so inappropriate.

  A man like him would never fall in love. Ever.

  Love was real, he knew that. Love was a beast that took hold of a man’s better nature in its teeth and shook it to death like a terrier shakes a rat.

  He’d seen firsthand the lethal power of love and the way it overwhelmed and drowned a man, rather like a tempest at sea where there is nothing solid to cling to and no land in sight.

  Love would not defeat him. He’d worked too hard to overcome the everlasting need to be loved. He’d made his place in the world—needed and respected, but never, ever loved.

  Now it was all shot to hell.

  As if something in her eyes had awakened some sense in himself, he looked about him to see that he was surrounded by love.

  His mother’s hopeless, wistful, regretful love. Even his mentor’s love of a father for a son, expressed only in a dry, hard handclasp on his deathbed before he’d slipped away.

  “Wyndham, you look a sight.” The full, fruity tones of the Prince Regent’s voice were tinged with real concern.

  Wyndham looked up at George in horror. There it was, gleaming behind the usual twinkling wicked humor in the prince’s eyes—real caring.

  Love.

  Stanton dropped his head into his hands. How was he to defeat something so pernicious? How was he to resist the temptation to take his mother’s hand, to clap George on the shoulder, to run his fingertips over Alicia’s tear-streaked cheek?

  “I’m done for,” he whispered aloud.

  George plunked his sizable bottom onto the settee next to Stanton. “I’ll say. She’s a sweet little minx, though, I’ll give you that. You could do worse than to lose your heart to a woman like that.”

  “She’s a liar.”

  George snorted. “Do tell. So is every person I’ve ever met. We’re deceitful creatures. I decided long ago not to hear the lies. You’ve got to look past them to the fear. That’s why people lie, you know—it’s the fear. Fear that they’ll be caught out, fear that they’ll be rejected, fear that someone will discover they’re just as weak and petty and evil as anyone else. And just as alone.”

  Stanton looked at George with surprise. He knew his monarch was not a stupid man, only a supremely unhappy and rebellious one—yet he still managed to forget that it was George who had changed London with his love of beautiful art and architecture. It was George who had loved and wed the most inappropriate woman imaginable, Maria Fitzher-bert, in a passionate attempt to be the man he truly was, even if the dutiful Prince Regent had been forced to dissolve the union later for a political marriage to a woman who revolted him.

  “You’ve seen your share of liars, I suppose,” Stanton said. “What would you think if a woman said she loved you but wanted to leave you?”

  George looked at him pityingly. “I’d ask her which part she was lying about, you ass.”

  29

  They rode out together again—Dane, Nathaniel, Marcus and Stanton. The others seemed to understand Stanton’s need for silence, although he did catch Marcus giving him the “you idiot” look now and then, much the way George had.

  The four of them rode side by side. Stanton had an irreverent moment, surely influenced by too much exposure to Alicia.

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War, famine, plague—and then there’s you, we’ll call you “heartbreak.”

  The day was mild and damp and edgy, as if the weather merely awaited an excuse to worsen into full winter. Stanton felt the air prickle on the back of his neck, just as it did when he was being watched—

  There was a man standing in the shadows of the fireworks structure. He ducked back when Stanton spied him, but not quickly enough to hide the impression of a scarred, damaged face, pale in the shadow. Stanton reined his horse about. “There!”

  The others didn’t require explanation, simply turning their mounts as one with his.

  So that’s what brotherhood feels like.

  It was only a fleeting thought, gone as soon as they thundered up to the castle, surrounding it on four sides. There was flat lawn for many yards around them. No one had run from the building while they approached it.

  “He’s in there,” Stanton whispered to the others. “He cannot have run without our spotting him.”

  They dismounted swiftly, leaving their horses a distance from the structure. They wanted no clever escapes this time. The door opened easily with a push and they moved in a great rush—to see nothing inside.

  The door of the little shed slammed shut. The four of them whirled.

  “Oh, hell,” Marcus breathed.

  Stanton threw himself at the door hard. There was not so much as a creak. The shed, after all, was newly built and made sturdy enough to support the elaborate façade throughout the upcoming series of fireworks explosions.

  Stanton stepped back. “Dane, why don’t you take this one?”

  Dane snorted. “Stand back then.”

