Dark Obsession (2 page)

Within seconds, indignation worked its way past her dumbfounded shock. ‘‘I didn’t. I never. That is
not
me.’’

Across the room, a brocade curtain swept open to reveal the stout figure of Signore Alessio. With a tug on his tailcoat he stepped forward. One fine-boned hand extended toward her, a rose balanced on the ends of his long fingers.

‘‘Now you see how much I love you,’’ he said in his accented English. His gaze shifted. ‘‘And now you, Signore and Signora Thorngoode, have no choice but to allow me to marry your daughter.’’

‘‘Then, by the devil, she’ll be married and widowed in the same instant!’’

Her father’s pounding footsteps and Alessio’s scampering ones muffled but did not entirely mask the swish and thud of Millicent’s senseless body swaying, then hitting the floor.

Beyond a doubt this had proved the worst day of Nora Thorngoode’s life.

‘‘Marriage.’’

‘‘But, Papa—’’

‘‘Immediately.’’ Millicent Thorngoode’s high-pitched pronouncement reverberated up the parlor’s walls. The crystal chandelier above their heads tinkled, a sound as brittle as Nora’s taut nerves.

‘‘Now, Mama, we mustn’t act rashly.’’

‘‘Rashly?’’ Her mother’s hand flew to cup her forehead, as if in preparation of repeating her earlier swoon. ‘‘You’re a fine one to speak of acting rashly. Perhaps you should have considered the notion before posing—’’

‘‘It wasn’t me—’’

‘‘—nude and shameless for all the world to—’’

‘‘I did
not
pose for that portrait!’’

At a warning twitch of her father’s eyebrow, she bit down on her tongue and laced her fingers tight, as if that might rein in her galloping anger, her staggering frustration.

Oh, how
could
that man have done this to her? Perhaps she shouldn’t have raced after Papa at the gallery; perhaps she
should
have allowed Alessio to meet his just end for disgracing her. . . .

Several breaths passed before she trusted herself to speak. ‘‘As I’ve explained countless times, Mama, that portrait came entirely from Alessio’s imagination. I had no part in it. We therefore needn’t speak of marriage—’’

‘‘There’s no other way, Nora.’’ Her father scowled. ‘‘Real or imagined, this debacle has struck your reputation an irreparable blow. By Christ, there can be no recovering from it. If only the whoreson hadn’t slipped off to God knows where, he’d be supping with the devil this very moment.’’

Nora reached across the table and slipped her hand over his, the thick-veined, coarse-haired hand of a commoner. ‘‘Papa, he
did
slip away, didn’t he? I mean, you haven’t . . .’’

Her mother’s palm slapped the tabletop. ‘‘Of what are you accusing your father, Honora?’’

She chewed her lip. Nearly all her life she’d heard whispers about her father’s travels across the world as a young man convicted of thievery; how he’d escaped the Australian penal colony and fought his way back to England via the Americas with the makings of a fortune in his pockets. Once home, he had allowed no one to stand in his way as he forged a veritable golden path from one end of London to the other, or so the rumors had it.

She had always wondered what, precisely, people meant by his not allowing anyone to stand in his way. . . .

With a sigh, she stared into her father’s murky blue eyes and answered her mother’s question. ‘‘I am not accusing Papa of anything.’’

‘‘Trust me, sweeting.’’ His gravely voice gentled as it once had when he’d soothed her childhood hurts or lulled her to sleep. ‘‘Wherever that scoundrel may be, as God is my witness, he arrived there by his own power, not mine.’’

Her gaze fell and she nodded.

‘‘He’s likely halfway to Florence by now, if he knows what’s good for him.’’ Her mother plucked a pear from the Meissen bowl at the center of the polished walnut table. Juice sprayed as she bit into the fruit; more dribbled onto her chin as she said, ‘‘And you, child,
will
be married just as soon as your father and I can find a suitable groom.’’

‘‘A suitable groom?’’ Nora swallowed an ironic chortle. Finding a son-in-law had been her mother’s one and only goal these past five years, since Nora’s eighteenth birthday. She’d virtually scoured the
ton
from top to bottom and sideways in pursuit of an eligible candidate—not that there hadn’t existed a surfeit of wellborn bucks in the city. There were plenty. Just none that wished to marry Nora.

