Guilty Series (103 page)

Pain squeezed her chest at the notion that he might think ill of her, and she realized she cared what he thought. His good opinion was hard to earn, but she wanted it. To think she did not have it, that he regarded her with the same disparagement Haye did, hurt more than she would have believed possible.

Memories of her past flashed across her mind. Did she regret her past? She thought about Armand, about that Carnival night in Bolgheri, and about all the rebellious, defiant things she'd done. The nuns had always called her sinful and wicked, and perhaps it was true, for she couldn't find it in her heart to regret any of the things she'd done. She had loved Armand. She'd given Elena a night of freedom the other girl would never forget. She'd had some wild times—smoking, drinking, gambling, sneaking out—and she'd enjoyed them all. Truth be told, she'd enjoyed rubbing her father's face in it most of all. Ian wouldn't understand that, she supposed. He certainly wouldn't approve of it.

In all honesty, Lucia had no regrets about her past, but when she thought of Ian, of how she would never have his respect or his good opinion, her lack of regrets wasn't much comfort.

T
hrowing an earl through a window would probably ruin his diplomatic career. Ian took a deep breath and rose to his feet, thinking if he didn't get Haye out of his sight in very short order, he'd do it anyway and be forced to find himself a new profession.

“I quite understand why you would come to these conclusions,” he said through clenched teeth as he ushered Haye to the door. “I will give Miss Valenti your letter breaking the engagement. I am sure she will feel as you do, that ending it is for the best.”

“I hope so,” Haye answered. “Despite her past conduct, I fear hurting her feelings, but it cannot be helped.”

“I am sure she will survive the disappointment.” The ironic inflection of his voice was lost on the earl, who nodded in agreement.

Ian walked with Haye as far as the corridor, but he could not stomach giving him the courtesy of showing him out, and he was relieved that Haye was too preoccupied to notice. The earl went down the stairs, and Ian waited until he had passed the landing and disappeared from view, then he turned around to return to the library. The moment he did so, he froze.

Lucia was standing by the library door.

She was dressed as if for bed, her hair tumbled down around her shoulders and her bare feet peeping out from beneath the hem of her lacy white nightgown and wrapper.

Ian looked at her face, and he knew she had heard at least part of his conversation with Haye. She pressed her lips together as if in pain, and his chest tightened, for he remembered what she had overheard.

The silence grew, compelling him to say something. “I thought you were at Lady Hewitt's rout with Dylan and Grace.”

“I was,” she answered. “I came home early because I was tired and had a headache. The Duke and Duchess of Tremore brought me home in their carriage. I went to bed, but I had a bad dream and could not fall back to sleep.”

She paused and drew a deep breath. “I wanted a book. Something dull, to make me sleepy.” She lifted a hand to the library door. “I didn't mean
to eavesdrop, but you know how it is. One hears one's name and—” She paused again, lifted her chin, and shook back her long hair. “Hell,” she said, and walked into the library.

He followed her. “Lucia,” he began, but she cut him off.

“You were right about my past, Sir Ian. It has come back to haunt me.” She tried to smile, but it seemed a brittle one. “Your job just became more difficult. If word of Armand gets out, it will become much harder to find me a husband.”

“Haye has given his word to be discreet. He is an honorable man. A prig, but honorable. He will keep his word.”

“Word might still leak out, and then Cesare will have to increase the dowry.” She gave a cynical laugh that hurt him. “If he expects me to be engaged within the next three weeks, that is.”

“You could ask your father for more time.”

Her expression took on a hardness he had never seen before. Her eyes narrowed. “I would crawl to the devil,” she said in a low voice filled with loathing, “before I would ever ask my father for anything.”

“Would you like me to ask Prince Cesare on your behalf?”

She thought about that for a moment, then she said, “Do you think he would agree?”

“Under the circumstances, with the Carnival incident sure to leak out, and now, with the possibility that your indiscretion with Bouget might also become known—” He paused, but he could
not lie to her. “No. It is my opinion he would not give you more time. As you said, he would raise the dowry high enough that some impoverished peer would surely step forward.”

Ian watched as she walked over to the table where a decanter of Dylan's favorite brandy sat on a tray. She poured a hefty amount into a crystal snifter and downed the contents in one swallow.

