It Started with a Scandal (20 page)

With a sudden pang, he wished he’d be able to teach Jack how to ride a horse. To watch his face light up with joy and pride and excitement.

Regardless, one way or another, within a fortnight, he would likely be on his way out of his and Elise’s life, more or less for good.

“Will you come to the Christmas pantomime, Giant, at the church? I’m going be a sheep. There are angels, too. There’s one angel called Colette. From Miss Endicott’s.”

“Ah, an angel called Colette. Is she pretty?”

“She’s
so
pretty,” Jack said with unfettered honesty and innocence. It made Lavay’s heart squeeze. Oh, to be so guileless.

Suddenly he remembered this was the name of Alexandra’s younger sister, the one who had been installed at Miss Marietta Endicott’s Academy.

This must be the very same Colette.

“I will come to the pantomime, Jack.”

“Hurrah!” Jack said, and thumped his heels lightly in the hammock, making it sway again. “Have you been to Ireland, too?”

“
Ireland?
” Philippe was amused.

“That’s where Seamus is from.”

“Who is Seamus?”

“Mr. Duggan. I like the way he talks. He knows a lot of songs. And he plays the fiddle and brings flowers to Mama. He’ll play the fiddle at the pantomime.”

Philippe stiffened. Suddenly the day had gotten significantly less idyllic.

“He does what?” He was aware his voice had gone rather steely.

Jack was blissfully oblivious.

“Plays fiddle. It’s like a violin. Mama likes flowers. And Mr. Duggan can rhyme, but not as good as Mama. He sings good.”

“He sings
well
,” Philippe corrected.

“Have you heard him, too?” Jack was delighted.

“Oh, I intend to.”

Chapter 21

E
LI
SE TOOK REFUGE FROM
the tumult of her feelings at the Pig & Thistle during the nights of singing, which magically coincided with her evenings off. She sat at the table with the vicar and his wife, a pint of the dark in front of her, enveloped in the cheery heat from the huge fire and all the bodies crammed into the pub, lulled by the cheerful, inebriated voices of the crowd and Seamus’s relentlessly merry band of musicians.

The evening’s music was already well underway when a gust of cold air briefly swept through the room, which is what happened every time someone new entered the pub.

She turned idly.

And froze.

Philippe was standing in the back of the room, a greatcoat covering his shoulders, hat in hand. Looking somehow infinitely more right than anyone in the room and more out of place. She’d somehow grown accustomed to his impact. In the context of this humble, centuries-old pub, he looked like the aristocrat he was.

He saluted her with a slow nod, but not a smile.

What the devil was he
doing
here?

“That’s Lord Lavay. Get him a table,” Ned Hawthorne hissed to his daughter, who had been gawking. Polly Hawthorne scrambled to shoo away a few disgruntled if awestruck young bloods from their spot and bid them stand in the back.

Lavay shook his head, smiled faintly, and waved away the attention. He took up a spot against a wall in the back of the pub.

Everyone reversed their motions and sat again.

Seamus drew his crowd-pleasing jig to a finish with a head toss and a flourish, and the crowd cheered their raucous approval. He bowed theatrically, accepting all of it as his due.

And then he stood on a chair and announced, “I should like to dedicate this song to a particular woman, because I know it makes her weep, and only the tenderest, kindest hearts weep.”

He winked at Elise, but the pub was so crowded that a dozen women imagined it was for them, and Seamus’s winks were in large part why the musical evenings were so successful.

But when he began, he sang it directly, unwaveringly, to Elise, in a pure, aching tenor:

What made th’ assembly shine?

Robin Adair.

What made the ball so fine?

Robin was there.

And when the play was o’er,

What made my heart so sore?

Oh! it was parting with,

Robin Adair.

Damn him. It was a song about how loving someone made everything better, and how the world was so much dimmer when he wasn’t there.

As if she didn’t already know.

Fortunately, she wasn’t the only one sniffling.

A gust of cold air signaled the door had swung open again.

Instinct told her to turn, and her suspicions were confirmed. Lavay had gone.

W
HEN
S
EAMUS EMERGED
from the pub a moment later to smoke and recover from the emotion he poured into the song of Robin Adair, he discovered Lavay leaning against the wall, staring up at the stars. Perhaps contemplating whether to go back inside.

Perhaps hoping Seamus would emerge so he could kill him.

“Lord Lavay is it,” Seamus said, tucking a cheroot into his mouth.

Lavay said nothing.

Seamus extended a cheroot.

