The Songbird's Seduction (34 page)

The guard shrugged. “No.”

Lucy, who didn’t understand any of this exchange, regarded him owlishly, looking vulnerable and small and exquisite. How could she have done this to him? And why did his heart still jump at the sight of her?

Madness. But then he’d been headed for madness the moment he’d met her. He’d suspected it; he just hadn’t heeded the warning bells his higher faculties had rung.

It was long past time he did.

He had spent the last days in some weird altered state of consciousness where folly had became the norm. But seeing his wallet in her hand and realizing that she had purposefully turned him into a criminal, engineered a trip that had organically changed his life, and very possibly ruined any hopes of returning to his former one, had catapulted him back to his senses.
Finally
.

It didn’t matter that enough vestiges of the madness remained so that his pulse quickened at the sight of her and his chest constricted painfully, and that something inside him leapt, ready and willing to dive back into the lunacy. He ruthlessly ignored the drive. As he understood it, a drug addict experienced much the same sort of thing upon withdrawal; it didn’t mean drugs were good for him. Eventually they destroyed you.

The guard beckoned her in. She hurried down the corridor, past the ogling gazes of the other prisoners.

“What are you doing here, Lucy? You should be with your great-aunts on your way to Saint-Girons.”

“They’re not here. They left a letter with the hotel manager. My friend is escorting them to Saint-Girons and I’m to meet them there.”

“Then you should go.”

“No. It isn’t right that a moment of reckless abandon keeps you in jail.”

He burst out in bitter laughter.

“A
moment
of reckless abandon?” he echoed. “My dear girl, the entire week has been one episode of recklessness after another. Please, just go.”

She shook her head vehemently. She stepped closer and gripped the bars. “No. Not until you are free.”

He might have anticipated something like this. Her sense of drama had been engaged. “You have to join your great-aunts. There should be enough money left of that boxing purse to pay for a train ticket.”

“It’s not my money, it’s yours.”

“I cannot believe that you of all people are sticking at that.”

At least she had the grace to blush.

“I won’t touch a
sou
of that money, Lucy. Not one
sou
. So you can throw it in the river, give it to the town drunk, or pay the hotel bill. I personally recommend the last option, seeing how the French seem radically opposed to people not paying their hotel bills.”

Her blush grew brighter. “Fine. But I still can’t leave you here like this.”

“Like what? I’m hardly doing hard labor, Lucy. Look, they’ve telegrammed my family’s lawyer and he’s sent word he’ll be here Monday. I should be in front of the judge by midweek. If I am lucky, he will allow me to repay what is owed along with whatever fine he deems appropriate and then let me return to London.”

“Midweek?” she exclaimed in horror. “That’s not fair. If anyone should be behind bars it should be me.”

“Doubtless true, but probably in another sort of facility. One with inmates rather than prisoners.”

“Now, that is simply unkind.”

His anger faded. “You’re right. It isn’t you who put their life’s work at risk for a rash and ill-considered scheme. Perhaps I should look into renting a room at one of those barred establishments myself when I get back to England.”

At this, she went still. “What do you mean, your life’s work at risk?”

He sighed and dropped down on the bunk, his forearms resting on his thighs, his head bowed tiredly.

“Archie? What do you mean?”

He looked up, vexed by her heedlessness. “As hard as it is to imagine—and I concede that judging from my recent activities it may be damn near impossible—I am a well-respected scholar. Some people, like my fellow professors, students, and research colleagues, actually look up to me. Not to mention the directors and trustees at St. Phillip’s where I am employed.” He paused, considered his last words. “But perhaps I should say
was
employed.”

She stared at him, stricken. “But Archie, surely once you explain—”

“Have you ever heard of St. Phillip’s, Lucy?” he broke in conversationally. “It is a very old, very conservative college with a very old, very conservative board of directors.

“They are vigilant in squelching any threats, real or imagined, to the college’s reputation for dignity and rectitude. What do you imagine their reaction will be when they discover that the man whom they had anticipated making the director of their newly minted anthropology department has been arrested for fleeing a foreign hotel with an unknown woman in the dead of night in order to avoid paying his bill?”

“They wouldn’t like it?” she asked in a small voice.

He nodded thoughtfully. “No, I daresay they wouldn’t.” He tipped his head, regarding her. “Do you suppose they will still offer me the directorship of the department?”

She shook her head.

“No? Neither do I.” He mused in silence for a few seconds; he could hear her unsteady breath.

“Which leaves only a few unanswered questions, the first being will I have a job at all when I return to England?” He met her eyes. They shimmered with tears and he reminded himself of his pledge not to be swayed by emotions.

He had spent a good part of his adolescence being extricated from one sort of trouble or another, disappointing his parents and thwarting his own aspirations. Subsequently, he’d spent an even better part of his young adulthood learning to keep his passions under control. And it had worked. Vigilant self-control had facilitated his successes.
Why
had he abandoned those hard-learned lessons? What about
her
had made him forget them?

Did it matter? Abandon them he had and look where it had got him. He might as well be fourteen again, trying to explain to the dean of students why he’d thought spelunking in the school’s abandoned well had been a good idea. Only this time rather than a corporal punishment, he stood at risk of losing his life’s work. The only thing that ever mattered to him, the only thing that had garnered him respect while still allowing him to do something he relished.

No, he would not be led by impulse and emotion again. Not his, God help him, not even by hers. They only led to imminent destruction. Hadn’t that been his life’s early lesson?

So now, he looked her dead in the eye and asked her, “Well, Lucy, what do you think? Will I have a job? Is my career effectively over? The career you once took pains to point out that I loved?”

