Your Scandalous Ways (11 page)

He slid his fingers through the soft curls and cupped her. He let his fingers stroke, gently and lightly at first while he listened to her sighs. As she moved more urgently against his hand, he responded, giving her more, but little by little. He wanted to be done. He wanted to make her his completely. But he wanted, even more, her surrender, and so he made himself take his time pleasuring her.

Her head drooped against his chest. His heart
pounded so hard it must deafen her. But her heart must be pounding, too, because her breathing came faster and faster. Her body shook, and she gave a little cry.

Then at last she sank against him, shaking.

He drew his hand away and wrapped his arms tightly about her, crushing her to him.

He lifted her up, to carry her to the rumpled bed.

Then he set her on her feet again.

From somewhere in the distance came sounds: voices, the click of heels on the
terrazzo
floor.

He heard the sounds without fully realizing and he reacted without thinking, training and experience coming to the fore. He'd learned to detect a footfall from several rooms away, through closed doors, upon carpets. He had the senses of a cat, some of his colleagues said.

If he was a cat, he'd been doing a fine imitation of a blind, deaf, and lame one.

He put her away from him, aware of her eyes and the flash of emotion in them. Anger? Hurt?

It lasted but an instant, until she noticed the sounds, too. Her gaze shot to the door.

The voices coming from the
portego
became plainly audible.

A female servant was saying, “But of course,
monsieur le comte,
I will remind the mistress that you are waiting.”

“I'll remind her myself,” said monsieur.

 

Francesca wasn't ready.

She was shattered, lost.

She didn't understand.

She understood pleasure. She'd studied how to give and receive it.

She'd learned, as well, to keep the upper hand, never to yield altogether.

She'd surrendered completely to him after a laughably short struggle. He'd touched her, kissed her, and her strength, her hard-won strength, seeped away.

Heart beating too fast, much too fast, she looked about her and tried to think.

She was aware of his bending down and picking up something. She made herself focus. Her dressing gown. Yes. She must…cover up.

He tossed it to her. She hastily thrust her arms through the sleeves while he returned to the window and clasped his hands behind his back.

The door opened.

The maid came in, the older man close behind her.

Francesca had to struggle before she could find the casual words she needed: “There you are, Thérèse.” Her voice sounded strange, not her own. Too high-pitched. She took a quick breath and went on, “What was I thinking of, not to send for you? It is not as though I can dress myself. But having all these gentlemen stomping about the place is so distracting.”

Magny's brow furrowed.

“Well, then, I shall take my leave,” Cordier said.

“You found your notebook, I trust,” said the count.

Cordier patted his breast pocket. “Yes, I did, at last.” He looked at Francesca. “What a strange place for it to end up in, eh,
cara
?”

Cara.
What a joke. She wasn't dear to him at all, merely a conquest. An easy one, more shame to her.

Beast.

He took a polite leave of Magny and an impolite one of her, catching up her hand and planting a wet kiss between the rings on her middle and third fingers.

She wanted to weep.

She wanted to kill him, to hurl a dagger into his back as he walked away, through the door.

She listened to his footsteps fade away.

Monsieur gave her one of his looks, then stalked to the window. He clasped his hands behind his back, exactly the way Cordier had done.

Trying to block out from her mind all else Cordier had done, Francesca walked past the count into the dressing room.

Thérèse followed, leaving the door open. She'd been with Francesca since the early days in Paris. Being French and eminently practical, the haughty maid was not in the least troubled by her mistress's morals or lack thereof. To Thérèse, what mattered were Francesca's hordes of admirers, her wealth, and her jewels. Not another lady on the Continent, save a few royals, could match the mistress in this regard. Furthermore, one of madame's grandmothers had been a French aristocrat.

All these factors made Thérèse fiercely protective of her position. No bribe was great enough, no one important enough to pry from her a syllable of her mistress's secrets. None of madame's suitors received special treatment, no matter who they were. Madame ruled. Thus Thérèse would not close a
door when a man was present or make herself scarce unless told to do so. And, most conveniently for Francesca and her guests, the maid condescended to understand and speak only as much English as she deemed absolutely necessary to performing her duties. She was equally scornful of Italian.

