Beast (2 page)

His
capote anglaise
, his English hat. With an annoyed tug, he plucked it off. He hated wearing such devices, but Roland was as promiscuous as a tomcat. Charles was afraid of getting some dread disease.

Thus, he put the bonnet up on his carriage, so to speak, whenever out with Pia for a pleasure ride.

Out the side of his eye, he caught a glimpse of movement, a flash of Pia's milk-white skin as she disappeared again up under the shadow of the bed's canopy. A faint clatter alerted him. Charles threw his arms and hands up just in time to deflect a barrage of hard, sharp-edged objects: his cuff links, studs, her jeweled hair combs, his passport, notecase, whatever else she was able to gather off the nightstand.

He tried to catch the last, a flash of metal—his own pocket watch as it turned out—which he missed completely. (Even in broad daylight, he had absolutely no depth perception.) When he heard her scraping something more off the bedside table, he launched himself across the bed through the debris toward the cloud of galling perfume, where, in her dark corner, his hand found an ankle. Grabbing her foot, he yanked Pia toward him.

She weighed hardly anything. Pia Montebello was all of five feet tall—though the most voluptuous, curvaceous five feet of woman any man could ever hope to lay hands on. Charles took her into his arms, an easy matter for a man well over six feet and over two hundred solid-muscled pounds.

She squirmed and reverted to her native language, Italian, for what became a scatological catalog of name-calling: "
Traditore di merda, merdoso, merdonaccio, merda di madonna
…" Treacherous
merda
, reeking
merda
, prodigious
merda, merda
of the sainted mother. She kicked pillows, churned satin covers as he tried to open her hand; there was another would-be projectile clenched in it.

He tried to reason with her. "I was
going
to tell you," he explained, "in Nice, under better circumstances."

"Pile of stinking, steaming…" she continued in Italian.

"I only decided a week ago. And I certainly didn't expect the whole clan to get on the next ship over.

They think I went back to France last month."

The problem specifically was this: Tonight at dinner, at a private table not far from Pia, there had been some heavy celebrating by a group murmured to be the Vandermeer portion of "the Harcourt/Vandermeer wedding party." Only after Pia had been making love with Charles for the better part of the evening and into the night did she mention this "amusing coincidence of names," never allowing for a moment that it was no coincidence: that it was the very Harcourt on top of her who had contracted himself, name, titles, properties, and money, just the week before to the Vandermeers in marriage.

Even as Charles had admitted to this fact, Pia had thought he was joking for a full minute: so sure she was of him.

Holding her in the quasi-straitjacket of his embrace now, he pried her fist open, finger at a time, releasing her own small but impressive choker of diamonds and black jade—the likes of which
he
was not allowed to give her.

"
You're
married," he complained.

"And my being married has done nothing but complicate our lives!"

"So get unmarried."

She made a sniff and tried to push away from him. "I knew you'd say that! You know I can't." She sketched again all the reasons she listed every time this subject came up. "My children… the scandal…

the money… Roland's position. I have a family, you know."

"And I would
like
one." He tossed the necklace somewhere into the sheets and let her wiggle free.

She hopped off the bed, a petite, shapely silhouette against the light through the moving curtains. "You're just being spiteful," she said as she bent and picked up what looked to be her corset.

"I'm being practical. I'm not getting any younger—"

"Oh, Charles, you could marry anyone any time—in your dotage, if you chose to." She faced him and laid it on thick. "You're charming, clever, extraordinarily well-liked." The coup de grace: "And in your sinister, grim way, you know, you're quite the dashing figure."

He made a wry face in the dark, yet this wry face warmed slightly. He hated that he was vulnerable to such flattery: for Charles was both sensitive and vain of his appearance. Though tall and well-built, he had a few drawbacks. For instance, he was blind in one eye. This eye bore a scar. He also had a limp that came and went, depending on the whims of arthritis that had settled into an old knee injury.

Pia, however, ruined the advantage her flattery had won her. "And besides, you're as rich as a czar and wear an absurdly impressive title. These don't hurt your appeal,
bello
."

Charles made a snort and stood up.

He had never associated with any but monied women so as not to be overly prized for his wealth. As to his title, it was nothing more than an appendage to his name, a legal cipher by French code allowed for the sake of distinguishing him from all the other Harcourts—his siblings, cousins, nephews, aunts, and uncles. He said, "Is that your corset? I'll help you put it on, but don't leave, not angry."

Pia paid no attention, concluding, "So you see, you don't need to marry."

He expelled a quick breath. "Nonetheless, I intend to. Grim, hard, blind, whatever, if I can't marry you, then I shall marry the girl whose papa owns this ship."

"This ship?" she repeated. "What are you talking about? Why ever would you want this ship?"

"Not this ship. Ambergris. Vandermeer owns all sorts of ships. He has a whaling fleet large enough that it is always gathering in a certain amount of ambergris."

"Ambergris," her voice said blankly.

"It is a key and very, very expensive ingredient of certain perfumes."

"A-ah," she said, then made a little click of her tongue, a
tsk
.

