Suzanne Robinson (13 page)

“I just don’t see why you’re in such a hurry to get married,” Acton snapped. “You weren’t before, and I know why.”

Valin rounded on his brother. “Be careful, Acton.”

“You were afraid no woman would have you. You were afraid the old rumors would start again. Have any of them asked you about—”

“Shut up, will you?”

“Are you going to tell Miss de Winter?” Acton sauntered around Valin, a quizzical look on his face. “Or would you like me to do it, since you never like to talk about it? I could, you know. I’ll say to her, Oh, by the way, Miss de Winter, pay no attention to the silly rumor that my brother burned our father and stepmother to death in the old lodge when he was seventeen.”

Acton held up a finger. “And there’s no truth to the rumor that he seduced my stepmother. No truth to it at all. Those fights between him and my father were over boyish pranks at school, not over dear Carolina. Not at all.” Acton stood grinning nastily at Valin.

“You are a bastard, aren’t you?” Valin said.

“I’m only offering to help you, old fellow.”

Not trusting himself, Valin went down the terrace steps, then stopped. “Acton, do you remember the last time we had a fight? A physical one, that is.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember who won?”

Acton scowled at him.

“If you speak ill of me to Miss de Winter, you’ll spend the rest of the Season in bed recovering from our next fight.”

He left the terrace swiftly, fearing he’d lose control and tie Acton’s legs around his neck. Acton had a talent for ferreting out one’s weaknesses and using them as weapons. Valin had learned not to let his brother see that his barbs drew blood, but this attack had been so unexpected that he’d lost his temper. The old memories flooded his senses, and he was seeing images over a decade old.

Father had been married to Carolina for several years, and that day he’d gone to a neighbor’s to see about the purchase of a Thoroughbred. It was high summer, one of those hot, bright days when the heat bakes flies into a stupor and insects sing to the sun. He was home from school for a few weeks and had been riding that morning. Arriving home, he found a note from Carolina asking him to meet her at the old lodge.

Carolina made him nervous. She was only eight years his senior, but she had an air of experience about her. When they were in each other’s company Carolina would fix him with an appraising look that made him turn red. His confusion never failed to gratify her.

What was worse, she had a habit of making embarrassing remarks under her breath, making sure only he heard them. Once, before dinner, they’d been alone in the drawing room, and he’d knelt to stoke the fire. Suddenly she was beside him on the floor with her hand on his thigh. He’d nearly fallen on his ass scrambling to get away from her.

Why was she at the lodge? He had no desire to meet her there to become the mouse in her game of hunting cat. Valin tossed the note in the wastebasket in his room, but hesitated as he started to remove his riding coat. The last time he’d refused to see Carolina she’d complained of his rudeness to Father. If he displeased her, it would only end in unpleasantness. Perhaps he should meet her and come to some understanding; if he made it clear to her that he was unwilling to play games with her, there would be less trouble all around.

Valin pulled his jacket back on, returned to the stables, and was soon riding through the park. The old lodge was a hunting box built by an ancestor when King James was a frequent visitor to Agincourt Hall. Its red brick facade concealed an interior
gloomy with dark wood paneling. The narrow windows had been enlarged, but their diamond-shaped panes still kept out too much light. It was used infrequently, and Valin disliked its tiny rooms and numerous drafts. The place was so dark and cold that one had to light candles and keep the fireplace running even on a summer day.

Upon reaching the lodge, Valin knocked but received no answer. He went inside to find the rooms on the ground floor deserted. With growing irritation he realized Carolina had probably forgotten her summons and wasn’t even here.

Then he heard her laugh. He was about to call to her when he heard her again. This time she was singing to herself. Valin followed the sound upstairs, but his steps slowed when he recognized the tune. It was a bawdy tavern song with which no lady should have been familiar. As he hesitated, a silence fell.

Anxious to get this interview over with, Valin hurried across the landing to a half-open door. His fist was raised to knock on the portal when Carolina’s voice reached him.

“Come in, Valin. I’ve been waiting much too long.”

He recognized that teasing, suggestive tone. Torn between leaving at once and the need to placate his stepmother, Valin went into the room. Carolina was standing in the middle of the chamber
wrapped in a brocade dressing gown. She had lit a fire and placed dozens of candles around a four-poster bed. She gave him a little mincing smile and opened her dressing gown.

Valin’s mouth was already open. Now his eyes widened to the size of dessert plates and blood rushed to his head. Confusion and horror burned through Valin’s mind while his body turned into glacial ice. He couldn’t speak or move.

“My sweet, sweet Valin,” Carolina purred, “at last you’re here.”

Valin gawked at her as she sauntered over to him. Surveying him from head to foot. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, and she slurred her words slightly.

“I had an argument with myself,” she said. “The good Carolina said to wait. After all, you haven’t even been to university yet. But naughty Carolina had a fit. She’s so, so anxious, you see. And naughty Carolina won.”

Valin swallowed hard as she stood in front of him, hands on her bare hips, the dressing gown hanging from her arms and trailing behind her.

“Come, Valin. Say something instead of standing there looking like a stunned buck.”

His mouth dry, his body stiff, Valin felt as if he was separate from the scene being played. He watched as Carolina took his hand and placed it on her breast. That touch jolted him out of his daze.

He shoved Carolina away and turned to leave, but she quickly twisted him around and sank her hand into his hair, pulling his face toward her. Her mouth was almost touching his before he was able to disentangle himself and back away. She came after him, and he sped up to avoid her grasp. Her grin should have warned him, but he lost his balance before he realized he’d backed into the bed.

His stepmother was there as he landed. Slipping a knee between his legs, she placed her hands on his shoulders and shoved him deep into the mattress. Alarmed, Valin freed one arm and tried to get a grip on the woman. Suddenly he felt something around his wrist. His arm was jerked, and he realized Carolina had tied a leather thong around his wrist and attached it to a bedpost. Stunned, he watched as she slipped another thong around his other wrist.

