The latch clicked on the door before Colin could form a reply. Will didn’t turn around. He knew who it was.
“Your grace—”
“What the blazes is going on?” came the unsettled and exasperated voice of Samson Carlisle as he brushed by the butler. “I’ve been sitting on an iron fence railing, staring at a dark building, for three bloody hours.”
“Will that be all tonight, your grace?” Wilson asked succinctly.
“Yes, thank you, Wilson,” he replied matter-of-f actly, as if it were a common occurrence to have three of the wealthiest noblemen in all of Britain in deep discussion in his seldom-used music room at midnight.
Will turned to face his friends just as Wilson closed the door on them with a loud thud.
“Well, how marvelous,” he said wryly. “Something like a party, isn’t it?”
Sam stared hard at him. He’d already removed his coat, loosened the neckcloth that hung low around his collar, and now confronted him with a none-too-pleasant attitude conveyed in his solid stance, hands on hips. “What kind of ridiculous errand was this? The only action I saw all evening was a streetwalker who offered me a match.”
“Probably the best proposal you’ve received all week,” Colin cut in. “And here you don’t even use tobacco. Pity.”
Sam completely ignored that remark and continued to look grimly at Will. “Now you send for me, and for what? It’s bloody midnight.”
His voice had a certain deep sharpness to it that the other men recognized, and understood. Sam remained a serious man, in all his affairs, due to a past to which even his closest friends weren’t privy. Seldom did he have the patience for joviality, or sitting still, especially at a time like this, when Will had asked for his help in friendship and had forced him to endure several hours of absolute boredom.
“I suppose you didn’t take her up on the offer then?” Will asked dryly, moving back to the tea table where he’d left his nearly finished drink. “Not a very exciting end to an evening.”
Sam’s dark brows crinkled in puzzlement. “Her offer?”
“The match.”
“What the devil is going on?” Sam demanded again, this time a little more insistently.
“I wonder how many times that question has popped up in the last ten minutes,” Colin interjected from the sofa before finishing off his whiskey. “I, for one, am getting tired of asking it.”
“Care for a drink, Sam?” Will offered.
“No.” Sam continued to stare at him, then asked bluntly, “Who in hell is Vivian Rael-Lamont, and why did you ask me to watch a darkened theater in the now apparently unlikely event that she might appear?”
Will carried his empty glass back to the sideboard and lifted the decanter to pour another.
“You’re drinking whiskey from a snifter?”
He glanced over his shoulder. “How do you know it’s whiskey?”
Sam finally took a stride or two farther inside the room. “By the color. Why am I here?”
Will frowned and lifted the decanter to examine the liquid in the light.
“Yes, do tell,” Colin interjected with a casual lift of his hand, sitting back comfortably on the cushion and raising an ankle to rest on the opposite knee.
Will poured. “Looks like brandy to me—”
“Goddamnit, Will, my ass is sore from sitting on metal, I’m tired, starved, and I still have no idea why I’m standing in your—” He took in his surroundings for the first time. “Is this the music room?”
“Did the large piano give it away?” Colin asked, reaching for his drink again before realizing he’d finished it.
Sam looked down at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Funny.”
Colin smiled. “This conversation is going nowhere. I was just getting ready to start playing—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, sit down,” Will ordered, lifting his half-filled snifter with one hand while he unbuttoned the top of his shirt with the other. “I’m still trying to figure out how that woman took me for everything. When I’ve discovered the answer to that enormous question, you two will be the first to know.”
Instead of sitting on the sofa next to Colin, Sam looked to his left, then walked three feet to the piano where he proceeded to pull out the padded bench and straddle it, facing the other two men. He placed his palms on his knees and waited.
“Cozy,” Colin said through a yawn. “Now why don’t you start at the beginning.”
A jumble of thoughts ran through his mind, from their first meeting in his library, when she came to him offering to buy a manuscript she knew would never be for sale, to their first touch, first kiss, first intimate encounter. To imagine it all to be an act on her part left him cold with rage even as he continued to feel the heated lust that raced through his veins when he thought of her.
Once more, Will sat down fast and hard in the rocker, forcing the wooden legs to creak as they moved on the marble floor.
“Mrs. Rael-Lamont came to me several weeks ago with a proposition. She wanted to buy my sonnet.”
“Good God,” Colin blurted as his head jerked back, his features contorted in disbelief. “This is why you needed the copy?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Why would she want it?” Sam asked through something that sounded like a snort. “She can’t very well sell it.”
“You know,” he replied with a shake of his head, “even after asking her that very question, I never received an answer that made much sense. At the time I’d found her so… intriguing it didn’t much matter to me.”
“Ah.”
That from Colin. Will ignored it.
“And?” Sam urged.
“And I told her that for me to consider such an idea, she had to agree to be my companion—”
“Oh, my God,” Sam muttered very slowly.
Colin burst out laughing, standing quickly, his empty snifter in hand. “I’m going to try that one some day, I really am,” he said between chuckles, walking around the sofa toward the sideboard. “You’re a goddamn genius.”
