Читать книгу Sins and Scandals Collection - Nicola Cornick - Страница 15

GARRICK DID NOT have an invitation to Joanna Grant’s ball that evening. He would hardly have expected it. It would take more than one hundred thousand pounds and the handing back of the ancestral Fenner lands to make him welcome in Tavistock Street. But since he wanted to see Merryn again he had no choice other than to arrive uninvited. He left it very late, when all the guests had arrived and the footman on the door was wilting at his post, and then he simply walked in. No one stopped him. No one appeared to notice him at all in the crush.

Garrick went straight to the ballroom, where he saw Merryn almost immediately. She was dancing with a young sprig of fashion, dancing very badly moreover, and with the expression of one who was having a tooth pulled or perhaps whose slippers were pinching. Her partner looked grim and bored. Garrick could not help but smile. Most young ladies at least made a pretense of enjoyment when they were with the opposite sex. Merryn clearly saw no need to do so.

He took a calculated bet that she would soon tire of the ball, helped himself to a bottle of champagne and two glasses from an obliging footman and slipped out of the ballroom and up the stairs. He was aware that he was abusing Lord and Lady Grant’s hospitality quite shamefully since not only had he not been invited, he certainly had not been given the freedom of the house. But he needed to discover how much Merryn knew. He needed to stop her quest for justice. And this was the quickest way.

The first bedchamber he came to quite clearly belonged to Joanna Grant and was lush with exotic drapery and scented with perfume. It had a connecting door standing open to her husband’s dressing room. The second chamber was less easy to apportion to a member of the family and for a moment Garrick wondered if it was Merryn’s. There was a set of very beautiful and very explicit pencil drawings spilling from a folder on the dressing table—nudes in various stages of debauchery with gods, satyrs and nymphs. The drawings were good—and extremely erotic. One of the nymphs, small, lush, curved, looked a little like Merryn. She was lying on a bench, her hair spread, her drapes sliding from her rounded limbs, a small cherub bending to kiss her breast. Garrick felt his evening dress tightening in various strategic places as he contemplated the picture. His breath strangled in his throat.

Concentrate.

This was not the time to be imagining Lady Merryn Fenner stripped of her clothes and lying small yet voluptuous, naked, perfect, among the tangled sheets of his bed. Despite that it was, Garrick admitted to himself, the image that had haunted him since the moment he had met her. Then he had not known her identity; he had known nothing but the blazing attraction that had drawn him to her. Now, even though he knew she hated him, even though he knew all the barriers that stood between them, the attraction was no less.

This was not Merryn’s room, though. There were no books. Garrick closed the door softly behind him and wondered briefly if the rumors of Tess Darent driving all her ancient husbands to death with her incessant sexual demands were in fact true. He, accustomed to being the target of slander, had thought it nothing but idle gossip. Now he was not so sure.

The third room he entered was most definitely Merryn’s. It was plain and tidy, almost austere. There were no exotic furnishings here: a bed with a simple white cover, a wardrobe, a table with a pile of books. French love poetry, in the French language, of course, jostled with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. There was an illustrated set of fairy stories and St. Augustine’s Confessions. And on the top, a bound book that looked suspiciously like a diary. Garrick picked it up, settled himself in an armchair, opened the book and started to read.

Ten minutes later he heard the patter of footsteps on the carpet outside and the turn of the doorknob, and then Merryn ran into the room. Because she was not expecting him to be there Garrick saw her in a totally unguarded moment. She wrenched the rose-colored bandeau from her head and cast it aside, kicking off her slippers at the same time. Her movements were jerky and exasperated, almost angry. She put both hands up to cover her face, digging her fingers into her intricately arranged golden curls, scattering the pins that restrained them. She made a sound of relief and release that was so heartfelt Garrick felt a stir of sympathy. She dropped her hands and put her head back so that her hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back like a silver river. Her eyes were closed and her eyelashes—very fair and not artificially darkened—were spiky against the curve of her cheek. The line of her neck was pure and tempting. Garrick found that he wanted to grab her and bury his face against that silken skin, dropping his mouth to the vulnerable hollow of her throat, inhaling her scent, burying himself in her. She looked lush, sweet and very seductive.