Magny took no more heed of Thérèse than she did of him. All the same, he spoke in English. “You should not have left Mira. I told you this was an unhealthy time to come to Venice.”

“You should not have come,” Francesca said, watching Thérèse fill a wash basin. She wished it were possible to scrub Cordier's touch away. She wished she could cleanse herself of the weakness he'd somehow uncovered.

“That was the whole point of my note,” she went on. “It was supposed to reassure you. I knew you'd hear stories—and of course they'd be horribly exaggerated. I was sure you'd hear I'd been murdered. I know what gossip is like, especially in country villages.”

“Speaking of gossip,” he said.

“Gad, I knew this was coming,” she muttered.

“I hear stories,” he said, “of you and Lurenze. But when I arrive, I find an Englishman. Do you know who his father is?”

“I never met Lord Westwood,” she said. “Elphick and he did not travel in the same circles—though I don't doubt that my former husband tried as hard as he could to worm his way into those exalted circles.”

“Westwood is a great hero, especially to the French aristocracy. One cannot count the number
of heads he and his lady saved from Madame Guillotine, at great personal risk.”

The image jumped into Francesca's mind, as it had done time and again: Cordier lunging into the
felze
and wrapping his arm around the villain's throat…the brute struggling helplessly, futilely…then going limp.

“Taking risks runs in the family, then,” she said. “Apparently Cordier jumped from one of his balconies into the canal to save me. Still, I should distinguish between physical daring—or recklessness is probably more like it—and heroism. He's a black sheep. He told me so himself.”

She heard a long, loud sigh. She glanced toward the doorway but Magny was not there. No doubt he still stood at the window, looking—or glaring—out.

“I won't ask what goes on between you,” he said.

“What else?” she said easily. “Games.”

She could not have guessed how dangerously sweet a game Cordier could make it. She could not have guessed how the light caress of his lips upon her skin could touch something hidden deep within her, a part of her being she'd buried long ago. It was as though he'd reached straight down into her soul and turned her inside out.

He'd remembered everything she'd done last night when she'd tried to seduce him. Everywhere her fingers had gone, his mouth had gone. He'd done what she'd silently invited him to do, but what he'd done to her was not what she'd bargained for.

He'd touched her and kissed her exactly as she'd instructed. And he'd made a shivering wreck of
her—she, who was an expert at the give and take of dalliance. But his mouth took possession of her so easily. His touch simply stripped her, leaving her naked and blind with longing. He'd pleasured her—and she liked to be pleasured—but this was not the same. He'd cracked something inside her and she'd come within an eyeblink of weeping. She didn't understand and wasn't sure she wanted to understand.

Why the devil hadn't he been quicker? Why hadn't he thrown her on the bed and had his way with her…and let her have her way with him, let her simply enjoy his big, strong body?

Beast.

“I do not wish to know,” Magny said. “I find it is better not to know. But if you own a particle of common sense, child, you'll send this one about his business. I survived my trials and lived this long because my judgment of men is keener than most. This one, I promise you,
ma cherie,
is trouble.”

 

The man who was trouble retrieved the jewelry case from the table in the
portego
where he'd tossed it shortly after leaving madame and a moment before Magny appeared. This time James didn't pause but continued through the archway, and down the stairs to the
andron
.

He fixed his attention on his surroundings, taking in every detail. Though he'd come this way before, it was the first time he'd done so in broad day. He could only hope his years of training had survived the tempest that was Francesca Bonnard, and he'd remember, once he calmed down, every detail of the rooms he'd passed through this day.
He had to hope that some part of his mind had paid attention, while the rest of it was roiling with anger, jealousy, lust, frustration, and several other emotions he'd rather not examine too closely.

If all else failed, he'd have to search the house. In such a case, it was best to have a mental picture of the likeliest hiding places. Searching, however, was the method he'd hoped to avoid. On the occasions when he had to turn burglar, he preferred to know exactly where to find what he was looking for.

