The Virtuoso

by Grace Burrowes

  Ellen met her gaze in the waning light. “And all you want is a healthy child who grows into some kind of happy adulthood.”

  “Desperately,” Abby said, and they shared a silent moment of absolute female communion. “I pray without ceasing for it, and I know Axel does too. But let me order our tea, and we can watch the moonrise while we discuss more pleasant things.”

  A deft signal the topic was to shift, and Ellen was relieved. She hadn’t spoken of the babies to anyone, but Abby was becoming a friend, and five years was long enough to live in silence without a single friend.

  ***

  “You’ll need it.” Axel held out a snifter of brandy to his guest.

  “I’ll not refuse it,” Val said. “Nick has vouched for your kitchen, your cellars, and your hospitality.”

  “We are going to have an uncomfortable discussion.” Axel poured himself a drink as he spoke. “I will impugn, or possibly impugn, a lady’s honor.”

  “We’re not going to discuss Abby, are we?” Val said, slowly lowering his drink.

  “Move over.” Axel settled beside him on the couch facing the hearth and bent to take off his boots. “Feel free to do likewise. You had a bath today, and I have sons.” He fell silent for a moment, staring at his drink. “Abby and Ellen shared a bottle of wine earlier today and certain confidences were parted with. Abby brought them to me.”

  “I happened to overhear some of the same conversation, since the ladies were on the balcony adjoining my room,” Val said, watching as Axel set his boots aside. “It gets worse. Ellen has the local solicitor collect the rents then puts every penny into a London account. As the holder of the life estate, she is the landlord and liable for all improvements, and she has made none.”

  “What is she doing with the money?” Axel asked, settling in with a sigh. “Hoarding it for eventual flight to the Continent?”

  “Could be, or it could be she’s being blackmailed.”

  Axel nodded, obviously more than willing to consider this possibility. “For her terrible crime, worse than killing her own husband, whom she professed to love.”

  “She did love him, and he loved her, and they should have lived happily ever after. I simply cannot see Ellen as a murderer.”

  “Neither can I.” Axel took a sip of his drink. “I still think you should make some inquiries. Find out if the money remains in that London account, for starters. That will tell you whether somebody’s bleeding her or she’s hoarding it. Either way, her behavior points to guilt over something, though I can’t see her as a murderer, either.”

  “Why not?” Val let the slow burn of the whiskey take the edge off the need to get away from this conversation and play fast, complicated music far into the night.

  “She’s a gardener,” Axel said, contemplating his feet. “She makes things grow; she isn’t a destroyer of life. Every time I see them, her gardens have that look of exuberance. They don’t simply grow, they thrive and glory in her care. Everything I’ve heard of her marriage to Lord Francis suggests he was thriving in her care, as well.”

  Val really did not want to hear that. “For example?”

  “When I ran into the man at my club, he never tarried in Town but professed to be eager to get home to his wife. He did not vote his seat when she was in anticipation of an interesting event. The birth would have been months away, and he remained in the country with her.”

  “Blazes.” Ellen had carried a child?

  “They never entertained over the holidays,” Axel recalled, “and the explanation Roxbury offered was he wanted the time to enjoy being with his wife. He was smitten, and one gets the sense she was pleased to be married to him as well. You know the lady better than I.” Axel saluted a little with his drink. “If she loved him, she likely didn’t kill him.”

  “She might have inadvertently caused his death, provided a second dose of laudanum when a first had already been given, something like that.”

  “A mistake.” Axel nodded agreement. “You are hoping it was a mistake, and so am I. The only reason I am telling you this is because I think Ellen could use a friend.”

  “I am her friend. Maybe her only friend.”

  “As her friend, you should make those inquiries. Find out what’s to do with that money; maybe dig a little regarding the late baron’s death.”

  “I see your point.” Though he hated the idea of rummaging around in Ellen’s past without her knowledge or consent. “How does one dig past loyal solicitors?”

