Don't Tempt Me (26 page)

“No time for that,” he said gruffly. As her hand slid
downward, he gently lifted it away. “Everyone was amiable for your sake, Zoe, not mine. Because you're pretty and amusing—and because they were worried that if they weren't amiable, you'd hit them with that great diamond of yours and break their skulls.”

She smiled up at him. If he was making a joke, he was calming, and he would take her with him.

“I see what will happen,” he said. “You'll fondle and flatter and smile me into it. I might as well admit defeat, instead of wasting time fighting you. But you'd better run along—and dress quickly, because I will not wait one extra minute for you.”

She reached up and grabbed his neckcloth, and pulled his face toward hers and kissed him hard. He was turning into a far better husband than she'd dared to hope for. He was not the shallow, capricious man she'd believed him to be. He was truly kind and truly caring…and she was afraid she was falling quite hopelessly in love with him.

Two hours later

The Bow Street Office stood a short distance from the Covent Garden Opera House, and on the same side of the street.

Zoe and Marchmont were able to bypass the busy courtroom at No. 3—where, Zoe supposed, the thieves and prostitutes and pimps and drunkards were gathered at present. This was because Mrs. Dunstan was being kept in a room in No. 4, the house adjoining. Here, among other things, Bow Street held
its prisoners.

The housekeeper had been taken to a room separate from the felons' room, in consideration of Marchmont, who'd asked to interview her privately. Otherwise she would have been shackled in the one room with all the other prisoners, Zoe learned.

A Runner had caught Mrs. Dunstan before she could board a Dover packet, bound for Calais.

She had not been cooperative, the Runner explained before Zoe and Marchmont entered the room. The housekeeper insisted she didn't know where Harrison was. She had not been involved with him in any way, she said. She had left the duke's house in a temper, she claimed, because the new mistress had questioned her methods. She refused to hang about, she said, and be accused of incompetence, and have her authority undermined in front of the rest of the staff.

“That's her story, Your Grace,” said the Runner. “Doesn't matter how we ask or what we ask. It's always the same.”

When Zoe and Marchmont entered, they found Mrs. Dunstan seated stiffly upright upon a bench against a wall. Though the room was dimly lit, Zoe saw her eyes blaze at their entrance. She didn't need to see it. The woman radiated hostility. But she was impotent, her ankles chained.

“Oh, Your Grace has come, have you?” she said. “You and she, to see me like this, in chains, like a common thief.”

“I should say, madam, on the contrary, that you are a most
uncommon
sort of thief,” Marchmont drawled. “I should say you are a genius among felons. Your aptitude with figures is a true marvel of sleight
of hand.”

This small show of bored arrogance instantly lit a very short fuse.

“What did you ever have to complain of us?” she burst out. “We did our work. There's no better-kept house in all of London. Everyone said so.”

The officer attempted to intervene, but Marchmont held up his hand. “Let her have her say,” he said.

“Oh, I'll say, all right,” she spat out. “Not one of all those servants in that great house ever gave you any trouble at all, did they, Your Grace? But you don't know what a trouble it was to us, to keep it that way. Everything always done for you. Like magic, wasn't it? It was the best-run house in London, in all of England—and you had to bring her in and spoil it.”

She shot Zoe a murderous look before reverting to Marchmont. “What did we ever do that harmed you? We had a right to our perquisites and more, for all we did and how well we did it. When did you ever need to take any notice of the running of the house, Your Grace? When didn't the windows sparkle and the floors shine? When was the sheets ever dirty or damp or the fires not lit when wanted? When was the dinner not laid exactly to the minute, whether you and your guests sat down on time or half an hour late? When was it ever cold or overcooked? When did you ever have to ask, ‘Why wasn't this done?' When did you ever have to ask for anything? Wasn't it always as you wanted, before you even knew you wanted it? What was so wrong that
she
must come in and start looking for a fault? Why did she ever go looking in those books but because she couldn't find
any fault anywhere else?”

“Yet such a great fault there turned out to be, in those books,” Marchmont said. “And there, you see, is the nub of the matter: theft and fraud, fraud and theft. So unnecessary. You might have asked for an astronomical salary, and I'd have paid, without question—because what did I care? Instead, you made a great deal of unnecessary work for yourselves with your clever conspiracy. I would have paid you as much as you stole and cheated me of, and I'd never have noticed or cared what it cost. But no, you must commit forgery and fraud and theft and make it a hanging matter, you foolish woman.”

