The innkeeper gave them both a jaundiced look as he walked over to warm himself at the crackling brick hearth where a round black iron kettle of soup was now bubbling. He knew Erica to be the mistress of the “English patroon,” Brett Danforth—and knew too that she often strayed. Indeed, the lady had brought gentlemen here before and he had been well paid to be discreet. But now his curiosity was roused and he wondered what this meeting in the snowy dusk was about, for Nicolas van Rappard was Brett Danforth’s sworn enemy.
The landlord would have given a good deal to have heard what was being said in that dark corner but the handsome pair kept their voices pitched so that he could not.
As he watched, the woman shrugged her elegant apricot velvet shoulders and gave the wickedly smiling fellow before her a predatory look from her narrowed amber eyes. “Nicolas,” she complained. “Talking with you is like trading with the enemy. I am never sure where I stand.”
An audacious grin played over the Dutchman’s hard handsome features as he drained his tankard and gestured to the lurking servant girl for a refill before he answered her. When he spoke it was in a caressing voice. “But you know I have only your best interests at heart, my dear Erica.”
She laughed. “And how do I know that?”
Nicolas leaned forward, an elegant and impressive figure. “Because I swear it,” he said caressingly, and smiled deep into her eyes.
Erica made a slight, disclaiming gesture. “You said the girl was here?”
“I never said she was here. You leaped to that conclusion.”
“And you let me do it....” But Erica relaxed, watching him now with catlike amusement. “Perhaps you will stop toying with me, Nicolas, and tell me why such a great heiress has waited so long to return and claim her inheritance?”
“Because she has thus far no idea of her true identity.” He waited to let that sink in and was rewarded by a widening of Erica’s amber eyes, a soft catch of breath.
“And where is she?”
Nicolas waited to answer until the little Dutch serving girl— obviously enamored of him, and carrying fresh brimming tankards instead of a pitcher, set them down and retreated with their empty tankards.
“It would seem the woman Elise took her to the Bermudas as a baby. She is living on the island of St. George under an assumed name. My informant said he did not know the name she now goes by.”
Those expressive velvet shoulders twitched again. “Then let her stay there! For can she not ruin you both?” As if to mute the sudden petulance in her voice, Erica leaned forward and gave Nicolas a dazzling smile. “What can I do, Nicolas darling, to make you forget you ever heard of this lost child?” she purred. “The inn is not so crowded that they cannot spare us a room to...” She gave him a melting look... “discuss it?” Beneath the table her petticoats rustled as her questing velvet knee suddenly brushed tantalizingly against his tawny trouser leg.
Nicolas broke into a low laugh. She was very good at this sort of thing, he thought—almost as good as he. “Not what you have in mind, Erica,” he chuckled. “Although a night with you would be well spent!”
Her nostrils flared suddenly with anger and she would have delivered a stinging slap across his face but that he caught her wrist in midair.
“Secrecy is not mine to give,” he told her softly. “Your brother Claes has already sold the information.”
“Not to ... Brett?” she whispered.
“No, not to Brett—to me. While drunk.” Nicolas dropped the slender wrist that had gone suddenly limp in his grasp.
“Ah-h-h-h, then it was Claes who told you!” The soft exclamation broke from Erica like a wistful sigh and she turned thoughtful, almost melancholy. She toyed absently with the handle of her tankard and her knee drew back almost imperceptibly from its contact with Nicolas’s tan-gold trousers. “You should have told me this at once,” she reproved him. “A gentleman would have.” She gave him a resentful look.
“And a lady would not have made me such a delightful offer,” he countered.
“I made you no offer!” she flashed. Then, with a shrug, “Although one could say that our meeting here is somewhat illicit.”
“Yes,” he said brutally. “Suppose Brett finds out? Do you think he will forgive you?”
If he had hoped to frighten her, the words had no effect. “I have been unfaithful to him before and he has taken me back,” she said indifferently.
