Le Chevalier

by Mary Jean Adams

  She had seen a flash of moonlight on metal as the object fell, but she did not see where it landed. Dropping to her hands and knees, her heart racing, she tried to remember the direction the sound had come from when the object disappeared.

  Alex crawled around on the floor, her hands combing the carpet and reaching into all the places where the object might hide—under the couch, between its tasseled cushions, around the elaborate scrollwork of the table’s legs. She groaned as she strained to probe underneath a chair. At last, her fingertips touched cool metal.

  Alex withdrew the object and held it up to the moonlight, her heart beating as her hopes rose. A key.

  She tossed it a few inches into the air and then snatched it in her fist. A reckless gesture, she knew, as she could just as easily have batted the key across the room as have caught it, but success buoyed her spirits. Keys unlocked secrets, and she had a pretty good idea what this key opened.

  She studied the desk again, her eyes narrowed. Why lock a desk unless you had secrets?

  Of course, an empty vase made such a ridiculous place to hide a key you didn’t want found. Perhaps Beau overestimated Mont Trignon’s intelligence. Or, perhaps he didn’t have much to hide. Alex fingered the key in her hand, while narrowing her focus to the lock on the ribbed cylinder of the closed desk.

  “Only one way to find out,” she muttered.

  With success or failure so close now, she tiptoed toward the desk, her stomach churning with excitement and a taint of apprehension. She thought it funny she hadn’t been nervous during her climb. The focus and the exertion of scaling the old maple had kept her mind off what she might or might not find. Now, as she fit the key into the keyhole with trembling hands, she admitted she might not like what she discovered.

  The cylindrical cover of the desk rolled back with little more than the whisper of polished wood against polished wood. Once open, she ran admiring fingertips over the unmarred glass-like surface before continuing her investigation.

  Empty cubbyholes lined the back of the desk. Empty that is, except for one holding a stack of folded letter sheets. Personal correspondence could be informative. She would come back to those.

  The desk had three drawers, deeper ones on each side of the area where the writer sat and a shallower one in the middle. Each of the unlocked drawers opened with ease but held nothing of much value. She tapped around the edges of the empty drawer on the left listening for evidence of a false bottom, before moving to the drawer on the right. This one held only a little-used English and French dictionary. A few pieces of fresh paper and a silver-handled quill knife sat squared away in the drawer in the middle.

  She fingered a piece of the paper, appreciating the fine grain. What must it be like to write on something so smooth?

  She closed the drawer and returned her gaze to the letters. With nothing else of personal value, they were her last hope. She picked them up and sifted through them, a familiar scent tickling her nose. Gardenias?

  As her senses adjusted, she smelled other flowers—roses and perhaps violets too. Maybe a hint of lavender?

  Alex leafed through the letters, raising each one in turn to examine it in the moonlight. There were four, no five, distinct fragrances, each corresponding to a different feminine hand.

  The wax seal on the letters had already been broken, so she slid a finger beneath it to open and unfold the first one. She struggled to make sense of the ornate penmanship, until she recognized one of the few French words she had come to know.

  Alex clucked her tongue in disappointment and refolded the letter. She should have known Mont Trignon’s correspondence would be written in his native language.

  She riffled through the remaining letters. They were also in French, each of them addressed to “Honoré.”

  “Honoré,” Alex tried saying his Christian name, her voice a mere whisper. She liked the way it felt on her tongue.

  She flipped over the letter she held in her hand as though the other side of the paper might tell her more. It didn’t.

  Alex pursed her lips and tapped the edge of the letter against her chin. The letters had to be personal correspondence. Had they been official, they would have been addressed to chevalier or Mont Trignon. Whoever these letter writers were, she would bet her life they were female and well-known to him, perhaps even intimately.

  She held the open letter in her hand and scanned the desk again for anything she might have missed. She even ran her fingertips along the underside searching for hidden compartments but found nothing.

