Engaged in Sin (18 page)

A hand landed on the door again. Not in a knock but with a hard, angry slap. “My brandy, love. What in blazes have you done with it?”

The duke had come himself. Anne jerked up on her knees in the tub so swiftly that water splashed onto the floor. She might lose everything for this, but she knew—knew in her
heart
—she was doing the right thing. “I instructed your footmen not to give it to you anymore.”

“They take orders from you, Cerise?” His voice rumbled through the closed door. “I know you were having my liquor watered down, but each night I had the stuff poured out and replaced. This time, when I insisted one of them bring a bottle to me, they all refused.”

“Your Grace, I told them they must do that. It is not their fault—”

“Apparently,” he barked, “they are more afraid of
you
than of me. I’ve never known my servants to cower
like this before my mother, never mind a—” He stopped abruptly.

Never mind a tart
. He did not say it. He didn’t need to. It was what he meant. She stepped out of the tub and wrapped a thick white towel around her. She padded to the door, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the gleaming wood. With her hand on the key, she took a deep breath. He was furious. She was trembling, but she opened the door.

The duke was leaning on the lavish molding. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The tails hung out over dark trousers. He’d left his feet bare.

“It’s not me they are afraid of,” she said simply. “I told Treadwell it could hurt you to supply you with liquor endlessly. That’s why they are not fetching your drink. It hardly helps you.”

“I happen to think it does.” He slumped against the frame. He didn’t look like a man preparing to hit a woman. Instead, he looked like a man at the end of his rope.

“You don’t need it,” she insisted. “I think it makes your nightmares worse. Last night, when I read to you, you seemed happy. After, when I left you to sleep, you didn’t have a nightmare, did you? You do not
need
the liquor. I could read to you each night.”

“You read for hours, Cerise. Until close to dawn. I can’t ask that of you each day.”

“Why not? I am your mistress. It is what I am willing to do.”

“You are my mistress. Not a slave. I will not make use of you like that.”

With that, he pushed away from the doorframe, turned, and walked away.

She stared after him in astonishment as he strode down the corridor, swinging his walking stick ahead of
his steps. He moved with so much more confidence now. In only a handful of days, he truly had changed.

Last night he had relaxed enough to fall asleep in her lap. He’d stopped her reading
Sense and Sensibility
, though, and made her read a manual on horse breeding, which would put anyone to sleep.

She was his mistress—she was supposed to be available anytime he wanted, for anything he desired. Yet he’d just told her he would not make use of her. Should she be pleased or worried?

Was she right?

Devon let one of the footmen put on his greatcoat. He could feel the weight of it dropping on his shoulders. He held out his hand for his beaver hat and drew it on ruthlessly. Once he cared about his appearance. He had no right to anymore, not when a choice he’d made had cost a good soldier his life, which meant the man’s wife and child had been thrown into grief and poverty. And now they had vanished somewhere in London’s slums.

He needed his liquor, but Cerise’s warning kept hammering in his brain. Was the brandy hurting him more than it helped him?

He’d thought drink would dull the pain, grief, and anger. When he didn’t soak his mind with liquor, his nightmares were soaked with blood and echoed with screams. Brandy turned them into vague and formless things he couldn’t grasp but that still tormented him. Admittedly, it had never once given him the gift of a night’s sleep.

Perhaps she
was
right.

If he couldn’t escape in liquor, he had to do it another way. There was sex, but he wasn’t in the mood for an activity that required him to act more like a human and less like a growling, guilt-ridden blackguard. Anyway,
he sensed there was a wall between them, forged by his determination to drown his anger and guilt in drink and her equal insistence that he stop. Intriguingly, the only way to tear down the wall was for one of them to win.

Instead, he was going to ride. This time he would take more care. He couldn’t throw his life away by breaking his neck.

Guilt twisted his gut hard at how close he had come to killing himself. Thousands of men had died in war. Likely all of them would trade positions with him in a heartbeat. Besides, his mother would expect him to produce an heir before accidentally killing himself—

“Yer Grace.” The puffing voice was Treadwell’s. “Another letter has arrived from Her Grace, yer mother. Should I give it to you or to Miss Cerise?”

