The Secret to Seduction (42 page)

And Anna, whether she’d done it deliberately or not, had gone to the one place where she could be found.

I’ll find her, Lockwood,
he promised silently.

For years Rhys had helped protect Richard’s murderer. It was time that everyone received justice, even if it included him.

“
Grazi mille,
Santoro. I have no need of a window at present, but allow me to make a gift to you of—” Rhys presented Santoro with a handful of lira.

Santoro was not one to protest the gift of money. He gripped the money in his hand, and bowed shallowly. “
Grazi,
Signore Rawden. Good luck to you.”

Italian weather could be unpredictable in this region in spring; snow might still cling to the mountains, the sky might break open and rain plummet ceaselessly down, accompanied by thunder that shook the ground. Rhys counted himself fortunate the skies were clear, and decided not to trust his good fortune. He kneed his hired horse up the steep winding road, coaxing it into a speed it was reluctant to take. It wasn’t an easy road, but it looked traveled enough: he saw the droppings of horses and the fresh tracks of carts over older tracks. The small mountain community of Tre Sorelle was isolated but not unsocial; the steep road would pose no deterrent to an Italian hoping to visit another Italian.

He almost missed the villa, so thick were the trees about it, clustered protectively it seemed. Or perhaps this was just how his poet’s mind viewed it. He slowed his horse only when a flash of color met his eye: terra-cotta, the wall of a house, peeking through.

He dismounted and looped the reins around a post meant expressly for that, then stood for a moment in the shade, swiping his hand across his brow, smoothing his hair back. He had no way of knowing how disreputable he might look. He only knew his clothing and his accent would speak for him when he opened his mouth to introduce himself.

He stood for a moment, listening. A bird hopped from one branch to another, rattling leaves.

And then he heard a more rhythmic sound:
Snick. Snick. Snick.

It was coming from behind the house, where no doubt a garden grew. He knew the sound from childhood, in the days before La Montagne had been lost, and his mother had enjoyed the gardens.

It sounded like someone was trimming roses.

“You’ve another visitor, Sabrina. A Mr. Wyndham.” Susannah stood in the doorway, eyes bright. “Handsome. But not a gentleman, I’d warrant.”

Sabrina smiled at her sister. Before Susannah had met Kit Whitelaw, the Viscount Grantham, she’d been a London belle; she could assess a lineage or a pedigree within seconds. Sabrina had learned so much about her sisters in her short stay.

And she loved every new thing she learned about her sisters. And every time she considered again the very idea she might have been deprived of them, she knew panic and anger afresh.

“He’s not a gentleman,” Sabrina confirmed shortly.

It was truly interesting that her husband’s friends felt obliged to make the pilgrimage to Grosvenor Square. She considered making Wyndham wait a good long while until he grew bored and went away on his own. She considered imperiously sending him on his way.

She wondered if he had word of Rhys; she wondered if she cared. She held the thought in her mind, but a shell had formed around the place Rhys lived in her. She felt nothing at all.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She was thinner, too, she realized in surprise. The skin beneath her eyes was a pale lavender; her eyes looked enormous. Vanity stirred.

But truthfully, it was boredom that brought her down the stairs and into the parlor.

“You look almost as wonderful as he does,” were Wyndham’s first words after bowing over her hand.

“I’m not certain that was a compliment, Mr. Wyndham.”

“It wasn’t, Lady Rawden.”

This gave her a bit of pause. “Did you come here to vaguely insult me, Mr. Wyndham, or did you have a mission?”

“I think you should see him.” Which was his way of coming bluntly to the point.

“This is becoming a rather dull refrain, I fear.”

“I’ve known him for years, Lady Rawden. We’ve done—” He looked at Sabrina’s face and apparently decided to edit whatever it was he’d been about to say. “We’ve done rather a lot of things together in that time. I know him very well. But I’d never seen him
happy.
I frankly didn’t think he had the capacity for it. And you made him happy.”

