The Deception of the Emerald Ring pc-3

by Лорен Уиллиг

  He had only made it as far as "Carre, Jean" when the carriage drew up before a secluded cul-de-sac. Trying to jar her as little as possible, Geoff eased an arm beneath Letty's knees. Carefully maneuvering her dangling legs around the doorframe, he carried her out of the carriage, painstakingly navigating the folding steps.

  Letty stirred as he started down the walkway to the house. Raising her head, she peered bemusedly down at the ground, as if trying to figure out how she had come to be dangling in midair.

  "I can walk," she said fuzzily, squirming a bit.

  "Are you sure?" Geoff made no move to relinquish her. "I'm perfectly happy to carry you."

  Pressing her eyes together, Letty stifled a yawn with the back of her fist and nodded. "I can manage."

  She effected her descent by the simple expedient of linking her arms around Geoff's neck, turning sideways, and sliding down, inch by agonizing inch. Agonizing for Geoff, that was. Letty, groggily rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, seemed entirely unaware of the distress she was inflicting.

  She gaped at the vista in front of her. "Good heavens. Where are we?"

  Geoff held out an arm to steady her. "Home. At least, for the moment."

  The house in front of her looked as out of place among the orderly rows of red brick as a camel caravan outside Dublin Castle. It was scarcely larger than a garden folly, a miniature fantasy of a house that billowed out of its own private bower of flowering plants. In the light of the torchieres, the gleaming white stone had a ghostly, insubstantial glow to it, as though at any moment the house might tremble and blow away like a silk scarf on the night breeze. The shape of the building added to the sense of movement; the building was all curls and curves, from the rounded arches of the fanlight to the bay windows that undulated from the walls of the first floor. The whole was surmounted by a whimsical dome, more suited to the pleasure palace of a Baghdad caliph than an island marooned in a chilly northern sea.

  Geoff opened the door with a key as ornately curved as the oval shape of the entrance hall. To either side, Letty saw doll-sized salons opening off, one upholstered in a ravaged red reminiscent of depictions of Pompeii, painted with murals representing the sack of an unfortunate city. The women—and they were all women—appeared to be fleeing in a considerable state of upset and undress. Letty could only assume the men had been away with the vanquished army, hopefully somewhat more clothed, although the statues that flanked either side of the staircase, ebony blackamoors lifting gilded torches, were as bare as their counterparts on the wall.

  "You must be tired." Geoff hustled Letty up the stairs before she could peer into the second salon.

  "Not anymore." Letty craned her neck back to try to get a better look at the truly peculiar bas-relief that arched above the bedroom door. Geoff hastily ushered Letty inside before she could attain more than a muddled impression of a very enthusiastic game of leap frog in fine Grecian style.

  Looking increasingly ill at ease, her husband set his candelabrum down on a marble-topped table supported by two very playful caryatids who made Letty's pectoral development look positively anemic.

  She was beginning to have her doubts about the sort of establishment to which Geoff had brought her, especially when she spied the open book on the bedside table. Bound in gilt-edged leather, it had the sort of richly illuminated illustrations one generally associated with medieval manuscripts. From the looks of it, Letty doubted the monks would approve.

  Geoff slapped the cover closed, but not before Letty caught a glimpse of two people entwined in a way that challenged all the known laws of gravity.

  "The owner is very fond of…philosophy," prevaricated Geoff.

  Letty reached for the book. "That didn't look like Aristotle to me."

  "Aristotle explored the motions of heavenly bodies." Geoff whisked the volume neatly into a drawer and slammed it shut.

  "Not those sorts of heavenly bodies," said Letty emphatically, nodding toward the drawer. "There was nothing celestial about it."

  "Well, actually…never mind." Geoff shook his head. "I don't know what I was about to say."

  Letty wandered in a bemused circle around the room, her eyes roving over the furnishings. It would be an understatement to say she had never seen anything quite like it before. She had never even imagined anything like it. An immense bed dominated the center of the room, as much with its opulence as with its size. Simpering golden Cupids supported a demi-canopy of gold-shot pink gauze. Yards of pink silk billowed across the bed, tufted and trimmed in yet more gold. All that pink made Letty's eyes ache.

