Читать книгу Just For Her - Katherine O' Neal - Страница 7

The intruder hadn’t counted on this.

He hadn’t counted on her waking up and catching him in the act.

He hadn’t counted on how ravishing she would look in the filtered moonlight: a vision to take one’s breath away. The blond hair, falling about her shoulders in slumberous disarray, gleaming like spun gold; the white lace bodice of her nightgown clinging to the voluptuous curves of her breasts; the chiffon skirt swirling gently in the breeze around the slender legs; the pampered skin dewy from Parisian lotions and tanned by the southern sun. Her voice, cultured, silky, carrying the faintest trace of an appealing Austrian accent—the sound of it alone was enough to make any man hard. She had the face of an angel and the body of a Botticelli nymph. With her aura of innocence and vulnerability, he couldn’t have envisioned a more ideal embodiment of a fairy-tale princess.

And yet, this delicate beauty was telling him she’d lured him here to…

“You want me to…kill your husband?”

When he spoke, the words sounded as crazed to Jules as they did to him.

“It wasn’t my intention to blurt it out that way,” she said. “But that is, indeed, what I am proposing.”

Slowly, incredulously, he asked, “Why on earth would I want to kill your husband?”

“Because he’s a monster.” She said this with a sense of poise and delicacy, as if she’d just told him her husband was cutting roses in the garden. “And because I shall compensate you for the service.”

He was still staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.

Have I? she wondered.

Deliberately he said, “Let me see if I understand you. You want me to kill the man in cold blood?”

“Of course not. I’m not a murderess.”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “What, then?”

“I want you to kill him in a duel.”

“What I’m going to do,” he told her evenly, “is leave this house and never look back.”

He headed for the open doors.

“Do you know who I am?”

He stopped again, in the shadows of the terrace overlooking the gardens below. “I know exactly who you are. The Archduchess Maria Theresa Louisa Juliana von Habsburg. Formerly a royal princess of the Habsburg family, recently dethroned by the Great War and sent into exile. Currently wife of British business tycoon Dominic DeRohan. I make it a habit of researching my prospective—donors.”

“Then you know I can afford to compensate you for your trouble.”

“On the contrary. I know you have next to nothing of your own except this house and your share of the Habsburg jewels. Not being portable, I care nothing for real estate, but obviously my presence here tonight tells you I care about the jewels. So tell me…will you offer a few choice stones as payment for the…service? Say, for instance, the Marie Antoinette pearls?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. They’re my—birthright, if you will—all I have left of my family. But I do have some household funds at my disposal.”

He considered her for a moment. “Why do you want him dead? To get control of his money?”

“I care nothing for his filthy money. I want him dead because he’s the devil himself. Because he killed the two men in the world I cared about. And because I now know it’s the only way I can ever be free of him.”

He glanced about, taking in the suggestions of furnishings in the darkened room. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take myself out of the light. An old habit, I’m afraid. Since you insist on this conversation, I take it you won’t mind if I avail myself of one of your chairs?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I seem to have forgotten my manners. But then, the circumstances are rather unusual. I was rigorously schooled in every aspect of entertaining, but I was never prepared to—”

“Entertain thieves in the night?”

“You’re the first thief I’ve ever—met, much less entertained.”

Suddenly she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation with this man. Once again, her heart began to beat erratically.

“And you’re the first quarry who ever asked me to do away with her lord and master.” He made his way to the far right corner of the room and a padded brocade chair. Once he sat down, he was completely hidden by the shadows. He might not have been there at all, except that his voice floated to her like a murmur from the bottom of a well. “If you hate him so much, why did you marry him?”

“I was forced into it.”

“What of it? Arranged marriages are an ancient royal custom, I understand. Particularly in the Habsburg line.”

“Except that mine wasn’t arranged. It was coerced. By DeRohan.”

There was a slight pause. When he spoke, it seemed to her that his tone expressed a more attentive, if still cautious, interest as he asked, “And just how did he manage that?”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll think I’m merely feeling sorry for myself.”

“Ah, but you’ve intrigued me. You wouldn’t expect a cautious rogue like myself to join you in such an intimate conspiracy without an explanation, would you?”

Jules hesitated. She felt ridiculous, speaking to this disembodied voice, like a schoolgirl called onto the carpet by her tutor. “I suppose I owe you that much. It would help, though, if I could turn on the light.”

He snarled at her from the dark. “Lady, you so much as reach for that light switch and I’ll be gone before you turn around.”

