Her hand lightly, tentatively touched his arm. "Max . . . ? Please don't be angry with me. I can't bear it when you're angry with me."
He turned, gathering her into his arms. God, but he loved her. For a moment he couldn't breathe. "I thought you were angry with me," he said.
She had shuddered when he first touched her. Now she was pressing the whole length of her body onto his. Her tautened nipples scraped across his chest. He tightened his jaw, and sweat filmed his eyes.
"I was so furious with you, I could have branched you myself," she said, and her voice again took on an angry edge as she remembered. ' 'But after you left I began to grow afraid you weren't coming back."
He stroked her, his hands cupping her buttocks and pulling her pelvis up and onto him, making her feel the hard proof of his desire. He started to rub himself against the soft curly nest of hair that was the fount of all his torment and his joy. But then he had to stop because he was so desperate for her by now, he thought he might possibly burst.
"I'll always come back, ma mie," he said, while he thought, Gabrielle, Gabrielle, I know it's important to talk this through, but I can't right now. I want you so badly. I need you. I have to—
She shuddered again, then a harsh, strangled sound tore from her throat. He felt the wetness of tears where her face lay buried against his neck, and his heart plunged into his gut.
"Oh, Jesus, Gabrielle, don't cry." He hugged her tight against him, hating himself. "Oh, God . . . I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"
Her mouth smothered the rest of his words, her lips pressing down on his, grinding them against his teeth and driving his head back against the pillow. He pulled her leg over his thighs and she rose above him, swinging her hips up and around to straddle him. He could make out her shape in the darkness but not her features. Then a stray beam from one of the lamplights outside pierced the night and the rain, and came shining through the window to turn her hair into a crown of fire. Or a halo. He smiled at the thought. Gabrielle, his angel of fire and passion.
As he watched, she rose above him, high on her knees, and taking his hard length in her hand, slowly, slowly, impaled herself upon it. And slowly, slowly he shut his eyes and, though he had no wings, he felt himself fly.
Afterward, Max lay holding his wife within the crook of his arm. His muscles felt heavy with exhaustion and his thoughts were filled with her, his Gabrielle . . . Winning her had been hard enough. Keeping her, he now realized, was going to be even harder. Somehow he would have to make amends for tonight. And although he couldn't yet give her what she wanted, which was his unconditional trust, he could at least give her a slice of his pride by groveling at her feet for forgiveness.
He took a deep breath to gird himself for the coming ordeal and constricted the muscles of the arm that held her. "Gabrielle?"
Her hand lay on his heart. Sighing, she twisted and coiled her fingers through the hair on his chest. "No," she said.
"But you don't even know what I was going to say."
"I do know. If you think, Maximilien de Saint-Just, that I'll forgive you for going out smuggling on our wedding night—"
"Our wedding night was last night."
"—just because you bestow a few kisses—"
"A few kisses!"
"Or a lot of kisses." She pinched his nipple. "No, no, I shall exact a greater payment."
With growing trepidation Max waited to hear what she would demand of him. He couldn't possibly make love to her again tonight. At the moment he couldn't raise his little finger, let alone anything else.
"I saw the most adorable little hat in the window of Madame Benin's," Gabrielle was saying.
"It's yours," Max said, laughing, and trying not to think about the fact that Madame Bertin made hats for the queen, and charged accordingly.
Then a sudden thought struck him that brought a strange lump to his throat. Out of love, he had been about to offer Gabrielle the gift of his pride and she, out of love, had given it back to him unopened. Out of love.
And in that moment he believed, truly believed, that what they had was special and could survive anything—anger, disappointment . . . even secrets.
And so, with his wife's hair spread across his chest and her head nestled in the crook of his arm, Maximilien de Saint-Just shut his eyes and fell asleep listening to the rain.
❧
It was still raining the next afternoon.