He must have made some involuntary movement because her eyes snapped open and she saw him. Her gaze widened with shock and she took a breath.

“Don’t scream,” Garrick said. “It would not do your reputation any good.” He laid the book aside and got to his feet.

Merryn expelled the breath softly. He could hear a tremor in it though her voice was steady. “I never scream,” she said. “Not for mice, not for pickpockets and certainly not for intruders.”

She half turned aside from him, shielding her face, reaching for the shawl that was folded neatly over the back of her dressing table chair and wrapping it about her shoulders to cover the rose-pink ball gown. The room was hot, lit by a fire in the grate. Garrick thought she was wrapping herself up as much to add another layer of protection as for warmth. He could feel the withdrawal in her as she retreated from those moments when she had revealed so much of her feelings.

“I take it,” he said, “that balls are not to your taste.”

She shrugged a shoulder. “I only went to try to please Joanna. Your generous offer this morning—” scorn colored her voice “—has caused much trouble in this household, your grace.”

Garrick could imagine. If Tess Darent wanted to accept the money and Joanna and Merryn did not, or worse if Joanna and Tess wanted to accept and Merryn did not, then he could see that the Fenner family would be split down the middle, wrangling over an issue that could not but wake painful memories.

“I am sorry if that is the case,” he said. “Such was not my intention.”

Merryn fixed him with a very direct stare.

“What was your intention then, your grace?”

“To give back something that should never have been mine,” Garrick said.

He expected her to contradict him or at the least to make some derisive comment but she did neither. Her blue eyes searched his face as though she was weighing the truth of his words and after a moment she gave a tiny nod of acceptance. Garrick released the breath he had not been aware that he was holding. He felt relief and something more, something that almost felt like gratitude, as though she had given him a present beyond price. Then she straightened and the moment was gone.

“Were you looking for something?” she asked.

“Yes,” Garrick said. He smiled. “As were you, when you ransacked my bedroom.”

Her gaze flickered. She stiffened a little. It was interesting, Garrick thought, how transparent she was. Interesting, but extremely inconvenient for her. The lies she had spun him that night in his bedroom had been imaginative because she was clever, but deceit was not her natural state. She would always prefer to meet an enemy head-on.

She ignored his comment. “We must stop meeting in bedchambers,” she said. “It is not respectable. I suggest that you leave.”

Garrick smiled. “I am merely returning your visit, as a courtesy,” he said. “I don’t believe we finished our conversation at the library. I’d like to talk some more.” He phrased it politely but with iron beneath his words. She heard the note in his voice and her head jerked up; he felt her antagonism. It shivered like a mirage between them. Her anger was palpable and with it bitterness, and something more, something not so easily defined. Garrick knew she was acutely uncomfortable that he had invaded her bedchamber, a space she had thought was private to herself. And she was even more uneasy about the fierce physical awareness that trapped them both. Garrick knew that she felt it as much as he did and he sensed that she, so much less experienced than he, did not understand their mutual attraction. Nor did she like it. But she could not deny it.

“I do not suppose that you were invited tonight,” she said, her pansy-blue eyes considering him thoughtfully.

“No,” Garrick said.

“Then you could at least have shown a modicum of courtesy and sensitivity by staying away.”

“I could have done,” Garrick agreed, “but I did not. This is too important.”

Their gazes locked. The antagonism flowered again, strong and dark between them, once again with that undercurrent of something else, something hot and turbulent.

Garrick gestured to the champagne bottle resting on the table beside Merryn’s pile of books. “Would you care to join me?” he asked.

She paused and then nodded. “Thank you.” She motioned toward the glasses. “What a civilized intruder you are, your grace,” she said. “You think of everything.”

“It would be an insult to the vintage to drink straight from the bottle,” Garrick said. He returned with two glasses and handed one to her. Their fingers touched. He heard the little catch of her breath she could not conceal as his hand brushed hers.

