The Dark One (7 page)

“Of course I know you were fond of her, and she of you. That's why I knew you would come. You walked
right into my trap. Little idiot,” he insulted her. “Now, back to more urgent matters. Tomorrow morning you will accompany me and Penmore next door to Lord Wulf's pride and joy. His stable. I hope we don't have any more problems between you and Lord Wulf. I'd hate to have to thrash him. As I told Penmore, Wulf was quite frightened of me when I warned him off.”

Rosalind held her tongue, but she seriously doubted that her stepbrother could frighten Armond Wulf. At the moment, she would say anything to have Franklin leave her alone. Rarely did they spend time together that she didn't manage to enrage him.

“If you wish me to be there, I will,” she said. “May I see your mother this afternoon? I've been lax in my visits and wish to make amends.”

Franklin shrugged. “I suppose if you must. I've just had tea fixed and taken up to her. A special blend she was always fond of. Do give her my best.”

The way he said the parting remark was sarcastic, but Rosalind was too happy to see him leave to care. She walked to her mirror, applied powder to help cover the small bruise on her cheek, grabbed her sewing basket, and went up to the third floor.

The duchess dozed in a chair by the window. The remnants of her morning tea sat on a small table to her left. Mary, the housekeeper, was busy cleaning the dreary room.

“Is she any better today?” Rosalind asked the housekeeper.

The woman shook her head. “I haven't managed to get a peep out of her for two days now. Her mind has gone somewhere else. She's so terribly tired it's almost more than I can manage to get her up and at least to a chair so the bedsores don't come.”

Rosalind knelt before her stepmother and took the woman's cold hand in hers. “Good afternoon, Your Grace. I'm sorry I haven't visited more often of late. I promise to be better about it.” She turned to Mary. “I will stay with my stepmother for a while. I'm sure you have other duties to attend.”

“Bless you, but I do,” the housekeeper admitted. “Runs a tight ship, Master Franklin does. Hardly enough of us in the house to keep up with what needs to be done.”

The dwindling servants were obviously a result of Franklin's now limited funds, along with the dwindling furnishings downstairs. Rosalind was certain her stepbrother had sold off anything in the house of value to feed his gambling addictions and pay his pitiful staff.

After Mary left the room, Rosalind tried to think of something cheerful to chatter on about in her stepmother's company. She didn't expect the lady to converse with her. The duchess's eyes always had a glazed look, as if she no longer lived in this world but had escaped to another. Rosalind wished at the moment that she could do the same. She tried to hold her emotions at bay, but her still stinging shoulders and the prospect of continuing to live in a house where abuse had become a fast companion got the better of her. She bent her head and allowed herself the weakness of weeping. A moment later, her stepmother's hand touched her hair.

The woman's gentle touch, in a world that had become violent, only brought more tears. Rosalind continued to weep as the lady, her eyes still glazed and staring straight ahead, continued to gently stroke her hair.

They stayed that way for a time; then the lady's hand fell limply by her side and Rosalind realized the woman had fallen asleep. Rosalind rose, took a comforter from the bed, and covered the duchess. She worked on her
needlepoint until Mary returned to take up her vigilance with the poor woman.

In the evening, Mary sent Rosalind up a warm bath and she allowed the scented water to soothe her outward aches. Nothing could soothe her inward turmoil. She needed a savior.

A vision of Armond Wulf's handsome face surfaced. Maybe because he had the look of an angel with his golden mane of hair. But no, she shook her head to dislodge the thought. He was no angel. But was he a murderer? Was he insane?

Rosalind slipped into bed with those questions tumbling through her mind. Sleep had almost claimed her when she felt a presence inside of her room. Her first thought was that Lydia had been right about Franklin's unnatural affections toward her and he had managed to make it past the lock on her door. She sat, her gaze scanning the shadow-filled room. A darker shadow stood next to the balcony doors.

“Franklin?” she whispered, fear tripping her heart.

