Teresa Medeiros (28 page)

“Surely you jest.” Her low laugh hit an off-key note. “Miss Winters would never have allowed it. She wanted me given into the hands of my illustrious guardian, pure and undefiled.”

Her words struck Justin like a blow. Reeling from its shock, he stared down at her wrist. The dusky hairs on the backs of his knuckles stood out in sharp relief against the pale silk of her skin. His hands were strong, graceful, from
long hours at the piano, honed and callused by hard physical labor, and like any man’s hands, capable of both gentleness and cruelty.

His fingers had stroked her until she cried out for his touch in a voice husky with passion. His hands, not Barney’s, had defiled the child given into his care.

His thumb massaged the circlet of prints he had left in her tender flesh. “Ironic, isn’t it? I’d kill any man who had touched you as I have.”

She pulled her arm free and paced to the window, turning her back on him. “A pity dueling is out of fashion. You could challenge yourself. Penfeld would make a dapper second.”

A ragged sigh escaped him. The flippant Miss Scarborough was beyond his reach. His only hope lay in coaxing out a glimpse of his Emily.

His voice softened. “Why didn’t you wait in New Zealand? I was coming back for you.”

“Too little, too late, Mr. Connor!” Emily spun around, her ruse of control snapping. Unshed tears polished her eyes to brilliance. “What did you want me to do? Sit at the hut window until the birds built nests in my hair? No, thank you! I’ve had my fill of waiting for the likes of you. Seven years of it. Dreaming, hoping, praying. Sitting with my fingers pressed to the window until I thought they’d crack and fall off from the cold. Even after I’d stopped hoping and started to hate you, I’d wake up crying in the middle of the night and think I heard your footsteps on the stairs.”

Justin started for her. She recoiled violently, stumbling over a miniature railway laid before the window.

Her foot lashed out, sending the caboose slamming into the wall, marring the wallpaper with an ugly red gash. “Did you really think you could erase years of neglect with trains and dolls?”

Her arm raked across the marble-topped chiffonier. Tiny bottles of toilet water tumbled to the carpet, their
crystal stoppers rolling away. The sickly sweet fragrance of lavender water stung Justin’s eyes. “Did you hope to buy my forgiveness with baubles? Trinkets?” She hauled open the doors of the lacquered wardrobe, snatched out an armful of dresses, and hurled them toward him. “I fear you’ve misjudged me, sir. My affections can’t be bought for a length of ribbon or a scrap of lace.”

Justin stood unmoving beneath her assault, allowing Emily her anger. He owed her that much. She was finally giving vent to the pain she hid so well behind sarcasm and flippancy. She was magnificent in her fury, whirling through the bedroom like a cherubic demon of vengeance.

She wrapped her arms around a magnificent wedding doll complete with tiny trousseau and thrust it into his arms. “Why don’t you send all of these charming things over to the seminary? I’m sure Miss Winters will waste no time finding some other poor beggar child to board in my attic.”

Her fury spent, she folded her arm over her brow and leaned against the bedpost. Her slender throat convulsed, and it broke Justin’s heart to know how hard she was fighting not to cry in front of him.

He set the doll gently on the bed, afraid Emily might crumple if he touched her. “I didn’t know, Emily. I swear to God I didn’t know.”

She gazed at him over her shoulder, her eyes glistening with tears. “And if you had known? Would you have come?”

He yearned to offer her that pathetic scrap of reassurance. But even now he hadn’t the courage to say the words that would freeze the contempt on her face forever. The words that would brand him as the monster she had believed him to be. She had every reason to hate him. Far more reason than she knew. He couldn’t give her the truth. But he couldn’t lie to her either.

“I would have made the necessary arrangements.”

Her beautiful eyes darkened in bitter triumph. “And you thought me fool enough to wait for you again.”

Justin’s sense of helplessness nearly choked him. “I would have never left New Zealand if I hadn’t had to comb this godforsaken city for David’s daughter.” He narrowed his eyes as realization dawned. “If I had gone back, you wouldn’t have been there, would you? Because you were here, leading me on a merry chase for a child that didn’t exist. I’d have gone back to a deserted beach and an empty hut. Was that to be your final revenge,
Claire
?”

She tossed back her head in proud defiance. “Don’t call me that. You haven’t the right.”

With agonizing clarity Justin realized all of the other things he had no right to do. She was standing near enough for him to touch, but forever out of his reach. A wall of propriety had slid between them, as fragile as glass and as impenetrable as stone. Society had a name for men who seduced their wards. Their shocked whispers and stares might never touch him, but Emily had already lived half her life under the burden of their scorn. She deserved far better.

His oath to David bound his heart like chains of iron. He had robbed her of her father and it was his penance and duty to replace him. To atone for his own neglect, he could give her a home, an education, a place in society. He could even find her a husband who would cherish her as David had. Fate had ensured he could never be that man. She would despise him if she knew the truth about the night that had left her father’s blood on his hands. All his noble intentions paled in comparison to what he could never give her—his love, his body, his children.

A white-hot anger blazed through him. Anger at her cunning, her blatant deceit, and the terrible unfairness of it all. His desire for her flared as brightly as ever. He wanted this defiant woman no less than he had wanted the angelic creature who had washed up on his beach garbed in nothing but sand and moondust.

He caught her arms and drove her back against the bedpost. His fingers pressed into her soft flesh, assuring himself she was real and not an illusion of his maddened desire. Her lips trembled, and he felt a bitter satisfaction to know she was not as immune to him as she was pretending to be.

He lowered his lips near enough to smell the tantalizing musk of fear and anticipation on her breath. “Are we even now? Have you punished me enough, Miss Scarborough? Are you satisfied with your revenge? To make me want you? To make me dream of you when you knew that once I discovered I was your guardian, I could never lay a hand on you?” She turned her face away, but he forced it back, capturing her chin between two fingers. “It was a terrible and wicked thing to do. Your father would be ashamed of you.”

