Genevieve stirred without opening her eyes, not wanting to shatter this moment. She draped across Richard. His scent filled the air the way his love filled her heart. She kissed the hard slope of his chest.
All her life, she’d feared love as a trap. She loved her father and had paid with years of thankless service to his causes. However much she’d resisted the prospect of marriage, she’d occasionally imagined falling in love with someone ordinary and malleable who shared her intellectual interests. “Ordinary” and “malleable” didn’t describe Richard at all. So why, despite physical captivity, did she feel so free now? As though the world opened up before her like a book and she could turn to any page she wanted.
“Why are you smiling?” Gently he brushed aside the untidy mass of hair concealing her face.
“I never imagined it was possible to feel the way I feel right now.”
“Me either,” he responded softly. “You’re my whole world.”
Very slowly she raised her head. “I should be terrified, stuck here in the darkness.” She met his unwavering gaze. “I’m not frightened because we’re together.”
His embrace firmed and he kissed her thoroughly. “We’ll get out of this.”
Sighing, she stood to retrieve dress and pinafore. “We’re wasting time. We should check the altar stone.”
His smile sent her heart on another of those disconcerting swoops. “I don’t regret a moment. I can’t get enough of you.”
She blushed. Although what right a girl had to blush given what she’d just done, Genevieve couldn’t think. “We might find the abbey treasury. It’s rumored that the last abbot hid it from Henry VIII’s men.”
Richard rose, wincing when he bumped his arm against the tomb. “I’ve had my fill of ancient mysteries.”
She watched him fasten his breeches. Observing the intimate action thrilled her, besotted creature she was. “This treasure would be genuine.”
“Are you sure the jewel’s a copy?”
“I’m surprised nobody else noticed. I suspect it was made last century. The filigree gives it away completely.”
“So there never was a Harmsworth Jewel?”
“Perhaps once.” She searched his face. This had to be a blow, no matter how well he appeared to take the news. “I’m sorry, Richard.”
He shrugged and his smile held no shadow. “I sought a jewel in Little Derrick. I found one. I’ve been amply rewarded.”
After an hour, their candle burned low and they were no closer to escape.
Breathless, Richard gave up shoving at the altar and stepped back, wiping his hand over his sweaty face. Discouragement weighted his sigh. Before sealing them in, Fairbrother had destroyed the mechanism for moving the stone. The broken stonework was new.
“Richard, you won’t shift it,” Genevieve said from the step below. With her knife, she’d been checking for chinks in the walls. But down here, safe from weathering, the masonry aligned as perfectly as it had five hundred years ago. “That altar must weigh tons. I doubt a team of oxen could budge it. If you’re not careful, you’ll reopen your wound.”
Leaning against the wall, she brushed back the hair that escaped its string tie. Another item from her seemingly bottomless pockets.
“I don’t suppose you packed lunch in your pinafore?” he asked hopefully, trying to lift the despondent atmosphere.
She laughed wryly. She must be as aware as he that every second, their situation worsened. “I didn’t prepare for incarceration today. Silly me.”
“I’d love to revisit our Oxford picnic.”
“Don’t torture me.” Her smile was reminiscent.
An hour ago, when he’d held her, gasping her release, he’d believed that he couldn’t love her more. Now her stalwart spirit made him light-headed with adoration. “That roast chicken was delicious.”
“Not to mention the champagne.”
“Looking at you makes me feel like I’m drinking champagne.”
Her cheeks flushed with the shyness that always clutched at his heart. “I’d swap a dozen bottles of champagne for a tumbler of cold water.”
She was right. The greatest danger was thirst. Foreboding oozed through his veins like glacial ice. He wouldn’t let Genevieve die. He couldn’t bear to lose her. Not now he’d found her. Not now she’d told him she loved him. Every time she spoke those simple words, she filled a river in his soul that had been dry since boyhood.
“There may be another way out,” he said without conviction. “Any ideas?”
