Lady of Sin

by Madeline Hunter

  Her words seethed with a vehemence that surprised him. That which still divided them suddenly intruded. Finley, Mardenford, Harry—all of it had begun with a blackmail threat. He had not realized she had experienced its devastation before, but her anger and speech implied that she had.

  “If I had accepted your proposal and come here as your bride, I would not have asked you to be a hypocrite for my sake, Nathaniel.” She opened the door. “Instead I might have urged you to tell Norriston to go to hell.”

  She could not decide what to wear. The one dinner dress that she had packed, with its ivory silk and ecru lace and sloping décolleté from shoulder to breast, showed a lot of skin. She did not want him thinking she was luring him. There was nothing worse than a tease.

  Unfortunately, the other dresses were not suitable for a country house. They had been brought on the assumption she would stay at inns. The ivory dress had only come on the chance some notable in some town invited her to a proper dinner, as indeed several had.

  She eyed all the options, and knew it would have to be the dinner dress, skin and all. It would look odd, almost rude, to sit in that dining room in anything else. It would also prove what a coward she was.

  Nancy set to dressing her hair. Charlotte kept insisting the style be made more sedate. Nancy wanted to do a bit of painting. Charlotte refused.

  All the while her mind hopped from thought to thought, but her nervousness and indecision about Nathaniel flowed like a racing current beneath it all.

  Mostly she considered what she had learned today. She had been indifferent to Norriston in the past. He was a presence one could not ignore in society, tall and imposing, a bit severe but temperate in demeanor. It was not hard to see him in Nathaniel, although Nathaniel was more amiable and quicker to smile.

  Now she decided she did not like Norriston at all. It was not fair that he coerced his son by withholding this property, and whatever else was involved. While it was true that younger sons of peers often entered the church, and while it was also true that most of them had no business doing so if one examined their beliefs and constitutions, that did not mean that all younger sons should strike that bargain without thought.

  She found it admirable that Nathaniel did not want to live a lie. If more men were that honest, the church might not be in the doldrums that begged for the winds of reform.

  It was a lovely property that he sacrificed too. The house was not distinguished, but it was large and very comfortable. The land was beautiful. The entire setting evoked peace. It had to tempt him. One word, one shift in where he performed, and it would be his. And more, he said. Probably much more, if Norriston had been increasing the bribe for almost a decade.

  Nancy finished with a final tweak of a curl, and fastened a simple necklace. Charlotte examined the results in the looking glass. She appeared elegant in an appropriately restrained way. There was nothing in the image she faced that would entrance a normal man, let alone Nathaniel Knightridge.

  I have to know.

  Well, he would have to survive not knowing. The last few hours had convinced her there was more to lose than win in any affair. Not only her memories of that night were at risk, but other, older ones, which had nothing to do with Nathaniel, also cringed on the edges of her heart.

  Lyndale’s party had not threatened those memories in the least. The entire episode had been removed from her real life, both past and present. It had been an experience in a separate realm of existence.

  That would not be true next time.

  She had begun to doubt the old memories. The pictures had sharpened again, so her mind could examine them. She resisted doing so. She did not want any proof they were the forgeries that she feared.

  She accepted her silk shawl from Nancy and left the bedchamber. If Nathaniel made advances, if he embarked on his grand seduction, she would explain all that to him. She would make him understand that sometimes it is better not to know.

  He paced, waiting for her to come down from her chamber. There was nothing casual about the way he moved. He trod a distinct path in the drawing room, back and forth, his strides determined and clear.

  He resented his impatience and the agitation it caused. Images assaulted him, of Charlotte in his arms, of her warmth, her skin, her passion . . .

  He kept insanity at bay by contemplating their recent conversations. She had alluded to blackmail hurting her family. Not her husband’s family. Her oldest brother had died young. There were whispers even now that it had been suicide.

  He strode out the calculations. Charlotte would have been a girl. Fifteen, perhaps. His jaw tightened as he imagined the grief such a loss would have caused her. If she knew the reasons—he remembered Harry’s misery as the boy described seeing his mother’s body dragged from the river. Not only sorrow twisted the boy’s face, but also pain from the abandonment. Questions of why. Doubts about love.

  Small wonder Charlotte had found Mardenford’s quiet lake so appealing. Of course she would despise Finley. She would hate any suggestion his blackmail had been based on fact, and that there might be secrets hidden in her adopted family as well, waiting to ruin her peace.

  It was astonishing she had spoken to him again after he revealed his suspicions. He realized that she had only in an attempt to defeat and divert him, and to protect those she loved.

  That was not the only conversation that kept returning to his brain as he paced. The other, out on the road, repeated again and again. I should not have to choose whether to risk those memories here. He did not think she only meant memories about their prior passion.

  It was all tied together. Much still divided them, she had said. The chasm had actually deepened these last weeks, even as little indiscretions temporarily built bridges. Bridges made of air, perhaps. Maybe they could find common ground only if they met as strangers.

  He found himself thinking that he did not want to know after all.