“I won't hang! I did nothing wrong!”

“You disappeared at the same time Harrison did,” Marchmont said. “Why didn't you two simply go abroad? It's easily enough done. If Brummell could sneak away unnoticed, with that famous face and physique, surely you could. But no, you must hang about and plot with Harrison to attack my horses. For what? Spite?”

“I never did that!”

“John Coachman and two of our footmen saw Harrison take a knife to one of my horses,” said Marchmont.

“I had nothing to do with that!”

“You and Harrison fled my house at the same time,” Marchmont said. “You didn't warn the other servants. They all stayed. One can only conclude that you and Harrison were in communication and still are. One can only conclude that you aided and abetted a violent attack.”

“I never did! If I'd known what he was about, I would never have stayed with him. I'd have run to Dover before today, and your dirty Runners wouldn't have caught me.”

“But you did stay in London for a time. With Harrison.”

She realized, too late, what she'd revealed. She bowed her head and pressed her fist to her mouth.

“I don't care about you,” Marchmont said. “I should be very sorry to see you hang simply because you were silly. But if you'd anything to do with what I'm bound to see as an attempt on my wife's life—”

“It wasn't me!” she cried. “I didn't know until he came back and told me.”

“He came back and told you,” Marchmont repeated quietly.

“I didn't want to stay in London, but he said we had to. He had to get the money we'd put aside.”

“My money,” Marchmont said with a thin smile.

“We were going to become innkeepers,” she said. “When he went out, I thought it was to do with the money, and making arrangements. But it wasn't, was it?”

“He was watching us,” Marchmont said. “Watching where we went and what we did. He was waiting for his chance.”

She nodded. “He told me afterward, and it was then I knew he must be out of his senses. He always had a temper, but I never knew him to do violence. He never needed to. No one dared to sauce him or cross him. He'd gone wrong in the head, that was clear. But I had to wait, because I feared he'd try to
kill me if I left him, knowing what I knew.”

She told them how Harrison had regretted not being able to stay to watch.

Zoe saw Marchmont's hands clench, but he un-clenched them immediately. His countenance told nothing, as usual, except to her. He wore his customary, sleepily bored expression. He controlled himself as he always did. He hid his feelings as he always did.

“The way he talked—it wasn't like him,” the housekeeper went on. “I didn't see until then how bad it was with him.”

The housekeeper went on to describe a degree of vengefulness others might have found shocking. Zoe wasn't shocked. She'd seen worse cases than this, murderous rages and vendettas over trivial matters: a hair comb, a bracelet.

Harrison had devoted twenty years to climbing a ladder of power. Then, when he thought himself securely at the top, she had come along. In a matter of days, he'd fallen off—and this time there could be no climbing back.

Mrs. Dunstan snapped her fingers, drawing Zoe's attention back to her. “That's what he did, again and again,” the housekeeper said. “Snapped his fingers. ‘Like this she knocked me down,' he said. ‘And I'll knock her down. I'll finish her, I will, like this.' He snapped his fingers and ‘I'll finish her,' he said, ‘because she finished me.' He drank and talked mad like that and finally he drank himself senseless. He fell onto the bed, dead to the world. Then I packed up and ran.”

“But he's still here?” Marchmont said. “In London?”

“He knows where to hide,” Mrs. Dunstan said. “No one knows London like he does, and no one has
the kinds of friends he has. He can hide right under your nose and you'll never know. He knows everything, doesn't he? Knows what you're going to do before you do it. A proper servant, he is. And like a proper one, he'll find a way to do it, whatever it is.”

 

Since Mrs. Dunstan could tell them only where Harrison had stayed last, there was nothing more for Marchmont to ask her. Zoe had nothing to add. He'd done a fine job of provoking the woman to reveal what she knew.

She told him so when they were back in the carriage and on their way home.

“She was right, you know,” he said. He looked out of the carriage window into the lamplit streets, where the pedestrians were merely anonymous dark figures, hurrying along the pavement. “It was a wonderfully well-run house. They did their jobs brilliantly. I took them completely for granted.”

“But that's the way it ought to be with good servants,” Zoe said.