“To me, damn it.” It was as though Treadwell had read his mind, had known he was thinking of his family. Devon stuffed the letter in his pocket. No doubt it would be another entreaty for him to fall in love and marry.

Hell.

He knew where he was. Probably.

Devon braced his hand against the rough bark of a tree, while Abednigo danced beneath him. As he soothed the horse, he tasted late afternoon in the heavy sweetness of the air, felt it in the heat of the sun beating across his face. Even blind, he knew the woods around him were drenched in the gold of the dropping sun. He would likely never see it again.

Though there was a chance he would. He’d been to specialists in London, and no doctor could tell him exactly why he was blind. They had explained that a nerve ran from behind his eyes into his brain. He’d suffered a blow to his head. The doctors believed something was pressing on the optic nerve. A knot of blood, they speculated,
or a splinter of bone broken off when a young soldier’s bayonet had slammed into his skull. His sight could come back, the doctors had told him, if the thing moved. But if it did move, it could also slice its way through his brain. It could kill him.

“Your Grace!”

Devon turned in the saddle toward the anxious voice that fell over him in a breathless rush. Skirts swished and boots crunched over fallen twigs. “You followed me on foot, Cerise?”

“Yes.” She let out her breath in a whoosh. “In a corset, no less. I can barely breathe. Why are you out here alone?”

Holding the reins, he dismounted. “I didn’t want you to run after me.”

“I wanted to ensure …” She hesitated, and her pretty voice died away.

“I can guess what you’re thinking, love. You’re wondering if I know where I am but you don’t want to hurt my tender feelings by asking me.”

“Your Grace, I thought I’d already proved I am not very mindful of your feelings.” Her tone was so wry it made him smile. Then she paused. “Do you know where you are?”

“Yes. I can smell apples. Behind me, the stream is rippling softly, not splashing noisily. Given those clues, I would say I’m in the woods, south of the apple orchard, near the path that heads down to the village. Where the stream is at its deepest.”

Her silence landed on him like a slap across the head.

There was only one reason she wouldn’t say anything. “All right. Where am I?”

“At the northern end of the orchard, I believe.”

He’d been completely wrong. “Damnation,” he muttered.

“You did excellently,” she said loyally.

“I don’t need false praise to make me feel better,” he said grimly. “I wanted to map out my property in my thick head, and I need to get it right—”

“You lost your sight. That hardly means you have a thick head. Let us work on this together. I will describe things to you as we walk along. Where do you wish to begin?”

Her crisp tones brought out guilt with an acrid twinge in his heart. He hadn’t expected her to leap so vehemently to his defense. But that was what she did, wasn’t it? She insisted he wasn’t mad, no matter how much evidence he gave her to the contrary. She risked injury to help him, risked his wrath to take his brandy away. Last night she had gone without sleep for hours so she could read to him, keeping him from falling into another nightmare.

Cerise was unlike any courtesan he’d ever known. Most would have run screaming. None would have worked so hard to help him. She deserved better than his bad temper.

He took a deep breath. “Angel, I apologize for my stupidity. Not about being lost, but for snapping at you. I don’t deserve you, but I need you.”

This time he didn’t know what to make of her silence.

He coaxed her to mount Abednigo and he swung up behind her. To fit on the saddle, he lifted her so she sat on his lap. Then they explored the woods.

Her descriptions amazed him. She explained how the path meandered through the trees, giving him details of every twist and turn. She pointed out where the oldest trees stood, their bark drenched in lichen. They reached the stream again and she gasped in pleasure.

“It is so … mystical,” she whispered. God, how he was aroused by her, by every squirm she made on his lap, by every ingenuous, luscious sound that fell from her lips.

“How is it mystical?” he asked, mainly to keep her talking.

“It makes me think of a fairy grotto, as though fey creatures must live within.” She described to him how the branches of ancient willows trailed in the water, how long grass waved along the edge of the stream and patches of silvery ferns carpeted the forest floor. She told him of the rocks in the stream, smoothed by the flow, that made a natural but slippery path across. Every word she said had his heart pounding.

