Beyond A Wicked Kiss (7 page)

Her hair was drying quickly. She had finally been moved to unwind her arms and raise her hands to untangle it. West thought it was even paler than it had looked in the carriage. It absorbed some of the reds and golds of the firelight, but that was only because, like sunshine, it had so little color of its own. Children sometimes had hair that was as light and fine a corn silk texture as this, but he could not recall seeing such a cascade on a woman grown.

Four-and-twenty, she had told him. Standing before the fire, tugging on the damp curls of her unbound hair with fingers made clumsy by an awareness of his open regard, she looked no more than six-and-ten.

"Perhaps you are Tenley's mistress," he said of a sudden.

Her fingers stilled in her hair. "No," she said quite firmly, if only on a thread of sound. "I am not your brother's mistress."

"Half-brother."

"Yes, of course, your half-brother. I was not his half-mistress."

A wry smile lifted one corner of West's mouth and a dimple appeared. "You are feeling more the thing, I take it"

"Yes."

Her stuttering had stopped, and he was heartily glad of it. "Good. Will you take a brandy?" He went to the drinks cabinet and found the decanter he wanted. "You would prefer sherry?"

"I prefer brandy."

"Just so." He poured a small amount into two crystal snifters and handed one to her. He watched her cup her hands around the bowl of the glass to warm the brandy, then sip delicately. "Better?"

She nodded.

"You will want to turn round," he said.

She stared at him blankly.

"To pull the dampness from your backside."

"Oh."

Seeing her flush, West found it difficult to believe she had journeyed all the way from Gillhollow to London unmolested—if one did not refine upon what he had done to her in the alley. He lighted several lamps in his study while she turned her back to the flames. He could feel her eyes following him, though each time he turned she quickly averted her gaze and regarded the floor.

Had she expected someone with the same imposing presence of his father? he wondered. Until the cancer had finally weakened him in the last months of his life, West knew his father had enjoyed robust health and the vigor of many men half his age. The duke had been tall and broad of shoulder. He had carried himself with a certain correctness of posture, as if he were always aware of his consequence and would have it that others were aware of it also. His countenance was severe but not unhandsome. He had aged well, the lines creasing his face at the eyes and mouth only adding to the definition of his character.

West had taken great pains to see as little of his father as was possible. That had been the duke's wish as well. Neither of them had been unhappy with the arrangement, and no attempt had ever been made to alter it. Still, his father had loomed rather larger than life. It was not possible to be unaware of him, given his services to the Crown. He might have been prime minister had it not been for Liverpool's deft handling of the opposition during the war with Napoleon. The defeat in the parliament had rankled him, West knew, and he imagined his father had been plotting a new stratagem when the cancer struck and made this final ascent to power impossible. England mourned. West did not.

He sat down in the comfortably worn wing chair situated not far from where Miss Ashby still stood. It was a restful place, this chair, or at least he had always found it so. He caught one leg of a three-legged stool and nudged it closer so he might place his heels upon it. Easing back into the chair, he cocked one eyebrow at his guest and bid her sit.

"I shall stand, if you do not mind," she said, looking around at row after row of books that lined the room.

"I do mind. I want to sit, and it is poor manners for me to be seated in the presence of a lady."

"My gown is still damp. I will ruin—"

"Sit."

She dropped to the upholstered bench on the edge of the Aubusson rug. The blood-red damask covering contrasted sharply with her black gown. She steadied the snifter in her lap with her fingers laced around the stem. Her back remained ramrod-straight as she waited him out.

Her eyes were blue-gray, he saw at last, and there was nothing youthful about them. She might appear to be six-and-ten in every other way, but not in her eyes. They were far older than the age she had given as her own—wise, perhaps, but also weary. The long journey to London could explain some of it, his harsh treatment of her earlier could explain still more, but neither of those things filled the whole of it. He wondered what these eyes had seen.

"Who are you mourning?" he asked, taking in the unrelieved blackness of her attire.

The question surprised her. How could he not know that now? "The duke, of course."

West's slight smile was humorless. "There is no
of course
about it. Is he your father also? You are another of his by-blows, perhaps. Tell me, must I embrace you as my sister?"

She spoke softly in a carefully modulated voice that was no effort for her. "You mean to be horrid, I think. I was told that you would be, and you are."

"One endeavors not to disappoint."

"I did not say that I was in expectation of your rudeness, merely that I'd been told of it."

West wondered what he might make of that. He sipped from his brandy. "You had formed an opinion of me that was contrary to what you heard of my character?" he asked. "How is that possible when we can scarcely call ourselves acquainted?"

"We have met before."

"Now, there you are in the wrong of it. I have a happy talent for remembering faces and putting names to them. I would know if we had been introduced."

"I did not say there were introductions. Only that we have met."

He studied her face for a long moment. To her credit, she did not look away, but met his gaze directly. West suspected that she had kept her face averted before because she was afraid he would recognize her and have cause to send her away. Now that she had secured entry to his home, she was no longer so fearful that he would do so. He wasn't certain why she thought that was. He could put her back on the street as easily as he could have left her there.

