Human Error

by Eileen Wilks

  He felt, absurdly, as if the sun had come out.

  Every detail emerged, etched bright and clear on his senses. The scent of the wet wood, the rush of blood to his groin, the tingle of cold in his fingertips. Aimée’s glossy dark curls and deep blue eyes. Her skin, gleaming and smooth as the snow but warm and pink with life.

  You, he thought, and shuddered with longing.

  You that I wanted. You I’ve been searching for all of my life.

  Aimée inhaled deeply, breathing in the peace of the snowy wood, holding it inside her. Away from the house, she could exist purely in the moment, absorb the naked beauty of the trees and the little mist hanging over the snow; the song of a blackbird hanging on the cool raw air; the prickly green leaves and glowing red berries clustered just beyond her grasp. Tempting. Taunting. Out of reach.

  Like Lucien.

  The holly leaves pressed against her breast, a hundred tiny pinpricks to counter the sting at her heart. The berries blurred.

  She blinked fiercely. She would not mope like a child crying for the moon. Perhaps she would never have the things that she’d once accepted as her birthright, beaux and châteaux and freedom to follow her heart and inclinations. There would still be opportunities for satisfaction. There could still be moments of joy.

  All she had to do was find the courage and determination to reach for them.

  Gripping her little pruning knife, she stood on tiptoe to slice through the holly branch.

  Snow crunched behind her. Someone walking over the ice.

  She teetered. Turned. Her heart leaped in recognition and delight.

  C’est toi.

  “Oh,” she said softly, foolishly. “It’s you.”

  You that I wanted. You I’ve been waiting for all of my life.

  Lucien left the cover of the trees and strolled forward, his thick gold hair drawing all the brightness of the day. “Allow me.”

  He reached over her head, his warmth pressing her back into the bushes, his chest brushing her breasts. He smelled of wool and sweat and sandalwood, earthy and exotic. His arms were hard and long.

  She shivered as he stretched above her, a subtle pressure, a shift of muscles. She heard the rustle of leaves, felt their tiny barbs against her back and him, solid and male against her front.

  The branch cracked and broke off in his hand.

  Lucien eased away. “For you.” His voice was husky.

  He was still close, so close, his hair a disordered halo around his face, his emerald green eyes intent. Something quivered in her belly like a plucked harp string, vibrating like music all along her bones. Her throat ached with longing.

  She swallowed.

  So did he. She watched the movement of his throat against his starched white collar.

  “Where are the servants to help you?” he asked.

  Her brain scrambled for words. “I sent them away. Ahead. To cut the log for the Christmas fire.”

  In case he came for her.

  Her answer trembled between them. They would not be interrupted this time.

  She looked up, her mouth dry.

  “There you are!” Julia’s voice shattered the bright crystal air. She bustled through the trees, bouncing and breathless, pink-cheeked with cold. Her glance darted from Lucien to Aimée. “I couldn’t imagine what could drag you from the house so early.”

  “Some of us were out earlier,” Tom Whitmore remarked beside her.

  Julia tossed her head. “Country hours,” she said with scorn.

  “You’re a country girl,” he pointed out. “Or you were before Town spoiled you.”

  “Your mama asked me to collect decorations for the ballroom,” Aimée said before Julia could snap at him again. She held out the bunch of holly berries. “Aren’t they pretty?”

  “I am not spoiled,” Julia declared. “Take it back.”

  “Spoiled.” Tom nodded. “And bossy.”

  Lucien narrowed his eyes.

  “They grew up together,” Aimée explained in an undertone. “Tom and his sisters and Julia.”

  He raised his brows. “Not you?”

  “At first. When I first came.” The memory made her smile.

  Despite being the only boy—or perhaps because of it—Tom had always been dragged into his sisters’ games to play the prince or highwayman. In return, he’d taught the girls to spit and to skip stones and to swim.

  “And then?” Lucien inquired.