He poured for her and clinked his glass softly against hers in a mocking salute, two adversaries meeting and acknowledging that the game was going to be a fierce one. She waited for him to make the opening move. Garrick obliged.

“Does Lady Grant know that when you pretend to be attending lectures and concerts you are actually stalking innocent noblemen in their own homes?” he asked. “Does she know you have been sleeping in my bed?”

A hint of color, rose-pink like her gown, stole into Merryn’s cheeks. “I don’t stalk noblemen in the plural,” she said.

“Then it’s just me,” Garrick said. “How flattering.” He waited until she had taken the window seat then sat down opposite her and stretched out his long legs. The leather wing chair was comfortable, enveloping.

“So,” he said again. “Does Lady Grant know?”

Merryn took a sip of her champagne. He knew she was buying time. A pulse beat in the hollow of her throat, betraying her nervousness.

“No,” she said, after a moment. “She knows nothing of what I do.” She looked up. Her eyes held a mocking spark. “What are you going to do about it?” she said.

“I could tell her,” Garrick said thoughtfully. “I could tell everybody.”

Merryn looked thoughtful. She caught her lower lip between small white teeth. “No one would believe you,” she said politely. “I am Lady Merryn Fenner. I am a bluestocking. I am above suspicion.” She held his gaze, her own steady and bright.

“Except that a woman’s reputation is so vulnerable,” Garrick said gently. “Was vulnerable not the word you used when you warned me at the library? A whisper of scandal and a reputation dies. Your reputation, Lady Merryn.”

Merryn’s gaze narrowed on him. “That is true, of course,” she said. She dangled her half-full champagne glass between her fingers. “If you want to frighten me, though,” she added, “you will have to use something more powerful than society’s censure. I don’t care for it very much.”

A point to her.

“You don’t seek to wed?” Garrick asked. “A tattered reputation might well put paid to your chances.”

She flicked him a look of contempt. “I’d rather become a nun.”

“I assure you,” Garrick said, “that you do not have the least aptitude for it.”

She blushed at his reference to her unrestrained response to his kiss but the look in her eyes was still one of deep disdain. “Oh, well,” she said, “if I change my mind I am sure that your thirty thousand pounds will repair any tatters in my reputation, your grace.” She shrugged. “That is if I find a man I prefer to my books. I confess I have not done so yet.”

“You are meeting the wrong men, then,” Garrick said.

She laughed. “Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, if I frequent the bedchambers of men like you.” She gave him a very direct look. “And you, your grace? Do you seek to remarry?” She paused. “I suppose not. It is not exactly your forte, is it?”

Ouch. Two points.

“I wondered whether you wished me to return your possessions to you,” Garrick said, upping the stakes. “Return the evidence of your midnight wanderings, if you like? Your book, your spectacles … Can you see without them?”

“Perfectly, I thank you,” Merryn said.

“Then they are for disguise only?”

She gave him another pitying stare. “You have too vivid an imagination, your grace. My glasses are for reading, not for disguise. Fortunately I have two pairs.”

“There is also your underwear,” Garrick said.

She stiffened. “You have been rifling through my underwear?”

“You left it in my drawers.”

“Then I think perhaps you had better keep it,” Merryn said icily “I don’t really want it returned secondhand.”

“I haven’t been wearing it,” Garrick pointed out mildly. “Merely looking at it.”

“How singular of you.”

“Not really,” Garrick said. “If you know anything of men, Lady Merryn—”

“I don’t.” She cut him off. There was something defensive in the way that she withdrew from him as though he trespassed on forbidden ground. Her voice was soft but her fingers, rubbing ceaselessly over the embroidery of the window cushions, betrayed her agitation. Merryn Fenner, he suspected, was not accustomed to people getting close to her and stripping away her defenses.

“I know nothing of men,” she said, “nor do I wish to know.” Her tone eased a little. “My sisters … They are the ones to whom you should address your gallantries, your grace. They are wasted on me.”

