Tempt the Devil (16 page)

He felt hope.

Tenderly he tucked her under his arm and drew her close into his body. To his surprised satisfaction, she didn't demur. She was warm curled up in his arms and smelled of sex and sleepy woman. The delicious scent seeped into his bones.

For a long time they maintained a strangely comfortable silence. The rain was a steady downpour, and the sound provided a pleasant backdrop to his sweet languor. His body was heavy with postcoital satisfaction. Whatever pangs his conscience suffered, his body had luxuriated in that explosive release.

“You looked ready to kill me when you thought I threatened your chick,” he said eventually. She sprawled against him but he knew she wasn't asleep.

“Who's taller than I am and not far off going to Oxford.”

He couldn't stem a twinge of jealousy. There was such love in her voice. He knew she smiled as she spoke. That lovely soft smile he'd only seen once or twice, and never for him. Damn it.

“I felt like that when I saw Roma and William for the first time after so many years. Roma's eighteen and marrying in June. William's nineteen and up at Oxford.”

Their sons would soon move in the same milieu. Might even become friends. The idea was disturbing. As though his two worlds weren't as separate as he imagined. As though the barrier he'd always believed impassable was in fact as fragile as the ruby Venetian glass vase on the mahogany chest.

“Tell me what happened when you had Leo.”

He felt rather than heard her sigh. “You won't leave this alone, will you?”

A faint smile stretched his lips. “No.”

“I was too young and he was too big and I almost died.” She spoke quickly, as though she could hardly bear to say the words. “I've never conceived since. Even if I did, I doubt I'd carry a child to term. If Lord Farnsworth hadn't paid for the best doctors, nothing would have saved me. I shouldn't have lived. Leo shouldn't have lived.”

Her pain and bravery gashed his heart. “Oh, Olivia,” he murmured, and held her closer.

“It's a blessing for a courtesan to be barren.”

“No, it's not.”

“No, it's not.” She sounded tragically sad. When she looked up at him, anguish swam in her tawny eyes. “It's a convenience. But it's not a blessing.”

He tried to imagine what her life had been like when she had Leo. So young, and with a baby to care for. “What happened then?”

“Lord Farnsworth had no further use for a child who'd turned into a mother.” A world of weary rancor soured her tone.

“You can't have regretted that.”

“I regretted losing the only home I had. I regretted leaving Perry and having to give up my child.”

His hold tightened on her while the vain urge to kill her first keeper ran like acid through his veins. Too late, damn it. “Farnsworth didn't cast you out on the streets?”

“No, he sold me to one of his friends.” Her voice was flat, almost unemotional.

How the hell had she borne it? How had she emerged as the wonderful woman he knew? A young girl, sold as a commodity by a gambling-crazed brother to a man whose name was a byword for vice. Then discarded like a worn-out shoe when she was no longer of interest to her vicious keeper.

Erith had trouble speaking past the horror that jammed his throat. If there was any justice, that bastard Farnsworth would roast in the hottest corner of hell for eternity. “Dear heaven, Olivia, that's barbarous.”

“I survived.” Her voice was flat.

He began to get an inkling of where her bone-deep pride originated. Pride was all she'd had to sustain her through the long nightmare.

“Farnsworth didn't want Leo?”

She gave a scornful laugh that held no genuine amusement. “Thank God, he didn't. Farnsworth abused his children as well as his lovers. He was crueler to Perry than he ever was to me. He thought torture would turn Perry into a
man
. I gave Leo to my cousin Mary. She and Charles had no family, and he took up a new living at the other end of the country. Nobody needed to know the baby wasn't theirs.”

“Including Leo.”

She lurched back on her knees, her eyes huge in her pale face. At that moment he had no difficulty picturing her as a vulnerable child forced to surrender her innocence to a foul old man. The repellent idea made his gorge rise.

“He can never know. Mary and Charles have loved him and educated him and brought him up to be a son I'm so proud of. Even if I'll never be a mother he can be proud of.”