“I’ve lost confidence in my ideas since Lord Neville discovered this crypt. I should have guessed a building of this era had an underground chamber.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. The Harmsworth Jewel occupied your attention.”
“And the scoundrel who plotted to steal it.” She lifted the candle and descended to sit on a tomb. “At least we know the jewel’s a modern copy.”
“If we don’t get out, nobody else will know.” Richard clenched his fist against the base of the altar, wishing he could punch it out of the way.
“We’ll get out.” Her statement rang with faith in him. By God, he’d make sure he justified her trust. She watched as he prowled down the steps.
“How appropriate that a fraud of a baronet should pursue a fraud of a treasure.” He sat and slung his arm around her shoulders, leaning his chin on her head. She was warm and soft and rested against him as if he provided inviolable sanctuary. Hope surged. He refused to countenance a universe that permitted this brave girl’s destruction.
“You went to enormous lengths to lay your hands on it.”
He struggled to recall his reasons for actions that in hindsight seemed lunatic. “Must we talk about this?”
She stroked his cheek. The brush of her fingertips shivered through him. “I love you, but I don’t know you.”
“You know me better than anyone else.” Even Cam, a realization that jolted him.
“I know Christopher Evans.”
His arm tightened. “Christopher Evans is more real than Richard Harmsworth ever was.”
His cryptic response didn’t placate her. She’d honed native curiosity into a weapon. She shifted to study him and her vulnerability scored his heart. “You’re always saying things like that. Things I don’t understand. I want to understand.”
A lifetime of pretending that he didn’t care about his birth warned him to stay silent, but he owed Genevieve honesty. Not because he’d lied. But because he loved her.
Still he hesitated. The hellish truth was that he suspected that his real self wasn’t worth knowing. Certainly not worth loving. He’d long ago recognized that much of his anger at the world’s derision stemmed from a deep-seated belief that the world might just be right.
With one finger, she traced a line up his temple where the pulse pounded with fear. “Trust me, Richard.”
She made it sound easy, yet telling her what it meant to grow up in scandal’s shadow was the most difficult thing he’d ever done. It sliced too close to the man he’d hidden from even his closest friends.
All his life, a sardonic air and an immaculately presented façade had deflected contempt. He couldn’t bear to reveal his soul to Genevieve, only to confirm that his pretense at being a shallow popinjay was no pretense at all.
She was right. If he loved her, he had to trust her. Damn it. He stole a jagged breath, gave the terror torturing his gut the cut direct, and flung himself into the void.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It sounds insane to admit that this quest started because I lost my temper.” Reluctant to reveal his flimsy motives, Richard shifted uncomfortably on the stone tomb. “At a raw moment, some puling cub sneered at my bastardy and I swore I’d show them all. The Harmsworth Jewel confirms the Harmsworth heir. So I’d find the gewgaw and brandish it under every disapproving nose in society. Childish, really.”
“I remember those stories in the papers.” Genevieve’s expression was troubled. “Don’t be too hard on yo
urself. A lifetime of prurient speculation would sting anybody’s pride.”
“I learned young that a bastard can’t afford the luxury of pride.” He laughed without amusement. “It’s a lesson that needs repeating.”
She looked puzzled. “Why is your illegitimacy such widespread knowledge? After all, you inherited the baronetcy.”
“Every dunderhead can count. Sir Lester was in St. Petersburg for sixteen months before his wife delivered a healthy boy. Odds were that another man had shared Lady Harmsworth’s bed.” His gut knotted. He loathed admitting that the world’s spite was justified. “Great Aunt Amelia was perfectly right to deny me the jewel.”
“What does your mother say?” Genevieve sounded so calm, whereas he was barely capable of reason on this subject. Talking of his bastardy turned him into a mass of howling pain, like a wounded animal.
Richard shrugged as if all this didn’t matter, although the devil of it was that it had always mattered too much. “Nothing significant.”
“Mrs. Meacham said nobody knows who your real father is.”
