Blackstone's Bride (17 page)

Violet touched her finger to her tongue and to the bill and got a smudge of blue ink. “Do you think it’s the same ink as Frank’s note?”

“I do. Can you read the script?”

Violet took up the glass to study the mysterious ink lines. The added script looked like no words she knew. She shifted the glass back and forth over the strange writing. Then a little shiver of recognition passed over her.

Blackstone noticed. “You know what it is?”

“It’s upside down and backwards. I used to write like that when I was trying to be cleverer than Frank, but he could do it, too.”

“Can you make it out?”

“Let me make a copy.”

Blackstone rummaged through her father’s drawers for ink, paper, and pen with his usual command of her house. He and Frank had spent hours in the gunroom. She rolled up her sheer sleeve and set herself to extract the hidden lines from the printed image on the note.

Blackstone watched Violet work. He told himself there was nothing remarkable about Violet Hammersley to make him kiss her at cricket matches or catch and hold her wrist. His youthful infatuation with her should have no power over him now. He should not care if she supported poor boys or seamstresses or beggars or dogs. He should not care that she loved her brother. Nothing was so common as family affection.

She wore a burgundy shawl over an evening gown of pewter silk with sheer sleeves gathered at her wrists. Candlelight lit her forehead, slid down her straight serious nose, and caught her firm chin, making of her clean profile a bright edge against the darkness.

He had watched her at work before, on a night long ago in the midst of the bullion crisis. She had been barred from the nightly meetings of bankers and cabinet men who gathered around George Hammersley to determine a way through the crisis. In her room at her desk she’d spread out newspapers and notes and was deep in thought when he’d entered. The men downstairs had forgotten a girl of seventeen, but he had felt his friend’s absence from the urgent conferences of men.

He had thought to divert her mind from the crisis that consumed the household and the nation, but she wanted to understand everything to help her papa and her brother. For half an hour she had pummeled Blackstone with questions. Her dark eyes had flashed with curiosity and determination to understand the workings of money. He hadn’t known it at the time but he knew now that Violet, in quest of understanding, came passionately alive.

At the time he’d been conscious only of her new more grown-up form, of her dark hair curling against the pale tops of her breasts. Her clothing had been simpler then. The energy of her thinking seemed to warm them both, so that her scent invaded his senses. Before he could summon any of his defenses, he found his trousers lifted in a blatant display of his interest in her person, and before he could make any excuses and take himself out of her presence, she’d noticed and made her comment about his penis.

Within minutes they had been tearing at each other’s clothes, trying to connect wholly and completely, until Augusta Lowndes found them, tangled in each other’s arms on Violet’s bed. He had managed an unconvincing apology for forcing himself upon her, which Violet had spoiled by announcing that she was fully as much to blame as he was.

Tonight when he’d wakened, he had caught her look of concentration directed at him, and something inside him had given a glad leap in answer to that scrutiny before he brought it to heel. Now in a colder waking moment, he was using her, getting her to betray her brother. And he must not forget that she was smart, and that he had to distract her from where the evidence of the banknote would inevitably lead. Her next question when it came was not the one he expected.

“Why does the countess take such an interest in you?”

“I suspect that she wants to get me alone.”

An amused smile played on her lips. “Blackstone, you cannot believe that every woman succumbs equally to your charms.”

“I think our countess succumbs to no man.”

“Then why does she want to get you alone? Suppose her helpless act induced you to follow her down the proverbial garden path, what would she do—betray you in some embarrassing or compromising situation? Get information from you?”

“She might murder me.”

“Really?” Her hand paused, and she looked up. “I understand the sentiment, but is it possible? She’s inches shorter, pounds lighter, and a woman. Does she carry a weapon? It’s hard to imagine where she could conceal a pistol or a knife in those gauzy frocks of hers.”

