Pierre opened the door for Anna, and she swiveled about and strode out of the cellar. Susan caught Isabelle’s eye. They were finished. For now.
“Wait!” Leo barked. “Loosen the bonds around my wrists, for God’s sake, unless you want my hands to drop off for lack of circulation.”
“Someone will take care of that for you,” Susan said.
“Tell me why I am here! When will I be freed?”
“Not yet,” Susan said.
“Don’t leave me like this!” Leo lunged forward, dragging the chains over the rough flagstone floor. “Damn you!”
Isabelle resisted covering her ears at the slew of insults and curses that followed. She hurried after Susan, taking a deep breath of relief when the door thudded shut behind them, muffling the earl’s irate bellows. Passing Pierre, they walked up the narrow stone steps and through another door to the kitchen, where the cook and a girl, busily skinning a chicken, studiously ignored them.
A tight-lipped and pale-faced Anna informed them that she needed to be alone for a while—that she needed to think. Without giving either Susan or Isabelle time to respond, she hurried off, leaving them in the ground-floor corridor staring after her.
“Let her go.” Susan grasped Isabelle’s arm as Isabelle lifted her skirts to go after Anna. “She will manage this in her own way.”
Not for the first time, Isabelle wondered at the nature of Anna’s relationship with Leo.
“Perhaps you would like to take a turn around the square, Isabelle?” Susan asked, unruffled as ever.
How could Susan be so calm? Isabelle stared at her friend for a long moment, then released a deep, pent-up breath and nodded. The fresh air might do her some good, and she and Susan needed to talk.
They donned their cloaks, bonnets, and gloves, then went outside, heading toward Berkeley Square.
It was a windy day. The wind whipped multicolored leaves from the branches of the maple trees and swirled them in clusters around the women’s feet. Dense traffic—carts and carriages and men on horseback—crowded the street, and people strode busily past them, hunched against the wind and intent upon their business.
Susan linked arms with Isabelle and set a leisurely pace. “We ought to talk about what happened. You appear to be shocked by Anna’s actions.”
“A little shocked perhaps. Forgive me, Susan, but I am not sure what she expects to gain by…doing that. Touching him in that way…” Isabelle swallowed hard, not liking the bitter, twisting feeling that rose in her chest when she thought about the wickedly erotic nature of Anna’s touches.
“In order to understand Anna, I believe one requires an understanding of what he did to her.”
Isabelle focused on the path ahead, trying to hide her blazing curiosity. “That certainly might help.”
They crossed the street into the square. Here the trees were stripped of their leaves, and their naked branches arched over them on either side.
They lowered themselves on a bench, smoothing their gowns. This area of the square appeared bedraggled and windblown, and loose leaves and twigs scattered across the grass, giving the landscape an unkempt look. A thick cloud cover now veiled the sun completely. Not many people walked the square at leisure this morning, whether because of the early hour or the grim weather, Isabelle was not certain. She watched a solitary leaf trip down the path in the same direction from which she and Susan had just come.
Laying her hand on Isabelle’s arm, Susan said, “Anna is not my cousin.”
Isabelle’s gaze riveted to her friend. “She isn’t?”
“No. She is not a relation of mine at all. It has been an ongoing charade for the past year.” Regarding her with inscrutable dark eyes, Susan tightened her fingers over Isabelle’s arm. “Very few know the truth, Isabelle. We have agreed to tell you because we believe we can trust you. Can we?”
“Aye, of course. I’ve no reason to divulge your secret to anyone.”
“You must never repeat what I am about to tell you. It would ruin her.”
With instant certainty, Isabelle knew that the tenuous state of Anna’s reputation must have something to do with Lord Leothaid. Had Leo debauched Anna like he had debauched her? Had he whispered in Anna’s ear how much he loved her and then, after they were exposed and the world had condemned her, disappeared?
Isabelle felt warm despite the autumn chill. She shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “I’d never willfully cause a lady’s ruination. You must know that.”