  A sound penetrated his focused thoughts. He pivoted in mid-stride. Charlotte stood near the door.

  “You are making a valley in the carpet,” she said. “Are you practicing a defense that is imminent?”

  “Yes.” No. I am thinking about you, and all that I don’t know and the little I do, and trying not to want you too much.

  She looked so beautiful that he ached. The ivory and ecru of her dress enhanced her pale skin. Her shawl did not cover that skin well, despite the way she kept it high. Her lips looked very red. Not paint. The color had gathered in them due to the way she kept nipping the lower one.

  That was the only sign she was nervous. Her bearing was proud and straight, her gaze level and distant. This was Lady M., with whom he had so often engaged in a battle of wits. This was the baron’s widow, whose intelligence and self-possession impressed society, and whose impeccable behavior had overcome the taints on her family name caused by other members’ less conventional lives.

  He offered his arm. “They await us. Dinner was announced a while ago.”

  “I dallied too long.”

  “I did not mind waiting, since the result is so beautiful.”

  She smiled weakly. They both knew she had not dallied for that. Half the time would have turned her out just as well.

  She did not have to come down at all. She could have sent word she was tired, or ill, and taken her meal in her chamber.

  But she had come down and now her hand was tucked around his arm. His deep contemplations seemed distant as he escorted her to the dining room. The gentle touch of her hand urged him to forget everything except the long night stretching in front of them.

  Charlotte watched how the servants attended them at dinner. She noted the familiar smiles Nathaniel gave them, and the special care they took.

  It had been thus since they arrived. The housekeeper had been overjoyed to see him. The sleepy house had come alive with his entry.

  “They are happy you are here,” she said after finishing her meal. An excellent meal. She judged it had taken many hours to prepare. “T
hey treat you as the master of the property. I suspect your brother is not greeted so warmly nor fed so well when he arrives to see his horses.”

  “I often visited with my uncle when I was a boy. I was his favorite. Mostly, I think, because he also was the youngest of a large brood, and guessed how number five is something of an invisible addition.”

  “I cannot imagine your ever being invisible.”

  “I exploited the situation. I was fully grown before my father had any idea who I was.”

  She had to laugh. She pictured that meeting, with a startled Earl of Norriston facing a son equal in height and force of will, being informed that son would become an actor.

  “And your mother? Did she not know you either?”

  “That was different. As the youngest, I had her attention in ways the others never enjoyed. In that I was blessed.”

  She should have been able to understand that, but she did not. She had also been the youngest, but she had not enjoyed a similar attention. She had been not so much invisible as much as an afterthought. As a child she had been a potted palm in the room while her mother plotted the future of the family.

  That had been part of Mardenford’s appeal. His attention had disarmed her. A cool peace surrounded her when he came to call. She was at the center of someone’s attention for what seemed the first time in her life. Finally, what she said was heard and not lost in the noise of others’ opinions and views.

  Not only heard, but respected as the words of an intelligent woman and not those of a little sister.

  She had found her voice and her character in her marriage. She had forgotten how much. Now images of that quick blooming sped through her head.

  It appeared that the sharpened memories did not harbor only disappointments. The truth might reveal value she had not counted too.

  She blinked, and realized she had been lost in a brief reverie. Nathaniel was watching her, permitting it, just as he had in her sitting room that day.

  His gaze held the same patient understanding.

  “Tell me about him. I did not know him well.”

  The overture stunned her. He appeared truly interested, and that surprised her more. She looked at her plate, trying to think of what to say, and how.

  “I am sorry, Charlotte. You said you no longer mourned him. I thought—”

  “Do not apologize. I just . . .” A year ago she would have spoken freely. Everyone always commented on how she could talk about her husband and marriage with ease, how one did not have to be cautious around her in making reference to him.

  “I was happy,” she said firmly. “He was a good man. Generous and caring and kind.” And affectionate, in his way. Her own love had been quiet too. There had been no tumult in her emotions. He was a good man, but he was nothing at all like you.

  “I want to know something. It is important to me to know it, so I hope you will tell me honestly.”

  “What is that?”

  “When I kiss you, do you feel that you betray him in any way?”

  Her pulse quickened, but everything else in the chamber went still. The question did not shock her as much as it should have. It had been waiting on the edges of her confusion as she contemplated memories old and new.

  “No. That frightens me. I think that is what undid me at that party. How he was not there with me, and I was alone. Truly alone as I had never been in years. And when you spoke to me . . .”

  Are you realizing that you do not belong here? That was what the voice behind her in the shadows had said. Sit here. No one will approach you, I promise.

  What followed could be seen as a betrayal, if she thought about it long enough. Not the acts, but the emotions. The passion and the intimacy. What kind of woman shared that transforming bond with a man anonymously, when she had not done so with her husband?

  If indeed it had been shared at all.