“I used to leap across stones like this. Once I fell in. I was in terrible trouble, for it was just before church, and I was wearing my best dress—” She stopped and went stiff against him.

Why? What had she feared she was going to reveal? He slid his hand higher, and he could feel her heart pound. “You said you grew up as a housekeeper’s daughter in a house in the country, then you lived in London’s stews. But your manners, your accent, the way you treat me, as if you’re a woman accustomed to managing—your story doesn’t ring true. You behave more like a lady than a servant.”

“I—I did work as a governess for the family before we went to London. I suppose I learned to manage then. But it doesn’t matter, does it? It was such a long time ago.”

How nervous she sounded. “Couldn’t you have become a governess again, Cerise, after your mother died?”

“I—no, I couldn’t. When we were living in the stews, my mother became ill. I knew I had to earn money, but my choices were thieving or prostitution, and she made me vow I would not do either. But my mother needed laudanum for pain. A great deal of it. So I … I had to break that vow to get money.”

This had to be the truth. She sounded as he had after battle—emotionless, almost distant.

“Was that when you went to work in the brothel?”

“Not then. It was after my mother died, as I said before. I hoped to become a gentleman’s mistress. I thought that would be the best way to survive, but I ended up in the brothel instead. Yet now I have become exactly what I dreamed of becoming. And we have reached the lawns, Your Grace. I can see the house. Come, we should go in.”

She didn’t wish to speak any more about it. It didn’t take brilliance to decipher that in her brisk tones. He understood why she would not want to think about the past, but he wanted to know more. Where was her family? Why had they not helped her? But he didn’t want to push her.

“I—I hope I did a good job of describing your woods to you,” she said shakily.

“You did, angel,” he murmured. He wrapped his arm around her waist. His heart ached for what she’d endured. He leaned forward until he felt the tickle of wayward strands of hair, then he kissed her bare neck. “Your descriptions were so lovely, so vivid, you almost made me see it.”

“Truly?” Her voice was rich, irresistible. “I am glad.”

There was one more thing he needed her to do for him. Fumbling, he found the pocket of his greatcoat and drew out the letter. “Another from my mother. Would you read it?”

She hated having to lie to him. Anne glanced at the duke’s face as she took the letter. His smile had vanished and the corners of his generous mouth were cranked down. He might be resisting his mother’s entreaties, but she saw how much it hurt him to do so.

“ ‘My dearest Devon,’ ”
she began. Her gaze slid down the page, rapidly reading ahead. The duchess had poured all her worry for her son into the letter. Bewildered pain leapt from every word.
“ ‘I cannot understand why you do not send any response to my letters, why you do not come home. Or why you do not at least go out into Society, so your friends could write me assurances and tell me you are healthy and well. I wish, I dearly wish, you would consider opening your heart to the idea of courting a bride. If Lady Rosalind had lived, she would have made a wonderful wife for you. She would have helped you heal. But you cannot shut yourself away from love because you have known loss. It has been three years
—’ ”

“That’s enough, angel.” He put his hand on her wrist.

She stopped, as he requested, but she hated to think of the poor woman worrying about her son. For the three years the duke was at war, the duchess must have been terrified. Anne would have been. She remembered how she had felt when her mother was slowly fading away. She eventually forgot to eat or bathe, change her clothes, or care about herself. “I could write a reply to your mother, Your Grace. You tell me what you wish to say, and I will write it and have it sent to her.”

“I don’t know what to say to her. You’re a female. Would you be happy to get a reply that tells you I’m not going to do any of the things you want me to do? Do you think that would set her heart and mind at ease?”

“I suppose not,” she had to admit. “But perhaps your mother is right. About a wife, I mean.”

“Angel, I don’t need a harping mistress—” To her surprise, he stopped then and smiled—a hard, bitter twist of a smile. “All right, love, you’ve wanted me to confide in you. On this, I will. Do you remember the book you read to me last night?”

She frowned. “
A Noble Treatise on Equine Breeding
?”