by Darcy Burke
Thomas was always looking.
His dislike might also have been founded on the fact that Joubert was an extraordinarily handsome young man, with curly, golden hair and soft, brown eyes that would have made Adonis himself weep with envy. Nor was there anything remotely dandyish about Joubert’s looks; everything about him was both pretty and unmistakably masculine.
Sabine smiled at the young man, who must have said something amusing—not that Thomas’s mood allowed him to pay attention to their conversation despite the fact that he was seated directly across the table from Sabine—and Thomas cut into the meat on his plate while fantasizing that it was Joubert’s liver.
Good God, what was wrong with him? Hadn’t he, mere hours ago, made a deliberate effort to ensure that Sabine would no longer focus any romantic attentions on him? Discouraging her interest in him had been his intention, yet here he was, mentally chopping another man into bite-sized pieces because she was doing exactly what he had wanted.
“—think, Monsieur Pearce?” she asked.
Thomas blinked at her use of his name and looked up to find her gazing at him expectantly. What he thought was that she looked radiant. Although the dark green gown she wore was less elaborate than the blue silk of the night before and her hair was styled in a simple knot at the nape of her neck, the very plainness of her costume only served to emphasize her natural beauty. “What do I think about what?”
She smiled—briefly at him, and then more lingeringly at Joubert—and Thomas feared his heart would do something melodramatic, like crack open his ribs and leave him bleeding on the table. “We were discussing the relative merits of powder versus shoe blacking for disguising the color of my hair. Monsieur Joubert favors the powder, but I doubt anyone would believe that my hair is naturally white, which would spoil the entire purpose of the exercise. Black hair, however, is feasible, especially if I color my eyebrows as well, so I think shoe blacking is the preferable alternative. What is your opinion?”
Shoe blacking? She was thinking of using shoe blacking on her glorious sunset-colored hair. Was she mad? “I think that powder will wash out, but shoe blacking almost certainly will not,” he said, managing an even tone despite his horror.
“That is exactly what he says,” she said, tilting her head in Joubert’s direction, “but so what? Hair grows out, after all. And I am told that short hair is all the rage for ladies in Paris these days. If it is not already popular in England, perhaps I can make it so.”
Thomas had to grit his teeth to prevent himself from forbidding her, right then and there, from cutting her hair. The images he’d been painting for himself since the moment they’d met—of her lying on a bed beneath him, her hair spread across the pillow like molten bronze—flashed through his head, and his loins tightened with all the heat of a forge. He wanted to run his fingers through that hair, coil it around his fingers, use it as a lever to pull back her head and trail kisses beneath her ear, along her jaw, down her throat. She couldn’t take it away from him before he’d even felt it brush against his skin as she rode him…
Christ, man, get a grip. You’re not ever going to feel her hair in any of those ways, remember? You are making sure of it.
And of course, if she wanted to cut her hair, that was entirely her choice. It was no business of his at all and wouldn’t be even if he were her lover. But in spite of that, his instinct was to demand that she never even consider such a thing, because the idea didn’t suit him.
Dear God, she was right. A man simply could not stop himself from wanting to tell a woman what she could and couldn’t do. It was like a disease that had wormed its way into the male psyche, a certainty that even when it came to her own body, a man knew better than a woman what should be done with it.
Somehow, he found his voice…and didn’t shout the first thing that had popped into his head. “With any luck, you will never have to choose between the two options. I only asked Monsieur Duval to supply the powder in the unlikely event that we cannot keep your hair covered up by a bonnet or hood. It was always intended as a last—not a first—resort. Powdering hair is messy and time-consuming, and I cannot imagine that coloring hair with shoe blacking would be any tidier or quicker. Let us hope it does not come to that, shall we?”
God help him, he hoped it was true.
Chapter 11
For the first hour of the journey, Thomas managed to keep himself occupied by reading. Sabine, who had borrowed several volumes from Duval’s extensive library, did the same. But even as he tried to immerse himself in the story, he could feel the air between them crackle with the rising tension. He had wanted to keep things between them platonic, but he had only succeeded in making them more volatile. The silence stretched out between them like an invisible but very palpable chain. Any more stress, and one of the links would break, and they’d both be struck by the recoil.
They couldn’t go on like this for a day, much less ten.
“We will never get through the day if we do not talk to each other,” he said, setting his book face-down on the seat beside him. His grandmother would have had his hide for subjecting the spine to such abuse.
Sabine closed her book with a snap and gave him a blank look. “What is it you would like to talk about?”
Having opened the door to conversation, Thomas was now in a bind of his own making. Perhaps he should have considered some safe topics before he’d gone down this road.
Instead, he started with a question that probably wasn’t safe at all, but one that had been plaguing him since the night he had told her she was William Pitt’s daughter. He had expected convincing her that her father was someone other than the man who had raised her would be the most difficult part of the mission. Instead, the issue had been of no consequence at all, and that puzzled him. “How long have you known that Claude Rousseau was not your natural father?”
