Читать книгу Just For Her - Katherine O' Neal - Страница 9

She awoke to the sound of someone moving in her room.

He’s returned!

But, no. She opened her eyes to sunlight streaming in through the open windows and to her butler, Hudson, setting down her breakfast tray.

For a moment, she couldn’t quite make the adjustment. She’d been so wrapped up in her dreams. All through the night, she’d been aware of the tingling of her body, of a quiver of excitement in the air, and strangely, of a surpassing peace. It was so unusual that a part of her sleep-drugged mind asked when she stirred: What is this feeling? And then snippets of memory would flash through her: The provocative rasp of his voice at her ear, urging her on…the feel of his strong fingers amusing themselves inside her as he watched…the dizzy, helpless bliss of coming together at last, taking his weight, his size, his very breath as her own…She’d never dreamed what ecstasy a woman could feel in submitting to such an enthralling…commanding…male. And again she would smile that smile of devilish satisfaction and burrow herself deeper into her silk bedding and drift back to sleep.

Even now, the disappointment that he hadn’t returned, along with the recollection of his abrupt departure, couldn’t dim the radiance that enveloped her. For the first time in more years than she could count, she felt girlish and young, like a sprite who might spring from her bed and dance about the room in the welcoming rays of the sun.

Hudson turned, saw the look on her face, and smiled. It was an odd smile, one she’d noticed from time to time, a secret smile as if thinking thoughts his mistress would never know. But this morning there was something about the smile that seemed faintly impertinent.

Suddenly she stilled. Had he heard the sounds of passion in the night?

But as was his custom, he proceeded to report on the happenings of the morning. “Not much in the post, I’m afraid,” he said in the proper English accent assumed by the multitude of butlers in London drawing rooms. “A few invitations to various soirees. The usual solicitations from charities. A thank you note from Mrs. Simpson for the flowers you sent. Oh, and there’s a letter from the mayor of Nice inviting you to take part in the dedication of the Great War Memorial on the tenth of September.”

There had been much talk about this affair, but Jules had deliberately tuned it out. “That war memorial again. Why is everyone making such a fuss about it?”

“Oh, many reasons, Highness. It’s the first to be built away from the battlefields. It’s the first to be paid for by subscriptions from all the participating nations of the war. It’s a symbol of reconciliation and peace, and a recognition that no one country can be blamed for it—that there were no villains, only victims. The dedication ceremony is going to be an international event.”

“Send Mayor Clément my regrets, Hudson. You know how I feel about taking part in anything that even subtly links my family to the war. Is there anything else?”

She sipped the Vienna coffee he handed her, smiling to herself.

“Nothing that can’t wait. You look happy this morning, Highness.”

She watched him for a moment. He was certainly the strangest butler who’d ever been in her service. While always maintaining the proper decorum—his butler’s sense of propriety insisted on calling her “Highness,” though she’d told him her family’s titles had been rescinded after the war—he, at the same time, managed to convey a subtle familiarity and a concern for her well-being that was almost personal. Having grown up in the Habsburg palaces in Austria in an atmosphere of staid formality and strictly enforced protocol, Jules found this quality of his to be refreshing. She’d also long since grown accustomed to the fact that he was much too physically striking to be a butler—tall, well-built, with wavy dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a strong matinee-idol jaw. She was so accustomed to him by now that she didn’t notice his appearance any more than she took note of the furniture in her house. But her friends found it to be a grand joke. Trust Jules, they laughed, to have a butler who looks like Francis X. Bushman!

They didn’t know the secret sorrow he bore, one he’d shared with her a year ago when he’d happened into her service in such an unexpected way. She’d just left the dreary fogs of London and taken up residence on the sun-bathed South of France. She’d been swimming alone, off the beach at nearby Villefranche, when she suddenly found herself being carried off by a riptide. She was a strong swimmer and was certain she could fight her way back to shore, but instead she found herself weakening and being hurtled out to sea. Her frantic efforts to keep afloat were exhausting her strength. She knew she should scream for help, but her Habsburg pride—the disinclination to make a spectacle of herself—kept her silent long enough to be sucked below the surface before she could utter a sound. She knew then that she’d hesitated too long.

But suddenly, just as her lungs were bursting and she realized through her panic that she was going to die, she’d felt firm hands pull her up and carry her out of the reach of the deadly current. “You needn’t worry,” he’d told her, as if reading her mind. “No one else saw you.” Quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss, he’d helped her to the shore, away from the crowded center of the beach where she could recover in privacy.