  Lady Basing had caught the girls sneaking into the house one summer afternoon, hair wet, shifts bundled under their arms.

  Aimée’s smile faded. She had been whipped and confined to her room for her bad influence on her younger cousin. And Julia and Tom’s childhood friendship had been quashed by chaperoned visits and calculated courtships and the success of Julia’s London season.

  “And then . . .” Aimée shrugged. “We could not play together as children anymore.”

  Julia stooped suddenly for a handful of snow and smashed it against Tom’s waistcoat.

  “They seem to have no trouble taking up where they left off,” Lucien observed dryly.

  She snuck a look at his face. He did not sound jealous.

  “It is the woods,” she offered, to appease any pang he might be feeling. They had all strayed away from their customary roles and paths this morning, into the woods, into a dream, into a fairy tale. “We played here.”

  Tom lobbed a snowball, spattering the bright blue of Julia’s pelisse with white. She shrieked and returned fire.

  “Shall we leave them to make up for lost time?” Lucien inquired.

  He looked at her, an indefinable glint in his green eyes, an expectant curve to his mouth.

  Anticipation quickened Aimée’s heartbeat. She observed the snow battle now raging between Tom and Julia. Would her cousin even notice if they slipped away? Would she care?

  That was the risk of the woods. Once you had left the accustomed paths behind, could you ever go back?

  “You wanted to speak with me,” Lucien reminded her. “Alone.”

  She flushed deeply. “Yes, of course.”

  But once they were strolling among the trees, she was at a loss how to begin. Lucien adjusted his long stride to hers, apparently in no hurry to break the silence between them. Mist wreathed the trunks. Above the bare black branches, the sky was cloudless, hazy, tinged with blue. The only sounds were their footsteps and Julia’s fading laughter. The hush, the solitude, the stark beauty of the snowy forest wrapped them in intimacy.

  Aimée cleared her throat. “Did you play in the woods when you were a child?”

  “No.” His tone did not invite further questions.

  He was the illegitimate son of an English nobleman, she reminded herself. She had no notion who his mother might have been. Perhaps his memories of childhood were not happy ones. “How old were you when you went to live with . . .” Your father. “The Earl of Amherst?”

  “Seventeen.” A pause. “I think.”

  He did not even know his age? Poor boy.

  “And before that?” she persisted.

  He turned his head, his eyes hooded. “I don’t remember.”

  Or else, she thought, his memories were too painful to recall.

  She squeezed his arm. They both had been forced to start over. And at almost the same time, it seemed. “I was thirteen when I came to Moulton.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She blinked. How could he know? But of course he had been talking with Julia. “I did not want to be here,” she confessed. “For a long time, I resented the . . . the circumstances that brought me. I missed my life in France. My home. My family.”

  For weeks and months, the gray wet English weather had seemed to overshadow her very soul. She had succumbed to clouds of grief, storms of tears, and homesickness.

  “You escaped the Terror,” Lucien said, his voice flat. “If you hadn’t, you would have died.”

  “Bien sûr.” The French slipped out, as it did sometimes when she talked abou
t her childhood. She smiled up at him in apology. “At thirteen I did not always think very clearly, you understand. Now I am wiser. And grateful.”

  “Grateful.” His face was unreadable, as it often was, with the marble austerity of a disillusioned saint.

  She wished she could make him smile.

  “To be alive,” she explained. She gestured around them at the winter wood, the dormant trees, the wisps of frost, the forest floor sleeping under a blanket of bracken, leaves and snow. “All this—life—is a gift. What you make of it is up to you.”

  His words.

  Lucien stared down at Aimée’s bright face.

  His words, wrested from the dark prison of memory on what must have been the worst night of her life, offered to comfort and encourage him. The irony cut him like a knife.

  He had saved her life and ruined it, and she was bloody grateful.

  She smiled at him, her eyes shining with sympathy, her fingers light and warm upon his arm. Their gazes locked.

