by Liz Carlyle
Her eyes widened. “A serious business?” she echoed. “Tell me, Geoff, how serious? My feelings and my plans aside, mind. Because I was given to understand your attentions were fixed elsewhere.”
At that, he felt the stirring of irritation. “My attentions are my own to fix as I damned well please,” he said. “And if some busybody—say, my old chum Lazonby—has managed to suggest to you otherwise, then I’ll deal with him soon enough.”
She turned her head away. “You mustn’t blame Lazonby.”
“Who, then?”
“It does not matter,” she murmured. “It was just something you said that day in the bookroom at the St. James Society.”
It damned well did matter.
But Geoff held his tongue, and let his mind run over all the things they had discussed that day. He had been uneasy about traveling alone with Anaïs, for even then he’d been dangerously attracted to her. God only knew what he might have said. Something about being ready to do his duty to his title, he thought. For a woman as skittish as Anaïs, perhaps that had been enough.
He had been quiet too long, apparently.
Anaïs looked up at him. “I ask you again, Geoff, are your attentions fixed elsewhere?” she asked. “And mind how you answer that, please.”
He felt a flood of frustration—and no small amount of chagrin. “They were, yes,” he confessed, “but in the vaguest of ways.”
“It mightn’t feel so vague to the lady in question,” she murmured.
At that, Geoff felt his cheeks warm, as if he were some chided schoolboy. “I will make my apologies to the lady as soon as we return to Town,” he said. “She will doubtless be relieved.”
But Anaïs’s eyes were sad. “You cannot know that,” she said, tucking her head nearer as she curled her leg over his. “Just let this be our secret, Geoff. I could not bear to have anyone else hurt. And this thing—this heat between us—it will burn out, you know. We are destined to go our separate ways.”
He felt a knot deep in his throat. “Could you love another that easily, Anaïs?” he rasped.
“I do not know,” she said. “I only know that I promised my . . . my family I’d marry from amongst my great-grandmother’s people. And if ever I find the right one, I will.”
“And yet you are one-and-twenty years of age, Anaïs,” he gently reminded her. “You have spent large portions of your life in Tuscany. And you have not found your dream lover so far.”
“Thank you, Geoff, for reminding me how thoroughly on the shelf I am,” she said, though there was little bitterness in her voice. “But this isn’t about me. You’ve left an iron in the fire back in London, so have a care no one gets burned—someone who doesn’t deserve it—for I’ve been on both ends of that harsh tool, and let me tell you, it hurts.”
She was right, he realized. And so he mulled on it, and said nothing. But inwardly he cursed his own impatience that day in the temple. He had been angry with Rance, and he had felt sorry for Lady Anisha. So Geoff had stepped up to the wicket; he. He had done what Rance would not—and now he was the one to regret it.
Anaïs, however, spoke again. “And I am twenty-two now, by the way,” she said, her tone almost artificially bright. “My birthday was last week.”
“And so was mine,” he said quietly. “I daresay they would be near one another, wouldn’t they? And you are not on the shelf, love. You are in your prime.”
“Hmph,” said Anaïs.
At that, he paused and stroked a fingertip over her hip; across the finely drawn tattoo that marked her fate as surely as it marked his. “I did not quite believe Lazonby when he said you bore this sign,” he murmured. “I cannot imagine a family so marking a woman. But he assured me he had seen it.”
“If he assured you of that, then he lied,” said Anaïs flatly.
Geoff stared down at her.
“What?” she said incredulously. “Did you think I’d flash my bare arse at Lazonby?”
“Didn’t you?”
She relaxed her head onto his chest again, and settled her hand almost protectively over his heart. “Well, I would have done, I suppose, had it come to it,” she said musingly. “After all, he has doubtless seen a thousand bare bottoms in his profligate life.”
“Oh, doubtless,” Geoff sourly agreed.
