Lord of Fire

by Gaelen Foley

  “Lady Glenwood. It is a pleasure to see you again,” he clipped out in a low, brusque monotone. Damien’s manner was so grave that he might have been laying out battle plans for his captains instead of greeting the damsel of his choice, Lucien thought. Indeed, after serving in nearly every major action in the war, Damien had come home with a deadened, icy look in his eyes that rather worried Lucien, but there was nothing he could do to help when his brother would barely talk to him.

  “I trust you find the evening’s entertainments to your liking, my lady,” he said gravely to the baroness.

  Caro smiled at him in an odd mix of patience and lust, while Lucien suppressed the urge to roll his eyes at his brother’s tense formality. Damien could lop off an enemy’s head with one blow of his sword, but put him in the vicinity of a beautiful woman, and the steely-eyed colonel turned as shy and uncertain as an overgrown schoolboy. The ladies of the ton were such sugar-spun confections that he seemed to fear that if he touched them he might break them. The hardy lasses who worked St. James’s Park at night put the war hero much more at ease.

  Ah, well, Lucien thought, shaking his head to himself, it was comforting to know that his exalted brother had his foibles. He looked on in amusement as Damien cast about haphazardly for something to say and suddenly seized on a topic.

  “How’s Harry?”

  Lucien shut his eyes briefly and pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation at his brother’s dim-wittedness with the opposite sex. Could he have made it any more obvious that he only wanted a highborn broodmare? No pretty compliments, no requests for a dance. It was a wonder women bothered with the great brute at all.

  Even Caro looked uneasy with his choice of subjects, as though to admit that she had borne a child was to admit she was beyond the first blush of her youth. She glossed over her reply, not bothering to mention the boy’s illness, then quickly steered the conversation to other matters. Watching them, Lucien could tell that it cost his brother an intense effort to pay attention to Caro’s empty prattle.

  “What a monstrous dull Little Season, don’t you think? All the best society has gone home to the country for the hunt, or to Paris or Vienna—”

  Bored in seconds, Lucien suddenly slipped his hand around Caro’s waist and yanked her to him. “What do you think of this pretty wench, eh, Demon?”

  She fell against his chest with a coy squeal. “Lucien!”

  “Does she not tempt you? I find she tempts me quite to the breaking point,” he murmured meaningfully, tracing the curve of her side with a slow, wicked caress.

  Damien looked at him in shock. What the hell are you doing? his scowl demanded, but perhaps he sensed the note of deviltry in his twin’s smooth voice, for he delayed judgment for a moment, regarding Lucien warily. He knew better than anyone that with Lucien, things were never as they seemed.

  “Doesn’t she look ravishing this evening? You should tell her so.”

  Damien glanced at Caro, then at him. “Indeed.” The single, ominous word rumbled like far-off thunder from the depths of his chest. He studied the woman, as though trying to penetrate her nervous, sugary smile, for he had not been born with Lucien’s gift of seeing past pretense in a glance.

  “Let go of me, Lucien. People are staring,” Caro murmured uneasily, brushing her shoulder against his chest as she tried to squirm free.

  “What’s wrong, mon ange? You only want my touch in secret?” he asked, his tone silky-smooth, though his grip on her body tightened ruthlessly.

  She froze and stared at him in shock, her brown eyes looking even darker as her face turned white.

  “Time to confess, love. You’ve been trying to manipulate me and my brother, but it’s not going to work. Tell Damien where you were last night.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she forced out.

  With a look that could have turned her to a pillar of ice, Damien cursed under his breath and turned away. Lucien laughed softly and allowed Caro to shove free of his embrace.

  “Damien, don’t listen to him—you know he is a liar!”

  “You would bat your lashes at me after you’ve lain with my brother?” he whispered fiercely shoving off her clutching hands.

  “But, I—it’s not my fault, it’s his!”

  “You are brazen, madam. Moreover, you are a fool.”

  She whirled to Lucien with a frantic look. “Did you hear what he called me? You can’t let him speak to me like that!”

