Twice Fallen (16 page)

He hadn’t had this intriguing a conversation since he’d left Spain. Damien nodded at the sideboard. “Pour me another glass of claret and tell me what kind of sin.”

Sebring’s smile was mirthless and his hand not quite steady as he dispensed more wine. “I am sure you are not interested in my small troubles, Dame.”

The nickname wasn’t precisely jarring, but it did strike a chord of the old camaraderie. During the war he was “sir” or “Major” and at the very end, “Colonel,” but it had been a long time since someone had addressed him with the familiarity of old acquaintance. Damien took the glass and deigned to mention that he had navigated his way through much larger dilemmas with ease, and simply looked bland. “If they are small, they are easily dealt with.”

“Since you’re here…” Arthur trailed off and restlessly ran his hand through his hair. “It’s fortuitous really, because I was starting to wonder where to turn, but I’ve… heard things.”

“Oh?” Damien kept his expression only mildly interested.

Unverified information, he’d found, was barely worth the time it took to listen to it.

“You did work for my Lord Wellington.” It was a tentative statement.

“Indeed.”

“In what capacity?”

“Confounding the enemy,” Damien clarified, wondering if he should just mention Lily and be done with it.

“Can you,” Arthur asked quietly, “confound mine? I have a friend with the War Office. I mentioned your name once and he told me that you were unmatched in gathering information.”

That properly caught his attention. “Did he, now?”

“I have someone threatening me.”

This wasn’t what he’d come for, but then again, it was interesting. “Who?”

“I’m not sure. He wants money to keep quiet about a certain matter. We’ve never met, but he contacts me through the post.”

That sounded familiar. In his probing—and he’d only just started—into Kinkannon’s activities, he’d immediately discerned that it was possible the man was bleeding a great deal of society’s more wealthy members and making quite a profit from it. Damien had to work at staying noncommittal. “I see.”

Lord Sebring went and settled heavily into a chair, his gaze level. He rubbed his forehead. “No, Northfield, you don’t. This could ruin me.”

Like you ruined Lily
?

Not the time to say it. “Maybe you should clarify how.”

“You might not want to help me.”

“But then again, maybe I would. We’re old friends. Why wouldn’t I help?”

Besides, you might be able to give me some valuable insights on Lady Lillian
.

“I’m not willing to reveal what he is holding over my head, for one.” To give Arthur credit, he didn’t look away, his gaze steady. “It’s personal, and though it isn’t a measure of my trust in your ethics, I don’t wish to discuss it.”

This was his type of challenge, though Damien didn’t say so. His mouth quirked up at the corner. “So what you’d like is for me to help you find an unknown person without any knowledge of whom I am looking for or why I should pursue them?”

“Put that way it sounds damned foolish.” His lordship’s smile was rueful. “I know it, but that changes nothing about my resolve.”

It just so happened that Damien wouldn’t believe any man who claimed to have no secrets was telling the truth, so the admission was probably a positive. “You do realize I at least need some information.”

“I will give you the letters the blackmailer wrote me.”

H

Well, perhaps she’d been optimistic in the first place, and that surprised her a bit, because Lily had actually thought she was immune to unrealistic expectations. So Lord Damien had been insincere, and she admittedly hadn’t expected it of him, but then again, he’d been trying to expediently shrug her off.

There
. Yet another reason to not trust deliciously handsome gentlemen with chestnut hair and compelling dark eyes. She’d thought she’d learned that lesson already.

It was fine, she promised herself, and duly smiled through a not-very-satisfying rendition of
The Magic Flute
, and did her best to come up with an original reason for wanting to head home directly after the opera.

The next day he did not call either.

Fine.
Blast him
.

Other gentlemen did, most prominently Sir George, and Lily did her best as the gracious hostess, all the while wanting to be honest with the man and in the interest of fairness inform him his suit would never be accepted. But the duchess arrived each afternoon to preside over
the formalities, and truthfully, Lily was not sure how to argue with the formidable dowager.