Sabrina felt a little surge of anger. Just like that, she should see him, as if she were a carpet, or a painting, or a fanciful stained-glass window. Because it made him
happy.

“Ah, but you see, he makes me
unhappy,
” she explained carefully.

“I don’t believe you,” Wyndham said flatly.

This brought her up short.

“Mr. Wyndham.” She said it coldly, a warning.

“I think he has
made
you unhappy. I do believe there’s a difference. One is permanent, Lady Rawden. And the other is a product of incident.”

She stared at him. “You are—”

She was about to say “impertinent,” but she knew this wouldn’t matter in the least to Wyndham.

“Lady Rawden. I swear to you he sees no one at all. Not Sophia. Not anyone at The Velvet Glove—”

The
Velvet Glove
? Good God, but she didn’t want to picture what went on there.

But Wyndham had never cared whether or not he was scandalous. “He won’t leave the house, except on errands he says nothing about. I haven’t seen him in weeks. And when he speaks, he’s—”

“Churlish?” Sabrina completed. “What a shame. That cannot be very pleasant for you.” She was all mock sympathy. What a different woman she was today from mere months ago.

“I know you’re angry. And Rhys is by no means a saint, and he’s the last person to claim to be. But you’re his wife. You’ve a duty to him.”

“A duty, Mr. Wyndham?” The word made her quietly, ferociously angry. “The earl and I agreed from the outset to live our lives separately. One might say we’ve been successful in that regard.”

“He’s an earl, Lady Rawden. He’ll want heirs.” Wyndham said it flatly.

Sabrina sucked in a breath. “You always did enjoy setting out to shock me, didn’t you, Mr. Wyndham?”

“I know so few people capable of being shocked anymore, Lady Rawden. You can hardly deny me the pleasure of shocking you.”

She almost smiled. She was quiet instead, turned her head away from him.

“I miss him,” Wyndham said simply.

Sabrina looked at Wyndham, his handsome, rakish face, those narrow dark eyes, and she almost knew sympathy. What an odd assortment of visitors Rhys had brought into her sister’s drawing room. The disreputable painter who could scarcely paint, and the opera singer who took gifts from other admirers and who had made love to her husband. She ought to have been touched by the outpouring of loyalty.

It changed nothing. They were hardly references for his character. And her husband had killed her trust.

“Did the earl send you here, Mr. Wyndham?”

“No. I swear it on all I hold dear.” His face was solemn.

Sabrina was suddenly curious about what Mr. Wyndham held dear.

“You won’t see him?” Wyndham asked when she seemed disinclined to interrupt the silence.

“No,” she said simply.

Wyndham ducked his head, briefly. Then nodded, as if in acceptance of his defeat.

“Rhys did say you were a good friend.” She would tell Wyndham that much.

“Did he?” Wyndham smiled a little. “Tell me, what did Rhys tell you about my artwork?”

“He’s an admirer of your painting, too.” Sabrina said this gravely.

Wyndham studied her.

And then a faint smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “You’re a beautiful liar, Lady Rawden.” Surprising her, he swiftly lifted her hand to his lips, lingered over it, relinquished it.

It made her wonder precisely how many hearts Wyndham had broken.

And then he bowed, and was gone.

It wasn’t precisely Rhys’s intent to creep up on her, but his footfalls were careful and quiet. He followed the
snicking
sound, and peered around the corner.

Gooseflesh washed over his arms.

He knew in an instant, with bone-deep certainty, whom it was he watched.

And an instant later he began to be able to identify the subtle little things that added up to why he knew: the way she moved, graceful, quick and deliberate, so familiar now to him, for it lived in her daughter. The set of her shoulders, and the line of her spine—elegant, straight, as though fashioned out of pride itself. The slender neck—they all had that long, slender neck, the Holt sisters—and her chin: when she turned it a little, he saw it was somehow both stubborn and delicate, even as the skin beneath it had gone a little soft. But there was something indefinable about her essence that spoke so strongly of Sabrina that his heart leaped in fierce recognition, and it hurt.

