Guarded Heart

by Jennifer Blake

  His lips parted and she felt the swift breath he drew as it wafted across her fingers. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. A suspended look hovered in their blue depths, along with what seemed to be searing doubt. An instant later, his lashes came down and both were gone.

  "Your fingers are so cool," he said, bringing one hand up from under the towel to wipe the remaining soap from his upper lip with his own hand.

  "Does it bother you?" Concern for the wash of color across his cheekbones touched her, so she reached to lay the backs of her fingers against his forehead. "Perhaps you have a fever."

  "I should not be at all surprised," he answered in dry tones. "You should not be cold, however. Warm your hands at the fire by all means. I can wait."

  "I'm perfectly fine." She reached for the razor, glad of the excuse to turn away.

  "As you will."

  The straight-edge was a work of art in its way, the blade of Sheffield steel, the handle of ivory with Gavin's initials inlaid in gold. Smaller than many such instruments, it was well-balanced in her hand. It seemed fitting that a man whose life could depend on the quality of his sword should have an affinity for good workmanship in any blade.

  "Second thoughts?" he inquired, his gaze watchful.

  "Simply admiring the workmanship." She flipped the inlaid work toward him.

  "It was made in Spain, a gift from my father on my sixteenth birthday."

  "A proud moment, I imagine."

  "Symbolic, yes, or it might have been if he had been present. It was handed to me by my valet."

  His voice was without expression, but a shadow of bitterness lay over his face. Pursuing its cause, she said, "Your father was no longer..."

  "Alive? Oh, yes, he was bonny and blithe, just away on one of his missions for the crown. That was how he added interest and importance to his days—his roles of landed gentleman, clubman, husband and father lacking something in that regard."

  "At least you knew him," she said shortly. She had never had that privilege with her real father.

  "Did I? The prattle of infants did not enthrall him. We, my brothers and I, were shuffled off to live with a grandfather who thought... But never mind."

  "Go on. I should like to hear." Emboldened by his absorption in the past, she began with short strokes to rake the frighteningly sharp blade down the hard plane of his right cheek.

  "The story is boringly common."

  "Not to me."

  Just beneath the area where she worked, a pulse beat strongly in the side of his lean neck. She glanced at it, then away again. How easy it would be to make a sudden cut with her weight behind it. Almost, it seemed that he offered that unprotected area, turning it to her in willing sacrifice.

  She swallowed hard. No, no, something inside her forbade that easy end. It was too unfeeling, too much like murder. She must focus on what she was doing.

  "You have a problem?" he asked, his voice dulcet.

  "No...yes," she answered in some confusion, then grasped at the first excuse that came to mind. "I...think you may have been right about the position for this task. It's a little awkward to reach you from here."

  "Come closer then."

  To comply would be unwise, particularly in view of the banked heat in his eyes, but she could not back down now. Setting the razor aside, she pushed back the bed curtains which draped down from the tester, then dragged the mounting step to the head of the bed and climbed onto the mattress beside him. With one foot braced on the steps, she eased over the yielding surface a few more inches until she was almost against him.

  If her jostling movements caused him discomfort, he did not show it. Rather, he lifted his arm to allow her closer access. When she was secure, he lowered it again, resting it across her bent knee with his lax fingers at the indentation of her waist.

  "Better?" he asked, a husky note in his voice.

  "Yes. Please go on with what you were saying." The words were a little breathless, but as much as she could manage.

  Something flared like lightning in the blue depths of his eyes before his lashes came down to conceal it. "Where was I? Oh, with my grandsire, I believe."

  His voice, melodious and lightly sardonic, came from much closer now, but she refused to look at him again. "So it was."

  "Yes, well. My grandfather had failed to make a country squire of his son so determined to do better with his grandsons. My older brother Thomas, the heir, was elected to become the sportsman in his image, proficient in shooting, fishing and riding to hounds—when not riding roughshod over the tenants. To the old gentleman's great disgust, I was bookish instead, with a taste for astronomy and the study of the globes as the means of escape into a wider world. Swordsmanship, my preferred way of working off my aggressions, he considered effete and foreign, not quite worthy of an English gentleman. Which is probably why the affinity became so rooted in me."