It wasn’t—naturally—until she had donned her oldest—but most comfortable—day dress on a rainy afternoon, and settled in for a long stint of reading, that there was a knock on the door and a maid stood there, holding out a calling card with a slight smile on her face. “You’ve a visitor, my lady.”

“Now?” She’d been ensconced in the library long enough that she wasn’t sure what time it might be. Lily squinted at the clock and realized it was long past four. “Oh, I see. Thank you, Molly.”

Why did Damien Northfield have to call
now
, when she was rumpled, her chignon half escaping from the pins, and…

“Not too surprising to find you here, I suppose.” Her unexpected guest strolled in, albeit crookedly with his limp—urbane in dark breeches and a tan jacket, his hair just slightly windblown. “Am I interrupting? I’d much rather join you in the informality of the library than sit in the stuffy drawing room.”

Lily fairly scrambled up from the chair where she’d been sitting, no doubt looking as disconcerted as she felt. “No… yes, well, no, I suppose not.”

“I assume some kind of chaperone will come dashing in at any moment to make sure I am not doing anything wicked to you, but I wondered if we could wrest out of this visit a few moments of privacy. I asked the young woman who took my card if she could take the flowers I brought and put them in the drawing room, and then took advantage and went in search of you myself. Rather an old ploy, I admit.”

“Flowers?”

His mouth quirked. “I presume you’ve heard of the practice of a gentleman bringing a lady flowers?”

Lily wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so she merely gestured at a convenient settee and sank back down in her chair. “Please… have a seat, my lord.”

His smile was a bit devilish. “I could lock the door.”

Was there any woman on earth who could resist that gleam of amusement in his eyes? Lily did her best to summon a proper censorious tone. “I think the once was quite enough for us to be locked in together and I doubt this room has a secret escape staircase.”

He’d brought her flowers. Not that other gentlemen hadn’t done so, but it was different now. Before her debacle with Arthur they had brought them to woo her, and now they brought them as a mere formality. She deeply resented that she was supposed to be grateful Sir George was willing to court her, and she resented even more that a part of her
was
grateful.

With impractical romanticism she wondered what it might be like to fall in love—not with a man who deceived and abandoned her, but with one who might share her interests.

What kind of flowers had the Duke of Rolthven’s brother brought her? Not roses. No, Damien Northfield would not choose anything so obvious. If she had been fooled by Arthur, how much more so could the man lounging so negligently on a faded rose-colored settee incongruous to his stark masculinity trick her into believing in his sincere interest?

It frightened her a bit.

Was she willing to take the risk to get an answer? She
wasn’t certain. Lily coolly murmured, “Why did you wish to talk to me in private?”

He hesitated a moment, glanced at the door he hadn’t locked but had closed, and then said simply, “Are you, per chance, being blackmailed?”

It was about the last question she anticipated, and Lily blinked in the surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“I promise I have a reason for asking.”

She opened her mouth to say… she wasn’t sure what, but he preempted her reply by lifting his hand and smiling ruefully.

“I vow if you are, your answer will not leave this room.”

The rain tapped at the windows, the sound normally soothing, but Lily wasn’t sure she was calmed at all. It took her a moment, but she managed to say with credible poise, “Why would anyone blackmail me?”

“My very point.”

“Sir, you talk in circles.”

At that he laughed, and it lit his face attractively. “I see we are starting to know one another.”

“I am not sure I agree.” She tried to smooth a wrinkle in her muslin skirt to no avail, and then gave up, squaring her shoulders. “The answer is no. No one has approached me in any way with a fiendish offer of silence for coin, which is just as well, as I have very little money of my own.”

“I see.”

“I don’t,” she said with a small frown.

“That’s a valid point.” He sank a little lower in the chair, long legs outstretched and his face thoughtful. “As a young unmarried woman, you wouldn’t have the resources to pay, so what would be the use of it, after all?”