Lavay took it.

Seamus lit it for him.

In total silence, two men united only by their devastating appeal to women and delightful accents sucked on their cheroots.

“I actually enjoy fighting, Lord Lavay,” Seamus confided finally into the long, tense, lethal-feeling silence. “I really do. I suspect you do, too. But I suspect you like to win better than I like to fight.”

“There will be no fighting,” Lavay said, almost lazily. “Because there would be no sport in such an easy kill.”

Seamus simply nodded.

The silence and smoking resumed.

“There is no harm in wanting what you want. But wouldn’t it be a pity to hurt a woman like that? One who has already been hurt?”

Seamus said it in his lilting Irish accent, which gave everything a bit of an ironic, lighthearted twist.

Lavay turned to stare at him. He would have preferred to be able to dismiss Seamus Duggan as lightweight and frivolous.

The door swung open. “Duggan! Get your arse in!”

Seamus wordlessly did just that.

Lavay took his arse home, walking the entire way.

A
SLEEPY HUSH
lay over the house when the reverend and Mrs. Sylvaine saw Elise home, before midnight. The rest of the servants had gone up to bed, and after she’d looked in on a blissfully sleeping Jack, she brought herself downstairs to test again the locks on the cabinets, to review the state of the kitchen. It was spotless, everything in its place, all the foodstuffs stored properly.

Not so long ago she’d never dreamed she’d feel so much pride in these kinds of things, but she surrendered to the impulse to bask in the triumph. It had been no small feat.

She had begun to feel as though she could accomplish anything.

She was returning to the kitchen through the passage between it and the storeroom when a shadow appeared at the end of it, blocking the light.

She gave a start.

“Philippe,” she breathed. There really was no mistaking him.

For a moment they were merely shadows to each other in the passageway.

With slow measured footsteps, he closed the distance between the two of them.

“Are you . . . are you looking for a tart?” she said softly.

And then she blushed when she realized how that sounded.

He smiled faintly, but he was clearly distracted.

“May I ask you a question, Elise?”

His tone was peculiar. A little diffident. Very tense.

“Of course.”

“How do you feel about . . . that man?”

“Which man?”

“The man with the fiddle.” He raised a mocking invisible fiddle to his shoulder and played, tossing his head.

The funny thing was that it did look quite a bit like Seamus when he tossed his head about.

“About Seamus Duggan?”

“Yes. Are you in love with him?”

“Am I . . .
what
? Why on earth . . . what on earth . . .
what
?”

“He is in love with you.”

“He most certainly is not. Or, more accurately speaking, Seamus is in love with everybody. Perhaps most particularly himself.”

“I saw the way he looked at you. And sang to you. That is a man in love.”

“Perhaps you have confused him with the man you see in the mirror.”

That stopped him as abruptly as if he’d run hard into a brick wall.

The truth could sometimes feel like a brick wall.

They studied each other.

And then he moved forward, startling her, backing her against the wall. His hands landed one by one on either side of her, fencing her in.

“How do you feel about Seamus Duggan, Elise?”

“I suppose I feel about Seamus Duggan the way you feel about Lady Prideux.”

This won her a smile that bore no relationship to humor.

“How do you feel about Seamus Duggan, Elise?” he repeated softly.

“Seamus is enchanting,” she murmured about an inch from his chin.

“Oh?”

“Have you seen how his green eyes sparkle?”

“I have seen,” he said grimly.

“And he has a lovely singing voice,” she went on.

“If one likes the singing of frogs, I can see how one might enjoy it,” he all but breathed directly into her ear, which caused everything on her body to stir in anticipation of bliss.

His hands glided up over her breasts without preamble and with shocking confidence, as if he owned her. Which wasn’t far wrong.

“I think that we shall make each other come now, with our clothes on.”

It was so matter-of-fact and so coarse and so thoroughly erotic that the blood stampeded into her head and she thought she might faint.

“Who are you thinking about
now
, Elise?” he murmured.

She stared at him, her mind erased, her body already enslaved.

“Who do you think about at night, alone in your room, Elise? I will tell you who I think about. I lie awake and I think about how I would like to do this . . .” His fingers delicately traced the contours of them through her muslin bodice. “. . . for your breasts have a graceful, saucy curve, like so.” He savored them with an illustrating caress, then paused to cup them. “And then I think how your nipples are like little raspberries, and I would like to suck them, and flick them with my tongue.”

“That is”—she swallowed—“quite a bedtime story. Not at all like Aesop.”