“I understand that,” he said. “But I know, too, that had I paid the slightest attention—taken an interest, however cursory—none of this would have happened.”

“You can't know that,” she said. “Some people are simply dishonest. Many are corrupted by power. Harrison was no lord, but in his world, he wielded great power.”

“If he was corrupt, I should have been the one to discover it,” he said tightly. “Because I didn't, I endangered your life.”

“That's illogical,” she said. They were sharing the carriage seat. She drew nearer to him and took his
hand. “You're a clever man—much cleverer than you let on—but your logic isn't good. If he's gone mad, then his mind has become diseased. That's no more your fault than the state of any wretch in Bedlam. If he hasn't gone mad, then he's evil. You didn't make him evil. You didn't corrupt him. That was the path he took. For the upper-level staff he hired the kinds of people he could corrupt. For the lower levels, he chose the kind he could bully.” She twined her fingers with his. “I told you I could manage a household. With the troublemaker gone, all will be well.”

“Nothing will be well until I see that man hang,” he said.

“The Bow Street Runners will find him,” she said. “You're the Duke of Marchmont, and you've offered a large reward. They'll ignore every other task in order to hunt him down. These are men who know London, you said. They must know it as well or better than Harrison does. It's their business to know it. Finding people is their livelihood. He won't get away.”

“No, he won't.” His grip on her hand tightened. “I don't care what it costs. I've doubled the reward. I'll triple it if I have to.”

“They'll find him,” Zoe said. “Leave it to them. We'll go to Lady Stafford's rout and count how many people step on our feet and how many elbows stick into our ribs. Shall I wear the lilac gown or the blue?”

“We're not going to the rout,” he said. “We're going home and you are not leaving the house until that man is in custody.”

For a moment, Zoe couldn't form a thought, let alone speak. It was as though she'd plunged into a deep, cold well.

To be trapped in a house for who knew how long, after she'd only begun to taste freedom, and while everyone else about her was free—when she wouldn't have even the companionship, such as it was, and the amusements, such as they were, of the harem…

Her heart was racing, and her mind raced, too, pointlessly.

All the past rushed at her in an icy wave of panic—the moment they'd taken her away in the bazaar…the voices speaking a language she couldn't understand…the darkness…the men touching her…she, screaming for her father, until they gagged her…the drink they'd forced down her throat that brought strange
dreams but never complete oblivion…the slaves stripping off her clothes—

She shook it off and made herself stare out of the window and breathe, slowly. This was England. She was in London, with her husband. She was safe, and all he wanted was to keep her safe.

He was upset, she reminded herself. When men were upset, their instincts took over, and their instincts were not always rational. Even she was disturbed by what had happened, though the danger was nothing to what she'd lived with day after day and night after night in the harem.

She made herself answer calmly. “I know you wish to protect me, but this isn't reasonable.”

“Harrison isn't reasonable,” Marchmont said. “We're dealing with a man who's either deranged or evil. You said so yourself. He thought nothing of brutally attacking a dumb animal. He didn't care what a creature maddened with pain would do. He didn't care who else might have been injured when the horses panicked. There's no predicting what he'll do.”

“There's no predicting how long it will take to find him,” she said. “It could be days or even weeks. What if he comes to his senses and runs away from London, as he should have done? What if he falls into the Thames and drowns? His body might never be found. You'd make me a prisoner in Marchmont House indefinitely?”

“I am not making you a prisoner,” he said. “I'm making sure he can't get at you.”

“It's prison to me,” she said. “You ought to understand this. I thought you did. I was kept caged
for twelve years. I lived in a vast house, larger than yours—a great palace with a great, walled garden. A prison is a prison, no matter how big or how beautiful.”

“It's not the same.”

“It's the same to me,” she said. “I can't abide to be confined.”

“And I can't abide risking your life,” he said. “Until we know he's in custody or dead or abroad, you'll stay home. You said the Runners would find him. You said they had every reason to do so. You were the one reassuring me about this. Reassure yourself.”

“You cannot keep me in the house,” she said.

“I can and will. Don't be childish, Zoe. This is for your own good.”