With those words Justin turned and left her, slamming the door behind him. He sank against the door, knowing his survival depended on pretending those stolen moments of passion and tenderness in New Zealand had never happened. But his bluff had not fooled him. Emily’s revenge had just begun, and the punishing flames of hell couldn’t lick any higher than his burning need for her.

Emily drifted in and out of sleep, her jumbled dreams as tortured as her waking thoughts. She threw back the suffocating weight of the comforter. An icy draft blasted her fevered skin, drying the sweat and rippling goose flesh over her body. Shivering, she burrowed back under the comforter and tried to pinch her down pillow into some semblance of comfort. It was too wet from her tears to be salvageable. She heaved it off the bed and threw herself back, rapping her head sharply against the carved headboard. Groaning, she rolled facefirst into the mattress.

She had taken to her bed after Justin had stormed out, and was contemplating spending the remainder of her life there.

She had lain unmoving, her sullen face turned to the wall when the maids had come to clear away the toys and sweep up the debris. She ignored the broth they brought, rising only to wiggle out of the binding wool and creep into the nightdress they left draped across the footboard of the bed. For hours people had tiptoed and whispered outside her door as if she were dying, but now, at last, even they had gone away.

She sat up, hugging her knees. One by one the tears slipped unbidden down her cheeks. Loneliness was no stranger to her. She had often tasted its bitter draft huddled in the attic with only Annabel for company. But that was a vague melancholy compared to this shuddering ache. All she wanted was someone to hold her. Annabel’s porcelain limbs were a cold comfort at best.

How could she be so miserable in such luxury? Two nights ago, shivering on an icy park bench, she would have swooned to imagine being snuggled between a feather mattress and a fat down comforter. A brass warming pan had been tucked at the foot of the bed to toast her toes. A fire licked at the grate, but its serene glow only emphasized the unfamiliar shadows of the room. The half-tester loomed over her head like a black cloud.

The alien house creaked and sighed a mournful refrain. Emily shivered. This was worse than being alone—a thousand times worse. Justin was in this house somewhere, near enough to hear her cry out but separated from her by a jagged chasm of broken promises and lies.

Emily wiped her cheek with her ruffled sleeve, becoming slowly aware of a new sound—music seeping through the floorboards. The faint notes swept her heart, bittersweet and hauntingly familiar. They called out to her, compelling her to rise and seek their source.

Her fists knotted in the comforter. How could she face Justin again? Her first glimpse of him beneath the Christmas tree had wreaked havoc on her fragile control.

With his dark hair trimmed against his nape and his
face clean-shaven, he had looked ten years younger than she remembered—vulnerable but devastatingly handsome in a crisp suit tailored to the lean planes of his chest and thighs. He had offered his heart in that lopsided grin, looking as tempting and delectable as a present waiting to be unwrapped. Emily had felt like a dowdy wren in Doreen’s borrowed dress and bonnet. Only her humiliated pride had given her the strength to spurn him.

It had been so easy to condemn him, but having him look at her as if he despised her, knowing he loathed what she had done, made her feel truly ashamed for the first time in her life.

The music played on, dancing over her nerves like silken fingers. She threw back the comforter and climbed down from the bed. A pair of velvet slippers warmed on the rug in front of the hearth. She shoved her feet into them, unable to resist a wiggle of her toes in their plush contours.

As she slipped out of her room, the music grew louder, a dark and fantastical lullaby in the sleeping hush of the house.

She crept down the long, curving staircase, realizing halfway down that the drawing room lay directly across the checkered tile of the foyer. Moonlight spilled through the wall of windows, varnishing the grand piano to an ebony gloss.

Justin’s hair flew as he pounded the keys. He had abandoned his waistcoat, and his white shirt was half unbuttoned. The muscles in his shoulders rippled beneath the rich linen. Sweat glistened on the column of his throat.

Emily sank to a sitting position on the stairs, clasping the wooden balusters in her trembling hands. The melody poured over her in jarring shocks of recognition. It was the symphony he had written for her on the island. Hearing it rendered in these magnificent tones made her realize what pathetic justice her own reedy voice had done it.

Justin played the piano like a master. His hands flew
over the keys, making her purr and thunder beneath his skillful touch.

Emily’s eyes fluttered shut. Her mouth felt dry, her breathing unsteady. It was as if Justin were ravishing not the piano, but her, taking her against her will with each crash of the chords. As the music climbed to a crescendo, a broken gasp escaped her. Her eyes flew open.

Justin looked up, and his gaze met hers across the gleaming expanse of tile. His eyes were dark and dangerous. His fingers never missed a stroke.

I’ve spent the last few nights pouring all of my passions into my music when all I really wanted to do was pour them into you
.

Without warning his words came back to her, rough with promise.

Tearing her gaze away from his, she rose and flew back up the stairs. She slammed her door and locked it, her heart beating frantic wings in her throat. She jumped into the bed, slippers and all, and pulled the comforter over her head. But no matter how hard she pressed her hands to her ears, she still could not stop the music.

Chapter 20
 

“H
ere’s one, sir,” Penfeld said, jabbing his finger at the newspaper spread on the dining room table. “ ‘Personal maid,’ ” he read over Justin’s shoulder, “ ‘Companion. Expert dresser of hair. Fluent in French and Italian.’ ”

Something slammed into the ceiling above them. Tiny specks of plaster floated down to dust Justin’s tea. A muffled oath that was neither French nor Italian burned their ears.

“Do you think we can find a maid fluent in bear wrestling?” Justin muttered.