The Danger of Desire (44 page)

He had thought of her, or at least the idea of her, almost constantly over the years. She had always been there, in his mind, swimming just below the surface. And he had come tonight in search of her. To banish his ghosts.

She took a sliding step back to lean nonchalantly against the arm of a chair, her pose one of sinuous, bored indifference.

“So what are you doing in Dartmouth? Aren’t you meant to be messing about with your boats?”

“Ships,” he corrected automatically and then smiled at his foolishness for trying to tell Lizzie anything. “The big ones are ships.”

“And they let
you
have one of the
big
ones? Aren’t you a bit young for that?” She tucked her chin down to subdue her smile and looked up at him from under her gingery brows. Very mischievous. She was warming to him.

If it was worldliness she wanted, he could readily supply it. He mirrored her smile.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it, Lizzie?” He opened his arms wide, presenting himself for her inspection.

Only she didn’t inspect him. Her eyes slid away to inventory the scant furniture in the darkened room. “No one else calls me that anymore.”

“Lizzie? Well, I do. I can’t imagine you as anything else. And I like it. I like saying it. Lizzie.” The name hummed through his mouth like a honeybee sprinkled with nectar. Like a kiss. He moved closer so he could see the emerald color of her eyes, dimmed by the half light, but still brilliant against the white of her skin. He leaned a fraction too close and whispered, “Lizzie. It always sounds somehow ... naughty.”

She turned quickly. Wariness flickered across her mobile face, as if she were suddenly unsure of both herself and him, before it was just as quickly masked.

And yet, she continued to study him surreptitiously, so he held himself still for her perusal. To see if she would finally notice him as a man. He met her eyes and he felt a kick low in his gut. In that moment plans and strategies became unimportant. The only important thing was for Lizzie to see him. It was essential.

But she kept all expression from her face. He was jolted to realize she didn’t want him to read her thoughts or mood. She was trying hard to keep
him
from seeing
her
.

It was an unexpected change. The Lizzie he had known as a child had been so wholly passionate about life, she had thrown herself body and soul into each and every moment, each action and adventure. She had not been covered with this veneer of poised nonchalance.

And yet it was only a veneer. He was sure of it. And he was equally sure he could make his way past it. He drew in a measured breath and sent her a slow, melting smile to show, in the course of the past few minutes, he’d most definitely noticed she was a woman.

She gave no outward reaction, and it took Marlowe a long moment to recognize her response: she looked careful. It was a quality he’d never seen in her before.

Finally, after what felt like an infinity, she broke the moment. “You didn’t answer. Why are you here? After all these years?”

He chose the most convenient truth. “A funeral. Two weeks ago.” A bleak, rain-soaked funeral that couldn’t be forgotten. The downpour that April day had chilled him to his very marrow. He went cold just thinking about it, unable to shake the horrible feeling sitting like a lump of cold porridge in his belly. It was wrong, all wrong. Frank couldn’t be dead. He shouldn’t be dead. And yet he was. They’d found his body, pale and lifeless, washed up cold and unseeing upon the banks of the Dart. Drowned.

At least that was what the local authorities said. But Marlowe knew better. Frank was murdered. And he would prove it.

Lizzie’s murmur brought him back. “My condolences, for what they’re worth.” She ran her palm up and down her other forearm as if she were chilled. Lizzie had never been at ease with open emotion. “Anyone I knew?”

“Lieutenant Francis Palmer.”

“Frankie Palmer?” For a moment she was truly affected. Her full lips dropped open in an exhalation. “From down Stoke Fleming way? Didn’t you two go off to sea together, all those years ago?”

“Yes, ten years ago.” Ten long years. A lifetime.

“Oh. I am sorry.” Her voice lost its languid bite.

He looked back and met her eyes. Such sincerity had never been one of Lizzie’s strong suits. No, that was wrong. She’d always been sincere, or at least truthful—painfully so as he recalled—but she rarely let her true feelings show.

“Thank you, Lizzie. But I didn’t lure you into a temptingly darkened room to bore you with dreary news.”

“No, you came to proposition me.” The mischievous little smile crept back. Lizzie was never the sort to be intimidated for long. She had always loved to be doing things she ought not.