  Axel snorted. “Loyal to whom? Not to the widowed baroness, certainly. But if the solicitors do hold the purse strings, they’ve likely held on to the late baron’s staff, as well. You might talk to them, see what they recall.”

  “Or send somebody off to talk to them,” Val agreed, a certain someone coming to mind. “Before I go tearing around, violating the woman’s privacy, hadn’t I better stop to ask why I’m going to such an effort?”

  “Because you’re smitten.” Axel slouched down, his drink cradled in his lap. “Even if you weren’t smitten, you’re constitutionally unable to ignore a damsel in distress.”

  “I can ignore them. I have five sisters.”

  “Distress is not a missing hair ribbon. St. Just has told me how careful you were with Winnie last winter, how much time you spent with her. Nicholas reports you dote on little Rose, as well.”

  Nicholas and his damned reporting. “I will concede I have a weakness for the underdog, but ask any man with four older brothers and he’ll tell you the same.”

  “You have honor,” Axel said simply. “You do not tolerate injustice, and that is a fine quality in any man—or any man’s son.”

  “Tell that to Moreland,” Val muttered before taking a hefty swallow of his drink.

  “I think he already knows.” Axel yawned. “You’ll see what you can do to help Ellen?”

  “I will. Have you somebody to take a message to London tonight?”

  Axel glanced out the window. “Moon’s up. Wheeler will likely be game. You can afford this?”

  Val smiled at him, knowing the question wasn’t intended as an insult. “You are a good friend, Axel Belmont, and a brave man. Compared to what I’ve put into the estate, this little investigation will be a pittance, and I can well afford it. I haven’t just produced a few pianos for the occasional schoolroom; I’ve also imported a lot of rare and antique instruments from the Continent. The Corsican left many an old family with little enough coin, so I can buy very, very cheaply and sell very, very dearly.”

  “Trade.” Axel smiled. “One doesn’t want to admit it, but it can be fun.”

  “Fun and profitable. I am seeing to it priceless instruments find a home where they’ll be taken care of, appreciated, and even played.”

  “Shrewd of you,” Axel said, his gaze appraising. “St. Just claims your business sense is every bit as astute as Westhaven’s.”

  “Maybe, but only in my very limited field.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Axel countered, rising, going to the desk, and rummaging for paper, ink, pen, and sand. “I’ll leave you to your correspondence and warn Wheeler somebody had better be saddling up.”

  “My thanks.” Val took the seat behind the desk.

  “And Val?” Axel paused by the door. “I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a connection we’re missing.”

  “Connecting what?”

  “Your estate has been beset with hidden traps, and it’s as if Ellen’s future has been sabotaged, as well. I can’t see the common thread, but I sense there is one.”

  “As do I. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  But after he jotted off a note to Benjamin Hazlit in London and had it delivered to the stables, Val sat for a long time, pondering Axel’s parting words. He knew what it felt like to have one’s future sabotaged, and it wasn’t a feeling easily tolerated.

  ***

  Ellen came awake when Val quietly closed her bedroom door, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s going to storm and I wante
d to be with you. Go back to sleep.”

  “I can handle a storm, Valentine,” Ellen said, but she heard something brittle in her own voice. Her confidences to Abby earlier in the evening reminded her that she’d handled too many storms, truth be told, and hated each and every one.

  “Maybe I can’t,” Val replied, lifting the covers and slipping in beside her. “Budge over and cuddle up, wench.”

  “It is blowing something fierce,” Ellen admitted, snuggling closer. Snow might pile up, and rain might come down, but the violence and wind of the summer storm intimidated her the most.

  “You’re safe with me.” Val kissed her crown. “Do you believe that?”

  “Safe?” Ellen frowned in the darkness as she curled up against him. “Safe how?”

  “I will not let harm befall you, Ellen. Now go to sleep.”

  What an odd declaration, and how lovely to find he was as naked as she. “Can one be safe in the embrace of a tiger?”

