“You have something on your mind, or are you just here to take tea?” Ivan lifted one dark, infuriating eyebrow.
“You know why I’m here,” she whispered angrily. “I want you to repay Wilmott right now.”
Ivan feigned surprise. “You cannot mean for me to pay him. He lost.”
“Then you cheated, no doubt.”
“If you were a man I could call you out for that, my sweet.” He crossed his arms over his chest and studied her. He seemed to find her appearance comical, for a small smile showed on the corner of his lips. “What are you wearing, Miss Alcester? Were you thinking of becoming Billingsworth’s wife or his mother?” He nodded to her cap.
Unwittingly her hand flew to her head. In her anger, she’d forgotten to take off the cap. Though she had thought it silly before, now she would defend it to the death.
“Caps are all the rage in Paris, I’m told. But then you couldn’t possibly understand why it’s never out of fashion to look innocent and chaste.” She gave him a withering glance.
“To look or to be?” His eyes locked with hers.
His retort wounded her to the quick.Lusty Lissa.Lusty Lissa. Already she could hear the children calling out. She lowered her hurt gaze. “To be,you beast,” she answered him, then summoned all her anger. “I should like Wilmott’s money returned to him this instant.”
“I won his money quite fairly, Lissa. I see no reason to return it.” He stepped closer. “But if you insist I return it, what shall I receive in its stead?”
“You cheated him. You deserve nothing!”
“Not true. In fact, there was a man of God who not only witnessed but participated in the game. He had no cause to say I cheated.” His arms rested on the top of a polished mahogany stall door. “And if he and Wilmott do not, I think you do not either.”
“So you duped this poor cleric too,” she admonished.
“He was no poor cleric, but rather a well-heeled bishop who had no right to gamble away his parish’s funds. Nonetheless, I did not dupe him, as you so eloquently put it. However, he did owe me a rather heavenly sum by the end of the evening.”
“Have you no shame?”
“None at all.” He stepped aside and closed the stall door. Now there was nothing between them.
Suddenly nervous, she watched him walk closer. All at once she remembered those days in the Alcester stables, and it seemed as if she were back there now. Ivan was hardly dressed better than the other stable help in his muddy boots and plain shirt. With dreadful clarity, she recalled the kiss, the kiss that had changed her forever. It had made her cross over the line to womanhood and after that, her entire life had been ripped apart. Instinctively she stepped back.
“I said I would like you to return Wilmott’s money. Even if you didn’t cheat, it was unfair of you to go against those who were clearly not your equals in the game.”
“They didn’t complain when they were winning.”
“But they did not win. What are you doing to the bishop, may I ask? Are you taking the food out of his orphans’ mouths in order to be repaid?”
“I daresay he’s never given a quid for his parish’s starving orphans.” His hand went up to caress her cheek. She turned her head. Slowly he began, “You weren’t going to marry him. Wilmott Billingsworth was not the man for you.”
“What are you saying? That you are?” she asked, taken aback.
“Yes,” he answered evenly.
She didn’t know what to make of this. Her heart hammered in her chest. Confused, she shook her head. “I can’t believe this. Are you proposing marriage?”
“No.”
Her heart stopped with a thud. She could have laughed aloud for what a fool he’d made of her, but her laughter was too bitter to release. Instead she swallowed and said, “Then I suppose you are proposing something else altogether.”
“I am the man for you, Lissa. I always have been.”
“How can you say that when the only thing you offer is . . . ?”
“Is it better to be a man’s faithful mistress . . . or a man’s faithless wife?”
A heavy silence followed his words. With the blood rushing from her face, she stumbled back. “I won’t listen to your lies!” she cried in outrage.
“No lies, Lissa. You marry Wilmott, I give you less than a month before your eye strays. But then, who would blame you?”
Suddenly she stopped. With her back now turned to him, she said stiffly, “I am not like my mother. Do you hear?”
“No, she was not nearly the temptress you are.”