Having indulged in alcoholic excess a time or two himself, Ian pointed out the truth nobody in pain ever wanted to face. “That isn't going to help matters,” he said in a gentle voice, and walked to her side.

“I know.” She poured herself another drink, then turned toward him, decanter in one hand, glass in the other. “I suppose I'm now going to get the lecture about how proper young ladies aren't supposed to get drunk. I don't think we're even allowed to drink spirits, are we?”

“I'm afraid not. A glass or two of wine is all young ladies are supposed to be allowed.”

She took a gulp of brandy and gave him a defiant look. “Too bad.”

Ian studied her without replying. There was something raw and painful behind the defiance in her face, something that hurt him, that made him want to go throttle Haye. He reached out to take the bottle from her instead.

She pulled her arm back, keeping the decanter out of his reach. “I'll get drunk if I want to,” she said in irritation. “What are you now? My chaperone?”

“Actually, I was going to pour one for myself.”

“Oh.” She eyed him with skepticism. “You were?”

“Yes.” After listening to Haye's idiocy for half an hour anyone would need a drink.

She handed over the decanter, and he poured a brandy for himself, then took both the decanter and his glass over to his desk. He sat down and leaned back in his chair.

She followed him, sitting in her favorite place on his desk. He must be getting used to it, because he didn't even care that she had plopped herself down on top of the letter he was composing to send to the Russian viceroy. The Russian viceroy was an even more pompous prig than Haye.

“My first impression of Haye was right,” she said. “He
does
have a weak chin. It fits a spineless character.”

“Hear, hear,” he concurred, leaning forward and lifting his glass for a toast to those sentiments. “We'll find someone worthy of you.”

She nodded and touched her glass to his, but she did not meet his gaze. She drank her brandy and refilled her glass. She didn't speak. The silence between them grew, lengthened into minutes, as she stared moodily into her glass, her countenance troubled.

She seemed disinclined to talk, an odd thing for her, and after a quarter hour had gone by without a word from her, he began to be concerned. “Are you all right?” he asked, breaking the silence.

“Si.”
She still didn't look at him. She kept her gaze lowered.

He swallowed the last of his brandy. “You're not pining after the fellow, are you, and putting on a show for my benefit?” Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer.

She shook her head. “No. I told you, I want a man who knows how to kiss, and Haye has a kiss most horrible.” She shuddered and took another drink. “It was like kissing a fish.”

Ian gave a shout of laughter. “Really?”

His laughter seemed to please her. She looked up, smiling. “Fishhh,” she repeated decidedly, slurring the word, a clear indication she was feeling the effects of her brandy. She gestured to him with her glass in an accusing manner. “You tried to persuade me to marry him anyway and teach him how to kiss.” She pressed her lips together and blew air between them to express her derision.

He grinned and poured himself another drink. “Forgive me. I don't know what I was thinking to suggest such a thing.”

“Neither do I. You see, I kissed him because I knew that would decide my mind about marrying him, and it did. I knew in that instant he was not the right man for me. And tonight, he proved my sense…my impression…ah—” She broke off with a sound of exasperation. “My first feelings, thoughts—how do you say it?”

“Instincts?”

“
Si.
My instincts were right.” She leaned closer
to Ian in a confiding way as if to impart a secret. “If he had been the right man for me, if he had loved me and respected me, I would have given him my heart and made him a good wife. I'd have been faithful, and given him sons, so many sons, he wouldn't have known what to do with them all. I'd have made him glad his whole life he married me.”

Ian wanted to kill the earl for rejecting her. He wanted to thank him. He looked away, lifted his glass, and drank until it was empty. “Haye is an ass,” he muttered, his voice raspy from the liquor. He reached for the decanter, only to find they had emptied it. He walked to the liquor cabinet and fetched another bottle. He opened it, brought it to the desk, and refilled his glass.

“Sir Ian?”

He looked at her again as he sat down. “Hmm?”

“You were right about me, you know,” she said in a low voice. “You were right.”

“In what respect?”

She gave him a tipsy smile that made him suck in his breath. “I am a flirt and a tease.”

Ian glanced down at her pretty feet peeping from beneath the hem of her nightgown. He indulged in a long look upward, torturing himself with imaginings of what was underneath two thin layers of muslin fabric. He paused, his gaze riveted to where a few tiny pearl buttons had popped free of satiny loops to reveal the inner
curves of her breasts. His throat went dry, and he opened his mouth to agree with her.