  Directly above was the dome she had spied from outside. In the daytime, inserts of tinted glass would cast colored shadows across the bed. Letty could only imagine how the yellow and blue and green would clash with the pink coverlet. Or how the colors would reflect off the skin of anyone lying on the bed, pillowed in pink and lit by the stained glass.

  Her cheeks turning pinker than the coverlet, Letty tilted her head back and conspicuously busied herself examining the dome. Above the glass, inscribed on the underside of the dome, the gods held court at Olympus, in the style of domes the world over. Departing from the usual hierarchy, this dome was dedicated to Aphrodite rather than Zeus.

  Aphrodite appeared to be having a simply marvelous time.

  "Whose house is this?" demanded Letty.

  Geoff stuck both hands in his pockets with the look of a man determined to brazen it out. "It belongs to a friend of mine."

  Letty cast him a quick look.

  "Not that sort of friend," Geoff amended. "A chap I went to Eton with keeps this house for his lady friends."

  "Hmm," said Letty noncommittally. Given the nature of the decorations, she suspected that the term "lady" was singularly inapt.

  Geoff moved to block a porcelain clock, which featured an amorous shepherd and his lass, enjoying the sorts of pastoral pleasures at which poets only dared hint. Given the plethora of equally objectionable items, the action was singularly ineffectual.

  "Since the house isn't currently occupied," Geoff explained rapidly, "I asked if I could borrow it. It's set well back from the street, and the servants are generously paid to look the other way."

  That brought Letty to a halt. Pausing in front of a small marble statue, she stared over her shoulder at Geoff. "Your friend probably thought…"

  "There's no probably about it."

  Letty's face flared with sudden color. "So, all the servants must think…"

  "Yes."

  "Oh." Letty sank down on the bed, an endearingly prim figure in her simple black dress against the billowing opulence of pink silk that surrounded her. She rubbed her forehead with the heel of one hand. "I do seem to be having a varied career recently."

  Geoff's conscience dealt him another uncomfortable blow. Now, he supposed, was as good a time as any to begin apologizing for all the manifold wrongs he had visited upon her. It was a matter of pure justice, he assured himself, not an attempt to get his wife into bed.

  Well, not entirely.

  "I am sorry," said Geoff, joining her on the pink coverlet. The feather tick sagged obligingly.

  "It's really not all that bad," remarked Letty, cocking her head to inspect the pattern of cavorting deities on the ceiling. A sudden stiltedness betrayed her awareness of their new proximity, but she didn't pull away. "As long as one avoids the pink."

  "The pink?" Was that shorthand for "Carnation"? Letty's way of telling him that a damaged reputation was manageable but spies were not? Funny, Geoff had thought that was the bit Letty minded least of the whole affair.

  "The coverlet," Letty elucidated. "The large and very bright object on which you happen to be sitting." She patted it in illustration.

  "Oh, right." That made his second botched apology of the evening. "That was intended as more of a blanket apology."

  Letty's blue eyes crinkled. "As in this blanket?"

  Despite himself, the corners of Geoff's mouth turned up. "That's not what I meant, and you know it
."

  Averting her eyes, Letty gave a little shake of her head. "I've given up trying to figure out what you mean."

  "I'll just have to make myself plainer, then." Tipping Letty's chin up, Geoff looked her straight in the eye. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that idiotic remark earlier. I'm sorry for having plunged you into all of this. I'm sorry—"

  "Don't." Reaching up, Letty stopped his mouth with her hand. "Please."

  The last thing she wanted was to be an object of pity, or, even worse, remorse. No one liked a hair shirt. They might believe it was good for them, but that didn't mean they actually enjoyed wearing it.

  But that was only the smallest part of it. Letty couldn't have quite put it into words, but she knew, with agitated certainty, that going over the past would be the worst possible thing they could do, no matter how generous an impulse drove the enterprise. Any discussion of the past would invariably come back to Mary. And once Mary entered the conversation…how could he help but resent Letty?

  "We don't need to go through all this again," Letty insisted.