He stepped into a moonlit swath left by her open balcony doors and she saw that the man was not her stepbrother. Perhaps Rosalind should have been more frightened by his identity, but she was oddly relieved.

“What are you doing here, and how did you get in?”

Armond Wulf, dressed in a white lawn shirt open at the neck, and snug black trousers, took a step closer. “You shouldn't sleep with your doors open,” he said. “And the trellis outside isn't so difficult to climb, not if a man is determined.”

Rosalind pulled the covers up higher around her neck. “Determined to do what?”

He stared at her for a moment, long enough for tension as thick as fog to fill the air between them, then said, “To speak with you privately.”

“Speak with me?” Had she detected a note of disappointment in her voice? “Speak with me about what?”

Armond moved toward her. “About the bruise on your cheek. It's been bothering me.”

Her nostrils flared slightly as he drew nearer. Lord Wulf had a distinctive scent. Not unpleasant by any means. Not the result of any tonic, but a natural one. She couldn't identify it exactly, but it reminded her of danger. Of maleness. Of something wild.

“I told you about my clumsiness,” she reminded him. “You should not be here. And you are not so far removed from manners that you don't understand that.”

“Should your stepbrother be here?” he questioned. “In your room at this time of night? You thought I was him for a moment.”

She hoped the darkness hid the embarrassed flush she felt creep up her neck. “Why wouldn't I?” she responded. “He's the man of the household. It makes perfect sense that I would assume you were Franklin, perhaps come to check on me.”

“Is that a habit of his?”

Rosalind gasped when the man had the daring to sit upon the edge of her bed. She scooted as far from him as her mattress would allow. “No, it is not, and if it was, it is none of your business. You must leave at once. It isn't proper for you to be here.”

“Did I mention that besides being a coward, lacking in honor and manners, I don't give a damn about being proper?”

“I am quite able to figure that out on my own,” she assured him. Rosalind supposed she should scream. But Franklin would be the only man who'd come to her rescue. She had a strong feeling that Armond Wulf was the lesser of those two evils. Still, she couldn't let the man believe it was acceptable to slip into her bedroom in the
middle of the night. “If you don't leave immediately, I will call out for my stepbrother. He said you were quite terrified of him.”

Armond's teeth flashed white in the darkness when he laughed. “And do you believe him?”

The sarcastic tone of his voice confirmed her earlier suspicions in that regard. Armond Wulf made her uneasy, but Rosalind wasn't positive that the fluttering in her stomach and her inability to catch a normal breath resulted in any way from fear of him.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

His gaze ran a slow study of her. “You know what I want.”

Armond had told himself that he'd only come to question her about the bruise on her cheek. That it was some heroic duty of his to make certain the lady was not being abused. He had lied to himself. What he really wanted was to touch her again. To kiss her. To feel the heat spring up between them the way it had the night of the Greenleys' ball. She drew emotions from him that he thought he'd long ago gained control over. She made him feel. She made him want. She made him behave foolishly.

“I have misled you,” she said, and tried to scoot farther away from him. “Regardless of my behavior at the Greenleys' ball, I am not the sort of woman who would allow a man who came into my room uninvited to also easily slip into my bed. This matter must be set straight between us once and for all.”

He knew what sort of woman she was. Her kisses, although they had affected him far more than those of any experienced woman he'd spent private time with, had been innocent the night of the ball. Her responses to him had been too honest not to be new to her. She had been an innocent playing the part of brazen. But why had she carried the game so far? He still didn't understand that. For attention? Well, she had gotten that, and he should remind
her that attention wasn't always a good thing when dealing with the ton or with a man like him.

“This formality with me does not suit you,” he said to her. “Not when I know beneath the ice a fire rages. Aren't you even a little tempted to get burned again?”

Her hand crept up to pull her gown's modest neckline closed. Her small pink tongue wet her lips, an unconscious gesture, but one that drew his gaze to her sinful mouth.

