ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One (7 page)

Michael Powers were alive he wouldn’t want to wring his neck.  The thought of her carrying another man’s name made him ill and he refused to think of another man’s hands on her, no matter how good that man might have been.

All these years he allowed himself to be twisted against her by his own guilt and the lying words of the one person he knew never to trust.  It had been too easy to try and wash away love with reckless behavior and bitter arrogance. Not that such knowledge would make a difference now.  He should have found a way to get back to her. He had tried once and then given up.  David had made the point that both Sebastian and Jessy had done what they needed to survive these last years.  What mattered was what they did from here.  It was not going to be easy to convince Jessamy to trust him again.  He had no idea how to reconcile what he needed and what he was here to do, but Tamworth’s suit made it imperative he win her back before it was too late.

He had made a career of being bad, licentious and self-serving.  It was a hard habit to break, an identity not easy to separate from who he might be if given a chance.  Jessy had seen what he was beneath and trusted him not to hurt her.  She had shown absolute faith in him but, he almost destroyed her. He then had the temerity to blame her for supposedly becoming a courtesan, marrying another man, and not waiting like some nun in her father’s house for the day he would return.  She wasn’t a princess in some damn dragon guarded tower waiting to be rescued.  Jessy was more the type to grab a sword and slay the dragon herself.  

He was a hypocrite and it was a bitter pill to swallow.  He had hated her for supposedly doing pretty much what he had been doing; the essence of hypocrisy. Yes, he had amends to make, scores to settle and duties to take up.  He knew he would never be quite the kind of man that David was, but he didn’t have to be a total cretin either.  He just needed an opportunity to talk to her and then, hopefully, a further chance to prove to her he was the man she had believed he could be, the man he realized he desperately wanted to be.

Jessy was unaware as she rode toward Bridge House that she wasn’t getting rid of Sebastian St. Just.  He just hoped the series of events that had brought him home would not take him away again before he had the time to follow through on winning her back.  Tamworth’s sudden departure told him that the king had arrived on England’s shores and he knew that meant his work was about to begin.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Still pondering Edward’s sudden departure, Jessy rode through the dark and foggy night to Bridge House.  Where in the world Edward could have run off to at this hour, and exactly who had landed, did not distract her long.  Tamworth was highly placed in the Foreign Office, and she knew it was unlikely she would ever find out what he had been called to do or who he was meeting.  It was best not to be interested when she was sure to never receive any answers.  It was only a way to pretend Sebastian was not filling her head with his presence, his scent and his touch.

What she was currently doing did not fail to strike her as idiotic.  The growing restlessness that had begun to nag her for the past year would not be satiated by drinking, gambling and dancing.  She certainly didn’t even want to consider that Sebastian was the answer.  Once, he had been the center of her universe, the answer to every question in her life, her future.  She couldn’t afford to allow that to happen to her again.  Drowning herself in the slightly wicked pleasures of Bridge House would have to be distraction enough tonight.

Tomorrow, she vowed, she would do her damnedest to not think of him at all.

A part of her relished the freedom, the total lack of constraint that characterized this world versus the one she had left only moments ago.  There had always been a wildness in her and it chafed against the rigid and
demanding structure of society.  Life in the countryside with doting parents, who didn’t raise her terribly conventionally, had offered her a life that was entirely without the constraints that existed in London. She had often thought that if mama had lived, and she had been brought for a Season, she wouldn’t have enjoyed it.  The white gowned, simpering, coquettes of the Marriage Mart, and the ungodly strictures that ruled their behavior, was nothing but a way to leave one gilded cage for another.  

These excursions were a pale and potentially dangerous substitute for her more youthful freedoms.  But she knew if she didn’t have some outlet she would burst with the demands that her life placed on her.  Demands she would not wish away, but confused and exhausted her all the same.  Tonight she wanted to just be distracted and stop thinking about the decisions weighing her down.  She wanted to not think about Sebastian St. Just.

Bridge House was certainly not the worst of the haunts frequented by either of her worlds, but nor was it strictly an acceptable establishment for her to visit when she had marks already against her.  It was a place where both her worlds melded together. Owned and run by a woman who had once been the very notorious mistress of a duke, it was a gathering place for the rakes, the high flyers, the bored aristocracy, the merry widows and racy wives of wealth. 

Everyone went masked, which only added to the allure, and provided a license for looser behavior.  It also allowed everyone to conveniently not recognize one another.

