The Corrupt Comte (16 page)

The crowd laughed their agreement, some raising glasses of sparkling champagne in acknowledgment.

“Excellent.” He smiled at them, then turned that smile on her. It was a charming smile, inviting one to join in his good cheer, but now that she knew what to look for, she saw the coldness lurking behind the kindness. He was measuring her, though for what she didn’t know.

She feared knowing.

“I wish I was more eloquent, but I’m afraid I’m unable to contain my excitement.” He beamed out at the crowd. “I’m announcing my engagement to Mademoiselle Pascale—please, congratulate us!” He took the hand on his arm and gripped it hard, raising it between them.

The guests, in collusion with the villain at her side, cheered boisterously, and the maestro struck up the orchestra in vibrant song. Bolstered by the happy news, the partygoers danced and drank with greater fervor, the din in the ballroom rising with each passing second.

For Claudia, it seemed so very far away. The duke lowered her hand, his hold shifting from her gloved fingers to her wrist, encircling it, squeezing it. He bent to her, switching back to English. “It’s a done thing,
chérie
. You’re going to be a duchess.”

She swallowed.

“Tomorrow, we marry by special license.” He paused, and his thumb stroked slowly over the inside of her wrist. “Enjoy tonight. It’s the last you’ll be alone.”

The second he released her, she disappeared into the crowd with a deadened sense of panic, crossing the ballroom as she headed for the grand wall of glass-paneled doors she’d noticed earlier. The doors led to the veranda, and, relatively unnoticed given the commotion of moments earlier, she slipped out into the chilly night air.

It was too cold to be out in the elements without a cloak, but she’d rather freeze out here than risk facing one or both of her parents in her bedchamber. She could barely summon the burn of betrayal. She’d known this would happen, had noted the clues and picked up on the cues surrounding her. Perhaps if she’d been more aggressive in her pursuit of Sabien, she’d have convinced him to marry her by now.

She refused to think about the
comte
. He hadn’t been there when he said he would be…but perhaps that was the sort of man he was. Unreliable. Untrustworthy. It wasn’t as though she
knew
him. She only knew what he did to her body, what he made her feel. She couldn’t find him in this city, even if she wanted to.

The
comte
had left her life as quickly as he’d entered it.

A light snow started to fall, and she shivered, violently. The veranda was eerily quiet, with no other guests having been foolish enough to venture outside. She stared out at the sprawling rear gardens of Évoque’s mansion and couldn’t decide if she pitied or envied the gardener his massive responsibilities.
Grandpére
had long touted the importance of working one’s own garden,
For how else do you know which scent belongs to which green, which flower?
Claudia had spent many an afternoon in the garden with him, before her governess told her he had succumbed to his demons and gone mad.

Her teeth were starting to chatter, but she wasn’t ready to go back inside, not yet. Inside, she would have to face her parents. Her fiancé. Tilting her head back, she gazed up at the black, starless sky. She was an engaged woman, practically already married, and she hadn’t said a word in protest.

She hated herself for her predictability.

Watching the flakes flutter slowly, silently, to the ground, catching on her eyelashes and melting on her upturned face, Claudia fought to accept her new situation. There was no recourse available to her, with no money in her name and only a small allowance at her disposal, no friends, no family—no options for escape. Nothing to do but marry Évoque and…and teach herself to predict
his
behavior. It was the only way to survive the rest of her life.

A shadow fell across her, and she whirled in a gasp. “It’s you,” she breathed, her heart pounding as stupid joy suffused her.

“Claudia, where is your coat?” he demanded sharply, shrugging out of a heavy black overcoat as he spoke and striding forward to settle the warm woolen garment around her shoulders. It was far too large, but it smelled strongly of him, spicy and familiar, and she snuck her fingers through the gaping neck to pull the lapels tighter across her chest, burrowing deeper. “Why are you not inside?”