“If I could possibly go back and change what happened between us at the Greenleys' ball, I would. I understand now how silly it was of me to leave with you. I understand that I wasn't thinking clearly, that I had not realized all the ramifications of doing something so daring. I used you for my own purposes, and I have apologized. What more would you ask of me?”

A lot more, he was thinking, but despite her sinful mouth, an air of innocence still clung to her and made conscience rear its ugly head. Her dark hair hung around her shoulders in wild disarray. Her curves were clearly visible beneath her modest nightgown. How could she call to something both decent and yet wild inside of him? What more would he ask of her? Not as much as he wanted to ask, but more than he should. He leaned closer to her.

“Another kiss.”

“A kiss?” she whispered breathlessly, then held up her hand as if to stop him. “A kiss and nothing more? Then you'll leave me alone?”

“If that is your wish.” Truth be told, Armond had to leave her alone. She was dangerous to him. He wouldn't try to fool himself into believing she wasn't. He supposed he liked playing with fire as well, because that was exactly what he was doing.

Slowly, she lowered her hand. Permission granted, he understood. Yet, now that Armond had permission, he
wasn't certain that he shouldn't turn tail and run. Could he kiss her and want nothing more? Could he kiss her and leave her alone from this night forward? Not bloody likely. But he did anyway.

How could Rosalind not be curious to know if the night in his carriage was some strange magical occurrence that would never happen to her again? Or if Armond Wulf had unearthed something inside of her that had been asleep all these years? Rosalind sensed that she could trust his word, perhaps because he hadn't taken full advantage of her that night and he could have. She thought she was relatively safe with him . . . until he kissed her again.

His lips were firm against hers, his open mouth moist, his tongue seeking. She opened to him like a flower starved for rain. It was a slow burn, the buildup between the first tentative touch of their lips and the way he took complete possession of her. The fire within her roared to life, creeping into her bones, licking at her flesh, sending the flame dancing through her until she burned everywhere.

“Rosalind,” he spoke her name. “How can I promise you that I won't ask for more, when everything about you makes me want more? More heat, more skin, more than my cursed life can give me?”

She remembered, then, about the curse upon his family. Although his kisses threatened to make her forget everything. Was he a madman? If he was, he spread his disease. She was surely just as mad to allow him into her room, into her bed, into a part of her that she had not known existed. Even though she should push him away, her hands curled into the collar of his shirt and pulled him closer.

“This is madness,” she managed to whisper between kisses. “It's wrong to feel this way. I don't even know you.”

He pulled back from her suddenly. She saw his face in
the glow from the fading embers of her night fire—saw his eyes. For a brief moment, they sparked and filled with an iridescent blue light; then, as quickly as it had come, the glow was gone.

“No, you don't know me,” he agreed.

Armond disentangled her hands from his collar. He rose and without a word moved across the room, out of her open balcony doors, and disappeared. Rosalind wondered for a moment if she was dreaming. If he'd been in her room at all. She touched her swollen lips. They burned. She burned. Beneath the cotton of her proper nightgown, very improper things were happening to her body.

Her breasts were swollen and aching. She felt warm and moist between her legs. She was hungry for more than what he'd given her. And she felt confused that he could elicit such feelings from her. And perhaps even a little angry that he could always so easily walk away. What would it take to shatter his seemingly inhuman control? And what possessed her to want to find out? She had enough problems in her life. Armond Wulf wasn't a problem she needed.

It occurred to her in that instant that nothing about Armond Wulf appealed to a woman's needs, but everything about him appealed to a woman's wants. He had warned her the first night she met him about the danger of playing false with men like him. Men like him? She wasn't even certain what kind of man he was, but she sensed there were few, if any, like him.

Rosalind was exhausted. Last night was much too eventful, and once Armond had left, she'd had trouble falling asleep. Later, she'd had nightmares. Nightmares that had her screaming in her sleep, or she supposed she had been the one screaming. She couldn't recall what the dreams had been about, only that Armond Wulf had been part of them.