Abel Hachette stood at his library window, scanning the passersby in the street below and growing more impatient by the minute. Max had promised to stop by late last night to report on the smuggling operation, but he never came. All that morning, Hachette had waited, and still no Max. It wasn't that he was worried—Max could take care of himself. No, Hachette wasn't anxious; he was excited. He had a surprise for his Black Angel and he could hardly wait to give it to him.
Hachette remembered the first time he had stood at this window waiting for Max. Until the last moment, he really had planned to have the gendarmes there to arrest the young brigand. He had even tried out in his mind several biting remarks he would thrust in that handsome, arrogant face as the boy was hauled off to a well-deserved scaffold.
But he had never sent for the gendarmes after all that day eleven years ago, and when the clock on the mantel chimed first twelve and then twelve-thirty, Hachette had felt a keen disappointment. At least there was some consolation, he had thought, in that he hadn't made an ass of himself by dragging the police out on a fool's errand. After the clock chimed one, Hachette rose from behind his rosewood desk and rang for his servant. His feet, of their own accord, carried him over to the window for one last look at the throng of pedestrians and vehicles that as usual clogged the busy Rue Royal. There was still no sign of the young aristocrat.
One half of the double doors opened behind him.
"Bring my hat and cane, if you please," Hachette said, turning around, "I'm—"
"Forgive my tardiness," came that mocking, drawling voice, this time unmuffled by any mask, and Hachette felt a chill dance down his spine. "I was unavoidably detained. I had this foolish suspicion you would summon the police."
Sweat started out on the financier's white brow. "How . . . how did you get in?"
Mocking brows arched upward over cool gray eyes. "Through the front door."
Hachette walked stiffly over to his desk. He felt for the seat of his chair with his legs and slowly sat down. He assumed a stern face. "Well, brigand—"
"My friends call me Max."
"And what do your enemies call you?"
"They don't live long enough to call me anything."
Hachette started to sneer at this bravado until he saw the glint of self-mockery in the boy's eyes. He laughed instead. "I'll have to remember what a dangerous character you are . . . Max. Since we are going into business together."
They made three shipments in all in the two years before France openly entered the war on the side of the Americans and the secret gun running became unnecessary, and therefore unprofitable. When he met with Max on a wharf at the busy port of Nantes on the morning the first shipment was to sail, Hachette was beset with fresh doubts, thinking what a fool he'd been to trust a stranger—a highwayman, no less— with a fortune in muskets and paper-wrapped cartridges.
"Once you sell the guns . . . how do I know you won't disappear into the Caribbean with my ship and the profits?" he said, trying to hide his nervousness.
Smells from the dock came through the open porthole with the breeze—cinnamon, tobacco, coffee, and over it all the stink of rotting fish. Max, who was bent over the captain's table studying a chart of the harbor, didn't even bother to look up. "You don't know, you can only hope. The same way I hoped you wouldn't deliver me to the hangman the afternoon I walked into your house unmasked and unarmed."
"Were you unarmed?"
Max smiled slowly until his eyes were nearly shut. "Hell, no."
When Max returned with the profits from the final shipment, Hachette was there to meet the shi
p at the dock, as he was at the end of every shipment. For always Hachette never quite believed Max would return. Yet when Max handed over the gold bullion and silver coins the Americans paid for the guns, Hachette wondered why he'd ever doubted the boy.
As Hachette counted out Max's percentage for this, their final shipment, he realized with real sorrow that his strange association with Maximilien de Saint-Just was about to end.
Curious, he asked the young man—a man he had drunk with and eaten with, a man he now trusted as a son, but whom he knew not at all—if he intended to join the cream of the French aristocracy who, following the example of the marquis de Lafayette, was volunteering in droves to fight for glory and liberty in America.
Max, who was packing the last of his belongings into a battered sea chest, shrugged indifferently. "I don't take orders very well."