  But Lucien’s only answer was a small, rather sinister laugh. He took another drink of his wine.

  “What is going on here?” she demanded in a shaky voice.

  “Caro, my heart, the man’s not a fool. There is something I neglected to tell you last night. Damien has been meaning to propose to you.”

  Her jaw dropped. For a moment, she looked as though she couldn’t draw in a breath past the tight stays that pressed up the splendid globes of her breasts; then her stricken gaze flew to Damien’s. “Is this true?”

  “I am sure there is no need to discuss it,” he growled.

  “Is it?” she cried.

  “I merely thought it would be helpful to give your child a father, since he lost his own.” Damien’s frosty glance swept her body, lingering at her hips. “Pity you are unable to temper your wantonness with a little discipline.” His angry gaze swung to Lucien. “A word with you, sir.”

  “As you wish, brother.”

  “Lucien—you can’t leave me!” She clutched at his arm quite without shame.

  “Caro, my pet.” He lifted her hand and kissed it, then let it trail from his grasp as he moved away from her. “He’s right. I’m afraid you failed the test.”

  “Test?” Understanding flashed in her eyes, then rage. “You fiend! Bastard! Both of you! That’s what you are! A pair of bastards!”

  “Why, everyone knows that, ma chérie,” Lucien said with smile. “Our mother was an even greater slut than you.”

  With a wordless cry of fury, Caro hurled her empty wineglass at him, but he caught it out of the air with catlike reflexes, placed it gently on the tray of a passing waiter, and blew her a kiss from his white-gloved hand. Offering her a smooth, mocking bow, he turned and followed his brother out of the ballroom.

  Despite their estrangement, the Knight twins fell naturally in stride with each other as they crossed the adjoining lounge and descended the grand staircase to the ground floor. People stared as they passed, but the twins were used to that reaction. They passed several of the luxuriously appointed refreshment salons, coming at last to the billiard room tucked away in the corner. When they stepped into this dim, oak-paneled male sanctuary, Damien cleared the room with a glower. Lucien held the door sardonically for the gentlemen who put out their cigars and hastened out, leaving a miasmic cloud of smoke drifting over the three pool tables.

  Nodding to the last man to leave, Lucien glanced out the door and saw that Caro had followed them as far as the hallway. It seemed she didn’t dare come any closer. Her gloved fists were clenched at her sides. Her dark eyes snapped sparks. She pursed her red lips like she was trying not to scream obscenities at him. He laughed under his breath and shut the door more or less in her face. The most amusing thing about Lady Glenwood was that when he was done here, he had no doubt he could go back out and smooth things over with a few soft words and bring her to his villa for the party this weekend, just as they had previously planned—sick child or no. Caro was determined, after all, to find out if his gatherings at Revell Court were every bit as wicked as she had heard.

  Turning, he found Damien studying him, his shiny Hessian boots planted wide, his arms folded across his chest. The formidable colonel stroked his chin with a brooding air. On his guard, Lucien sauntered over to the nearest pool table, reaching across its green velvet surface to toy with the glossy black eight ball. He spun it like a top and watched it whirl under his white-gloved fingertip, like God in a sadistic mood, toying with the earth. Where shall I send a famine, a plague?

&
nbsp; “Didn’t we make a pact once never to let a woman come between us?” Damien asked.

  “Why, yes, on our eighteenth birthday. I remember it well.”

  “Do you?”

  Damien waited for an explanation; Lucien let him wait.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” He looked innocently at his brother. “Oh, come, you can’t be serious.”

  “You’re damned right I’m serious!”

  Damien’s roars could make whole regiments quake in their boots, but Lucien merely sent him a long-suffering, rather bored look. “I cannot apologize when I am not sorry.”

  Damien’s eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits. “Sometimes I think you are an evil man.”

  Lucien laughed mildly.

  “What kind of game are you playing now?” He took a step closer. “You’re up to something, and I want to know what it is. Give me a plain answer for once or I’ll flatten you. Damn it, Lucien, if you weren’t my brother, I would kill you for this.”