Garrick wondered if she resented being in the shadow of Joanna Grant and Tess Darent, both such beautiful, charming women. Had she deliberately taken this step back, refused all competition, made her world in books and libraries, lectures and scholarly research where they could not and did not want to follow? And could she not see that she, too, was beautiful and oh so desirable, like a tiny pocket goddess with her tumble of silver gilt hair and those wide blue eyes? It seemed not. Or perhaps she simply did not value good looks. Perhaps she did not even want to be beautiful.

He shifted in the armchair, studying her thoughtfully.

“What do you really do when you are pretending to attend your bluestocking soirees?” he asked. “And when you are not stalking me?”

She considered him for a moment. Her eyes were a smoky-violet in the shadowed room. “I lead a blameless life, your grace,” she said. “I really do attend bluestocking soirees. I read and I study. I go to Professor Brande’s lectures at the Royal Institution and to poetry readings and concerts.” She took another sip of champagne. She sounded cool and amused.

Garrick smiled slowly. “You also work for Tom Bradshaw,” he said.

Merryn jumped. A drop of champagne fell on the rose gown, staining the material to a deeper pink. They had been fencing before, testing each other’s defenses. Now the nature of their exchange had altered. Garrick sensed this was really important to her.

“How did you know that?” She spoke abruptly. Garrick was interested that she did not try to deny it, even for a second.

He shrugged. “I have been asking questions about you, of course.” He tilted his head and studied her, watching her closely. “You know how the system operates, Lady Merryn. I pay someone to find out about you.”

He saw her fingers tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. “You paid someone to do your dirty work for you,” she said. Scorn tipped her words. “Yes, that fits.”

“It’s quicker,” Garrick said. “Bradshaw is corrupt,” he added. “But surely you know that?”

Her gaze flashed to his face. “He is not!” She sounded outraged at the slur. “Tom works for justice! He helps people—” She broke off, as though she realized too late that she had revealed too much.

“No,” Garrick said gently. “That is why you work for Bradshaw.” He paused. He could see it all, her blind quest for justice and the determination that drove her. She felt a burning need to set right perceived wrongs and he would wager his entire fortune that it had been initiated by her brother’s death at his hands.

“It is, isn’t it?” he persisted. “You do it because you believe in justice and fighting for what is right, and to help the underdog?”

“I do it for the money,” Merryn said defiantly. She tilted her chin up, her look defying him to contradict her. He had trespassed, Garrick thought. Merryn Fenner’s world had hitherto been a secret from all those she knew, even those closest to her. He had not only blown that wide apart, he had seen straight through her motives to the painful truth below. For a moment she looked small and defenseless and Garrick felt the most enormous compassion for her. He was a cad to do this to her, to force her to confront those truths, to strip away her defenses, and his only justification was that there were those even more defenseless who needed his protection. Twelve years before he had sworn to defend them. He had never imagined that the price would be so high.

“My reasons are not what matter here,” Merryn said, after a moment, rallying. Garrick could see that her eyes were suspiciously bright but she faced him down. She was not, he thought, a woman who would resort to tears or to the vapors to get her own way. “What matters,” she said, “is that you have chosen to challenge what I am doing. And you are doing this because …”

“Because you threatened me,” Garrick said. “When someone indicates that they would like to see me ruined it concentrates my mind.”

“Has that happened to you often?” Merryn inquired politely.

Garrick laughed. “More than once.”

She flicked him a look. “I might have imagined so. A pity no one has as yet followed up on their threat.”

“There’s always a first time,” Garrick said. The last time a man had threatened to take his life it had been in the Peninsular and it had ended very badly for his assailant. No need to tell Merryn that, though. She would probably pick up that cause as well and declare open season on him.

“You have been gathering evidence,” he said. “That newspaper entry you found at the Octagon Library—”

He saw her eyes flash. “The one you stole from me? That was underhanded.”

Garrick laughed. “I did not hear you protesting at the time.”