She felt stupid with the desire to smile up at him and torn by the need to cry. Her eyes stung with unshed tears as she gazed at him, his features unaccountably harsh in the yellow light streaming through the glass doors.

“I n-n-needed air.” Then she saw him, truly saw him, and her eyes widened. “What happened to you?”

He wore neither white nor red, but the dull hues of a low-class tradesman. His homespun shirt hung loose around his arms, and the brown wool vest had certainly seen better days. Instead of his usual decadent cravat, a dark neckerchief covered his throat. His dirty tan breeches disappeared into the tops of slouchy black boots, well-worn and supple around his calves. There was no lace at his cuffs for once, which made the black leather gloves he wore that much more shocking. It was as though she were seeing his hands for the first time, and they were large. Intimidating.

His face was different too. He hadn’t shaved, the faintest golden-brown scruff covering his jaw. Dirt smudged his temple, and a cut caked in dried blood bisected one brow. He looked angry, dangerous and nothing like himself.

Or maybe…maybe he looked
exactly
like himself. He wore those ragged clothes like a second skin, making his usual frippery all the more a costume.

His jaw clenched, and she realized he didn’t intend to answer her. She gave herself a moment to breathe, as she didn’t want to stumble the first time she said it. “Gaspard?”

He closed his eyes. He was shaking, ever so slightly.

“Gaspard, p-please.” It felt good to say his name, even easy, and she hated
G
words as much as she did every other hard consonant. “T-tell me you’re all right?” She wanted to touch him but sensed she would be rebuffed, so she snuggled deeper into the collar of his coat.

“
Oui.
Yes.” He shook himself, and then both hands were on her shoulders and he was pulling her inside the sheltering curve of his body. He seemed bigger to her tonight. Stronger and meaner, and maybe he could help her find a way out of this terrible engagement. Maybe—

“We must go inside now.” The words were choppy, harsh.

To the ball? “B-but your clothes…”

He steered her toward a set of steps she hadn’t noticed leading down into the garden. “We will go to your room. I know the way.” He stopped suddenly, and his arm squeezed her closer.

Closer felt incredibly, wonderfully safe.

“Why were you outside, Claudia?”

So he hadn’t believed her when she said she’d escaped for some air. If she were him, she wouldn’t believe her, either. “I am t-to be…m-married.” A couple of silent tears snuck through her defenses, chilling instantly on her cheeks.

His breathing hitched audibly, and then he moved them forward again, until they were negotiating the dark side of the mansion and he led her to a secret door on the side of a turret. After he pushed her through the door and into a hidden staircase, she decided to stop worrying about her situation, and his.

Gaspard Toussaint obviously had things under control.

Chapter Ten

The Duke of Berry was dead by Gaspard’s hand, but, much as Faron had predicted, their patsy had claimed responsibility for the deed.

Faron had found the royal saddler Louvel wandering the alleys of
rue de Richelieu
, muttering to himself and pacing, one hand hovering around the handle of a poignard trapped in his belt. Gaspard had watched from the mouth of the alley as Faron approached in the guise of a stumbling drunk. Louvel had been startled, then intrigued as Faron let loose the angry, inciting prompts they’d planned.

He disparaged the Bourbons as a scourge upon the country.

He professed his steadfast loyalty to Napoleon.

“Someone needs to do something.”

Louvel had followed Faron as the spy ambled away in the direction of the opera house steps, and as he’d passed by, Gaspard had seen the maniacal glint in his eye, his mental instability a tangible thing in the sharp night air.

Lifting the dagger from Louvel had been simple, though Gaspard had clumsily sliced open the skin of his forearm when he’d slid the weapon up his sleeve, forgetting that he’d not worn the sheath in which he usually carried his own knife. He’d haunted the shadows at the top of the steps, hiding in unlit darkness, and watched as the Duchess of Berry, Princess Caroline, was bundled into a carriage with her lady-in-waiting.