That was not the case here. Though, like other Venetian
palazzi,
hers was fairly simply laid out, the house was large, containing all too many possible hiding places. With most people, he could easily deduce where they'd keep precious items, once he understood how their minds worked. The trouble was, he could not unscramble the workings of a woman's mind while she was scrambling his.

He swiftly made his way to his waiting gondola. Sedgewick and Zeggio, who'd been talking softly, looked up at the same time. Both faces were wary.

They think I've taken leave of my senses
, James thought,
and they're not wrong.

He told Zeggio to take them to the island of San Lazzaro.

James needed to clear his head, and he was sure that would happen more quickly once he was out on the water, several miles from Venice—and from her. The tiny island, once a haven for lepers, was now home to the Armenian monastery where Byron had studied.

A monastery, at the moment, sounded like heaven.

“
Y
ou should not have come,” Francesca again told Magny as she emerged from the dressing room.

He'd left the window and planted himself on a chair in the boudoir. His hands folded upon the elaborate gold knob of the walking stick propped between his legs, he glowered at the floor.

“I hear things,” he said. “They make me think you've taken leave of your senses.”

“You are at liberty to think what you like.”

She walked to the writing desk she often used as a receptacle for odds and ends of jewelry, scarves, gloves, creams, and lotions. She sank into the chair, and hunted through the bric-a-brac for her note paper and pen. “I will not allow any man to rule me. If that was what I'd wanted, I'd have remarried.”

“Thérèse, do gather up those pearls and put them away properly,” he said. “For God's sake, Francesca, let the girl tend to your jewelry. What has come over you, to make you so careless?”

Look at the way you treat those pearls, those splendid pearls
, Cordier had said.
I'm not one of your baubles. You won't use me as you use your jewelry. I won't be used, to prove whatever it is you want to prove, and cast aside.

Men used women, but when the tables were turned…oh, that was another matter altogether. That was a capital crime.

“Take them,” Francesca told her maid. Though Thérèse ignored the count, she was no doubt itching to do as he commanded.

Francesca pushed a jar of powder aside. “Ah, there's a pen.” She took it up, separated the inkwell from the other little jars and bottles, and cleared a space on the table. She found a few sheets of note paper under a scarf.

Magny knew better than to ask to whom she was writing. He knew she'd only tell him it was none of his affair.

“I understand they've caught one of the men,” he said after a moment's thunderous silence.

“Footpads,” she said. She shuddered involuntarily.
She gave a short laugh to conceal it. “Or are they
float
pads in Venice?”

“It does not amuse me,” he said.

She shrugged. “They'd heard of my jewelry. That's what they wanted—and to entertain themselves by tormenting a helpless woman.”

“Is that what the governor believes? Is that what
you
believe?”

She paused, the pen in midair. She turned and looked at him. “The man was already in custody,” she said. “He's sure to be executed. Why should he lie? What had he to lose by telling the truth?”

“I don't know. I cannot help thinking it had to do with that business earlier in the summer.”

“Lord Quentin,” she said grimly. She turned back to her note.

She didn't know how Quentin had learned about the letters she'd taken from the locked drawer in her former husband's desk. She didn't know how Quentin had obtained the fragment he'd shown her, so startlingly like those she had. It sounded, however, as though he'd made the discovery not very long ago.

The matter has puzzled us for some time,
he told her.
But it was only recently that we've begun putting the puzzle pieces together.

The puzzle pieces indicated that Elphick was what she'd suspected him to be five years ago: a man who worked for his country's enemies. But five years ago no one would have believed her. With the appalling accusations he'd made during the divorce, he'd destroyed her credibility—that was to say, what little credibility remained, after her father had swindled half the Beau Monde.

Her own lawyers, to whom she'd shown one of the letters, had told her they'd do her more harm than good, either during the criminal conversation case John had brought against her lover, Lord Robert Meadows, or during the divorce proceedings. John's lawyers would have no trouble making people believe the letters were the inventions of a vindictive, amoral woman.

They'd had no trouble, she'd discovered, making the world believe the worst of her, in any case. Her father had made that all too easy for them.

