Scandal (11 page)

“As you wish,” she said stiffly.

Banallt remained silent. His eyes searched her face. “I thought we'd gotten past our difficulties. Does it pain you so much to be near me?”

“It is ... uncomfortable to be here.” She glanced around. Her brother and Miss Llewellyn were conversing at the other end of the room, near a globe that John was slowly turning with the tip of his index finger. He lifted his head at something Miss Llewellyn said and made a sharp gesture. Vedaelin was sitting on a leather chair before the fireplace, hands folded over his stomach. “The duke assured us you were never here,” she said in a low voice. “Had I known you would be here, we would not have presumed.”

She walked away without giving Banallt a chance to reply and found herself confronted with a portrait of a woman she belatedly realized must be the late Lady Banallt. An exquisite blonde looked down from the portrait with blue eyes the color of the sky and sapphires on her ears and around her slender throat. Her smile hinted at some internal sadness. A black crepe bow still draped the frame. Her heart felt too big for her chest. Had this beautiful woman loved her husband? Had Banallt broken her heart the way Tommy had broken hers? When she turned away, Banallt hadn't moved away from the Caravaggio, but she felt his gaze nonetheless.

Banallt raised his voice to say, “I'm told Mrs. Evans is devoted to reading. Shall we discover her opinion of my library, Vedaelin?”

Before they left, she spared one last look at the woman whom Banallt had married and, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the way Tommy had abandoned her. She was right, she decided. Lady Banallt did look sad.

The library at Hightower House was exactly as Banallt had described it to her: spacious with comfortable places to sit and read and filled with thousands of books, all of which were morocco bound with a small impression of Banallt's coronet on the lower spines. His collection included novels, exactly as he had claimed. She even found hers among them. All ten of the novels she wrote during her marriage were behind glass and at eye level. How strange it was to know that Banallt had read them before he knew her. And stranger still to think he had bought the ones that came after.

“Your sister may come here anytime she pleases,” Banallt was telling John. She remembered his voice, reading her words aloud. He had a marvelous reading voice. He turned to her. “Borrow whatever books you like, Mrs. Evans.”

She lifted a hand to the glass, remembering the stories and the circumstances under which she had written them. Banallt came to her side again, leaning a shoulder against a panel of the shelves. “You have them all,” she said.

“Yes.” His head rested against the glass, his arms crossed over his chest. “The pride of my collection.” He opened the glass door and reached for
The Murder of Gilling Fell.
He held it open, balanced on his palm. “I had this one already in my collection. When I read it, I never once suspected I would one day meet the authoress.” He lowered his voice. “Does your brother know about your novels?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you writing still?”

She shook her head.

“That seems a shame.” He closed the title and took out a second one, turning pages. “Ah, the adventures of Beatrice, one of my favorites of yours.”

She shut the book and took it from him. “All that is behind me.” Drat his eyes. She could never look into his face without the risk of losing her soul. She replaced the book on the shelf but ran a finger down the spine, taking care not to look at him. “I don't need to pay the grocer or the butcher from my pocket anymore.”

“Have you set aside pen and paper forever?” He'd managed to come quite near her, and she was trapped between the shelves and him. Not trapped. At any moment she could slide away and put a more comfortable distance between them. She touched his neckcloth. King's cravat had been perfect. Banallt's was not. Her fingers shook. “Miss Llewellyn is lovely,” she said.

“Yes, she's quite beautiful. I have a dozen inquiries a month about her.”

“But her heart is taken, isn't it?” Her knees were actually shaking.

His eyebrows rose. “You know?”

“I think it's a good match, Banallt.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she replied. But she was lying.

