The Deepest Sin
Page 19
“The Royal Navy.”
“And afterwards? Your thirst for travel remained unslaked?”
“I think we already determined that fact in Rashid. You were the one who correctly suggested that I was a difficult child and an even more difficult young man. With the ‘attention span of a flea,’ I believe were your words.”
She did not spare him the directness of her gaze or a small smile. “There must be more than that to a man like you.”
Archer threw his hands wide. “Ask any question you like, and I shall try to be honest and forthcoming in my replies.” And so the inquiries began. Where he was born, the years at Eton where he’d first met Rushford, the death of his father in a hunting accident. The details were rushed over lightly. His mother’s indifference and remarriage told with a desultory shrug.
Meredith turned away from him for a moment and stared into the brazier, as though tucking away the information for future reflection. “Rushford maintains you never stay in London or at your estates very long.” It was a statement, but it was clearly intended as a question.
“I get bored very easily. Perhaps the years away in the Royal Navy gave me a taste of the wider world. London can be hopelessly provincial.”
“You love The Brigand,” she said abruptly. “I can tell that you feel yourself to be at home here.” She smiled lightly over the rim of her mug. She cast her eyes around the polished teak interior, beautifully honed but modest nonetheless for a man of his rank and wealth.
“Yes,” he said shortly, uncomfortable suddenly.
“You prefer these humble surroundings when you could be cossetted by the finest comforts the world has to offer. It does give one cause to wonder why.” She paused to take a breath. “And to make one’s own breakfast, a peer of the realm? Amazing.”
He shrugged. “There is beauty in simplicity.”
“Ah, yes, and yet that simplicity is not enough. Boredom stalks you at every turn.”
“Rushford talks too much,” he grunted.
“Rushford doesn’t say nearly enough,” she said. Her smile broadened. “It’s all right, Archer, to give up a little sliver of your soul. Particularly when you are so demanding that I give up mine,” she added with the customary glimmer in her eye.
Archer shook his head in rueful acceptance. “So I’ve been told.” Camille’s words came back to haunt him.
“Perhaps by someone who cares for you and for whom you care?” she asked, intuition on full alert.
He shook his head in brusque dismissal, but she continued carefully, “Rowena mentioned the Countess of Blenheim.”
Archer leaned back in his chair, his gaze raking her face. Her expression was calm and inquiring, the gray eyes returning his scrutiny with candor. “Don’t look at me like that. You ask me about my past with alarming regularity, if you’ll recall.”
He continued to regard her. His relations with women were open and honest, a rarity among his peers and their set. He knew from a young age that women often followed him with their eyes and that his past, although somewhat of a mystery, communicated a hard resilience that women seemed unlikely to resist. He simply gave pleasure and wished not much more in return. “I didn’t think you cared,” he said, deliberately casual.
“I don’t,” she replied. “No worries there. I am simply endeavoring to maintain some kind of balance between us. Rushford and Rowena mentioned the countess and I thought you might wish to elaborate. Although you need not worry. This incident”—she emphasized the word carefully—“will remain between us only, I trust.”
“You’re not the jealous sort, I take it.”
She nearly sputtered a mouthful of coffee. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then for the record, the countess was once a lover and is now a very dear friend.”
Meredith reached for a piece of bread, savoring the tang of butter. She added another splash of coffee to her mug. “I appreciate your candor.” Calm and cool, she was as damn frosty as the weather outside.
“I take it that I’ve satisfied your curiosity, then,” he said abruptly, not caring at all for her answer. Rising from his chair, he moved toward her, taking the mug from her hands. “The weather overnight and today has been unseasonably cold. I know of a pond nearby that is frozen solid and I suggest we conclude our conversation and take advantage of it.”
Meredith was only too eager to agree, wishing to escape from the dangerous confines of The Brigand and into the harsh cold of the outdoors. Unresisting as Archer threw his greatcoat over her pelisse, she allowed him to pull her down the icy gangway and over the low hills in the near distance. The sea was somnolent because of the unusually frigid weather, the masts of the sloop covered in a sheen of ice, like a thousand diamonds sparkling in the low sun.
The pond was in a small copse of trees, a short scramble from the yacht. Miraculously, Archer produced two pairs of skates, helping her strap them on over her boots. Since Montfort enjoyed colder winters than most of England, she waltzed onto the ice with ease. It was difficult to count the number of times she’d skated on the river with the girls when they were young, Rowena sleek as an otter on the slick surface, Julia with round cheeks and rosy nose hanging on to Meredith’s skirts. Content for the moment with the memories, Meredith skated in lazy figure eights around the pond, the wool of Archer’s coat tickling her cheek as he skated beside her. The breeze raised a flurry of snowflakes lingering on the surrounding trees. Although only a hoarfrost covered the ground, the effect was of a crystalline fairy tale.
