Tempted By Fire

by Thea Devine

  She could not even conjecture what might happen if Southam

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  were to appear this night. She ripped off the blatant satin wrist bands and buried them behind her pillows.

  She refused tea and luncheon, and then forced herself to join Lady Waynflete for dinner.

  The conversation was stiff with her unspoken resentment, and Jainee had no stomach at all for any contentious conversation with her patroness.

  Nor could Lady Waynflete summon up anything to say to Jainee. She felt once again that the newcomer had usurped all rights, that her effrontery in permitting Dunstan Carradine such unlimited access to her person in public went beyond all bounds of good taste.

  And she could not be fair about it; it was perfectly plain that Dunstan had come especially to see her—until he had caught sight of Miss Bowman.

  It was just as she had concluded the night before: even dressed in the plainest of costumes and using no arts whatsoever to attract, the chit positively fascinated every man in sight.

  There was no fighting it, obviously. She wished that Jane Griswold, who had championed Miss Bowman so eloquently, could take the jade into her home for just one week —one little week to see how Miss Bowman set everything topsy-turvy with her mysterious allure, and then she would see how understanding Jane would be, yes indeed.

  And Dunstan, with his neverending questions about her; it made her blood boil just to think of his unwarranted interest.

  In fact, both he and Nicholas had stirred themselves on behalf of Miss Bowman more than they had done in all the years she could remember.

  She stared across the table at her and wondered why.

  Miss Bowman, for the first time since she had arrived in London, looked totally fagged out. Her face was drained of color, and her eyes seemed preternaturally large in her face. She held herself limply, bonelessly, almost as if the fight had been knocked out of her somehow. She did not look feisty or at all attractive to Lady Waynflete at that moment.

  Well, good, Lady Waynflete thought uncharitably. Why should the chit look forever stunning? Surely even beauties had days when

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  they wished they needn't step out of their rooms. Perhaps this was one of Miss Bowman's days.

  Perhaps the company had bored her to tears. Surely she would not scruple to say so.

  Perhaps Dunstan had made a fool of himself in her eyes—oh, she certainly hoped so. Above and beyond everything, she considered Dunstan was hers. He had never married, never shown an interest in any woman that was not just a passing fancy, and in the end, he had always come back to her. Always.

  A younger woman could not hold him, a man of his intellect and power of persuasion. A man like that needed a woman with a superior mind, a leavening of cunning, elevated social status and a wide circle of friends who could only be of use to him.

  Jainee Bowman could do nothing for Dunstan Carradine except amuse him for a week, a month perhaps. And as evidenced by this evening, her beauty was not endless and forever. She could get tired, bored, annoyed just like any other woman, and all of her emotions would show in her face and etch away her beauty.

  Lady Waynflete felt reassured by this, and by Jainee's unusual silence. Perhaps she understood that Dunstan was not permitted to be one of her conquests. Perhaps that was the thing rotting her soul from the inside and showing on her face. It would be well for her to comprehend that at the outset.

  Lady Waynflete did not want to tell her. Lady Waynflete did not like scenes.

  ******************

  Marie looked at her closely. "Something is very wrong, mademoiselle."

  "No, nothing." She denied it, knowing full well it was all written on her face and that Lady Waynflete had seen it as well.

  "Something happened today?" Marie persisted, as she began helping Jainee remove her dress.

  "No. Yes... I must think about this," Jainee said distractedly, taking the chintz robe that Marie held out to her and sliding her arms into the sleeves.

  "Something has happened of importance," Marie said sagaciously, "and you know not what to do. Perhaps if you share it,

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  mademoiselle, two heads might find a solution where one cannot."

  Jainee sent her a speculative look. But Marie already knew the whole, or as much of the story as she had cared to tell. Marie was her ally, her quiet companion, ever grateful for having been lifted out of the backrooms of Lady Truscott's house and into the sumptuous life of the English aristocracy.

  "I have seen my father," she whispered.

  "Dieu," Marie muttered and crossed herself. "Sit down, mademoiselle, sit down; how shocking. How unexpected. You thought he was dead, I'm sure, for all your feelings to search for him —I believe you thought you would find he was dead."

  Jainee nodded: it was true. She had thought —or maybe in the deepest part of her heart, she hoped that there would need to be no confrontation, no accusations, no recriminations.

  And now —. . . when you fall, you will be dead . . .

  "He is alive. I saw him," she repeated as if the words made him real and not the fact she had spent an hour in his sinister company.

  Marie knelt before her. "Where? When?"

  Jainee looked down into her kindly, ugly face, and shook her head. "I can barely believe it myself," she murmured, sloughing off the questions; she didn't want to answer questions, she wanted to think. But Marie wanted to minister to her; Marie shared her distress that the event had actually happened. She had seen him —he was alive.

  But Marie did not understand the complications, and Jainee did not want to spell them out. "I saw him today," she said finally. "I just saw him today."

  Marie patted her hand and rose to her feet. She took up Jainee's dress and smoothed the wrinkles in preparation to hanging it in the wardrobe.

