The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (38 page)

Through the glass walls, Sally could see the lanterns that had been hung all about the gardens, shimmering like stars against the dark hedges.

Sally turned in a slow circle, the floating edges of her Grecian tunic brushing the corners of the flower pots. “What is this place?”

There were no lights lit, but the braziers created their own sultry light, lending a warm glow to the haze of heat.

“It was my mother’s workroom.” Lucien ducked beneath the hanging branch of a richly flowering tree. The white petals clung to his red velvet shoulder, releasing a heady scent. “I hadn’t realized Uncle Henry had preserved it.”

Impulsively, Sally set a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?” Belatedly, she remembered that he didn’t want or need her help. “I mean—”

“I know.” Lucien captured her hand before she could retrieve it. “And, yes. Thanks to you.”

“Me?” Outside, the lanterns twinkled in the cold, but inside it was all warmth and gentle darkness. The faint glow of the braziers limned Lucien’s familiar features and made the gold embroidery on his doublet burn with hidden fire.

“I did a great deal of thinking this morning.” Lucien’s fingers twined through hers. “Some of it wasn’t particularly pleasant.”

“Oh?” Sally was having a hard time concentrating on what he was saying, what with all the hand-holding.

“Yes,” said Lucien. “I’ve been a self-indulgent idiot.”

“I wouldn’t say idiot. . . .”

“But definitely self-indulgent.” Lucien released her hand, folding his arms across his chest, and Sally tried to tell herself that she didn’t mind. “I sentenced myself to exile, telling myself I wasn’t worthy to return until I avenged my parents’ deaths. I thought that I was honoring their memory by staying away.”

“No one can blame you for wanting vengeance,” said Sally encouragingly. “Who wouldn’t want an eye for an eye?”

“It wasn’t vengeance,” said Lucien firmly. “It was a waste. A waste of my life and their legacy. Whatever one might say about my parents, they both lived. They pursued their own passions.”

The word seemed to linger in the air between them, charged with all the sweetness of the tropical night.

Aside from the fact that they were in Leicestershire in October.

“Like these flowers?” said Sally, turning hastily away before she could do something foolish. Correction: something more foolish than she had done already.

“Like these flowers,” Lucien agreed.

Maybe looking away hadn’t been the wisest idea. Sally could feel Lucien’s presence behind her, so close that his breath ruffled her intricately arranged curls.

“This was my mother’s greatest achievement. She catalogued plants no one had ever seen before.”

Lucien’s velvet sleeve brushed Sally’s bare shoulder as he reached around her to finger the purple leaves of a plant with tiny white flowers.

“They’re lovely,” said Sally breathlessly. “Truly lovely. It feels as though we aren’t in England at all.”

All the way in this odd nook of the castle, they might have been on a tropical island, a million miles away, lost in a soundless sea, the lanterns in the garden mere phosphorescence on the foam. Someplace without all of the rules and strictures of society. Someplace where nothing mattered but the two of them.

“Most of the plants are from Martinique.” With a twist of his fingers, Lucien broke off a pink flower with a profusion of petals. “They call it the Isle of Flowers.”

Leaning forward, he tucked it into the pearl diadem that held the hair back from her brow. The petals brushed her temple, their scent a heady promise of pleasure to come.

“Do they?” Sally ducked around Lucien’s arm, walking rapidly down the long aisle between plants.

Before she made any more mistakes.

They had agreed their kiss was a mistake, hadn’t they?

Sally’s flat slippers slapped against the flagstones of the floor. It was common sense, she told herself, common sense rather than flight. She came to a halt by a large pot holding a tree adorned with unimpressive greenish-white flowers. There was something rather familiar about those shiny green leaves.

“Lucien?” Sally used his name without meaning to. It just slipped out. Sally gestured towards the plant. “Are those the same leaves someone left in your carriage?”

“Don’t touch that!” Lucien leapt between Sally and the manzanilla.