  Biting back disappointment, she pulled her hand back. She had hoped to discover receipts or maybe even an official letter from the marquis; although she doubted she would have been brave enough to read it even if it were in English. But these perfumed letters were all that she had to work with.

  Who were these women who wrote to Mont Trignon so intimately? Lovers? She could easily imagine a man like him having more than one woman pining for his return to France.

  Alex glanced at the signature on the first missive-Marguerite, and then flipped through the remaining letters. At least there was no danger of violating his most intimate relationships since she couldn’t read a word.

  In addition to his Marguerite, Mont Trignon had received fragrant correspondence from Madelaine, Isabelle, Melanie, and Christiana.

  Christiana, the most prolific of the five women, had sent at least six of the twenty letters. She studied the round child-like scrawl.

  My beloved.

  The words sent a jolt of excitement through her. Christiana wrote in English at least part of the time. Very poor English, Alex decided as she held the paper closer, trying to decipher a few lines. Still, Christiana’s English was better than Alex’s French, so how could she criticize?

  However poor her grammar, Christiana excelled at terms of endearment. In addition to my beloved, she also called him sweetheart, dearest, and a number of other names that perhaps lost their effect when translated to English.

  Christiana poured her heart into her letters, assuring the chevalier she missed him and languished in misery while awaiting his return.

  Languished in misery? The phrase sounded extreme, but those were the words she had chosen to describe her pitiful condition. If anything, she wrote almost as if Mont Trignon had died. There were even a few smudged areas on one of the letters, as if she had shed tears. Had he jilted her to come to America?

  Alex threw the letters back to the desk with a grunt of disgust. Did Mont Trignon merit such melodrama? Did any man?

  When she saw the way she had strewn the letters across the desk, she stacked them back up, trying to remember their order. Once she thought she had done a credible job, she stowed them in their cubbyhole.

  Then she scanned the chevalier’s desk one last time. No receipts, no ledger books, and certainly no official orders from the marquis. She turned the lock, and then strode over to the vase to drop the key in, cringing as it rattled around the bottom.

  With a sigh, Alex tiptoed to the nearly empty bookshelves. She pulled out a title, a layer of dust and sticky cobwebs clinging to her fingers. Alex smirked at the gold lettering on the spine of a book about gardening. What a dull subject for a man’s study. Even she didn’t own books on gardening.

  A quick scan of the bindings of the remaining books confirmed they were in similar like-new condition and covered equally dull topics such as housekeeping and fashion.

  But books could be used to hide things too. She pulled each of the titles out, one by one, and flipped through their pages, looking for anything of interest: margin notes, circled letters, loose sheets of paper. The spines on several of the books cracked when she opened them but not from age. Who could afford to buy books and not read them?

  Disappointed she had not found a cipher or hidden compartment, Alex sighed and stowed the last book back on the shelf. Then she pivoted on her heel and stared at the door leading to the darkened hallway.

  She needed to look one more place no matter h
ow much she had been hoping to avoid it. If reading his personal correspondence amounted to an invasion of privacy, her next stop bordered on an assault.

  Although Mrs. Montgomery’s servants weren’t great at dusting bookshelves, they kept hinges well oiled, and the door to the study didn’t make a sound when she opened it.

  At the end of the hall, Alex could just make out the outline of a large ornate wardrobe and tester bed beyond an open doorway.

  She strained her ears for any sounds coming from the open door or the house below. Satisfied the household still slept and Mont Trignon had not returned, she tiptoed down the hallway and into the dark room.

  A thin shaft of moonlight poked through heavy, velvet curtains, drawing Alex’s attention to the portrait of a woman above the fireplace.

  Moonlight haloed her serene face, highlighting an angelic expression and blonde hair imbued with strands of gold and silver. Her large blue eyes appeared to be gazing with adoration at something or someone just out of frame. The way the artist had captured the moment, made it easy to imagine she looked into the face of her lover.