  "And did he know, mademoiselle?" she asked sympathetically, her voice muffled because her back was turned.

  Jainee closed her eyes. On the stage of her mind, she could see the exact moment when Dunstan Carradine walked in the door, the instant she recognized him even before she saw him by his voice. "Yes," she said slowly, "he knew me."

  "Mademoiselle must be on guard," Marie said suddenly, briskly.

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  "Look you, it must be true that he never expected to see you again, either."

  "Yes, I have thought of that."

  "We will take special precautions," Marie said.

  "Yes . . ."

  "Does Monsieur know?"

  "No. Not yet."

  "Does Monsieur come tonight?"

  Ah, practical Marie. One always did what one must and when the thing was fait accompli, it was treated as the usual turn of events. Does Monsieur come tonight? As if she had been welcoming Monsieur into her bedroom forever, and nothing was unexpected.

  She shrugged. "How can one know?"

  "Nevertheless, if he comes, when he comes, I will watch. There will be no threat to mademoiselle in this house, in my care."

  "Thank you, Marie." An idle promise that, but she could not tell that to Marie. If Dunstan Carradine wished to infiltrate a place, he would have the means to do it, and no rock solid peasant guardian would be able to stop him.

  Look at how easily his nephew had penetrated the locked doors of the Mayfair townhouse.

  Marie withdrew, and again she was alone with her thoughts and the pulsating desire to run.

  Run where, with what? How many hundreds of pounds did she have secured in her trunk in the storage rooms of the house? How far would they take her and in what street in which city would she land, flat on her back, and no better off than she was now?

  But her father would be nowhere around, her father would not search for her. In effect, she would be making a bargain with him: her silence in exchange for her life.

  She could make the same bargain in London . . .

  Could she? Could she?

  An interminable series of bargains, one after the other, designed solely to protect her
life after she had interfered in plans and schemes which had never concerned her at all?

  She was a fool. If her father didn't destroy her, Southam would.

  She groaned. Plans and schemes, and there was Southam, de-

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  manding she identify her father; how was she ever going to convince him that her phantom father was not in London so that she would not unmask his uncle?

  Then again, she thought, he had taken a calculated risk bringing her to town and setting her up like this; she had not guaranteed that her father was in London. She had told him the fairy tale that Therese had related to her and he had chosen to make enough of it so that he agreed to the bargain.

  After all, in two weeks or three, after she had made all the rounds he had proposed for her, it would have been likely she might not have seen him. And then what? What had Southam expected?

  And if she told him, at the end of that time, that she could not identify the man who was her father, what then?

  And why could she not decisively tell him now and end the farce?

  He would have to take some kind of action — whatever it was, it would remove her from her father's sphere, and she could make some new beginning somewhere.

  She hated trying to prophecy the future. To play games with trying to foresee what Southam or his uncle might do was worse than reading the cards. Nothing ever turned about the way one forecasted. It wasas inevitable as the turn of the roulette wheel. Something always went wrong. Fate laughed. The gods were crazy.

  She would not allow herself the lunacy of trying to predict what anyone would do. She couldn't. She would chain herself into an immovable lump if she tried to cover all of the "what ifs" and possible complications.

  No, she must deal, as she always had, with the event of the moment, and try to make sense of that. Perhaps fate had truly been kind. When she had lain upon Therese's dying body and made that promise to her, she had never dreamed that a year and a half later she would be in London and have met the man who was her father.

  Everything was unlikely; nothing was set. A turn of the wheel, a pragmatic direction, and everything might change again, this time in her favor.

  Was she not a gambler? Had she not risked everything on a turn of a card in order to accomplish her objective? And had she not

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  made herself into the kind of woman who would always be noticed, and to whom men were kind?

  She had planned it all and to the greatest extent, it had all gone exactly as she had mapped out. But only because she had not looked ahead, only because she had worked around the event of the moment.

  And she had let nothing scare her, nothing, not even the thought of being bedded by Southam.

  Edythe Winslowe had told her: one made one's moments, and it mattered not if she had been dealt a losing hand. Always there was something to work with; eventually, the cards would turn. She had only to take the risk and mind the danger.

  Eventually she would draw the winning hand. Still, she could not fall asleep. Something had changed palpably in the atmosphere and she did not know how to define it.

  She lay in bed, staring at the fire, watching the flames take on a life of their own as her thoughts went down wayward paths of their own.

  . . . She must not show fear . . .

  Southam would not come, not tonight: he was in a rage the entire afternoon as he watched her first with Jeremy's friends and then his uncle.

  He thought Dunstan was taken with her . . .

  . . . And Lady Waynflete, so coldand resentful at dinner, on her way to an evening of cards with friends, excluding her from the invitation deliberately, maliciously, even —

  . . . Her voice, this afternoon, so cheerful, and yet, her eyes when Dunstan arrived . . .

  . . . She was jealous of Dunstan's attention . . .

  . . . No. How could it be, when Lady Waynflete was a widow and surely beyond considering another alliance for herself?

  But why not?