The dismal fact had once convinced her, despite Papa’s sincerest assurances to the contrary, that she lacked the physical attributes necessary to attract a man. And it
was
true that she’d been a rather late bloomer, with the awkwardness of adolescence lingering several years longer than she would have preferred.

But nowadays her mirror professed the truth, that while perhaps not having achieved extraordinary beauty, time had nonetheless softened a reedy figure, smoothed unruly hair and whitened a freckled complexion. She could only conclude that perhaps it wasn’t any deficiency on her part, but rather Mama’s voracious, often embarrassing efforts—and yes, Papa’s shadowy reputation too—that drove the young men away.

Perhaps they should have allowed her to marry Alessio. The thought barely concluded before a shudder skipped across her shoulders. As a painting master he’d fulfilled her heart’s desires. But as a husband . . .

No, she had never felt so much as a twinge of desire in that respect. Not to mention that the brute had proved himself a scoundrel beyond redemption this very afternoon.

‘‘Perhaps a trip abroad.’’ She brightened at the notion. ‘‘What a charming adventure Paris would present, and I could study painting with some of the most celebrated—’’

‘‘Painting—bah!’’ Tiny pieces of pear accompanied her mother’s outburst. She leaned as though taking aim from across the table; indeed, she pointed her half-bitten pear at Nora. ‘‘You’ll never paint again, young lady, not if I have anything to say about it. Art has utterly ruined you! Great bloody heavens, displayed before all of London like a common—’’

‘‘Now, Milly, Nora says it wasn’t her, and I believe her.’’

‘‘Thank you, Papa.’’

‘‘You’re welcome, child. You’re a good girl and I never doubted you. But London will—make no mistake. And if you think to escape by running off to Paris, think again. Scandals are fleet of foot, my dear. This one will arrive in any city of consequence long before you’ve even packed your bags. No, the only way to diffuse the barrage is for you to marry—marry well and marry swift.’’

‘‘Yes, but with whom? A butcher’s son?’’ Millicent shut her eyes and groaned as if about to be ill. ‘‘After all my efforts to see her well connected . . .’’

‘‘No, my dearest, she’ll not marry a butcher, baker or candlestick maker. Our Nora will have her nobleman yet, for I believe I know just the man we seek.’’

‘‘Who?’’ Nora and her mother exclaimed as one.

‘‘Sir Grayson Lowell.’’

A gasp flew from Nora’s lips, but Papa didn’t notice. No, he was too busy leaping from his chair and running to aid his wife, slumped over onto the table in a dead faint for the second time that day.

Grayson stood at the edge of the headland, renamed Tom’s Tumble by the villagers, as if this outcropping of dirt and stone confronting the Atlantic Ocean were a site of frolicsome sport rather than a place of death and the personal hell it had become for him. But even to those who had devised the moniker, the term held no jest; it was merely a simple, grim remembrance of what had occurred here nearly a year ago.

Squinting against the winds shuddering off the water, he peered out at the whitecaps riding the sea like ghosts on a midnight gale. His brother, Thomas, Earl of Clarington—dead these many months. Right from this spot he had slipped, among the heather and gorse and bluebell, on a sparkling summer’s day, a day the ocean shone so bright it seemed the sky itself had drifted to earth in a billowing waft of silk.

The sun hadn’t shown its weary face since, or so it seemed to Grayson. No, a perpetual dusk had descended over Blackheath Grange that day, over the hills, the moors and the sea. Over him. And over ten-year-old Jonathan, orphaned and silent ever since, little more now than a shadow and a huge pair of eyes that slid over Grayson to imprint his guilt deeper and deeper still. . . .

He backed away from the cliff, intending to head home. He’d found no answers here, not that he’d expected any. Tom was dead and it was his fault.
His
.

The knowledge fanned an ember inside his chest, a constant, searing reminder of those last awful days. . . . The despicable words Grayson had blurted upon his discovery that the estate was bankrupt, the Lowell family nearly penniless. Grayson might have offered his understanding, his compassion, his assistance in rectifying his elder brother’s disastrous financial decisions. Instead he’d . . .

Young Jonny was earl now, but of what? An empty title, a shell of an estate. And who to look after him but his shell of an uncle, haunted, guilt ridden and shriveled of heart.

‘‘Ah, Tom, forgive me. . . . Forgive me. . . .’’

