by Brenda Joyce
"YOU LITTLE FLIRT," HE GRATED.
He wasn't thinking, he was only feeling. "A man's kiss," he cried. "You want a man's kiss?"
She frantically shook her head no.
His mouth came down hard and brutal upon hers. He was savage in his attack, plunging relentlessly into her mouth, again and again.
"Jane," he whispered, agony in his voice. She was clinging to him, her hands caught in his hair. He pulled her closer, stroking down her back to her waist, hips, and the delicious curve of her buttocks.
He needed her desperately. He wanted her with every fiber of his soul and being.
In horror, he saw them then. The depraved brute and the innocent schoolgirl. She was moaning . . . clinging . .
With supreme willpower he threw her to the ground.
Jane lay panting, face uplifted. "Nicholas," she begged.
He stood staring down, more horrified than he had ever been in his life. More afraid.
"God, what am I doing?" he cried into the night. And then he turned and ran.
Also by Brenda Joyce
THE CONQUEROR
THE DARKEST HEART
LOVERS AND LIARS
Published by Dell Publishing a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10103
Copyright © 1991 by Brenda Senior
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
ISBN: 0-440-20610-3
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
June 1991
10 987654321
CLS
I
“The Lord of Darkness”
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
II Fallen Angel
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
III
Paradise Reclaimed
51
52
53
54
55
56
EPILOGUE
For Prince Eliyahu—I love you.
With the utmost, heartfelt thanks
to Tina Moskow and Leslie Schnur
for their wonderful warmth
and incredible support.
I
“The Lord of Darkness”
DRAGMORE 1874
1
He wasn’t in a particularly good mood.
But then again, the Earl of Dragmore wasn’t particularly well-known for his good moods.
Nicholas Bragg, Lord Shelton, stood staring out of the French doors his wife had insisted on, a letter dangling loosely from his hand. The vista that greeted him was spectacular: endless lawns of emerald green carefully, faithfully manicured, thick beds of pink roses, a long, curving graveled drive, and beyond, sweeping green hills framed by oaks in the last of summer’s lushness. The earl was not soothed. His hard mouth was twisted into an even harder line; the tendons in his powerful brown hand tightened, and he crushed the letter. “Damn!”
The word was an explosion, and simultaneously he jettisoned the letter in one violent movement.
He began pacing.
The earl was clad, as usual, in soft, form-fitting breeches, high black boots, a fine cotton shirt carelessly tucked in and open to midchest, ignoring the dictates of Victorian decorum. As he moved, it became evident that a barely restrained power coursed through his muscles, like that of a cougar or a panther. He paused to stare down at the crumpled letter on the floor, feeling the childish urge to crush it under his heel. But that would not make the letter go away. Nor would it make her go away.
A ward.
He cursed his wife, now dead, with no remorse.
The earl strode to the windows, raking a hand through impossibly thick and impossibly black hair—so black it shone blue in the sunlight. He had too much to do to play nursemaid to some ward, for God’s sake. He didn’t need this complication in his carefully constructed life. The harvest was about to begin and he was on his way to Newmarket to look over some breeder bulls. His stallion, No Regrets, was racing Sunday next, and by damn if he’d miss that. He’d intended to spend the following fortnight in London, assuming everything went smoothly on his estates until then. Damn.
How the hell old was she?
The earl savagely retrieved the letter, tearing it as he unfolded it. His face was nearly expressionless except for the blazing anger in his gray eyes, so pale as to appear silver at times, all the paler because of the dark, coppery cast to his bronzed skin. She was seventeen. Seventeen, for God’s sake, and according to her aunt Matilda, a handful of trouble—which was why they were coming to him.
The earl cursed. “I’ll put her in with Chad,” he decided grimly. “She can be of some use in the nursery.” He briefly questioned the wisdom of this, a seventeen-year-old girl with his five-year-old son, then dismissed the issue.
His wife had been seventeen when they had first been introduced.
His rage and, it seemed, frustration, grew. He would not think about that lying, deceitful bitch, who, if the Christians were right, was at this very moment burning in hell. He laughed, feeling no compassion. He did not believe in hell—or in God, for that matter.
His stallion was as dark and big and powerful as its owner. The grooms of course were used to their lord. No one batted an eye when Nick leapt up onto the stallion’s broad bare back and urged him into a gallop. He tore down the drive. It was graveled and meticulously raked every day; his wife had ordered it so, and the orders still stood, four years after her death, because he did not care enough to change them. The drive wound for four miles through Dragmore before reaching the main thoroughfare to Lessing and then London. The earl urged the stallion off the driveway and across a carefully groomed lawn. He knew his gardeners thought him ignorant. They thought he did not know that every time he raced his mount across the lawn he tore it up and that they frantically repaired it with sod before he could see the damage. Nick smiled. It was his lawn. He’d tear it up if he wanted to.