  "In defiance, you mean."

  "Defiance of the most grim. Merry on the outside, dolorous as a hangman at the heart."

  "But you were allowed to leave." The touch of his hand upon her was so distracting that she was not sure if what she said made sense. The heat of it seemed to melt away the layers of her clothing, the gray-figured India cotton of her day gown, the poplin of her stays and silk of her chemise. His clasp was meant, surely, to give her balance, but was so nearly an embrace that she was barely able to draw breath. That the trembling inside her did not communicate itself to her fingers was surely the miracle of the day.

  "Allowed is not quite the term," he answered lightly. "Encouraged comes more readily to mind. Persuaded is another choice. Compelled might better apply."

  The radiating heat of his body on her right side, with its quiescent, muscle-sheathed power, was fully as disturbing as his touch. It gave her the feeling that his stillness was by stringent choice rather than necessity. She sent him a quick glance before returning at once to her work. "You must have done something unforgivable."

  "Astute and without remorse, a deadly combination in a lady." His laugh was short, a good thing since she was shaving carefully around one corner of his mouth. "But you are quite right. I killed my brother."

  She paused while shock ran over her in a poisonous wave. It was a moment before she could speak. "Your elder brother, you mean? The heir?"

  "Your opinion of me, I see, is no better than that of my parents or grandparents. But no. The victim was my younger brother Sean, poor, darling child. He was an afterthought of my parents by several years, product of a fit of jealous assertion of husbandly rights when my father came home from Greece, Italy, Portuguese Macao or some such place to discover that my mother had taken the gardener into her bed. Or the baby may have been sired by the gardener. As there was no way to say with certainty, he was given the benefit of the doubt. He was dear and bright and his head was as gold as—" He stopped abruptly, as if his throat had closed.

  "What happened to him?" She stroked the razor over his chin and down his neck with consummate care, as if anything more might increase the pain she'd heard in his voice. To learn something of his history made him less formidable somehow. That it also made him more human was something she didn't care to examine at the moment.

  "He was playing with his toy boat on the ornamental lake that surrounded three sides of a ridiculous folly of a summerhouse built by some ancestor. He and his nanny had enjoyed an al fresco repast. She became ill afterward, so asked my elder brother to watch Sean while she ran to the house. Thomas swore he delegated the task to me, as I was reading in the summerhouse according to my usual habit. In my concentration on my printed tale, so he claimed, I must have let Sean drown."

  "No." The denial was a mere whisper, but definite.

  He studied her, his eyes wide but his gaze not quite focused. "You seem very certain."

  She was, though she could not say how. Was it something in his voice, or merely what she expected him to claim? Or could it be simply that she had seen his concentration and knew it to be fierce but capable of infinite e
xpansion to include any movement or sound around him. "What really happened?"

  "Farce and tragedy rolled into one and as sordid as you may suppose. I was not in the summerhouse, had never been there. I was, alas, involved at that moment in a mutually satisfactory rendezvous with the lady who was betrothed to Thomas. I could not betray her by claiming it, and naturally she could not speak for me without jeopardizing her future as my sister-in-law. It was better that I take the blame, accept the castigation and leave my grandfather's house. And that is how it was done."

  Her hand slipped. That was all it was; she was listening too intently, hearing not only the words but their plastered coating of grief and blame, pride and betrayal.

  The blade nicked his neck above his Adam's apple. A bright bead of blood rose on his skin and hung there, shining in the morning light.

  Sickness rolled over her in a cold wave. With it came the memory of how his side and back had looked as he lay on the field—a morass of flayed skin and bone in a welter of blood and mangled cloth from his coat and shirt. She dropped the razor, pressed her thumb to the small cut and held it tightly even as she squeezed her eyes shut.

  "Don't," he said in hard command. "Don't think. It does no good."