Charles owned controlling interest in a consortium that manufactured luxury goods. Italian leathers, champagne, and—his own special interest—perfumes made from flowers grown in his own fields in Provence.

"So that's what this is all about?" Pia asked irritably. "Money and your damn toilette water."

Weil, more than just toilette water; and the blending of perfumes meant more to Charles than money.

But. yes, Vandermeer had offered to double his whaling fleet, then give over
all
its collection of ambergris to Charles as part of the marriage agreement, a stupefyingly generous—and enormously useful—arrangement. If Charles couldn't marry for love, he damn well could marry for
something
that mattered to him.

It was God's truth, though, when Charles said, "No, Pia, this is about my not being able to see you unless Roland is out of town or seasick. This is about my not being able to make love to you without a condom, of your smelling of his bourgeois tastes in perfume. This is about my not being able to give you or buy you anything he might notice, about my not being able to have dinner with you when I'd like or to ask you to go anywhere or do anything on the spur of the moment. This is about lying in bed at night, churning over the fact that your stinking, whoring husband is not only allowed to touch you whenever he wants, he may one day bring you a disease that will kill you. Roland is the swine. Pia. He's vile—"

"You are so jealous—"

"Yes, and I am so jealous that the vision in my
good
eye dims at just the thought of his having more right to you than I do."

There was a kind of tender pause before Pia said, "Oh, Charles, this should certainly tell you that you mustn't,
mustn't
marry."

"By God, it tells me I'd better if I'm to have any kind of life."

She drew in a long, broken breath in the dark. "You are being so selfish—" Her breath caught, a sob.

He heard her catch back a few more as she tossed her corset at him, its tangle of laces snapping and bouncing against his bare arm as the thing fell into the shadows.

She padded off, a barefoot march from the bedroom into the sitting room punctuated by sniffles and wet catches of breath.

He trailed after her. "
Chérie
," he offered, holding out his upturned palms. "It is not that I want to leave you. I want to balance my life with yours, try to make myself more content with what we have together."

The sitting room was darker still, the overhang of its private terrace blocking light. Charles might have put on the electric lamp, but the wall-to-wall curtains were open. He and Pia would have made a fine picture, standing there naked, arguing.

Into the darkness, he said, "You are hurt and angry out of proportion. I am simply getting married because I have at last accepted that you are not getting a divorce."

"I can't."

"Fine."

"No, it's
not
fine to you."

"No, it's not. But there is nothing I can do about it."

"So you do th-this." She punctuated her words with a soggy, hiccuping sound that made Charles feel like the miserable, selfish wretch she said he was. She let out another half-sob. "You pressure me to do what is so—s-so b-bad for me."

He followed the sound of her voice, trying to pinpoint her by her rose-geranium scent as she seemed to move toward a pitch-dark corner by the door. "No, Pia, I'm not…"

He found her flesh, a round shoulder, just as the ship did one of its slow, inexorable tilts. He would never know if what happened from here was on purpose or if she merely grabbed for the door handles for balance. In any regard, the double doors unlatched, keening out a loud creak as they swung widely into the room with the ship's angled ascent. The corridor's yellow light washed up the length of Charles, from bare feet to naked genitals to broad, hair-swirled chest. He grabbed for something, anything, to hold on to—missing the nearer door edge by inches through lack of spatial perception—so that when Pia jerked back from him, he was left balanced for one weightless, precarious moment, then the ship dove. His center of gravity shifted, and Charles was thrown forward, out into the hall, catching himself on the far wall.

Behind him, the doors likewise obeyed the pull of the earth. They eeked in reverse, to slam shut at his back.

At this point, Pia most certainly could have reopened them and let him in again. But, instead, he heard the privacy bolt click in place, the little window reading the verdict in three languages—DO NOT disturb.

VEUILLEZ NE PAS DERANGER. PER FAVORE NON DISTURBARE.

It took him a moment to admit what had happened: The love of his life, through plan or opportunity, had locked him out his own room at well past midnight, without his wearing a scrap of clothing—not so much as a prophylactic. He arched, pivoting around, flinging his arms up to attack the doors, to break them down if he had to. Childish, idiot woman. Then he jerked his whole body to a stop just short of a good thumping on the carved panels. There were three other
cabines de grand luxe
on this deck, the inhabitants of each presently asleep. Suppose his noise woke them, and they popped their heads out into the hall to see what the commotion was about?

And there was the Prince d'Harcourt standing out in the corridor in his all-together, not a stitch
on. locked out of his own stateroom by
—
you'll never guess
—
the wife of the chief American
diplomat to France, whom apparently he had been
…

Good God, everyone thought he was in France planning a wedding, a misconception he very much needed in order to appear wholesome and trustworthy in the eyes of his future in-laws, not to mention to protect him from the chief American diplomat, who had become downright suspicious of his wife and her

"French friend." No. contemplating the possibly touchy outcomes made Charles come up with a much better plan. At the end of the corridor was a short companionway down to the first-class promenade deck. There, among the line of wicker deck chairs, he would find a blanket, then settle back under a chair's hood, where, comfortable and safely hidden, he would wait for Pia to dress and clear out of his