[Samuel Barbara] The Black Angel(Book4You) (2 page)

Turn.

And fire.

Involuntarily, she slammed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes closed. A man cried out in surprise. Her eyes flew open.

Blood bloomed in the shape of a peony over Malvern's chest. Adriana saw the stain leak into the embroidered satin of his waistcoat, spreading like doom, saw the surprise steal away his drunkenness. Abruptly unfrozen, she raced forward and grabbed Julian's arm. "God, Julian, you've killed him! You killed the Duke's bastard."

Julian dropped the pistol, and the icy calm over his face shattered. He raised gray eyes to Adriana's face, and in them she glimpsed misery and resolve. "He'll trouble you no more."

She flung her arms around him, weeping. "I am so ashamed," she whispered against Julian's neck.

Gabriel touched her back, her hair, and she embraced him fiercely. "Take care of him," she whispered, then pulled away. "Now, go. Go!"

Without a word, they turned together, and disappeared into the mist of the dark morning.

Hartwood Hall, England

1786

Just before the bells awakened her on her wedding day, Lady Adriana St. Ives dreamed of her brothers. They rode white horses over a muddy road, and even in the damp, they looked splendidly heroic, one so fair, the other so dark. There was urgency in the air all about them; their hair and cloaks flew, and the horses' hooves kicked up a spray of mud over the men's legs. Firm intent marked their faces.

They were coming. Coming to save her.

Bolting awake, she found herself alone in her cold chamber, blinking at the pale light coming through mullioned windows. Only her own bed. And no sound of horses beyond. She fell back to the pillows, heart pounding, and blinked at the dark-beamed ceiling.

A dream. Only a dream. But after a moment she rose, taking a wrapper from the chair, and padded over to the window to peer out. The grounds of Hartwood Hall spread in wet emerald beauty below a drizzly sky, the leaves of the boxwood glistening along the edge of the road. A road that was empty, as she'd known it would be.

She leaned her forehead against a pane of glass, the improbable hope withering in her breast. It had been almost five years since Julian and Gabriel had fled England after defending her honor, or rather, avenging her shredded pride. She was quite certain they were dead, drowned at sea or captured by Indians or fallen to some exotic fever.

No, there would be no rescue from her brothers, as there had been when they were children, playing pirate in the lush landscape of their father's Martinique estates. But that did not keep her from wishing to be saved.

Shivering a little in the damp, she walked over to her desk and took out her pen, and ink, and a small bound book. She and her sister Cassandra had both acquired the habit of journals, a way to amuse themselves on the long passages between the islands and home. Long, long, long days for children. She began to write:

In an hour, I must allow them to know I have awakened, but this last hour is mine, perhaps the last I can call my own for a good many years. It is, at the outside, the last in which I will be free.

At noon, I am to be married to a man I have never seen, a distant Irish cousin my father thought would make me a suitable husband.

Cassandra has been most insistent I should resist this match, as have all those glittering renegades who grace her salon. They are too scandalous and mixed a lot to approve this move I must make in behalf of my family. They thought me too much like them, I think, seeing in me a freedom of character and heart that does not truly live in my soul, thinking those months of passion with Malvern meant I have some wild freedom of attitude, which is not true. In fact, I am only a ruined spinster who so disgraced herself that she is lucky to find even an Irishman for husband.

But it is to Papa that I owe my allegiance. He worried so much about us toward the last! If he chose this Black Angel for me, I suppose he imagined some good would come of it.

But foolishly, I've harbored a fantasy that somehow my brothers would hear of this marriage, and come home in time to set things right. Foolishness, but I know Papa never gave up watching for them to return, either, so at least I am not alone. They were likely slain in the uprising that cost Papa his fortune, but I feel I would know if they were dead, if their spirits no longer walked the earth.

Ah, I promised myself I would not be maudlin, but here it is, a gray cold morning, and I find I cannot help myself. I miss them most terribly.

Now I've splotched the page and my ink will smear. For it is Julian who is most emphatically in my thoughts this morn, golden Julian who tossed all away to avenge his sister in a duel. And disappeared to save his neck. Now, to do my part to save our estates, I must take this rake they call Black Angel as my husband and somehow make the best of it. For all of us.

With a sense of finality, she scattered sand over the page, then bent to add coal to the fire. In the passageway beyond her door, she heard the first stirrings of her sisters, probably the youngest two, by the excitement and hushed giggling. Fondly, she smiled, and the tight knot of worry eased a little.

Without her knowledge, her father had arranged the marriage before his death a year ago. As his consumption stole the breath from him, he worried obsessively over the fate of his daughters and wrote at length to the Earl of Glencove, Tynan Spenser, whom he'd met in London a few years before, to offer his eldest daughter's hand in marriage.

