Two Sinful Secrets (15 page)

Even as she tried to hide under her drab, dark clothes, that beauty showed through.
He hadn’t lied to her. If she could recite a line with any conviction at all, she
would be a sensation on the stage.

And if her being an acclaimed actress shocked her family, all the better. A woman
like her should shun convention, shun anyone who tried to stifle her.

Surely she had once thought that, too, or she wouldn’t have eloped with Westman. But
she wanted to return to her family now.

His mind often seemed to work like the plot of a play, and now one was forming in
his imagination as he watched Sophia smile at him. The beautiful, disgraced daughter
of an ancient family, thrown out onto a cold world. All her efforts at reconciliation
rebuffed, until her heart hardened toward them and she threw herself into a life of
scandal.

Or perhaps a future life on the stage? With a notorious family like the St. Claires?
Perhaps even as his mistress? How the Huntingtons would hate that.

S
ophia rubbed her hand over her eyes and stared down at the column of numbers in the
account book. Surely they had not moved, but they seemed to swim in front of her.
Her skill at bookkeeping obviously had not improved, but after her failed attempt
at finding other employment she needed to find a way to earn her keep. She kept remembering
Dominic’s words, that she could be an actress, and she was intrigued by them. She
had always loved the theater. But how her family would hate that.

After she returned from the café, Sophia had reluctantly gone along with Camille and
her friends to a new restaurant. She hadn’t been in the mood for champagne and oysters,
but after all that had happened that day, she hadn’t wanted to be alone. Thinking
too much was obviously not good for her. Among that noisy, convivial company, she
had begun to forget.

And neither was too much champagne good for her. Sophia reached for her glass of soda
water and took a long sip, yet it didn’t seem to help much. The numbers still persisted
in wriggling around on the page.

Suddenly there was a knock at the office door. “Yes?” Sophia called, glad of the distraction.

Makepeace, the English butler, stepped into the room. Sophia wasn’t sure where Camille
had found him, but he was the perfect major-domo for an exclusive gaming club. Quiet,
watchful, and unfailingly discreet. He saw everything and revealed nothing, including
his own thoughts.

Sophia wished she could be more like him.

“You have a visitor, Madame Westman,” Makepeace said. “In the salon.”

“A visitor? At this time of day?” Sophia said. So early in the afternoon, everyone
she knew was either still sequestered in their chambers, as Camille was, or out buying
flowers to apologize for whatever had happened the night before. They were seldom
out paying calls.

Perhaps it was Dominic? Sophia’s heart beat a little faster at the thought even as
she told herself she was being ridiculous. She had just seen him yesterday at the
café; he wouldn’t be calling on her now.

“She won’t give her card, or even a name,” Makepeace said with a sniff at such a breach
of etiquette. “But she was rather insistent that she must see you.”

A woman.
Not Dominic after all—of course. Whoever it was, Sophia had to see her off quickly
and then try to get back to the accounts. Perhaps it would be something interesting
to break up the quiet day and distract her.

“Thank you, Makepeace. I will be down in a moment.” As the butler bowed and left,
Sophia quickly smoothed her hair and snatched up a shawl to wrap around her shoulders.
The day had grown chilly, and no fires were lit.

With the club closed and all the merrymakers gone, the old rooms were silent and cold.
The main salon seemed cavernous and echoing, almost ghostly in the faint light that
streamed from the one uncurtained window. A
woman in a short, jet-beaded black velvet cape and a veiled bonnet sat on a sofa at
the far end of the room with her back to the door, and she was so very still she could
have been a ghost herself. Sophia saw that the butler, ever efficient, had left a
tea tray on a table, but the woman hadn’t touched it.

Oh, dear
, Sophia thought. She hoped this was not some disgruntled wife whose husband had lost
too much at the faro tables or flirted too obviously with one of the pretty dealers.
Whatever it was, surely it was best to deal with it quickly. Sophia pasted on her
brightest, most charming smile despite her aching head and hurried across the room.
“I am so sorry to keep you waiting, madame. How may I help you?”