He spoke with utter sincerity. “You underestimate him. And yourself. You're a woman anyone would be privileged to claim.”

Even a lost, hardened miscreant like the Earl of Erith.

O
livia flinched as if he'd struck her. “Stop it,” she said sharply.

Erith frowned, not understanding. “Stop what?”

“This.” Her left hand performed a chopping gesture as if cutting the intimacy that slowly, surely curled around them like a spider's silk around a trapped fly. “This…this attempt to understand. This attempt to get close.”

He sighed and leaned back against the bed head. Under the temper, she was frightened. After the horrors she'd been through, fear must be a constant companion.

“I can't help it,” he said with complete honesty. She fascinated him. Every moment he spent with her brought him more deeply under her spell. He'd never known a woman like her.

Where would his bewitchment lead? To disaster or joy? Already the idea of saying good-bye in July made his gut clench in anguished denial.

“Good God, Erith, I thought I was taking on the big, bad
terror of Vienna.” She surged to her feet and glared down at him. “What about the infamous womanizer? The man who tupped half a dozen trollops before his breakfast eggs every morning?”

Her disgust was so vehement that he burst out laughing. “I hope for the sake of their enjoyment that it was a late breakfast!”

No glimmer of amusement lightened her expression. Her brows lowered. She looked like a furious goddess. Beautiful beyond imagination. He clenched his hands at his sides to stop himself reaching for her.

Devil take it, he needed to get a grip on reality before his endless hunger for this woman drew him into doing something utterly reckless.

Something that put his family forever beyond his reach.

“I'm not trying to be funny, Erith.”

His humor evaporated in an instant. “I know you're not. You're not trying to insult me either, even if that's the end result. I know what the bloody gossips say. Can't you make up your own mind?”

She ignored his last question. “I asked Perry about you before I accepted your suit.”

“And of course Lord Peregrine is an expert on my life and habits,” he said tersely.

“He told me what he'd heard.”

“A lot of damned poppycock.”

“Do you deny you've killed men in duels?”

Old shame clenched his gut. Those men shouldn't have died. “Good God, that was nearly twenty years ago. When I didn't care if I lived into tomorrow. And I didn't care if anyone else did either.”

It was the first time he'd admitted that, although he'd known it was true even as he accepted the challenges. Each matter of honor had concerned a woman. He remembered that much even if he couldn't remember the actual women.

The bristling tension drained from her willowy form. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh.” He paused. “Don't you want to know why I felt like that?”

“No.” She took a step back as if he physically threatened her, although he hadn't moved. She bumped into the mahogany chest of drawers behind her.

“No?”

“You're not the only one with eyes in your head, Erith.” She cast him an irritated glance under the thick fringe of dark gold lashes. But her voice, when she spoke, was grave. “You loved your wife, and her death left you devastated.”

The stark words fell between them like pebbles thrown over a cliff. Each sharp ping as they landed made him wince.

“How did you know?” he asked quietly after the silence had stretched into tension.

“I guessed. And when I did, so much made sense. The man I'd heard about didn't match the man I started to know. You have a reputation as cold and heartless. Yet…” She looked toward the curtained window as if seeking inspiration. Then she turned back to him, her lovely face even more somber. “Yet you've been anything but heartless with me.”

“My wife was the light of my life.” He was surprised how easily the words emerged.

He never spoke of Joanna. To anyone. It was as much a rule as not cheating at cards and keeping his linen clean. She lived on in a candlelit shrine in his heart, where she stayed untouched and beloved. Pure and unsullied by his sins.

More bizarre that he should speak of Joanna to a fallen woman like Olivia Raines. And that he knew she'd understand where nobody else would. Although he didn't fool himself about what his wife would have thought of his current mistress. Joanna would have despised everything about Olivia.

“You still love her.” The words weren't a question.

“Yes.”

“I admire that.” She turned and poured two glasses of
wine from the decanter on the sideboard. “She must have been a remarkable woman. You were lucky.”