Spenser had written to Adriana two months ago, almost a year to the day after her father's death. Although she had at first been appalled at both her father's belief that Julian was dead—else there would be no need to arrange the marriage at all—and at his high-handedness in arranging the match, Adriana knew how desperately the family estates needed the influx of capital Spenser would bring.

And he, by trading on her father's good name, hoped to buy a seat in the English House of Commons. It amused her, and she'd written him an acerbic letter, making sure that he knew of his future wife's scarlet past before he committed himself.

The return mail had carried a very short missive. "It does not matter," he wrote. "Will be arriving in London, 10 September. Will correspond further then."

And in many ways, the solution had been the answer to a prayer, so Adriana tried to make the best of it. Knowing nothing of him, save the blatant facts of his tide and holdings in the west of Ireland, she had conjured a picture of him from clues she could gather from his letters. The handwriting was bold and sprawling, marred with blotches of ink and hastily crossed-out words. It suggested to her a man of energy, a plain-speaking country Irishman with political ambitions. Someone near her father's age, perhaps, portly or balding. Yes, she could make such a trade.

Such bliss in ignorance!

Wrapping a warm woolen shawl around her shoulders, Adriana heard a squeal, quickly hushed. Her sisters again. They were so young, she thought with a pang. A wedding, no matter how it was arranged, was to them the height of excitement.

She peered once more toward the road, and saw with despair that it remained empty.

It was Adriana's sister Cassandra who'd brought the truth of the Black Angel, gleaned in gossip. Tynan Spenser was no portly, balding squire. Instead, he was the very stuff of Adriana's nightmares, a rake with a silver tongue obscuring a heart as black as a winter night. He was rumored to have slept with every great beauty in London, and a good many wives of the Irish Parliament, and was said to make a fine game of it, passionate one moment, cold the next, so the women sighed in longing for him.

Adriana tried not to think what he might look like. She tried to remind herself of the way Malvern had looked that misty morning in Hyde Park, dissipated and sodden and distasteful.

Instead, her rogue imagination insisted upon dishing up other memories: the feel of her lover's mouth upon her throat, the brush of his hands over her breasts and gliding up her thighs—

She put her face in her hands, hating the betrayal of her flesh. Five years, and she still remembered. Not him, not her foolish, vain lover, but the pleasure he gave.

This was her most dangerous, and most private, failing—that she still ached for that pleasure. That she had not yet found a way to keep it from her thoughts, the wish for it. And now she would be forced to lie with a rake who'd made such pleasure his trademark, and she feared desperately that it would be her undoing. As it had been in the past. Somehow, some way, she had to armor herself.

Adriana clapped her hands sharply, and the noise of a half-dozen girls and women abruptly ceased. "Enough chatter! If we do not settle my attire, the bride will be late."

The chastening lasted barely an instant before the voices rose again. All four of her sisters, aged fourteen to twenty-one, plus two of the younger house maids, even Adriana's new girl, Fiona—oddly enough the first Irish maid she'd had—chimed in with opinions.

"Riana, please not the bombazine!" Ophelia begged. Fifteen and prettiest of them all, she clasped her hands under her chin in a prayer. "At least the blue silk."

"Oh, you only think of blue because it suits
you
," Cleo said with a toss of her head. Dusky as her half sister was fair, she rivaled her in beauty. "But, Riana, perhaps at least the gray brocade? It
is
more festive."

Cassandra, a widowed twenty and languid, sprawled over a divan, one hand on her cheek, a tendril of red hair falling down her forehead. "Since she's inclined to throw herself to sacrifice for our benefit," she drawled, "at least let her choose the gown of her doom."

Adriana, exasperated, looked to Phoebe—twenty-one and prim. "Help!"

"If you want to stay, halt your chatter," Phoebe said, her voice stiff as whalebone. Briskly, she pushed the maids out of the way and plucked a brush from one of their hands. "Can't you find some work elsewhere? We'll tend to our sister."

Summarily dismissed, they left. And as Phoebe's reign took hold, the others lit on the bed and the trunk. "There," Phoebe said with a smile. "You have some peace."

Adriana closed her eyes and took in a breath of air to steady the race of her heart. "I'm terrified," she whispered, and put her hands to her bloodless cheeks. "And it shows."

"You've let yourself be swayed by the gossip," Phoebe said, yanking the brush through Adriana's long, thick hair. "No man could live up to that reputation."

"I've heard otherwise," Cassandra drawled. A happy widow with no intention of marrying again, she kept a house in London. Her drawing room was famed for the wit and gossip batted about. "But in that you should find some comfort, sister. If he's the rake they say, he'll not want to molder about at Hartwood. He'll come in, and bed you, and be off again in a day. You'll be free."

"Cassandra!" Adriana hissed, tossing a warning glance in the direction of the two youngest girls.

"Perhaps he'll be so handsome you'll fall in love on sight," Ophelia offered. Her eyes went misty. '"' is such a dangerous nickname. I think he sounds exciting."