A Lady of Notoriety (The Masquerade Club) (16 page)

MacEvoy gave him an approving look. ‘Good idea. Make certain she keeps to her bargain and never returns here.’ He turned thoughtful. ‘Although with Campion busy with his shops, there’s really no reason for her to come back.’

Somehow that did not appease Hugh.

* * *

After breakfast, MacEvoy checked the records and found the location of Daphne’s town house. Hugh immediately set off to call upon her.

She resided in Mayfair, but where else would Lady Faville reside? Her house was on Hereford Street, a few streets from Grosvenor Square and near the corner of Hyde Park that bordered Oxford Street. From the Masquerade Club near St James’s Street, it was a little over a mile. Hugh welcomed the walk. He’d been spending too much time in darkness, watching people play cards and dice. Even though the nightlife suited his recent gloom, the sun and fresh spring air made him feel more alive than he had felt in over a month.

Or was it the prospect of seeing Daphne again that roused him?

Perhaps anger was a step up from gloom. He refused to believe that anything but anger prompted him to make this visit. He wanted answers, answers she’d cleverly avoided giving him. This time he would not leave until he knew precisely why she had returned to the Masquerade Club. If Lady Faville planned more mischief for his family, he would nip it in the bud right now.

While he’d tossed and turned in his bed that morning, one thought had consumed him, and it was not the notion that she’d come to the Masquerade Club looking for him. It was that she’d come looking for Xavier.

Apparently she’d held her obsession with him for ten years. What made him think it was over now? Or had been over even when she’d been with him in the cottage? What other reason than Xavier would have made her come back? She might not have known Xavier was rarely at the club now that Hugh had taken over its management.

If she was really pining for his brother-in-law, what had been her meaning in making love to him?

He passed Berkeley Square and walked down Mount Street to Park Lane, which bordered the park. He needed to smell trees thick with new leaves, spring grass and flowers. Scent had become so much more important to him, a vestige of his two weeks of blindness.

He turned onto Hereford and found the house easily. With no hesitation, he strode up to the door and sounded the knocker.

A footman opened the door and broke out into a smile of recognition before composing his face again. ‘Mr Westleigh.’

‘Carter?’ This was Hugh’s first glimpse of Carter’s face. The man had been masked at the Masquerade Club. Hugh returned the man’s smile. ‘Believe me when I tell you it is good to see you.’

Carter grinned again. ‘I am delighted you can tell me so, sir.’ He stepped aside to allow Hugh to enter. ‘Have you come to see—?’ The man shut his mouth and looked perplexed, probably not knowing which name his mistress wished him to use.

‘I have come to see Lady Faville.’

Carter bowed. ‘Allow me to see if she is receiving callers.’ Carter’s voice was comfortingly familiar.

He escorted Hugh to the drawing room and, leaving the door open, left him there to find Daphne.

The room was dominated by a full-length portrait of Daphne—or rather, Lady Faville—her expression too cool and remote to be the Daphne he thought he’d known. Hugh closed his eyes and remembered the cottage drawing room, which he’d learned to navigate without sight. He turned away before opening his eyes again. This room was larger, more formal and feminine than the cottage’s furniture had turned out to be. This room was decorated in fine brocades and velvets in shades of ivory and blue, no doubt to reflect the blue of her eyes. There was no pianoforte in this room, which somehow made it seem cooler, more impersonal, not warm and comfortable like the cottage had been.

Perhaps this room suited the cool beauty of the portrait, whose appearance was always calculated to turn heads. At least, that had been his impression of Lady Faville. That was not the same woman he’d known in the cottage. He closed his eyes and remembered her, the sound of her voice, her scent, the warmth of her skin. That Daphne had not been real, but a fabrication based on her lies and his need. To know her as Lady Faville could only make it easier to forget the illusion she’d been.

He heard a swish of skirts behind him and her voice. ‘Hugh?’

Daphne stood in the doorway. Or rather, Lady Faville stood there. Her gleaming blonde hair was pulled away from her face into a simple knot and the rose-coloured dress she wore accented her flawless skin and matched the pink of her full lips. This paragon of beauty, so cool and flawless, was, indeed, not the Daphne he’d known.

