To Deceive a Duke (19 page)

E
dward roused slowly from sleep, a deeper, sweeter rest than he had known in a very long time. A dreamless, healing slumber that seemed to wrap all around him like a soft velvet blanket, bringing such beautiful dreams.

Only the dreams were real. He opened his eyes to find himself lying on a pile of cushions on the cottage floor. The air was warm, scented with woodsmoke, wine and lilies. As he gazed up at the dark rafters high overhead, he heard the splash of water. And a humming sound. Loud and distinctly off-key.

‘“It was a lover and his laaaaasss, with a hey and ho and a heeeyyy nonny no”,’ the voice sang, all warbling and wavering. And very, very happy. ‘“Nonny nonny no!”’

Grinning, Edward sat up to find Clio in her bath, splashing her feet in the water in time to the song. Steam rose up in curling wreaths around her, dampening her pinned-up hair and flushed cheeks. She was truly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

‘Thomas Morley would roll over in his grave, if he could hear what you do to his song,’ he said.

Clio smiled at him over her shoulder, giving one more great splash that sprayed water over his bare chest. ‘I confess I am not the musician Thalia is. But everyone is a great singer in the bath. I’m glad you’re awake. You can hand me that soap over there.’

Edward pushed himself to his feet, stretching luxuriously in the heated air. When had he ever felt so very—free?

Never. And surely he never would again. But he would always have this time with Clio. Even if he had had to resort to kidnapping to gain it!

‘It is no use trying to tempt me with your body, Edward Radcliffe,’ she said teasingly. ‘I am taking my bath, and that’s that. I can’t be distracted. Now, soap please.’

Edward laughed, and scooped up the ball of white soap from the table. It, too, smelled of lilies, summer-sweet, just like Clio. He walked slowly toward her, the soap held out like an offering, to see if she could indeed be tempted.

Her eyes widened, but she shook her head. ‘Would you be so kind as to wash my back?’

‘With pleasure, madame. I am yours to command.’

‘Well, that’s a first,’ she said, leaning forward in the tub. ‘Why do I suspect you are mine to command only in things you already wish to do?’

‘You know me too well.’ Edward rubbed the soap between his hands, working it into a frothy, scented foam. He studied in fascination the elegant arc of her bare back, the curve of the nape of her neck, the damp curls that escaped their pins to cling to her skin. So beautiful, yet so vulnerable.

‘On the contrary,’ she murmured, shivering as his fingertips touched her spine, ‘I don’t really know you at all.’

She knew him, deep-down knew him, better than anyone
ever had. ‘What do you want to know that you don’t already?’ he said, tracing a soapy pattern over her skin.

Clio leaned back into his touch. ‘Everything, of course. Everything you love, everything you hate. All that has ever happened to you.’

‘That’s a great deal to know.’

‘Of course. So, start at the beginning.’

He laughed. ‘From the day I was born? I fear I don’t remember it well.’ He kissed the nape of her neck, breathing deeply of her lily perfume.

‘Then tell me what you do remember,’ she whispered.

He ran the flat of his palm over her shoulder, the curve of her arm, the slickness of her wet skin. He felt the pulse beating in her wrist, strong and alive. ‘I grew up much like you, I suspect.’

‘Not with a passel of sisters!’

‘I fear not. Only with an older brother. A perfect older brother.’

‘Ah, so you
were
like me. For no one could be a more perfect older sibling than Calliope.’

‘William was.’ Edward gently urged her forward, slipping into the tub behind her. It was a tight fit, but he wrapped his legs around her, holding her close, and she curved her body back to fit against his, her head on his shoulder. The lily-scented water lapped against them.

It was easier for him to talk about his family, to voice their long-unspoken names if she couldn’t see him.

‘William was always good at his lessons, and he never, ever got into trouble,’ he said.

‘As you did?’

‘Oh, always. I never could resist getting into mischief. William, though, was my parents’ fine classical son. Their Hector, they called him. He followed in their scholarly foot-
steps, did well at school, at university, at everything. He joined the Antiquities Society, found a perfect lady to become his fiancée.’ Edward paused. ‘He would have made a fine duke.’