The woman slowly turned around. The heavy veil was tucked back to frame a pale, perfect
oval face and silvery-blonde curls. Sophia froze in her tracks. It was her cousin
Elizabeth.

“Hello, Sophia. It’s good to see you again,” Elizabeth answered as she rose to her
feet. The rustle of her silk gown seemed inordinately loud in the silent room. A tentative
smile touched her lips, and for an instant, Sophia glimpsed the Elizabeth she had
known long ago.

When they were girls, Elizabeth had been sweet and a little shy, a beautiful example
for Sophia’s parents to hold up as model behavior for a Huntington female—a model
Sophia, with her wildness, simply couldn’t follow. But there had been a hidden streak
of mischief to Elizabeth as well, and a wonderful silvery bell of a laugh that made
everyone want to laugh with her. Elizabeth, Sophia, and their cousin Aidan had come
up with many ridiculous larks during stuffy family holidays.

Then, when Elizabeth was only eighteen and Sophia sixteen, all that had ended. Elizabeth
suddenly vanished for several weeks and then was quickly married to Lord Severn, a
man decades her senior. She had appeared at the ducal estate for family occasions
again, but the laughter was gone. Elizabeth had become silent and vague, as if she
was off in her own little world where no one could follow.

Sophia hadn’t seen Elizabeth since before she married Jack, though she had heard that
Lord Severn had died. Now here Elizabeth was, in Paris, sitting in Sophia’s own salon.
Her blue eyes were bright as a summer sky, with flashes of the old Elizabeth.

But her smile slowly faded when Sophia couldn’t move. She felt frozen and awkward
with surprise.

“Cousin Elizabeth,” she finally managed to say. “What a surprise.”

“Yes, I suppose it must be,” Elizabeth answered. “I didn’t know you were in Paris
until I saw you at the theater last night. You are looking well.”

“So are you,” Sophia said truthfully. Elizabeth had always been beautiful, but now
she had lost that doll-like stillness. It reminded Sophia of the days when they were
girls together, of times with her family when it hadn’t been all battles or frosty
silences. She had no idea what she should feel in that moment, as she stood there
looking at the only member of her family she had seen in months. Part of her longed
to rush forward and hug Elizabeth. Yet part of her wanted to turn and run, to deny
that she was a Huntington.

“I heard about Lord Severn,” Sophia said. “I am sorry.”

Elizabeth nodded. “It was mercifully quick, at least.
I’m also sorry about Captain Westman. You hadn’t been married very long.”

“No. Not long.”

“Yet you must have loved him a great deal, to be brave enough to do what you did.”

Sophia wasn’t sure what to say to that. Love Jack? Once she had thought she loved
him, that he would rescue her from her family and from herself. Instead he had taught
her only that she had to rely on herself alone.

“Yes,” she said simply. “How—how is everyone? I have heard from no one but Aidan in
a long while.”

Elizabeth smiled, and her beautiful face became transcendent, like a sunbeam. “Ah,
yes, Aidan. He is disgustingly happy, writing his plays and living with his new wife,
as he deserves to be, even though he is quite ostracized by the family. And everyone
else is much the same. Edward is engaged to be married any day now.”

“Edward is engaged?” Sophia said. She could hardly be surprised. After a series of
youthful peccadilloes, her brother had learned to toe the family line. He had always
ended up doing what was expected of a Huntington, outwardly anyway.

“Yes, to the daughter of one of your father’s neighbors. Our uncle the duke is quite
happy about it.”

Sophia nodded. So, since her brother was properly engaged and the two black sheep,
Sophia and Aidan, were in exile and out of sight, all was well in the Huntington world
again. But what had brought Elizabeth here? “Why are you in Paris, Elizabeth?”

There was a tiny flicker of unease in Elizabeth’s eyes. “I thought a little holiday
might help me get some things in order.”

In order? As far as Sophia knew, nothing in Elizabeth’s calm life had ever been in
the slightest bit disordered. “What sort of things?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I’m just learning to manage widowhood, I suppose. I have never
had to be on my own before. And Paris seemed like the best place to do that. I was
glad to see you were here. You seem to be doing well with your—your business ventures.”
She gestured around the room at the card tables and roulette wheels. “So very exciting.”