Sabine pursed her lips in thought and then shook her head. “Honestly, I cannot think of a time when I did not know. I am sure there must have been a first time my mother told me, but I do not remember specifically. It is odd, as I am not even sure how she could have explained it when I was very young, but she must have done it in a way that made sense to me, because I never questioned it. I always knew that my Papa loved me because he chose to raise me as his child even though we weren’t related by blood.”
“He must have been a very special man,” Thomas said with sincerity. “Especially since, if you had been a boy, his property would have passed to you on his death instead of to his brother.” He could not imagine his own father allowing such a thing to happen. In fact, he felt relatively certain his father would have preferred his property and title revert to the crown than to have it fall into the hands of anyone not related to him by blood.
“Oh!” Sabine let out a huff of laughter. “I think he actually hoped I would be a boy. In case you hadn’t guessed, Papa and Uncle Etienne never had much in common, but then, they were only half-siblings. Papa’s mother died when he was nine, and his father remarried about a year later. Etienne is my grandfather’s son by his second wife, and from what little I remember of her, she was every bit as mean and selfish as he is. If I had been a boy and thereby denied Etienne the opportunity to inherit the family estate, I imagine Papa would have been thrilled.
“Except,” she continued with a grimace, “that makes it sound as though he might have been disappointed by the fact that I wasn’t a boy, and I never, ever had that impression. What he wanted more than anything else—and the primary reason he married my mother—was a family, not just a wife, but also a child. He was married twice before he met my mother, you see, and both women died without ever conceiving. He must have been fairly certain he could not sire children himself, so marrying a woman who was already with child made sense. And they were never able to have any other children together, in spite of the fact that they were obviously devoted to one another until Papa’s death, so he may have been correct in his assessment.”
Thomas recognized the st
ab of pain in his chest as envy. Her childhood must have been idyllic.
For all that his grandmother had tried to make up for his parents’ coldness—both toward him and his older brother, Conrad, and toward each other—she had not been able to compensate completely for the chill that set in whenever the pair were in the same room together. Since his grandmother had raised his father and had apparently been wildly in love with her husband, Thomas’s grandfather, he had never understood how his father had turned out to be such a remote, unfeeling man. And whatever lay between his mother and father was more than he could fathom, but he thought their mutual animosities were mostly to blame for their inability to show either of their sons more than the most glancing affection. It was as if they disliked one another so intensely, they could not recognize any part of themselves in their sons. His mother tried harder than his father to show some semblance of parental warmth, but Thomas was always aware that it was an effort for her, which made it seem less like something she genuinely felt and more like something she felt she ought to feel.
“You were very lucky,” he said, his throat a little thick. “I suspect if my father thought either my brother or I were not his issue, he would have us killed.”
Sabine’s beautiful blue eyes rounded with a mixture of disbelief and dismay. “Oh, surely you are exaggerating.”
“He barely tolerates us as it is. Blood is the only thing that matters to him, and having sired a legitimate heir and spare with my mother, he did not feel obliged to do any more. I suppose it is overly dramatic to say he would out-and-out murder me or my brother if he found out we weren’t his offspring, but he would certainly do everything in his power to disinherit us. And under English law, I do not see how he could do that other than to see us dead…or make it appear as if we were.”
“That is…” she paused and drew a long breath, “…awful. Your childhood must have been miserable. I am sorry.” Je suis désolée, she said. And she sounded genuinely desolate on his behalf. So much so that he felt he had to reverse course. His upbringing hadn’t been that dire, after all.
“Oh, it was not so bad as all that. Conrad and I had my grandmother—who actually is an Allard from Tarare, by the way—to show us the affection our parents did not. I think something must have gone very wrong early in their marriage, before I was born if not before Conrad was, and it soured their ability to demonstrate that they love us, but I do not truly believe they do not love us, if that makes sense.” He paused for confirmation that she understood what he was getting at.
“I suppose,” she said, but her tone was so dubious that he couldn’t help smiling.
“I had plenty of people to care about me anyway. My grandmother, my brother, and my best friends, Walter and Freddie.” The thought of the Langston twins—and of Freddie in particular—made his smile broaden. “I think you and Freddie would get along famously.”
She gave him a puzzled look. “Freddie?”
“Ah,” he breathed, understanding her confusion. “A nickname for Winifred. She and Walter are twins, and the three of us were thick as thieves when we were young. Half the trouble we got into was trouble she dreamed up, and the other half she made sure we could not easily get out of.”
“What sorts of things did you do?”
“Oh, the usual things children get up to: climbing and falling out of trees, skipping lessons to go fishing or swimming, pulling pranks on the tutors we disliked…and also on Conrad, who was—and still is—a bit stuffy.”
“That sounds like fun. I had a few friends when I was a girl—the daughters of neighboring families my parents got on well with—but if I wanted to climb trees or fish or swim…those were things I did with my Papa. I would not change those moments with him, but I think I would have liked having friends like your Walter and Freddie.” She sighed a bit wistfully. “All of the girls I grew up with are married now and live hours away. What are your friends doing now?”