Ten

Rider Hall,
April 27, 1812

 

 

 

THE CANDLELIGHT WAVERED AS SOPHIE HEADED BACK TO the room she used as her office. She jumped when her foot hit the seventh stair from the bottom and the riser creaked beneath her slipper-shod foot. That stair always creaked, but she'd let her thoughts get away from her, and she hadn't been prepared for the noise, even though she knew it was coming. A shiver of fear lingered between her shoulder blades. If ever there was a time for a ghost to appear, now was it. Despite the hour, half past two in the morning, and despite the silence in the house, there were no ghosts walking the halls of Rider Hall.

She turned the corner, her mind already back to her story. Poor Beatrice. Her young life was not going as well as it ought. And thank goodness. Her story had been stalled these past days and only just now had she worked her way past the troublesome issue of what was going to happen to the girl. She continued down the stairs and along the hallway to the room where she wrote when Tommy was at home.

So intent was she on Beatrice and her unhappy fate now that her aged aunt was dead and her fiancé was missing in Arabia that Sophie didn't notice someone else was in the room until she was halfway in. When she first saw the looming shape, her heart slammed against her chest. The sensation was a good deal less pleasant than her fright on the stairs. An instant later, which might as well have been a lifetime later, she realized the intruder was none other than Tommy's infernal companion, Lord Banallt.

His head was angled toward the lamp she'd left burning while she was upstairs attending to personal matters. He held several sheets of paper. Not just random sheets of paper, but her manuscript. And he was reading. Her manuscript! She didn't know whether to be furious or embarrassed. Both, it happened. The work was not even half done and contained much to be corrected and improved. He had no business reading without asking. She would have told him no if he had.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said curtly.

He turned his head toward her without moving any other part of his body. His hair gleamed black as ink, and the lamplight gave his eyes an unsettling silver glow. Gracious, was it possible for a man to be more handsome than he? Tommy was angelic, but Banallt was so darkly intense that when she looked at him she couldn't imagine thinking any other man deserved to be called handsome. “Ah,” he said. “Mrs. Evans.”

“Those are my personal papers, sir.” She struggled to keep outrage from her voice. It wasn't easy. How dare he invade her privacy? Those were her papers. Her book. Her writing. How dare he? And her very next thought was she would be completely undone if he told Tommy she was writing. Tommy wouldn't understand. Never. And if her husband found out she was selling what she wrote? Her stomach clenched into a painful knot.

Two hours ago, Tommy and Banallt had come home from whatever carousing they'd been doing in town, with Tommy singing at the top of his lungs. They'd roused the household, had more to drink, and then Tommy had come into their room and stretched out on the bed even before his valet had arrived. Sophie left him. Let his servant get him undressed and sorted out. With her husband in another drunken sleep, she'd thought she was safe from interruption. Tommy wasn't going to wake up and doubtless Lord Banallt, too, was snoring between the sheets. So she'd thought.

“I saw the light on and thought it was your husband.”

“It wasn't,” she said. Banallt wasn't reading anymore, but he hadn't put the pages down, either.

He tipped his head to one side. If he was drunk, he didn't show it. He sounded and appeared perfectly sober. He couldn't be, though. Tommy had come home drunk, and surely so was Banallt, and her experience of Banallt in such a state was not agreeable. She did not want to snatch the pages from him, but she might have to. “You are up very late, ma'am. Do you not sleep at night?” he asked. All perfectly pleasant.

“Rarely.” She scowled at her manuscript held in his long-fingered hands. “Those are my papers. Please put them back where you found them.”

“I am used to London hours.” He leaned a hip against the edge of her desk. In the light, his complexion was ghostly pale, and his eyes gleamed like a cat's. “In Town if I fall into my bed much before dawn, I've made an early night of it.” He smiled, and Sophie felt a tug in her chest. For all his faults, and Banallt had a great many, he hadn't Tommy's vindictiveness. “But I daresay the same cannot be said of you.”

She pressed her lips together and walked toward the desk, where she set down her candle. She did not smell liquor. Without looking at him, she picked up the pages of her story. He must think her a foolish woman, writing away in the dark of night, when no respectable lady read such novels, let alone penned them. “It is not your right, sir, to invade my privacy.” She glanced at him and found his eyes steady on her. From the looks of things, he'd picked up her pages toward the middle. The most troublesome spot, too. She refused to look away from his pewter gaze. “Scribbles,” she said. “Only scribbles.”