She froze in place. “Please don’t go. I’ll tell you what you want to know.” She looked about her in the darkness. She hadn’t planned for this negotiation to take place in her bedroom. She couldn’t very well sit on her bed and talk to him, although she realized the absurdity of thinking anything unseemly at this point. Instead, she began to pace in the moonlight at the foot of the bed, the only glimmer of light in the room.

“You know about my family, so you must know how devastating the war was to us. The empire was broken up, we were ousted from power, stripped of our Austrian possessions, and sent into exile. My brothers and mother all died in one way or another as a result of the war. My father and I were the only ones to survive. All we had left was this house, which my grandmother had built in the last century, and the jewels my mother had sewn into the lining of our corsets and smuggled out of Vienna just before she died.”

“Forgive me, but that’s more than most people had after the war.”

“Believe me, I know how fortunate we were. We had so many friends who’d lost everything. At least we had a roof over our heads. But our accounts had been seized by the new Austrian state. We left Vienna in the middle of the night with what little money we could scrape together. We couldn’t afford to run this house, so we boarded up most of it and lived in two rooms like refugees.”

“Why didn’t you just sell your jewels?”

“To do so would have been unthinkable. They were our link with the past, the symbol of what we’d once been. To lose them would be to lose, finally, everything…what was left of our identity. Father always told me, ‘Your mother died to save those jewels. You must never part with them under any circumstance, even threat of death.’ But ultimately, ironically one might say, even they were threatened by—”

She stumbled on the words. It seemed that she was somehow betraying the father she loved by speaking of such things. Hadn’t he suffered enough, without her airing his weaknesses to a perfect stranger?

“By what?” he prompted.

She realized her pride was making her irrational. There was no way to tell it otherwise, so she admitted softly, “Father’s gambling. Something I wasn’t aware of until we were thrown into such close proximity.”

“Another royal custom difficult to give up.”

“I’m not excusing him. But you must understand his health and reason had been ravaged by all he’d been through. He desperately needed some diversion, as well as some hope of bettering our circumstances. So I permitted him to indulge his vice under strict limitations. But one week, when I was visiting a cousin in Belgium, he went to the casino at Juan-les-Pains and—despite his promise to avoid the tables in my absence—he was coaxed into a game of baccarat by DeRohan. In half an hour, Father had lost this house. A few minutes after that, in a frantic effort to win it back, he threw a marker for the jewels into the pot and lost them as well.”

“Lady Luck is a cruel mistress.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it. DeRohan cheated, just as he’s cheated in every other venture of his life. He’s always hated my family. Like so many people, he unfairly blamed us for the war—”

He cut her off. “After all, it was the assassination of a Habsburg archduke that started the war.”

“Was that our fault? That some maniac in Sarajevo gunned down my uncle?”

“Seems to me I recall hearing that certain of your family members pushed for a war for self-serving reasons.”

“I’m not here to argue history with you. My point is, DeRohan hated the Habsburgs—and he hated us long before the war. There was something more personal in his prejudice toward us, as if he harbored some private grudge. In any case, he deliberately lured Father into a fixed game so he would lose the few possessions he still had to his name. He wanted to destroy him.”

She heard him shift restlessly in his chair. “Where does the marriage come in?”

“It wasn’t enough that he had my father completely on his knees. It occurred to him that he could make his defeat even more humiliating. DeRohan—a commoner, scoundrel, and profligate rake—could marry the daughter who’d been groomed to marry a prince. He came to me and coldly told me he would allow us to retain the house and jewels under the condition that I give myself to him in marriage.”

“Obviously, you agreed.”

“What else could I do? I couldn’t allow Father to be thrown into the street like yesterday’s rubbish.”

“And then, too, there were the jewels.”

“Yes, I admit that was a consideration. I’ve told you what they meant to us. I married DeRohan in a private ceremony. Even Father didn’t attend. But in the end, it was all a terrible mistake. Just days later—here, in this very house—DeRohan went into Father’s study. He said something to him—I don’t know what it was. But that evening, Father shot himself. I heard the shot and ran down to his study. And there he was…lying in a pool of his own blood…and I felt someone beside me…I looked up and there was DeRohan…I’ll never forget his face. His lips were curled in the coldest, cruelest, most cynical smile…it was almost as if he were laughing to himself. My father was dead and this Lucifer I’d married was smirking!”

She put her face in her hands, reliving the awful memory. But once again pride rose to the fore. Fighting to control her emotions, she composed her face, then lifted her head. “Later, the authorities told me it was DeRohan’s pistol Father had used. DeRohan must have left it there for him when he went in to see him. He must have said something to Father to make him do it.”

“With your father dead, why didn’t you just leave him?”

