Tempted By Fire

by Thea Devine

  No other woman in his life had ever offered to win back that which he had lost. How Dunstan would have laughed at that.

  What couldn't she do, with her strength, her practicality, and the wisdom of her plain-speaking?

  Jainee . . . goddess no more. Woman incarnate, forever his. What sane part of him had had the sagacity to bind her to him for the rest of his life?

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  He would never know, but by early morning the next day, Dunstan's plots and plans be damned, he was going to Jainee and straight on into his future.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "So, my dear daughter, tell me what you would like to know," Dunstan said affably as they sat at the dinner table and waited for a footman to come in and clear the table.

  "You know," he mused, "I have always loved this house. It is so much more intimate inside than you would expect from without. The rooms are not too big and overwhelming, and there is such a sense of being welcomed into its center when you walk in the door . . ."

  He trailed off as a footman entered with a tray and began to clear the table. "We will have brandy—and coffee? in the library, unless you would prefer otherwise, Jainee?"

  She shook her head. The night would be long: he had come all this way to kill her, she thought, and she must push herself to stay awake, despite the threat, despite her aching shoulder and her head which was thrumming with the tension of the revelations to come.

  "Excellent. Come." He rose up, came to her chair, helped her out and offered his arm with all the good will in the world.

  "I am quite proud of you, you know," he said as they strolled across the hallway to the library where a fire was blazing and the atmosphere was as intimate as if lovers had sought its refuge. "You are very beautiful, and you have your mother's wit and guile and her peasant practicality. Never in a lifetime would I have thought you could track me down. Such intelligence—absolutely from my side of the family. Have a seat, my dear," he invited, and she sank gratefully into a chair by the fire and he took

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  the opposite. "Ah, the brandy, and coffee. Excellent. Thank you so much."

  He held his snifter to the light and admired the color. "Henry was ever a man to keep a well-stocked cellar. This is luscious. Where were we?"

  "My intelligence, from your side of the family," Jainee said rudely.

  "Yes, yes. Quite a shock. Tell me how."

  Jainee looked at him, totally unable to connect him with the father she had known. What she saw was a man puffed up with importance, with a lean feral look to him because something in his plans had gone awry. He had built a life here, and what had happened in France had been set aside like losing his place in a book he was disinterested in. And now she could topple him whole, right off the pedestal society that had permitted him to occupy and ruin everything.

  "It was the boy," she said finally.

  "The boy?"

  "She got greedy, she asked for more than she was entitled to, and they came, and in exchange, they wanted the boy. She had no boy to give him. She had her grief and guilt, but she didn't have the boy. So they killed her. And they thought they had killed me, but they hadn't. And she lived long enough to exhort me to find the boy because they most certainly would kill him too."

  "Extraordinary," Dunstan breathed. "Just unbelievable. Poor Therese. Poor Jainee. On the streets, alone, no money, no soul . . ."

  "Murat took me in," Jainee said, her voice expressionless, "out of kind feeling toward mother. And because she wanted to sell me to the emperor as well. He is desperate to get a child—any child with anyone, and Murat was determined to prise that woman from the throne. Events you had no control over, mon oncle. Including her talking her brother into sending her husband to Italy. I went with her and she eased my way to England from there. A year later more or less, I had the fortune to meet my lord, and the rest you know."

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  "What a story, what a story. You gulled Nicholas as neatly as everyone else."

  "One tells the truth by omission, as you must readily know. I told my lord I was seeking my father."

  His heart constricted. What else did Nicholas know?

  But that was jumping the gun: Nicholas would be here if he thought there was any threat to this woman or to his inheritance. Nicholas knew nothing. Nicholas trusted him. He always had, and this jade would not come between them, not for anything.

  It would be her word against his, and whose had to be the strongest case?

  "And for that, he married you," Dunstan said finally, shaking his head. "Amazing. I am amazed. The folly of men. The determination of women. It is ever fascinating." He took a sip of brandy. "And Fate —so fickle and always amused by the puny efforts of men. It does give one pause. Why don't you have questions for me, Jainee?"

  "I have one question," she said carefully. "I think I know the rest."

  "And children," he murmured, "always believing there is nothing new to be learned. Ask your question, daughter."

  "Why the boy?"

  "Ah, the boy . . ." He seemed to sink into deep, deep thought and she felt a flare of resentment that he might not answer her questions. She had waited so long, but he looked like a man of infinite patience, sitting there and staring into his brandy and the reflection in its deep color of the flames of the fireplace.

  The boy ..." he said at last, his voice far away. "The boy was insurance on certain promises the Emperor made to me. It is as simple as that."

  She felt something within her deflate. All the anger, all the guilt, all the crying and recriminations because a man wanted to save his skin and wring something additional for himself into the bargain.

  It was monstrous. But he could not have had any idea how the abduction would destroy their lives, and somewhere in the shire there was a little boy, innocent of his heritage and the trail of

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  deception and murder which had followed.

  "You are the traitor whom my lord seeks."

