Guilty Series (59 page)

She remembered his words the night they had met.
I will never write music again.

She thought of Etienne, who had forever been saying he would never paint again, only to be hard at work a few days or weeks later, passion renewed.

Her reply to Dylan that night at the Palladium had been so confident.
Yes, you will. One day.
She hadn't understood.

His hand tightened in her hair, fisted around the long, loose strands. “Then you came, and gave me hope.”

“Oh, Dylan, it isn't because of me.” She leaned over him and laid her hand against his cheek. “It is all inside of you. You do not know how strong you are!”

“Strong?” He shook his head. “The night you met me, I was trying to kill myself, for God's sake. That is as weak and cowardly as a man can be.”

“We all have our weaknesses, Dylan, but you have proven that you are strong. You have the will to live when living is hell and hope is all you have left.” She paused, then she said, “My husband was a volatile man, a man subject to abrupt, inexplicable changes of mood. He was a brilliant man, but he allowed the weaknesses in his character to take him over until they dominated everything he did.”

“The same could be said of me, Grace.”

“No. There is one great difference. I left my husband not because he had weaknesses but because he did not have the will to fight them. He lost his hope. If I had stayed, I would have lost mine, and he would have destroyed me. He died a year later.”

“Grace.” He pulled her down to him and kissed her. “Grace, you are the most compassionate person I have ever met. Whenever I am with you, you soothe me. Your voice,” he said and touched her throat. “Your eyes, so green. Fresh and green.” He touched her lashes with his fingertips. “Like spring, I thought, when I saw them in daylight. You quiet the noise in my head. Last night was the first night in five years I got a full night's sleep. When I am with you, the noise goes low and far away and I can hear music.”

She smiled. “I thought you were just being torrid, and making love to me. Pouring the butter over me to get me into bed.”

“Well, I was doing that, too.” He lifted her onto him and smiled that pirate smile at her in the moonlight. “And it worked,” he said, unbuttoning her nightgown. “Didn't it work?”

“Dylan, stop,” she whispered, glancing around as she tried to pull the edges of her nightgown back together. It was futile, for he was already sliding it off her shoulders. “We can't! Not out here!”

Impervious to her sensibilities, he ignored the hands that pushed at him, and he cupped her breasts. “Yes, we can,” he murmured, teasing her with his thumbs and his voice. “Come on, Grace. I dare you. Make love with me naked in the moonlight. I won't tell on you.”

And she did. A pagan dance with him in the dark. Wicked man, to tempt her with such delights.

In the cottage afterward, he slept soundly beside her, lying on his side, one arm around her waist, his other arm pillowing her head. Grace watched him, glad he could sleep. She loved him. He made her laugh. He made her glad to be alive.

She turned her head and whispered her secret against his palm, her voice so low that she could barely hear it herself. “I love you.”

She kissed his palm and folded his relaxed fingers over, gently, so as not to wake him. She did not fall asleep. Instead, she lay there with her lips pressed to his fist, where her secret was caught inside. She was alive in every part of her body and soul. She was thankful for each and every moment of happiness. But fear still cast a shadow over her, fear born of past pain and the dread of what she would feel if it all fell apart.

 

May turned to June. By tacit agreement, they were discreet. During the day, in front of others, they were polite and perhaps a shade more distant than they had been before. When they were alone, the things he did to her ignited the flames banked by daytime discretion and anticipation.

It was not only he who could inflame desire. She began to discover some of the secret things that drove him to ecstasy, and loving him as she did, she loved doing every one of them.

There were moments when it was hard to keep their secret. Sometimes, she would look up from one of Isabel's lessons and find him watching her, and she knew he was thinking about their nights together in the dark, of the words he murmured in her ear and the words he wrung out of her when he made love to her.

He liked that, she discovered, wordplay in bed. She discovered that she liked it, too. She had never known that such a wanton side of herself existed, but when he murmured hot, shocking ideas to her as he touched her, she wanted him to do them. He wanted her to tell him what she wanted, just for the sheer pleasure of hearing her voice. She did it and reveled in it.