‘But you, too, must have learned your classical lessons well!’ Clio exclaimed. ‘Everyone admires your great scholarship, even my father.’

‘Oh, I learned eventually. One could hardly avoid it, with tutors and my parents ramming Plato and Aristotle and Herodotus down my throat every day. Yet I did not care. Not until much later. Only then, when it was too late for William and my poor parents, did I see the true value, the wonder of it all. They knew only my wild youth.’

Clio was quiet for a long moment. Then she leaned over the edge of the tub and caught up their goblets from the remains of their supper. She held them up, hers empty of wine, his still full. ‘Does this have anything to do with it? I noticed your glass was full at our dinner party, too.’

Edward plucked the cup from her hand, studying the ruby-red liquid as if it held vast secrets in its depths. He placed it gently back on the floor, and leaned his head on the edge of the tub. ‘You asked me once why your brother-in-law hates me.’

Clio thought this seemed as if it might turn into a rather serious discussion. She stood up from the water, reaching for one of the fluffy towels and wrapping it tightly around her torso, as if the thick cloth could be an armour to ward off words. To keep the truth away from their idyll, even as she knew she had to hear it.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Cameron is so very amiable, I don’t understand his fury with you.’

‘Amiable, yes. He always was, even with me. We were friends of a sort, when we first met.’

Clio sat down on the couch, still wrapped in her towel. Edward leaned his arms on the tub, watching her. His hair was damp, slicked away from his handsome features. ‘You were friends?’ she said, surprised.

He smiled humourlessly. ‘You are startled, I see, and who could blame you. People less observant than you, my dear, have noticed the strained manner of our recent meetings. But when we first met at university, he was like no one I had ever encountered before. He had spent his life travelling, seeing places, meeting people all my other friends had thus far only read about. He was serious, serious about his studies and his family, yet also—kind. Always ready for a jest.’

‘And you were not? Serious and kind, that is.’ She couldn’t picture him jesting, either.

‘I was not. I was spoiled, always seeking the next pleasure, the next novelty. My friends were the same way, a useless, debauched lot whose lives did no one any good. Least of all themselves.’ Edward rose from the bath and reached for the other towel. His breeches were soaked through, his amulet gleaming on his wet, naked chest. The stone floor around the tub was covered with soapy puddles, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was far away from her, deep in his own past.

‘A friendship with Lord Westwood might have been a good thing for me then,’ he continued. ‘After all,
he
has come out a worthy husband for a Chase Muse. Yet I was too caught up in drinking and whoring, gambling away any money I had, or didn’t have. Showing my parents how little I cared for their scholarly ways, for what was important to them.’

‘Did you truly not care?’

He laughed harshly. ‘Of course I cared. But I was tumbling downhill too fast to stop myself. I was drunk all the time,
living in a haze, in danger of being sent down and disgracing my parents even further. That was when it happened.’

Clio felt a cold, clammy dread creeping over her, yet like Edward she felt she could not stop anything. There had to be truth between them if they were to move forwards. Even if the truth was like daggers. ‘What happened?’

‘There was this woman. Isn’t there always? But she was girl really, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen.’ He sat down on a bench by the fireplace, not close to her, not looking at her. He stared only into the past, to a place where she could not go. ‘She worked as maid in a tavern where my useless friends and I liked to go. She was pretty and sweet-natured, and she seemed to like me a great deal. Heaven only knows why.’

Clio swallowed hard, her throat dry. ‘You had an affair with her?’

‘An affair? I swived her in the alley behind the tavern, if that’s what you mean. Several times, if I remember correctly. My—relationships back then were always of that sort.’

‘Then what was special about that one girl?’

‘Your brother-in-law liked her. Not in the debauched way I did. I think he saw her true vulnerability, in a way I could not. He warned me to leave her alone, but I just laughed at him. Told him who knew the Greeks were really such priggish puritans, insulted his mother in a way I’m ashamed to remember. He was right in the end.’

‘What happened?’

‘She came to me one night. I was drunk, as usual, and had just lost my entire quarterly allowance on the turn of a card. I was in a foul mood. And she said she was pregnant.’

‘With your child?’

