Bent over the silver tray as she was, she paused. “Hmm?” She blinked like an owl startled from its perch. He could practically see her thoughts rapidly spinning. “Well, they are for us,” she said slowly, as though she spoke to a small child. “Just not yet.”
A startled squeak escaped her as he drew her into his arms. “Splendid,” Christian breathed against her lips. “I was afraid you’d invited company.” He nibbled her plump lower lip. All the while he worked his hands along her slender waist, downward to her gently flared hips. “And I am selfish, for I’m not prepared to share you.” A breathless sigh slipped from her, that gentle puff of air warming his lips and heating him all over with the promise of picking up precisely where they’d left off last evening. “I want to make love to you in this parlor, Prudence.” And in every room in the townhouse, so each echoed with the memory of her desirous moans and her climax.
His words brought her eyes flying open and she slipped out from his arms.
“Would you like that?” He stalked toward her.
She danced out of his reach, knocking against the small, rose-inlaid table with the tray of pastries and tea. Prudence shot her hand out to quickly steady the delicate porcelain teapot. “U-undoubtedly.” Skittish like a doe caught in the snare of a hunter, she backed away from him. “J-just not now.”
Her gaze skittered beyond his shoulder and he followed her stare to the ormolu clock. The broken ormolu clock. Her lips flattened in a little frown. “It is nearly thirty minutes past twelve.”
Prudence yanked her gaze back to his. “It is? How do you know?”
He folded his arms at his chest and sank his hip upon the edge of the upholstered sofa. “I had my meeting with my solicitor this morning.”
“You did?” Then she widened her eyes. “Of course! You did! I just was not thinking of your meeting, but rather—” She clamped her lips tightly closed, bringing her ramblings to an immediate cessation. “How was your meeting?” she blurted when he opened his mouth to speak.
The niggling of suspicion crept in yet again. What was she up to? “My meeting went well.” Her gaze strayed past him, once again, over to the door and lingered. His wife was expecting someone. The way she worried her lower lip hinted at her distractedness. “With the funds, we are now free to fly to the moon.”
“Are we?” she murmured, maintaining her focus on the doorway.
“Oh, yes,” Christian drawled. “And Redding informed me we are now in a position to fit the King’s soldiers in new uniforms made of white gowns.”
Prudence stitched her eyebrows into a single line and swung her attention to him. “What?”
He closed the distance between them and, settling his hands on her shoulders, he leaned down and kissed the sensitive skin at the nape of her neck. “Was it the mention of white gowns that earned your notice?”
She tipped her head sideways, granting him greater access to her satiny soft flesh. “I detest white gowns,” she breathed.
“You could wear a tattered, drab shift and still be as magnificent as—”
The sound of a clearing throat at the doorway cut across his words and Christian shot his head up. Dalrymple bore a faint trace of amusement on his coarse face. “The Duke of Blackthorne,” he announced.
As though scalded, Christian drew his hands away from his wife. He stared in a hazy fog of a dream turned nightmare as Dalrymple stepped aside and admitted the towering bear of a man. He stood, his frame in profile, and with the cold, austere stare he raked up and down their persons, he may as well have been born to the role of duke. Larger than he remembered, broader in his shoulders, the duke only bore hints of the young man he’d skipped rocks with as a boy of seven. Silence ticked away the tense moments and he dimly registered his wife looking between Christian and Blackthorne.
Except, this stranger was not the friend of his past. The man turned, presenting the whole of his face.
The muscles of Christian’s gut clenched as guilt sucked the air from his lungs.
At his side, Prudence drew in a slow, audible breath. He marveled at her strength. Most women and men would cower at the ferocity glinting in the Duke of Blackthorne’s lone blue eye. The hideous, jagged, white scars that covered half his face stood a glaring reminder of Christian’s crimes.
A hard, mocking smile formed on the other man’s scarred lips in a macabre rendition of amusement. “St. Cyr and…” He scraped another gaze over Prudence. “I take it this is the new Marchioness of St. Cyr.”