“Walter is a vicar in a small village in Cumbria, and Freddie is married to my brother.” Thomas huffed a small laugh. “I still cannot believe either one of those things is true. Walter is the last person I would have expected to become a man of the cloth, but he actually seems to be quite good at it and is happily married, to boot. And Freddie married to Conrad?” He shook his head. The incongruity of it still stunned him when he stopped to think about it. “She is the most improper countess in England, and he not only allows it but enjoys it because, despite being terribly uptight and proper himself, he loves her to distraction.”
“All right. Perhaps I am not so very sorry for you after all,” she said. “And I do think I would like to meet this Freddie. She sounds…” She trailed off, obviously at a loss for words.
“A bit like you?” Thomas supplied.
“A bit like someone I would have something more than gender in common with.”
“It was not because you are a woman, you know.” The words leapt out of Thomas’s mouth before he could stop them.
She squinted her eyes and quirked her mouth in a way that reminded him so forcibly of her true father, the premiere, when he was trying to parse something he found unintelligible, that he found himself wanting to genuflect to her…just for a second. “What was not because I am a woman?”
He hadn’t planned on making this confession, but now that he’d begun, he couldn’t very well stop. “The reason I would have abducted you if you had not come willingly. I would have had to do the same thing if you were a man. I was sent to get the premiere’s child out of France. If you had been Mr. Pitt’s son, my orders—and my actions—would have been no different.”
She was silent for a few, long moments before she said, “But if I had been Mr. Pitt’s son instead of his daughter, would you have kissed me back?”
The air between them crackled again with an entirely different sort of tension than before the conversation began. Everything he had been trying to accomplish had been undone in minutes. Arousal prickled under his skin and thrummed through his veins. “Probably not,” he admitted softly. “But then, I did not kiss you back to convince you to come to England. I kissed you because I wanted to.”
Her lips parted, and her tongue darted out to dampen them. The gesture pulled him like a magnet. He leaned toward her, the need to taste and feel her mouth beneath his both primal and instinctive. She swayed closer to him, as though she were being tugged by the same invisible force. Their eyes met, and breathing became nearly impossible. Mere inches separated them.
The carriage rocked and jolted, jerking them apart and out of the moment. Joubert rapped several times on the roof, indicating they’d reached a stopping point in their journey.
Thomas blinked, backed away, and caught his breath, while Sabine reached for her bonnet, put it on, and tied it with trembling fingers.
He had almost kissed her. What a terrible mistake.
No. The mistake was that he had only almost kissed her.
Chapter 12
By the time they reached the coaching inn at the north end of Bourges that night, Sabine was wretchedly stiff and sore and utterly exhausted. Despite the fact that they had stopped every few hours to water the horses and take care of human bodily needs, her knees refused to bend properly, and her bottom ached.
Monsieur Pearce registered them under the name Martin and procured two rooms, one for Bernard—who was so young that she simply could not think of him as Monsieur Joubert—and one she and Monsieur Pearce would share. Bernard scowled all the way up to their respective bedchambers. He had been none too pleased this morning when he had been informed of their planned sleeping arrangements, but given his uncle’s clear directive that he was not to interfere in any way that might lead to Sabine’s identity being discovered, he had little choice but to tolerate it.
But Sabine couldn’t shake the certainty that Bernard was going to become a problem. She also did not see any way to broach the subject with Monsieur Pearce without casting aspersions on his judgment or Monsieur Duval’s. Besides, the boy was so
obviously infatuated with her—a sentiment she sadly could not return, as her infatuation had already settled elsewhere—that she had a hard time believing he would do anything to put her at risk. So, she kept her counsel and hoped she would be able to intervene before matters reached a tipping point.
The room she was to share with Monsieur Pearce was small, poorly lit, and smelled faintly of damp. The furnishings in the cramped space consisted of a bed pushed up against the left wall, a privacy screen in opposite corner adjacent to a basin stand and wall-mounted mirror, and a rectangular table with two chairs positioned between them. A small window framed with heavy brown curtains looked out over the street, and a low fire burned in the grate to its right. The bed was piled high with plain white linens, slightly yellowed from use but otherwise clean and serviceable.
Also, the bed was about the size of the one in her room at home, which meant it was spacious for one person but decidedly not spacious for two. There was no way they could both sleep in that bed without touching each other. The idea should have made her nervous, but the sensation simmering in her belly felt more like anticipation.
Her trunk and both of their valises had already been brought up for them and sat at the end of the bed. Cheered by the prospect of washing up, she reached up to remove her bonnet, but Monsieur Pearce caught her wrist gently to arrest the movement.
“Not yet,” he cautioned, pushing the door shut behind him with the heel of his boot. “They still have to bring up our dinner, and I do not want to risk anyone seeing your hair, even a single servant.”
“Oh.” She nodded, then sighed, looking around the room for some way to occupy herself until the food arrived. “How is it possible that I can be so tired when all I have done all day is sit? The last thing I want to do is sit for even one minute longer, but I am so weary, I am not sure I can stand for long, either.”