  Pressing a kiss to her palm, Geoff removed her restraining hand, holding it just below his chin. "I misjudged you. Horribly."

  "That was all I wanted to hear," Letty lied, lacing her fingers through his. "Truly."

  It wasn't, of course. But it would have to do.

  "Shall we start again?" asked Geoff, his keen gray eyes intent on Letty.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Letty took in the familiar, lean lines of his face; the small creases on either side of his eyes, even in repose; the flexible quirk of his thin lips; all the infinitesimal, indefinable details that had become so familiar over the past few weeks, and which she had studied covertly across the length of London's ballrooms long before that. Whatever reservations she might have paled in comparison.

  "We never did have a wedding night," she ventured.

  "A lamentable oversight," Geoff agreed, solemnly enough, but there was a curious light in his eyes that sent a corresponding current straight through Letty.

  His free hand was already moving through her hair, freeing it of its remaining three pins. The pins didn't make a sound as they fell, muffled by the thickly woven carpet. The last heavy coil gave way, brushing across Letty's back as it slid down.

  "Shall we call this a belated one?" Letty asked, her voice strangely thick to her own ears. Geoff's hands were on her shoulders, burning through the sleeves of her gown.

  "You can call it anything you like." Sweeping aside the clinging strands of hair, Geoff kissed the side of her neck. "Your hair smells like chamomile. And lemons."

  "The lemon is for my freckles," Letty confessed breathlessly, distracted by the gentle brush of his fingers where his lips had been. She was having a very hard time focusing on what she was saying. "It's supposed to bleach them off over time."

  Geoff turned his attentions to the other side of her neck, and Letty wondered if it was possible to simply dissolve into the coverlet in a blob of pink goo. "How long have you been trying to bleach them?"

  "Since I was twelve," Letty admitted, wrinkling her nose.

  Geoff lightly kissed the offending appendage. "I like your freckles."

  Letty shook her head at him. "No one will ever write an ode to a freckle. It just isn't done."

  "You certainly don't want me to," said Geoff, with a sudden boyish grin. "My odes are terrible and my sonnets are worse."

  "I know. Mary showed me that last poem, the one that began—" Letty broke off, wishing she hadn't said anything.

  "'O peerless jewel in Albion's crown'?" Geoff recited resignedly, banishing Mary's ghost as smoothly and deliberately as though the awkward moment had never been. "Is there anyone in London who hasn't seen that blasted poem?"

  "I've read them all," declared Letty giddily. "Every last one."

  "Oh, no." Geoff's head dropped in mock shame.

  "Every heroic couplet. Every deathless stanza."

  "You don't want to do that," Geoff warned.

  Oh, but she did.

  "'O Muse! O Fates! O Love Divine!'"

  Letty abandoned her pose as Geoff began stalking her across the breadth of the pink bedspread. Scooting hastily backward, Letty declaimed, "'Lend strength to my…'"

  "Right." Geoff pounced.

  Rolling out of the way of Geoff's hands, Letty managed to gasp out, "'…enmetered line!'" just before she found herself caught up and rolled across several yards of pink satin coverlet, in breathless, laughing confusion. They fished up on the far side of the bed, with Geoff propped up on his elbows over her. Letty's dress was decidedly worse for the escapade, and she had hair in her mouth. Making a face, Letty swiped ineffectually at it.

  "Serves you right," said Geoff smugly, grinning down at her. "Mocking my poetry like that."

  "You wrote it." Letty's blue eyes glinted mischievously up at him. "Don't worry. Percy Ponsonby thought it was quite good."

  "Ouch." It wasn't a very convincing complaint, since his mind was otherwise engaged in the complicated engineering dilemma of how to work the buttons down Letty's back free of their moorings while she was lying on them. Any man to come up with a mathematical theorem to explain that great quandary of nature would surely win the respect not only of his peers but of posterity.

  Perhaps if he rolled her just a little bit to the right…

  "Oh, it gets better!" It certainly did. The shift in angle worked as smoothly as anything devised by Newton, exposing a whole row of buttons ripe for the plucking. Or, rather, the unplucking. Geoff eased the first one free. "He called it 'corking good verse.'"