  "I didn't mean to do it." She looked at him with tears rimming her lashes. "Really, I didn't. I'm so sorry."

  "It doesn't matter. Certainly it's nothing I haven't done and recently at that. It could even be," he added, "that I owe you some small recompense in blood."

  Alarm struck through her. He knew. Somehow, he had discovered who she was, guessed her aim. She shook her head again, unable to comprehend it.

  "For the cut to your wrist," he said, turning his head more toward her on the pillow. "One injury is very like another. Some fester, some heal, but few are forgotten. Ours, I do trust, will leave no scars, at least none that are visible."

  She met his eyes then while her heart slammed against her ribs as if trying to fight its way free. They were darkly blue, concealing in their swirling depths such vital secrets, such pain and remorse that she could feel herself being pulled into their vortex. He was eminently human and not without sensitivity, so had his sorrows and regrets as surely as she had her own. And who was to say whose were more dearly paid for or more difficult to bear?

  She had sworn to kill him, sworn it in the fresh anguish of grief. The death of sweet Francis cried to be avenged. Yet how could she bring about the death of this sword master when she could not bear to see him bleed, when she felt the pain of the hurt she caused him in her own flesh?

  "Forgive me," she said, leaving the razor where she had dropped it as she shoved away from him and off the side of the mattress. "I can't do this. Someone else must finish it for you."

  "I will finish it," he said, taking the toweling from his chest to wipe the lather from his face.

  She stared at him, caught by something in his voice, some inflection that made her wonder if they spoke of the same thing. He watched her, his gaze shuttered, features without expression. His was so very handsome even with a fleck of lather on his nose and a trickle of blood on his neck, and yet so implacable inside. His strength was not merely physical, not solely a thing of muscles and sinews and driving force. It was in his mind, that vital intelligence that shone from his eyes, sang in the words that tripped with maddening obscurity from his tongue and in the truths hidden in their snare.

  Ariadne had thought to know more of him, to learn his weaknesses and turn them against him. It had never occurred to her that he might have none.

  A sudden chill whispered across the back of her neck and feathered down her spine. With it came a desolation that crowded the back of her throat with the hot, salty ache of tears. She swung away before he could see, and moved to the door. It was only when she was safely on the other side with it closed behind her that she could breathe again.

  Twenty

  Madame Zoe Savoie had no compunction about disturbing the Englishman. Like an unstoppable force of nature, she sailed from the salon where Ariadne and Maurelle had received her and, talking volubly all the way, shedding shawls and scarves and bits of feathers like so much flotsam released from her rolling waves of iridescent gray and aqua silk trimmed with silver braid, she traversed the gallery and swept into the sickroom. The parrot on her shoulder squawked and began to bob up and down as he saw Gavin. Once near the bed, he made a fluttering dive with clipped wings to establish a perch on the footboard.

  "Napoleon and I have come this evening, mon ami, to smooth your pillows and raise your spirits," the diva announced, adding with a roguish smile, "The lift of anything else is entirely dependent on your mood and strength. Ah, but how unfair of you to look so wanly handsome on your pillows. It quite puts me out of patience with you."

  "Napoleon doesn't seem to mind."

  "Napoleon is male, so quite unaffected. Don't you agree, Ariadne, ma chère?"

  The parrot, hearing his name, flapped his wings and puffed out his chest. Ariadne, smiling at his antics, said, "If you refer to being out of patience..."

  "No, no, don'ttell me the two of you are at outs already!"

  "Certainly not. Monsieur Blackford is a guest here, as am I."

  "Just so," the diva answered with a droll twist of her lips. "More than that, you are obliged to him for protecting your good name, even if that appears to have been useless since he is now a danger to it. But men are not at their best on their sickbeds, so I'm sure he's given you provocation. That is why I am here, to intercept it." She turned to Gavin, drawing a ribbon-tied box from the huge muff of sheared beaver that she carried on her arm. "Bonbons, chocolate of course, to sweeten your humor, mon ami. These are from Vincent's, so naturally too rich by far to be consumed all at once by an invalid. I shall help you dispose of them."