They took a fat, high stone wall fearlessly, the horse and rider flying effortlessly over as one being. It was a harmony of motion, a ballet. Yet on the other side the earl instantly checked the steed into a canter, careful to skirt the sheep—his sheep —and later, in the next pasture, careful not to upset the mares with their frolicking foals. He did not ride through the cornfields. He never had, he never would.
Just the goddamned lawn that required fifteen gardeners.
He returned to the stable, his shirt soaked with sweat and sticking to his powerful torso
, his mount blowing heavily. Grooms came running out to take the stallion. The earl waved them away. He walked his horse for thirty minutes, until the two of them were cool and dry.
The head groom, an old man named Willard, watched from a distance, chewing tobacco. His nephew, Jimmy, twelve and new to Dragmore, also watched his lord, wide-eyed. “Is it true?” the lad whispered. “Is it true what they say? Is he the devil, then?”
Willard spat another wad, watching the earl, whose hand was on the stallion’s velvet muzzle, his head bent low, near the horse’s ears. It was impossible to see if the man spoke or not, yet the way he walked, it was as if he were in low conversation with the beast. Willard knew one thing for sure. The stallion was Satan’s own. “Maybe,” he muttered. “Maybe. But don’t be caught talking that way, boy.”
The earl left the stallion and moved swiftly back to the house. It was a huge affair, with forty or fifty rooms, yet modest compared to the Duke of Marlborough’s manor. It was hewn of dark-gray stone, with turrets and porticoes and many crystal-paned windows. Roses crept here and there and everywhere—again, his wife. He’d always preferred the ivy, now long since cut away.
The south wing had been gutted by a violent fire. Blackened walls, only partially erect, rose up over charred stone and timbers. Here there was no roof, no turrets, just one lone tower with gaping holes where the windows had been. It remained a tragic sentinel amid the crumbling, burned-out ruins. The earl did not even glance at the ashes.
He entered his study through the French doors, thinking about a whiskey and some correspondence from his Braddock tenant-farmer. He had never acquired a taste for brandy. He paused in the threshold, his gaze held riveted by an overly lush female derriere. The maid was bending over, apparently retrieving the letter.
The very faintest of smiles touched his lips. It was the barest curving up at the corners of his mouth, so faint as to be indistinguishable except for the instant softening of his features and, especially, his eyes. Yet this was the best smile the earl could offer.
For a moment he just watched her.
Then he reached the maid in a soundless stride, grasped her hips, pressed his own arousing tumescence against her, and as she gasped, jerking upright, he nipped the nape of her neck.
“You scared me,” she scolded breathlessly without turning, relaxing visibly.
“Did I?” He was pulling her firmly against his body, wrapping his arms around her, throbbing against her buttocks. He rubbed himself lazily, then urgently, there.
“Y-yes.” She gasped. Despite her passion, it flitted through her mind to tell him that he frightened her more often than not. That it was only when they were making love that she wasn’t afraid of him. She knew she would never say so.
The earl pressed his face into the side of her neck and ran his palm over her groin, again and again, until she was thrusting against him and he was thrusting against her.
Sullenly he pushed her onto her belly on his desk, flipping up her skirts. He entered her abruptly and she cried out—yet it was clearly in pleasure, not pain. She was wet and hot and he groaned in undisguised pleasure.
“Harder, my lord.” She gasped. “Harder!”
The earl held her hips and thrust. A moment later it was over. He did not even try to contain his own release—he did not care to. He rested a scant minute, his weight upon her, letting her finish, then he withdrew and fastened up his breeches. He moved to the sideboard and poured himself a whiskey. He was aware of the maid, Molly, fixing her skirts behind him. His mind was elsewhere. It had been foolish to ride No Regrets like that just now, with the race just around the corner. Very foolish. He sipped the drink and resolved not to do so again. His gaze drifted to the open French doors and the lawns beyond. Molly, daring a quick glance at him, left without a word. He barely noticed her.
His foul humor returned. His gaze found the crushed letter, now lying upon his desk where the girl had left it. She had tried to smooth it out. A ward. Christ! Just what in hell was he going to do with a seventeen-year-old ward?
He cursed again, viciously.
The Earl of Dragmore was furious.
2
I will not be afraid.
I am not afraid.
It was a refrain that Jane kept repeating, with a kind of desperate determination, the closer they got to Dragmore. She sat stiffly glued to the seat of the hansom they had rented at the rail depot in Lessing. Her hands, gloved in fragile white lace, twisted miserably in her lap. Her blue eyes barely focused on the rolling meadows, the treetops framing them vividly against the dismal August sky. A fine English mist covered the countryside. She did not see the beauty of the Sussex landscape. She could only feel the tight, tense beating of her heart.