They didn’t exchange any words, the tension between them as finely honed as a razor’s edge. The memories of the girls retreated as reality intruded, forcing her to contemplate the fresh disaster she had wrought in the past hours. She pushed the thoughts aside, but they stealthily stole back into her consciousness, sharper than before. She had believed the world of passion was closed to her forever. Even now, she reveled in the memory of Archer’s heated words and languorous touch. She closed her eyes and relived how he’d told her in intoxicating detail what he was going to do to her and how she’d feel and where he would touch her. It was an escape, an enchantment long thought forever out of her reach. But right now, even with the cold biting into her skin, she knew she would never forget how Archer had kissed her, his mouth trailing down her throat, helping her push away the past and the future, allowing her to obliterate the clouds on the horizon. He had given her oblivion, even though she knew it had been madness to take advantage of it. Wasn’t that what this was all about? She recalled the stabbing pleasure, the avalanche of sensation. There was no comparison with any other days or nights of her life.
The sky above them turned a bruised purple, lit by a half-moon so unlike the one they had shared on the other side of the earth two months earlier. An owl hooted somewhere in the trees, a plaintive counterpoint to the melancholy mood. They skated around one another, an atonal duet, careful not to touch, the simmering undercurrent between the two of them ready to explode into something more. She set her expression in a rigid mask to hide her growing realization that their uneasy alliance was far from over.
Archer was down at the other end of the pond, skating in swift, sure circles as though chasing some frigid demons around the ice. Meredith forced herself to quit watching him until his shout caused her to look up from the patterns made by her blades.
“Care for a game of tag?” he shouted across to her. And before she could answer, he raced toward her, hurtling past her in a moment, catching her greatcoat in his hands, which sent her flailing across the ice and onto the ground at the pond’s edge. Archer’s calling her name drowned out everything else as she floundered to sit up between gusts of laughter. Her petticoats were hiked up, displaying most of her legs from the knees down. Her stockings were askew, her skirts in a shambles around her, leading Archer’s gaze directly where it was wont to go. Lust and annoyance pulsed through her, as she followed his eyes with hers.
When he held out his hand, she wondered whether she should accept
his help. Putting her gloved hand in his, she felt his fingers brushing her palm as her hand curled around his. Her gaze met his, and she was unable to bank the spark of desire in it. Bracing on the edge of his skates, he pulled her up as though she were a piece of down. She found her footing easily, mesmerized by the hard blue of his eyes, the disorderly riot of hair that he pushed absentmindedly back from his forehead. He smiled at her in the waning light and she knew it was insanity to feel this heat blossoming inside her, intemperate to allow this irresistible impulse to melt into his body.
He was a man like no other, she was forced to admit. He reached out and softly touched her cheek with his gloved fingertips, then her mouth. With delicacy he brushed downward until his palm caressed the skin at her throat left bare by the opening of her pelisse.
“I thought we needed a little fun. Are you cold?”
Warm, pulsing rapture throbbed undiminished through her senses. She shook her head. His low voice sent a shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with the weather and all her plans blurred. It took a full moment for cooler reason to prevail. With the lengthening silence between them, her mind whirled, backing away from the harsh reality that would soon intervene. It was going to be a living hell. Because nothing had changed in the real world, the one outside the charmed circle that seemed to close around her when Archer held her.
The lines around his eyes deepened with his rueful smile. “I’m like a boy. You affect me that way.” He placed his hands solidly on her shoulders. “The last thing I’d ever thought to confess at this stage.” He grimaced.
Meredith couldn’t answer in a way that would please him because she knew that they were together here for the wrong reasons, despite the fact, at that moment, she wanted only him. Sliding her hand out from under her coat, she held it out to Archer, and in the short seconds before he took it in his, it seemed as though they’d never touched before. As though the passion were achingly fresh. “I will confess, it is the same for me,” she whispered, her eyes taking in his broad shoulders, strong arms and wide chest. “And because of that, I’m definitely not cold,” she murmured. Her body seemed heated from within. She had forgotten how desire could fill her with a fierceness that was staggering. Archer’s gloved fingertips touched hers and then slid down, interlacing smoothly until their hands touched, palm against palm, his long fingers curled around hers.
His grip tightened on her hand and the smile in his voice was tinged with suggestion. “Nevertheless, we should absolutely make sure that you aren’t cold.”
“You have a suggestion?”
“I do, indeed,” he said before he drew her gloved hand to his mouth and pressed her palm to his lips. And it all came hurtling back in a rush, searing memories of their hours together, the unguarded pleasure that together they could create. Archer’s mouth hovered above hers and he smiled. “The suggestion is waiting back at The Brigand,” he said in a quiet, intense voice, “guaranteed to sweep away any chill.”
The following hour was both extravagant and excessive, culminating in a copper tub that had been miraculously produced and filled with steaming water. Meredith lay with her head back against a small cushion, considering herself fortunate and blissfully satiated, the world outside the confines of the sleek yacht locked out.
Archer sat on the edge of the tub. “You are no longer cold.”
“I never claimed to be,” she murmured.
“Then I’ve kept you warm.”
Her eyes opened, half-lidded. “A job well done, Lord Archer,” she assured him, sinking deeper beneath the thin film of bubbles. She was tender in places that did not bear thinking about. She was content to wallow, feeling the ache leave her muscles.