Falling to her knees in the sand, gasping for breath, she’d looked up at him—a muscular man gleaming like a sun God—asking, “Who are you?”

“I’m Hudson, Ma’am.”

“No…what are you? To be able to swim like that? A sailor? An Olympic swimmer?”

He’d chuckled. “Hardly, Ma’am. I’m just a humble visitor to this part of the world, accustomed to swimming the Thames each morning. Actually, I’m in service. Between engagements at the moment, I’m afraid. In fact, if you happen to know of any good families in the area looking for a butler, I have excellent references.”

She’d eyed him skeptically. “You are a butler?”

Stiffly, with a hint of injured pride, he’d told her, “My family has been in service for three generations.”

“You’ll have to forgive me—Hudson, was it? I didn’t mean to sound as if I were mocking you. But I’m very much afraid, Hudson, despite your references, that you’re much too, shall we say…arresting a man for your desired post. The husbands I know would feel most uncomfortable having a butler in their employ who might upset the equilibrium of the ladies of the household. But then, surely you’ve had this trouble before?”

He’d looked at her for a moment in a most un-butler-like way, an acute sort of look as if carefully deciding upon his next words. Then, lowering his lashes, he’d said gravely, “Should it be necessary, I could put their minds at ease on that score. I was wounded in the war in a manner that would make any question of a dalliance impossible.”

Jules’s heart broke for him. There was something almost noble in the dignity with which he’d spoken, in the careful tone meant to hide his pain.

“I, too, have a war wound,” she’d told him. “Except that mine isn’t physical. It’s in my soul. So we’re really rather alike, aren’t we?”

“I suppose we all of us carry wounds or scars of some sort. All of us who lived through the war.”

“I suppose we do. That’s why Gertrude Stein calls us the ‘Lost Generation.’ Because we’re so lost inside, and then try to cover it up by chasing bright and mindless gaiety to dispel the gloom.”

“Yes,” he’d agreed. “Because of course, one soon tires of being lost and wants to find his way to something—more.”

She’d felt a bond with him that she’d never felt with any servant, not even the governess who’d cared for her as a child. So she’d confessed to him something she would never have told anyone else. “As it happens, I have need of a butler. I’ve only just reopened my house. But to be perfectly honest, I’m in a rather fragile state at the moment. I feel the need for someone who might—” She stopped, uncertain how to put it.

“Take care of you?”

She’d nodded mutely because by saying the words, he’d brought the taste of tears to the back of her throat.

“I should consider it a privilege and a pleasure,” he’d told her solemnly. “They say when you save a life, that life belongs to you, in a fashion. From this day forth, I shall endeavor to care for and protect my lady to the best of my ability.”

He’d reminded her of a knight of Camelot pledging his fealty to the queen. Since then, he’d become indispensable to her, handling everything she threw at him with the same quiet unflappable assurance, no questions asked. But over time, he’d become more than her butler. While always keeping his place and maintaining the proper decorum, he’d become her advisor, her confessor, her friend. The one person to whom she could tell even her most embarrassing secrets, confident that he’d carry them to his grave.

But she hadn’t told him anything of her scheme to employ the Panther. He would have gone to any lengths to talk her out of such insanity. But now that it was a fait accompli, she was bursting to tell him. He could do nothing about it now, and he was the only one she could trust with such an explosive confidence.

And yet…would it be insensitive to do so? Poor Hudson, to never experience what she had last night. She’d never realized before how dreadful it must be for him, living like a eunuch. She wondered if he’d been able to turn off his desire for women simply because his body could no longer function. She’d never thought about it before. But that was because, before last night, she’d been a sort of eunuch herself.

Still, he knew the one thing about her that she couldn’t tell her new modern friends, so cynical and urbane. He knew that after nights in their company, she’d come back home and read romantic poetry late into the night, escaping into fictional worlds where men and women loved desperately and often tragically. Where they found lives not of rote and routine, but of high adventure. They’d even made a game of it. The next morning, she would tell Hudson what had happened to the heroine in her poetry as if it had happened to her.

He always seemed to enjoy the interlude of fantasy before they tackled the daily schedule. But then, it hadn’t been real.

While she was debating, he spotted something on the floor by her bed and bent to pick it up. When he rose, he had in his hand the nightgown the Panther had ripped and used to bind her wrists. She’d been in such a tizzy that she’d completely forgotten she was naked beneath the sheet.