The color fluctuated deliciously in her face. She looked infuriated, pink, cross, unwillingly aroused. “I should have guessed you would stoop as low as kissing me to achieve your aim,” she said.

“It was no hardship,” Garrick agreed.

She glared. “You are a rake.”

“I was a rake,” Garrick corrected.

“You are confusing your tenses.” Merryn looked down her nose at him. “I do not believe that a man ever stops being a libertine.”

Looking at her, with her shining fair hair as rich as silk and her cheeks stung pink with righteous anger and her bow of a mouth pursed with disapproval Garrick was tempted to prove that she was exactly right by grabbing her and kissing her to within an inch of her life.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but you base your remarks on … what, precisely?”

She turned away. “Literature,” she said. “Observation.”

“Let me know if you would prefer to replace that with experience,” Garrick said, and received another glare for his pains.

“We drift from the subject,” Merryn said tightly.

“We do indeed.” Garrick shifted. “From the piece of paper that I extracted from your pocket I surmise that you have found other items, little details that you think contradict the official record of your brother’s death—”

She reacted to that, as he had known she would. “I don’t think they contradict it,” she said hotly. “They do contradict it.”

“Guest lists can be notoriously unreliable,” Garrick said. “Names confused, numbers miscounted—”

“Like the number of shots heard?” Merryn said sweetly. “The number of bullets in a body?”

Hell. She had discovered a great deal. Garrick felt the sweat break out over his body. A few more steps, a little more digging, and Lady Merryn Fenner would be perilously close to the truth. She would learn what an out-and-out rogue her brother had truly been, she would learn the appalling things Stephen Fenner had done, she would be heartbroken.

Not that he was blameless. Garrick rubbed his forehead. He should have dealt with matters differently, he should have kept his head, instead of sacrificing everything—life, honor, the future—in that one desperate moment that he had killed his friend. Yes, Stephen Fenner had been a scoundrel but a day did not go past when Garrick did not regret his death.

Merryn was watching him. She had, not surprisingly, misread his expression. Garrick knew that he had looked guilty as all hell because in many ways, in the matter of Stephen’s death, he was.

“Can I appeal to you to let matters rest?” he asked. “I can look after myself but if you pursue this matter there are others who might be hurt—” He broke off, seeing again in her eyes that vivid flash of pain he had witnessed when they had spoken at the Octagon Library.

“Others often are,” she said in a hard voice, and Garrick knew she was speaking of herself, of the thirteen-year-old girl who had had home and family and fortune ripped away from her.

“If you refuse to stop I will expose your work for Tom Bradshaw,” Garrick said. “Taken together with the information that you habitually visit the bedrooms of noblemen, I think you will find that scandal more difficult to quell than a simple slur on your reputation.”

There was a frozen silence. Merryn sat quite still, almost as though she had not heard him.

“You’re trying to blackmail me,” she said. “How immoral of you.”

“I would do nothing so vulgar as stoop to blackmail,” Garrick said, and saw her smile as she recognized her words to him at the library two days before. “I am merely pointing out to you the dangers of your situation.”

“I am obliged to you,” Merryn said ironically. She sighed. “The same argument applies as before, however. The worst you can do is ruin my reputation—” there was the shimmer of triumph in her eyes “—and that only matters if I care about it.” She rubbed her fingers thoughtfully over the rim of her empty glass. “It would be a nuisance,” she conceded, “to be the subject of scandal and gossip, but I am sure I would survive it.”

“You would not survive with any of the things that you value left to you,” Garrick said, and saw her gaze jerk up to his.

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

Garrick shrugged. “The other reason I think you work for Bradshaw is that you are bored,” he said. “You are clever, and society has no use for clever women.”

She was betrayed into a rueful smile. “Other than to laugh at them,” she said dryly. “Or to make them conform.”

“Exactly,” Garrick said. “So with no work and a reputation destroyed, no freedom to attend all the academic events that you currently take for granted, nothing to do with your time …” He let the sentence hang. Her life, he knew, would be an utter desert. She was too unconventional to conform and it made her vulnerable.