  “Over Caro Montague?” he asked dubiously.

  “You deliberately humiliated me.”

  “I saved you from humiliation. You should be thanking me,” he retorted. “Now at least you know what your angel is made of. Jesus, I was trying to do you a favor.”

  Damien snorted. “Admit it. You seduced Caro to get back at me. To even the score.”

  Lucien paused, cast him a veiled look of warning. “Score?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. The title.”

  “I don’t want your bloody title.” Lucien’s eyes flickered with gathering fire, but Damien ignored his words and charged on.

  “You have no reason to resent me. Your fortunes are set now since Carnarthen left you the unentailed property. Frankly, I don’t fancy living on half pay for the rest of my days. I am accepting this earldom, and you’re just going to have to learn to live with it. Incidentally . . .” When he stopped mere inches from Lucien and stared coolly at him, it was like looking into a hostile mirror—the same black hair, the same haunted gray eyes. Both men were too hard and proud to admit that in their own separate ways, each had been left shattered by his experience of war.

  “Yes?” Lucien asked prosaically.

  “I hope you don’t plan on seducing every woman I take an interest in, because I won’t brush off an insult like this twice. Not even from you.”

  For a long moment, Lucien stared at him, incredulous. “Did you just threaten me?”

  Damien held his stare in granite stillness. Stunned, Lucien turned away in amazement. He ran his hand through his hair for a moment, at a loss, then began laughing, low and bitterly. “You glory-hound! I should have let you marry the slut and watched her cuckold you all over Town. Are we through here?”

  Damien shrugged.

  “Good.” With a lightninglike movement, Lucien rolled the eight ball at the other billiard balls. It struck them with a savage crack and sent them scattering, pell-mell, over the table, colored and striped, some crashing down into the pockets. He pivoted and stalked toward the door.

  How fitting, that this was what his life had come to, he thought acidly as he crossed the billiard room. For the past two and a half years, he had worked alone, changing identities like a shape-shifter each time he had moved on to a new assignment, drifting in and out of countless people’s lives like a ghost, never quite connecting. Now not even his twin brother knew him anymore—did not know him and did not want to know him, for he was a spy, a deceiver, a man without honor. A man who knew the rules of gentlemanly conduct and ignored them. Self-loathing pulsed through him, and despair. If Damien did not give a damn about him anymore, who ever would? No one, he realized, with an empty, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was utterly alone.

  “One more thing,” Damien called after him.

  Lucien turned in formidable, elegant hauteur. “Yes?”

  Damien lifted his chin. “I’ve been hearing odd rumors about you. Bizarre things.”

  “Do tell.”

  “People are saying you’ve resurrected our father’s old secret society. There is talk of . . . indecent goings-on at Revell Court. Strange rites.”

  “You don’t say,” he uttered blandly.

  Damien searched his face. “Most people seem to think you’re merely having wild parties, but a few claim you’re involved in some kind of . . . pagan cult, along the lines of the old Hellfire Club.”

  “How very interesting,” he purred.

  “Is it true?”

  Lucien merely slipped him a dark, jaded smile, turned, and strolled out of the room.

  Morning sunlight gilded the Hampshire countryside with the mellow glow of autumn and streamed through the French windows of the cozy parlor at Glenwood Park. Alice Montague picked a crumb of Harry’s breakfast muffin out of her hair with a slight frown and went on singing softly to the toddler, rocking him in her arms. She glanced restlessly out the bow window each time she paced across the room, for she expected Caro’s carriage any minute now. At least she hoped.

  All week Harry had been uncharacteristically whiny and tired. Yesterday he had fallen asleep on the parlor floor with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket wrapped around him, while Alice had sat intently sewing a new suit for the dashing Mr. Wembley, Harry’s jointed wooden doll. This morning at dawn, however, his old nurse’s warnings had proved correct. The diminutive Baron Glenwood had awakened the entire household with a wail of lordly ire—one fevered, angry, miserable little boy, covered in chicken pox.

