[Samuel Barbara] Lucien's Fall(Book4You) (7 page)

Mornings were invariably spent in her gardens—as long as she dared, for he also learned it was not a pursuit Juliette particularly approved. If Madeline had been ladylike, taking a bonnet and gloves and prissily clipping a flower here, a flower there, it might have been all right, but as with everything else she did, Madeline took to the gardens with a wholehearted gusto Lucien found surprisingly erotic. Such passionate attention in the bedroom might be interesting indeed.

From the garden, Madeline changed and ate with whatever guests happened to be present in the dining room, sampling tidbits from the constant feast laid out at the sideboard—kidneys and eggs and rashers and bread. Afterward, she escaped to her greenhouse if she possibly could, otherwise she allowed herself to be drawn into promenades about the grounds or she read in the study or she played the spinet in the music room.

The greenhouse was her first choice, however, and he watched her through the windows as she made notes like a scientist on various plants she grew. At such times, she donned a pair of spectacles from her pocket.

She posted a great many letters, and Lucien bribed a servant to learn where they were going. She carried on a lively correspondence with several renowned naturalists, and exchanged chatty letters with two friends, one in London, another in a hamlet to the north; girls she’d evidently met on her travels. Another correspondent was less clear: a Sir Julian in London. He waited to see what that might mean, but Lucien thought it must be another of her botanical friends.

At night, she played the piano and sang a little with the others, politely laughing and conversing; at such times she seemed the very epitome of the graceful lady—her unruly hair neatly tamed and dressed with ribbons or jewels, her creamy bosom proudly displayed in one dazzling gown after another, her cheeks dusted with a discreet brush of rice powder. The powder amused him. For all the care she took with her hats and long sleeves, her skin had taken on a ruddy warm glow from the sun, and bright streaks ran through her hair like veining in black marble.

In those lazy evening hours, he admired her, and amused himself with pleasant images of disrobing her. Over the festive suppers—at which Lucien found himself always seated very far from Madeline and very close to Juliette—he toyed with images of kissing a particular freckle high on her left shoulder.

But for all that she was enchanting in the evenings, it was the mornings he awaited with eagerness, when she came from the gardens after her early work. Her hair was mussed, falling loose from her cap, her clothes askew, her hands dirty. Often she smelled of light sweat and the earth and a peculiarly arousing perfume of sunlight that seemed to come off her in waves. He wanted her deeply at such moments, and did not want to take her comfortably in a bed or after she’d washed—he wanted her just like that: musky and overheated and tasting of her work.

The power and violence of his wish surprised him. It should have warned him.

It did not.

…

Madeline told herself she should be wary of the cheerful Lord Esher when he joined her at five of a drizzly Friday morning. He was dressed for working in a pair of scuffed boots and sensible woolen trousers. His head, predictably, was bare, showing the wealth of thick, dark hair that adorned his well-made head. She thought he might be vain about his hair, the way he never covered it.

"Good morning!" he said in greeting.

Madeline glanced up, as if she’d just seen him. "Good morning." She was working in the rose gardens this week, going from the middle outward, clipping rose hips and dead blooms and pruning out deadwood. It was her third day at the chore, and she’d only managed to make it to the middle pink tones. "What brings you out here so early?"

"I’m here to help you," he said, spreading his hands.

"What do you know of gardening?"

"Nothing at all." His grin was crooked and unrepentant. "But I’m easily bid. Tell me what you need done, and I’ll do it."

"Why would you drag yourself out of bed so early to do such a thing?" She brushed a lock of dampening hair from her face so she could see to cut a withered stalk from the middle of an ancient bush. "It’s tedious work and not to most people’s liking."

"True," he replied, "but I’m here to win your good favor."

Madeline paused. For a moment, she took his measure, from the top of his head to his boots. "I suppose it doesn’t matter what your motives are. I am not foolish enough to dismiss help when I can get it." She pointed out a pair of pruning shears. "Take those. But watch me first. I don’t want you butchering the good wood."

Agreeably, he picked up the shears and watched carefully as Madeline illustrated the process of pruning. "If you’ll cut off the dead branches, I can trim away the rose hips and old blooms."