A heated image of her sinuous white body temptingly entwined in another man’s arms rose unbidden in his brain. Good God, what other things had Lizzie been doing over the past few years that she ought not? And with whom?

Marlowe quickly jettisoned the irrational spurt of jealousy. Her more recent past hardly mattered. In fact, some experience on her part might better suit his plans.

“Yes, my proposition. I can give you what you want. A marriage without the man.”

For the longest moment she went unnaturally still, then she slid off the chair arm and glided closer to him. So close, he almost backed up. So close, her rose petal of a mouth came but a hairsbreadth from his own. Then she lifted her inquisitive nose and took a bold, suspicious whiff of his breath.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“I have,” he admitted without a qualm.

“How much?”

“More than enough for the purpose. And you?”

“Clearly not enough. Not that they’d let me.” She turned and walked away. Sauntered really. She was very definitely a saunterer, all loose joints and limbs, as if she’d never paid the least attention to deportment. Very provocative, although he doubted she meant to be. An image of a bright, agile otter, frolicking unconcerned in the calm green of the river Dart, twisting and rolling in the sunlit water, came to mind.

“Drink or no, I meant what I said.”

“Are you proposing? Marriage? To me?” She laughed as if it were a joke. She didn’t believe him.

“I am.”

She eyed him more closely, her gaze narrowing even as one marmalade eyebrow rose in assessment. “Do you have a fatal disease?”

“No.”

“Are you engaged to fight a duel?”

“Again, no.”

“Condemned to death?” She straightened with a fluid undulation, her spine lifting her head up in surprise as the thought entered her head, all worldliness temporarily obliterated. “Planning a suicide?”

“No and no.” It was so hard not to smile. Such a charming combination of concern and cheek. The cheek won out: she gave him that feral, slightly suspicious smile.

“Then how do you plan to arrange it, the ‘without the man’ portion of the proceedings? I’ll want some sort of guarantee. You can’t imagine I’m gullible enough to leave your fate, or my own for that matter, to chance.”

A low heat flared within him. By God, she really was considering it.

“And yet, Lizzie, I think you may. I am an officer of His Majesty’s Royal Navy and am engaged to captain a convoy of prison ships to the Antipodes. I leave only days from now. The last time I was home, in England, was four and a half years ago and then only for a few months to recoup from a near fatal wound. This trip is slated to take at least eight ... years.”

Her face cleared of all traces of impudence. Oh yes, even Lizzie could be led.

“Storms, accidents, and disease provide most of the risk. Don’t forget we’re still at war with France and Spain. And the Americans don’t think too highly of us either. One stray cannonball could do the job quite nicely.”

“Is that what did it last time?”

“Last time? I’ve never been dead before.”

The ends of her ripe mouth nipped up. The heat in his gut sailed higher.

“You said you had recovered from a near fatal wound.”

“Ah, yes. Grapeshot, actually. In my chest. Didn’t go deep enough to kill me, though afterward, the fever nearly did.”

Her gaze skimmed over his coat, curious and maybe a little hungry. The heat spread lower, kindling into a flame.

“Do you want to see?” He was being rash, he knew, but he’d done this for her once before, taken off his shirt on a dare. And he wanted to remind her.

And then there’s A SENSE OF SIN ...

T
he Ravishing Miss Celia Burke. A well-known, and even more well-liked local beauty. She made her serene, graceful way down the short set of stairs into the ballroom as effortlessly as clear water flowed over rocks in a hillside stream. She nodded and smiled in a benign but uninvolved way at all who approached her, but she never stopped to converse. She processed on, following her mother through the parting sea of mere mortals, those lesser human beings who were nothing and nobody to her but playthings.

Aloof, perfect Celia Burke.
Fuck you
.

By God, he would take his revenge and Emily would have justice. Maybe then he could sleep at night.

Maybe then he could learn to live with himself.

But he couldn’t exact the kind of revenge one takes on another man—straightforward, violent, and bloody. He couldn’t call Miss Burke out on the middle of the dance floor and put a bullet between her eyes or a sword blade between her ribs at dawn.