“Good,” he replied blandly, watching as she arched her neck like a cat, pleasure enveloping her. Her dark red hair clung silkily to her shoulders. It was clear that he enjoyed the sight of her long slender limbs and slick breasts in the candlelight. “Although, I should think the water must be getting cold.”
“I suppose there is no calling a maid,” she said.
“I could get someone from the estate, I suppose. They were kind enough to provide the tub in the first place.”
“The water would be far too cool by then. So I suppose you are the only one at hand.”
“Of course,” he said, half beneath his breath. He had hastily donned his shirt and had not bothered to button it. “On one condition,” he supplied casually, undeterred by her commanding tones.
“And what might that be?”
“That I join you first in your sybaritic pleasures in the tub.”
A sudden flare of excitement raced through her. It was like a flood after a decade’s long drought. Archer’s hands on her body, his mouth on hers, the exquisite pleasure when their bodies joined. For the moment, it filled her world. She tried for levity. “I don’t suppose I could dissuade you.”
“Only with a pistol,” he said lightly. “I’ve seen the accuracy of your aim. But alas, it’s out of reach, at the moment.”
“You make a good point.”
“So is what I have in mind.” His voice lowered.
She sat up, splashing him in response, but it was too late as he had already shrugged out of his breeches and shirt and climbed in beside her. The water sloshed onto the teak floor, but neither of them seemed to care.
A good time later, she said, “You did this on purpose.” Her tone was mocking.
“I do everything with purpose.” He arched a wicked brow. He stood up and held out his hand. She stood thigh-deep in the water next to him, as he wrapped a towel around her. Her long legs, slick with water, gleamed in the firelight. In one motion, he scooped her into his arms and moved toward the bed, her body pressed warm and damp against his chest. Although they had just made love, he would have given his soul to slide his fingers into the knotted towel and peel it from her skin.
The urge was clearly not his alone. Meredith’s fingers clutched at his shoulders as though she needed to keep him there, hovering over her. He looked for no further encouragement, as he lay down beside her.
“How is this possible?” she murmured against his neck.
“That I want you again?”
It was a question he couldn’t answer. Instead, he rested his forehead lightly against hers. His lips brushed her skin. “Perhaps,” he tried carefully, “we should endeavor to speak of other subjects.”
Her eyes spoke rueful appeal as she looked up at him. His expression was encouraging. “What are you looking at?” she whispered when the tension of their silence became unbearable.
“You,” he replied simply. Against the furs she looked as decadent as an odalisque, making it nearly impossible for him to think clearly. The silvery marks on the inside of her arms reminded him of his folly. He was quiet for a long time, his arms loosened around her. He lifted his head up, looked down into her eyes. He appeared as if he was considering whether to speak.
“What happened, Meredith?” he asked finally. He took his thumb and gently brushed it over the inside of one arm and then the other.
She stared at him. “They are the price I paid rescuing Julia and Rowena,” she said thickly after a moment.
He nodded, continuing with his stroking. “How?”
“It was the nursery fire,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “I had awakened to the sound of flames as my bedroom was adjacent to the nursery. They were little more than babes.” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t think but simply plunged through the smoke. Julia was standing by the rocking horse while Rowena was in her crib. When I reached in to gather her into my arms, the heat of the crib’s metal spindles singed my flesh.”
Archer was silent, his rhythmic caress continuing.
“It was well worth it,” she said fiercely. “These are scars that I welcome because they saved the lives of two innocents who would otherwise have perished.”
“As your father did.”
She nodded.
“And the kaleidoscope?” he asked softly.
There was much he wanted to say but couldn’t.
“I know what you’re thinking. And what you would like to ask.” She turned into his arms. Her eyes were wide and filled with truth. “Faron set fire to the nursery.” She said the words too quickly, too breathlessly, and he stared at her intently.
“That is what Rushford told me,” he said gravely. Then he asked, “Why would he do something like that?”
She shuddered in his arms. “Revenge. Madness. But it was my fault.”
“I don’t believe it.”
And as if it were yesterday, Meredith saw Faron standing in the light of the summer afternoon inside a simple cottage. “It happened in a little cottage outside Blois,” she said, her eyes looking into the distance, almost able to smell the roses that scented the air around the place. “Of course, Father knew we were falling in love. Faron’s parents were always in Paris and thought their son’s dalliance with his tutor’s daughter was something they could simply ignore, in the assumption that he would grow out of it.” She paused. “He surprised me one day by taking me there,” she said softly.
“You fill my heart, mon amour. I would give you all the world as a bouquet.” Their eyes had met, and the magic that existed for them alone filled his gaze. It seemed like yesterday, despite the years that flashed by and the memories that threatened to engulf her. Her eyes had shone with tears of love at the sight of Faron, his arms overflowing with red roses he’d gathered from the bush outside. He was across the room at her side before the first tear spilled, dropping the flowers and sweeping her up into his arms. “Don’t cry,” he whispered into her hair, cradling her against his chest. “Think of the happiness we share and all the years ahead of us.” They walked to the cottage door and she stilled in his arms, gazing out at the sunset, and the gentle forest beyond. The radiant summer sun lit up the young couple looking into the promise of a shared future.