Green Eyes (6 page)

VI

A
nna, shaken, had just gotten to her feet when Graham came barreling back through the door with Davis trailing unhappily behind him. Graham was scowling ferociously as Davis quietly shut the door. Davis, in response to a discreet look from Beedle, darted a glance at his lordship and shook his head.

“You lot clear out of here,” Graham snarled, glaring at the gaping servants as though looking for someone upon whom to vent his wrath. The maids and Beedle, needing no more than the expression on the lord’s face to give the command emphasis, immediately melted away. Mrs. Mullins, a hardier type, offered to make tea. She was shooed away with a peremptory movement of Graham’s hand, and left looking offended.

Davis, his face wooden, bent to retrieve the pistol and the candlestick from the floor. He replaced the former gently in its case and the latter in its customary position on the table, and looked around to see if he could discover any other offenses against tidiness. There being none, he took himself off, the dignity of his bearing almost making up for the shambles the night’s work had made of his appearance.

Quickly recovering her wits, Anna made a move as if to follow him. Not for anything in the world did she wish to be left alone with Graham. But she was too late.

Even as she murmured a hasty good-night, Graham came up behind her and caught her arm.

“I want to know what happened. Everything.” There was a harsh edge to his voice that made it totally unlike his normal hearty tone. Caught by his hand on her arm, Anna had no choice but to stop and look up at him.

“I told you. He—I saw him, and he tried to carry me off, and I shot at him. Then I hit him with the candlestick, and he was knocked unconscious. Then Davis and the others came and—you know the rest.”

“How did he get in? What did he want?” The question had an urgent undertone that bewildered Anna.

She shook her head. “You heard what he said— that he came to visit you. Graham, who is he? What did he mean by calling you ’brother’?”

Graham’s mouth twisted. “He’s a low-life bastard who’s been trying to pass himself off as my father’s by-blow for years. My father never acknowledged him, and I mean to follow that example. His mother was a gypsy whore; his father could have been anybody. He hates us all, every living Traverne. I suppose we must count ourselves lucky that we weren’t all murdered in our beds.”

The expression on Graham’s face was so dark that Anna involuntarily shivered. If the housebreaker hated all Travernes, then it was clear that Graham returned the favor with interest. Hatred shone from his pale blue eyes.

“He was up to no good, you may be sure. It was fortunate that you came across him.” Graham’s expression changed. His eyes sharpened as they looked down at her. The hold he had on her arm tightened too. “What were you doing from bed at such an hour? I was on my way to visit you.”

Anna lifted her chin. Her eyes as they met his were unflinching. She was small-boned and fragile next to his bull-like frame, and his hold on her arm was tight. He could break her in two with a minimum of effort—but still she meant to stand her ground.

“That was why I was from my bed,” she said steadily, and for a moment his grip on her arm tightened so cruelly that she winced. Then his hold eased, and he began instead to subtly knead her arm. There was something obscene about the almost gentle caress, and something obscene too in the tiny smile that played across his mouth as he watched her face, feeding on the revulsion she could not quite manage to hide.

“I meant what I said, Anna. I mean to be repaid for my kindness in taking you and your gel in.”

“Chelsea is your niece! You have a moral obligation to provide for her!”

Graham snapped the fingers of his free hand.

“That’s how much your moral obligation means to me. But don’t worry, I don’t mean to abandon the brat, unless you make it necessary. I just want to be recompensed for her upkeep. Something for something, you know. A business transaction, pure and simple.”

His head dipped toward hers. The hand on her arm tightened again, and his eyes were on her mouth. Anna, shuddering, realized that he meant to kiss her. Summoning her last reserves of strength, she managed to jerk her arm free and step back.

“You make me sick!”

Graham’s eyes glittered at her. His expression was not pleasant as he surveyed her. “And you make me— But you know what you make me, don’t you, my dear sister-in-law? You’ve always teased me, batting those big eyes at me and then running away like a skittish virgin. But you’re no virgin any longer, and the time has come to pay the piper. You’ll bed me, my dear, or get the hell out of my house. You and your brat.”

“I’ll tell Barbara.…” She made the threat in sheer desperation. Graham laughed.