“We’d signed a legal contract. DeRohan had agreed to put this house and the jewels in my name and to pay for the upkeep and running of the house until my death. In return, he insisted that I make my residence in London. So after Father’s funeral, I kept my word and sailed for England with DeRohan. But our agreement failed to specify where in London I had to live. So when we arrived at Victoria Station, I informed him that I intended to take my own house in Mayfair.”

“He agreed to that?”

“He didn’t have much choice. I’d found a loophole he hadn’t foreseen. Too, he was so busy in this particular period expanding his business empire that he didn’t have time to contend with my rebellion. But to keep him pacified, I allowed him to present me as his wife—his Habsburg trophy—at three or four social functions a season. This went on for three years. I expected it would continue forever. I was married to a stranger I detested, but at least I didn’t have to put up with him except occasionally in public. I’d long since given up any girlish hopes for happiness. But then, unexpectedly, I met someone I cared for.”

“The other man your husband—killed, you said. Your lover?”

She blushed slightly. “His name was Edwin. He was a tender, kind man—a poet—who understood the loneliness of my life and befriended me. Gradually, our friendship blossomed into a deeper sentiment. It wasn’t lewd or unseemly, I assure you. It was lovely and pure—a meeting of two minds who cherished poetry and beauty above all else. When we met, we were always careful and discreet. But somehow DeRohan found us out. He goaded Edwin into a duel—poor Edwin, who didn’t know one end of a dueling pistol from another. Before he’d even aimed, DeRohan had shot him squarely between the eyes. They say he had a sneer on his face when he did it.”

“That’s when you left London?”

She brushed away a tear. “Yes. I just didn’t care what happened to me anymore. I had to get away—away from that dreary town, away from him. And suddenly all I could think of was Rêve de l’Amour.”

“Rêve de l’Amour. Dream of Love?”

So he did speak French. “That’s the name my grandmother gave this house. The place I’d come to every winter as a child, the place I loved. Even the fact that Father had died here so tragically didn’t spoil my memory of it. He’d been part of this house, as had my mother and my grandmother through the years. It was infused with the spirit of our family. Here I could be a Habsburg once more, instead of a bought-and-paid-for DeRohan. I wanted to be myself again, if only for a week, or a day, or even an hour. I knew it wouldn’t last. I fully expected him to turn up at any moment—to take me back, or take the house away from me—something.”

“Did he?”

“No. That was the most frightening thing of all. He didn’t do a thing. That was a year ago. At first, I lived day by day, always looking over my shoulder, feeling as if I had a sword hanging over my head. But gradually, as the months passed, I began to relax and even hope he’d decided I was more trouble to him than I was worth. I made new friends, built a life for myself here, and found—if not happiness, at least some measure of peace.”

“But something must have changed for you to ask me what you did.”

“A few days ago, I received a telegram—the first communication I’ve had from him since I left. He said he was coming here. To discuss our future.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It could mean anything. He’s had a year to coldly plot his revenge. He’s a diabolically clever man. I don’t know what evil sorcery allows him to know the things he does, but he has a way of knowing the exact punishment that will debase his victim most. He could force me to go back to London with him, force me to live under his roof. But I’m very much afraid that what he really means is that he’s coming to force me to do the one thing that would disgust and horrify me the most.”

“Which would be…?”

She shuddered, feeling mortified. “To…give him his…” she swallowed, choking on the words, “…conjugal rights.”

“My, my,” he scoffed, “you are a damsel in distress.”

She whirled toward him, facing the dark corner where she knew he sat, watching her like a phantom. “Please don’t make light of me. I’ve only told you this because you insisted. I don’t want your sympathy. I want your help.”

For several moments, he pondered her words. Eventually he said, his tone softening, “Look, lady, I’d like to help you. I know who Dominic DeRohan is. I know he’s a ruthless, miserable bastard. A man capable of anything—even with his wife. A man who, Lord knows, deserves to be dispatched to his just reward. But I also know he’s a spectacular shot. And I have no intention of putting myself in the position of being his target.”

“But you’re a marvelous shot,” she cried with new enthusiasm. “That’s why I asked you. I heard the story of how you escaped from the Villa Cypress with a detachment of police on your heels. How you shot the hats off the heads of three pursuing gendarmes. They said, when they inspected the hats later, that each bullet hit squarely in the middle of each of the brass badges on the hats. You could just as easily have killed them, but instead you sent them retreating in terror, while at the same time letting them know you could kill them. Nice-Matin said the Panther was the best shot on the Côte d’Azur, if not in all of France.”

“Keystone Cops, all of them. Not a deadly shot in the bunch. Which, I shouldn’t have to remind you, Dominic DeRohan is.”

“But I have faith in you,” she insisted. “Oh, I know it sounds deranged, and I don’t blame you for thinking me mad.”