Susan’s lips turned upward in the barest hint of a smile. “I do know it, Isabelle. And I do trust you, dearest, because I truly believe you will understand.”
Isabelle had the sinking feeling she would understand. Perhaps far too intimately.
“She is, in actuality, from Peterborough,” Susan began with a sigh. “Her father is a magistrate there, and she was a gently bred young lady, although I believe she might have been allowed to run wild. You haven’t known Anna long, but you have surely taken note of her spirited nature.”
“Aye, I have,” Isabelle agreed.
“Anna was nineteen, wretchedly bored, and dreaming of escape from her provincial surroundings when she was invited to Lord Jennings’s house party, along with her father. Leo was Jennings’s guest as well.” Susan crossed her slender arms over her chest and stared straight ahead. Two spots of color appeared high on her cheeks. “Anna flirted with him, and he took advantage of her innocence. Anna embraced his seduction with enthusiasm, no doubt with fairy-tale dreams of the two of them running to the Highlands and living happily forever afterward in some gilded castle on the banks of Loch Lomond. When she woke the following morning, Leo had gone, taking her chastity with him.”
Isabelle winced. In truth, it was worse than her own experience with Lord Leothaid. At least he had never left their bed. He’d abandoned her after they’d both left it.
“How awful for her,” she murmured.
As a magistrate’s daughter, Anna was a lady. As a gentleman, Lord Leothaid should have married her after compromising her. Coldness seeped to the marrow of Isabelle’s bones. Despite his abandonment, she had never felt hatred for Leo before, but loathing materialized now, like a small lump of metal in her breast.
“That is not the worst of it.” Susan squeezed Isabelle’s hand. “Leo was seen slipping into her room, and the woman who witnessed it told Anna’s father. The man turned his back on her, Isabelle, leaving Anna with nothing. She made her way to London. She was young and naïve and alone, and she didn’t realize how expensive London is. It wasn’t long before she ran out of funds. When I first saw Anna last year, she had reached a point that was truly low.”
“Oh, Susan.” Isabelle breathed. How on earth could she reconcile this monster, the gentle youth she had once loved, with the angry lord in the cellar? “She must despise him.”
“She does despise him. She was sheltered and young. She has experienced horrors no lady of breeding should ever have to endure. You understand now why she must pose as my cousin. To reveal her true origins would destroy her reputation, her name, and the respect she has struggled so hard to regain.”
Isabelle nodded. “This is why she treats Leo with such contempt. He stole everything from her. Even her name.”
“Yes. And I will stand by whatever she chooses to do with him, Isabelle.” Susan stared at her, her eyes like chips of obsidian, cold and hard. “It happened almost two years ago, but her experiences have affected her deeply. Perhaps more than either of us, she requires vengeance in order to heal her soul. I do not think she will truly harm him, but make no mistake of it, she intends to make him pay, and pay handsomely, for what he did to her.”
“But she will make him pay through…through”—Isabelle struggled to find the correct word—“seduction?”
“Seduction is Anna’s most powerful weapon.”
A dry leaf flew beneath the brim of Isabelle’s bonnet. It crumbled as she tried to pull it out, and she picked at the pieces, considering her reaction to this.
In truth, she did not know what to feel. Leo had abandoned her as well, and her father had disowned her, but at least her aunts, and later her uncle, had taken her in. She was one of the lucky ones, she supposed.
But that surge of attraction, that rush of feeling when she’d first seen the earl in shackles, in all that handsome dishabille, disconcerted her. She should not feel this way about someone who was an unconscionable rakehell, the very worst breed of scoundrel. Still, she could not deny how he had affected her. If he had but beckoned to her, she would have forgotten Susan and Anna in a heartbeat and thrown herself into his arms.
She pursed her lips. She was a wanton fool. To think of abandoning true friendship for the promise of…what? A night of passion? She had already experienced that and knew where it had left her. Horribly alone, terribly lonely, and desperately unhappy.
She could not make that mistake again.