“And thus cut your own throat. Barbara doesn’t care for having a widowed young sister-in-law in her house constantly taking the shine out of her. She’d welcome the excuse to throw you out on your pretty ear. I don’t want you to be under any illusions about that.”

Anna stared at him. The smirking smile on his square face made her long to slap him; she had to close her hands into fists to resist the impulse. Reading defeat in her face, Graham smiled wider and reached out as though to catch her arm again. But before he could touch her the front door burst open. Through it hurried Henricks, followed by a short, greatcoated stranger. Both stopped just beyond the doorway as they became aware of Graham’s presence.

“I’ve brought the magistrate, your lordship. And ’twas quite a task getting him to come, I must say. Didn’t believe me, he didn’t!” Henricks’s voice was both triumphant and indignant.

“Your man here tells me you had a break-in, my lord?” With a single annoyed look at Henricks, the magistrate focused on Graham. His voice conveyed polite skepticism.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Graham said shortly, clearly not pleased at the interruption. He turned back to Anna, lowering his voice so that she alone could hear his words.

“I mean to have you, and I won’t be put off any longer. When I’ve dealt with this, I’ll be coming along to your room. I expect to find you there, warm and welcoming. You always were a sensible little puss.” He smiled at her. Anna, hating him, also hated herself as, in the face of that hot stare, her eyes faltered and dropped.

His hand came to rest briefly against her neck. She jerked away. He scowled.

“You’ll lie with me, Anna, one way or another.

You don’t have a choice.” Then his voice rose so that the others could hear. “Go along up to bed now.”

He turned away from her and moved to join the men. Anna, feeling as if she had just been punched in the stomach, slowly left the hall, Graham meant what he said, she knew he did. He would have her, by force if necessary, or he would toss her and Chelsea out of his house.

It was frigid December, she had exactly five pounds and her clothing to her name, and there was no place for her and her innocent child to go.

She shivered as if from a chill and drew the enveloping cloak more closely around her neck. Something hard bumped against her thigh, and she was reminded of the emeralds concealed in the folds. She must return them to the library.…

And then a thought so evil that it must have been prompted by the devil popped full-grown into her brain.

Concealed on her person was a fortune in emeralds that no one short of heaven knew she had.

The housebreaker had stolen them. When they were missed, he would be blamed. If she kept her mouth shut, no one would ever connect her with them at all.

And he was gone, escaped, certainly never to be seen around Gordon Hall again. He would suffer no punishment for her misdeed.

Stealing was wrong. But so was succumbing to Graham. Of the two evils, stealing was probably the lesser. And certainly it was the more bearable.

The miracle she had prayed for earlier had just been delivered into her hands.

VII

J
ulian Chase rode through the icy night like a centaur. Bent low over Samson’s neck, his knees gripping the stallion’s heaving black sides, he might have been a part of the horse. He’d learned to ride before he could walk, as most gypsy children did, and this wasn’t the first time the instinctual communion between man and beast would stand him in good stead. Already the hallooing pursuit set on him by his beloved half-brother was fading into the distance. In another few miles he would be free and clear.

Damn, his head hurt! Throbbed so much that he could barely focus his eyes, let alone think! What the hell had the little besom hit him with? Impossible to imagine that a chit that small and fragile-looking could inflict such a blow.

Who the devil was she, anyway? Not Graham’s wife, he knew. He’d seen Lady Ridley twice in London and once during a scouting expedition to Gordon Hall. She was a handsome enough woman, tall and full-bosomed, with a loud voice and an obviously high opinion of herself. But she wasn’t a patch on the angel turned hellcat who’d clouted him on the head.

Masses of blond hair, green-as-grass eyes. For some reason that combination stirred a vague memory.

But of what, or whom, he couldn’t have said. Besides, his head hurt too much to make the effort to sort it out.

A six-foot-high stone wall, nearly hidden by a copse of trees, loomed up out of the darkness, Julian scarcely saw it before Samson was up and over, landing lightly with hardly a slackening in his pace. At the barely felt impact a sharp pain shot through Julian’s head. He reined Samson in, blinking in an effort to drive away the pain as he slowed the animal’s headlong pace. For a moment he swayed in the saddle, on the verge of losing consciousness, before the iron control that had played a large part in keeping him in one piece for the thirty-five years he’d been alive asserted itself. He would not pass out. To pass out would almost certainly result in a fall from the saddle, and then he would very likely be taken by Graham’s men. Might as well shoot himself in the head here and now as let himself be captured by men loyal to his brother.