“Be still, lover,” Carolina said. “You’re going to like this.”

“No!”

Valin bucked and yanked against the thongs—but they held. Carolina had apparently done this before.

Now she was breathing hard from their struggles, but her humor remained. “I should have taken more time with you, my pretty. But I do so like a man with a little fight in him.”

When Valin tried to free his arms again she slid
on top of him, slipped her hand under his shirt and found his waist. Valin tried to shake her off, but he couldn’t prevent her from moving her hand between his legs. When she squeezed him gently, he let out a roar of outrage and lunged up, off the bed. This time Carolina toppled to the floor with him. One of Valin’s wrists was still tethered to the bedpost, but the violence of their struggle had wrenched the frame apart. One post crashed against a bedside table, sending a candelabrum skidding to hit the far wall, where floor-length curtains framed a window.

Fighting to free his bound wrist, Valin had no time to escape when Carolina pounced on him again. She took his mouth in a violent kiss. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the flames. He tried to speak, but Carolina’s tongue was in his mouth. Desperate, Valin stopped trying to fight her and concentrated on freeing himself from the broken bedpost. While her hands roamed over him, invading and arousing a response he couldn’t control, Valin tried to untie the leather thong. It had been jerked even tighter by the fall.

Without warning, Carolina released his mouth.

“There’s a fire, damn you!” he cried.

She wasn’t listening. Her gaze caressed the flames, and to his horror Valin realized the danger had only excited her more. She looked down at him and tore his shirt open.

“You make me burn as hot as the fire.”

Valin’s body tensed with a strength he hadn’t possessed before, and the thong snapped. Leaping up, he sprang away from her.

“Come on. We have to get out.”

She pulled her bedraggled dressing gown around her shoulders as the flames jumped from the curtains to the bed. “Just a few minutes, pretty one. We have that much time, and it will be so good with the fire almost on us.”

Valin’s stream of curses was cut short when flames shot across the ceiling. In less than a second the wall by the door was ablaze. Carolina didn’t seem to care, and Valin realized she was either drunk or had taken some drug.

But the crackle and roar of the fire spurred Valin. “Come now, damn it!”

He worked his way across the room and hurtled through the flames that surrounded the door. Once outside, he found that his stepmother hadn’t followed him. Carolina stood where he’d left her. He yelled for her to hurry. Something of his desperation must have reached her at last. Gathering her dressing gown around her, she rushed toward him, but the fire shot across the carpet and into her skirts.

Valin tried to go back, but the searing heat blocked him. Fire burned his clothes. He could hear Carolina screaming as he stumbled back, coughing.
In desperation, he ran downstairs for water. There was an old pump in the kitchen yard. Valin grabbed a bucket and filled it, but by the time he got to the stairs the fire had spread to the landing. He could still hear his stepmother screaming.

Horrified, Valin rushed outside again, this time to his horse. He had his foot in the stirrup when his father galloped up, shouting at him.

“What’s happened?”

His throat hoarse, lungs burned, Valin gasped out, “Carolina is in there. We’ve got to get help!”

They stared at each other for a terrible moment, then his father was gone. Valin sprang after him, catching him only at the front door.

“You can’t go in there,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

His father shrugged him off, but he caught the older man again. This time, without a word, his father spun around and clipped Valin on the chin. Valin hit the ground swimming in pain, then blacked out. When he regained consciousness he was in the midst of a milling crowd, and the entire lodge was aflame. Valin struggled to his feet and stumbled toward it, but two men held him back. As he fought them, a figure carrying another person appeared at one of the upper windows. Or was it his imagination?

Valin screamed and pointed, but no one else saw. “Let me go, damn you, he’s there!”

“We don’t see nothin’, and it don’t matter, sir. Whoever’s in there is for it. Jesus, Billie, help me with him.”

Valin tried to hit one of his captors, and got a punch to the jaw that sent him into blackness once again.

The darkness dissolved, as did the years, and Valin returned to the present to find himself standing in the middle of the lawn. The ladies had noticed him and were calling. He managed to wave and smile as he trudged toward them.

Acton had been right. He was mad to consider marriage. What woman of virtue and honor would want to marry a murderer?

The morning after she’d left Valin floundering in the yew maze, Emmie sat beside Courtland in his study in the Gallery Tower. Underneath her tranquil exterior—while she listened to her host and nodded with interest—her entire being vibrated with turmoil. If she’d been piano wire she would have popped loose and zinged across the room. Last night she’d set out to cause the marquess trouble, and she’d succeeded. It had been exciting to provoke him out of his stern and masterful complacency.

And then she’d lost her wits in the yew maze. Valin North had driven her mad with anger and temptation at the same time, and she had grown so confused that she actually allowed him to kiss her. No, she had kissed him. Gracious mercy, what akiss.
A few more moments of that kind of kissing, and she would have ended up on the ground with him, making the yews shake.

Dear heaven. She hadn’t known kissing could be like that, hadn’t suspected what it could lead to. If Betsy ever found out, she’d laugh. All her friends would snicker and tease her for falling under the spell of an accomplished seducer like the marquess. How humiliating.

Everyone had heard stories about Valin and the Countess of Maxa, and Lady Perdita Strangeways, and Mrs. George William Arbuthnot. How dare he try to add her to that list?

She had to put Valin North in his proper place in her head—that of a rich dupe. But try as she might, he refused to remain in this safe category. She was desperate to hide that fact from her friends, and she longed to hide it from herself as well, but the truth was that Valin North was no dupe, and certainly not her prey. Indeed, it seemed that the moment she got near him her prey turned into a predator, one she feared she might not be able to resist.