A thrash of his heart tore the whispered words apart. A chill slithered beneath his skin, raked the hairs on his arms and neck. He whipped around to view the headland behind him, gripped by a sense of being watched.

Again.

Pulse lashing in his wrists, he scanned the rocks and wildflowers, the hillocks that cast craggy shadows into the grassy hollows. Once more he felt the oppressive weight of a presence that watched him, that seemed always to hover just over his shoulder.

Limbs trembling, he raised a reluctant gaze to the more distant trees. In their summer-heavy branches he saw movement, an assemblage of shape and form that was not tree, not shadow, neither solid substance nor a figment of the wind.

And it was, indeed, watching. As it had twice before.

‘‘Thomas?’’

Dread pooled thick in his throat, cutting off breath. His legs fell out from beneath him and he landed on his knees in the weeds, head slumped between his shoulders. His right hand fisted, and as though to yank the pain from his being he rent purple blossoms from the earth.

But the pain and the horror of that day had become his boon companions. What would he be without them? His quaking fingers opened, offering a token to the wind.

The flowers spiraled from his palm and soared above the water as if intent on meeting the gulls and cormorants flapping over the tossing waves. But the breeze faltered and the flowers dipped, disappearing over the cliff to float gently to the rocks below.

Tom hadn’t floated gently down. No, he’d . . .

Grayson sucked a breath through his teeth and stumbled to his feet. He stared into the trees and saw nothing, not even the trees themselves; only shadows and emptiness. Had he truly seen something or merely taken a glimpse inside himself?

Sleep. He sorely needed some, but ever since that day he hadn’t been able to steal more than two or three hours’ slumber at a time, and restless ones at that.

Slowly the breath began moving freely in and out of his lungs. His vision cleared. His resolve, like the apparition itself, reaffirmed and took shape inside him.

‘‘I’m going to marry her, Tom. For Jonathan’s sake. Her dowry will restore the Grange and the earldom and give your son a future—the grand one he deserves. He’ll have everything a boy can want. And he’ll never know how close we came to losing everything. That’s my promise, Tom. I swear it on my life.’’

Ah, such paltry security for his pledge. For what worth did his life hold now? Soon to be shackled to a woman he didn’t know, much less love. And while the optimist might hope love would grow over time, Grayson held no such illusion.

He had appealed to Zachariah Thorngoode for a loan. He’d come away with unlimited funds. . . . And betrothed to the man’s daughter.

London’s notorious Painted Paramour, as the
ton
had dubbed her. Rumor held her to be bold enough to make the most seasoned demimonde blush. He deserved her. They deserved each other. A sardonic chuckle broke from his lips.

Ah, what a glorious couple they would make.

Grayson alighted from his curricle just beyond the front steps of the Earl of Wycliffe’s Park Lane town house. Raising a gloved hand, he adjusted his beaver hat and stepped onto the pavement. ‘‘You needn’t wait,’’ he said to his driver. ‘‘I’ll more than likely stay the night.’’

If not, he’d walk home to Clarington House, a mere half dozen streets away. His driver nodded and clucked to the matching grays.

‘‘Should tonight go badly,’’ Grayson added under his breath as he watched the gig recede, ‘‘I don’t know how much longer you’ll be in my employ.’’

But how could the evening be anything less than an unqualified success? He was here at his closest friend’s home to officially offer for Honora Thorngoode, a little farce they would play out for appearance’s sake. Never mind that all of London knew the truth of it: theirs was a union fashioned out of desperation and nothing more.

Thorngoode had assured him of his daughter’s hand, insisted she was delighted with the match. Of course, that was merely another way of saying there could be no backing out for the chit, not with her reputation in such tatters. Nor could there be for him, not with Jonathan’s future equally laid to waste.

He placed his foot on the bottom step, then went utterly still. From the dark void of the park across the street, a strange hissing rode the wind. He heard it sift through the branches overhead, felt it scour the street. Beneath his clothing, his flesh prickled. From a chilling wisp of breeze, an eerie murmur uncurled.

He clenched the railing. ‘‘Who’s there?’’

His eyes strained in the darkness. In the fog prowling Hyde Park’s lawns, did he see . . . ?

No. There was no one. Nothing. No gathering of shadows, no eyes glaring in accusation. Merely branches fluttering in the mist.