“I don’t doubt it,” he muttered, for the skin that showed above her low-cut neckline was petal smooth and her suddenly speculative lazy smile seemed both to strip away their clothing and tell him what it might be like with her in the hot darkness of an upstairs room at the inn, with a fire roaring in the hearth and the sheets rasping softly against their bare bodies and every sense alive to madness and desire.
It maddened him that he must hold himself in check with this tantalizing wench.
“Does Brett love you then so much?” he asked grimly.
“Sometimes I think he does not love me at all,” she sighed in one of those flashes of honesty that so intrigued men. “And then again ...” Her shrug spoke volumes. “Four times I have strayed and always he has taken me back.”
“I am surprised that you go back,” he said bluntly. “You must have had many other offers. Indeed, better offers!” And as her casual nod acknowledged those other, better offers, “Do you love him then so much?” He felt nettled. And alarmed. For it had been chancy bringing this information to her and he was only too aware that he might live to regret it.
“Love him? I despise him!” she flared. “In fact, I have left him. Again!”
“So I’ve been told,” he murmured. But, then, he reasoned, despite the fact that she had strayed and been taken back four times, mistresses come and go and Danforth was in no way bound to this one. He watched her. “Then it is only the money you are after? You wait to be sure he gets it?”
“Oh, he already has it!” Haughtily.
His knuckles showed white but it was the only sign that she had stung him with her answer.
“That he is successful in holding on to it, then? That is why you stay?”
“Of course!” But something in her purring voice gave that the lie. Nicolas watched her keenly. It was difficult to know with her which way the cat would jump, but this elegant fox-haired wench could help him if she would. “I think,” he said softly, “that it will occur to Claes, having sold the information to me, that it would be even more profitable to sell that same information to Brett.”
And that was why he had sought her out, telling her that he had information that could bring her world—and Brett’s-—down about their ears.
“Unless,” he added, “you find a way to stop Claes.”
The hardness in her amber eyes now matched his own.
“And why would I do that?” Silkily.
“Because, as Claes tells it, when he saw her she was a pretty golden-haired child. She might have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”
Erica’s teeth caught in her soft lower lip and he pressed his advantage.
“Like mother like daughter,” he said tranquilly. “I’m told her mother, Imogene, was dazzling.”
“Bah! She is still a child!”
“Fourteen this month, by my count. Many girls are wed before that age, as well you know. I myself knew a girl who was married to her second husband before she was fourteen!”
Erica’s high-arched brows rose. “Indeed, her first husband must have caught pneumonia on his wedding night and died of it!”
The smiling face of the blond Dutchman opposite her was suddenly very hard. “Marrilee was wed to her first husband against her will. He died suddenly on their wedding trip. By drowning.”
Looking at him, her heartbeat quickened. “And were you there, Nicolas?” she asked softly.
“Nearabout.” Carelessly.
“And where is Marrilee today?” she wondered. “While her champion converses with me in corners?”
His shrug was co
mpletely natural. “I do not concern myself with Marrilee’s whereabouts,” he admitted frankly. “She must be all of twenty-six by now and since she had an unfortunate tendency to gain weight, she must be as fat as her mother and her aunt!”
“Nicolas, you are a scoundrel!” Erica was reduced to laughter, but she watched him more narrowly.
He made her as deep a bow as table and tankard would permit. “It takes one to know one. Will you have some more rum?”
Not at all offended, Erica rose sinuously. “No, thank you, Nicolas. You have given me something to think about and I feel a sudden need to seek Claes out.”
“Tomorrow will be time enough,” he told her negligently. “When I left him he was very drunk, sprawled across a table at the tavern down the street. I tossed the tavernkeeper a coin and told him to find Claes a bed upstairs, that either his sister or myself would be back to collect him.”
Erica gave him a thoughtful look. Knowing Claes, he would stay there and stay drunk until somebody came for him.
“Besides,” added Nicolas, “you have sent your coach away and the snow is now too deep for you to struggle home through it.”