“And he didn’t quite believe I had the mark, either,” Anaïs acknowledged. “I suggested he send for one of the servants, if he wished. So he fetched his housekeeper—a great battle-ax of a woman with a brogue so thick you could have driven nails into it—and she had a look. She knew at once what it was.”
“Ah.” Geoff felt a strange sort of relief at that.
Still, as she had said, she would have shown Lazonby had it been necessary. Anaïs was dutiful, he coming to understand, almost to a fault. It was one of the traits he most respected in her. And it was the very thing that was aggravating the devil out of him just now.
Ah, but a man could not have it both ways, could he? A fickle, fainthearted woman would have been intolerable. And Anaïs would never be either of those things.
But her fidelity had not always been rewarded, he was beginning to think. Someone had put that bitter edge in her voice. Someone had left that hint of world-weary sadness in her melting brown gaze. Geoff’s hand fisted in the sheet as if he might throttle the man.
But Anaïs did not need him to fight her battles. She was strong; whoever he was, he had come up against a formidable adversary. He relaxed his hand and pulled her closer.
“Do you want to talk about him, love?” he murmured.
In his embrace, Anaïs fleetingly stiffened. “I thought you could not read me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t need to. I know you like a lover, Anaïs. And I know, too, that you don’t deserve disappointment.”
That, at least, made her laugh a little. “Oh, Geoff, after what I just experienced, I think the word disappointment has vanished from my lexicon. And no, I don’t want to talk about him. He is not worth wasting one moment of my short time with you.”
There it was again. That phrase he was coming to hate.
Geoff felt his days with Anaïs racing past, and he yearned to reach out, to rein them back as if they were a team of wild horses that might be somehow slowed. But that would leave Charlotte and Giselle at risk. That would compromise the mission.
“Still, you once loved him,” he said, more to himself than to her. “He was the man whom you believed was the one. And I . . . well, I find myself unaccountably jealous.”
For a long moment, she lay silent in his embrace, and he thought she might refuse to answer. Then finally she sighed. “He was my Florentine fencing master,” she said. “The man Vittorio hired to train me.”
Geoff felt his heart sink. “Good Lord,” he said. “How old were you?”
“Seventeen,” she said. “And I was not naïve, Geoff. I should have known better. But what can I say? Raphaele knew how to get his opponent’s guard down.”
Still, seventeen was very young, or seemed so to him. “And he seduced you?”
“Oh, thoroughly,” she said. “After saying how much he loved me. That he could not live without me. That he wanted to marry me. After a few weeks of it, he simply wore me down with his looks and his charm.”
“The lying rotter,” he gritted under his breath.
Her gaze had turned inward now. “A rotter, yes,” she said. “But you know, I don’t think he was entirely a liar. I look back on it now that I’m older, and I think . . . I think that in his way, he meant it. That he did love me, insofar as a man like that can love anyone save himself.”
“And were you desperately in love with him?”
“Oh, yes,” she whispered. “In that dramatic, heartbreaking way a young girl first falls in love. But I think about it now, and I wonder if perhaps I was just in love with the idea of him.”
“And would it have been a bad match?” he asked. “Was your family opposed?”
Again, she hesitated. “My
family did not know at first,” she finally said. “Nor did Vittorio. Raphaele said we should keep it secret until I was a little older. That Vittorio would think ill of him for having come to San Gimignano and seduced me when he was supposed to be tutoring me.”
“And you agreed to that?”
She nodded, her hair scrubbing on the pillow. “I was a fool,” she said. “I adored him. He was older—all of twenty-four!—and wiser, I believed. And I imagined I was the luckiest woman in the world. That a man so beautiful should wish to marry me . . .”
“Anaïs, hush,” he commanded. “He was fortunate to have you—and deserved to lose you, too, I daresay.”
Anaïs, however, seemed lost in her memories. “But yes, I thought he was the one. He was so dashing. So witty and charming. And to see him with a blade—!” Here, she made a very Italian gesture, setting her fingers to her lips. “Like poetry, that man. So I let myself love him. But all the while, the dream seemed so tenuous. So fragile. And eventually, I realized why.”
