Twenty-one
“Damn.”
He wanted her. Wanted her as much as he could remember wanting any woman—more. And he couldn’t have her. Not without a price, and that price was marriage.
Ethan stared into the black, storm-ravaged night. Shards of rain hit the window’s thick glass, and the wind pushed restlessly against it, making his elbow cold and damp where it rested against the French doors.
Swearing again, he turned from the window and threw himself into Brigham’s chair. Marriage. Would the idea have been so abhorrent to him if he hadn’t witnessed, daily, the pain of his mother’s second marriage? Marriage was nothing without loyalty and constancy, and Ethan didn’t believe in women’s constancy, didn’t have much faith in most men, either. Given time and opportunity, lovers would stray. Victoria had taught him that lesson well.
Victoria—a shining example of his immature and misguided belief in love’s capacity to conquer all.
He’d loved her. Loved her with heart and soul—body burning with unfulfilled desire for the mere touch of her. She’d been beautiful. All shimmering gold hair and blinding alabaster skin, so stunning it had pained his eyes to look at her. He’d wanted her with a passion that, at four and twenty, was unparalleled. But he’d done no more than offer her chaste kisses and promising glances. She was a lady, and he gave her every courtesy, every consideration.
He needn’t have bothered. The roiling rage he’d experienced when he’d found her in Leigh’s arms—not talking innocently, as his detractors claimed, but with Leigh’s hand fondling her bared breast and her skirt hiked practically to her neck—had almost consumed him. He could have, cheerfully and without regret, killed them both.
But he hadn’t. He’d shown remarkable restraint, escaping into his work for the Foreign Office and the terrors of the Revolution in France. It wasn’t until he’d returned to London that he’d heard the lies about him almost killing his—former—best friend.
No doubt Leigh had spread the rumors. He had been angry and humiliated when Victoria had refused his offer of marriage. Apparently, she’d realized just how modest Leigh’s income really was. Victoria’s final marriage to a lowly Irish peer did nothing for her status in the eyes of theton. Guilty or not, she would always be tainted by scandal.
When he’d returned from France, Ethan had seen no need to plot revenge. Victoria and Leigh were their own punishments.
But even now, sitting in Brigham’s desk chair and staring into the Hampshire night, Ethan felt a wrench from the old anger, the humiliation. Francesca was nothing like Victoria, he told himself, except that Francesca too was beautiful.
No, not beautiful, he corrected. If she’d been beautiful he would have noted her when they were first introduced. She wasn’t at all classically beautiful, as her sister was destined to be and as Victoria was.
Something else in her attracted him. Something more. Something wild and untamed in her face and eyes and hair. She wasn’t merely beautiful. She was ravishing. Violently ravishing—a hard beauty, like the harsh rocky hills and moors of his home in Yorkshire, tempered with the softness of Hampshire’s sloping green knolls and stately meadows.
She was like the fabled lodestone rock he’d heard sailors discuss when his work had demanded he sit for hours in seedy dockside taverns. Her magnetism drew him in, and he saw himself surrendering, one by one, the defenses he’d erected since Victoria.
Witchcraft, he decided. Chalk it up to witchcraft. He didn’t want to consider any other possibilities, though one in particular came unbidden to his mind more frequently of late.
He was falling in love with her.
Even as the idea entered his mind, he shoved it aside with a violence that should have crushed it. But somehow the notion continued to survive the assault and return when he least expected the attack.
Ethan scanned the stack of papers he’d laid on the viscount’s desk and extracted one. He perused the missive then flicked his gaze to the clock. Three and a quarter. Outside the wind began to wail again, but the knock on the French door was sharp and peremptory. Ethan rose to open the door.
FRANCESCA BRUSHED ATa wayward curl and pressed her ear to the door again. She bit her lip. Squinted. But all she could hear were muffled voices. Men’s voices.
The storm had woken her, and she’d gone down for a glass of milk. Then she’d heard sounds in her father’s library. She was silent as a mouse as she moved. At half past three in the morning, the last thing she wanted was to be seen eavesdropping.
“Both your and Grenville’s theories can go to the devil!”
The voices on the other side of the door rose in argument, and Francesca caught her breath, pressing her ear firmly to the smooth wood.
“You have your list of suspects. While you and the secretary run off at the mouth and waste time investigating half the peerage, I’m sailing for France. I’ll get my hands on the real bastards.”