If Anna wished to shape her revenge in the form of seduction, Isabelle would push her own wicked thoughts aside and wish her the best. It wasn’t as though Leo hadn’t touched another woman in the seven years they’d been apart, after all. By all accounts, he had touched hundreds.
The lump of loathing hardened in her chest, and she met her friend’s dark eyes. “I’ll support her, Susan. And you as well. Whatever punishment you deem is necessary, I shall back you with every part of myself.”
Susan clasped both of Isabelle’s gloved hands in her own. “Isabelle,” she murmured, “I know you still have tender feelings for Leo. I can see them in your eyes—”
“Nay, no more,” Isabelle said flatly. If what Susan said was true, he was a different person than the lad she thought she knew seven years ago. He deserved whatever fate Susan and Anna had in mind.
Susan rose, drawing Isabelle up with her. They linked arms and resumed their walk. They reached the far end of the square and turned to skirt its outside edge.
“How did you first meet Anna?” Isabelle asked after a prolonged silence.
“My cousin—my real cousin, that is—brought her to me.” Susan sighed. “I haven’t the faintest idea why my cousin did what he did, but he knew her background and sympathized with her plight. After she recovered from her ordeal, we changed her surname from Newton to Tomkins and acquainted her with London society. No one but the two of us, and now you, know of her reduced circumstances.”
Isabelle squeezed her friend’s arm. At least all men weren’t as loathsome as Lord Leothaid. “What an honorable man your cousin is.”
Frowning, Susan paused in her step and drew Isabelle to a stop beside her. “Once I would have agreed with you, but after last night, I simply don’t know anymore. I’m terribly disappointed in him.”
She turned to Isabelle and grasped her hands, her dark brow furrowed with consternation. “Isabelle, my cousin is the man who arranged the orgy—the depraved spectacle Leo planned to attend last night. My cousin is Lord Archer.”
CHAPTER THREE
The women had left Leo alone in the dark, trussed up, hungry, and cold. The rage coursing through his body clashed with the twisting pain in his skull. He curled his wrists in yet another futile attempt to loosen the ropes.
When this was over, he would strangle them himself. All three of them. One by one.
The door creaked open and then slammed shut.
Every nerve bristling, he stood still, listening for movement. Light footsteps traversed the floor. Water sloshed.
“I will shave you, monsieur.” A man’s voice. A calm voice, heavily accented in French. Leo wondered exactly how many people had conspired in this iniquitous plot to capture and chain him. Three females, the giant, and now this Frenchman. Unbelievable.
The man continued. “But if you do not show cooperation, I will stop.”
Leo pressed his back against the stone wall, the curved ceiling grazing his head. “I believe I would rather become a bearded barbarian than have a vicious frog approach me with a razor.”
“I will not harm you unless you try to fight, monsieur.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“It is your choice, of course. But the ladies wish for you to be shaved, and they will not be happy to see that you are not.”
Leo smiled grimly. “I am willing to take my chances, thank you.”
In truth, he needed a shave. His jaw itched. Pride, however, prevented him from giving in, more so than fear of this new villain.
The man sighed. “As you wish. Would you like me to loosen the ropes?”
“Of course I would. Do you think I enjoy being trussed up like a common—”
“I will remove them, and the blindfold,” the man interrupted, his voice annoyingly mild. “You may drink and wash as you wish.”
Just then a feminine whisper came from the direction of the door. “Wait.”
Leo tensed. It was the timid mouse, Miss Juliette. Why was she here? How long had she been present?
“I will shave you, my lord.” She still spoke in a whisper, but her tone was clipped, different from earlier. In her soft-spoken way, she sounded angry with him. “If you do not wish P—”
Silence.
Leo pushed away from the wall, unable to stop his lips from curling into a smile. She’d almost cracked, almost said the Frenchman’s name. Now Leo knew the man’s name started with a “P.” What was it? Pierre? Paul? Pascal? Another small step toward escape.