He waited while she thought about it and saw in the widening of her eyes that she had reached the same conclusions.

“You would take away all the things I value.” She looked stricken. “My work, my interests—” She broke off. “Damn you,” she said with feeling. “As if it was not sufficient to rob me of everything once.”

Garrick hardened his heart against the pain and disbelief he could see in her eyes. “It is your choice, Lady Merryn.”

She stood up so abruptly that the table rocked and the champagne glass almost toppled to the floor. “I think it is time that you left, your grace.” She waited, drawn up as tall as her diminutive stature allowed. “I should have guessed that you would sink lower than I had could ever have imagined,” she added.

“I’ve only just started,” Garrick said. “You will have to broaden your imagination to keep up.”

“Oh?” She raised her brows. “If I refuse to concede, what then? Kidnap? Abduction? Marriage?” She smiled faintly. “I doubt you could get away with murdering two members of this family.”

“The marriage option interests me more than the murder one,” Garrick said.

She laughed. “So that you could bar me from testifying against you?”

“No,” Garrick said. “So that I could make love to you.”

The air in the room seemed to heat and catch fire. Merryn’s eyes dilated in shock. She gave a gasp. A pink flush mantled her cheeks and she turned her back on him, hunting feverishly now for her slippers, the need to escape him evident in the tension enveloping her slim figure.

“You have outstayed your rather tenuous welcome, your grace,” she said. “If you will not leave, I will. I should return to the ball anyway. My sister will be wondering where I am.”

“A conventional excuse to escape,” Garrick said. “I would have expected something more imaginative from you. Besides—” he took a breath, looked her over from shining fair hair to bare toes “—you cannot go back to the ballroom looking like that.” His voice dropped. “You look far too disheveled. People would talk. You look as though we have already been making love.”

Something flared in her eyes. Her lips parted. She looked innocent, frightened but also bewitched.

Garrick knew that he should not touch her. It was one thing to use whatever advantage he could to persuade her to give up on her quest. It was quite another to take the step of seducing her. Her innocence and her openness fascinated him, she called to every one of his long-buried rakehell propensities, but even he was not such an unscrupulous bastard that he would deliberately ruin her. Merryn Fenner was the last woman he could ever have. Twelve years ago, after he had taken her brother’s life and destroyed so many other lives as a consequence he had sworn that the only way to redeem himself was through duty. He had given up his hard living. He had turned his back on those who had predicted that with his wife dead and so spectacular a scandal attached to his name he would go back to his debauched ways with a vengeance. He had proved them wrong because after Stephen’s murder and Kitty’s death, strength of character was the only thing he had left, the only thing that could save him. He had served his country and he had tried to atone for his past failings. And now what tarnished honor he had left did not permit him to pursue Merryn Fenner, innocent, untouched, a woman who had already been cruelly hurt. He could not be such an unmitigated scoundrel. Even so the temptation grabbed him by the throat.

Just this once …

He knew he was lying to himself even as he kissed her. If he tasted her response just one more time he would not be able to let her go.

He bent his head and his lips met hers.

That night in his bedroom it had been no more than a brief caress. At the library he had kissed her with ruthless intent. This time he did not hurry to force a reaction. This time he courted a response from her, teasing her lips until they parted to allow his tongue to slip into her mouth, tasting her, drawing out the pleasure. He felt her tremble and slid his arms about her to hold her still.

It was a thousand times more potent than Garrick had ever imagined. Her lips were soft and yielding beneath his, offering the sweetest of surrenders. Her tentative response, the hesitant way she touched her tongue to his, tempted him to deeper intimacies. Suddenly Garrick wanted to make love to her here and now, throw her down on the bed or take her on the rug before the fire, he who had not behaved like that with a woman in twelve years and had thought he never would again, the Duke whose emotions were ice-cold and whose only passion was for books and dry documents.