Will cursed under his breath and sat forward with feet flat on the floor, leaning over so that his forehead rested in his palms. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Of course not,” Sam said sarcastically. “Knowing your taste in the female sex, I’m sure she’s quite ugly-”
“I assumed as much myself,” Colin cut in with a raising of his refilled snifter. “And if she wanted my sonnet, I’d simply require her to read it while she sat—”
“I wanted her companionship,” he stressed again, raising his head and looking at one after the other. “And in point of fact, she’s lovely, though that’s irrelevant.”
Sam almost smiled. “Of course it is.”
“Yes, indeed,” Colin agreed flatly. “I’m thoroughly stunned.” Sipping his whiskey, he returned to the sofa, relaxing into the cushions, legs spread wide under the tea table, one arm splayed across the generously padded back. “So why don’t you tell us exactly what happened.”
Will wanted to punch the knowing grin right off his face.
“Mrs. Rael-Lamont is also the Lady Vivian, eldest daughter of the Earl of Werrick, a fact she’s kept from the community for the ten years she’s lived here.”
Colin let out a low whistle. “Fascinating, though I was hoping for something a little bawdier.”
Sam brushed over that as he immediately asked, “Why is she living alone in a tiny house in Penzance?”
Will felt that certain tenseness returning. “Her husband was an opium addict. Their marriage was never consummated and he refused to agree to an annulment in the fear that someone would learn of his… affliction, shall we say. It was her word against his, I suppose, and so she sought a separation agreement as the best that she could do under the circumstances. He returned to France, the place of his birth, while she decided to begin a new life here, away from family thereby saving them disgrace.”
For the first time since they arrived at his home, both men
stared at him with completely blank expressions.
“You seem quite certain of these facts,” Sam asserted at last. “Yet how do you know she didn’t lie about everything?”
“Because I took her virginity.”
Mouths dropped open in unison. For a lengthy moment, nobody managed to reply, and it occurred to Will that it had been a long time since he’d rendered Colin speechless.
He sat back once more against the yellow cushion and began to rock.
Sam recovered first, bewilderment now played out across his typically stoic features as he rubbed his palms along his thighs. “So,” he extrapolated aloud, “the daughter of an earl is passing herself off as a common but comfortable widow, when in actuality she’s a… what? A married but legally separated lady… maiden?”
“That’s an adequate assessment, I suppose,” Will agreed, taking another full swallow of his whiskey.
“Well, no,” Colin corrected. “Technically she’s no longer a maiden, but I don’t think that’s illegal.”
Will shot from the chair again, suddenly agitated. Head down, he walked behind the sofa and began to pace, arms behind his back. “This is all beside the bloody point.”
Sam drew in a long breath and exhaled loudly, leaning over to rest his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together in front of him. Quietly, pensively, he charged, “Then what is the point? Tell us why you sent for us and what’s got you drinking whiskey like cold tea in July?”
Will began to feel his heart hammering away in his chest as the memory of how betrayed he had felt when he’d seen her leaving her home earlier this evening came flooding back in waves of additional shock and acute anger. How could he put that feeling of disillusionment into words? Neither Colin nor Sam had ever cared for a woman as he had cared for Vivian. Of that he was positive.
Masking his complex and confusing emotions as well as he could, he stopped pacing when he reached the end of the sofa, staring straight ahead at the intricate daffodil-and-ivy-patterned wallpaper.
Softly, he explained, “After Vivian and I became…”
“Companionable?”
“Get over it, Colin,” Sam ordered irritably.
“Intimate,” he enunciated as he shot them a quick glance, “she told me she needed the manuscript because she was being blackmailed into acquiring it by a man called Gilbert Montague, a rather famous Shakespearean actor.”
Sam chuckled for the first time that night. “I beg your pardon?”
“A famous actor?” Colin repeated, incredulous.
Will rubbed his eyes with the fingers of one hand and pivoted once more to face them. “I know. It sounds unbelievable.”
“Rather like a very bad play,” Colin amended, taking another sip from his snifter.
“So, go on,” Sam urged with a fast lift of his arm. “What could an actor possibly use to coerce her into blackmail of all things?”
Agitated, Will began to pace again, moving behind and around the sofa toward the rocking chair. After reaching for his snifter and what drops remained of his drink, he continued to walk to the closed French doors, rubbing the knots in his neck with the fingers of one hand as he noticed how the night had faded to a solid, eerie black, made worse by a low, haunting fog.
He looked down at the fine crystal in his hand, desperate for another shot, then deciding suddenly that he’d had enough. In what seemed to him a childish act he felt compelled to commit, he turned away from the darkness of night and set his glass on top of the piano, knowing that if Elizabeth were still alive, she would haughtily scold him with the worst words imaginable for such a simple act of carelessness. He did it deliberately now, enjoying the fact that this was his home, his piano, his drink, and, at this second in time, his greatest desire.
“I said Vivian is separated from her husband,” he finally managed to answer, eyeing his friends over the top of the piano. “She had it legally done, through a London solicitor and on paper. According to her, this actor somehow managed to obtain a copy of her signed separation decree, then threatened to expose her socially should she not do as he asked.”