“I see we’ve had a bit of an accident, Highness. Moths, perhaps? I shall see to it that it’s disposed of at once. And instruct Denise to be more careful when inspecting your attire.”

He was folding the shredded gown in such a serious way. He knew very well moths had nothing to do with its condition, but he would never ask.

Suddenly, she laughed. Pulling the silk sheet to her chin, she said, “I’ve been a naughty girl, Hudson.”

“Have you, Highness?”

“I’ve done something outrageous. Something so scandalous, you’ll never believe it.”

“Have you, indeed?”

“I’ve had a visitor in the night. A man I invited in a cunning sort of way. A most spectacular man.”

“Ah, Highness, I see we’ve been reading Lord Byron again,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Who was it this time? Childe Harold or Don Juan?”

“No, Hudson, this was real. It happened. A daring thief was actually here, in this room, last night.”

“My mistake, Highness. You’ve been reading stories about the Panther, then?”

She sat up in bed, careful not to let the sheet slip. “Yes, the Panther! He came here last night, looking for my jewels.”

He pretended to look around the room. “But of course the jewels aren’t here. Did he take anything else?”

“Only me.” She giggled, hugging her knees.

“Am I to infer, then, Highness, that the theft was not unwelcome?”

“More than welcome, it was glorious! It was beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. It was…” She stopped abruptly, lifting a brow. “You don’t believe me, do you? You think we’re playing our game.”

He lowered his gaze so she couldn’t see the look in his eyes. “I believe everything Her Highness tells me. And I believe Her Highness deserves whatever happiness comes her way, no matter how it may appear.”

Did he still think she was relating a fantasy? Or was this his sly way of acknowledging her truth?

“You’re the most exasperating butler there ever was, Hudson.”

With a bow he said, “I don’t doubt it, Highness,” and left the room.

She wasn’t remotely hungry, so she left untouched her breakfast of tropical fruits and fresh-baked croissants and, grabbing the first thing she could find in the line of closets between her bedroom and sitting room, she slipped into a butter-cream summer frock with a low back and a fringed skirt that came to just below her knees. It was a contemporary, flirty creation, very much a product of the Jazz Age in which she lived, strikingly at variance with her elegant eighteenth-century French furnishings.

Eager to be away from the morning household bustle, she left her private apartment on the second floor and went out into the arched columned gallery that ran at mid-length on four sides between the reception hall below and the trompe l’oeil ceiling above, painted to look like a blue summer sky.

Peering down, she could see the maids polishing the vast mosaic Pompeii-style floor, dusting the statues and priceless paintings on the walls.

She exited through the two-story staircase enclosed within a half-circular wall of glass that looked out over the green hills and the sea.

Cap Ferrat was a narrow peninsula on which the Riviera’s most exclusive homes were located. Once mostly owned by Belgium’s King Léopold II, it was the showplace of old money and the long-standing winter abode to Europe’s highest ranking aristocracy. Rêve de l’Amour was the largest of its villas and the most spectacularly situated. It was the creation of her grandmother, a Bavarian princess, who’d loved the Mediterranean and had constructed on twelve hectares of barren land atop the highest, narrowest point of the peninsula a sprawling terra-cotta and white evocation of an Italian Renaissance palazzo. The views from this luxurious perch were breathtaking, with the Bay of Beaulieu and its wedding-cake casino on one side and the Bay of Villefranche with its charming port and fleet of ships on the other. The gardens spread out from the back of the house over four hectares of land, a harmonious counterpoint to the modern hectic world. It had taken her grandmother’s workers seven years to dynamite and cart away the original rock and create an oasis of peaceful opulence and exquisite taste.

To visitors who called, her house struck them as a sumptuous, paradisiacal mansion on a grand scale. But to Jules, who’d spent her childhood in palaces with more than a thousand rooms, Rêve de l’Amour was simply a country villa, so named by her grandmother because she’d used it for clandestine meetings with the lover she’d cherished and lost.

Skirting the maids, Jules made her way back through the house to the terrace overlooking the lawns, where no fewer than twelve gardeners toiled to maintain the aura of tranquil retreat. The French garden, the largest of seven with different themes, stretched before her in the morning sun, the cypresses and Aleppo pines and palms swaying in the ever present breeze from the sea that kept the property cool, even in the most scorching summer heat.