"But you'd be giving orders, boy, not taking them. You're a nobleman, so you can buy yourself an officer's commission. Your father the comte is a marichal, after all. Surely he—"
Max's laugh was bitter. "My father wouldn't spend a sou to buy me a seat on a coach going to hell."
"Pity then you have such a poor relationship with the comte," Hachette said, wondering aloud. "With his influence at court you could go far, even get a pension."
"I'm his bastard, Abel. My father acknowledges my existence. That's the extent of our relationship."
"I see. Still, you've made enough money in the last two years to buy yourself a dozen commissions—"
For the first time, Hachette saw Max lose his temper. The young man slammed the lid of the chest down so hard it bounced. "Dammit, Abel, what the hell business is it of yours anyway? If you must know, I see no compelling reason why I should want to fight for a country that isn't even mine and means nothing to me."
"I thought it did mean something to you." He waved his arm around the cabin. "Why do this then, these shipments of arms?"
"I did it for the money, Abel. The same as you. To fight for something means you have to be willing to die for it."
"You're willing to risk you life for money but not for liberty?"
"What is liberty? It's only a word."
Hachette stared at the youthful, handsome face, browned by the weeks at sea and flushed now with anger. "What does matter to you then?" he asked. "What do you want out of life?"
Max stared back at him for a moment longer, then his breath left him in a sigh. "To discover things. To invent the things that can't be discovered because they don't yet exist. Hell, maybe I just want to keep from being bored."
He isn't one of us after all, Hachette had thought then, hiding his disappointment, and the subject was dropped.
Hachette hadn't really expected to see the young brigand again after they had parted that day but, as was so often the case with Max, he had been wrong. For Max had shown up at his house in the Faubourg Saint-Honore" a little over a year later and he had brought with him the key to the English ciphers, the code used by the enemy in their battle communications.
Abel Hachette had sat behind his rosewood desk, holding the cipher key with hands that shook. "Dieu, this is incredible. Where did you—"
"From a bedroom in London."
"But how . . ."
"I stole it."
"This is incredible, Max. Do you realize what this is worth to the army, to the king?"
Max smiled. "That's why I brought it to you, my dear Abel. Because you would know how much it's worth. And you can sell it for me."
Hachette glanced sideways at the young man, who paced with restless excitement across the parquet floor. It was time, he decided, for the boy to choose just what sort of man he was to become.
"France's treasury is depleted," Hachette said. "This American war has turned out to be more expensive than anyone anticipated. Why not sell this back to the English instead?" -
Max stopped, whirling to stare at Hachette in astonishment.
"England can afford to pay whatever you ask," Hachette said. "I doubt our king could scrape together a hundred louis—"
"Then give it to him for nothing, for God's sake!" Max threw himself into one of Hachette's fragile gilt chairs. He scowled at the old man, then began to laugh. "Don't look so shocked, Abel. I do have some principles and I even try to live up to them occasionally. When living up to them doesn't interfere with my survival."
"Then you do care what happens to France?"
For a moment Hachette thought he was going to get the flippant reply that was so typical of the boy, but Max had said, "Hell, I'm a Frenchman. Of course I care."
"How old are you?" Hachette asked suddenly.
Max shrugged. "I don't know. Around twenty, I guess."
"Twenty! Dieu, that means you were only seventeen the year you captained our first shipment of muskets!"
Max flashed his cocky smile. "I'll tell you another secret, Abel. I had never sailed before that day. I'd never even set foot on a ship before in my life. I didn't know a poop deck from a sparsail."
Hachette burst into laughter. He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks, and he had to mop them up with his lace-edged handkerchief. Then he sobered suddenly and stared hard at the younger man.
"Max, my dear boy, I have a business proposition to put to you . . ."
And until this moment it had been a very profitable partnership, indeed. Profitable for the cabal and profitable for France and the cause of revolution. Abel Hachette thought of that now as he spotted the dark head of the man he had been waiting for coming toward him on the rain-slick Rue Royal. And he made a silent vow to that man, to Maximilien de
Saint-Just, whom he now realized was as dear to him—as necessary to him—as a son.