  "Corking?" Geoff paused in his unbuttoning and cast Letty an incredulous look. "Is that even a word?"

  Letty shrugged, which had the beneficial effect of shaking an extra button free of its casing. "I don't know; you're the poet."

  "Someone ought to cork Percy Ponsonby," declared Geoff absently, thinking mostly of buttons.

  Letty's face went stiff, and she lurched upright so abruptly that her dress slid drunkenly off one shoulder. As Letty grabbed for it, the impact of Geoff's mistake thudded home. Since Percy was the one who had found them…Damn. Cursing himself for his carelessness, Geoff hastened to make amends.

  "Not that," he said softly, cupping Letty's face in both hands. "I didn't mean that."

  For a moment, Letty's lips parted as though to speak. Whatever she might have said, she thought better of it. Instead, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Geoff's with a determination that might have meant that she believed him, or might equally well have meant that she didn't. Geoff was vaguely aware that he ought to inquire, but what with one thing and another, his body deemed external considerations irrelevant.

  Geoff's hands slid to where her dress gaped invitingly, narrowing to a point at the base of her spine. His hands roamed over the exposed area, the fine fabric of her chemise bunching beneath his fingers. "Is there a hem to this?" he asked huskily, his lips barely leaving hers.

  "It would be a little odd if it hadn't," began Letty, but her philosophical meditations on the finite nature of fabric ended in an indrawn breath. Geoff had found the edge of the chemise all by himself, and was involved in exploring under it.

  The sensation of her husband's ungloved hands stroking the length of her spine made their previous kisses seem practically proper in comparison. There was something more than a little decadent about sitting side by side, in the glare of a dozen candles, fully clothed except for the secret caress of his hands against her bare back, hidden from view by the specious propriety of her gown. In a mirror of the movement of his hands on her back, Geoff's tongue slid across her lips. Driven by pure instinct, Letty leaned into the kiss, matching his tongue with hers. There was nothing delicate or courtly about the kiss; it was an open-mouthed expression of pure passion, the sort that might have persuaded Lancelot to forsake his allegiance to Arthur, or Helen to run off with Paris.

  "For that," commented Geoff hoarsely, when they could speak again, "I'll even forgi
ve your mocking my verse."

  "For that," replied Letty cheekily, "I'll even forgive you writing it."

  Their eyes locked, glittering with heightened awareness. Geoff could feel a cockeyed grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, echoed by an answering expression on Letty's face, the same sort of expression he had seen on agents before they set out on a particularly exciting mission, flush with high spirits and ready to dare the devil himself. But no agent he had ever known had looked anything like Letty. With her color heightened, and her gown slipping from one shoulder, she looked like a Renaissance painter's depiction of Susanna bathing, all pink curves and unconscious sensuality.

  Geoff drew in his breath at the sight.

  When he spoke, it was with a certain amount of difficulty. "This is your last chance. If you want me to sleep on the divan, tell me now."

  She couldn't choose the divan. It might be fitting punishment for his sins, but he wasn't sure he could survive it.

  Letty ran her tongue over her lips in a gesture that was nearly Geoff's undoing.

  "I couldn't make you sleep on the divan," she said breathlessly, her eyes never leaving Geoff's. "It's short. You're tall."

  Geoff favored her with a decidedly rakish smile. "How fortunate."

  "For the divan?"

  "For me."

  His hands slid over her shoulders, drawing the sleeves of her gown with them. He paused by the same freckle that had taunted him on their wedding day, perched on one dimpled collarbone. Bending over, Geoff pressed his lips to the spot, following it down to another tiny brown dot, conveniently placed just above the swell of Letty's breast, a whisper away from the deep pink barely veiled by her chemise.

  "I told you I liked your freckles."

  Letty's hands clutched at Geoff's hair as he eased the fabric aside for better access.

  "I don't think that's a freckle," gasped Letty.

  "Does it matter?" inquired Geoff, doing his best to make sure it didn't.

  His tongue circled the rosy skin of her breast, closing in narrowing spirals around the tender nub.