“Yes, I was.”

What a revelation. He'd been blessed with a great love and all he'd done since was run away from the fact that God had granted that gift, even if for too short a time.

He accepted the crystal glass filled with wine the same color as the robe Olivia wore. She settled herself cross-legged at the end of the bed. Too far away to touch, damn it.

Her effortless grace, the way she crossed her legs, modestly folding the satiny material across the enticing paleness of her thighs, reminded him of women of the seraglio. She was endlessly alluring. Endlessly erotic. Endlessly exotic. Wherever she'd been born.

She took a sip of her wine, never shifting her clear scrutiny from his face. “So why did you abandon your children?”

He choked on his wine. “Confound it, Olivia!”

He caught his breath and stared at her in shock. For a moment she'd lulled him into a sentimental dream. He should have known she wouldn't let him linger there.

He found his voice. “Bloody Montjoy has a busy tongue, hasn't he?”

“Perry told me what he knew.”

“What he
thought
he knew.”

“So he was wrong?”

Damn it, he wanted to lie. Damn it, he wanted to tell her to take her curiosity and her presumptuous self and remove both from his presence until she was prepared to be the mistress he'd bartered for in Montjoy's salon.

Except he didn't want that cool, self-possessed beauty, in spite of her spectacular looks and vulpine cleverness. He wanted the disheveled woman who stared him down over a glass of wine and asked him questions he didn't want to answer.

Hell, he wanted her and as more than a temporary bedmate. He had no idea what he could do about it.

Nothing. That was reality.

So against his will, against his inclination, but at the bidding of his cold, empty heart, he answered her. “I couldn't bear to stay after Joanna died. I couldn't bear the sight of my own children because every time I looked at them, I saw my wife. Even as a baby, Roma looked heartbreakingly like her mother. Then I remembered my wife was dead.”

He recollected few concrete details of those first months after Joanna's accident. It was a time he never revisited. Which meant it haunted him like an angry ghost.

Olivia leaned forward and placed one slender hand on his knee, bared by the gap in his robe. He didn't understand it, but the touch made him feel more whole than he'd felt since that tragic, horrific day sixteen years ago when his world had disintegrated.

“I'm sorry, Erith.”

Even her voice soothed his pain. How did she do that? And because she did that, how could he live without the balm of her presence? He felt himself sinking deeper and deeper toward inevitable disaster.

Very slowly, as though the gesture had a significance into a future he couldn't imagine, he lifted his free hand and put it over hers. He felt her momentary tension before she relaxed. As if she accepted his touch. As if more existed between them than just a contract between keeper and courtesan.

He curled his fingers around her hand in a light hold and spoke. Against his expectations, the words emerged without difficulty. “It wasn't Roma and William's fault that I felt like I'd died with Joanna. The damnable thing is, it wasn't anyone's fault except my own, unless I blame Joanna's stubbornness.”

“What happened?”

He took a fortifying sip of wine, feeling the rich liquid slide down his throat. His hold on Olivia's hand firmed. Her touch was his only lifeline to the present.

 

Olivia studied Lord Erith as he struggled to summon words to describe his wife's death. How strange to think that only a few days ago he'd seemed superhuman, almost from a different species compared to other men she'd known. A cold automaton with intelligence that cut and wounded.

Attractive, certainly. A challenge. A bait to her curiosity. A fillip to her reputation for eternal irresistibility. Nothing more.

The man before her was tired and sad and had known too much loss and pain. Most of the time, his vigor and his brilliant mind meant his age was hard to guess. Now he looked older than he really was.

She'd fought stalwartly against admitting that he touched her heart. It was a fight she'd finally lost in a rain-sodden grove in Hyde Park. Even if a heart was a luxury no courtesan could afford.

His voice was different, flat, grim. “We quarreled. She wanted to go riding just after she told me she carried our third child. Joanna was a punishing rider. I've never seen a woman like her on horseback. If you met her in a drawing room, you'd think her the perfect lady. Put her in the saddle and she was an Amazon. But she'd had two hard deliveries. I worried about her health and tried to coddle her.”