“An interesting choice of word,” he said mildly.

“My scribbles can be of no interest to a man like you.”

“Pray tell me what you mean, Mrs. Evans.”

“You'll find no verses, no lofty emotions. No Greek or Roman oratory. I write to amuse myself with lives I can never live. And if others are diverted as well, then let it be so.” Those pages in his hand exposed her, opened her wide to a man she wished weren't here at all. There were two piles of paper on the desk. One consisted of the undisturbed beginning pages, the second of the overturned pages he'd read from the inch-thick set in his hands. He'd been careful, she saw, not to get her pages out of order. “It's how I pass the time, my lord.”

“Mere amusements, if I may boldly contradict you, rarely keep ladies of good breeding up past midnight.” Another smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “At least not in the country.”

“I don't sleep well.” The words came out with genuine emotion instead of sounding distant and chilly, as she'd meant. “I never have since I came here.” She didn't sleep well; that was true. He held her pages against his chest, drat the man. She could not simply take them back. “I have nightmares, if you must know.”

His eyebrows rose. “Nightmares?”

“You know. The usual. Ogres in the closet She shrugged. Unpaid bills. Looming expenses—Tommy's bootmaker was especially fond of sending a representative to Rider Hall. A husband she did not see for months at a time. ”Strange noises in the house. The wind. My father often complained of my overactive imagination.”

“Ah,” he said. He didn't sound convinced, but then, wasn't that the beauty of polite excuses? They weren't meant to be examined, only accepted as plausible.

“My lord, please.” She bit her lower lip. His gaze dropped to her mouth. He wasn't drunk enough, if he was drunk at all, for her to hope she could divert him. “If you have been reading—”

“I confess I have.”

“—then it's perfectly obvious what that is.” She sighed as she stared out the window behind the earl. Moonlight silvered the lawn and the hedges beyond. “I work best when it's quiet.” She sighed. There was no hope for it. He knew. “At night, with you and Tommy about, I cannot work in my room. So I am in here.” She pinned him with her most earnest gaze. With luck, he would suffer an attack of regrets and leave Rider Hall. “Here,” she said in meaningful tones, “I may have my privacy and my thoughts to myself.”

“Scribbling away,” he said. He did not sound in the least drunk. “In the dark of night.”

“Yes.”

“As scribbles go,” he said, “yours are better than most.” The corner of his mouth, with its full lower lip, curved as he looked at the pages against his chest. She despised him for his beauty. “This is very good.” Another smile slid across his face. “Have you thought of publishing?”

There was no point in pretending she didn't know what he meant or that she'd never thought of such a thing and was flattered by the suggestion. She hadn't the patience anyway. She lifted her chin and met his peculiar tarnish eyes. She touched a finger to the desktop. Men were invariably taller than she was. Sophie was used to looking up. But Banallt was taller than most, and besides, she particularly disliked looking up at him. But she did and found herself struck anew by his dark good looks. If she were an artist, she'd paint him as Lucifer. She held his gaze and ignored the fact that he stared back. However compelling she found him, the fact remained that Lord Banallt was Tommy's friend, and Banallt's reputation was far from pleasant, as she had personal reason to know. She saw no point in pretending about that, either. With another sigh, she said, “Do you think the bills are paid from my husband's generosity and deep pockets?”

Some emotion, she could not tell what it might be, lit his eyes. “No, Mrs. Evans. I expect they are not.”

She spoke over him because it occurred to her that he was mocking her. How dare he belittle her? “Because they are not, my lord. I assure you of that. I write because the bills must be paid somehow, and because even if I had a talent for farming, which I have not, it wouldn't matter. Tommy owns Rider Hall but not the land. He sold that shortly after we married.”

“I know.”