‘Why have you come here, Hugh?’ She’d not moved from the doorway, as if she was afraid to enter the room.

‘We have unfinished business, you and I.’ He stared her in the eye. ‘I would speak with you.’

She blinked and glanced behind her. Looking for an escape? But she closed the door and took a step closer to him. ‘I have apologised for coming to the Masquerade Club. I will not come there again.’

‘As you said.’ His voice sounded bitter. ‘But that is not why I have come.’

‘What more can be said?’ She lifted her chin regally.

There was no reason to mince words. ‘I want to know why you came in the first place.’

She clasped her hands together. ‘I—I wanted to see the place.’

‘See the place?’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Do not play me for a fool. Again.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘Then why did you think I came there?’

He glared at her. ‘To find Xavier.’

‘Xavier?’ She acted surprised.

‘Xavier,’ he repeated. ‘You remember him. Xavier Campion? My sister’s husband? The man you lusted after for weeks—years. You planned to break up his marriage, if you recall.’

She lowered her gaze to the floor. ‘That was a long time ago.’ She raised her eyes again and her expression was like ice. ‘Surely you have not come here simply to point out my past failings. I assure you I am well acquainted with them.’

‘I want to know if you came to the Masquerade Club to see Xavier.’

She stepped towards one of the chairs and placed her hands, delicate and long fingered, on the back of it. ‘You took the trouble to call upon me merely to ask me that?’ Her voice rose in pitch. ‘You want only to know that I will not further trouble your family?’

That was not the only reason. He wanted to know how deep her deception had been in those two weeks he’d been blind. He wanted to know if she was still as obsessed by Xavier as she’d been before. If so, what had he, Hugh, meant to her?

He moved closer, standing behind her, close enough for her scent to reach his nostrils. Her scent matched the rose of her dress.

‘I will cause no more trouble, Hugh,’ she said, her voice weary.

That did not answer his question. ‘I am to believe you? You made other promises and broke them. You’ve told other lies.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But whether you believe me or not, I will trouble you and your family no further.’

He scoffed. ‘Maybe you cannot return to the Masquerade Club, because now you know even a mask cannot disguise you from me, but how do I know you are not plotting some other mischief?’

‘You cannot know.’ She shook her head. ‘I mean, I ask only that you believe me this time.’

Believe her? ‘I am to believe you do not have some other mischief to wreak upon my family?’

‘Yes, because I do not.’ Her voice turned very quiet. ‘I mean none of you any harm at all.’

He strode up to her and held her by her shoulders. ‘Then tell me why you came. If not to start that business with my sister’s husband again, then why?’

It was a mistake to come so close to her, to touch her. His body was drawn to her like a magnet to metal.

She made no effort to pull away. Instead, she looked up into his face. ‘Would you believe me if I told you I came to see you?’

His senses heightened at her words and her nearness. It hurt to look at her; she was that beautiful.

‘I would not believe it,’ he managed.

She took a breath and it felt as if she’d robbed him of air. ‘Well, I did come to see you. I wanted to look at you without bandages, to see for myself that you were not blind. When I left the cottage, I did not know if you would be blind or not.’

‘If you’d cared so much, Daphne—’ he released her ‘—you never would have left.’

She stepped away from him. ‘If I’d stayed, you would have discovered who I was.’

His voice dipped low. ‘I would have discovered how seriously you deceived me, you mean.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed again. ‘That is what I mean.’

Had he meant that much to her that she needed to see him healed? Wait. He must not fall for more deception. ‘How did you even know I was at the Masquerade Club?’

She paused before answering, ‘Mr Everard, my man of business, told me.’

Her man of business? Hugh knew that Lady Faville’s man of business had met with Rhys and Xavier to arrange the compensation for the damage to the Masquerade Club.

‘Your man of business told you I was at the club and that was why you came there?’

She nodded.

He could not believe her. If he’d been that important to her, she would not have deceived him. She would not have left him. ‘You came to assure yourself that I was not blind and not to see Xavier?’

She turned her head away. ‘Yes.’