Christian watched his former friend’s entrance into the room, feeling much like a player who’d not practiced his lines upon a Drury Lane stage. Gone were the once long, powerful steps. Blackthorne now moved with the aid of a serpent-headed cane as his leg hitched with the force of each stride. This was his doing. All of it. He balled his hands into tight fists. “Blackthorne,” he said quietly. He tried to make sense of his former friend’s reentrance into his life. “This is my wife. Prudence Villiers, Lady St. Cyr.” A sea of questions raged through his mind, all coming back to a single one—what was the man whose last words to him were “rot in hell” now doing here?
The duke ignored that introduction. Instead, he eyed the threadbare furnishings and the worn upholstery of the sofa. His lips peeled up in the corner. Shame tightened Christian’s cravat at the unspoken scorn there.
Of course, his cheerful, ever optimistic bride broke the thick tension blanketing the room. She rushed over and then stopped in a whir of white skirts. “Your Grace,” she greeted and sank into a deep curtsy. “It is an honor.”
Christian braced for the other man’s curt rejection of her warm greeting.
Instead, his former friend inclined his head displaying a trace of the charming gentleman he’d been before his entire world had been blown up with the spark of a flint. “Indeed,” he said on a lethal whisper.
Prudence’s smile faltered and she fisted her skirts. “Would you care for refreshments?”
Refreshments? Had his wife lost her bloody, everlasting mind? Blackthorne had not come ’round for—
Christ!
Christian took in the tray of refreshments, his wife’s earlier, odder than usual behavior. Why…why…she’d orchestrated this bloody meeting. “Prudence,” he said quietly, willing her to return to his side. “His Grace does not want refreshments.”
A vile chuckle rumbled from the duke’s chest. He spread his arm wide, the tip of his serpent-headed cane nearly brushed Prudence’s arm. “Do not be ridiculous, St. Cyr. Why, this is a festive occasion. A reunion. How would I dare reject your,” he smirked, “lovely wife’s graciousness?”
He silently cursed.
Prudence hesitated a moment and then slid into the shellback chair with its ripped upholstered seat. She reached for the teapot.
Blackthorne claimed the seat closest to his wife. He rested his cane alongside the edge of his chair, but kept the palm of his hand about the gold serpent head. “I must admit when I heard from you, I was at first surprised, my lady.” She froze mid-pour and looked to their revered guest questioningly. The duke settled back in his chair and looped his ankle over his opposite knee. If Christian hadn’t been studying this ghost of his past so very closely, he would have failed to see that faint spasm of pain. But he saw it and knew the long ago injured leg still brought the other man agony. “But upon consideration, I am not at all surprised.”
There was a hint of taunting in those words. Did his wife hear it? Tightening his jaw, Christian stiffly walked over and claimed the only available seat on the opposite side of Blackthorne. As he slid into the King Louis XIV chair, he realized his former friend had carefully placed himself in a way that put him between him and Prudence, and also placed the scarred and burned portion of his face on display to Christian.
…Oh, God…Derek…I am sorry. Oh, God forgive me…
His wife’s words came as though down a long stretch of empty hall. “My husband has spoken of you,” Prudence said softly, favoring Christian with a small smile that yan
ked him from the hell of the battlefield memories.
“Has he?” The duke wrapped those words in a jeering whisper.
She held out a cup of tea to Blackthorne, but he deliberately ignored that offering.
“And just what else has your husband told you?”
She wetted her lips. Color blossomed on her cheeks.
“Blackthorne, perhaps we should meet alone,” Christian said quietly, appealing to the gentleman the recent duke once had been—before he had gone and destroyed the other man’s existence.
The duke thumped the floor once with his cane. “Come, surely what you would say to me in private you would say to your beautiful, new bride?”
His mouth went dry as all the shame of his past bubbled to the surface, fresh as though those crimes belonged to yesterday and not years ago.
“My husband spoke of your friendship,” Prudence said, finding words when he himself had none. “And I assured him that friends as you were, what happened in the past surely could not keep you apart now.”