Inexplicably, a chill fell over his heart. “Why?”
Anaïs closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Because he could never have married me. Not then.”
“Why?”
Her smile twisted bitterly. “Because he already had a wife,” she whispered. “A wife of less than a year. An arranged marriage. Vittorio didn’t know, and Raphaele—well, he found it convenient not to mention it.”
Geoff’s hand fisted again. “That bastard.”
Anaïs gave another sharp laugh. “That’s just what Vittorio called him,” she said. “That, and much, much worse. Raphaele was from a family with long connections to the Fraternitas in Tuscany. They were people Vittorio trusted with his life—and with me.”
“Good God,” whispered Geoff. “What did Vittorio do?”
Anaïs looked at him in vague amazement. “What did he do?” she echoed. “He was Tuscan. He was Vittorio. He seized his favorite rapier, and carved up Raphaele’s face like a turnip.”
“Good God,” said Geoff again.
“Yes, let’s just say that when Raphaele’s wife got him back again, he was not quite as beautiful as when he’d left her.”
The horror of it sickened Geoff. A married man.
And a handsome, relentless lothario secretly committed to another woman . . .
That was part of the horror that sickened Anaïs. Of course it was.
But he was not Raphaele. He was not married, or even betrothed. He had simply asked to pay court to an eligible lady.
Which, in his world, was perilously near to offering a lady marriage.
He was not going to offer marriage to Lady Anisha Stafford. Not now. Not under any circumstance. But she was still a dear friend—and a fine, well-bred lady of exquisite beauty who was received in London society with something less than unbridled enthusiasm. This, merely because her skin was not quite pale enough, her blood not quite English enough. She did not deserve to be hurt by him, too.
Anaïs was right. He had left an iron in the fire. A very hot one.
And it suddenly came clear to Geoff what he was going to have to do, for all their sakes. He was going to have to explain this disaster of his own making to Lady Anisha herself—and not in a letter. Writing to his mother and to her brother was simply not sufficient. And Ruthveyn, who was stuck on a Calcutta-bound East Indiaman right about now, would likely not even receive his letter for some months.
He sighed aloud, and rolled up onto his elbow to better look at her. “I will make this right, Anaïs,” he said quietly. “My situation, I mean. The lady is just a friend, and we both wish one another happy. We were neither of us besotted. It would have been—if anything—a marriage of mutual convenience.”
Anaïs only shook her head again. “That sounds like something a man would say—and perhaps even believe,” she whispered. “Please say no more. I could not bear being the cause of—”
“Hush,” he interjected, touching a finger to her mouth. “You’ve caused nothing.”
But she merely thinned her lips, and looked sad.
“Anaïs, love, I am not Raphaele.” He reached down and tucked a wayward curl behind her ear. “And Raphaele is gone. He is in your past. Dead and buried, practically.”
She gave a sharp laugh. “Oh, hardly that,” she said. “No, Raphaele is persistent, I’ll give him that. It wanted only Vittorio’s death, and I suppose he thought himself safe.”
Something jolted in Geoff’s brain. “Aye, you saw him at the funeral Mass, you said.”
“Not just then.” Her gaze was fixed somewhere in the depths of the room. “He came to Vittorio’s villa. Just beforehand.”
“Pretty bold of the bastard,” Geoff gritted. “What did he want?”
“His way,” said Anaïs bitterly. “He wanted his way, that is all. But he didn’t get it. Raphaele is not the sort of man who graciously accepts what he cannot change—and he cannot change my mind.”
“He thought he would simply pick up where you left off?” asked Geoff, outraged. “He thought you would willingly commit adultery with him?”
She fell silent again, her face an emotionless mask. “She died,” Anaïs finally whispered, her voice distant. “Raphaele’s wife. She died. In childbirth, just after Vittorio sent him back to Florence with his tail between his legs. And with Vittorio gone, he thought . . .”