That Gaspard’s target had been the one to hand her into the carriage was sheer providence. As soon as the duke had been vulnerable, Gaspard had been on him like a wraith, the blade shoved deep into Berry’s chest. The scene had devolved into chaos as Gaspard dashed down the steps, at the bottom of which Faron and Louvel had been waiting. Louvel’s expression had been one of awe, but when he saw Gaspard and Faron running in the opposite direction, some measure of animal survivalism seemed to click into place, and the saddler had followed.

He had followed too clumsily and been caught. Poor Louvel. As he’d been dragged to the watchhouse, the man had been shouting, “I did it! I did it! I knew I would do it!”

Poor Louvel, indeed.

But Gaspard was far more the fool than he, because here he sat in a pristine armchair before Claudia’s hearth, as if he deserved this seat or the attention she showered up on him, when he’d told himself he was done with her.

He’d held firm to that decision for less than a day. Weak, he was weak. He’d submitted to the incessant demand of his instincts, instincts that told him to go to her.

So here he was.

Using a towel dampened with warm water, she efficiently cleaned the gash over his left eye, earned when he’d rounded a corner too fast and run face first into a swinging wooden sign hanging haphazardly over a bookseller’s door, losing the cap that had hidden his hair and shadowed his eyes. Claudia’s expression was serious but soft somehow, and he couldn’t stop staring at her face. There was so much color to her tonight, set off by the pure white of her evening gown—gold in her skin, pink in her cheeks, red on her lips and the faintest hint of smoky blue-gray darkening the tip-tilted corners of her eyes. Firelight only extrapolated each hue, making her glow and turning her into a glittering palette of sensuality.

He wanted to sniff her, lick her, touch her. Paint with her. He wanted to sink into her, lose himself in her. Cleanse himself with her.

He wanted to…hold her. Simply hold her.

She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

I am to be married.
That’s what she’d said. Her engagement had been announced and, as it wasn’t to him and he knew Sabien had been occupied elsewhere, that meant…Évoque. Évoque had gone through with it, after all.

Silence reigned between them, and while Gaspard normally would not mind the quiet, it physically pained him now, worse than the bump on his head and the laceration hiding on his forearm. She might prefer not to speak, but he needed to hear her voice.

The sound of his name on her tongue… Mother of God.

Would she touch him so tenderly if she knew what he’d done an hour earlier? Doubtful, and the sick feeling that had been churning in his gut since the meeting in Max’s study after midnight nearly made him cast up his accounts.

It must be something he’d eaten today, or leftover adrenaline from the gruesome deed he’d committed. He couldn’t let himself believe he was sick, physically sick, over the thought of losing her. She was just a warm body. A soft, warm body, scented of honeyed tea, with a mouth that stuttered and snapped at him and sucked his cock like it had been divinely designed for that purpose alone.

“Kitten,” he rasped.

“No.”

“
Chaton
, I—”

“Let m-me finish.” She refolded the cloth and used two fingers to lift his chin, angling his face to the light. “You’ll b-be fine.”

Gaspard didn’t feel fine. He felt like shit. As she moved the cloth toward his forehead again, he jerked his chin from her grasp and grabbed her wrist. “Stop. Do not continue this…this care of me.” He glanced past her into the fire, noting how it leapt against the grate, much as he imagined did the flames of his future hell, though that hell could be nothing compared to what he’d lived through.

He was a man who’d had bones broken in every limb of his body, and broken them in the bodies of others. His survival was a sickly combination of luck, brutality and mercenary contrivance, all of which had turned him into the titled slave he was now. As of tonight, he was now a traitor to the king, along with being a war criminal, a murderer and one of the most desperate men to ever roam the sordid streets of Paris.

Claudia could never know these things about him. She would never love him if she knew.

He stopped breathing, gray fuzzing the edges of his vision.

Love
him? He didn’t want her love. No. Absolutely not. She was no longer a part of his plan, completely separate and uninvolved and newly engaged to the person he hated most in this world. The
living
person he most hated, that is.