“My mother has remained remarkably close-lipped.” Rancor tinged his answer. “I assume the answer is as appalling as everyone suspects—she swived some groom or traveling gypsy.”
To his surprise, Genevieve struggled out of his embrace to regard him accusingly. “You sound like you hate your mother.”
Without Genevieve, his arms felt empty. “I do.”
“Really?” She sounded skeptical. Wise Genevieve. She knew him too well.
He sighed. “If she’d been a faithful wife, my life would have been easier.”
“Perhaps she loved your father.” Genevieve was angry, although he couldn’t think why. So far in this tale, he’d played innocent bystander.
“I doubt it.”
“You’re very judgmental.”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“No. But if she has a son as wonderful as you, she can’t be all bad.”
If he hadn’t been so tangled up in misery, her praise might mollify him. “The world calls my mother a whore.”
“The world can be wrong,” Genevieve said coldly. Although only inches away, she folded into her body, closing off the warm, loving openness.
Old insecurities stabbed. Was he wrong about Genevieve? Of all people, she struck him as someone who might be capable of looking beyond illegitimacy and scandal. Not for the first time, he wished he was Christopher Evans, with Christopher Evans’s clean name. He’d long ago discovered the futility of wishing. Alone in his bed at Eton and at last able to stop pretending that the endless abuse didn’t distress him, he’d prayed night after night for some twist of heredity to prove him Sir Lester’s son.
“Genevieve, does it matter to you that I’m baseborn?” His voice shook, damn it.
She looked appalled. “Surely you know me better than that.”
Even as he wanted to believe her, years of insult whispered doubt in his ear. “It’s mattered to everyone I’ve ever known.”
Rage flashed in her eyes. “Sedgemoor and the Hillbrooks don’t treat you with the contempt you appear to consider your lot.”
“They’re my friends.” And Jonas, Sidonie and Cam were no strangers to scandal.
“So what am I?”
“The woman I love.”
His declaration didn’t thaw her anger. “Yet you think I’ll blame you for something that’s not your fault and that has no bearing on the man you are.”
He spoke the bitter truth. “I’m the man I am because I’m a bastard.”
“Then heaven send us more bastards.” Her lips tightened with impatience. “You need to show some forgiveness. Both to yourself and your mother. You talk as though she never said a kind word.”
Richard dearly wanted to claim that was the case. But while he’d been vaguely aware of whispers, on the whole, his early years had been a haven of affection and luxury. Then at eight, he went to school and discovered how the wider world despised the offspring of illicit affairs. Especially offspring with the temerity to claim equality with their legitimate schoolfellows. Thank God Richard had found Cam and Jonas, although their friendship, as much mutual protection as meeting of minds, had earned the cruel label “bunch of bastards.”
“At Eton, my inferiority became blatantly clear.”
He’d suffered his share of beatings, until learning that sharp-tongued indifference discouraged violence. If bullying provoked no visible effect, his peers transferred their attentions to more responsive prey. Richard Harmsworth, arbiter of style, was born from blood and pain and mockery. But he never forgot that his elegance shielded a man inadequate to the role he was born to.
Genevieve’s eyes softened with compassion, although her tone remained implacable. “You’re no longer that schoolboy. Do you see your mother?”
This inquisition was beyond enough. He slid off the tomb and strode into the darkness. He wanted Genevieve to understand his resentment of his mother, but he had a nasty feeling that explanations would make him sound like that sulky schoolboy she decried. “Not if I can help it.”
She rushed after him and caught his arm. “I’m sorry.”
However he tried, he couldn’t keep Genevieve at a distance. He slumped where he stood, his weariness stemming from childhood. “I’d do something about my bastardy if I could. But it’s a wound that never heals.”
She stiffened, although he couldn’t see her expression. “I don’t care about your birth.”
“Really?” Sarcasm drenched the word. “Then why are you angry?”
He found himself cradled in warm, soft Genevieve. Her arms curled around his back, her face lay against his bare throat. “I can’t stand that the world doesn’t recognize how remarkable you are. I can’t stand that you’re estranged from those closest to you.”