“Childish?” she said. “
Childish?
I risked my life to be free. You don't know what they would have done to me if they had caught me. I risked my life for this.” She waved her hand at the window, where the shadowy figures hurried along the pavement, and riders and carriages passed in the busy street. “I risked everything to be in a world where women can go out of their houses to shop and visit their friends, where they can even talk to and dance with other men. For twelve years I dreamed of this world, and it came to be my idea of heaven: a place where I could move freely among other people, where I could go to the theater and the ballet and the opera. For twelve years I was an amusing pet in a cage. For twelve years they let me out only for the entertainment of watching me try to run away. Now I have my own horse, and I can ride in Hyde Park—”

“Only listen to what you're saying,” he said. “Ev
erything you want to do will expose you. Hyde Park is completely out of the question.”

“You can't do this,” she said. “I won't be locked up. I won't hide from that horrible man. He's a bully, and this is bullying, and you're letting him do it. You're letting him make the rules, because you're afraid of what he'll do.”

“He's not making any rules, Zoe!
I'm
making the rules. You're my wife, and on the day we wed, I promised to look after you—and you promised to
obey
.”

She started to retort, but paused.

She knew that keeping his word was a strict point of honor to him.

Everyone knows that he regards his word as sacred
, Papa had said.

When she had promised to obey, she'd given her word, too. To fail to keep her word to him would be dishonorable, a betrayal of trust.

“I did promise,” she said. “And I shall obey.”

 

They traveled in silence the rest of the way home. All the while Marchmont's gut churned.

He heard it over and over: the snap of the housekeeper's fingers, and the words she'd repeated.

I'll finish her
,
I will
,
like this.

The words echoed in his mind as they entered Marchmont House and crossed the marble entrance hall.

He heard them as he and Zoe climbed the stairs.

He was aware—oh, very well aware—of his wife walking alongside him with all the light and life gone out of her, and he knew he'd killed her happiness and humor and delicious insouciance.

He told himself she was making too much of it. The trouble was, he knew why she made so much of it.

Her freedom was precious to her, far more precious than it was to other Englishwomen, who simply took it for granted, the way he'd taken his servants and his smoothly running household for granted.

He remembered what she'd said that first day, after she'd proposed to him and he'd declined.

I was married from the time I was twelve years old
,
and it seemed a very long time
,
and I would rather not be married again straightaway.

Yet she had married again, straightaway, because he'd lacked the will to resist temptation.

She'd never had a chance to be courted by other men.

She'd never had a chance to decide for herself which of them she truly wanted.

He'd wanted her, and he'd had to have her, and that was that.

Still, he'd hardly condemned her to a life of misery. Being married to him offered more freedom than most other women had, including other aristocratic women. No doors were closed to the Duchess of Marchmont. She would never lack for money to buy whatever she wanted. She could still flirt with other men and dance with them.

And she could go where she pleased, to a point.

Until tonight.

I want fun
, she'd told him that day in Hyde Park after she'd raced with Lady Tarling.
I want a
life.
In Egypt I was a toy
,
a game. I was a pet in a cage. I vowed never to endure such an existence again
.

He watched her enter her apartments, then he walked on to his.

He told Ebdon he would not be going out this evening, and ordered a bath. The odor of Bow Street seemed to cling to his skin as well as his clothes.

The bath should have calmed him. It didn't.

The new valet had laid out a clean shirt, pantaloons, and stockings. The duke stood and gazed at them for a long time. He felt so weary, suddenly, not in his body but in his mind and heart, as though he'd carried a great burden, inside, for an endless time.

“Give me my dressing gown,” he said.

He didn't bother with the clothes readied for him, to be worn under his damask dressing gown: the full costume of “undress.” He shrugged his naked body into his dressing gown and slid his bare feet into his slippers. The maroon leather mules had pointed, upturned toes, in imitation of Turkish fashion.

Like a pasha's. Like the men in another world, who kept their women caged.

“Plague take me,” he said.

“Your Grace?” Ebdon was obviously baffled. He bore his confusion like a man, however. No weeping or fainting or trembling. Merely a slight crease between his brows.

“I'll be back in a minute,” Marchmont said.

He left the dressing room, crossed his bedroom to the connecting door, and walked in.

He found his wife in her bath, her face on her arm, resting on the linens draping the tub. She was weeping.

“Oh, Zoe,” he said.

 

She'd been so lost in misery that she hadn't heard him approach—another bad sign. She was losing her
old skills. She didn't care. She was too wretched to care. She loved him, and she wanted to be a good wife. She knew he only wanted to protect her—but she couldn't bear this, to have the walls close in on her again, so soon.