  “Yes, though perhaps one cannot get a good night’s rest in the arms of a tigress.”

  Ellen considered his words while the wind picked up and the rain slapped down in gusts and torrents just beyond her window. The darkness and the fact that Valentine would seek her out in the middle of the night gave her courage. “May I ask you something, Valentine?”

  He left off nuzzling her temple. “You may ask me anything, Ellen. That is part of what it means to be safe in the company of another. You are also safe in my esteem.”

  She stretched up and put her lips near his ear. “Would you allow me to put my mouth on you?” To elucidate her inquiry, she slid her hand down over the flat, warm plane of his torso to cup him gently and then wrap her fingers around his member. “I’ve wondered about it since we were by the stream earlier. I’ve wondered a very great deal.”

  “Your mouth?”

  She held him a little more snugly. “Is it wrong to want such a thing with you?”

  This was a request she could not have made in daylight. In her hand, Valentine’s arousal was literally growing by the moment, and where she was draped along his naked frame, he’d gone still.

  “It isn’t wrong. There is no bodily intimacy between us that could be wrong, Ellen, but neither is it something a decent man expects of any woman.”

  She heard hesitance in his voice, which was not the same thing at all as censure, distaste, or shock. “When we were at the stream, Valentine, you surprised me, but I enjoyed it. Why did you use your mouth on me? I’m sure decent women don’t expect that, either.”

  He wrapped one hand around her nape and used the other to cradle her jaw. “You trusted me. You did not let shyness overcome your curiosity, and I wanted to give you pleasure.” He fell silent a moment, his fingers moving slowly over her face as if to map her features in the darkness. “It pleased me tremendously to give you that pleasure, Ellen.”

  In the next silence, she stroked the burgeoning length of him under the covers. Maybe what she wanted was wicked, but she could not reconcile wickedness with the pleasure and closeness he’d shown her earlier in the day, or with the tenderness welling within her for the man who’d come to her bed in the middle of a storm.

  He pushed the covers aside and lay there, signaling in one eloquent gesture his willingness to appease her curiosity.

  “Thank you, Valentine.” She pressed her mouth to his chest, drawing in the scent of him, gathering her courage. He did not offer her instructions or warnings or prose on about rules and pinches. She concluded from his silence and his passivity that in this, he was deciding simply to trust her.

  She scooted a little and pillowed her cheek low on his abdomen. His scent was different here. No less clean but more male. Using her hand, she guided him to her mouth and allowed herself one lapping pass of her tongue over the soft skin of his crown.

  Beneath her cheek, his belly tensed, and then she heard and felt him let out a sigh.

  Perhaps a few words were not a bad idea. “You’ll tell me if I do it wrong?”

  “You won’t.” He brushed his hand over her hair then let it rest at her nape.

  When she licked him again, she let herself explore him with her tongue, found the different textures of the male organ, learned the contour of it from a wonderfully intimate and sensitive perspective. With long, slow strokes, she wet his length, then wrapped her fingers around him, and used her hand in concert with her mouth.

  To feel him growing more aroused, harder and hotter in her grip and her mouth, was prodding Ellen past curiosity and a need to give him pleasure, on to fueling her own arousal. She took him into her mouth and set up a rhythm like the ones he’d used with her, while desire crested higher in her own veins.

  “Ellen, I’ll spend.” She heard him, though she barely recognized that harsh rasp as her lover’s voice. She heard the desperate heat in his words and drew on him gently in the same rhythm that her hand was stroking his strength.

  “Ellen… God…”

  He cupped her jaw and carefully disentangled himself from her mouth, then closed his hand over hers. The firmness of his grip was surprising, the feel of his hot seed spurting over their joined fingers a moment later both intimate and shocking.

  When he subsided, his hand still around hers, Ellen remained where she was, her head resting on Val’s chest for a long moment while his arousal faded. She relaxed against him, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her cheek, while tenderness for him threatened to overwhelm her.