She reached out, pressing her fingers to his lips, making heat curl in his belly. “Don't be all polite and gentlemanlike right now and apologize and say you didn't mean it. You said I'm a flirt and a tease, and that I manipulate men to get my way, and you are absolutely right. I like having my way, and I use what I have. I have teased men, and kissed men, and made them want me.”

“Poor devils,” he muttered against her fingers in acute self-pity.

Lucia pulled her hand back, much to his relief. “But since I was a girl of seventeen, I have known the truth about myself. All I want, all I have ever wanted, is one man. Just one. To love me just as I am, without being ashamed of me or wanting to change me. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Before he could answer, she spoke again. “I have much feeling in me, you see.” She looked past him, her dark eyes all dreamy—from female romanticism or alcoholic haze, he couldn't be sure. “I have much to give, saved up all my life. I have passion and laughter and love and—” She paused to take a drink. “And myself,” she went on in a soft, confiding voice. “I know what Haye thinks, but he's wrong about me.”

Ian had once regarded the earl as a decent fellow, a man of good character, but now he could not think of him with any opinion other than utter contempt. Soiled goods, he'd called her.
God, the idiot couldn't see something luscious right in front of his nose.

And she was luscious. Of course, she was also an exasperating, unpredictable femme fatale who was making some of England's most well-bred gentlemen brawl like ruffians, and Ian didn't know if he was going to live long enough to get her married off. “I told you, Haye is an ass.”

She bent her head, and coffee-black curls tumbled over her face. “I've done a lot of wicked things, you know. I've gambled at Parisian gaming hells, and I've smoked tobacco and eaten hashish and gotten drunk.” Without looking at him, she lifted her glass in a wobbly salute to her past escapades, then lowered it again and continued, “At the convent, I used to sneak into the kitchens and steal food—they gave us so little, and I was always hungry. They thought going without food would make me good.” She gave a little hiccup. “It didn't.”

Ian smiled at that. No surprise there.

“Sometimes,” she went on, “I stole vinegar or olive oil the nuns made, and I would go into the village to sell it so I could buy tobacco to smoke. Whenever the nuns caught me stealing, they used a rod to beat me, and I shouted curses at them and spat at them.”

Ian felt another spark of rage, and his hand tightened around his glass. “Perfectly understandable of you, to my mind,” he murmured, thinking anyone who put a rod anywhere near Lucia's pretty backside ought to be horsewhipped in return.

“When Cesare banished me and sent me to
my cousins in Genoa,” she went on, “I stole two gold plates, sold them to a pawnbroker, and boarded a ship for London. I wanted to see my mother. Cesare hadn't let me see her since the convent.”

“I've wondered how you'd managed to get yourself to England.”

“Yes, I've done a lot of bad things,” she said with a nod, her head bent, her voice low and contemplative. “Once or twice, I've even let a man I really liked touch me, but no more.”

Damn it all, he already knew she was a virgin. Did he have to listen to this?

“I've never done…I've never given a man
that,
” she went on. “Not even Armand.”

Ian felt himself coming apart. He wasn't her priest, and he jolly well didn't want to hear her confession. He set down his glass, stood up, and grabbed her chin. He lifted her face, intending to kiss her and shut her up.

“He wanted me to,” she said before Ian could carry out his intent. “But I wouldn't. I've saved myself for one special man who loves me, and I'm going to be the best wife in the world for him.”

Christ.
Ian yanked his hand away and sat back down. He wanted to go pound his head into a wall. Instead, he took another drink.

“I used to sneak out and meet Armand at night because I loved him. He didn't love me though. If he had, he'd have told my father to go to the devil and he'd have taken off with me somewhere and married me. Five thousand sous and a merchant's
daughter were more tempting than I was. But—” She shoved hair out of her face and looked at Ian. Her big brown eyes began to glisten. “I'm not soiled goods.”

Those words ignited something inside him, something he'd never felt before, something primal and savage, something he could not control. Before he knew it, his glass was out of his hand and flying across the room toward the fireplace where Haye had been standing earlier in the evening. It hit the marble mantel and shattered into bits.

He looked at Lucia and found her watching him, her eyes wide with shock at what he'd done, her fingers pressed to her mouth.