Pam Rosenthal (3 page)

No matter. That girl was no more herself than the heroine of a book she once might have liked to read. In another life. When she’d had books to read. Before he’d blown out the candle and changed everything.

Chapter Two

His valet tossed the tea-stained silk stockings onto the back of a chair, atop this afternoon’s coat and breeches. Glancing at their reflection behind him in the mirror, the Vicomte caught sight of his own bemused smile as well.

Well, of course he was smiling—who
wouldn’t
smile, he thought, after this afternoon’s encounter in the library? Her image glowed in his mind’s eye: flushed and tremulous, all freckles and bright hair and round little breasts like quinces.

Astonishing. How in the world had she come to be serving tea in his father’s chateau?

Hardly noticing what he was doing, he stepped into the breeches the kneeling valet held out for him. Obedient and absentminded as only someone who’s been bathed and dressed by others all his life can be, he extended his arms, lowered his head for the gauzy linen shirt with intricate tucks at the shoulder.

But now he shook his head. No, not the pink waistcoat with fussy gold embroidery. The dark red velvet was better, a little soberer.

“And just brush my hair straight back into its queue, Baptiste. Don’t try to make it curl.”

He’d been kept (he loathed the word, but had to admit that it was accurate) for the past several months by a woman who liked to see him dressed like an organ-grinder’s monkey. He hadn’t had any choice: she’d paid for the clothes; the only garments he’d owned when he’d arrived at her country house had been those bloody smuggler’s rags.

On occasion, however, she’d indulged him by costuming him as he preferred, in simpler and darker garments
à la mode américaine
. Men dressed with refreshing plainness in America—he’d learned there to appreciate a style and set of manners that made few distinctions between statesman and tradesman. Of course, it was one thing to admire, even to affect, a style. He could still revert to type when affronted or threatened: his eyebrows would rise and his lip would curl with the best (well, the worst) of his class. The epitome, he knew, of a spoiled, parasitical French aristocrat. A veritable Baron Roque.

So he could hardly, he chided himself, afford to feel superior to his benefactor Madame de Rambuteau. She’d played intermediary between him and his family during his sojourn abroad. It had been she who’d written, telling him to come back to France if he wanted to see his father again. Together they’d planned his return in the letters they’d exchanged. He’d found a way to sneak across the border; she’d sent a coach to fetch him in Montpellier.

She’d enjoyed caring for him while his leg healed and his family sorted out his legal status. His bad condition and ragged clothes had excited her, allowing her a safe bit of rebellion against the memory of a stodgy husband. It had been easy for Joseph to regale her with tales of seedy encounters and narrow escapes. She’d kept her looks, too; it had been easy to make love to her.

Not, he supposed, that her looks had really mattered. He’d kissed her dimpled little hands and pretended there were ink stains on the fingers; slid his fingers through her long pale hair and imagined it glowed like copper. And when he’d tongued her breasts he could almost taste freckles sprinkled across them like powdered cinnamon.

Tolerant, worldly, realistic, she must have understood that it wasn’t really
her
he’d pleasured so dutifully every night and afternoon. But Madame de Rambuteau was wise; she took what life offered and didn’t waste time yearning for the unattainable.

A quaint version of the unattainable, he supposed. A shopgirl, no, not even that anymore—she was only a servant now.
His
servant—well, his family’s, anyway. Unattainable only if you followed the idiosyncratic code he’d adopted almost fifteen years ago. The powerful mustn’t exploit the powerless. Terrible things might happen otherwise. Terrible things
had
happened once.

But could anything so terrible happen if he touched her glowing cheek or patted her little derriere as she passed?

Yes, damn it. They could happen and probably would.

He wouldn’t touch her and that was final.

No matter how difficult it was going to be. Much more difficult than it had been last December.