  Was this what he felt when he gave her pleasure? Was this sense of trust and communion as precious to him as it was to her?

  “I need to hold my tigress.” There was a different note in his voice—softer and perhaps slightly awed.

  Ellen uncurled herself from him, groped around for her handkerchief on the nightstand, and tended to him as he’d tended to her. “Your tigress needs you to hold her, too.” She tossed the hankie away and tucked herself along his side, hiking a leg across his thighs as if she’d protect him with her very body.

  “Thank you, tigress.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and Ellen felt his lips against her hair. While the storm raged outside, beneath the covers she felt safe and warm, well pleased with her tiger, and pleased with herself, as well.

  When Ellen’s breathing signaled that she’d drifted into peaceful slumber beside him, Val lay for a long time, gliding his hand over her hair, listening to the storm.

  There was a lesson for him here, in Ellen’s courage and generosity—in her trust. This intimacy she shared with him came from her heart, and the resulting depth of pleasure was unprecedented in Val’s experience.

  The best music Val had ever created, the most sublime, had come not from the thrill of playing before a packed salon of educated connoisseurs, not from demonstrating hard-earned technical prowess before fellow students at the conservatory, not even from the polished efforts he’d put before his most learned teachers.

  The best, loveliest music he’d ever created had come from the need to give something of value to someone he cared for—reassurance, comfort, consolation, relief from pain or despondency. The best music he’d ever created had come not from his fingers or his musical mind, but from his heart.

  ***

  The next day was spent largely cleaning up after the storm. Because neither Axel, Val, St. Just, nor the boys were inclined to attend services, they spent the day cutting, dragging, and cursing fallen trees and trees limbs.

  “Where is Nick Haddonfield’s considerable brawn when it’s needed?” Val asked the sky as he paused to swig some cold cider.

  “Probably in bed with his new countess,” St. Just muttered.

  “You miss your Emmie,” Axel observed, a curious smile on his face. “And you are anxious to start your journey north.”

  “I am, though I am not pleased to be leaving my brother in such unsettled circumstances.”

  “I’m not unsettled.” Val tossed the jug of cider to him. “I am looking forward to moving into my house and living like
a human for a change, instead of some forest primate in the tropics. Why is it always the big trees that come down?”

  “Not always.” St. Just took his drink and passed the cider to Axel. “Your oaks have withstood centuries of storms.”

  “My oaks?”

  “As in the oak trees growing along the lane of the property you own and have still refused to name.”

  “It isn’t that I’ve refused to name it.” Val slipped the reins of the waiting team around his shoulders and under one arm. “A name just hasn’t come to me.”

  “Names.” Axel grunted as he took an axe to a sturdy root. “I can’t get Abby to name our unborn child.”

  “She will.” St. Just took up a second axe and began to hack away at the root in alternating swings with Axel, while Val used the team to keep tension on the entire tree. They kept a steady chop-chop, chop-chop, until Val began to hear something like a clog dance in his head. Hearty, energetic music that managed to be both buoyant and solidly grounded at the same time.

  “Look sharp, Val,” St. Just called as he heaved the axe in one mighty, final swing and hacked the root in twain. The team jumped forward but hawed obediently as Val steered them over to the side of the lane, dragging the great weight of the tree trunk with them.

  “This one will keep you warm for while,” St. Just said, wiping his brow. Val urged the team forward to get the remains of the tree as close to the woodshed as possible.

  “That’s the last of the big ones.” Axel glanced at the sky. “I’m guessing it’s close to teatime. Let’s call it a day.”

  “Amen,” St. Just muttered as Axel bellowed instructions to his sons. They waved from where they were sawing branches off another fallen tree and signaled they’d follow by way of the farm pond.

  An hour later, the men were scrubbed and presentable for dinner while the boys had yet to be seen.

  “We’ve company, wife,” Axel said as he passed Abby a small serving of wine. “The boys should be here in time for dinner on those rare occasions when we allow civilized folk to dine with them.”