  "Indeed yes, and it was I who set him on the trail in order to divert any suspicion from me. So you see, the intelligence does come down this pathway, Jainee, and not your mother's. You and I— we are devious, but we go after what we want, and we use any means to accomplish it."

  Oh yes, oh yes—he was right: she had told herself that so many times. Any means, any way.

  "And in the process, of course," he added, "I convinced him to gamble away the Southam fortune. Now tell me, that isn't clever? At some point, my dear Jainee, I will begin to wonder about his sanity, and perhaps I will pull him up into a court and demand to be made an executor on the basis of Nicholas' destructive behavior. And they will put him away, and I will finally have Southam — which should have been mine all along."

  Monstrous . . . heinous . . .

  "You were in love with the Lady Eliza," she said baldly, and his head shot up.

  "No one ever knew that," he said, his voice deadly.

  "People knew it," she said, allowing that certainty into her tone. Oh, he would kill her now just to erase the knowledge from memory. "She married Lord Henry, didn't she? She did not want the younger son. So you set about ruining the child to pay for the transgressions of its mother."

  "If they had not adopted Nicholas, all this would have been mine. If she had married me, I would have given her the earth."

  "Even if you were married before."

  "It was another country, another time. It had nothing to do with England—or her, except that I accepted the commission to get as far away from her as possible."

  "And so you found Therese—who was as unlike her as any woman could be."

  "She had nothing to do with Eliza, and she was there. And then—so were you."

  "And the boy."

  "And the boy," he agreed.

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  "Where is he?"

  "Where I told you, Jainee. Safe."

  "Nearby?" she hazarded.

  He shook his head.

  Shee took a deep breath, shifted her aching arm and pl
unged into the uncomfortable question. "Is he dead?"

  "My dear daughter ... are you?"

  "Not yet. Did you try to kill me?"

  "Let us say the little accidents were . . . warnings."

  She felt cold. His eyes were remorseless, and he was looking at her, and she was his daughter. "Here, too?"

  "I thought I was very clever, actually. Nothing that seemed amazingly unusual — in the house . . ."

  "In . . . ? Everything?"

  "My dear, what does everything mean? I caused a stack of books to fall on your head ... I made you fall out of bed, and of course the candles. Excellent work on my part. Nothing that didn't seem in the normal course of events except for a little carelessness."

  "And the rest. . . ?"

  "The rest too, my dear: the cart, and of course I followed you to town and tried to both run you over and push you under a carriage in traffic. Yes, of course. The shooting was the easiest: I was behind Mr. Coolidge. You know I was here for two weeks before and followed everyone's schedule. It was too easy."

  And the other things? Not him? The glass, her fall, the ink — not him?

  She had an enemy in the house, and her enemy sat beside her, and she would never get out alive, never.

  "No other questions?"

  "Why don't you just get it over with?"

  "There's time, my dear. There is time. I had thought I would spend a day or two with you to get to know you, but I saw immediately how fruitless that would be. There is just no way I can trust that this story would never come out, no way. Of course, I understand how hard it would be to tell Nicholas that his traitor is both his uncle and your father. I appreciate fully the conflict

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  you have had over this situation. But here at Southam Manor, Jainee, you are alone with yourself and nature. Confidences flow; see how we have aired our secrets with barely a nudge from one to the other. What wouldn't you have said to Nicholas over the course of time? He would be astonished — and angry, but eventually he would forgive you, and he would have come after me.

  "No, Jainee. This is the wisest course. You were warned and you chose to stay in the race and now your horse must stumble and you will get caught on the turf. You are victim of war, my dear, long fought and hard won —but only by me."

  "You have such contempt."

  "My dear, I have manipulated everyone from an emperor right down to my own brother and his adopted son. Everything would have worked out fine had you not appeared on the scene. I daresay Nicholas would have expended a lifetime of income within the succeeding two years keeping up with Prinny. A brilliant stroke, don't you think? He never would have looked my way; the secret is that everyone must trust you and that you never must show that contempt."

  "You could not sell him away from marrying me."

  "If only I could have, Jainee. This story might have a different ending. The fates again, I'm afraid. Laughing, turning everything slightly askew. God, I can still feel the sensation the first time I saw you at Lucretia's. My blood ran cold."

  "And mine," she said grimly, lifting her arm yet again to relieve the pressure on her shoulder.

  He ignored that and got up from his chair to look out the window.

  "It's so dark, Jainee. This is a night of mystery and of death," he murmured, wheeling around to face her with a pistol in his hand.

  She started. She had not expected it quite so soon. Her father was a man of many surprises, not the least of which was that he would take her life as calmly and cold-bloodedly as any murderer.

  Her father was desperate. No one had ever threatened his

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  comfortable existence before; no one had ever tapped into his plots and plans and secrets.

  Of course she had to die. There was no other choice. Then he would go on as he had before until the time he could take action to ruin Nicholas and destroy his life.

  He paced closer to her, his hand steady on the pistol as he held it by his side.

  It was a curiously beautiful instrument, brass barreled and chased in silver with ornate designs inlaid into the burnished wooden stock. Just a lovely thing that he would point at her and do away with her lovely life.