“I wasn’t planning to,” said Sally. Although it was, really, rather sweet that he’d felt the need to defend her from a plant. “It’s a manzanilla, isn’t it?”

Lucien circled the tree, which looked deeply innocuous for something with the potential to wreak so much havoc. “I hadn’t realized it was still here. I had assumed—” He rubbed a hand against his brow. “Foolish of me. It’s not as though it was the tree’s fault.”

“It was this tree?” The plant took on a sinister aspect.

Lucien nodded. “There aren’t many of them in England. In fact, I’m not sure there are any. . . .”

His eyes met Sally’s as the impact of his words hit them both.

“There might be others,” said Sally doubtfully. If there weren’t, that meant that whoever had left the manzanilla leaves in Lucien’s carriage had come from the castle. She seized on an alternative. “The castle isn’t precisely fortified. Anyone might have snuck in here.”

“The same person who snuck in and found my father’s snuffbox?” Lucien’s face was hard in the light of the braziers. “I should have known. I just didn’t want to see it. Hal had both the motive and the means.”

And a convenient scapegoat in the person of his cousin.

It seemed like a very unsatisfying ending to their investigations. Hal was just so . . . ordinary. It was rather lowering to chase a legendary spy and end up with Hal. But if Hal had, indeed, killed Fanny Logan—which, as Lucien had so reasonably pointed out, he had every reason to do—then it seemed highly unlikely that there was a spy in the mix.

Which meant that they still had no idea who had killed Lucien’s parents.

And there was one other slight problem.

Sally dragged her shining skirts slowly down the path between the flowers. “You do realize what this means?”

“Yes,” said Lucien heavily. “It means my cousin is a murderer.”

Sally waved an impatient hand. “Yes, that too.” That wasn’t the worst of it. “It means that Miss Gwen was wrong. There is no spy. It means that our betrothal—all of this”—Sally’s gesture encompassed the lanterns in the garden, festive decorations for a celebration that wasn’t—“was for nothing.”

Lucien’s head snapped up. “Don’t say that.” His eyes burned brighter than the coals on the brazier, smoldering from within. “It wasn’t for nothing. You’ve given me my home back.” A hint of amusement quirked the corner of his lips. “You’ve brought me back from the realms of the undead.”

Sally wrapped her hands in the cool silk of her tunic. “I thought you didn’t believe in vampires.”

“I don’t. But there’s more than one kind of tomb.” Lucien touched her cheek, as gently as the brush of a flower petal. “You rescued me from a mausoleum of my own making. Even if I wasn’t terribly gracious about it.”

It was rather gratifying to be appreciated, even if it had taken him a while. “You would have done it yourself eventually. I didn’t do anything except ambush you in a ballroom.”

“And my garden,” Lucien pointed out, smiling in a way that did dangerous things to Sally’s insides. “Don’t forget my garden.”

Sally tossed her curls back over her shoulder, striving for normalcy. “How could I? You were absolutely infuriating.”

“And you were trespassing,” Lucien reminded her. There was a glint in his eye that Sally found deeply unsettling. “Isn’t there generally a forfeit in that sort of situation?”

Lucien reached out, twining one of her bright curls around his finger. Sally couldn’t take her eyes off it. “If so, you should have taken it at the time,” she croaked.

Lucien followed the length of the curl up to her cheek. “I didn’t know you then.”

“But you do now?” There was something deeply unsettling and exhilarating about that thought.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and Sally could feel his breath soft against her lips. “If I had known then . . .”

It was rather close in the greenhouse. Sally was finding it more than a little bit difficult to breathe. “Then what?” she demanded.

“Then this,” he said, and kissed her.

Chapter Twenty-four

He kissed her because she looked so damned kissable in the low light of the braziers. He kissed her because he couldn’t help kissing her. He kissed her because it was easier than trying to tell her all the confused thoughts that were bumping around in his head, all of which began with “stay,” and ended, frighteningly, dangerously, with “love.”