At the barely sustained amiability in his voice, she broke down. Tears spilled from her eyes and trailed down her cheeks. Her hands
gripped the bars so tightly her knuckles shone white. “Oh, Archie, I am sorry! I am so, so sorry. Maybe if I talk to your directors, I am sure I can make them understand—”

“Oh, no. No. For
God’s
sake, no. I beg you, spare me your help.”

“But—”

“
No
. Can you
at least
do this one thing for me?”

Her lips trembled but after a second she nodded miserably. “All right. But you must believe me, Archie, when I tell you that I never meant any of this to happen. I swear I would never have—I wasn’t thinking—”

“Exactly!” Even to his own ears, the word came out with whiplash cruelty. He saw her flinch but still could not stop the words from coming. All his frustration, his sense of betrayal, his outrage and confusion came pouring out, demanding to be heard. “You were
not thinking
. What the hell
were
you doing, Lucy?

“Why in God’s name would you steal my wallet and then convince me to take off in the middle of the night leaving a bill, a bill I could have paid, behind? I’m not blaming you solely for that part. I could have said no. I didn’t and that responsibility falls squarely on me, but I need to understand why you would take my money. Why would you risk a virtual stranger’s entire life work like that?”

She paled. Her hands fell limply to her sides. “Stranger?”

“Yes,” he said, his anger carrying him along while, inside, alarms were clanging madly. “What else would you call someone you didn’t know existed a month earlier?”

Which really wasn’t what he wanted to know at all. But he charged on, bent on getting an answer to his question.
The
question. “Was it simply a lark? On a whim? What?
Why?
”

Her head drooped, a flower too heavy for its slender stalk.

“Did you ever stop to consider the risks? Not to me—clearly I didn’t rate that sort of consideration—but to your great-aunts? Lavinia stood a very real chance of not arriving in Saint-Girons by
the proscribed date. If it hadn’t been for this friend of yours—” The friend. The man to whom she’d entrusted her great-aunts so she could play havoc with his life. “Who is he? How could you play so fast and loose with your great-aunts’ future?” He plowed his fingers through his hair, trying to make sense of it.

“No,” she said tragically. “
No
. I would never have let it get to that point. I swear it. If things got too tight I would have—”

“Would have what? Suddenly ‘found’ my wallet? You may think I’m dense, Lucy, and heaven knows I’ve provided ample evidence to support that idea, but even I am not as gullible as that.”

“No.” She sniffed. The tears were still streaming down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away and against all reason he found his hand twitching to do just that. “No, I would have told you what I’d done.”

“Really? You mean as in told the truth? No fabrication, none of your stories?”

“I’m not sure.”

He turned away from her with a sound of disgust. “Well, there’s an honest answer at last.”

“Monsieur, please. How can you treat the girl so? You are breaking her heart!” exclaimed the young socialist.

“Shut up,” Archie said tiredly. He was drained, wrung dry, nothing left in him to give, neither anger nor understanding.

“I thought I knew exactly what I risked,” he heard her say softly.

“Then why?” he asked the wall, not really expecting an answer.

“I did it because I’d fallen in love with you.”

Something deep inside of him leapt at the soft declaration, like a deeply buried ember, uncovered by a thready, chance wind and blown to life. A small warmth seeped through the chill engulfing him.

No. No more burning and glowing for him. Ruthlessly, he forced himself to view her words as the delusional, romantic fantasy they were.

“That’s ridiculous. People don’t fall in love at first sight.”

She laughed a little at this, forlornly, sounding much older, much more worldly than him.

“Of course they do. They do it all the time. Why, my grandparents fell in love after one dance. Lavinia fell in love with your grandfather within days of meeting him.

“But I knew you wouldn’t believe that. So I tried to buy us some time, so you might realize that you were in love with me, too.”

“In love with you?”

She nodded somberly.

“I don’t
know
you!”

“Yes, you do.” She sounded so certain, so sure of herself, and he reacted against her conviction because it threatened everything he’d been taught to believe.

“No. I
know
Cornelia. I
know
my grandfather. My parents. My brothers and sisters. Not you.

“And as for love? Love doesn’t pounce on you like some overly friendly puppy or catch you unsuspecting when your resistance is down like a bad head cold. It’s a process. It comes from a slow discovery, from the security of knowing how someone is going to react or what they are going to say, to shared ambitions and a common base of experiences. And from trust.
Trust
, Lucy. As in not lying to another person or manipulating them or playing havoc with their lives . . .”

He closed his eyes, the sight of her anguish acutely painful even though the scientist in him affirmed what he said as true, firmly grounded in good sound reasoning.

“I see,” he heard her murmur.

And when he opened his eyes again, she was gone.

The nine o’clock a.m. train from Châtellerault climbed into the Pyrenees foothills rocking gently, the rhythmic sound of the steel wheels against the rails singing a lullaby. Most of the passengers had disembarked earlier, leaving only a handful bound for the route’s end point, Saint-Girons. Lucy was among them. But while the thin-haired old man in the cheap new suit across from her snored gently, sleep eluded Lucy.

She had telegrammed the Bergerac hotel, which Margery named in the note the fat innkeeper in Châtellerault had held for Lucy, and received a reassuring message in return. Having grown fond of her great-aunts but also because he simply
had
to satisfy his curiosity about how this particular chapter of their story would end, he’d arranged for the Misses Litton and himself to travel on to Saint-Girons. They would meet Lucy there. And where in the name of mercy had she been?

She had stayed an additional day in Châtellerault to buy a decent set of ready-mades, using the money left over from the
boxing purse Archie had refused. She left her raggedy skirt and jumper in the fire grate of the hotel. The next day she had returned to the town jail, only to be informed that Archie refused to see her. She did not try to bribe the guard again. She could not see any good in forcing herself on Archie. So, with no other recourse, she had done as he’d bid her and bought a ticket to Saint-Girons.