She spun to face him. “You black-hearted villain, I demand you repay Wilmott! You repay him this day so I can forget I ever set eyes upon you!”
He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “I have already paid Billingsworth back. I gave him the choice. His debts or you. Need I tell you which he chose?”
She looked up at him, shocked to the core. “Not true,” she said.
“True,” he countered.
“You set this up, didn’t you?” she demanded angrily, trying to push away from him. “You planned to ruin my engagement. This entire move to Powerscourt is simply for revenge. Are you planning to ruin everyone in Nodding Knoll whom you have a grudge against? Or just me?”
“If people are ruined, then it is simply because they put themselves in harm’s way.” He touched her lips. “Of course, you were in harm’s way the day you grew to womanhood.”
Her shoulders tensed. She felt him pull the string on her cap. Her hands flew up to try to stop him, but he ruthlessly brushed them aside. The pristine linen cap fell down her back and onto the dirt of the stable floor.
“Enough,” she whispered before his fingers laced at her nape.
“Kiss me,” he demanded.
“No,” she said furiously, grinding her fists into his unyielding chest. She tried to pull away but he quickly forced her back against a stall door. He nearly covered her with his body. She couldn’t get away no matter how hard she struggled.
“I came here to get you to repay Wilmott,” she panted, her eyes nearly spitting fire. “These tactics won’t bully me into accepting anything less!”
“But I’ve ruined all your plans.” His lips twisted cruelly. “So without his suit, how will you satisfy your lust for money?”
Her voice lowered to a husky whisper. “I haven’t a lust for money—only survival. If you force me, I shall marry the first gentleman who crosses my path. And mark my words well:gentleman, I say.” She hoped the words angered him.
They did. His face darkened. The scar whitened. “You’d best watch your methods, Lissa. You know what they say about a girl who goes from man to man.”
If she could have summoned the courage to slap him, she would have, full across that wretched cheek. Instead, she reined in her anger and hurt and stared at him defiantly. “It’s not true, what gossip you’ve heard. And I dare you to prove it.”
“I don’t want to prove it. I don’t want to know.”
His fingers, which were clasped behind her neck, tightened. He pulled her forward in an instant. His lips moved down on hers, and though she vowed not to accept them, they caught her easily. Too easily. She released a small shudder, denying the sudden burst of emotion that now demanded satisfaction. Her hand went to his chest to stop him, but her lame refusal just drove him further. His arms dropped to her waist and he possessively lifted her off the dirt floor to fall hard against his body. She was so close to him she could feel his heart pounding against his chest, but it was not beating nearly so wildly as her own traitorous one. His kiss deepened and he thrust his tongue ferociously into her mouth. Desperate, she ached to shun him, to turn him away, but it was as if they were fighting a war. And with every angry caress of her waist and every brutal movement of his lips, she found she surrendered another bit of ground. When she felt the beard-roughened texture of his cheek against hers, she knew she had lost another battle. When his tongue finally seduced hers to respond in kind, she knew, most definitely,
the war was over.
Now the Pandora’s box that she had fooled herself into believing she had closed was open wide. She had controlled those restless, longing spirits for five years, and only at this very moment did she discover that they had been loose all the time. Waiting for the return of their master.
She tore her lips from his and grasped the tatters of her sanity. He was treating her as if he full well believed all the gossip about her—that she was just like her mother. He wanted her to surrender to his lovemaking like a wanton, and use her desire for him like a drug, a drug that she well knew could all too easily kill.
Without another thought, she struggled from his embrace and ran. He caught her at the door and forced her back to the harness-covered wall, and her rage at herself, at him, exploded.
“Still forcing yourself upon unwilling ladies?” Panting from the chase, she inflicted another wound. “You act the gentleman, but that’s all it is, an act—don’t you know that no amount of fine clothing and riches can make you otherwise?” She did everything but utter the word bastard and immediately she regretted her words.
