An Affair Without End (44 page)

Gregory must have sensed the sorts of thoughts that were whirling around in her mind. “Do not worry, Viv. I know that the odds are against me. I don’t expect her to fall in love with me. I am not handsome enough or exciting enough for Camellia. I’m sure no one would think we would suit. But I cannot change how I feel about her.”

“You are very handsome, and any woman who did not think so would be most foolish!”

He chuckled. “Spoken like a loyal sister. But I know what I am—bookish, unromantic, not the kind of man who appeals to young women. And the irony of it is that the one thing that usually draws women to me like flies to honey is something Camellia doesn’t care a fig about—my title.”

“Perhaps that is one of the things that appeals to you about her. You know that whatever she feels about you, it is for you yourself and not some title or land or wealth. And who is to say that the two of you would not suit? You both love to ride. You enjoy living in the country. Neither of you likes parties or making calls or any of the
ton-
ish sorts of things.”

“That scarcely seems the basis for a marriage, does it?”

“I would think it’s more than a good many couples have. Think about the man who falls in love with Dora Parkington for her sweet and girlish ways, only to find that it was all cold calculation.”

Gregory smiled. “No need to threaten me with such
horrors. I would like to think that if Camellia comes to know me better, she might feel something stronger for me. But I fear I’m deceiving myself. We are quite different. She is so vivid, all fire and passion, straight like an arrow to the heart of what she wants. And I am the puttering, meandering thinker, always questioning, planning. Dull.”

“You are not dull.” Vivian leaned across the carriage and took her brother’s hands. “Stop saying such things. I have clearly been too wrapped up in my own doings. I have not paid enough attention to you or Camellia. I will talk to her, spend time with her, and see if I can gather some sense of how she feels about you.”

“Do not push her, Vivian.” He sounded alarmed.

“Gregory, dear, give me some credit. I will be as subtle as a butterfly.” She settled back in her seat and fell silent.

She could not help but think of her own relationship with Oliver and how very different they were. Was her brother right, that two people so different could not find happiness? A common ground? She and Oliver, she thought, had the opposite relationship to that of Cam and Gregory. Her brother and Camellia were friends, but he feared that there was no attraction between them. With Vivian and Oliver, it was all attraction, but they were not compatible. It was all heat, with nothing solid beneath it. Such a relationship could not last; surely it was only illusory. But if it was illusory, why did it hurt so much when she told herself she must see him less?

When they reached their home, Vivian went straight up to her room. She was tired and ready for sleep, and she wanted, quite frankly, to stop thinking. Her maid helped her out of her clothes and into a nightgown, then took down her hair and brushed it out. It was a relief, as it always was, to shake out her hair, and the rhythmic strokes of the brush through it soothed and relaxed her. When her maid slipped
out of the room, Vivian climbed into bed and snuggled down into the soft mattress. This night, finally, she fell quickly and deeply asleep.

She awoke with a snap, pulled abruptly out of her sleep, and for an instant, she was lost. Darkness was all around her, only the faintest bit of light around the edges of the draperies. Something was around her neck, choking off her breath. She struggled and the hard thing around her neck tightened. She realized, coming fully awake, that she was in her bed and someone was there with her, seated on the bed behind her. He had lifted her up and wrapped his arm around her neck.

“Where is it?” a hoarse whisper rasped in her ear. “What have you done with it?”

She shook her head. His forearm pressed harder into her throat. A moment later she felt the sharp prick of something on the side of her throat beneath her ear, and she knew he held a knife to her. At the same time the arm loosened enough for her to breathe.

“Scream, and I’ll cut you,” the harsh, low voice went on. “Now, tell me, what did you do with it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Tears of fright welled in Vivian’s eyes, and she blinked them away.

“You took it. I know you did. I saw you there. You have it. Now give it to me or I’ll slice your throat right here.”

Vivian steadied herself. What was he talking about, where had he seen her? She had to think. She had to outwit him. “If you slice my throat, you’ll never get it.”

“But no one will know.”

She could not let him believe that killing her would rid him of his problem. Vivian summoned up a derisive laugh. “More fool you. If you have lost something, it was not I who took it.” She had to keep him talking, make him
concentrate on something besides threatening her. “
I
didn’t take anything. I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re looking for.” She tensed, waiting.

“Stewkesbury!” the voice exclaimed, and she could feel his body relax, the hand that held the knife dropping away from her neck. She had been waiting for that moment, and she reared up and back with all her strength, and she shrieked her brother’s name at the top of her voice.

She felt the crown of her head connect hard with the man’s chin, and she heard the sharp clack of his teeth slamming together, followed by a startled cry of pain. His grip loosened, and she lunged in the opposite direction, off the bed and straight for her door, screaming. The room was dark, but she knew it like the back of her hand, and she veered off course, turning to her right and grabbing the water pitcher that sat beside the washbowl. Her hand closed around the handle and she whirled, all in one motion, as her attacker came off the bed after her. She released the pitcher and it flew straight at him, catching him solidly in the chest and splashing water all over him.

He reeled back as she headed once more for the door. She heard a door crashing open and footsteps in the hallway. The intruder apparently heard them, as well, for instead of pursuing her, he turned and ran for the window. Vivian opened her door, and Gregory charged in just as the intruder nimbly slipped out the window.

“Vivian!” Gregory looked around and caught sight of the man disappearing. He ran for the window and leaned out, looking down. “The devil! Where did he go?”

“I suspect he clambered down that brick column between your bedroom and mine. It has enough decorations and outcroppings to give a good climber handholds.” Vivian turned and lit a candle with fingers that trembled.

Gregory turned and started toward the door, but Vivian reached out and took his arm. “No, don’t bother. You’ll never catch him now.”