Oh, whatever had possessed her to do something so stupid as dress up in dead Charlotte Mackinney’s clothes and haunt the school bully, Timothy Smith? The whole plan, inspired by her vivid imagination and her desire to scare the pants off the boy, who deserved at least one good setdown for all his cruel, bullying ways, had backfired, and soundly. Charlotte Mackinney was Tim’s aunt and dead one month. Jane had scared the daylights out of Timmy, floating into his room at night like that, lingering, beckoning, just like a ghost—after all, she was an actress. She relished the part. She played it to the hilt. Timmy had been whiter than her own fair complexion, as white as the whites of his eyes. He’d been frozen stiff. Jane had so gotten into the role, drifting around the doorway of his bedroom, that she hadn’t heard anyone coming down the corridor. She had nearly jumped out of her skin and Charlotte Mackinney’s dress when a woman behind her exclaimed, “What’s this!”
It was pitch black in Timmy’s bedroom, except for the glow of the full moon, and near pitch in the hall. Jane found herself face to face with Timmy’s mother—Charlotte’s sister. Abigail Smith saw Charlotte’s dress and flaming hair and fell dead in a faint at her feet. Jane managed to stifle a scream. She picked up her hem and ran. In her haste she went smack into the door jamb, stubbing her toe smartly. She cried out in pain. That was the beginning of the end.
“You ain’t no ghost!” Timothy shouted.
Jane threw him a look. Timothy was beet red, whether from embarrassment or fury Jane didn’t know. But he was a mean fifteen-year-old bully, six feet tall and twice her weight, and Jane suspected she was in dire straits. She ran.
Timothy caught her.
Now Jane blinked back a sudden tear. Everything had gone so well until Abigail Smith had come along and fainted. Damn damn damn her impulsive, reckless behavior! If only Abigail had picked another time to go to bed, if only she, Jane, had enjoyed her performance less and quit sooner, while she was ahead, if only she hadn’t thought of the stupid idea anyway … If, if if!
They called him the Lord of Darkness.
Jane shuddered. She told herself not to be silly, to stop thinking like a moron. He was no devil. He was just a man. She was not afraid.
She shot her aunt a despairing glance. She knew there would be no sympathy from that stiff-backed widow. Matilda sat ramrod straight, eyes turned out of the carriage to the countryside. Jane had to try.
“Aunt Matilda, are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Her voice broke. She couldn’t control it.
Matilda turned her plump, unsmiling face to her niece. “We are almost there. Don’t you dare pull any of your ill-mannered, thoughtless stunts, Jane. I’m warning you. You had it easy when Fred was alive, that you did—twisted him around your finger, you did, with those big blue eyes. An’ these past six months you’ve run free, you did, with me grievin’ an’ all, God bless his departed soul. But the earl ain’t a foolish country parson. He won’t put up with any pranks from you.” Matilda shook her finger. “No stunts, you hear!”
Jane turned her pale, gamin face away, biting her full lower lip. Matilda had never liked her, never cared. Her uncle, Fred, who had died last winter of a heart attack—he had liked her, a little, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. She would go crazy living with the stern, no-nonsense
Matilda. She had never seen the woman smile, not once.
She had considered running away. After all, she was seventeen, soon to be eighteen. But Matilda’s decision to pack her off to Dragmore had come so suddenly, she hadn’t the chance to formulate any plans. Yet she could still do it. A surge of warmth filled her heart, and Jane thought about her friends—her real family—left behind four years ago in London. The King’s Acting Company of the Royal Lyceum Theatre.
If only Robert had never made her leave.
Her mother had been Sandra Barclay, the famous actress. Jane had grown up in theaters across the country. As an infant a nurse had rocked her in her mother’s dressing room. Jane had fallen to sleep soothed by the sounds of the standing ovations her mother received on stage. As a toddler she had seen her beautiful blond mother sweeping into the chamber clad in elaborate costumes, glittering and sequined, then sweeping out again, in a different dress, to the roar of applause and whistles and shouts. As a young child she had watched, wide-eyed, her mother on the stage, gesturing, crying, laughing, even dying—only to stand up again and receive one thunderous ovation after the other. Roses were strewn at her feet. Again and again.
“Your mommy is wonderful, isn’t she?” her father would say, hugging her and letting her ride his shoulder. Jane, beaming, agreed. “Almost as wonderful as my little angel,” he would say, stroking her fine platinum hair. “My blue-eyed angel.”
Jane would laugh and pull his hair. Then her mother would appear, impossibly beautiful, radiant in the aftermath of her performance. Jane called out. Sandra, seeing her, instantly softened, and took her from her father’s arms, hugging her fiercely. “Darling! Darling! Mommy is so thrilled! Did you enjoy the show?” And her mother nuzzled her soft cheek.
She was Sandra Barclay, considered one of the finest actresses of her time, renowned throughout London. He was Lord Weston, the Duke of Clarendon’s third son, the Viscount Stanton. To this day Jane had such wonderful, vivid memories of the three of them together, always in one theater or another, until her father died when she was six.