He’d awakened in a panic just before a wintry dawn with absolutely no idea where he was.
A year of exile and hiding can do that
, he’d thought—a year of sleeping in palaces and hovels, depending on how well his charm and his skill at gaming had served him. He sniffed: rosemary and lavender. And something else, spicy as cinnamon, tart as lemon. A woman. The sheets of her bed smelled like
her
.

Memories flooded back: the endless afternoon, the pain, the dizziness, the growing fear that he’d never get back to the inn where he was supposed to wait for Madame de Rambuteau’s coach. Someone had jostled him in the street—someone in a furious hurry had knocked against him yesterday and from then on his leg had hurt like the devil.

What awful work to be a book porter, he thought; if he ever had to sneak over the border again, he’d certainly find another way. Smuggling was hard and dangerous, even if a month ago it seemed like an opportunity to bring worthy and interesting literature into France.

Trudging over rocky paths and hiding from border guards had been grim rather than romantic. The fall he’d taken had almost finished him off. But worst of all was facing all those difficult, demanding booksellers yesterday—what had that pushy fellow’s name been? Ah yes, Rigaud, Rigaud who’d wheedled the last copies of Rousseau’s
Confessions
out of him when he’d been too weak and dizzy to care.

Still, he’d made it back into France, all in one piece and without his creditors or other enemies knowing. With any luck his family would pay off his creditors and placate any enraged husbands who might still demand satisfaction.

He leaned back on the lumpy pillows, breathing rosemary and lavender, lemon and cinnamon as he contemplated the last and most difficult bookseller, the girl whose bed smelled so sweet and spicy. His mouth twisted into a lopsided grin as he remembered how furious she’d been to discover that he’d shorted her father’s order. She clearly wasn’t just a shopkeeper, though she’d impressed and rather annoyed him with her competence. She was a
reader
: she’d even quoted a passage from Monsieur X’s memoir. And had he imagined it, or had her ink-stained fingers lingered for an extra moment over the pages of that particular book?

Ridiculous to have been so enchanted by those fingers, he thought. But not so ridiculous to have been stirred by eyes like turbulent Paris skies. And by a wide, determined mouth that was clearly capable of passion.

And then—ah yes—the freckles. Bronze and copper as tiny autumn leaves, they scattered themselves across her glowing cheeks, drifting down her neck and chest like faint clues on a treasure map and disappearing tauntingly into the snowy linen tied across her breasts. When she’d untied the fichu it had been worth all the pain, all the terror of being weak and wounded. If only he’d been a little more clearheaded. If only he could remember whether there were three or four of those freckles on the breast that had been so close to his face when she’d leaned over him and knocked away his silly eyepatch.

“She’s engaged,” the little bulldog of a brother had announced when he brought him a bowl of bread and coffee in bed.

“Well, all but engaged, to someone who understands, as we all do, that her head is altogether too full of books and stories, and that she needs looking after.

“It’s a good deal for everybody. She’ll get to stay in the book trade. She’ll be an asset to Rigaud—I suppose you met him yesterday?”

The Vicomte must have betrayed some consternation, for the fellow had laughed merrily.

“No, of course she’s not engaged to old Rigaud—what could you be thinking, old fellow? Her sweetheart is Rigaud’s nephew; my dear friend Augustin has been crazy about her since we were kids. He and Marie-Laure will run Rigaud’s shop when Augustin’s uncle gets too old. It’s a profitable business, unlike this one.”

A good deal. A profitable business.

And was she also crazy about the nephew?

“And if you so much as touch her, my friend,” the brother had added, “I’ll tear your leg back open.”

He hadn’t touched her. Well, if you didn’t count lying in her lap and squeezing her hand as touching her. He hadn’t touched her as he’d wanted to, in any case.

And—half a year later—it seemed that she hadn’t married the nephew.

He’d liked Gilles, who chatted amiably and volubly now that he’d made it clear—man-to-man, so to speak—that Marie-Laure was off limits. He’d been amused by the fellow’s directness and impressed by his devotion to his family, his sweetheart Sylvie, his friend Augustin. And his work.