He didn’t answer. The fall of light revealed the wintry landscape of her white throat against her dusky curls. The tops of her breasts glowed above the dark pewter of her gown. Then she bent to her work again. He listened to the careful scratch of her pen and thought he heard something else, something like slippers on the flagstones of the courtyard. He didn’t turn. In the lighted gunroom they were perfectly visible through the French doors from almost anywhere in the darkened courtyard. He himself had used its potted palms for concealment.

In the end, Violet could make out two words. Because the bill had been folded, part of the message had been smeared beyond recognition. Only two words emerged clearly from the smudges. She looked at the copy she’d made.

“What does it say?”

She passed him the written note. “Leave England.”

Blackstone looked at it and laughed. “Just our luck. Your brother offers travel advice.”

“What did you expect?”

He shifted closer to her, speaking lightly as if he jested. “I had hoped he would say—‘Come to number seven Cat’s Hole Lane. They’ve got me in a back room on the ground floor.’”

Violet stared at the two words. Her shoulders slumped. She had taken care. She was sure she had decoded them properly. She had no doubt they were from Frank. She and he had played at scripts as children, and he always kept banknotes hidden on his person. She had worked carefully in the hope that the hidden script would solve the mystery of Frank’s disappearance before it was too late to save him.

Blackstone watched her from the end of the table, his left hand resting on it, behind him the French doors of the dark courtyard. There was some tension in him, something alert and wary in the way he held himself that triggered an answering wariness in her. The light caught the gleam of his ring.

She thought about what she had just done, and her stomach clenched with a sudden uneasy feeling. A sick feeling. Her knees went limp, and she slid off the stool and only caught herself by grabbing hold of the table. He could kiss her in the morning or in the moment of dizzy victory for her boys and stand there now, dark and cool and treacherous. He’d tricked her, misled her, deceived her again.

The weakness passed, and anger, hot and bracing, surged through her and lifted her. “Three days you and I have played this cruel farce. Three days have passed. You hold my hand with its false ring and whisper in my ear. You give me buttons and banknotes, but only to make me betray my brother.”

She lunged for him in a swirl of skirts and rage, lifting her hands to strike him. He seized her wrists stretching her arms wide, bringing them face-to-face.

She leaned in. “You are not looking for Frank’s kidnappers. You are looking for Frank. That’s why Bow Street wouldn’t help Papa.”

He tightened his hold and marched her backwards along the length of the table, their strides matching in an angry dance.

“Are you mad!” She twisted against him while he pinned her between his hips and the edge of her father’s book-topped cabinet.

Violet’s writhing woke the clamoring part of Blackstone that should have no say in their conversation. “Look at me, Violet. Keep your voice low. We’re lovers, remember.”

“Lovers. Hah.
We
are not working together.
You
are using me. You think Frank’s hiding from the government. I see it now. Our engagement, the announcement in the papers, is a lure to draw him out.”

Her eyes flashed with the rapid flow of her thoughts. She twisted in his hold, one step from figuring out the whole, ready to bolt.

“Violet, we have a spy. Behind me in the courtyard, who must not hear your suspicions.”

The words stopped her. She stared at his shadowed face. He lengthened the stretch of his arms, bringing their bodies closer, silk brushing wool. Violet sucked in a breath as her breasts flattened against his chest, no escape for either of them.

Fashion, Blackstone thought, was every rational man’s enemy. Fashion bared Violet’s neck and shoulders, her collarbone and the tops of her trembling breasts flushed a shell-like pink. The friction of their bodies meeting shot arrows of glad sensation straight to his groin. He was supposed to betray her, so that he could win back everything he had lost to scandal and treachery. He was supposed to use her, but his body throbbed in answer to the angry pulse that rocked her against him, while to his back a spy looked on. Of course, Violet’s unstoppable brain went on asking questions. His stalled as her scent rose up to beguile him.

“Who is spying on us?”

“Someone in the prince’s retinue.” He kept his arms extended, holding himself between her and whoever watched them. He had not forgotten that a bullet had nearly missed her in this very room.

“Why? What do they suspect?”

“They think Frank will try to give you something they want.”

What?
Her eyes asked it.

“A hundred thousand pounds.”

“You’re mad.”

