Cheryl Holt (29 page)

While mentally, she comprehended that she should desist, physically she felt as if she’d arrived exactly where she belonged, that she’d always been equipped for him to handle her in such outrageous, dramatic ways. Whatever depraved deeds he might perpetrate against her person would be precisely what was needed to alleviate the building tension that was driving her to recklessness. If the pressure wasn’t assuaged, she might explode!

He caressed her breast! His hand slid inside her nightgown, and he clutched the mound, molding and manipulating it, then his finger and thumb glided to her nipple, pinching and tweaking the nub in an afflicting, seductive manner. Her response was instantaneous and striking; she felt as if he’d jolted her with a bolt of lightning.

How could she survive such commotion? It couldn’t be healthy! Such an extraordinary reaction had to be dangerous!

“Ian! Stop it!”

From behind her, in the vicinity of the doorway, John barked the command, but it took several seconds for reality to pervade sufficiently for her to realize that he’d entered the library and was observing all.

“Ian!” he growled again.

His severity penetrated, and with a shriek, she wrenched herself from Ian and leapt away. With the brusque loss of the security of his arms, she was off balance, and she stumbled to find her footing.

“Shit!” Ian griped, then he muttered an epithet she’d not heard before. She wasn’t certain of its definition, but the tenor with which he uttered it unequivocally captured her disposition.

She couldn’t have been more embarrassed if her father had stomped into the middle of the torrid scene. Her cheeks were flaming crimson, her heart hammering, and she grappled to regain her composure.

Ian rested a supportive, comforting hand on the small of her back, and she lurched away, imposing distance. With the light of discovery shining upon them, she didn’t want to be seen as joined with him in disreputable behavior.

What must John think? No wonder he wouldn’t have her! Who would? A few hours earlier, he’d clarified his position as to marriage, and her inaugural act as an unattached woman was to trifle with his brother like a common slattern!

Harshly, John queried, “What the hell are you doing?”

At his brutal tone, she jumped, then swiftly discerned that he was scolding Ian and not herself.

“What did it look like?” Ian insolently replied, casually rising from his perch on the desk as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “I was kissing Caroline.”

The room was charged with a frightening menace. If they’d been holding pistols, the guns would have been drawn and leveled at each other. All because of her!

She’d never witnessed this side of either of them. In fact, she wasn’t aware that they ever quarreled. They were never at odds, and to detect that her lewd conduct had instigated discord was an added disgrace.

“Caro, leave us.”

John issued the decree, and though she was desperate to flee from his scrutiny, his superior attitude raised her hackles.

For once, she bravely claimed, “You’ve relinquished your right to order me about.”

“That may be”—he didn’t take his eyes off Ian—“but you’re a guest in my home, and your father’s not here. In his stead, I
will
see to your welfare.” He glanced at her, and his fury shook her to her core.

“Go!” he declared, and she scurried away like a timid rabbit.

“Caro! Wait!” Ian beseeched, but she didn’t hesitate or turn around.

She was mortified, shamed, having heinously perverted herself, and she couldn’t bear to ascertain how he might be viewing her. With fondness? With regret? God—with pity?

For one fleeting, joyous moment, she’d lowered her ingrained defenses, had dropped her inhibitions, had let her wild nature take flight, but she’d crashed to the ground rapidly enough—just as her mother had warned would happen should she give free rein to her sordid proclivities.

What had come over her?

Blame it on the night. On the shadows and the isolated room. On the elegant, dashing man.

Temporary insanity, that’s all it was. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Under control, she rushed out and hastened to the safety of her bedchamber. Too distraught to sleep, she packed her bags so that she’d be ready to depart at dawn.

Ian remained rooted to his spot, listening as Caro’s footsteps faded, then he analyzed John as he approached.

He didn’t know what explication he could furnish, or why he would feel honor bound to provide one. Especially to John, who hadn’t once refrained from engaging in any dubious diversion, but from the deadly gleam in his brother’s eye, he could tell that he’d crossed a line that even John—in his jaded state—couldn’t tolerate.