With a neat precision she would not have expected, Lord Esher did as she’d shown him. "Like so?"

She smiled her approval. "Yes."

They quickly developed a pattern: Lord Esher trimming the bush of its worst deadwood and old branches, Madeline following behind to neaten the overall appearance.

She was glad of his help; the work was less tedious when there was someone to talk with, and whatever else his failings, he was an intelligent man.

They chatted lightly about books and horses and dinner parties. Madeline learned he like poetry, and that his taste ran to the lusty works of a hundred years before, but he didn’t like the current crop of romances.

"Why not?" Madeline asked in challenge. "One is just a longer version of the other—love and drama."

His crooked grin flashed. "And carefully described moments of passion."

"Sex you mean."

"Yes" His dark blue eyes glowed with approval.

"Still, I think those poems appealed more to men, less to women, as novels appeal more often to women than men."

"Perhaps."

It surprised her that he didn’t seem to need to be proven right on every statement.

In that way, he was unlike most of the men of her acquaintance.

"I like this one," he said, touching the velvety blossoms of a dark rose bud, still curled tight and beaded with silvery rain. "The color is extraordinary."

"Yes.
I like it, too. It’s particularly compelling in this light. I’m not sure why, but there are some of them that seem to have greater intensity in lower light. This cloud cover brings out the vividness."

He wrestled a thick, dead branch from its stranglehold. His mobile mouth turned down at the corners. "Hmmm. Perhaps it’s like your theory of Pompeii."

"I don’t understand what you mean."

"A field of some sort, that has a vibration influenced by outside factors. One must be of a certain nature or frame of mind to perceive the vibrations at Pompeii, and with the flowers, the light must be at a certain hue."

Madeline considered that, pursing her lips as she glanced over her shoulder toward the willow tree at the center of the concentric circles that made the garden. The soft green leaves veritably glowed against the pearl-gray sky. White roses, beautifully displayed now that Madeline had pruned the bushes, made blurry marks against the light, with the yellow climbers against the wall almost dazzling. "The colors are all more vivid in this light," she said.

"Yes, to some degree." He turned, barely touching her shoulder to point toward the farther reaches of the garden, to the still-wild beds that had not been cleared. "Look at that red one."

Amid the dark green foliage, the flower blazed, almost impossibly bright against the dim morning, its color so vivid it was almost painful to look upon. Before she could speak, Lord Esher strode to the bush and clipped it, bringing it back to her.

He held it loosely in his long-fingered hand. "It’s so beautiful, I want to eat it."

Madeline laughed. "It sounds odd, but I know what you mean. It’s not enough to simply look at it— it’s so impossibly fleeting and vivid you want to absorb it on as many levels as possible."

"Yes." As with the flowers, his eyes were doubly blue in the strange gray light.

He put the flower against his nose and inhaled, closing his eyes as he did so.

A strange, sharp pang rushed through Madeline’s chest. His black lashes, long as a child’s, lay in a wide sweep against his high, elegantly hewn cheekbones. The bright soft petals of the flower touched a jaw not yet shaved this morning, and the contrast of rough and hard against delicate and sweet made her ache.

He opened his eyes, then deliberately put the flower against his mouth and tasted it. He grinned. "Not much flavor or scent, really. We’re meant, I think, only to look at it."

One delicate petal snagged against his mouth, and tore. Madeline backed away, unaccountably upset, and bent her head to her work. "You may have all the time in the world, my lord. But I have work that must be done."

"And I promised to help you, not distract you."

"Your presence is a distraction," she said. "I think perhaps I’d rather not share this quiet morning time. If you want to help me, please come back later."

He said nothing for a moment. Madeline dared not look at him but kept her eyes on her task. He stood still, but some emotion emanated from him, turbulent and unidentifiable. "I meant nothing untoward, Madeline."

"I did not give you leave to call me by my Christian name."

"Forgive me." The turbulence increased, and he took a step forward. "I was only—"

She looked up, her heart rushing. "Trying to seduce me."