Ah, how he loved her. She possessed an effervescent light in an otherwise dark world; this inexplicable ability to see good in him, in Blackthorne, in the now.
They were two dark souls, however, who could not dwell in that world.
As she spoke, Blackthorne’s frame stiffened. Perhaps it was his wife’s words or perhaps it was the years of dwelling in his own townhouse with the world shut outside, but his former friend remained silent. He proceeded to bang the bottom of his cane upon the floor in a slow, grating rhythm. “My you are the forgiving type? First wedding the gentleman who made a public wager involving you and now this.”
His wife’s mouth parted on a small moue. She fluttered a hand about her heart. Prudence, in her innocence, was no match for this stranger’s ugliness.
“Blackthorne,” he warned, infusing a steely edge to his command.
“My how your life has worked out, St. Cyr. You find yourself not the impoverished baronet your father was,” he continued over Prudence’s gasp, “but rather a marquess.” He jabbed his cane in her direction, brushing the hem of her skirt with the bottom. “You have secured a lady’s fat dowry and if that touching display when I first entered the room was any indication, you are even…” He peeled his lips back displaying the gleaming, even row of his white teeth. “Happy.” The jeering emphasis placed on that one word indicated he found that sentiment as real as fairies and other fey creatures. “Despite my best efforts.”
His best efforts? Then a wave of shock slammed into him. “By God, it was you.” Air left him on a slow hiss.
Prudence shook her head and looked back and forth between him and the duke. “I don’t…”
He clenched his jaw, resisting the urge to drag the other man across the table and beat him bloody. “It was Blackthorne who bandied those falsities to the gossip columns.” A chill ran through him. He’d known the duke despised him, but he’d never before believed he’d become this ruthless, vengeful bastard.
Instead of being properly shamed, his one-time friend inclined his head. “Brava. As cowardly as you were on the battlefield and foolish as you were with Lyn—” Christian’s stomach lurched and he glowered the duke into momentary silence. The other man continued as though he’d not missed a proverbial beat. “You still were clever enough to know I handed your words over to the correct people.” A cruel grin formed on his lips. “I always have servants listening wherever you are concerned.”
Christian gritted his teeth. “Then your blasted source would know they were not my words.” He stole a look at Prudence to see whether or not she believed the duke’s lies. Their gazes locked and she gave him a slow nod. She believed Christian. Some of the tension went out of him.
The duke frowned, alternating his one-eyed stare between them.
When he returned his attention to Blackthorne, he turned his palms up. “I am sorry.” And he would forever carry the regret of his own failings and what those failings had cost Blackthorne and so many others. “I do not expect you can ever forgive me.” Even if his young wife had been foolishly optimistic of that possibility. “But I would have you know that not one day has passed where I have not regretted…” Everything. “What happened,” he finished lamely.
A cold, winter wind slapped at the crystal windowpanes. That desolate reminder of the season’s chill was suddenly punctuated by Blackthorne’s slow, precise clap. “Ah, brava, St. Cyr. How heartwarming. How utterly touching.” He grinned another feral, soulless smile that sent shivers skittering along Christian’s spine. “That would be perfect, would it not?” He waggled his black eyebrow. “You have your fortune, your title, your lovely wife, your happiness, and freedom from guilt. Then you are fit to go on as the cheerful, charming bastard you always were while all the men who had the misfortune of calling you friend or brother-in-arms suffer for you ineptness.”
Prudence leaped to her feet. “That is enough,” she gasped. She planted her hands akimbo and glared at her guest. “How dare you come here and spew such…such venom.” His wife seemed to remember herself for she patted her cheeks once and then drew in a calming breath. “I understand why you are so hurt,” she conceded to the stoic duke who took in her brave display through the hooded lid of his lone eye. “But what good can come from this darkness? It is time to find your light. Both of you,” she said, looking to Christian.
Through her defense, he sat numbed, empty, and shamed by the truth of Blackthorne’s charges.
“How very forgiving you are of your husband’s failings.” Blackthorne made a tsking sound. “Would you be so forgiving if it was your face destroyed or your friends killed?”