She wiped her eyes and looked up at him. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I know it's mad to feel this way, but I can't help it.”

He simply reached down and lifted her up, out of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it about her, then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. He buried his face in her damp hair.

“You're all I have left,” he said. “You're all I have left.”

His voice was hoarse, broken.

“Lucien,” she said, her face against his chest.

“You're all I have left, Zoe,” he said. “They're all gone—everyone I ever loved. Gone forever. You, too, I thought. But you weren't. You came back from the dead—and if I lose you, I don't know what I'll do.”

She held him tightly, as tightly as she could.

His parents. His brother. Gone.

He'd had her family, but it wasn't the same.

Everyone I ever loved.

You
,
too
,
I thought.

She was one of them, one of the loved.

Loved. He loved her.

It was as simple as that.

Her heart lifted, the way it always used to do when she caught sight of him, when Lucien came back from school to spend the summer with them. When he came, her world brightened.

“Lucien,” she said softly. She had learned Latin and
Greek, and she knew
lux
was the Latin for “light.” Her heart lifted, because he was the light of her life and had been from the first day she met him. “Oh, Lucien, we're both a little mad.”

“No,” he muttered into her hair. “You're the mad one. I'm completely sane.” He lifted his head and drew away a little and looked down at her. “Let's get you out of that wet towel.”

 

He got her out of the wet towel and dried her off with another one, in front of the fire.

He played lady's maid, kneeling before her, the towel in his hand. He lifted one slim foot onto his thigh and gently dried it, and she shivered.

He looked up, and there she was, all creamy skin with touches of pink in the special places, and a dusting of gold between her legs. She was all curving womanliness, and she was looking down at him, her blue eyes filled with something he couldn't put a name to. How could he, when he'd never troubled to read a woman's gaze?

In her case, perhaps, he didn't need to. Perhaps, after all, they simply understood each other. Perhaps they always had.

He slid his hands up from her foot, up along her calf to her knee and along her thigh, and up, to the downy place she had so many names for.

“Your Golden Flower,” he murmured, lightly drawing his hand over the feathery curls, still damp after her bath. “Your Palace Of Delight.”

“My Secret Abode,” she said. She slid her fingers into his hair. “My Hidden Treasure and my Throne of Love and my Lion's Head.”

“Your Lion's Head?” He caressed her so lightly.

She made names for the caresses, too: the Teasing Feather and the Gentle Glove and the Fire Touch.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “This part of me is very dangerous when hungry for lovemaking.”

She combed his hair with her fingers. “My lover's hair is like silken candlelight,” she said softly. “My lover is the candlelight in the night and the first rays of the sun on the horizon and the last rays, too. My lover is my light.”

He looked up, his gaze locking with hers. “I had better be this lover you're talking about,” he said.

She laughed and let go of him. She stretched her arms above her head, stretched like a cat, and he watched her beautiful breasts lift. She was completely at ease in her body, in her nakedness.

How could he think of stifling a soul so free?

“My lover leaps upon me, like a tiger,” she said.

He caught hold of her buttocks and pressed his mouth to her Hidden Treasure, and he felt her tremble.

He caressed her with his mouth and his tongue and felt her fingers tighten in his hair while her body vibrated with pleasure.

Then, after he'd driven her to the peak and made her cry out, he slid his arm behind her knees and brought her down.

Her eyes were dark and unfocused, her face flushed.

She gave way to passion in that unhesitating, liquid way of hers. She caught his mood—or he caught hers—and simply yielded to feeling.

Tonight the feeling was stormy.

She sat on the rug and opened her legs, and he crawled between them. She pushed open his dressing gown and raked her hands over his skin, and it was his turn to tremble while she explored him, running her fingers over muscles that bunched under her touch. She explored him as though he was new to her, a lover she'd never seen before…and yet as though, too, she knew him as well as she knew herself, and knew he belonged to her.

From the first she'd been this way, unhesitating, as easy with his body as she was with her own.

But there was more between them tonight than simple possession.

You're all I have left.

There it was, the thing buried in the deepest recess of the hidden place in his heart, in the dark cupboard he hadn't been able to keep shut since the day she returned. He'd uttered the words, and they still beat in his heart.