She'd not been without sin, true. She'd served her faithless spouse as he'd served her. But no one cared about a man's infidelities, even when they were beyond counting. Meanwhile, by the time John was done poisoning everybody's mind, her one spot of mud—one affair, undertaken when she was maddened by heartbreak and rage and longing to get even—had grown into a reeking cesspit.

Like father like daughter, all of England believed. Even her lover, embarrassed by the crim con case and sickened by the stories, abandoned her.

Lord Quentin had urged her to entrust the letters to him. She remembered the exchange very well:

You must have heard the rumors,
he said.
Elphick has hopes of becoming our next prime minister.

Some would say that England will get the leader it deserves,
she answered.

If the man's a traitor,
his lordship said,
isn't it long past time he paid the penalty?

Hanged, drawn, and quartered, do you mean?
she said.
But is that punishment enough? Why don't you leave it to me?

She didn't add,
Why should I trust you?

For all she knew, Quentin was one of Elphick's pawns. For all she knew, every word Lord Quentin uttered was part of an elaborate lie concocted by her former husband, a brilliant liar.

Quentin had returned several times, until at last she'd told the servants he was not to be admitted.

Some weeks later, her villa was searched. It was efficiently done. The signs were not obvious. But Magny had noticed, and once he pointed out the signs, so had she.

He'd warned her that her bank accounts and the contents of the bank vaults would probably be scrutinized. Government agents could get in wherever they liked, and Elphick had built up a network of allies in government. Magny had offered plenty of advice. Too much. The matter had made him finical and meddlesome. Since she'd decided years ago that no man, ever again, would control her, they'd quarreled, repeatedly.

And so she'd left Mira.

Magny's voice ended her brief journey into the recent past. “You never let me help you,” he said.

“Make decisions for me?” she said without looking up. “No, thank you, sir.”

“Francesca, this is absurd. Let me take you back to Paris.”

“My enemies can find me as easily there as here,” she said, “if that's what worries you. I'm not worried. They dare not kill me until they find what they want, because they don't know what arrangements I've made in the event of my un
timely demise. They cannot risk those letters being published.”

“Francesca.”

“I have letters to write,” she said.

Sunday night

When Marta Fazi learned that Piero had been taken into custody and Bruno had disappeared, she smashed several more madonnas, had a weeping fit about her lost emeralds, and vowed revenge on everybody who'd ever annoyed her. Then, as was usual with her, she abruptly became completely calm again. Plan A—using bullies to terrify the Englishwoman into handing over the letters—having failed, she swiftly devised Plan B. Then she went out in search of lackeys to replace the pair she'd lost. This was difficult in Venice but not impossible. Everywhere, Marta had learned, a strong-willed woman could find weak-willed men to do her bidding.

It was true that Venice was not the most welcoming place for criminals. This didn't mean it hadn't any. As was the case in more lawless cities, it had a population of desperately poor persons and desperate neighborhoods in which they lived. In such places, crime flourished, and as long as the criminal element confined itself to stealing from and cutting one another's throats, nobody bothered about them very much.

The difficulty was not in finding ruffians but in
finding ruffians whose speech she could understand. The Venetians definitely didn't qualify. For all she understood of their language, they might as well have spoken Chinese.

Luckily for her, people came to Venice from everywhere. It had its Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Turkish, and Jewish communities. It had drawn, as well, its share of outcasts from other parts of Italy, including regions where she'd lived. Among the ne'er-do-wells who met her requirements were a handful willing—for a price—to venture outside their neighborhoods and risk the attention of the Austrian soldiers. The price, as one would expect among the poor and desperate, was quite low. It didn't take Marta long to find what she needed.

Three o'clock in the morning,
      the following Tuesday
Caffè Florian, Piazza San Marco

At this hour the coffeehouse's rooms were thin of company. Customers were drifting away, either homeward or to other entertainments.

Francesca and Giulietta remained, though, sharing a table with Lurenze—and, for once, no one else. He'd contrived to shed the various diplomats and most of his retinue, except for a few bodyguards trying to be unobtrusive here and there: some inside the café, others outside, loitering about the entryway.