Jessy adjusted her black silk mask and the domino which covered her golden dress.  Of course she was still recognizable, but by the code of the house, everyone would pretend otherwise.  She felt the little frisson of excitement that her monthly visits elicited and a sense of recklessness.  She was feeling decidedly rebellious.  Between the scene with Sebastian and her (not unrelated) decision that she would not accept Tamworth, she felt dangerously close to the edge.

Feelings, sensations she had almost forgotten she possessed had coursed to life again.  She had forgotten the intoxication of feeling hot blood beating under sensitive skin, of all her most delicate and secret places blooming to life at a touch, a look.  No number of masked flirtations or turns at faro could produce that level of excitement.  Is that what drove all this? She wondered.  Was her restlessness a product of having known such extreme physical and emotional sensations and then been deprived of them?

For a long while she had feared that what she had known, had felt with Sebastian would haunt her entire life.  It was too easy to be addicted, to crave that experience.  She knew people, men, who had come back from Waterloo injured and found themselves addicted to opium.  She knew the stories of

Caroline Lamb and the obsessive love that drove her mad over Byron. That poor woman had lost all sense of self, and dignity, in the compulsion that drove her. Love, lust, opium or alcohol could all be unbreakable addictions. 

There had been a time when she couldn’t get through an entire day without his touch and the sound of his voice.  Joy at time spent with him would swing her so high she was transported, only to be followed by despairing lows when he was gone for so much as a day.  It had taken years to reach a place in her life where he wasn’t her center, where she could think about him and not want to violently break something. The pain had been unspeakable to have to do without him, and worse to know he hadn’t felt the same when he abandoned her.  Living without him she had felt cleaved through the heart and soul. The rare times when the numb fog of misery had taken over were welcomed. Now he was back and so was the urge to smash her hand through the carriage window.

  His touch tonight had confirmed for her fears.  How could she live on a diet of the bland and ordinary when she had tasted the rich and heady?  She had experimented and let other men, a few, kiss her and hold her over the past years and found the moments lacking.  She had tried to convince herself she simply was no longer capable of passion, that surely the damage she had suffered had burned all that out of her.  She had tried to be glad.  Watching other couples she had come to understand that what had burned between them in passion, laughter and shared interests was not common.  It was not a love likely to be repeated with another and she didn’t want it back if she couldn’t keep it forever.

Tonight in her dressing room had proven the fires still raged in her, they just had been dormant.  Unfortunately for her, they seemed to ignite for only one man.  The one man she truly could not and would not have in her life, the one man who could finally destroy her if she let him close again.  She could not survive that kind of pain twice. The idea of letting him get close and then up and disappearing again was enough to make her feel sick.  She unconsciously pressed a hand to her stomach.

The carriage slowed to a stop and the doorman assisted her down.  Bridge House was an imposing and elegant resident, bricked and colonnaded with tall windows.  Lights glowed into the night and the sound of laughter and the rattle of dice in cups and music greeted her as the doorman took her cloak.  It was crowded tonight and the noise, the press of people, the smell of perfume, tobacco and the arrangements of flowers that decorated the low tables assailed her senses.  It was elegant and yet unmistakably raffish.  Gowns were cut a bit lower, eyes glittered behind silken and velvet masks, smiles were slyer and easier, bodies stood closer to each other with an understood sense of intimacy.

“Good evening Madam,” a lightly accented French voice addressed her. 

“Your usual drink?”

She turned and smiled at the slender man who spoke.  “Yes indeed Jean-

Claude, and show me the way to my friends.”  She didn’t need to state names, this discreet man knew all the associations and workings of those who came to
this house.  The fact she had a ‘usual’ drink here should tell her it was time to cut herself off from this venue.

“Madam, I believe they are in the blue parlor enjoying a little presentation.”

Presentation? She wondered.  What this time?  It was not unusual to be offered entertainment for those not playing dice or cards, but the blue parlor was the most private of the salons.  She had never been in there before.

“I believe it is Lord M-‘s birthday and his friends have arranged a little private entertainment,” Jean-Claude elaborated having seen the questioning look on her face.  Jean-Claude was always a bit starchy and quiet as befitted his position but something in his tone indicated a reluctance.  He hadn’t moved to escort her there.

“Well lead the way monsieur before I am more than just fashionably late,” her lips curved below the black mask.

“As you wish,” and he led her on through to the back of the house.