  At the impact of the big blond lord on the door, there was a definite shudder through the structure, but that was all. Dane repeated his assault several times, but all that was accomplished was a great deal of noise.

  At last Dane desisted and leaned both hands on his knees. “Whose brilliant idea,” he gasped heavily, “was it to make the door lock from the outside?”

  Stanton bent to peer at the latch. It was a good one, of course. After all, the structure was designed by Forsythe, a stickler for details. “Locked properly, with a key. Who has the key?”

  Nathaniel looked thoughtful. “Forsythe, I imagine. George might, as well. Or Cross. Or the carpenter who built the bloody thing. There’s no way to know.”

  Marcus rubbed at the back of his neck. “All of whom might have left it lying about where it could be taken. After all, we know who did this, even if we don’t know precisely how he got the key.”

  Nathaniel straightened and nodded. “The comte. He wants to blow us up.”

  “The Chimera,” Stanton growled, “is beginning to seriously plague me off.”

  Dane shook his head. “What would be the point of merely locking us up? The moment someone comes in earshot, we’ll be released. The promenade display isn’t completed. There’ll be staff all over the place in a few hours.”

  Nathanial frowned. “This all seems rather . . . extemporaneous. I don’t think it was planned. He might have had the key because he’s been hiding out in here for the past few days. Look, there are signs that someone has been using this shed.”

  He was quite right. A pile of what seemed to be rags in one corner turned out to be a blanket rolled about a cheap flask and battered tinderbox. Nathaniel shook the flask, then uncapped it and sniffed. “Gut-rot gin,” he said, grimacing. “Sooner kill you than not. You’d think a French lord would have better taste.”

  “He’s in pain,” Stanton said slowly. “He’s been ill from nearly drowning, thanks to Dane, and wounded, thanks to your lady, Marcus. By all rights he ought to be holed up somewhere, recovering. That’s what I would be doing, getting well, gathering my strength to battle anew.”

  “God,” Nathaniel breathed. “He’s not, though, is he? He’s running on nothing, burning himself out. Why?”

  “He’s lost and he knows it.” Dane let out a long breath. “We thought he was dangerous before. Now, imagine that man—that twisted-minded genius—gone to desperation, with nothing left to lose.”

  Marcus had gone white. “Julia.”

  Stanton nodded, battling down a surge of something very like terror
. Alicia. She’d already been targeted twice. And you didn’t believe her either time. His worry flared higher, until he remembered that Alicia had left him.

  She was gone. Gone and safe.

  It was better that way.

  “Quite. It is obvious that he has taken advantage of opportunity to occupy us long enough to get at someone else—” Stanton halted, gazing around the dimly lit shed. The air seemed hazy, gone sharp with—

  “Fire.”

  Stanton drew a breath, choked on it, coughed it away. “No,” he gasped. “Smoke.”

  It was coming from under the door, billowing up darker now, black and deadly in the tight, airless confines of the shed. He pulled off his jacket and tried to block the gap. “Smoking us out—like badgers from a hole.” Except there was no out. Nathaniel added his coat as well. The cloud ceased. They’d stopped it all.

  Dane crouched. “Get down. The air is better. The smoke might yet vent—the shed isn’t that—” He choked, coughed violently. “Isn’t that airtight,” he finished weakly, since they could all see that the shed was, in truth, appallingly airtight.

  Dane abruptly sat, shaking his head and blinking. “It’s not just smoke . . .”

  Stanton could feel it as well. His vision blurred, the room tilted, the hazy dimness acquiring churning colors and shapes. “What—” He realized he was on his knees. No, on all fours.

  Nathaniel dropped to the floor next to him. “Opium,” he hissed.

  Yes, it was opium, along with something even more acrid and unpleasant that turned the air in Stanton’s lungs to scorching fire. He saw Marcus sprawled unconscious, Dane just beyond him in the same condition. He held his breath— too late, fool—and tried to crawl across the unconscious bodies to the other side of the shed. If he pressed his lips to that knothole, could he—

  The big form of Lord Greenleigh was an insurmountable obstacle. “Nate—help me—”

  Nathaniel was passed out, one hand still pressing his coat into the door gap. Stanton blinked dully at the three men for a moment. He was floating above them—no, swimming beneath them . . .