Geoff did not know what to say. “Good Lord,” he managed.
Anaïs looked up at him with a sort of pleading in her eyes. “That, you see, is how well Raphaele knew me,” she whispered. “He assumed . . . well, I don’t know what he assumed. That I had been heartsick all this time? That I had been waiting in the wings? Well, I should sooner douse him with lamp oil and set him afire. But he did not know that—because in truth, for all his fine talk, the truth is that Raphaele never really knew me at all.”
“No,” said Geoff firmly. “No, he definitely did not. Or he would have known never, ever to cross you and then come back for more.”
Anaïs laughed, a faint, almost withering sound. Then she shocked him by pulling him down and kissing him, her palms cupped round his face.
“Umm,” he said when they came apart sometime later.
But Anaïs was still holding his face. “Make love to me again,” she whispered, her eyes pleading. “I daresay once more won’t matter. I don’t want to talk of Raphaele, or of the past—or even of the future. Just make love to me once more, and give me something real and something true. Something more I can cherish when this night is done.”
And so he did. He made love to her with a sweet, unerring slowness, putting to use his every skill, his every masculine wile; doing, in short, all that he could to ensure that she would come to crave him as he was fast coming to crave her.
And he was. He was coming to need her with an awful ache in his heart and in a bone-deep yearning of his soul, and fast coming to fear that without Anaïs his future was going to roll out before him in endless days of a bland, colorless landscape.
Like something never quite real. Never quite true.
But even as he thrust inside her for those last sweet strokes and felt her rise to him again like the moon and the stars rose to the heavens, Geoff knew Anaïs held back from him a little piece of her heart. And he knew, too, that it would be the last time they made love for a long while to come.
He just hoped it wasn’t forever.
He drowsed in her arms for a time, but despite the pleasure and lethargy that had flooded through his limbs, Geoff did not rest. It was time to leave Brussels, he sensed. He yearned to go home; to return to London, set his life aright, and lay siege to Anaïs’s heart. To see Charlotte and her daughter safely to England, and placed under the vigilant watch of the Brotherhood.
Tonight at Lezennes’, he had felt the evil afoot; felt the dark emotion surging through the house. Not just Lezennes’ trifling pursuit of Anaïs, but something deeper and far more sinister than that.
He tried a second time to fall sleep, curling himself more ti
ghtly about Anaïs and drawing in her exotic scent, but to no avail. He bent his head and nuzzled her lightly. She made a soft, happy sound in the back of her throat, and snuggled deeper into the pillow. For a moment, he allowed himself to thread his fingers through the soft, silken hair at her temples, thinking of how he would never tire of such a simple pleasure.
But there was no point, he realized, in tossing and turning here, and continuing to disturb her sleep as well as her life. It was time to set about the practicalities of what had to be done.
Extracting himself ever so gingerly, he rolled away and sat up on the edge of the bed. It took him but an instant to snatch up his clothing, which lay scattered about the room. And as he bent down to grab his trousers, he saw Giselle Moreau’s little stuffed dog.
He snatched that, too, and quietly slipped from the room.
Chapter 17
Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Anaïs dragged herself up from the black depths of a dream to a shaft of feeble moonlight cutting across her eyes. She lifted her hand to block it out, and realized she was shivering with cold. And there was something . . . something just beyond her conscious mind. A heavy thing, like a sense of impending doom. Or the remains of a nightmare.
Scarcely half awake, she considered turning over to bury her face against Geoff’s chest. To draw in his scent and summon back the memory of his hands flowing over her, of his lips tasting and tempting. But even the exquisite memory of what they had shared could not offset the weight of apprehension. And the chill at her back told her he was long gone from her bed.
Levering up onto her elbow, she looked about the room. She lay naked atop the counterpane, and the outer draperies had not been drawn. Her evening gown and underthings still littered the carpet, just puddles of white and aquamarine in the gloom. Geoff’s clothing was gone.
Anaïs dragged a hand through her hair and tried to remember what had awakened her.