I will let nothing, or no one, come between you and your destiny.
❧
Hachette barricaded himself behind his rosewood desk and waited with breathless impatience for the majordomo to announce his visitor. He actually had to stop himself from bolting out of his seat when the door was at last flung open and Max entered the room.
"Monsieur le Vicomte de Saint-Just," the lackey announced in stentorian tones.
Hachette couldn't help smiling as he saw Max stop as if stunned by a blow. He had never been able to disconcert that arrogant presence before.
He didn't have long to enjoy his triumph, however, for the arrogant presence was recovered in seconds. Max waited until the lackey had shut the door, then he turned slowly, eyebrows raised. "My dear Abel," he drawled, "are you in that most subtle way of yours trying to tell me something?"
"Your brother is dead," Hachette said bluntly. "A hunting accident."
Except for an almost imperceptible twitch in his cheek, Max's expression didn't alter. He sat down in the gilt and velvet chair and regarded Hachette from beneath sleepy lids. "Poor Francois ... he never did learn how to sit a horse properly."
Hachette pushed his breath out his pursed lips in exasperation. "Mon Dieu, Max. Don't you realize what this means?"
The eldest boy of the comte de Saint-Just had died ten years before, fighting for the Americans in their revolution. Yesterday, the second son had taken a fence wrong and broken his neck. The bloodline of Saint-Just rested now with the comte's sole surviving son, a bastard, true, but one formally acknowledged years before. It would be nothing to make Max his heir, to give him the newly vacated title of the vicomte de Saint-Just. Hachette almost shivered with excitement as he thought of the heights his Black Angel could now achieve with a powerful title and his father's backing, what offices he would be offered, what knowledge would pass through his slender, aristocratic hands—
"I know what it means," Max was saying, "and you need to study your law, Abel. My half brother's death doesn't mean I get his tide by default.''
Hachette waved his hand. "Bastard or not, you're the only son the comte's got left. He'll give you the tide now if only to keep it away from the Guillard branch of the family. I hear they all detest one another."
Max shrugged. "We'll see." It was obvious he
didn't want to talk about it, and Hachette reluctantly let him change the subject. "I came here expecting to find you all agog to hear about the smuggling," Max said, pretending to be hurt. "I could have caught an ague running around in the rain last night finding out who their leader is, and now I discover you aren't even interested."
Hachette smiled, flicking open his snuffbox. "So tell me then. Who is the wicked man cheating our wicked king out of his ill-gotten gabelle?"
"His name's Louvois. He—"
The snuffbox bounced off Hachette's lap and clattered to the floor, scattering brown dust all over his champagne satin breeches.
"—works for the duc de Nevers," Max went on as if nothing had happened. "Which makes sense when you remember that one of the duc's lucrative pensions is the collection of the gabelle, and why the hell did I spend four hours last night tracking down the identity of a man you already know?"
"I don't know him!" Hachette felt sweat trickle down his chest. He forced himself to look up and meet those sharp, assessing gray eyes. "Well, I might have met him once. I'm surprised at the duc de Nevers's involvement in this smuggling," he said quickly, wanting to steer the conversation away from Louvois.
"I don't think the duc is involved," Max said in a neutral voice. "Why should he be? He skims thousands off what he collects for the king through the gabelle. The more salt that gets taxed, the more money Nevers makes. It's more likely Louvois figured out the smuggling on his own, as a way to do damage to his rich master and make a few livres on the side."
Max smiled, and for the thousandth time Hachette wished he could tell what thoughts lay behind those mocking eyes.
"Then this lawyer," Hachette said. "What was his name— Louvois? He would be easy for us to control. Louvois can run the smuggling and we can run Louvois, and the king and his duc can remain in blissful ignorance of what is allowed to pass through the barrieres on certain days."
Hearts Beguiled Page 23