“The government, Violet, thinks Frank took a hundred thousand pounds and murdered two agents.”

“No.” Her quiet voice was firm and unwavering, but bright betraying drops welled up in her eyes.

The tears distracted him. They were in the shadows, and he kept himself between her and the spy in the courtyard, but he could not track the spy’s position or determine what the spy might have heard or read on Violet’s lips earlier.

Violet pressed up against him, her mouth close to his. “My brother did not steal a hundred thousand pounds or betray his country or murder anyone. How can you believe it of Frank? You
know
him.”

As soon as she said it, her face changed. Her eyes went hollow, and the fight went out of her. He could feel her slump in his hold. He pressed her against the cabinet, holding her steady with his outstretched arms.

“That’s the unforgivable thing, isn’t it, that someone who knows you has no faith in you.”

She closed her eyes, and the bright liquid burned in shining tracks down her smooth cheeks, a glittering snow melt. And damn him, he wanted to comfort her. He wanted to kiss her and burn away the pain. What did it matter that he understood that pain precisely because she had once inflicted it on him. What did it matter that this moment was a just repayment, a betrayal for a betrayal.

“I’m going to kiss you, Violet.” It was the only warning he gave. He caught her waist and lifted her up onto the low cabinet, nudging her knees apart and making a place where he could press the ache she made him feel against her warm, womanly center. Through wool and silk and linen, he could feel the heat of her.

With one arm he anchored her to him. With the other he captured her head and held it so that he could take her mouth. Her spine was straight, unbending, but she tilted her head and opened her mouth under his and let him in.

He kissed her because he had missed kissing her for so long, because in that time he had not been living exactly, and he was alive right now, as she was alive, for him.

She stopped trying to push him away. Her hands gripped his head, sliding into his hair. Her gown billowed between them like the foam of stormy waves. He freed one hand to brush aside her insubstantial gossamer skirts and slide his palm over her silk-clad knee, feeling the muscled contour of her thigh until his fingers passed over the gathers of her satin garter and met skin. The softness of it dizzied him momentarily.

He reached the apex and traced the crease where thigh and hip joined. She shivered and clung to him more tightly. He slid his open palm then to cup her, his palm pressing down, his fingers curving up to play lightly, until he felt her body bloom for him, opening, spreading under his touch, and he could slide his fingers into her slick warmth and feel her ready for him.

Remember,
his lips said, trailing along her throat.
Remember,
his hand said, warm and strong sliding over her knee, stopping to quake like her at meeting her flesh.
Remember
, his fingers said sliding into her cleft, opening her.

Then, because she was Violet, daughter of Eve and Pandora, curious and questing, she slid her own palm between their fused bodies. Her fingers, sure and swift, released the fall of his wool trousers and the closure of his linen smalls, and closed around the smooth hot shaft of him, and did to him what he did to her.

Blackstone’s consciousness flickered like a candle in a draft. He flexed his hips up, sliding into her touch, and thought that he had come home for this, for Violet Hammersley’s hand on him, he had stayed alive for this, that Violet Hammersley would once again love him.

He pulled her hand free of his cock and shifted so that he might push into her, but she shuddered at his first touch, pulsing around him even as he came into her. A cascade of books fell from the cabinet, hitting the floor with a clatter, recalling him to reason.

He drew back as she quaked in his arms. He lifted his mouth from hers and kissed her forehead. Their ragged breathing filled his ears. His back was to the courtyard. He and Violet appeared to be no more than impatient lovers, but he did not know how close the spy had come or what he or she might have heard of their conversation.

He helped her from the cabinet. They had hardly disordered their clothes. She did not look at him as she shook her skirts and twisted her hair into a neat knot. He fastened his trousers concealing his aching arousal.

He made her leave the books on the floor. He did not know whether she realized how he had betrayed his employer. Maybe he had already decided he could not play the government’s game when he’d asked Wilde to keep the Spanish banknote between them. Not that Violet would accept him back, but now he had to make his own plans to find Frank Hammersley before Goldsworthy did.