  He felt it. The snap of connection, like a key in a lock, like a piece in a puzzle, like two halves sliding together to make one whole. It’s you.

  Behind her blue, translucent eyes, recognition wavered. Doubt bloomed.

  Tension thrummed along his nerves.

  If she knew the role he had played in her life, would she still feel grateful? Or would she hate him?

  It didn’t matter. She could never know. The threat of demons, the unpredictability of humankind, compelled the Nephilim to live secretly.

  She could never know him.

  He drew a ragged breath, torn between relief and regret. Though why he should feel regret he was not sure.

  “Is that why you want to go to London?” he asked. “To make a new life?”

  She blinked those long, lovely lashes like a dreamer waking from sleep. “What?”

  He helped her over a log fallen in the snow. “You wanted to talk with me about a position in London.”

  “Not for myself. For Miss Finch. Julia’s lady’s maid.”

  Lucien raised his brows. “If the girl thinks to improve her lot in London, why doesn’t she apply to your housekeeper for a reference? Or Lady Basing.”

  “Her lot is not so easily remedied,” Aimée said. “She is with child.”

  Ah.

  Lucien considered. “Can the father be brought to marry her?”

  Aimée pressed her lips together. “No.”

  Suspicion stirred in his gut. “Basing?” he asked grimly.

  She lifted one shoulder in a little shrug. “He denies it. He will not take any financial responsibility for her or the child.”

  Swiving son of a bitch. “So you came to me.”

  “I am not asking you for money,” Aimée said hastily. “I know you are . . . That is, this is none of your affair. But . . .”

  She knew he was short on funds. She had applied to him for help anyway. He was oddly moved by her trust.

  “You did the right thing,” he said. “Martin can take her to Fanny.”

  “Fanny?”

  “Fanny Grinton on Maiden Lane. She can give your maid shelter until permanent placement can be found.”

  Aimée bit her lower lip. “How much will it cost? I can contribute a little to Finch’s keep, but . . .”

  He shook his head. “It isn’t necessary.”

  She shot him a skeptical look, very French. “Your Miss Grinton takes in boarders out of the goodness of her heart?”

  “Yes,” he said shortly.

  She looked unconvinced.

  “Fanny was in service herself once,” he explained reluctantly. “Until she was debauched by the master of the house. When his wife threw her into the street, Fanny prostituted herself to survive. Now she rescues others who have suffered a similar fate.”

  “This is an inspiring story. But inspiration does not pay the bills.”

  “The residents of the house take in sewing and laundry. They contribute what they can,” he said.

  “And you provide the rest,” Aimée guessed with an approving nod. “Which is altogether noble and generous of you.”

  He was shaken by her faith in him. Unlike Amherst, she believed the best of him without hesitation. Without question.

  He did not deserve her good opinion.

  “I am no hero. No angel. I am not even a very good man.”

  “Most gentlemen in your circumstances would not spend their resources on those less fortunate.”

  “I have to.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. He forced himself to relax them, forced himself to say, “I hired her.”

  Aimée’s brow puckered. “This house on Maiden Lane . . . It was your idea? You hired Miss Grinton to run it?”

  “Yes.” His head throbbed. He was tempted to let her go on believing that. To let her think well of him. But he had never been good at pretense. “No. I was her last client.”

  Aimée continued to regard him, her face calm.

  Didn’t she understand?

  “I hired her as a whore,” he said harshly.

  He didn’t know why he told her. To shock her, to drive her away? Or was he hoping, against hope and all reason, for her absolution?

  He held himself stiffly, prepared for her blushes, braced for her condemnation.

  She did blush, a rosy flush that swept from her jawline to the brim of her bonnet. “If you set up every lady of intimate acquaintance in a house with a budget and instructions to rescue other unfortunates, it is no wonder you are short of funds.”

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to do any number of inappropriate things.

  Because he could not, he glowered at her instead. “I am not intimately acquainted with any other woman.”

  She tilted her head. “Only the one? Miss Grinton.”