Was she jesting? ‘Your man of business would have mentioned a blind gambling-club manager. There cannot be so many of those in London. When he spoke of me, surely you knew then I was not blind. Why come to see it?’

Her shoulders slumped and she retreated to the fireplace. ‘It does no good to banter back and forth. You cannot believe me and I cannot convince you. Suffice to say I will not bother you again, Hugh. I do promise that.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Please leave me now.’

He crossed the room and turned her around to face him. ‘Not before you tell me why you lied to me! Why did you not tell me you were Lady Faville? Why did you let me think—think you were someone else? That our time together meant something else?’

Her eyes glittered with unspent tears and she trembled beneath his touch. Instead of pulling away and slapping him across the face as he deserved for such roughshod behaviour, she reached up and touched his cheek.

‘I am so sorry, Hugh,’ she whispered.

Her voice was like her whispers in bed. He could resist no more. He crushed his lips against hers. Closing his eyes, he brought back the Daphne he loved, warm and soft and real.

* * *

Daphne threw her arms around him and kissed him back, starved for his touch, the feel of his lips. He tasted wonderful, so familiar, so masculine. She held him in the kiss by burying her fingers in his hair, savouring the feel of his thick, dark, unruly hair no longer covered by bandages. The heat of his body inflamed her and she could think of nothing but joining with him again.

In the month they’d been apart it was if she’d been torn in two. She needed him to be whole again, to give her life some kind of meaning. She clutched at him with a desperation that matched his own. He backed her to a
chaise longue
near the fireplace, and her need was too great to wait upon removing clothes. She undid the buttons of his trousers while he pulled up her skirts. Suddenly she was beneath him, pulling him to her, opening herself to him. It was madness, but a glorious derangement, this urgent need to make love to him, to again share the ecstasy of a passionate release.

They freed themselves of enough clothing, and he thrust into her, his power so exhilarating that she thought she would weep for the pleasure of it. She rose to meet him in a frenzied, desperate rush that was unlike any of their past lovemaking. Never had her need for him risen so quickly, become so violently intense.

She clutched at him, fearful something would yank him away, like a sailor swept from his ship in a storm. This storm was of their own making, Daphne thought, but she felt as helpless as if it had come from the wind.

She felt the sensations inside her grow more intense, building with each rhythmic thrust. Did he realise what his body did to her? Did his need drive him higher and higher, harder and harder? Suddenly she reached the precipice and his seed exploded inside her. She cried out as her own release came and she quivered beneath him in waves and waves of supreme pleasure.

A moment later, it was over. They plummeted quickly from the highest peak straight to the deepest reality.

He lay atop her only briefly before standing, looking alarmed. She made an attempt at covering herself with her skirts when he fumbled through his pockets and handed her his handkerchief. It was a kindness she didn’t expect after such an animalistic coupling. He glanced at her, but quickly turned away to button his trousers and straighten the rest of his clothes.

‘Did I hurt you, Daphne?’ He faced her again.

She shook her head, but felt a tear escape her eyes and run down her cheek.

He leaned down and gently wiped it away with his thumb. ‘I am sorry for that.’

Her brows knitted. ‘Sorry?’ Had he regretted this?

‘I should not have treated you so. It was not well done of me at all.’

Was he ashamed? ‘Then why—?’ She could not get the words out.

‘Why?’ He blew out a breath. ‘I honestly do not know why. Your beauty—?’

Her beauty.

The dagger inside Daphne’s heart twisted.

Of course. Acclaimed beauty, Lady Faville. What man did not want her?

Besides her husband, she’d allowed no man in her bed. Except Hugh. Even though he despised her for causing trouble for his family and lying to him, he’d made love to her beauty.

And she’d allowed it.

She’d wanted it. She’d wanted nothing more.

Except perhaps that he make love to Daphne, a woman he couldn’t see.

She glanced around the room. The curtains were open and sunlight streamed in. Anyone walking by might have seen them on the
chaise
. Her cheeks burned at the thought.

‘I must go,’ he said.

She managed to stand and to smooth her skirts. ‘Yes. Go.’ He’d walk out the door, out of her life, and she feared all the shopping and good works in the world would not be enough to take away the pain of that.