His justice would have to be more subtle, but no less thorough. And no less ruthless.

“You were the one who insisted we attend this august gathering. So what’s it to be, Delacorte?” Commander Hugh McAlden, friend, naval officer, and resident cynic, prompted again.

McAlden was one of the few people who never addressed Del by his courtesy title, Viscount Darling, as they’d known each other long before he’d come into the bloody title and far too long for Del to give himself airs in front of such an old friend. With such familiarity came ease. With McAlden, Del could afford the luxury of being blunt.

“Dancing or thrashing? The latter, I think.”

McAlden’s usually grim mouth crooked up in half a smile. “A thrashing, right here in the Marchioness’s ballroom? I’d pay good money to see that.”

“Would you? Shall we have a private bet, then?”

“Del, I always like it when you’ve got that look in your eye. I’d like nothing more than a good wager.”

“A bet, Colonel Delacorte? What’s the wager? I’ve money to burn these days, thanks to you two.” Another naval officer, Lieutenant Ian James, known from their time together when Del had been an officer of His Majesty’s Marine Forces aboard the frigate
Resolute
, broke into the conversation from behind.

“A private wager only, James.” Del would need to be more circumspect. James was a bit of a puppy, happy and eager, but untried in the more manipulative ways of society. There was no telling what he might let slip. Del had no intention of getting caught in the net he was about to cast. “Save your fortune in prize money for another time.”

“A gentleman’s bet then, Colonel?”

A
gentleman’s
bet. Del felt his mouth curve up in a scornful smile. What he was about to do violated every code of gentlemanly behavior. “No. More of a challenge.”

“He’s Viscount Darling now, Mr. James.” McAlden gave Del a mocking smile. “We have to address him with all the deference he’s due.”

Unholy glee lit the young man’s face. “I had no idea. Congratulations, Colonel. What a bloody fine name. I can hear the ladies now:
my dearest, darling Darling
. How will they resist you?”

Del merely smiled and took another drink. It was true. None of them resisted: high-born ladies, low-living trollops, barmaids, island girls, or senoritas. They never had, bless their lascivious hearts.

And neither would
she
, despite her remote facade. Celia Burke was nothing but a hothouse flower just waiting to be plucked.

“Go on, then. What’s your challenge?” McAlden’s face housed a dubious smirk as several more navy men, Lieutenants Thomas Gardener and Robert Scott, joined them.

“I propose I can openly court, seduce, and ruin an untried, virtuous woman”—Del paused to give them a moment to remark upon the condition he was about to attach—“without ever once touching her.”

McAlden gave a huff of cynical laughter. “Too easy in one sense, too hard in another,” he stated flatly.

“How can you possibly ruin someone without touching them?” Ian James protested.

Del felt his mouth twist. He had forgotten what it was like to be that young. While he was only six and twenty, he’d grown older since Emily’s death. Vengeance was singularly aging.

“Find us a drink would you, gentlemen? A real drink. None of the lukewarm swill they’re passing out on trays.” Del pushed the young lieutenants off in the direction of a footman.

“Too easy to ruin a reputation with only a rumor,” McAlden repeated in his unhurried, determined way. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

Trust McAlden to get right to the heart of the matter. Like Del, McAlden had never been young, and he was older in years, as well.

“With your reputation,” McAlden continued as they turned to follow the others, “well deserved, I might add, you’ll not get within a sea mile of a virtuous woman.”

“That, old man, shows how little you know of women.”

“That, my darling Viscount, shows how little you know of their mamas.”

“I’d like to keep it that way. Hence the prohibition against touching. I plan on keeping a very safe distance.” While he was about the business of revenging himself on Celia Burke, he needed to keep himself safe from being forced into doing the right thing should his godforsaken plan be discovered or go awry. And he simply didn’t
want
to touch her. He didn’t want to be tainted by so much as the merest brush of her hand.

“Can’t seduce, really
seduce
, from a distance. Not even you. Twenty guineas says it can’t be done.”

“Twenty? An extravagant wager for a flinty, tight-pursed Scotsman like you. Done.” Del accepted the challenge with a firm handshake. It sweetened the pot, so to speak.