  What was she getting at?

  “Yes,” he snapped.

  “Did you . . . Do you love her?”

  The wistfulness of the question caught him off guard.

  “No. It was a transaction,” he said curtly. “It meant nothing.”

  Something that Aimée, in her goodness and innocence, could never understand.

  “And yet you felt guilty enough afterward not only to rescue Miss Grinton from her situation but to save others as well.”

  He was furious. Found out. He had never put it in those words, even to himself. Perhaps Aimée understood more than he thought.

  “Amherst thinks I am running a brothel.” Now why the devil had he told her that?

  “The situation is unusual,” Aimée acknowledged. “But surely he should understand that you are only trying to help these poor women.”

  “I didn’t tell him,” Lucien admitted.

  He had resented being forced to justify himself. At the time his reticence had been a point of pride. Now, however . . .

  “Amherst has other concerns,” Lucien said. “He would say Fanny and the others are not our kind.”

  Not Nephilim.

  “You do him an injustice,” Aimée said. “He obviously cares about you more than he does for the world’s opinion. Why else would he have brought eleven out-of-wedlock children to be raised at Fair Hill? You should not let your pride come between you.”

  “I’m not currying favor with the old man for money.”

  Aimée widened those blue eyes at him. “It is not his wealth you should worry about losing. It is his regard. He is your father. Your family. It would be a great sorrow for you to lose him.”

  As she had lost her family.

  Remorse seized Lucien. “I’m sorry, I’m a brute. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t realize . . .”

  Aimée shook her head. “No brute. Perhaps no angel, either. But I think you are a very good man.” Standing on tiptoe, she brushed her lips against his cheek. “Thank you for helping Finch.”

  He was not good.

  But he felt, at that moment, very much a man. God help them both.

  He stopped in the snow and placed his hands on her shoulders, turning h
er to face him. She stared gravely up at him, her eyes clear and unafraid.

  With a groan of longing and surrender, he covered her mouth with his.

  Lucien’s kiss was warm and firm and seeking, his lips parted. Aimée could feel the heat and moisture of his mouth, and an answering heat and moisture rose in her, in her stomach and breasts and between her thighs. He pressed against the seam of her lips and then he . . . Yes, he did, he put his tongue right in her mouth, shocking and delicious.

  Her toes curled in pleasure.

  She ought to stop him. She knew the dangers of indulging in desire. She had too much sense to throw away her heart on an inappropriate liaison.

  But what had her good sense ever gotten her but alone? For years, she had been starved of affection, of connection, of simple human touch. She was hungry for life.

  For Lucien.

  The branch she was holding slithered to the ground. He licked into her mouth, coaxing, exploring, and she grabbed the lapels of his coat and sucked eagerly at his tongue.

  Heaven.

  His tongue stroked, dabbled, thrust. Against her stomach she could feel that part of him, the part she had glimpsed when he rose from his bath. A picture of him formed in her mind, large, dark, exciting. She squirmed against him, trying to get a better fit between their two bodies. His hands slid from her shoulders to her upper arms, lifting her, aiding her.

  There. She shivered in delight.

  He raised his head, his eyes dark and penetrating. A flush stained his cheekbones. “You are cold.”

  She was tingling. Melting. “No.”

  Don’t stop.

  His hands tightened again on her upper arms before he put her gently from him. “We have been gone too long already.”

  Disappointment speared her. Disappointment and desire. “There is a gamekeeper’s cottage close by.” Her heart beat faster at her own daring. Her knees trembled. “We could shelter there.”

  His muscles were rigid. He did not move. Indeed, she almost fancied he did not breathe.

  He exhaled. “I will not risk your reputation more than I have already.”

  She honored him for his concern. How could she not? But she also saw her opportunity to know passion, to feel close and loved and alive, slipping away. She had no illusions. Lucien had made her no promises. But she was terribly afraid that if she did not grasp at life now, she would regret it all the long and empty years to come.