“May I mention I have no earthly idea what we are talking about?”

“You may point out whatever you wish.”

There was only one reason anyone could try to extort money from her and it didn’t take a giant leap to deduce what it might be. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to the fact society remembered her disastrous social stumble. “This must have something to do with Arthur.”

His lashes lowered a fraction. It wasn’t much, but the reaction told her something. “What makes you think so, Lady Lillian?”

“It couldn’t be anything else.”

“A virtuous lady. You intrigue me more each time we meet.”

Intrigue
. She thought maybe he was a bit too familiar with the meaning of that word, but then again, he didn’t bore her like most of the foppish gentlemen she knew. In a way—though they were quite different—he reminded her of her older brother. Jonathan was not subtle, nor was he understated, and certainly they looked nothing alike, but it was there in the ironic glimmer of Lord Damien’s smile and that same unmistakable dangerous air. With studied control, she let out a breath. Then she said, “Is
this
why you came to see me?”

He liked her in simple moss-green muslin with pink ribbons. The neckline was unfortunately too modest, but he had quite a good imagination. Lily had a lovely, natural grace and it showed in every movement. A lift of her hand to brush back a wayward lock of hair from her ivory cheek. The shift of her slender body on the chair,
the turn of her head as she glanced at the rain-streaked window, the sudden shadow across her face…

He’d have to address later his instinctive desire to protect her, but for now he needed to answer her question.

“I don’t know what happened between you and the viscount, but I suppose I can see how you’d not think of him with kindness,” he said, feeling his way because there had been an edge of bewildered anger in her question. “And I never said my question had anything to do with Lord Sebring. You jumped to that conclusion.”

“Understandably so.”

Actually, he wasn’t quite sure of why he was there, in the library of the Earl of Augustine, questioning Lily about another possible scandal, except he had a completely unreasonable curiosity about her past with Sebring. It had crossed his mind that the problem the viscount didn’t wish to discuss might be an affair that would not only damage his marriage—or had done so already—but also his political ambitions.

Damien didn’t want Lily dragged into another sordid scandal. Charles did not get involved in matters of this sort lightly. If Kinkannon was the problem, he was a true threat.

And Damien was very good at sensing danger. It was also possible he might be jealous. As it was a new emotion, he was inept at recognizing it, but he did know he was unhappy at the idea of Sebring and Lily harboring a secret involvement.

“Are you still seeing him?”

“Who?”

This was ridiculous. He felt like a fool. But then again, his conversation with Arthur hadn’t rung true. At all.
Maybe she wasn’t being blackmailed, but maybe she was the
source
of the blackmail.

“Your former lover.”

“How dare you!”

He’d truly hurt her. He saw the wounded look in her lovely eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did. You are just as judgmental as everyone else, damn you.”

The less-than-ladylike language didn’t matter to him, but the sudden luminous threat of tears in her eyes did. “Lily.”

“Perhaps you should leave, my lord.” She stood there in delectable disarray, her hair escaping in small tendrils that framed her face, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, the doors parted and the dowager duchess swept in. “Lord Damien,” that lady said with crisp intonation, offering her hand. “I was informed you were calling. Can we offer some refreshment? Claret, brandy or tea?”

Considering the circumstances and time of day, he opted for the tea, but with some brandy to fortify it, and though he could tell the duchess longed to whisk them off to the formal drawing room, he informed her blandly that he found the library just as suitable.

As far as he could tell Lily participated only as much in the conversation as required of her out of politesse. When he rose to leave, he bent over her proffered hand and murmured, “Violets.”

Her eyes reminded him of the sky just when it began to darken on a summer day. Indigo with an iridescent quality. A slight frown wrinkled her brow. “My lord?”

“I brought violets exactly the color of your eyes.”

Damien then released her slender fingers, wondered just what the hell to make of this visit, and took his leave.

“Y

Regina smiled indulgently at her younger brother’s authoritative tone. “You think I should send every painting to the Academy.”