There was an overdue confrontation pending, but he was in no mood for it. He had numerous bones he’d like to pick with John that had never been addressed but, as he was still in the throes of arousal, he wasn’t in any condition to discuss them. His balls were aching, his pulse racing, his senses overloaded.

As he’d suspected, Caro was a lusty woman, whose prurient attributes had been repressed for so long that she wasn’t cognizant that they existed. If John hadn’t bumbled in when he had, Ian couldn’t predict what he might have done. Would he have proceeded to deflowerment? Would he have ravished her on top of the desk without regard to the consequences?

With her, he’d had to constantly fight a rampant, perilous attraction that couldn’t be acted upon. He’d considered her to be like an angel in heaven. Admired, worshipped, but inviolate. To have finally been granted the
opportunity to dally with her! How could he have passed it up?

The experience had confirmed his worries about his tainted constitution once and for all. If he could abuse Caro so terribly, then there was no doubt he was the bastard birth status said he was, and thus, completely unworthy of someone so fine. Why did he spend so much time trying to prove otherwise?

Testy, distressed, his body was loudly proclaiming its displeasure as to its lack of alleviation. His thoughts were disordered, and he couldn’t be relied upon to respond with his usual astuteness.

John advanced until they were toe-to-toe. “Don’t touch her again.”

“Or what?”

“You’ll have to answer to me.”

“God, I’m trembling.” Would this be the occasion when they came to blows? Formerly, they’d had their dissensions, but one of them had habitually backed down before tempers raged.

“Fuck you!”

“What are you so upset about? You don’t want her,” he reproached. “Why do you care who does?”

“I may not want her, but you can’t have her.” Cruelly, he pointed out, “You’re too far below her station.”

There was no more demeaning criticism John could have made. They both knew it, and that he had hurled the remark merely indicated how high their passions were running. They were too aggravated for rational conversation, yet Ian was a vain man, and his pride regularly goaded him into all sorts of unsavory trouble. He wasn’t about to abide the slight.

“So what are you saying, John? That I’m good enough for your sleazy mistress to sneak into my bed and suck me off in the middle of the night”—he
stretched to his full height, meeting his brother’s angry glare with one of his own—“but I’m too foul to kiss your pretty little ex-fiancée?”

John hit him so hard that he almost fell down. As he lurched sideways, an ornamental table crashed to the floor and sundry figurines went flying. He clutched the desk, wrestling to stabilize himself.

“Jesus . . . I’m sorry.” John was immediately repentant, and he reached out to Ian to steady him, but Ian shook him away.

“Bugger off.”

They glowered at one another, John massaging his sore knuckles, Ian swiping blood from a cut on his cheekbone, then John moved behind the desk, wisely putting space between them.

“I’m sorry,” he maintained again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“You’re a prick. You always have been.”

A damaging silence ensued, and if either of them broke it, they’d likely express hurtful slurs they didn’t mean. Or perhaps the problem was that whatever they might fling would be exactly what was intended, but in the past, the accusations had been judiciously held in.

“I don’t think any of those things about you,” John said. “I never have.”

“Save the confessions for your pedigreed friends.”

John sighed and rubbed his bruised hand once more. Disturbed and bewildered at the turn of events, he asserted, “It’s folly for you to pursue her, Ian. Her parents wouldn’t allow it in a thousand years. You grasp that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Ian caustically retorted, “but that doesn’t stop me from wanting her.”

“Why didn’t you confide in me?”

“It was none of your damned business.”

He couldn’t enumerate how often he’d looked the other way, or feigned apathy, while ignoring John’s treatment of her, and assuring himself it was none of his concern.

Caroline had been a nagging thorn in his side, and he’d forced himself to discount his fascination. He’d even managed to persuade himself that he was bewitched simply because she was John’s, the consummate symbol of every wretched inequity in the world.

Drained, John started to sit and, in the process, peered down at the desktop. In the melee, Ian had forgotten what he’d been doing before Caroline had walked in. The estate ledgers were out and open, when they shouldn’t have been. The books had been tucked away since early afternoon, locked in the drawer, with John supposedly having the only key.