He loved her hair. She put it up every morning, and he took great delight in taking it down every night. He ran it through his fingers, he pulled it down to fall over his face when she was on top of him. Sometimes, he would walk by her when no one was looking and snatch away a comb, bringing one of her braids tumbling down. Worse, he would walk away and leave her with the comb in his pocket and no way for her to put her hair back up.

When it was fine, they lay outside at night, talking, sometimes making love in the grass. When it rained, they remained inside the cottage, lying on the mattress with the window open, listening to the rainfall. Dylan liked rain, she discovered. He said the sound of it, like her voice and the ocean, soothed him.

Sometimes he slept, sometimes he didn't. When she had her courses, he slept with her anyway if she felt up to it, content to simply hold her. She loved that about him. Sometimes, if she had pain, she wanted to be alone, and he let her. Sometimes, he wandered away when he couldn't sleep, took long walks in the hills or along the sea by himself. She didn't know what he did or where he went, but he always came back to lie beside her. Slowly, day by day, Grace forgot what it was like to be all alone.

 

The pretty days of June went by and became the hot, sultry days of July. Dylan composed while Isabel had her lessons each morning. Most of it was a struggle, one note at a time. Occasionally, inspiration came in a flash—he'd see Grace walk by, or Isabel would laugh, or the ocean would call him, and he would have music to write. Those moments were precious and rare, and when they came, they were sweet satisfaction. Bit by bit, he worked his way through the symphony into the fourth and final movement.

The end of any piece had always been the easiest part for Dylan to write, but not this time. He just could not find the right way to bring this symphony to a satisfying close. This opus was a watershed, representing the beginning of a new phase in his life, and it was important. He wanted the finale to be just right, but perhaps he was simply trying too hard.

He knew now that when he felt like this, when he was exasperated by hours spent getting nowhere, it was time to stop and relax, and he decided to seek out his best two sources of inspiration.

Today, when he went up to the nursery, he found Grace teaching Isabel how to dance a waltz to the tinny sound of a musical box on his daughter's desk. Not wanting to interrupt, he paused by the door and watched.

Grace happened to glance up as she led Isabel across the floor, and she saw him standing in the doorway. He put his finger to his lips, and she carried on the lesson as he looked on, unobserved by his daughter.

Grace's golden head was bent slightly above Isabel's dark one. Dylan listened to her liquid voice count the cadence, a voice as melodious as the Weber waltz to which they danced.
Or tried to dance,
he amended to himself as his daughter stumbled.

A waltz was something Isabel understood from a musical standpoint, but actually dancing to one was something altogether different, as his daughter was now finding out. Grace tried with gentle patience to guide her along with the lilting melody, but Isabel was stiff and awkward, unable to relax.

Most people would have been surprised that someone with Isabel's ability at composition would be less accomplished with the dancing of it, but Dylan understood at once. She was frustrated by the notion of being led anywhere.

“I don't like this,” Isabel said, and she confirmed his instinctive conclusion by asking, “why can't I lead this time?”

“A girl doesn't lead,” Grace answered.

“You're leading me, Mrs. Cheval, and you're a girl. And anyway, who made up the silly rule that a girl can't lead?”

Dylan pressed a fist to his lips, smiling. So independent and strong-minded, his little daughter. Tenacious, too, forever questioning the world and everything in it just as he did, fighting its conventions and strictures with the same contrary nature he possessed. The reason for it was one he could not quite fathom, even for himself, let alone for his child. The need for drama to constantly replenish that creative well, or the restless, prowling energy that consumed him, too. Fighting the world, perhaps, because it was simply there, and life would be deadly dull if someone didn't fight it.

This was his connection with her, he realized, the true one, one deeper even than music. He understood her, and she made him understand himself. They shared character traits that were soul-deep, passed from him to her in a kinship beyond the loveless act that had created her.