Samson bunny-hopped over a fallen log that lay in his path, and another blinding pain pierced Julian’s head. Good God, had the thrice-damned chit actually managed to crack his skull?

But then, Julian supposed he was lucky to have escaped with no more hurt than that. If his brother had succeeded in holding him, he would be in worse straits indeed. Graham had hated him ever since he had first been made aware of his half-brother’s existence, half a lifetime ago when Julian was sixteen and Graham was twelve.

With the cockiness of youth, Julian had traveled down to Gordon Hall to confront his supposed father about the truth surrounding the circumstances of his birth. His granny had always told him that he, Julian, was the lord’s rightful heir, as her daughter Nina had been the earl’s legal wife and not his mistress at all. In Julian’s only other encounter with his father, Lord Ridley had had all the advantages. But then Julian had been a frightened eight-year-old, painfully eager for his father’s love. At sixteen, he considered himself a man grown, toughened by years of living by his wits and fists in London’s meanest slums and well able to take care of himself.

If the memory weren’t so painful still, he might smile at the recollection of his sixteen-year-old rashness. Instead of being greeted with the common civility his father would have accorded even a chance-met stranger, Julian had, after being admitted no farther than the front hall by the servants, been ordered by his icy-voiced father to take his person from the premises and never return. When Julian had attempted to argue, the old lord had had him bodily thrown out. The mother and father of a fight had ensued. By its conclusion, fully half a dozen fellows wielding stout sticks had joined together to beat Julian to a bloody pulp. Finally the servants, at Lord Ridley’s direction, had thrown the barely conscious Julian into the road, where they had let him lie.

And then a pudgy youth had run up to him and spit full in his battered face, hissing “Gypsy bastard” with hatred glittering in his pale blue eyes. That youth had been Graham, and Graham hated him still. Julian suspected that he feared him, too. If, as Julian suspected, Graham had somehow gotten wind of the notion that Julian might, just might, be the legitimate offspring of the old earl instead of a by-blow, then seeing his brother shot or hanged for thieving would simultaneously soothe Graham’s anxiety and fill him with glee.

No doubt he’d been a fool to put himself within Graham’s reach. But the emeralds were his, and he wanted them. And wanted, too, the mysterious “proof” they were said to contain.

His granny had always insisted that her girl Nina would never have lain with a man outside of marriage. Of course, mothers being what they were, Julian had taken that pronouncement with a grain of salt. But soon after the old earl’s death, he’d received an anonymous note that had read simply: “The proof is in the emeralds.”

From whom it had come, or exactly what it meant, he had no idea. But he knew about the emeralds. He’d been raised on the story, heard it nearly every day of his life until his granny’s death when he was eight.

The emeralds had belonged to the Rachminovs, a sprawling gypsy clan whose chieftain had been Julian’s grandfather. No one knew precisely how such an itinerant tribe had come to possess such a treasure, but Julian, knowing his relatives, had his suspicions. When Nina, his mother, had run away with her noble lover, she’d taken the emeralds with her as, presumably, her dowry. Months later Nina had returned, heavy with child. The emeralds had not returned with her, and Nina had died giving Julian life.

His granny always insisted that Lord Ridley, having gotten what he wanted from the gypsy girl, had cast off Julian’s mother because he was ashamed of her low birth. But he’d kept the gems. After his granny’s death Julian had learned that something of the sort was indeed the case.

An uncle had taken him to Gordon Hall. He’d been a tall, sturdy boy of eight with a shock of black hair and a sullen air that had proved most successful at disguising the mingled fear and longing that overwhelmed him at the idea of confronting the nobleman who was supposed to be his father. The uncle had tried to barter Julian and a sheaf of papers that supposedly proved the nobleman’s paternity for the emeralds. The earl had agreed, extracting the emeralds from the same hidey-hole in the library from which Julian had retrieved them just a short while earlier. The exchange completed, the uncle has hastened away with the emeralds. Julian had been left at the mercy of his father.