Gregory hesitated, looking for a moment like their father in one of his more bullish moods, but then he relaxed. “No doubt you’re right. Bloody hell! Who was that? What was he doing here? Did he hurt you?”

He peered at his sister in the dim light.

Vivian shook her head. “Other than frightening me half to death, no, he did not hurt me. I have no idea who he was. But he wanted something he thought I had.”

“What was it?”

Vivian shrugged. “I have no idea. He never said. But we have to get dressed and go to Oliver.”

Her brother stared at her, dumbfounded. “Stewkesbury? Now? It’s the middle of the night.”

“That doesn’t matter. To get him to let go of me, I intimated that while I didn’t have this something, someone else did. And he said, ‘Stewkesbury!’ So obviously he thinks that if I don’t have it, Oliver does. He’ll go after Oliver next. He may be going there right now. We have to warn Stewkesbury.”

Gregory looked as if he had a hundred other questions burning to be released, but he was smart and practical enough not to give voice to them. Insead he nodded and left the room.

Fifteen minutes later, brother and sister were downstairs, dressed and cloaked, ready to leave. Seyre had had the foresight to ring for a servant, whom he had sent round to the mews, and though Vivian chafed at waiting the extra five minues until their carriage had pulled up in front of the house, Gregory insisted upon it.

“You have just been attacked by someone who is still out there, free to do so again. You are not going out unless it’s in
a closed carriage, no matter how nearby Stewkesbury House may be.”

Vivian hated to wait, but she could not argue with her brother’s reasoning. As soon as the vehicle pulled up, she climbed into it, and when they stopped in front of Oliver’s house a few minutes later, she whipped open the carriage door and jumped down, not waiting for the step to be pulled out. Trotting up the front steps, she rang a sharp tattoo on the brass door knocker, repeating it as Gregory joined her on the stoop.

A footman finally opened the door, blinking the sleep from his eyes and still buttoning his livery. “My lord? My lady?” He gaped at them in sleepy confusion.

Vivian pushed past him into the entryway, saying, “I have to see Lord Stewkesbury. It’s vitally important.”

“Best run up and give him the message,” Seyre advised the servant as he followed his sister inside. “She’ll only keep after you or go up to pound on his door herself.”

His words moved the servant to action, but the man had made it only halfway up the stairs when Oliver appeared at the top. His hair was mussed from sleep, his shirt hanging loose outside his breeches, but his eyes were sharp, the sleep already banished from them.

“Vivian!” He ran down the stairs. “What is it? Are you all right?” He reached her and took both her hands in his, only then glancing at Gregory. “Seyre. What’s happened?”

“I’m not entirely certain,” Gregory replied, turning toward his sister.

“I have put you in danger. I’m sorry, Oliver; I didn’t mean to do it. That is, I meant to deflect him, but I didn’t realize he would assume you had it.”

“Deflect who? Had what?” Oliver frowned, his hands instinctively tightening on Vivian’s.

“What’s going on?” Camellia’s voice came from the stairs,
and the three in the hall turned to see her standing there, a candle in her hand. Her hair hung in a long golden braid over her shoulder, and her dressing gown was wrapped around her, held closed by her other hand. Her eyes were heavy and slumberous, as if she’d just been pulled from her bed.

Vivian heard her brother’s sharp inhalation beside her, and she thought wryly that if his heart had not already been lost, it was now.

Camellia hurried down the rest of the steps, her dressing gown fluttering around her legs, opening to reveal flashes of the thin white cotton nightgown beneath it. Vivian noticed that it was Gregory Camellia went to stand beside, not her cousin or her friend, and Vivian filed that bit of information away for further examination later. Perhaps the situation was not as hopeless as her brother believed.

Fitz came into view on the stairs, with Eve beside him, her fair hair unbound and hanging like spun silver and gold over her shoulders, her hand clasped in her husband’s.

“Lady Vivian. Seyre.” Fitz grinned in his usual way. “So glad you decided to drop by.”

“Hush, Fitz,” Eve reprimanded softly, her forehead creased in concern. “Vivian, what’s wrong?”

“Lady Vivian is about to tell us,” Oliver said, taking Vivian’s elbow. “I suggest we all move into the drawing room to hear it.” He turned toward the footman. “Jameson, I believe tea might be in order.”

The group relocated to the drawing room, decorated at some briefly whimsical moment in the past in chinoiserie. Teak dragons climbed the wooden columns to the mantel and bared their teeth at the ends of sofas and chairs upholstered in red patterned damask.

“Eve, I thought you would have banished the dragons by now,” Vivian commented as she settled into a chair.

Her friend chuckled. “No, it is Stewkesbury’s house, love. We are simply moving out.”

“The danger I believe you mentioned, Vivian?” Stewkesbury reminded in a mild voice. “What you didn’t mean to deflect on me but did?”

“Vivian was attacked tonight,” Gregory told him.

Oliver went still and straight, his mouth tightening into a hard, thin line as a chorus of whos and whats and wheres broke out all around.

“I was asleep,” Vivian said. “I woke up, and a man had his arm around my neck choking me.”

“The devil!” Fitz burst out, and Oliver’s face turned grimmer.

“Did he hurt you?” Oliver asked.

Vivian shook her head. “Not really. He frightened me half to death. He had a knife to my throat, and he asked me where it was.”

“Where what was?” Gregory asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he insisted that I had something and he wanted it back. I tried to get him talking, hoping he would loosen his grasp and give me a chance to get away. So I told him he was a fool.”

Oliver winced. “Vivian . . . the man had a knife to your throat.”

“Yes, well, but when I said I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about and if it was taken, it was someone else who took it, then he said, ‘Stewkesbury!’ That was when he relaxed and lowered the knife, and I was able to hit him.”

“Hah!” Fitz let out a crack of laughter. “You planted him a facer? Well done, Vivian.”