She was so strong-minded, in fact, that it worried him. The life of a woman with his temperament would not be easy. He almost wished she had been born a boy. But then he looked at her in her white dress trimmed with a crimson ribbon—a ribbon of victory in the battle over proper colors for little girls. And the hem had ruffles of lace—
lace,
that hateful stuff that itched.

“Papa!”

She careened to a stumbling stop, her big, dark eyes looking at him, her absurd, pretty, rosebud mouth smiling at him. Dylan banished any thought of boys.

“May I lead?” he asked.

Grace stepped away and walked to the musical box to start the waltz again as he came forward and took his daughter by the hand. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Yes, Papa.”

No hesitation in that reply but a conviction she did not easily give, an inexplicable trust he hadn't yet earned.
He would earn it,
he vowed. “If you let me lead,” he said, “I will not let you stumble. I promise.”

She nodded, and he looked over at Grace. She was watching them, looking like a warm spring day, with her gold hair and her green eyes, with her peach-colored dress and her radiant smile. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and the sweetest dessert he'd ever had.

As he looked at Grace, Dylan felt his daughter's hand in his, how small it was, how vulnerable. His throat tightened, his heart constricted. It was too much, that feeling, it poured over him, sank into his bones, and welled up in his chest until he couldn't breathe.

He turned his head and looked through one of the open windows, seeing the pear trees in the distance. He turned his head again and saw the map of Devonshire on the wall. Right beside it was Isabel's rendering of Sonata, the pony—a rendering somewhat out of proportion. Nearby, his daughter's collection of seashells reposed in a clear glass bowl on a dark, cherrywood table. He had been in here countless times since they had arrived two months ago, and yet this time, he could only stand and look about him in a buffle-headed sort of daze, as if he had never seen it before.
Home,
he thought stupidly.
I am home.

“Papa, are you ready?”

He looked down into his daughter's upturned face and touched her cheek, and he finally understood what Grace had meant that night five years ago when she had told him why he needed to live.

You might be needed for something important.

This was it. This, every day, for all his days until they put him in the ground. Dylan held his daughter's hand tight in his and drew a profound, shaky breath. “Yes, my darling girl, I am as ready as a father can be.”

D
ylan and Isabel had been dancing for only an hour before their lesson was interrupted. “Sir?” Osgoode said from the doorway, raising his voice slightly to be heard above the musical box. “Sir Ian Moore has come to call.”

Dylan brought Isabel to a halt and looked at the butler. He hesitated, not wanting to stop what he and Isabel were doing, but he couldn't very well leave his brother lounging about in the drawing room. “Tell him we shall be there directly.”

He looked at Grace and Isabel, then he gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

Downstairs, Ian was waiting in the drawing room, and he rose to his feet as they came in. The moment he looked at Grace, Ian's eyes widened just a bit, and his usually impassive face flickered with surprised admiration of her beauty, and something more. But the smooth diplomatic countenance slipped back in place before Dylan could define quite what he had seen in his brother's face.

“Ian,” he greeted him, “you remember my daughter, Isabel?”

“Yes, of course.” Ian bowed to her. “Miss Isabel.”

“Good afternoon, Uncle,” she answered and dipped a curtsy, then took her father's hand in hers and gave Ian a look as imperious and gloriously superior as any queen his brother had ever met. Dylan could almost read the words
Told you so
above her head like a Rawlinson caricature. Ian's lips twitched with a hint of humor, but other than that, his face was politely grave.

“And this is Mrs. Cheval, Isabel's governess.”

“Excellency.” She gave him the full curtsy due his diplomatic rank as he bowed. “Will you take tea?” she asked.

“Certainly.”

Grace rang the bell and, when a maid appeared, ordered tea be brought, then she moved to sit in one of the chairs that formed a pair of conversational crescents in the center of the room. She motioned Isabel to sit beside her. Ian took the chair opposite Grace. Dylan, forever restless, did not sit down.