“What do you suggest?”
He grinned. “That I tell you my plans and we seal a devil’s pact—upstairs in my room, where the chambermaid has already made a fire and put a bed warmer into the featherbed,”
“Doubtless in the hope that she herself will soon occupy it?”
“Doubtless,” he agreed smoothly. “But I hope that she will be disappointed this night.” His long fingers reached out and caressed her gloved hand.
Erica cast a look at the window. In the gathering darkness the world outside was silent and midnight blue. The snow fell softly and steadily, piling up around the windowpanes. There was no need to hasten to see Claes—he would not be stirring from his tavern. Nor would that fast river sloop, the River Witch, be likely to voyage downriver in search of her in this weather. She would be safe here, for the landlord was a friend of hers—one well paid for his friendship. And Nicolas was most attractive. She wondered idly, luxuriously, what it would be like to feel his arms around her and what it would be like to run her fingers over his bare chest and feel his muscles tense beneath her teasing. A familiar languor stole over her, making her eyelids feel heavy.
She gave the man across the table a slanted look.
“It is drafty here downstairs,” she murmured. “Perhaps I should warm myself before your upstairs fire before I consider going out into the snow....”
Triumph was etched on the Dutchman’s hard countenance. With the utmost decorum he rose, offered her his arm, and led her up the wooden staircase. With a flourish he flung open the door to his bedchamber—and it was, as he had promised, wonderfully warm, with a fire roaring on the hearth and the big square bed with its red quilted coverlet invitingly turned down.
Erica was pulling off her gloves as she entered the room and she flung them onto a cedar chair with a careless gesture. They looked like flowers, he thought.... Her cloak and hood followed before he could help her off with them. They slid to the floor and she ignored them. Her amber eyes sparkled like topazes as she tossed back her head, rumpled her hair and turned to him with a low laugh. “Perhaps I will yet win you to my cause,” she purred.
“All things are possible.” His voice was hoarse with desire and he bent over her, letting one hand run familiarly down her slender velvet back as he pressed a kiss onto her impudently upraised lips. “Perhaps we will find that our interests—converge.”
The slim apricot bodice twisted away from him. Her words were a challenge. “I have been told that since coming here, Nicolas van Rappard, you have bedded half the girls in New York.”
“Only the pretty ones,” he shrugged, advancing on her again. Again she spun away from him, holding him off with a fragile outstretched hand. “You are in a hurry,” she mocked him.
“You fire a man’s blood,” he muttered.
“And blind him to his destiny?” she suggested, amused.
“That too,” he agreed pleasantly, certain that no woman, not even a woman as exciting as Erica Hulft, could ever blind him to his destiny. And now he flung his own challenge. “I invite you to try!” It was the kind of challenge a woman like Erica could not resist. With a low exultant laugh she slipped into his arms, opened her lips invitingly and raked her nails lightly over his cheek as he swept her slight body up against him. She would give this arrogant Dutchman, she told herself, such a night as he would not soon forget! And in his arms she would learn his every plan. . . .
Their clothes made a ragged trail toward the bed into which they fell like ferrets, holding each other in a death grip—for here were two to whom the game of love was more than a game; it was a deadly serious pursuit with victors and vanquished.
Tumbling, breathless, their naked arms and legs tangled, twining, untwining, bodies clutching, twisting, they made golden promises—forgotten even as they were being whispered. Hot words of love poured out, unheard and only half remembered. The red quilted coverlet had long since slid to the floor and the sheets were a wild rumple as the tawny pair rolled about the bed, each striving for supremacy in this mad, exciting game, each fighting to gain—and hold—the upper hand. Only one man had ever really bested Erica in this sort of encounter—and that man was Brett Danforth. Perhaps that was why, in her own strange way, she loved him.
But tonight—tonight as always during these moments she forgot even his name. Forgot all but the pursuit of pleasure and the man she currently held in her arms. Her every move was exquisite, wanton, enticing. She exulted as Nicolas’s passion flared up—and then with marvelous timing she held him back, so that he flamed up again, each time higher, until together they reached exotic fiery peaks.