Watching him, she saw Ivan’s face take on the hardness of granite, yet if she looked closer, she could find what she dreaded most. In his eyes was the slightest glimmer of hurt, the smallest hint of vulnerability. It was the only evidence that he thought what she’d said might be true—that he wasn’t good enough; that, in fact, the damnation his father had wished for him was his true and only path.
“Oh, God, stay away from me,” she gasped.
He pushed her away.
“Ivan—” she began, but he quickly silenced her. His hand grabbed her jaw and he forced her to look at him.
With deadly precision he said, “We’ll be finished when I’ve given the devil his due. Not before.”
“And what will that take?” she cried out, on the edge of hysteria. “What do you want from me?”
But he didn’t answer. Instead he walked to the stable door and opened it. Across from her a row of riding crops dangled in the invading breeze.
She closed her eyes and groaned. “I’m begging you, Ivan, stay away from me. Please stay out of my life. For if you don’t neither one of us shall survive.”
Then, as if the hounds of hell were at her back, she ran through the door, passing him without looking back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was a brutally cold day, and the promise of snow was fulfilled with the flourish of white flakes that fell outside the kitchen window. Lissa was helping Evvie bake a cake for George’s birthday. The atmosphere was warm and relaxed. The only tension arose when Lissa looked at the hearth and saw the two mastiffs napping as if they belonged there. One of them—Finn or Fenian, Lissa couldn’t tell—released a long sigh of contentment. This irritated her beyond all reasoning.
“George, really, shouldn’t the pups return to the castle? They won’t make it if the snow continues to fall much longer. You don’t want something to happen to them, do you?” She turned to her brother, who was sitting at the kitchen table making a fort out of their Mason’s ironstone dishes.
“Ivan told me—”
“LordIvan,” she corrected crankily.
“LordIvan told me to keep them today since it’s my birthday. I promised him I would.” George looked up from his play. “I thought you liked them now, Lissa. I saw you give them a bowl of stew only yesterday.”
Lissa began dismantling the fort by putting the ironstone back on the pine hutch. She felt guilty for being so waspish, but it wouldn’t do to have George referring to the marquis in such familiar terms. The Alcesters needed to put distance between themselves and Ivan. The sooner George accepted that, the better.
“Yes, yes, well the dogs have grown on me a bit,” she began, “yet we mustn’t get too attached to them. Finn and Fenian belong to the marquis, not us. He may decide not to let them roam so freely in the future.” With that cryptic remark, she turned to the oven to check on the cake.
“It’s not done yet,” Evvie stated even before Lissa could open the iron door. Lissa put down the dishcloth she used as a potholder. It was unnerving the way her sister could tell time.
Restless, she went to the little window set high in the thick plaster wall. The cottage had been built hundreds of years earlier, before the necessity of keeping warm gave way to the necessity of light and ventilation. She wiped at the thick, wavy glass and, on her tiptoes, watched the snow fall on Nodding Knoll.
It was a beautiful sight. The church steeple rose in the gray, snow-flecked sky like a sleek falcon on the verge of flight, and the thatched-roofed cottages seemed to nestle deeper into the ground as if they were fat brown wrens warming their young. She smiled. In her toasty little kitchen she felt safe and secure, but then her vision roamed to Powerscourt. Its ramparts towered over the whitework of the treeline. The castle looked even more magnificent beneath the silent lacy flakes of the first snow. Uneasily she turned from the window.
“No, I do think we should take the dogs back now, George.” Lissa ruffled her brother’s hair. “I know it’s your birthday, but they can’t stay here forever, and already I think it will be difficult getting them back to the castle. The roads are completely covered.”
“I don’t have to take them back.” George’s leg began to swing. Lissa wanted to shake him.
“Now why is that?” she asked calmly, but on the verge of anger. If Ivan had given him the dogs, why, she would—
“Ivan—LordIvan will be taking them home.”
“He’s coming here? Whatever for?” she asked, her voice cracking.