  She was inordinately fond of Nicholas, why not his uncle?

  Had Dunstan ever married in England?

  More layers. Her mind was sifting through the inconsequentials and upturning everything at the heart of the matter.

  Now the complication of Lady Waynflete and her father . . .

  No, she surely must be imagining that . . . But her father

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  had made a great show of sitting with her.

  They were at stalemate......

  He would do nothing if she did nothing . . .

  If she were confident, if she were proud and did not let his presence cow her . . .

  She would sidestep the question of her father with Southam and let him determine what the penalty would be . . .

  Blood line . . . but no one was strict about cousinship in terms of preserving the patrimony —cousins cohabited, cousins wed . . .

  For all she knew, she might be the daughter of some other man— Therese had never been particular. God—Therese . . .

  She delved behind her pillows and pulled out the satin strips that she had buried there hours before and held them up to the firelight.

  The key was Southam . . . Southam must be distracted, entertained, and bound to her as tightly as she tied the strips around her wrists so that he would be diverted from seeking her father. Yes, and just for as long as she could hold him away from the truth of it.

  But the follow-up, the why of it—why did Southam seek her father? Yes—the key, the key, the why of it; their bargain had not been struck until . . . until what? Until in her distress she had called to him, she had said "monsieur" . . .

  Her being French in some way contributed to his agreeing to their bargain , . .

  But she could make nothing more of that.

  Then Dunstan, back and forth to France ... a wife and daughter—an illegitimate son abducted in the heat of a moment's peace before hostilities began again. He had no love for the boy, so why had he taken him? As a hostage? For blackmail? Who? Who? An emperor who was so far above the masses he would never even hear Dunstan's petition? It made no sense, no sense at all.

  And if Southam did not suspect his uncle, then why had his interest been struck by the fact she was French?

  Her head went dizzy with all the complications that crowded into her mind, and the questions, with odd alignments between her, her father and Southam.

  "Ah, the queen of jades rests in her bower, preparing a new menu of tarts for common consumption," Southam's voice said from across the room.

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  Her head snapped up; she had fallen asleep, stupidly, indefensibly, unguardedly, for all of Marie's protestations of protection. And here he was, armed to the teeth with venom and stealth, and taking her by surprise once again.

  "Oh no, don't move. You are a picture just as you lay, Diana, with your robe askew and the implements of your enchantment wrapped around your limbs. If only my lecherous uncle could see you now."

  She knew it, she had guessed it; how perfect, how prime that he thought Dunstan wanted her. "He is an old goat, my lord, and he has no interest whatsoever in me."

  "Oh, he is a goat all right, with poor Lucretia dripping honey all over him, and he will settle for nothing less than garbage; but he will not have my leavings until I am done with them, huntress. You will not go on the prowl for Dunstan Carradine and lure him into your satin toils, do you hear me, Diana? Do you?"

  His anger boiled over; he could not bear the sight of her laying there as if she were awaiting a long line of worshippers, her body firmly and fully outlined beneath the thin material of the gown, the long length of her legs naked and entwined in the slithery erotic strips of satin.

  For all he had known, Dunstan had come to her this night. He would not have put it past him after the fool he had made of himself with her; his uncle's inamoratas were legion, and he always went after the woman he wanted and got her.

  He was in a rage, she thought: good. "You need not shout, my lord," she said silkily, watching
him, attending to every shift of his diamond hard eyes and subtly maneuvering her body this way and that to reveal just that little bit more of naked skin to his burning gaze.

  "So be it," he said, his voice calming down oddly. Already the hem of her gown had been lifted higher and higher on her thigh, and she had twisted her body ever so slightly so that the edges of the gown had parted and he could see the tantalizing shadow of her feminine curls.

  She twisted the satin strip around her wrist and through her hair. She pulled it, watching him, down around her shoulders and between the partially revealed mounds of her naked breasts.

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  Down she pulled it, so that it lay enticingly between her legs, and down so that she could loop a length of it around her bare foot.

  "I do not care about Dunstan Carradine," she said huskily, fervently; he had to believe that, he had to. She saw by the look in his eyes that he was hers, he wanted her, that Dunstan had become the furthest thing from his thoughts as he watched her play with the satin strips.

  "Prove it."

  She had not expected that; she had thought her delicious little seduction would work on him enough, but she could see that it had: his skintight pantaloons were stretched to the limit by his eager and responsive manhood. Now she must seduce his will, and that was the tenor of the game they played tonight.

  She pushed herself into a sitting position and slowly untied her robe and slipped out of it. Now she was naked, in a pool of bright colors and blue satin, and she was rewarded by the fierce jut of his male root straining against the tight material of the breeches that almost could not hold it.

  She did not know what to do next, what to contrive that would push him out of control to the place where he became hers and she became queen of his desire.

  She picked up the end of one of the strips and wound it around her waist and crossed it over her midriff and then looped it around her breasts to compress them and push them forward, and then across her upper chest and around her neck. Her hands trembled, her body was edgy with explosive arousal just watching his response to her play.