  "You are too kind," Gavin replied at his driest.

  "Am I not?" Her smile was wicked. "And I daresay Ariadne will be glad to lend her aid. All we require is..."

  "Coffee, I think," Ariadne supplied as she went to pull the bell cord.

  "Precisely." Madame Savoie flung her muff into the chair on the far side of the bed and proceeded to arrange it as a cushion. "Now we shall be comfortable and pass a little time, yes? But not too much, for nothing must be allowed to prevent the invalid from rising as soon as he is able. From his bed, of course, from his bed!"

  If Ariadne had expected Gavin to be offended by the diva's risqué manner, she would have been disappointed. He held out his hand to Zoe with laughter in his eyes and accepted the quick kisses she pressed to either jaw before taking her fur-softened seat. Their exchange concerning Madame's next performance, her health and news of their mutual friends was quick, colorful and totally without pretense. They were friends of an uncommon kind, or so it seemed.

  For herself, Ariadne was delighted to have Madame Savoie's presence to ease her way back into the sickroom. She had not been in it since the shaving incident the morning of the day before. She had been on the point of strolling in while pretending that nothing of moment had occurred on her last visit when saved by the diva's arrival.

  And what had taken place exactly? Nothing more than an attaque de nerfs on her part, she saw in retrospect. It had passed, as such things did, and now she was quite prepared to take up where she had left off.

  "I wonder if you had heard the rumor that your erstwhile opponent intends to quit the city?" the diva asked.

  "It has been brought to my attention." Gavin directed his attention toward the chocolate box, pulling free the ribbon tie as if only half listening to his visitor.

  "Word now is that the gentleman has reserved passage on the Leodes bound for Marseilles but due to repairs it will be some days before she sails."

  "So his head is better?"

  "It would seem so."

  "Yet he languishes, unable to leave the scene of his disgrace."

  "And visits sundry gaming dens where his capacity for drink has been duly noted, along with various remarks made concerning his regret that he w
as not permitted to finish dispatching you."

  "Regret is no crime, nor is ambition."

  Madame Zoe nodded so the feather on her hat bobbed around her shoulders. "Unless he acts on them. There were any number of maître d'armes present to hear him, and to remember."

  "On whose behalf, you have come riding, ventre-à-terre, to put me on my guard? Or do you hope to pry me from my bed with the news?" Gavin held out half the bonbon he had taken from the box toward Napoleon, coaxing the parrot to come to him. "Though grateful for the warning, I can't think our Russian friend plans to continue the mayhem. For all he knows, a nice bout of gangrene or a putrid fever may save him the trouble."

  The diva lifted dark brows. "There is a chance of it?"

  "Not while I am tucked up in starched linen and nursed like an unweaned bunny in a nest of moss and mother's fur. Yes, and with chocolates to sustain me."

  "Abominable man," Madame Savoie said without heat as she watched her pet waddle across the sheet and pluck the piece of chocolate from Gavin's fingers before nibbling it like a child with a cookie. "It would serve you right if I took back my offering."

  "Which you might be able to accomplish," he said amiably, "if you care to engage in fisticuffs with a bird like a green eagle."

  "Oh, I don't mind that, but it does rend my soul to hear a baby rabbit cry."

  Ariadne, hearing the low chuckle that sounded in Gavin's throat, was amazed. She could think of no one else who would have dared say such a thing to him or, saying it, have survived unscathed. Her estimation of the diva rose several notches. At the same time, it was fascinating to see that her patient was capable of laughing at himself. She had not thought it of him.

  Other visitors had been in the house earlier in the day. Ariadne had not been present since it seemed clear they preferred her absence. Rather, she had allowed Maurelle to show them to Gavin's room while she kept to her own. Now he and Madame Zoe spoke of his friends, laughing at the things that had been said and the antics of the children that had accompanied them as if they were family.