"No!" The word was vehement, and Madeline stepped back once again. "I vow it—for once, I was not—it was only conversation."

She did not know whether to believe him. And he seemed more dangerous for her own indecision. It was not Lord Esher who was to blame for his extraordinary appeal, she noted with some embarrassment. It was she who responded to it so vehemently.

"Very well, you may stay," she said abruptly.

"No." The word was heavy. "No, you’re right. I lied."

Madeline lifted her head.

He put the flower in her hand. "It was all designed for seduction. The flower, the conversation." He gestured toward his clothes. "Even my being here this morning."

Madeline turned the flower in her fingers slowly. "Do you have any idea who you are under all those disguises?"

"None at all."

"It doesn’t matter, you know," she said, gathering her shears, "whether you came out here to seduce me, or win my favor as you put it, or to discover something lost, which I think is more likely."

He lifted an ironic brow.

Madeline ignored it. "The fact remains you’ve halved my work this morning, and I’m grateful."

His eyes narrowed. Instead of taking the shears, however, he shook his head.

Without a word, he left her, striding into the morning mist with a rigidness on his spine.

Madeline watched after him for a moment, admiring with some small part of her woman’s heart the taut, muscled length of his legs.

A puzzle.

At the end of the garden, he turned around. For a long, long moment, he simply looked at her with no expression at all on his handsome face. Madeline bore it for a time, then she put him out of her mind and trimmed her roses.

When she looked up again, he was gone.

…

Juliette, restless and weary, climbed from her bed, disturbed by something she couldn’t name—only knew it had taken her from sleep. Jonathan had not slept with her last night. He started his foolishness about marriage again, and she’d been forced to send him away when he appeared at her door. There were rules.

She missed him with a vague, aching hollowness in her belly. Trailing her amber silk dressing gown behind her, she rubbed the hollowness with her palm and drew open the drapes over the long French windows. A dreary, misty morning greeted her and she leaned against the wall, gazing out on the grounds.

From here, she had an eagle’s-eye view of the maze and rose gardens, and also of the open meadow, lined by elms, that lay beyond. Madeline’s gardens. How fiercely she protected them!

And there the girl was, amid the roses with her basket of tools at her feet. Even from this distance, Juliette could see the muddy hem of her old gown. She smiled fondly.

In truth, the girl had a rather dazzling talent for flowers, inherited from both sides of the family. The earl’s ancestors had built the gardens, of course, but Juliette’s mother, too, had had a passion for flowers. Although she died when Juliette was twelve, and the flowers she coaxed out of the mean back garden in the rough London slum where Juliette had grown up had hardly compared with this grandeur, Juliette remembered that small plot with great joy. It had been the only spot of joy in her mother’s short, hard, brutal life.

Too bad she did not live to see Juliette’s stunning success and the granddaughter that so resembled her. Where Juliette was blond, Madeline was dark, with the same creamy English skin as the grandmother she’d never seen, didn’t even know existed.

Only Juliette and a handful of trusted servants knew all the secrets of Juliette and Madeline’s lives. And this gray, gloomy morning, Juliette wished she could tell Madeline of her true parentage, that she looked like a grandmother long dead; that her love of flowers had come from that long-dead woman.

As she stared at the girl in the dim light, a figure emerged, dashed toward one end of the garden and came back to give Madeline a flower. Juliette grasped the edge of the drapes.

Lucien Harrow. There was no mistaking that elegant, graceful figure. Unlike most of the dandies in his crowd, Lucien was a restless, physical man, and it showed in his trim body. He was rather roughly dressed and appeared to be working with Madeline on the roses.

Juliette narrowed her eyes. Not bloody likely he was doing it without good reason. And Juliette knew just what that reason was.

She frowned.

For months, even before Madeline’s return, Juliette had researched the possibilities of a husband for the girl. It was important to Juliette that the man not only be rich enough to save Whitethorn, but that he have a reputation for kindness—and that he not have a wandering eye. Madeline was a biddable girl to some extent, but she’d not tolerate unfaithfulness, however fashionable it was at the moment. Her husband would be husband to her in more than name, or a wife he would not have.