  She felt helpless. “I do not know what to make of what happened between you and me. I think if I ever do, the conclusions will not be flattering to me.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “There is nothing in my memory or my thoughts about that night that is not flattering to you. Are you convincing yourself to feel guilty for not feeling guilty? If you have decided to live the life of the moment, and not the past, that is a good thing. It is why you went there that night, you said.”

  “Perhaps it had nothing to do with the past, or even the present. Maybe it was appropriate that I was masked, made anonymous, because it was not really me there.”

  He looked down at the hand he held. His thumb caressed its back. “It was you. Unless you tell me that you never think of it, that it made no difference in the days ahead, and that you reject the memories and regret the passion, it was you.”

  She could not say that. It had made a difference. The old ennui was dead. She saw the world differently. She noticed colors and lighting, and felt the cold of the air and the warmth of the sun, as if her senses had been revitalized. All of them. Those of the body, but also the more primeval ones of the heart and soul.

  He raised her hand and kissed it. “We both went there alone, two people who had loved others long ago, and we shared something very unusual. The only question is whether the intensity was born of the mystery, or whether it can happen again. I have to know. Don’t you?”

  She had not expected such a question. He was not seducing her at all, but requiring a deliberate choice.

  The sensual lure remained, however. The firm hold of his hand, masculine and firm and strong, excited her. She had been waiting, waiting . . . now waiting became anticipation, making her vibrate.

  It was his gaze that undid her, however. It claimed her more completely than his hand. The stark familiarity in his dark eyes, their fathoms of comprehension and desire, drew her in. The most potent memory from that night became real again. Not one of pleasure, but of a trust born of knowing another so thoroughly, so instinctively, that her own soul could hide nothing in response.

  They might never find common ground except in this bond, but she could not deny its power. Only the biggest coward would reject what might be waiting.

  “Yes, I have to know too.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  She rose to retire at once. She could not bear to be in his presence, trembling and breathless, while servants waited nearby. She could not make polite conversation now and pretend she had not just given him an astonishing agreement.

  The fire in his eyes as he watched her leave almost had her swooning. Feeling so alive it was unearthly, she hurried to her chamber.

  Nancy was surprised by her early return. With wordless gestures, she had Nancy undress her and prepare her for bed. Then she sent her maid away, with instructions not to wake her in the morning or return until called.

  Gowned in a bed dress of fine white cotton, she realized that she now had hours to wait. Nathaniel would not come here while the servants were about.

  She tried to make some plans about the petitions. Her eyes read the notes she made on her paper, but her mind did not see them at all. It pictured Nathaniel down below, waiting too. His expectation flowed to her through the walls and space, arousing her despite his distance.

  She did not know how long she sat at the small writing desk, with the phantom sensations building until she neither saw nor felt anything else. She sensed the house quieting, though. The stillness of night crept over it until empty silence stretched.

  She went to her bed and lay down. She did not look at the clock. Its ticks did not matter. She was already captivated by his power and he was not even in the room.

  He drew her into memories so vivid they became her world, and she did not even notice how they blended into dreams.

  The touch, when it came, was no intrusion to that deep reverie. A vague consciousness returned to her, and with it an intuitive awareness that it was Nathaniel’s hand on her arm. Her most basic sense had absorbed his presence near her some time ago. With the gentlest guidance, he pulled her back to the w
orld.

  A dark world. No light leaked through the window drapes. Only the small lamp she had left burning near her bed gave any illumination.

  He stood beside her, looking down. No urgency marked his expression or manner. He appeared prepared to wait forever for her to open her eyes.

  It took a few moments for her to fully waken. During that brief lull of luxurious relaxation, before her body found its own alertness, she languidly admired how handsome he appeared in the lamp’s glow with his dark coats and high boots and his hair falling carelessly across his brow. His eyes held a compelling expression, with nuances of both warmth and severity.

  His fingertips brushed her cheek, then gently closed on a lock of her hair. He lifted it while his touch slid down its length. “I was torn between waking you or watching you. You were smiling in your dream, and appeared like a girl.”

  She began to rise. He shook his head. “Stay there.”

  He began undressing. She watched, fascinated by the distracted male movements. The way he shrugged off his frock coat and stripped away his cravat created a domestic mood that was in marked contrast to the frantic, mutual disrobing of the last time.

  She knew then that it would be different. It had to be. They were alone and this was no impulse, no unexpected crescendo of passion. The methodical way he dealt with his garments said as much.

  She had never watched a man undress before. The emergence of his true form, the expression that said his thoughts were on the purpose, not the process—all of it captivated her. Her breath caught when he slid off his shirt to reveal his lean, athletic torso. She had held that body in her arms, but she had not simply looked as she did now, stirred by his beauty alone, without so much as a touch between them.

  He rested his hips against the bed’s high edge. The muscles of his back corded and stretched as he bent to remove his boots.

  His lower garments loosened. He stood and they dropped. Her eyes filled while he stepped out. He had a magnificent form, broad shouldered and wonderfully proportioned. Tight, hard lines delineated his muscles and lured her gaze down the taper of his back to the firm swells of his buttocks. The lamp washed his body in a soft, golden light.