“Because it’s my birthday.” George looked at his sister’s pale face. “I know I shouldn’t have invited him. You don’t really like him, do you, Lissa? He said you would find the idea disagreeable.”
“But, George, why couldn’t you have invited Alice Bishop or Miss Musgrave?” she reasoned.
“I’m sick of girls!” He slid off his chair. George Alcester looked at both his sisters, who were lovely, yet hopelessly feminine. He shoved his hands in his pockets and stomped out of the room.
In his wake, Lissa and Evvie merely stood for moment in silence. Neither knew what to say.
Lissa finally cleared her throat. “He’s, no doubt, in his room. I suppose I should apologize. I’ve put him in a terrible dilemma.”
“Ivan has been kind to him,” Evvie stated quietly. “And he does need companionship of those his own sex.”
“Yes, but looking up to Ivan is hardly the way—”
“LordIvan,” Evvie corrected.
Taken aback, Lissa looked at her sister. There was a twinkle in her sightless blue eyes. Suddenly Lissa burst out in laughter. “Have I been that witchy?” she asked.
“Well . . .” Evvie choked back her own laughter, then bit her lower lip.
“All right.” Lissa sighed, hating to give in. “Ivancan come here and pick up his beasts. And if he happens to come when we are cutting George’s cake, then I suppose it would only be hospitable to offer him a crumb or two.” She dreaded seeing Ivan after what had happened between them in the stable two weeks ago, but for George she would concede.
“I suppose that’s the Christian thing to do.” Evvie moved to the oven, picked up the dishcloth, and took the cake out. “It’s done,” she announced.
The two girls spent the next hour readying their cottage for their guest. Evvie plumped the cushions while Lissa dusted the mantel. Later they went to their rooms to bathe and change into their best tea gowns. Lissa felt better as the day progressed. Whenever she found herself thinking about Ivan and how passionately he’d kissed her in the stables, she would simply redirect her thoughts to her new suitor.
His name was J. Albert Rooney. She wasn’t sure what theJ stood for, but it was probably for jellyfish, for, unfortunately, Albert was a mama’s boy through and through. She’d been acquainted with him for at least three years, yet most recently, whenever she’d see him in town, she noticed him glancing at her whenever his mother looked away.
She happened to see him on the way to church two Sundays ago, and this time she’d made it quite clear that she’d be amenable to his suit. While she had to admit that Albert succumbed to his mother’s wishes far too frequently, when she’d tossed him her first coy look, Albert had ignored his mother’s admonitions and pursued her.
She’d had dinner at the Rooney estate that very next evening and had even made plans to ask Albert to tea the day following George’s birthday. Albert was growing on her. Though he was awkward and painfully thin, he was also pliable, eager to please, and . . . wealthy. His father had passed on, leaving him three cotton mills in Manchester and a match factory in Leeds. Albert lacked a sense of humor of any kind, yet she found she forgave him this, especially when she found out that he also owned a small gold mine in Australia.
She thought of Albert as she pinned her mother’s gold brooch beneath her collar. No, he was not the man she dreamed about, he could never be that. But he had enough riches to take care of them all. And Ivan Tramore could not touch him. In fact, when she’d first dined with Albert, Lissa had brought up the subject of gaming and was delighted to hear him launch into a diatribe about its perils to modern society. She’d taken his arm and listened with rapt attention. She couldn’t have agreed more.
Happy that J. Albert Rooney was heading right for her snare, Lissa smoothed her chignon and prepared to go downstairs. It unnerved her to no end that Ivan had managed to stomp back into their lives. He’d gotten the upper hand in every encounter. But this time it would be different. She might be more afraid of him now than ever before, but she vowed she would never let it show. To Ivan she would be cool yet pleasant; quiet yet charming. She would endure his company for a snowy afternoon. And then he would go home. With that thought, she descended the stairs.
* * *
The running footman dashed through the white pines and down the path to the road. He skidded in the snow, but that did not deter him. On he went, to deliver his message to the Rooney estate.
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