She tipped her chin up a notch and held the duke’s cold stare. “I believe I would.”
His lip pulled in a snarl. “Ahh, so you must know everything.”
Christian sat forward in his chair and made one more attempt at separating her from this looming exchange. “Prudence, if you’ll excuse us?”
His wife’s hesitation hinted at her desire to hear the rest of Blackthorne’s words.
“Surely you’ll not invite me over for tea and refreshments and flee merely because I wish to discuss your heroics with Lady St. Cyr?” The other man’s carefully placed barb knotted his stomach.
“I know more than you think,” she said quietly. So sure. So confident that she did, in fact, know all, because she’d asked and he’d promised her the truth. Instead, he’d withheld that darkest, most shameful secret.
“Ah, so you know of lovely Lynette, then?”
“Prudence,” Christian tried again, her name an entreaty. Waves of panic slammed into him, threatening to pull him under. For everything she had forgiven, she could never simply ignore this greatest sin.
His wife froze and gave her head a slow shake. He willed her gaze to his but her shocked, horrified eyes remained trained on Blackthorne.
“Tsk, tsk, you’d not tell her the most shameful part of your time in Toulouse.” No, he wouldn’t. They’d, after all, established the extent of Christian’s cowardice. Bitterness singed his throat. God, how he despised himself. “The lovely Lynette. Your husband’s Belgian lover. If he had devoted half as much of his attention to the battlefield as he did that lush beauty, he’d have been made Commander of the Royal Guards.”
The color leeched from his wife’s cheeks and he reached a hand out for her fingers, but the space between them was too great. Her attention was riveted on Blackthorne and so he let his shaking palm fall to his lap. “Blackthorne,” he seethed, fury coursing through him. Crimes of his past aside, how dare Blackthorne speak so to his wife?
“Ah, I gather by your stunned silence, madam, you were not aware of these particular pieces of your heroic husband’s past. How he was fool enough to arrange to meet with the lovely Lynette after the battle at Toulouse, unwittingly giving over our regiment’s position and through that, costing far better men their lives.”
Had the other man knifed him with a dull dagger, the pain could not be greater.
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“Enough,” Prudence commanded. The faint quiver to her words hinted at her threadbare control. She met Christian’s gaze and in her eyes was so much pain, questioning, and hurt it ravaged him on the inside.
Shoving to his feet, the legs of his chair scraped along the hardwood floor. “Prudence, I—” Am a failure. “I—” Never deserved you. With her imploring eyes begging for him to deny Blackthorne’s words, he spun jerkily on his heel and fled the room. His former friend’s empty, maniacal laugh followed in his wake.
Chapter 25
Lesson Twenty-five
When in love, a lady will become her husband’s staunch protector…
Prudence stared at the door her husband had just fled through, and then with rage thrumming inside her veins, swung her attention to the Duke of Blackthorne. He came slowly to his feet. Instead of the triumph she expected from this cold, callous man, the unmarred portion of his face remained peculiarly blank. She fisted and unfisted her hands into tight balls until her nails left jagged crescent marks on the soft palms. “How dare you?” she seethed. “I invited you to come to find peace with Christian.”
He blinked his sole eye as if he did not know what to make of a person who challenged him. Then he found his inner ugly. “Did St. Cyr use you to try and soften me? If he did, he is as foolish as he was a rotten soldier.”
She shot a hand out and she cracked her palm against his cheek. Fury vibrated through her being. There would be time enough later for horror at striking a duke and one Christian called friend, but for now, all she knew was the white-hot anger clouding her vision. “You, sir, are a monster.”
“A beast,” the Duke of Blackthorne did not so much as miss a proverbial beat. “They call me the beast, and but one glance at your husband’s handiwork and you can certainly understand why.”
Icy chills danced along her spine at his gravelly whisper better reserved for nightmares than afternoon visits. She studied Christian’s former friend a moment; a man whom she’d optimistically believed had ceased to hold her husband culpable for the dangers of war. Looking at him now, with the palpable rage emanating from his person, fury rolled together with pity and sadness. This man was broken beyond repair.
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