Miss Juliette had offered to shave him in the Frenchman’s stead. She’d be close to him, touching him. Earlier she’d brushed her fingertips over his foot. The brief contact had sent an electric jolt through his system not unlike the reaction he’d experienced when he’d first heard her voice. What would it feel like to have her hands on him again? He could not deny that he found the thought perversely arousing.
It made no sense. Her soft voice and tentative touch should not affect him. Hell, as soft-spoken as she was, she was one of his villainous abductors, just as guilty as the others.
“Very well,” he said, feeling his way back to the chaise. “If you give your word not to gouge me with the blade.”
Mistress Jane would likely have made a snide comment about his vanity and Lady M would likely have laughed in agreement, but Miss Juliette merely said, “I will not hurt you,” in a flat tone. For some inexplicable reason, he believed her.
She sat beside him—at a respectable distance, not crushed up against him like Mistress Jane—and took shallow breaths as she spread the shaving soap across his cheekbone. Was it his imagination, or did the brush tremble?
“Tell me what the weather is like today,” he said.
The soft bristles left his cheek. “The weather?”
Her voice was breathy and soft. Illogically, his chest tightened in reaction to the sound. He wondered again why she had engaged in this dastardly plan at all, given her seeming reluctance to go along with the evil machinations of the other two.
“Yes, the weather. I have literally been in the dark all day. I rather enjoy the outdoors. If I cannot be outside, I like to hear about it, to know that nature is still at work beyond my narrow sphere of existence.”
She rubbed the cool cream over his other cheek. “It is cloudy,” she breathed. She paused between each word, as if planning each one carefully before allowing it to escape her mouth.
“As it was yesterday?”
“…Yes.”
“Do you think it might rain?”
“I don’t know.” Her whisper was hardly audible.
As she scraped the razor over his cheek, the level of his vulnerability slammed into him. One of the women who had kidnapped and bound him was swiping a deadly blade across his skin while he sat, completely trussed, upon a sofa. All she’d have to do was aim for his jugular and he’d be done for.
Yet he knew instinctively that this one wouldn’t hurt him. She was the only one of his captors he’d entrust with a blade. He didn’t understand why he trusted her—it made no sense. In fact, nothing made sense about Miss Juliette. She was an enigma.
“Would you elaborate?” he said softly. “I want to hear about the wind, the cloud cover, the fog. What is London like today, Miss Juliette?”
“I don’t—” Her voice trembled, then faded altogether. He sensed her helpless glance at the Frenchman, whose presence he could still feel at the other end of the room.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” he persisted. He heard the gentle slosh of water as she dipped the blade in the basin to rinse it. He wished he could see her. What did this soft-spoken woman look like? Did he know her? Who in his life had he known with that melodious lilt to her voice? There was a certain familiarity about it, but something about it was altogether new. It was as if he had not known her, but someone very close to her. Her sister or mother, perhaps?
And her smell, too. Leo inhaled rose water with an underlying feminine musk, her distinctive scent. Just like her voice, it was off, somehow. He’d smelled this woman, but he had never smelled anything like her. It was altogether confusing.
“I do not wish to speak anymore,” she whispered, placing a soft hand on his jaw to still it.
Her touch…oh God. Familiar and yet...
He closed his eyes behind the blindfold, inhaling the scent of the soap on her fingers. To press his face into her hand, to feel those cool fingertips against his skin, all over… Beyond all reason, his cock began to grow hard.
Surely from her vantage point she could see the frenetic beat of the pulse in his neck. He took a measured breath, trying to control his body’s reaction to this woman. What was happening to him? His visceral reaction to her wasn’t at all sensible.
“I don’t want to cut you, my lord. Please allow me to finish.”
He sighed. “Very well, Miss Juliette, but sometime when you are not shaving me, I should very much like to get to know you better.”
She released a little huff of a breath. Was it a laugh? A touch of cynicism? A display of the skepticism clearly resident in her friends?
Within moments, she’d finished shaving and rinsing him, and, without uttering another word, she left him alone with the Frenchman.
The Sweetest Revenge Page 3