He deepened the kiss, plundering her mouth now, desire leaping to wild desire, passion laced with tenderness. He slid a hand into the bodice of the rose-pink gown and felt the curve of her breast against his palm, small and soft, the nipple tightening against his fingers. It was shattering, hardening his arousal to painful proportions. She made a sound deep in her throat, and her body seemed to quiver beneath his caress. Feral possession ripped at Garrick and set him gasping. He was within an inch of losing control and ravishing her body as fiercely as he took her mouth.

He fought a brief, violent struggle for self-control and let her go, stepping back.

And then he saw her face and almost dragged her back into his arms. There was a dreaming unawakened expression in her eyes and a little smile on her lips as though she had just discovered something new and so fascinating that she was enchanted by it.

It was there for a second and then reality smashed through her pleasure banishing the look of a princess in a fairy tale. Horror was etched on her face and she pressed her fingers to her lips as though to scrub the kiss away.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no, not you!” And she turned and hurried away from him, her stockinged feet making a soft slapping on the floor that seemed to emphasize her agitation.

Garrick understood what she meant. If he had had a choice she would have been the last woman in the world he would have wished to be so attracted to. It was impossible. It was madness. And yet it seemed he had no choice.

MERRYN DID NOT STOP running until she had reached the sanctuary of the library. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she was running toward people, not away from them, but with Garrick in her room there was only one other place to go that could give her solace.

There were plenty of guests in the hall. She fled past them, seeing their faces, curious and speculative, hearing the titters of laughter.

“Lady Merryn is such an original … Running into the library with her hair down and no slippers …”

Damnation, this time it was her shoes she had left with Garrick Farne. First her book, her spectacles, her underwear … Soon he would have sufficient of her possessions to equip a whole room.

She braced her forearms on the table in the library—such a pretty room, designed to a yellow floral pattern by her sister Joanna—and stared at her face in the mirror facing her on the wall. She was horrified by what she saw there. Long blond strands of hair snaked about her face. Her cheeks were flushed a warm pink. Normally she had very little color. From childhood she had been accustomed to people commenting on her disparagingly as “an odd, pale little thing …” She had not minded particularly. She had always thought looks were overrated. What use was it to be beautiful, unless to make a good marriage? People had spoken approvingly of Joanna and Tess because they were such pretty girls, as though that was the most important thing in the world. Merryn, with her reading and the stories in her head and her imaginary friends, thought it was better to be clever than beautiful, though that did not mean that sometimes she would not feel a tiny bit jealous … Jealous of Tess’s charm and dimples, jealous of Joanna’s thick golden-brown hair and vivid eyes … Jealous of the admiration and approval that was withheld from her because she was different.

But now, looking in the glass, she saw that her face had all the color and vivid animation it had previously lacked. Her hair was all disordered profusion. Her eyes glittered with a fierce light so deep and blue, her mouth looked soft, pink and stung with kisses. She pressed her fingers to her lips again. She remembered her words to him at the Octagon Library:

“I have never been kissed before …”

Well, she had now. Wildly, passionately, pleasurably kissed by an experienced rake. She had been kissed until her entire body had risen to Garrick’s touch.

It felt as though she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers. An echo of primitive heat and tension clenched her stomach. The kiss at the library had shocked her, so brief and ruthless. This one had seduced her. It had been strange, something so far outside her experience, new and different. But it had also been so much more than that, a world she wanted to explore, a hunger awakened, a fierce desire stirred. She knew she would never be the same.

She backed away from the mirror and sat down heavily in one of the armchairs. How was it possible to feel like this? She had spent twelve years hating Garrick Farne with a clear, cold passion. Then she had met him and that cold hatred had become confused by a different sort of passion. Disgust and despair shredded her. She did not understand how she could so betray herself and all that she believed in. Yet she was still trembling from Garrick’s kiss even as she despised herself.

She tried to tell herself that she would have responded in the same way to any man. She knew she lied. The thoughts cluttered her head, falling over each other. She ruthlessly demolished every justification with plain fact, too honest to deceive herself.