Her hair, still dark, was coiled at the base of her neck; he could see it beneath the bonnet she wore; it was several years out of fashion and the ribbons were undone, as if she’d been too impatient to get at the roses this morning to tie it. A basket dangling from her arm held four long stems topped with fully blown blooms, brilliant and crimson. No doubt she was cutting them to enjoy in the house before the heat crisped their edges and they nodded on their stems.

She reached for another rose, extended her scissors.

But a shadow, a sense of something, must have alerted her to his presence.

She whirled. Froze and stared.

She didn’t drop her scissors, he noticed; she kept them firmly in her grasp. Ah, the resourceful Holt women. Even in a moment of terror, she’d had the presence of mind to hold on to a weapon.

It wasn’t until then that Rhys realized he hadn’t the faintest idea what he’d intended to say to Anna. He’d been so utterly focused on simply finding her.

So he decided just to speak quickly, in a voice that would reassure nearly any English-born woman.

“My apologies, madam. I am Rhys Gillray, Earl of Rawden.”

Belatedly he realized it was a voice that would reassure anyone with the exception, perhaps, of a fugitive from England.

So he bowed low then, which would have given her an opportunity to lunge forward with the scissors should the urge take her. A gesture, he hoped, of trust and, he hoped, not of foolishness.

Once he was upright again, she’d managed to compose herself. Her face was colorless, but she had donned an expression of polite confusion, a mask over her fear. She looked at him more fully then, seeing him. Ah, and despite her trepidation, she had that, too, the Holt women’s appreciation for a handsome man: he saw her eyes flare almost imperceptibly.

He smiled a little, reassuringly.

Bella, indeed
, he thought. Her eyes were pale, more gold than green, whereas his wife’s eyes were decidedly more green. Those delicate bones and soft mouth. Fine lines beneath her eyes evident in the sunlight, as suited a woman her age, a woman who had known grief and fear and loss and love.

She spoke, her voice soft, her hands making a helpless, conciliatory feminine gesture. “
Sono spiacente, signore, ma non capisco l’inglese
—”

“Anna Holt.” His voice, soft, gentle as the breeze in the garden, sliced off her sentence as surely as her scissors cut her roses.

She went very still. The hand clutching her scissors began to tremble a little.

Anna had been an opera dancer, perhaps, but she would never have made a convincing actress.

“Anna.” Gently, gently said, though he knew nothing could cushion the words he was about to utter. “I am Rhys Gillray, Lord Rawden. And I am married to your daughter Sabrina.”

The scissors slipped from her hand, landed with a metallic
thunk
at her feet. She stared a moment, then frowned slightly; her fingers went up to touch her face, a helpless gesture of disbelief.

And Rhys saw her knees begin to buckle.

He was next to her instantly; he caught her folding body in his arms, supporting her while her legs could not. He touched her wrists; her hands were ice cold. He saw a little bench nearby, tucked beneath a tree, and swept her up in his arms and carried her there.

Rhys gently settled her, turning his folded coat into a pillow, lifting her feet onto his lap. He’d been a soldier, after all. He knew a little bit about shock and how to treat it.

For a quiet minute or two, in the garden of a secluded Italian villa, Rhys Gillray, Earl of Rawden, sat quietly with Anna Holt’s slippers in his lap.

“I’ve never fainted,” were her first words. Very English, a little surprised, very steady, considering. “Not even when James Makepeace told me about Richard.”

She glanced up at him to gauge his reaction to this statement. His silence told her he knew precisely what she meant.

“Are you feeling…,” he ventured, gently.

“Better? Yes, thank you, Lord Rawden.” She sounded almost wry now. “May I…?” She glanced down at her slippers, tellingly back up at his face.