In a bitter tone, he said, “I don’t think you’re mad. I think you saw an opportunity and took it. After all, I’m just a common thief. What does it matter if I get myself killed dispatching your husband?”

Was it her imagination, or did he actually sound hurt?

“You couldn’t be more wrong.”

“How am I wrong?”

“To imagine that I think of you as dispensable. On the contrary, it’s as if you’d just stepped out of my dreams.”

“You must have dark dreams then. I pity you. I know, because my dreams are full of demons as well.”

She gazed into the darkness, wondering what he looked like, wondering why, if he was masked, he felt the need for such total blackness in which to hide. “Have you ever read Byron?” she asked.

“Byron who?”

“Lord Byron. He’s one of the romantic poets. He created a character they call the ‘Byronic Hero.’ An idealized but darkly flawed character, brooding, an outcast or outlaw with a lack of respect for rank or social institutions. A loner with a troubled past. But he’s also larger than life. A dynamic figure who takes what he wants and sweeps away the obstacles in his path. He defies convention and doesn’t care what others think. I’ve been reading about a man like that for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never seen such a man in real life. Until tonight. Do you remember what I said when I was trying to keep you from leaving?”

“That you want me to kill your husband.”

“No. I said, ‘I want a hero.’ It’s the first line of Byron’s Don Juan. Somehow, when I first heard stories of your exploits, I thought you might be that hero. That’s why I spread the false rumor I hoped would bring you here. I knew you were the one man who could defeat DeRohan. Perhaps the only man.”

“A noble epitaph to write upon my tombstone.”

Her face, which had been glowing with hope a moment before, fell. “You refuse to help me?”

“You’ve given me no compelling reason. Not even the prospect of a few meager pieces from your collection of baubles.”

“But I’ve told you I can pay you.”

“Thief I may be, but I’d like to think I’m not vile enough to kill a man for money. No, lady. I’m afraid there’s only one payment I would consider for my services in this matter.”

Her heart quickened. “And what is that?”

“You.”

The word he’d spoken hung between them. Suddenly the night air was charged with something raw, something so potent she felt her breasts tighten. “Don’t be absurd.”

“You think it absurd that I might want your body?”

No man—not even Edwin—had ever spoken to her so frankly before. Taken aback, she averted her embarrassed gaze, attempting to disengage herself from this sticky turn in the conversation with some semblance of grace. “You wouldn’t want me.”

“Why not?”

“Must I tell you?” she asked helplessly, hoping he’d be gentleman enough to drop the subject.

But he merely responded in an amused tone, “I think perhaps you’d better.”

She clasped her hands before her, squeezing the fingers tight. “I’m not…” Struggling to find a decorous way to say the words, she finally murmured, “I’m not experienced in such things.”

“Come now. DeRohan is one of the—what was it you called him?—profligate rakes of his age. Surely the wife of such a man would learn a few—”

“Our marriage is in name only. I swore to my husband the instant the ceremony was over that I would never allow him to touch me. I’ve never broken that vow.”

“But…you had lovers.”

“One lover. And we only had one…encounter before DeRohan found out and killed him for it.”

He rose to his feet and started toward her, coming into the dim light. He looked huge suddenly, stalking her way. “You expect me to believe that in your three years of married life, you only got fucked one time?”

The word shocked her, bringing her up short as if he’d just slapped her in the face. “Please do me the courtesy of not being crude.”

“I’m a crude man, lady. Answer the question.”

“Let’s just say—if we must—that I know nothing of the art of…love.”

“Or sex either, apparently.”

“Please, must you—?”

He didn’t even bother to listen to her protests. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“I swear it. Every word.”

He peered at her for so long, it seemed he would never reply, and she began to squirm beneath his scrutiny. Finally, in a husky voice, he told her, “If you were my wife, you wouldn’t be able to give such a testimony. I can assure you that.”

She suddenly caught the aroma of night jasmine that perfumed the air. She took a step back, coming up against the bed. “Please…don’t…”

He came closer, treading slowly. “So your husband neglects your education while he whiles away his nights with English whores.” He stood before her now. “And meanwhile the fallen princess languishes in her ivory tower, dreaming of an outlaw who takes what he wants and snarls at the uncaring world. Who’s man enough to wreak her vengeance for her.” He was so close she could feel his breath on her cheek as he spoke. She jerked her head away. But he touched her averted chin with a gloved finger, tilting it so she was forced to look at him. “There’s one thing you forgot to take into account in your fantasia romantica.”

“What’s that?” she gasped.

He took her hand and placed it on his crotch, where a raging erection burned her palm.

“This.”