Self-loathing and savage sorrow vibrated in his voice. The heart she refused to acknowledge ached for him. She should have guessed something like this from the first. His guilt about his wife was too close to the surface for him not to blame himself. Inwardly Olivia cringed with shame to remember Perry's cavalier recounting of Lady Erith's death and how she'd accepted the bald facts so easily, so thoughtlessly.

But of course, she'd been a different woman then.

She made herself speak calmly. “Of course she rebelled and took the horse out.”

“She marched off in a fury and had her favorite mare saddled and…” The hand that held hers tightened. Not to the point of pain but with a firmness she felt to her bones.

She saw him swallow. The gray eyes were bleaker than the North Sea on an overcast winter's day. “Stupidly, I gave her half an hour's start so she could collect her temper. Then I set out after her. She had a customary path through the park, so I knew where she'd be.” He paused again, and his baritone voice was low and unsteady when he went on. “Or I thought I knew.”

“Erith…” she whispered. His pain reached out and grabbed her by the throat so she couldn't breathe. She twined her fingers around his in silent empathy.

He leaned across and placed his wine on the table beside the bed. His hand trembled so badly that liquid sloshed over the edge of the glass. She wanted to cry as she witnessed this strong man shaking with grief and remorse.

How he must have adored his wife.

She'd seen so much fault and folly. She'd never believed love like this existed. The purity of emotion in his strained face cut right to her soul.

And hurt more deeply than anything since her brother's betrayal so many years ago.

Nobody would love her like that. Ever. The glow in Lord Erith's eyes—eyes she'd once thought cold and emotionless—made her want to rage with envy for a dead woman. Olivia's essential, inevitable and eternal isolation stabbed her anew.

“I rode out to fetch her. I came to a bend in the bridle path through the woods and…” He snatched a shuddering breath. “The mare must have shied at something. We never found out exactly what happened. The horse was skittish. That's how Joanna liked her mounts, fresh enough to be exciting.”

That's how Joanna liked her husband too, Olivia thought. He must have been breathtaking when he was young and madly in love. The idea shot another arc of pain through her.

Hard to imagine him innocent. Not so hard to imagine
him in love—he still worshipped his wife, for all his dallying with the fallen sisterhood. She read that now as an attempt to fill a life left essentially meaningless after the collapse of its central pillar.

His voice seemed to scrape out of his throat. The gray eyes were opaque as a silver mirror as he relived that afternoon so long ago. “I heard the horse screaming. The poor brute had broken its leg and was in agony.”

He stopped. His hand flexed in hers, and she knew that whatever horrific visions paraded before his inner eye, he knew exactly where he was and who he was with. He hadn't left her, however powerful the harrowing memories that held him in thrall.

The knowledge meant more to her than it should. Than a woman like her could allow it to mean. “And Joanna?”

He gave an infinitesimal shudder and his eyes were bleaker than ever when they met hers. “I think she was killed instantly when the horse fell on her. I can't be sure. Her face was peaceful, so I've always prayed she didn't suffer before she…she died. I can't bear the thought of her calling for me, that I failed her. Just as I can't bear to remember that our last words were spoken in anger.”

“She knew she was beloved.” At a profound level, Olivia recognized that if this man committed himself, you could trust that commitment to the end of the world.

“Yes,” he said dully. “I worshipped the ground she walked on and she knew it.”

“Then she was a lucky woman, and the last thing she'd want is for you to destroy yourself with remorse.”

His gaze sharpened and the frightening blankness left his expression. He sounded like he woke from a long nightmare. “I've never told anyone about Joanna.”

She wondered at the people close to him, that nobody had forced this story out of him before, like lancing an infected wound. Then she realized a proud man like Erith would permit very few people close, probably no one.

Looking down, she contemplated their joined hands, his skin so tanned in comparison to the pale olive of hers. Desperately she sought for words to give him solace, strength.