  Having itched and fussed and cried since breakfast, he dozed at last in Alice’s arms with an air of defeat, his rose-petal cheek resting on her shoulder.

  “Mama,” he bleated wearily, just as he had been doing all morning.

  “She’s coming, my love,” Alice whispered, hugging him. “She’s on her way. I promise.”

  “Bumps.”

  “Yes, I know you’ve got the bumps, lambkin. Everyone gets them. I had them too when I was your age.” Unfortunately, it was going to get worse before it got better.

  “Three.”

  “Yes, you are three. Such a clever boy.” She squeezed him gently, ignoring the strain in her back. He was too big for her to be carrying around like an infant; but he reverted to babyish ways when he was sick, and she couldn’t bear to watch him suffer without doing what she could to comfort him.

  “Look!” Harry said suddenly, lifting his peach-fuzzed head and pointing over her shoulder at the window.

  “What is it?”

  “Mama!”

  “Can it be?” she asked doubtfully. Walking over to the window, Alice shifted him onto her hip and pushed the damask curtain aside.

  Harry pointed his tiny finger in excitement, then looked into her eyes with his first wide smile of the day, showing his little white teeth. To Alice, his smile was like the sun breaking out from behind the clouds. She gazed lovingly into his sky-blue eyes, ignoring the approaching carriage for the moment. When Harry smiled, he looked so much like her brother, Phillip, that it brought tears to her eyes.

  “Mama! Mama!” he began shouting, kicking his legs violently as he craned his neck to look at the distant carriage.

  “Didn’t I tell you she was coming?” she teased, hiding her relief, for the baroness was not the most dependable creature. Caro had a way of popping in and out of her child’s life as the whim struck her, but Alice had written to her three days ago warning her the boy was coming down with something.

  “I go!” Harry squirmed out of her arms and went careening out of the room with small pattering steps, trailing his blanket from his tiny, clenched fist. “Mama! Mama!”

  For a moment, Alice listened to her nephew’s hollers trailing down the hallway, and his nurse Peg Tate’s hearty exclamation as the big, sturdy woman intercepted him.

  His rambunctious excitement at the prospect of seeing the glamorous stranger, his mother, nearly broke her heart. He wanted so badly to get to know the baroness, but every time Caro visited, she would leav
e again just when Harry was starting to get used to her. It left the child confused and angry—and played havoc with Alice’s future. She sighed quietly, turned, and took a long look at the bright, airy room where she spent most of her time. Her gaze traveled from the large, intricate cage of white-painted cane that she had fashioned to house her pet canary, to the round table where she idled away the serene country hours of her life at Glenwood Park, absorbed in her various crafts, all very suitable for a quiet-tempered young lady. Yet she couldn’t help but feel she was living in a dream here while life was passing her by.

  She was haunted by a hunger for she knew not what, sometimes so intensely that it kept her awake at night. She was torn between her devotion to her nephew and the running of Glenwood Park, and her own need to find her life. But the overriding fact was that Harry needed someone he could depend on to be there for him all the time, not just when the whim struck her. Since it was a duty his mother had abdicated, that person was Alice. She slipped her hands into her apron pockets and stood very still, the sunlight warming her skin, glistening upon her bright, reddish-gold hair. She tensed her body tightly, trying to get rid of the well-hidden tension that plagued her, then forced her shoulders to relax and took deliberate pleasure in gazing upon the vase of dried hydrangeas that she had arranged just yesterday. The flowers graced the center of the table. Beside them lay the elegant silk purses she was sewing as Christmas gifts for a few of her London friends, and her delicate japanning tools, perched well out of Harry’s reach. Her latest piece, an intricate jewel box, sat in a middle stage of completion. All of her hobbies ran in an artistic vein, but in her heart, she knew in a sense they were merely distractions, her way of trying to burn off her restlessness.

  Hearing the baroness’s carriage rumble to a halt outside the manor house, Alice moved dutifully to the window to wave hello, but when she looked out, her eyes widened in appalled shock. It was not Caro’s fashionable yellow barouche.