His mouth twisted wryly as he set his brandy on the side table. But he hadn't left her on the street, had he? Like a bedraggled kitten, he had bundled her up and brought her home. He reluctantly concluded her confidence was not entirely misplaced.

"Then you are not my sister," he said at last.

"Not even your half-sister."

"Touche."
He tipped his head forward in a modest salute. "We met in town?"

"No."

"Then it wasn't during the Season."

"No." She smiled faintly, amused that what had begun as an interrogation was now a parlor game. He had seventeen questions left.

"You are acquainted with Southerton?"

"No."

"Eastlyn?"

"No."

"Northam?" Before she could say no and tick off another point in her favor, he was inspired to ask a different question. "His wife, then, the former Lady Elizabeth Penrose?"

"No." She subtracted two more questions from him anyway.

West fell silent as he considered a different tack. He was reluctant to pursue their connection if it existed only through his father. It would be difficult to be kindly disposed toward her if she had been somehow enamored of the late duke. Her name meant nothing at all to him, but then he had not spent a great deal of time with the solicitor since learning of his father's passing. In point of fact, he had walked out on Mr. Ridgeway, although not before announcing bluntly that he preferred bastardy to dukedom. West fully expected in the coming days and weeks he would be learning the names of relatives who had never troubled themselves with any thought of him.

He had always been Westphal's bastard to them, as if he'd had no proper name of his own. He was the by-blow, born on the wrong side of the blanket. As a child he had accepted this last information in the most literal sense, assuming his mother had lain on the sun-faded side of a quilt when she gave birth to him. He could not imagine why he was treated so differently because of this oversight. He had finally been moved to ask her about it. It was the only time he could remember her striking him. She had cried afterward, of course, patently horrified by what she had done. There had never been any question that he forgave her, but he had also never forgotten.

There were things that could not be put from one's mind.

West removed his feet from the stool and leaned forward in his chair. His elbows rested on his knees and his fingers formed a steeple beneath his chin. A slight, vertical furrow appeared between his brows as his eyes narrowed. A slim lock of copper hair fell forward over his forehead, but he was too intent upon the pale crown of his guest's own hair to give it notice.

He had seen hair like that before.

"You are Ria," he said.

She marveled that he had won the game.

Chapter 2

"No one has called me Ria for a very long time," she said. "I wasn't certain you would know me by that name or any other. I thought I would have to explain so much more. You recall the occasion of our meeting, then."

West still had the stripes across his back and backside to keep the memory fresh. He did not tell her that. "I remember it well enough." There was little inflection in his voice to indicate any emotion. He picked up the brandy snifter and got to his feet "Will you have another?" he asked, pointing to her glass.

"No."

He nodded curtly and retraced his steps to the drinks cabinet, where he refilled his glass, allowing himself considerably more this time than last. He was willing to risk a sore head in the morning for the pleasant numbness of liquor now. He did not return to his chair immediately but stood where he was, considering what he would do next.

"You are much changed," he said at last. It was an absurd thing to say. Of course she was changed. A score of years had passed.

"As are you."

He shrugged. "How did you find me?"

"I inquired of Mr. Ridgeway. He gave me your address."

"As solicitors go, the man has a loose tongue."

"I pressed him rather urgently."

West had little difficulty imagining that, though by what means she had done so was a mystery. She was a thorough beauty with her sunshine hair and fine, perfectly symmetrical features. The blue-gray eyes were perhaps a bit too grave, but their color was splendid and the lashes that framed them were dark and long. She had not fluttered them once in his direction, yet West wondered if Mr. Ridgeway's experience had been different.

Ria was in no way comfortable as the subject of West's unwavering observation. She thought he had had sufficient fill of her in the carriage, then again in front of the fire. His repeated assessments were unnerving, though she hoped she gave no indication of it. It was not her wish to appear spineless.

She was more cautious in her study of him, confining herself to glances when she was certain he would not catch her out. It was not easy to accomplish as he rarely turned his attention from her. She wondered if he had not entirely absolved her of intending to do him harm.

It was not in her nature to harm anything. She would trip over her own feet rather than step on another creature, no matter how repellent the thing was. She had once allowed a great, hairy attic spider to crawl up her bare leg until she could flick it away rather than squash it with the book in her hand.

West would not know that about her, she realized. There was no reason that he should. To her knowledge he had not put his eyes on her in twenty years. It was astonishing that he had divined her identity after so much time had passed.

"How did you know me when I stepped out of the club?" he asked her.

Ria felt a wash of heat in her cheeks that could not be explained by the proximity of the fire. She dissembled. "I heard the footman call you
Your Grace."

"Paladin was also at the club this evening."

She had no idea who Paladin was, except that he must also be a duke and therefore addressed in the same manner as Westphal. Her silence did her in.

"Then it wasn't Ridgeway who described me," West mused aloud.