He didn’t want to think of love. Love was terrifying. Love made you vulnerable. Love hurt. So he kissed her instead, long and hard and desperately, with all the feelings he didn’t have the words to express, his hands spreading across the warm silk of her back, her curls tickling his cheek and neck.

“You are so lovely,” Lucien said tenderly. “Inside and out.”

Sally drew an uneven breath, her breasts rising above the low neckline of her tunic. “What about meddlesome?” she demanded.

“That too,” said Lucien. He couldn’t stop the foolish smile that was spreading across his face. Her indomitable will was part of what made her Sally, and he wouldn’t have her any other way. “Especially that.”

“But—,” Sally began, which promptly turned to “mmrph” as Lucien leaned forward and kissed her again, more thoroughly this time, the crushed petals releasing their exotic fragrance in the air around them, and then to a very different sort of “mrrph” as her fingernails rasped against the velvet of his tunic and her rings caught in his hair and she kissed him back as though her very survival depended upon it.

Which it might, given that he seemed to be holding her at a rather gravity-defying angle.

Dragging his lips from hers, Lucien flicked aside one long golden curl and kissed the base of Sally’s ear, just below a dangling pearl that teased his nose; he kissed the side of her neck, the slope of her shoulder; he kissed the skin exposed by the embroidered straps that held up the bodice of her tunic, the gold of the embroidery dark and dull next to the bright color of her hair.

“Sally,” he said raggedly, but the response came not from Sally, but from behind him, as someone cleared a throat.

Sally let out a squeak and pulled back, yanking at the strap of her tunic. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair rumpled, her carefully arranged curls falling the wrong way forward over a diadem that was distinctly askew.

Her eyes darted from Lucien—to someone just over his shoulder—and back to Lucien again.

“Well,” she said faintly. “Well, then.”

Lady Florence lifted her head from her quiver and subjected Lucien to a frankly appraising stare.

“Go away,” Lucien snapped, his eyes intent on Sally. There was so much that needed to be said, if only he could think of the way to say it. And who the hell’s business was it but their own? They were betrothed, after all. Anyone with any decency would turn around and scurry away, not stand there harrumphing like a dowager with a chest infection. “This room is occupied.”

“I see that,” came the apologetic voice of Lucien’s former tutor. “I hate to intrude, but it really is rather urgent.”

Sally whisked around Lucien so quickly that Lady Florence gave an indignant squeak from the depths of her quiver. “Mr. Quentin! What are you doing here?”

“Intruding,” said Lucien flatly, fighting a wave of irritation mingled with more than a little fear that, once broken, the moment would never come again, that Sally would whisk away out of his life, leaving him darkling.

Love. He hadn’t mentioned love. Perhaps he ought to have done so before he swooped. But she was looking so kissable that swooping had felt absolutely imperative at that particular moment.

Sherry stepped into the room, a cloak still draped around his shoulders, spattered with mud or a very convincing facsimile thereof. “With good cause, I promise.”

“It had better be very good cause,” Lucien said grimly.

His eyes slid towards Sally, who had drawn herself up with her usual aplomb, as if she were at St. James and ready to be presented. Even ruffled and befuddled, she looked like a queen. No, a duchess.

His duchess.

Lucien could imagine a dozen Sallys throughout the years: Sally wrangling the tenantry and making them drink soup, whether they wanted it or not; Sally feeding raspberry jam to a child with his dark eyes and her bright gold curls; Sally cream and rose and gold against the crimson sheets of that ducal bed that was far too large for one.

Lucien felt a powerful surge of possessiveness. He hadn’t been lying when he said she’d given him his home back; what he hadn’t realized was that it was a home only if she was in it with him.

It was a distinctly terrifying thought.

Sally sidled in the direction of the door. “I’ll just leave you to it,” she said, with a bright social smile. “I’m sure you both have a great deal to speak about.”

“No,” said Lucien, just as Sherry said, “Yes.”

Sally’s eyes met Lucien’s and then flicked away again. “I’ll be in the ballroom,” she said quickly. “Dancing. And . . . dancing.”