Groaning, he pulled her into him. To his astonishment, the wound that never healed didn’t feel nearly so agonizing with Genevieve in his arms. “I’m a damned self-pitying fool. I never wanted for anything.”
“You never wanted for anything but kindness and love. I had no right to criticize. But I can’t imagine your mother doesn’t love you.”
“That’s because you’re a paragon and an angel.”
Her laugh was choked and he felt hot moisture against his skin. He’d made her cry. He really was a bastard in all senses of the word.
She drew away. In the darkness, he saw only the glint of her eyes and the pale oval of her face. “I love you. Whoever you are. Whatever you call yourself. Whoever your father was.” She sounded as decisive as she had when she’d reproached him for misjudging his mother. “You’re a wonderful man, Richard. Kind. Perceptive. Clever. Resourceful. Brave. Handsome enough to turn any girl’s head. That’s what matters. Not what your parents did.”
With an unsteady hand, he brushed the tears from her cheeks. A lifetime of self-doubt melted under the blaze of Genevieve’s love. With a few words, she’d made him anew. He tried to sound insouciant, but his voice cracked. “If the paragon and angel Genevieve Barrett rates me so highly, how can I argue?”
Her smile was shaky. “Now come back into the light.”
He wanted to tell her that she’d already drawn him from stygian darkness into light. Instead, he kissed her as he’d never kissed her before. She was the most precious thing in the world. He cherished her. He honored her. He loved her more than he ever thought he’d love anyone in his heedless, selfish life. Passion burned. He couldn’t touch her without passion. But deeper than passion at this moment ran tenderness, care, his delight in her existence.
They returned to the stone tomb and the guttering candle. Genevieve fumbled in her pocket for the second candle, lighting it from the dying flame.
She smiled at Richard as if she believed he was a hero. Silently he promised her that he’d never let her down. “I now understand why you love Sirius so much.”
Confused, he stared at her. “He’s a fine dog.”
“He’s a fine dog of unspecified
breeding with a stalwart heart. You’re kindred spirits.”
“My darling, that’s hardly flattering to my noble hound,” he said thickly, then frowned and glanced around. “Speaking of Sirius, where is he?”
Concern replaced her smile. “He’s been away a long time.”
The thought of Sirius coming to grief in this labyrinth was unendurable. Raising the candle, Richard set out ahead of Genevieve into the looming darkness.
Richard’s calls summoned only echoes, no bark of recognition. The crypt was huge, a vaulted maze of pillars and tombs and gargoyles fit to give the most prosaic man nightmares.
At last they reached the chamber’s end. Genevieve turned to him in frustration. “He can’t disappear into thin air. If he hears you calling, he’ll come.”
That was true. Sirius’s manners belied his humble background. “Let’s follow this wall and see what we find.”
The wall proved impossibly long. Richard began to loathe the industrious monks. With every step, he called to Sirius. Genevieve progressed more slowly behind him, her hand running along the bricks. He bowed to her knowledge of medieval architecture, but a secret passage seemed too much to hope for.
Although she’d just said that she loved him. Miracles could be the order of the day.
“Sirius!” Where the devil was the mutt?
The wall took an illogical turn. Or perhaps Richard’s senses failed after all this meandering. When he raised the candle, another line of stone columns extended ahead. “Sirius!”
Silence. Richard started down the hall. A hundred yards down, he heard something in the distance. Could that be a bark? He called again. In this restricted space, sound reverberated, distorting response.
Genevieve joined him. “Is that Sirius?”
“I don’t know.” He called as loudly as he could. Echoes made it impossible to tell if Sirius answered. Richard stepped forward, then halted. The scrabble of paws was unmistakable. “Listen.”
“Is it him?”
“Either it’s Sirius or the rats are big enough to eat us.” He lifted her hand and kissed it, then passed her the candle. “Sirius!”
A Rake's Midnight Kiss (Sons of Sin) Page 28