  “Find what you were looking for?” said a voice, from behind her.

  Through sheer force of will, Alex managed to squelch a scream.

  Chapter Ten

  “I thought you were still at the tavern,” Alex whispered, fighting to still her racing heart. She didn’t dare turn around until she had regained her composure.

  “Apparently,” Mont Trignon said.

  Splash.

  She whirled to find the chevalier lounging in a brass tub placed not ten feet away.

  “You’re in the bath!”

  “I was hot, and I did not feel like lighting a candle before taking a soak.” He shrugged but fixed her with a hot gaze that belied the nonchalance of the gesture. “I was not expecting to entertain guests at this hour.”

  Mortification rendered Alex mute. Her heart skipped, and her head swam as his broad chest sprinkled with dark curls and his bare, well-muscled arms resting on the sides of the tub penetrated her awareness. Her breath came in short bursts through open lips.

  “You must be terribly overheated dressed as you are. Care to join me?”

  His white teeth gleamed in the moonlight as he smiled. Shadows masked the rest of his expression, but the hardness in his voice made her wary, as did his shocking invitation.

  “No…No thank you,” Alex stammered.

  “Then perhaps I shall be done with my bath and prepare to receive you properly.”

  He stood, and Alex glimpsed only the dark outline of muscular thighs and narrow hips before averting her eyes. Even in the darkness, she could see the Adonis of her youth couldn’t hold a candle to the man standing dripping wet just a few feet away. The thought did nothing to calm her beating heart.

  “Ah, I forgot what prudes you Americans are. Perhaps you would be so kind as to hand me the towel which lies on the back of the chair next to you.”

  Alex snatched the towel and, keeping her eyes on the adjacent wall, stepped forward and stretched out her arm. She sighed with relief and let her arm drop when he lifted the towel from her hand.

  The soft rasp of thick cotton sliding against skin had her imaging all the darkness obscured. Her father’s books had plenty of sketches of Greek gods and athletes, most of them naked.

  “And my dressing gown, s'il vous plaît,” he said, after a moment.

  Alex opened her eyes to find a burgundy silk robe hanging over the back of the same chair. She handed it to him, squeezing her eyes tight and trying to ignore the whisper of silk as he put it on.

  “Ah, that is better, for you at least.” His mocking words grazed her skin like a physical touch.

  Her eyes flew open, and she found him standing almost toe-to-toe with her. His nearness and the anger blazing in his eyes had her thinking only of escape.

  She shot a glance toward the door, but he must have read her thoughts for, in the next moment, he had her wrist in his hand and her back up against the wall next to the fireplace.

  “Oh, no, not yet Mademoiselle. First, you will tell me why you were skulking around a gentleman’s bedroom in the middle of the night.” The anger in his voice matched his expression.

  She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I wanted to know if I could trust you.”

  Surprise flickered across his features just before they softened.

  “You could have just asked.” The sudden sadness coloring his words tore at her heart.

  Had it been her admission or her actions that had hurt him more? She swallowed back tears of regret.

  Alex looked at her feet and found herself gazing at a set of bare toes just inches from her own.

  She had never seen a gentleman’s bare feet. His served to remind her that the rest of him was naked too beneath his satin robe. She lifted her eyes and found his gaze searching her face with a heat that made her tremble.

  Frowning, she tugged at her wrist to free herself from his grasp but found it immovable. Anger tinged with fear surged within her and rendered her powerless to control her sarcasm at the ludicrous suggestion.

  “Ask if I could trust you? Yes, I could see how that might work.” She tugged again at her wrist, but he only held her tighter.

  The hard look in his eyes returned. “You do realize, do you not, if you were discovered sneaking into the home of a colonel, you could be charged with treason and executed as a spy?”

  Alex swallowed. She hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t plan to turn her in, did he?

  The chevalier dropped her wrist, and Alex rubbed the spot where his fingers had dug into her soft flesh.