Ian’s journal, where he’d been copying sums, was next to the accounting records, his distinctive handwriting impossible to disregard. The pages containing his notes were also visible, an incriminating pile of evidence for which there could be no valid justification.

John perused the materials, while he tried to interpret what he was seeing, and Ian braced. This altercation had been looming for an eternity, and he was surprised it hadn’t arrived much sooner. Only John’s reputed disinterest in fiscal matters, and their father’s presence as a wedge to discovery, had kept it from occurring.

“Explain yourself,” he said.

Ian shrugged, swallowing down a wave of remorse, unwilling to grovel or apologize. “I’ve been checking the balances. Calculating my share.”

“Your
share
of what?”

“Of what Father promised me for watching over you.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Since I first came to London.” Twelve years. Twelve years of deceit and duplicity, of lies and scheming and conniving with his father to John’s ultimate detriment.

“Why?”

John was gravely wounded, but Ian steeled himself against feeling any sympathy. His brother had been given so much, but he had scant appreciation for how fortunate he was. “Because Father asked it of me. And it was an enormous financial boon.”

“How
enormous
?”

“Ten percent of the profits from each of your individually owned properties that Father was administering for you.”

“Ten percent for doing what?”

“For baby-sitting you. For reporting.”

John was aghast and stunned. “You were paid to tattle to him about my personal affairs?”

“Every detail I felt warranted his attention.”

“That’s why we crossed paths in London.”

“Aye.”

“Our meeting wasn’t an accident.” The ramifications were gradually sinking in. “You plotted against me. With Father.”

“Yes. He sent for me after you moved out on your own. He didn’t trust you, and he wanted my assistance.”

“Was there an ending date to your agreement with Father? Or did you have license to steal from me in perpetuity?”

Ian hadn’t viewed it as
stealing
; he’d worked for every farthing of his blood money. “There was no fixed duration, though I had the authority to terminate our arrangement if I could convince him that you’d changed.”

“My, my, what faith he had in your abilities.” The
unspoken comment being that their father hadn’t had any faith in John.

“I tried my best.”

“I’ll just bet you did.”

Though John valiantly struggled to hide his reaction, his shock was so great that his knees buckled, and he collapsed into the chair, staring blankly at the condemnatory information. “I want you to leave in the morning.”

“I’d planned on it.”

“When I return to London, I want you gone from the town house.”

“As you wish.”

Tormented and afflicted, John scrubbed a weary hand over his eyes. “Your thievery is finished. You’ll relinquish all your keys, then I don’t want to hear from you ever again. I’ll have my solicitor contact you to negotiate an appropriate monetary settlement.”

“Stuff it,” Ian said crudely, spinning around to go. “I don’t need any support from the Wakefield coffers. I have plenty in the bank already.”

He strolled out, declining to dawdle and rehash the contemptible situation.

At the last second, John said quietly, painfully, “I thought you were my friend.”

“I never was.” He departed without looking back.

I
AN
strode down the hall toward the foyer. The summer sun had barely colored the horizon when he’d risen for the journey to London. He’d grabbed a bite of cheese and bread in the kitchen, had a horse saddled and ready outside the door.

All he need do was go, but he couldn’t make his feet take those decisive steps. So much was left unfinished—with Caroline and with John—and he suffered from the distinct impression that, once he went, he’d never see either of them again.

He stopped by the library and walked over to John’s desk, where he deposited a pouch containing the keys their father, Douglas Clayton, had given him. Keys to desks, keys to doors, keys to ledger books. A damning collection.

Briefly, he considered jotting a letter, some message of apology or justification, perhaps a simple farewell, but he couldn’t think of any statement that wouldn’t seem selfish or greedy. He marched out, refusing to ruminate or ponder the ways he’d betrayed his brother.

He wasn’t sure why he’d consented to act as an accomplice with Douglas. In most situations, he hadn’t been able to abide the tyrant. When Douglas had first approached him with the idea of spying on John, he’d been annoyed and insulted, yet secretly flattered that the philandering bounder had needed him.