The wound their way through the press of bodies, heads turning at their passing.  Jessy took the glass that appeared in front of her as the door to the Blue Parlor was opened. She took a sip of her favorite wine and then very nearly spit it out.  What met her eyes as the door of the blue parlor closed on her shocked even her theater jaded sensibilities.  

Within a circle of sumptuously dressed masked figures, two women, completely unclothed, were engaged in a rather grotesque acrobatic that at first made no sense to her wondering eyes.  When she finally followed the pattern of limbs and heads she could feel herself turn green and then flush with mortification.  She was not even aware of the door opening behind her until firm hands took her by the shoulders and promptly dragged her from the room.

Without even a chance to turn around she found herself spirited through another door and into a small empty room where a fire blazed in a marble hearth.  She whipped about the moment the hands released their pressure not certain if she had been rescued by a friend or was about to confront an importunate male with nefarious plans.  What she saw was Sebastian.

Her mouth gaped open rather comically and before she could even form a word she found herself being roughly shaken.

“What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?  Is this the kind of company you keep?  The way you preserve that precious reputation of yours?  This is the last place beside an out and out brothel I would have expected to find you after everything David told me.”  His face was pale with fury and the glitter in his eyes was more than a little unsettling.  She needed some composure and she needed it now.  But two shocks in a row were her undoing. And what the
hell
(she couldn’t help the unladylike word popping into her head) had David told him?  Nerves, anger and embarrassment came out in a violent torrent of words she couldn’t stop.

“Well I see you here!  Isn’t what’s good for the goose also good for the gander my lord?  Why the sudden concern for my reputation?  Aren’t you the one who this very evening offered to make me your whore? Certainly this place is too tame for you.  Shouldn’t you be the one at a brothel?”  And she instantly knew she had gone too far.  Long strong fingers bit into her shoulders and she knew she would have marks there come tomorrow.  

“What am I doing here you ask?  Attempting to save your much vaunted reputation. I thought maybe you didn’t realize where you were going, but after seeing how that eunuch of a French major domo treated you, you are a regular.  Much thanks I get for rescuing you from that filth.  I suppose I should just return you to the show.” He sneered.

“Oh don’t be an idiot.  That look has never worked on me,” she tossed out. “Of course I don’t want to see that dreadfully ridiculous show.  I have never seen anything like that here before.  I would have turned around and walked out myself if I hadn’t been so shocked.  It’s that fool Lord Marsh.  He has the tastes and inclinations of a fourteen year old boy.”  She set the wine glass in her hand down with a snap after having taken a good sized gulp of it.

“What are you doing here Sebastian?  And playing knight errant to,” she laughed with a slight sneer of her own. “I would have imagined that while that show wasn’t to my tastes it might be right up your line. Even cut off one has heard things from Celtica over the last years.  Your reputation has proceeded you home.” 

“I’ll let the last bit pass other than to say I have never, not since I was fourteen anyway, been that tasteless or juvenile.  I am here because of you.  I saw you leave the ball after Tamworth and wanted to talk to you. I asked a footman where you were headed and could barely believe his answer.  You need a chaperone now and always did.  You don’t have any more sense now then you did at sixteen.  I don’t know how you have managed in London at all.”

“Is it any of your business where I go or what I do?  You think you can just show back up all these years later and start following me about?  Dictating who I have for friends and how I spend my time?  Would it be inappropriate for me to be here if I had taken you up on your offer earlier?  I think I recognized plenty of mistresses out there this evening.  Don’t I fit right in?” She tossed her head and provocatively cocked one hip as she slipped the domino aside with one slim hand. She’d been on the edge of snapping all evening, since seeing him sitting in that box in the theater, and now it was expressing itself in a rage.  How dare he?  How dare he act like he had a right to tell her how to do anything at all?  

Sebastian eyed her uneasily.  It had seemed the right and proper thing to do to follow her, protect her from herself if he had to, but he had forgotten how formidable she was in a temper.  If she didn’t get it under control they would make a more obvious scene than the one playing out in that private room.  It didn’t help she had just thrown down a gauntlet he was more than tempted to
pick up. God she was beautiful in a temper. She was also as noisy as he remembered.  Maybe the two of them weren’t so changed after all.

“Are you just going to stand there like a block of wood?  You’ve propositioned me, followed me, manhandled me and insulted my intelligence all in one evening and you have nothing to say for yourself?  Seven years!  Seven! You waltz back into my life and cause me nothing but grief!  I have my own life now and I’d advise you to stay out of it.  I’ll live it the way I want to without your interference.”  She nearly shouted, her eyes sparking green lightening.