“Best work in the world. I’ve always wanted to be a physician. I hung around the university’s medical school when I was a kid and did errands, just for the chance to learn bits and pieces here and there. Lucky for me that my father—the best father in the world—figured out a clever way to pay the school fees.”

Work you love and the best father in the world. And that sister as well. Lucky for you indeed, Gilles Vernet.

He couldn’t help but feel bitter and jealous after Gilles had clomped off to school. Though you wouldn’t think that Joseph Dupin, Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond, would have reason to be jealous of a shabby, carrot-haired student.

They were a family of nobodies, he told himself: middling people of no consequence, history, or property. Banal, petty tradespeople with not a hint of wit or style: they were, quite simply, not his equals.

And she was the worst of them. Just look at the silly crayon portrait of her hanging by the side of the bed, he thought. The artist couldn’t have been without talent, for he’d gotten the eyes right: that wonderful, changeable blue-gray wouldn’t have been easy to capture. But why had he given her that rosebud of a mouth? And—how dare he not show the freckles? Perhaps the portrait had been conceived to please young Augustin Rigaud, a man for whom the Vicomte felt an unreasoning and absolute dislike.

“Monsieur Joseph, they tell me that supper will be late. An hour at least.”

“That’s all right, Baptiste, I’m not hungry. Why don’t you go ask the other servants about a girl called Marie-Laure? Marie-Laure Vernet. Or perhaps Marianne.” His sister-in-law liked to address her servants by names of her own choosing.

“Find out when she was hired and where she works. And if she’s managed to hide herself from my father.”

Hideous to contemplate his father pawing at her. But how
had
she kept herself safe from that lecherous old goat? If she had.

“And don’t forget the rosemary and lavender for my room.” Since last winter he hadn’t slept a night without the two herbs perfuming the air.

Chapter Three

Supper’s lateness wasn’t merely due to the preparations for tomorrow’s banquet. There’d also been an argument between the chef, Monsieur Colet, and the wife of the Duc’s older son—Madame la Comtesse Amélie, better known to her servants as the Gorgon.

Marie-Laure had found the proceedings vastly entertaining. As usual, Monsieur Colet’s kitchen had produced a masterwork of a meal, from the hors d’oeuvres and foie gras to the ducks and glazed shell of beef. But for dessert the Gorgon had insisted on a towering confection of spun sugar, though the day’s weather was far too humid for the spinning of sugar. Monsieur Colet had shouted and sputtered at his employer as only a master chef—one who was entirely indispensable—could do.

He’d been even more voluble after the Comtesse had stalked away in defeat. He’d paced and declaimed, waving his arms and thundering about idiot bosses who knew less than drooling infants about running a kitchen and hadn’t the savoir faire to appreciate his strawberry tart properly anyway. It wasn’t until Nicolas opened a very old and dusty bottle of the Duc’s Chateauneuf-du-Pape that the chef ceased his tirade and waved his minions back to work.

And so supper had finally been served, both upstairs in the dining salon and downstairs in the dessert kitchen, a dry, sweet-smelling room where baking supplies were stored and the servants took their meals. Marie-Laure squeezed onto the edge of a bench at the long table and picked at the food on her plate, glad at least to stop working for a while. And to have a moment—while the argument between Monsieur Colet and the Gorgon was recounted with great hilarity—to remember more about her first meeting with the Vicomte.

The next morning had started out pleasantly enough. She heard conversation downstairs; the tone was companionable, though she couldn’t make out the words. He must be feeling better.

Papa was better too: sitting up in bed, eyes bright behind octagonal Franklin-style spectacles, engrossed in a pamphlet about the Americans’ victory (with French help, of course) over the English General Cornwallis.

“You must check on the smuggler,” he told her. “Poor fellow, doing his part to bring brave and original thought to France.”

She nodded abstractedly as she straightened his bedclothes and opened the window to let in some air. Reluctant to face the man who’d caused her to…well, to feel
that
way last night, she looked around for ways to make Papa more comfortable.