  “So what did you find out about me?” He turned away from her and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his silk robe.

  “Not much. Just that you left a harem behind in France.”

  Anger, however misplaced, still burned in her belly. Sneaking into his rooms had to be the stupidest thing she had ever done, but that didn’t give him cause to manhandle her.

  “Pardonnez-moi?” He turned back to her, one eyebrow arched in derision.

  She had struck a nerve. Perhaps her comment had brought her close to the truth he didn’t want revealed. Had he come to America to escape the clutches of a woman? Perhaps even several women? The moment called for courage not cowardice.

  “Yes, I believe there was Marguerite, Madeleine, Isabelle, Melanie…” She ticked off the names on her fingers.

  He stepped closer, his jaw set, and she lost her focus. Maybe a little cowardice would have been wise.

  “And one more, but I seem to have forgotten the name,” she whispered, with his face just inches from hers.

  “Christiana,” he replied, his eyes hard but his voice as soft as velvet as he spoke her name. “She is the woman whose portrait stands behind you. Should you ever meet these women, I beg you not to tell the others, but Christiana is my favorite.”

  “I sincerely doubt I shall ever meet your lovers.” Alex licked her dry lips.

  His eyes followed the sweep of her tongue. “Then you do not plan to become part of my…what did you call it? My harem? Then, pray tell, what brings you to my room in the middle of the night?” He took another step nearer, causing Alex to take a step back until she was once more against the wall.

  She placed her hands behind her hips to avoid being pinned again.

  His voice had been soft, seductive, but an underlying coldness made her shudder despite the warmth of the night and the stifling heat of her cloak.

  “Do you love all of these women?” Alex asked. She didn’t care for the wistful tone in her voice, nor for the tears she had to blink back.

  It took a moment for Mont Trignon to respond. “I can assure you I love each and every one of them, and they love me. Does that surprise you?” he said, with a gentleness more characteristic of the man she had yet to know much about.

  “No, actually, it doesn’t.” As his gaze searched her face, she had no desire to speak anything but the truth. “It just surprises m
e that you would court so many women at once.”

  A wicked grin touched his lips. “Oh, I am not courting them.”

  Alex tried to back away when he took another step forward, but her backside already up against the wall, she had nowhere to go.

  “No, of course not,” she said, glad the darkness of the night covered the heat rising in her cheeks. “I understand that marriage is not always the goal.”

  “It is not?” He held his body so close that Alex could feel the heat emanating from him even through her cloak.

  “No, it isn’t,” she whispered, her gaze settling on his lips.

  “Then what is the goal, ma bichette?” Moonlight caught his hazel eyes, turning them to burnished gold.

  She could not voice aloud the response the intensity of his gaze brought to mind.

  “Passion.”

  She grimaced. Apparently, she could voice her thoughts aloud. She squirmed with embarrassment as a slow smile crept to his lips.

  “Not love?” he asked, his voice rumbling deep within his chest as he lowered his face.

  “That would be nice too,” she managed to say, just before his lips took hers.

  Unlike the gentle kiss on the front steps of her house, this kiss demanded a response as his mouth devoured hers. She parted her lips and tried to follow his lead, hoping her actions fell somewhere between inexperienced and wanton. Given her profession as a tavern owner, she had seen more than her share of illicit kisses but had no experience of her own.

  When he sucked on her lower lip, alarm bells sounded in her brain telling Alex to protest, push him away, do anything to get herself out of the precarious position her curiosity had put her in. Yet, how could she when she had been dreaming of this for days?

  Instead, she wound her arms about his neck, buried her fingers in his damp hair, and let him pull her into his strong arms. When he teased her lips open with his tongue, she followed his lead and delighted in the riotous sensations of such an exotic pleasure. She sunk deeper into him, reveling in the sensation of his hard body pressing against her soft flesh.

  With a soft groan, he pulled away and looked down at her, the intensity of his gaze sending shivers of desire coursing through her.