At the other end of the same room, most of the remaining patrons were gathered about the
Countess Benzoni. Don Carlo was not among them. Francesca wondered if he'd decided Venice had insufficient quantities of the “the more old woman, who sometimes she is ugly, but very, very beautiful in the purse,” and had taken himself elsewhere.

She'd decided to take herself elsewhere, and was debating how best to discourage the prince from following, when the atmosphere of the room changed. She looked up as Cordier came through the door.

He was dressed in a black tailcoat worn open. Over the frilled white shirt and black under-waistcoat he wore an embroidered waistcoat, from which hung a gold watch chain and fob. His immaculate neckcloth was tied with a simple knot. Close-fitting, light-colored evening trousers displayed long, muscular legs. The black pumps, black hat under his arm, and white gloves completed the picture of the proper English gentleman. His air and the way he moved, as lithe as a panther, told another story.

She remembered Magny's warning:
This one, I warn you,
ma cherie,
is trouble.

Trouble did not look her way but made straight for the countess.

To Francesca's exasperation, all the men in the group made way for him, including the countess's lover, the Cavalier Giuseppe Rangone.

Francesca returned her attention to Lurenze, who was describing a miniature recently presented to him, of a Bavarian princess, one of the hordes proposed as the next Queen of Gilenia.

That was to say, Francesca tried to attend to Lurenze. Her gaze kept reverting to Cordier. Though
far from flamboyantly dressed, he was impossible to ignore. For one thing, the café was thinly populated. For another, he stood at least a head taller than those about him…except when he was bowing over one of the women's hands or whispering something to make them smile or—no small achievement in that group—blush.

A plump masculine figure hove into view, blocking the scene at the other end of the room.

The approaching fellow paused at Francesca's table. He carried a covered tray.

“What is it?” Lurenze said. “Trinkets for ladies?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Giulietta said. With an impish glance at Francesca, she signaled the vendor to uncover the tray.

He did so, and Lurenze leaned forward to peer at its contents. He instantly recoiled, as though it had been filled with rats, and waved his hand. “No, no! Are you mad? Cover those things! Be off with you!”

When he chose, Lurenze could be imperious. The vendor hastily threw the cloth over the tray and started to back away.

“No, please wait,” said Giulietta. With crooked finger she summoned the vendor. She turned a limpid, doe-eyed gaze upon the prince. “This is most important, your illustriousness. These are cundums.”

“I know what they are,” Lurenze said. “I am not a child. But you—please not to speak of this in a place so public. It is most improper of this man to come before ladies.”

“It is always improper for the man to come before the lady,” said Giulietta.

Francesca laughed.

After a moment's cogitation, Lurenze understood the joke. “Oh, she is wicked,” he said, clearly torn between mortification and amusement. “Someone must wash her mouth with soap.”

“But your radiance, the cundum is most useful,” Giulietta said. “You would not wish to have a deformed heir, or an idiot to succeed to the throne of Gilenia—or perhaps to have no successor of any kind. These are some consequences of the pox. Also, to go mad and have ugly sores on the face, not to mention warts on the manly organ.”

His fair countenance instantly turned rosy. “Signorina Sabbadin, I promise you, I do not consort with persons who carry these diseases,” he said.

“But what of Lord Byron?”

His eyes opened very wide. “Lord Byron?
Lord Byron
? What is this you say? He is a
man!
A man does not consort with men. It is unnatural!”

“He is a great poet,” said Giulietta. “Yet even he, an intelligent man of letters, received an unwanted gift from a highborn lady.”

“I could name several ladies in England who received similar gifts from titled gentlemen of their acquaintance,” said Francesca.
With any luck, a lady will be so accommodating as to pass on the gift to Elphick.

Lurenze's gaze went from her to Giulietta. Then it settled upon the cundum seller, patiently waiting.

“Very well,” said the prince. “I do it for my posterity.”

“Show his excellency your wares,” Giulietta briskly told the vendor. “The good ones. Underneath.”

Obediently, the man lifted out the first tray, to reveal the articles below, in their thin paper packets.

Lurenze peered at them for a time. Then he reached for one.