  Closer and closer as she sat, she couldn't move, she couldn't speak. There wasn't a servant around; they had all retired for the night. It had to be one o'clock, perhaps two. How long had they talked?

  She knew everything now, but what was the point of knowing everything if within a moment or two she would know nothing.

  Her thoughts raced furiously through her mind, disconnected, desperate.

  She could never beg, never. Perhaps that strength in her stopped him for one silent moment. It was as if he could not quite bring himself to lift the pistol —not yet.

  Daughter, daughter . . .

  She had no filial claim . . . what was he seeing as he looked at her so intently. Dear Lord, she had faced a pistol once before, the specter of death twice in as many years. . . Martian, maman — Therese was behind her, with her: come to me, Jainee, I wait for you ... —her voice in her ear, shutting out the buzzing, the singing tension, the ache in her arm — everything, everything but Nicholas* face and her voice, crooning softly, come to me, come to me—I wait for you, I yearn for you . . .

  He lifted the pistol and took aim at her head.

  . . . It is painful but a moment, maybe two, and then we will be together, me and you —

  She thought she heard the click of the cock, she thought she heard noises and the voices of angels —

  A shriek from somewhere behind Dunstan as he took his

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  sighting . . .

  "Dunstan! Don't you dare touch that girl. . . !" And the diminutive form of Lucretia Waynflete hurtled herself at him and caught his arm a moment before the pistol went off and they fell in a tangle of legs and arms, her smaller bulk leeched onto his lean frame, the pistol beneath him, a heartbeat away from discharge.

  The shot was deafening, a roaring in her ears in a wave of pure terror so intense she was sure she had died.

  And then there was silence, a thick numbing fear-soaked silence in which she realized she was still alive, and she was hearing a suppressed sobbing sound, muffled against something thick and muted with unbearable pain.

  She opened her eyes slowly, almost fearfully, afraid of what she would find.

  Beside her, on the floor, Lucretia Waynflete lay on top of Dunstan Carradine's motionless form, her face buried in his morning coat, her tiny frame heaving with the force of her weeping, a river of blood streaming out from under his body.

  And then she looked up, and there was Nicholas standing in the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Dunstan was buried two days later on the grounds of Southam Manor.

  "And now," Nicholas said mordantly, "it belongs to him; he will never leave it and he will never again sin."

  Lucretia sagged against Jeremy, who immediately put his arm around her to bear her weight.

  Nicholas dropped a handful of dirt gently on the casket and turned and walked away, Lucretia's sobs a chorus to his grief.

  Jainee stood as still and tight as a statue, her face blurred with tears and a sense that her grief would never spend. She waited until Jeremy had left, supporting Lucretia's spent body as he took her back to the house. And then the servants, and some of his friends who had made the trip up from London to attend the burial —Coxe, Annesley, Chevrington, Charlotte Emerlin and her mother. Lady Jane Griswold with her kind eyes.

  They had all come the night before and were to depart directly after the funeral. And, she thought, if she stayed very still and never moved again, she might not have to face the end of what was to come.

  She could be the marker on her father's grave, the goddess turned to stone in reverse of the myth. She wished she were stone and hard and unmoving and without feelings.

  She was shocked she had feelings and a sense of deep, irreparable loss.

  Some time passed, she couldn't tell how lon
g: it was marked by the sound of carriages crunching down the drive as they began the journey back to London; and voices, distant, muted with

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  goodbyes and sorrow.

  Soon she could move, soon. The gravediggers waited, and waited, as she stood by the coffin and stared at the fields beyond. From here, from the little family cemetery, Dunstan's grave would overlook the little pond that she had discovered, and the riotous carpet of wildflowers that swept to its edge.

  The only man I ever loved......Lucretia's wail when Nicholas finally got to her and pulled her off of Dunstan's inert body. The only man ... as she immediately leaped on Jainee, tearing and clawing at her dress, her face.

  Horrible, terrible to see Lucretia fall to pieces like that, inconsolable, utterly devastated, her whole body awash in anguish that could never be assuaged.

  She felt a chill, and she moved: she took one step forward and another and forced herself to leave the graveyard, and her father to his final rest.

  ******************

  A man was a fool, Nicholas thought, who spent weeks ruminating on all he had missed and all he might have lost; a man should have known that dreams were fleeting and the cost was too high. It had taken one tender moment for him to fall victim, and one tender betrayal from her to fall from grace.

  He was waiting for her in the library, for whenever she would choose to come. It didn't matter. He had been standing in the shadows and he had missed not one scurrilous word.

  "You heard the whole?" she had said when she saw him.

  He nodded. And there was nothing more to say. She hadn't told him and he had found out this way, just when he was ready to hand her his heart. The perfect perfidy.

  It was well that the room was dark, with just the play of firelight over the tall stacks of books. The darkness comforted him, as it always had, inviting him into its embrace.

  He had remained thus since his guests had departed and Jainee had returned from the graveyard. Mrs. Blue had brought food and he had waved it away.