“It’s a living,” Sophia answered. She reached for the tea tray for something to do
and carefully poured out two cups.

“I envy you,” Elizabeth said, drawing off her kid gloves. As she took the cup from
Sophia, the dim light caught on her large diamond wedding ring—and on a long scar
that bisected the back of her hand.

It was something Sophia had never seen before, that stark pink flaw on her cousin’s
perfect skin, and it startled her. But Elizabeth was sipping at her tea as if nothing
was amiss at all. “Why should you envy me?” Sophia murmured. “You were always the
perfect one, the one who knew exactly what to do and how to behave.” Who was content
with her life, while Sophia was always leaping before she looked.

Elizabeth gave a bitter little laugh. “I am only a good actress. I have had to be.
But you, Sophia—you know yourself. You stand up for what you want.” She studied the
room over the edge of the china cup, an unreadable expression on her face. “You are
free.”

Sophia hardly knew what to say in the silence that hung between them after those strange
words. “Anyone could do what I did.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No. A coward like me could never run away like that. Whenever
I try to be free, it ends up in something very bad. I am trapped where I was born.”

“Is your life so very terrible, Elizabeth?” Sophia asked quietly, concerned. “What
has happened?”

“My life is not bad at all. Especially now,” Elizabeth said with another sudden, sunny
smile. “It is the strangest thing, Sophia. I had a letter from your mother only a
few days ago.”

“My mother?” Sophia was dizzy with the sudden change in subject.

“Yes. She thought I might run into you here in Paris. She had heard you were traveling
again.”

“I am quite sure she did not send her love,” Sophia said with a wry laugh.

“Oh, you are wrong, cousin. Your mother misses you a great deal.”

That was even more surprising. For an instant, Sophia remembered when she was a child,
and the echo of her mother’s rare laughter as she walked through the gardens of their
country home with Sophia and Edward, chasing them around the flowerbeds and through
the old maze. The smell of her lily of the valley perfume in the air when she knelt
and hugged them. Such moments had seldom lasted long—Sophia’s father disliked the
noise of children playing, and her mother was very busy with her social obligations.
But they had been sweet moments nonetheless.

And then when Sophia’s father had cast her out when she wanted to marry Jack, her
mother had cried but done nothing. The family always came first with her, even above
her daughter.

But Elizabeth said her mother was asking about her
now. Against her better judgment, Sophia felt a rush of hope. Could this be what she
had been waiting for?

“What did she write to you?” Sophia said carefully, stirring her tea.

“Merely that she thought perhaps you might have married again.”

“I have hardly had time to think of such things.”

“I know. Neither of us has been widowed long, and really who would want to jump back
into the matrimonial state when it has barely been escaped? But your mother…” Elizabeth
hesitated.

“My mother what?”

“She asked me to see if you had any new suitors. Anyone—well, I believe her word was
‘suitable.’ ”

Sophia had to laugh. Her mother, who had abandoned her, was worried about her suitors?
“Mama asked you to spy on my love life?”

A touch of pink bloomed in Elizabeth’s pale cheeks. “Not spy! Just find out how you
are doing. Since we are family.”

“And did she have any candidates in mind?”

“Not at all. She merely hinted that a husband who was acceptable to your father might—facilitate
your return home. She does miss you, Sophia, I am sure of it. And I have missed you,
too. With you and Aidan gone, life in the family is very quiet.”

“I see,” Sophia murmured, though in truth she didn’t see at all. Was this some sort
of olive branch being extended, however obliquely, through her cousin? The possibility
of a return home, to her old life, no longer alone in the world—if she married properly
and mended her ways. If she caused no more trouble.

“I miss you as well, Elizabeth,” Sophia said carefully. “I miss how things once were.
But I fear I have no suitors, respectable or otherwise, at the moment. And even if
I did, it is probably much too late for me to change my ways.”

Elizabeth nodded, a sad smile on her lips. “I have done what I told your mother I
would do, and I have given you her message. But if I were you, Sophia, I would not
go back. What you have here is quite extraordinary. You shouldn’t trade it for something
cold and airless. It would suffocate you.”