Going down the steps, she passed between the smaller fountains on either side to the large central fountain, where a row of water sprays shot up and danced twenty feet in the air. From there, a rectangular pool extended some two hundred feet between the manicured lawns, like the pool at the Taj Mahal, where it met a stepped waterfall spilling into it from the high hill on the far side. She made her way alongside the pool, climbing the stone steps of the hill, the sounds of gently rushing water and birdsong sweet in the morning air. At the top, she came to the Temple of Venus, a circular columned open gazebo with a domed roof fashioned from marble, in the center of which stood a graceful statue of Venus, Roman goddess of love.

This focal point could be seen from the house, but the trees and luxuriant plants that surrounded it on three sides gave it an air of privacy, a sanctuary Jules had always loved. She’d come up here as a young girl to read her treasured books of heroes and their lady loves, to dream her own personal dreams, away from prying eyes.

But today, as she sat on the marble bench facing the temple from the side, she drank in the familiar surroundings with a new sense of wonder. However briefly, she’d lived her secret fantasies for one enchanted night. She was no longer merely the barren, bartered wife of an insufferable fiend. As she hugged herself, her body tingled anew with the memory of what his hands and tongue had done to her, and she blushed like a new bride. It seemed that she could still feel him inside, so large and hard that he’d fit her like the last missing piece of a puzzle. She smiled dreamily, feeling altogether different than she had the day before. She’d been swept away by a man who in her mind was not a wanted thief, but who’d taken on the proportions of a reckless hero, casting the world’s conventions aside. A man who was like no other she’d ever known in her sheltered life. He’d taken her girlish dreams and given them a raw sexual edge that was far more thrilling than her own arid notions had ever been. Because he’d forced her to face an aspect of herself that she hadn’t known was there, she felt strangely stronger, capable of handling whatever came her way.

It didn’t even matter that the Panther had turned down her proposition. It was a desperate idea, born of panic upon learning of her husband’s intention to reenter her life. She probably couldn’t have gone through with it anyway. Despise DeRohan as she did, she didn’t have it in her to be a party to his murder, however cloaked it might be by the pretense of a duel.

No, she would have to think of another solution. But in some mystical way, the Panther had made her feel she could. As if she’d absorbed some of his courage and audacity and made it her own.

She wondered suddenly who he was. He’d given her no clue. He spoke Italian in a whispery tone surely meant to disguise his true voice. His Italian was perfect, but it was a vernacular form, not the more cultured language she’d learned from her tutors. She couldn’t tell whether it was his native tongue or a second language he’d perfected. She didn’t even know what he looked like.

Not that it mattered. She’d never see him again. But she’d always treasure the memory of the gift he’d given her. For showing her that the life she’d been living, the persona she’d adopted, had been a lie. He’d made her feel there was more to her than what her battered ego had supposed.

Someday when I’m an old woman, I can look back on that one moment of insane rebellion against everything I am, and it will give me some strange comfort.

But while she felt changed inside, her circumstances hadn’t altered. Unwanted, the words of DeRohan’s telegram ran through her mind. Arriving Cap Ferrat last week of June to discuss our future…

The last week of June. Just a few more days of freedom.

She shuddered, cursing him for intruding on her happy mood. Well, he’d find a more formidable opponent this time around. She’d see what he wanted, inform him that she had no intention of falling in line, and send him packing, leaving her in peace once again.

It struck her then how odd it was that the Panther’s domination of her had thrilled her so, while her husband’s left her feeling abused. But then, the Panther had sought to give her pleasure, when all DeRohan wanted was to crush her spirit.

Before she realized it, the sun was high in the sky. The faint growl of her stomach made her realize she’d had no breakfast and it was nearing noon. She left reluctantly, taking the path down the steps, but when she reached the bottom, she saw the garden staff rushing about the grounds, gathering armfuls of cut flowers with uncharacteristic haste.

What was going on?

As she crossed the lawn alongside the long pool, she saw Mimi, one of the housemaids, rushing toward her, flapping her hands in agitation. “Madame, Madame…” She stopped before her, wheezing.

“What is it, Mimi?”

The maid struggled to catch her breath, then gasped out in French, “Monsieur has arrived.”

“Which monsieur?”

“Why, the master, Madame. Your husband. Monsieur DeRohan.”

Jules looked up at the villa, her happy mood vanished.

Mimi rushed on, “He arrived half an hour ago. We did not expect him so soon. And even then, we were told his visit would be brief. But Madame, he has come with many, many trunks. He has been moving in since he arrived, ordering us about, taking over the house. The staff is in a tumult, Madame. We did not know what you would want, so naturally we’ve done as he instructed—”

Moving in…

Taking over the house…

Her house.

She’d just see about that.