It would not have been the same with any other man. Two years ago, James Devlin, cousin to her brother-in-law Alex, had made his admiration for her very clear. He had even tried to steal a kiss and she had rejected him. Dev was a wickedly handsome man, charming and dangerous. Many young ladies would have adored being the object of his attentions. Yet his handsome face and elegant address had left her completely unmoved. She had not for one second burned for him as she burned for Garrick Farne. Garrick intrigued her as no man had ever done.

Garrick Farne had killed her brother.

It was hopeless, shameful. She would not, could not, allow herself to be drawn to Garrick. She did not understand how it could possibly happen. And yet she knew that there had been an affinity between them from the first moment that they had met. She could try to pretend that it was no more than a physical attraction, perhaps, although she knew little about such things and understood even less. But no matter how little experience she had, she would still know she lied. What she felt for Garrick was no mere infatuation. It was deeper than that. She lost herself when she was talking to him; he challenged her, he intrigued her. For a little while at least he made her forget who he was and what he had done.

She felt unutterably confused. Garrick had shown himself ruthless that night, as dangerous as she had feared, threatening to blackmail her, exposing her weaknesses. But her greatest vulnerability was her susceptibility to him. At the library he had exploited her attraction to him. Tonight—she trembled at the thought—he could have ravished her, taken her there and then, tumbled her on the pristine narrow bed in her spinster room, and she would not have stopped him. He had been a rake. He knew exactly how to provoke a response from her body. She shook harder as she thought of his mouth on hers, his hand against her breast. He could have seduced her, ruined her. She wondered why he had let her go.

If it were not so foolish, she would have said it was because he had some shreds of honor left. Her instinct told her it was so but surely her instinct must be mistaken.

Merryn shook her head to dispel such disturbing thoughts and went over to the bookshelves, taking a book down, a copy of The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. It was a beautiful volume, bound in leather, the pages smooth beneath her fingers. She started to read, concentrating on the words, willing herself to forget Garrick. Books were her friends. They never failed her. They soothed, cheered, distracted and encouraged her. She had used them to help her through the worst moments of her life and to celebrate the best. But tonight they could not save her. The words danced before her eyes. She could not concentrate. Her mind was full of Garrick, of his voice, his touch. Her senses felt inflamed. She was bewitched.

After ten minutes she put the book aside, baffled and upset. The ball was still in full swing but she was tired. She wanted to go to bed. She hoped Garrick had gone or she really would be obliged to call a footman and have him forcibly ejected, no matter the scandal.

She hesitated outside her bedroom door, aware of the shivers of anxiety and anticipation running up and down her spine, but when she opened the door the room was empty. Her slippers lay just as she had kicked them off.

Something caught her eye—her journal, sitting not on top of the pile of books at her bedside but on the cushion of the chair Garrick had taken. She grabbed the book. A sheet of paper fell from it.

His writing was bold and strong, as she might have imagined.

“Love and war are the same thing and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as the other.”

Cervantes. She smiled a little, despite herself, as she recognized the quotation. She had been harboring notions of war and revenge for years. She knew nothing of love.

Then her eye fell on the second line of writing.

“Pray do not waste your time in writing poetry, Lady Merryn. It is very bad indeed.”

Garrick had read her poems. How dared he. She blushed with mortification. She had known they were bad. She did not need confirmation.

She thrust his note into the fire and watched it curl and burn.

It was as she was about to ring the bell to call her maid to help her undress that she saw the other book. It was not one of hers but was a new copy of Mansfield Park. There was a note in that one, too.

“Your other copy was damaged beyond repair, I fear, so please accept this replacement.”

She wanted no gifts from Garrick Farne. She wanted nothing from him. She rather thought that she had made that plain in the lawyer’s office that morning. Yet he had her now because she found that she could not throw a book away. It was impossible. Anything else she would have consigned it to the fire along with the note. The book she reluctantly placed on her shelf and she tried not to think too much of the man who had given it to her.

For the second night in a row she lay awake.