“Copies, copies everywhere,” Colin interjected, pressing his fingertips against his brows. “Who did the work?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“Did you ever see this copy?” Sam asked thoughtfully.
He shook his head. “No, but I believed her.”
“Why?”
That made him squirm in his shoes a little. “Because it made no sense for her to have devised such a scheme all by herself. She would have had nothing to gain by lying about her marriage, and besides, she’s lived in Penzance for ten years. She has a life here, social acquaintances, a business—”
“A business?” Sam cut in.
He leaned over and placed his forearms atop the cold wooden surface of the piano, palms together. “She’s a florist, supplies plants and flowers to the community.”
Colin grinned widely. “A noblewoman posing as a flower girl? Incredible.”
“I didn’t say she sold carnations on the street for a few measly coins,” he shot back testily. “She runs a business and is thoroughly respected by everyone in town; she has some of the best cultured orchids in Cornwall, though it’s my opinion she sells them at a ridiculously high price.”
“Did—did you say orchids?” Sam asked, deadpan.
“Yes, from the common varieties to the rare. Some of them are quite rare.” He felt his face flush suddenly, and he thinned his lips with his building aggravation. “I buy arrangements from her frequently and have done so for nearly a year now. She’s very good at what she does.”
They both stared at him as if he’d said he planned to have his stables painted pink.
Now highly uncomfortable, Will shifted from one foot to the other, finally accepting the inevitable of having to admit what they probably already knew. “So I don’t give a damn about the flowers. I never did. I’d seen her twice before, at a distance, and admired her. Buying her merchandise was… practical.” He sighed. “And as it happens, it was the only way I could think of to get to meet her without raising suspicion.”
“Good God,” Colin spouted. “He’s in love.”
Will shot him a look of heated fury, which only made Sam snort forcefully as he attempted to conceal a crooked smile.
Nodding very slowly, Will maintained, “Of course it’s all very amusing now, isn’t it, gentlemen?”
“A regular comedy of errors,” Colin agreed, trying in vain to subdue his mirth for the sake of a friend.
Will slammed his fist on the piano top. “I cared for her and she used me!”
That outburst sobered them at once.
“Sorry,” Colin said meekly, lifting his snifter to finish off his whiskey.
Silence droned. Sam tapped his fingers together for a moment, then sat up straight and rubbed the heel of his shoe into the Oriental rug beneath his feet.
Will closed his eyes and placed his face in his hands. They didn’t understand, and for some reason the easiness with which he should be able to explain the events of the last few hours evaded him. He decided to swallow his pride completely and tell them everything forthrightly.
Quietly, he revealed, “I’d arranged to have Sam wait for her at the theater, in the unlikely event she was taken there against her will, and you, Colin, to keep watch for her as she arrived at the pub. She didn’t know who the two of you were, and neither would anyone else from Penzance, at least not from a distance and in common surroundings. Neither of you looks like a policeman or an agent of inquiry, either, so you’d blend in better than Hastings’s men.”
Lifting his head, he eyed them frankly again. “I arranged this not because I didn’t trust her, but because I thought she might… I don’t know… give herself away when she handed over the forged manuscript, might need the added protection. It just seemed a good idea, and I knew the two of you would help without questions, which I wasn’t prepared to answer. Of course that point is now moot.”
<
br /> Standing tall, he started to walk very slowly around the perimeter of the piano, arms crossed over his chest.
“Approximately two hours before her scheduled meeting with Gilbert Montague at the pub, I was at her home, handing over the copy of the sonnet. Everything seemed fine, except she was quite forthcoming about her identity, which she finally confessed to me after a bit of nudging. I guess I was taken aback by her very well-kept secrets. I didn’t see or sense any of this betrayal coming when I left there before she was supposed to depart for their rendezvous. In fact, she seemed rather nervous about meeting the man.”
“The actor,” Colin clarified.
“Yes,” Will continued, his thoughts beginning to take coherent form for the first time all night as he pieced together the details for his friends. “My intention was to watch her house and then follow her when she left for the pub. I didn’t tell her I’d be so close because I didn’t want her to give my presence away by looking over her shoulder for me, or seeming too confident at the exchange. She had to be nervous, even scared, to pull this off. I knew she needed me, but I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to arrest the man.”
His stomach churned when he said it, causing a burning in his chest. He never should have had a second drink.
“That was noble of you,” Sam asserted, his tone suggesting he remained quite serious, not at all mocking.
Will continued to pace stiffly, shoulders tense, throat tight. “Yes, well, as it happens she didn’t need me.”
“Ah,” Colin broke in. “We’ve finally reached the juncture in the conversation where you inform us what actually transpired tonight and got you wound so tightly.”
He ignored that. Inhaling a slow, purposeful breath, Will stopped moving as he neared Sam, who continued to sit on the bench at the front of the closed keyboard.
“God, I’m such an idiot,” he whispered hoarsely, squeezing his eyes tightly shut in an attempt to ward off the vision of the two of them stepping into that nondescript carriage, so close together she snuggled under his great coat, the sound of his genuine laughter at something she said as she looked into his eyes.
Duke of Sin Page 20