‘Yes. I did not believe her. I disavowed that the brat could
be mine, declared I was sure the father could be any one of a dozen men.’ His voice was low, expressionless, but tight with an emotion long suppressed. ‘She fled in tears. Two days later she was discovered hanged in her room. And it was Cameron who found her.’

‘Oh.’ Clio felt she had had the air punched out of her. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, closing her eyes against the rush of tears. That poor, poor girl.

‘Once you told me I could not possibly have been worse than any other young nobleman, gadding about in my misspent youth,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I was not. I’m sure my so-called friends got plenty of tavern wenches and house maids with child. But I have been haunted for years by that girl. I murdered her, and my own child, and I was too drunk and callous to care. Cameron broke my nose the day he found her body, and he should have done worse.’

Clio shook her head. ‘What could he do that is worse than what you have done to yourself? It was a terrible thing, true, but you don’t drink now. You don’t debauch serving maids.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Only young ladies of good family. After kidnapping them, of course.’

‘
This
young lady practically forced you to debauch her! As for kidnapping—I am still not happy about that. But I know you did it because you believed you had to, to protect me somehow. You work for the Antiquities Society; I have heard you are exceedingly generous to charities. You are trying to make amends. And your old friends are probably just as useless as ever.’

‘Better late than never, eh?’

‘Of course. None of us is a lost cause until we’re dead.’

He laughed, no longer the harsh, humourless sound she so hated, but a real laugh. ‘Clio, who knew you were such an optimist?’

‘Well, I am not a lost cause, either. At least I hope I am not. We all have lessons to learn; yours was harsher than most. It made you see you had to abandon your old ways. Turn your life around.’

‘Not
just
that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Clio wondered if he had yet more terrible secrets in his past, and she shivered. But she, too, had made a choice when she made love with Edward. She had made the choice to let him into her life, for good or ill.

‘You remember Lady Riverton’s game of Truth?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘This is my truth, Clio. After that girl died, I spiralled even further into trouble. More drink, gaming in ever-rougher establishments, even experiments with opium. I told myself it was because of the pain of my broken nose, but that was not so. I loathed myself; I wanted to destroy myself, end what I was doing. Not even my parents could stop me, though they tried.’

‘What
did
stop you?’ she asked softly.

He came to sit beside her on the settee, reaching for her hand. His fingers entwined with hers. ‘A muse. For are they not figures of great inspiration?’

‘So I’ve heard,’ she whispered. She touched his bare arm with her other hand, tracing a sinuous line along his tense muscles. ‘What did this muse inspire in you?’

‘She inspired me to change, once and for all. To seek to alter my course before it was too late.’

‘An extraordinary muse indeed. Don’t they usually just inspire a sonnet or a play?’

He smiled at her. ‘This was a more far-reaching muse. An ambitious one, you might say.’ He pressed a kiss to her temple, lingering there as if to savour her taste, her feel. ‘That game at Lady Riverton’s…’

‘Oh, yes,’ Clio said, remembering his words that night. ‘You said you lost your one true love.’ She had been intrigued then by his hinted-at secret. Had even been jealous of that unknown woman.

Could it have been that poor, lost tavern maid? Was that part of his torment? Or…

‘I did not lose her so much as she was never mine in the first place. Muses can’t truly belong to anyone at all, I am coming to realise.’

‘And where did you find this—muse?’

‘Where does one find anything important? At the British Museum, of course.’

Clio gave a startled laugh. Of all places, she did not expect that. Gaming hells, brothels, taverns—those fit his story. Not the British Museum. ‘When did you find time to go there? Getting drunk and losing your allowance must have been very time-consuming.’

‘So it was. But after one particularly lurid night, some of my friends thought it would be amusing to go the British Museum, to scandalise all the high-in-the-instep scholars. I agreed, thinking news of my behaviour would surely reach my parents. But I got more than I bargained for.’

Clio remembered that long-ago day now, surely the very day he talked about. She and her parents, along with Thalia, Cory and baby Urania had gone to the museum to look at a new black-figure vase just donated to the collections. As they went in, she stopped to peer into one of the sculpture galleries, drawn by the sound of raucous laughter.