Although tomorrow she would casually forget him, tonight her body was a frail craft afloat upon a sea of passion—a wild sea that tossed them hither and thither, that whether he guided the boat or she did, brought gasping sobs to her lips and groans of desire and lust from the strong-armed man who held her.
She was—had always been, and had known it since she was eleven—a woman of tinder, of flame. And tonight she proved it once again as Nicolas, driven almost mad by the way she somehow managed to hold him off, while endlessly teasing and tempting and driving him on to bursts of passion, went over the brink with her again and yet again.
Morning found them lying as they had finally fallen apart in exhaustion, with one of her bare legs carelessly thrown over his. And—with the resilience that characterized her—it was Erica who woke first.
She was shivering, for the fire had gone out and the room was cold.
As she contemplated retrieving the quilted coverlet from the floor, there was a discreet knock on the door. Erica sat up. Mindful of the fact that she had not a stitch of clothes on, she pulled the sheet up to cover her bare bosom and called out, “Come in.”
The young chambermaid who sidled in had dark circles under her eyes that came from,crying. She gave Erica, with her rumpled hair and bare shoulders, in bed with Nicolas, a sullen look.
“I came to make the fire,” she muttered.
“Then do so,” said Erica. “We are both freezing. But first,” she directed carelessly, “bring me that quilt.”
The girl bent reluctantly to do as she was bid and gave the sleeping Nicolas a reproachful look as she spread the red quilted coverlet over the bed she had thought herself to occupy. Erica measured her rival with a practiced glance and some amusement. Not much of a face—too puffy, but of course that might come from tears shed over Nicolas—but the wench probably had an excellent figure concealed under the folds of that brown homespun dress. That figure was used to relaxing in this very bed, no doubt. Suddenly the thought irritated Erica, for last night Nicolas had proved to be a remarkable lover whose stamina almost matched her own. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the girl bend over the dead fire, sweeping up the ashes with a short hearth broom into a dustpan.
“If you tell anyone
you saw me here, I promise you’ll be dismissed,” she told the girl in a clear hard voice and was rewarded by a sudden jerk of homespun shoulders.
“I won’t tell,” said the girl in a muffled voice and Erica gave a low malicious laugh.
“You’d better not,” she added warningly. “And you can bring me a bath once you’ve built up the fire.”
The serving girl shuffled out. Nicolas, exhausted from his endeavors, slept peacefully on. He didn’t wake until Erica was in her bath and threw a sponge at him. Then he came awake with a start and stared at her, memories of last night curving his mustached mouth into a smile.
“Well, good morning,” he said. “When you’ve finished bathing, come back to bed. It’s warm here.”
“Perhaps.” She gave him a sunny smile, lingered over her bath, holding up first one pretty leg and then the other for inspection.
Let him think she was returning to bed. Let him savor what he thought was soon to be his—and then take it away! For in spite of the fever heat of their passions last night, Nicolas had spoken no word at all of his plans.
She rose at last, standing in the metal tub, and let a last spongeful of water course down her slim delightful body in a display that was wickedly tormenting and made Nicolas eyes gleam in anticipation. Then:
“I must go find Claes,” she said. “He may wander off somewhere and we wouldn’t want that.”
Nicolas frowned, for he realized the truth of what she said. It was in neither of their interests for Claes to “wander off somewhere.” He watched as she toweled herself dry, her naked form emerging and reemerging in tantalizing fashion.
“There’s still time...” he suggested hopefully.
“Only for breakfast.” Her voice was crisp. She was already slipping her sheer bronze lace chemise over her head; it was so gauzy she might have been naked. Erica never planned for cold; her future, like her past, would be full of warm firelit rooms and men to ply her with warming wines and cover her nakedness with lavish velvets and furs. And jewels. Especially jewels.
Rich Radiant Love Page 2