“But then I know I can also do this,” he murmured into her ear, and then his tongue was there, delving just a little into it, then tracing the contours of it, slowly, dexterously, so sinfully knowingly, which made her moan softly. And he lightly pinched her nipples, then skated hard over them with his thumbs. “And they will go hard as little stones, you see, and you will be wet. So wet for me. Are you wet now, Elise?” he whispered.

“Guh,” she gasped eloquently.

Which was really all the answer he needed.

She was either a wanton or he was an arch seducer, infinitely more formidable than she could have anticipated. Probably a bit of both. He was a man who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it, and she was in all likelihood not the most difficult thing he would ever have to get.

And now it was too late to stop, and every ounce of blood in her body seemed to have pooled between her legs and she was aching, burning for him.

He unfastened his trousers with shocking alacrity and hooked an arm beneath her thigh, fitting himself against her. She gasped in shock. The heat and hard length of his swollen cock pressed against her, so excruciatingly tempting.

“And I think,” he went on, his narrative made ragged now by his breathing, “how it would feel to be inside you.” He moved his hips to slide his cock oh so delicately against her wetness, lightly, teasing, torturing her, torturing himself. She groaned a low, animal sound of pleasure, a plea. “And how sweet that will feel. But for now we will only torment each other,
oui
, because when you want me,
you
will come to me.”

“I won’t,” she whispered.

He slid against her slick heat again. And she ground against him, her limbs shaking and tense with reigned-in lust.

“You will,” he whispered.

He slid against her soaking curls again.

He muttered hoarse oaths against her mouth, strings of oaths, all unrelated, all filthy and appreciative and French. “You feel so good,
chérie
.” It was a dry rasp.

“Philippe . . . I . . .
please
now . . .” She teetered just on the edge of release. She clung hard to his shoulders and moved herself against him, begging, and he hissed in a breath. But he held her fast, so that she couldn’t move. He was in control of this. She whimpered. Their gusting, ragged breath mingled hotly. Her head tipped back hard, and he burned a kiss into her throat. His face was sheened with sweat. The effort not to take her now and take her hard might simply be the death of him.

“Please,” she whispered.

He moved again, swiftly, once, twice, lightly, and just like that she shattered with a raw scrape of a scream, and quaked in the throes of it.

Just as he swiftly shifted his hips and she heard his guttural moan of pleasure as he spilled against her thigh. His release wracked him hard.

He allowed himself a minute to breathe, his head ducked against her throat. He was breathing like a bellows beneath her hands.

She kissed his temple.

But neither of them felt particularly tender or charitable.

It had been a ferocious interlude. All frustrated desire quickly, gracelessly satisfied.

“. . . and I think to myself,” he said, through gusting breaths, “. . . when she comes to me I will show her the true meaning of pleasure. And she will forget how to even pronounce Seamus Duggan.”

Seamus who?

He was gently cleaning her thigh with his handkerchief as he spoke. And then he dropped her thigh again and smoothed down her dress. He buttoned his trousers so matter-of-factly that she wondered how many times he’d done just that, because it was so smoothly executed.

Except she knew she was different from any of the women who had come before.

“It isn’t fair.” Even as she said them she knew they were petulant, tense, quite obvious and not particularly helpful words.

He gently took her chin in his hand.

“I suppose you are right,” he said softly. “But then,
tout est juste dans l’amour et la guerre, chérie.
We have not chosen to want it. But we do. You need only find a way to justify wanting it.”

She didn’t know how she could love and hate a man all at once.

He kissed her, sweetly, lightly, on the mouth, and then he turned and left her. She watched him move down the hall toward his study.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER,
the house echoed with the sound of a vase shattering into a thousand pieces.

He stood in shame amidst the shrapnel of another vase and breathed, wondering at the fact that his life seemed to be closing in on all sides once again, when for a brief shining moment it was as though the sun had burst through.

She was right. As usual.

And it wasn’t as though he didn’t know it.

Whether or not it was fair was of no consequence.

He had no right to do this to her. To use her passion and sensuality and love for him as weapons to get what he wanted. The desire was like claws in him, and when he inwardly writhed at the injustice of it, the claws sank deeper still.

And he wouldn’t ask her again to trade passion for yet more shame. He wouldn’t be one more man who partook of her and left, nor would he ask her to live on the fringe of his life, in the shadows, to be enjoyed whenever he could spare a moment. She was a woman who belonged in the light. She was a woman who deserved to be loved and honored for the rest of her life.