One Illicit Night Read online

  ‘I want you…’

  His voice was strained, no longer distant, no longer indifferent, only pain within them.

  ‘I am married.’

  Martin. She tried to bring his face to her thoughts, but couldn’t. Cristo smelt of soap and musk and strength and the memory of Paris flooded back, of arching into delight and finding the hidden notes of pleasure in the slightest of caresses. Potent memory, honed with a celibacy that had taken all her passion ate years since, month by month by month.

  Sweat dripped beneath the raindrops as ecstasy boiled, and then the seconds ran out under the urgent shadow of lust and she surrendered to the sheer promise of what was offered. Her toes arched in her boots and her head tipped back, his hands steadying her.

  Even then she could not feel shame or contrition. Nay, all she could feel was the throbbing release through the very core of her body, untying all the knots and the pressure and leaving a freedom that she remembered from only once before.

  ‘I love you.’

  Had she whispered it? Please God, let it not be so!

  He broke away and laid her face against his chest, his heart wild-beating fast.

  ‘Damn. Others are coming.’

  She could not hear a sound.

  ‘They will be here inside two minutes.’

  She was glad he did not look back at her as he walked away.

  Chapter Eleven

  Asher Wellingham and his men came into the glade by foot and along the same route that Cristo had taken.

  ‘Her steed was lame,’ Cristo said from his place on the other side of the horse. He sounded normal, indifferent, the kiss of a moment back a long-forgotten thing. ‘You found the marker, I guess.’

  The Duke of Carisbrook nodded. Up close, Eleanor could see a familial resemblance that had nothing to do with the shape of nose or mouth or face. It was menace and danger that entwined the Wellingham brothers as well as height and darkness of eye. Both looked at each other with a glance that held a myriad questions beneath the polite exterior.

  ‘Are you quite well, Lady Dromorne?’ Asher Wellingham addressed her now, as he picked up a stick and threw it into the undergrowth.

  ‘Very well, thank you, your Grace. I walked along the path and was lost…’

  ‘But now you are found.’ The sentiment was not quite said in the way Eleanor would have expected it and when she turned to Cristo she saw him send a flinty glance in warning to his oldest brother.

  The Duke laughed.

  ‘Is your mount able to be ridden at all, Lady Dromorne?’

  All she could do was nod.

  ‘Then if you will ride behind me, Cristo will bring up the rear. Would that meet with your approval?’

  Such formality in the middle of nowhere was confusing, but she was pleased for the proposed distance.

  Cristo dried himself off in the bedroom he had been given and one that reminded him of his own childhood chamber at Falder. Even the fabric on the bed was similar. Golden. Sheer curtains and French doors along one whole side of the room. But it was the books that caught his attention. His books, title by title, of collections he had begun as a youth. He ran his finger across the spines in wonder. Who had brought these here? Who had cared for them? Hearing footfalls, he turned and Beatrice-Maude swept into his room after a quick and perfunctory knock.

  ‘I hope you do not mind about the books.’

  ‘You took them?’

  ‘Cared for them,’ she amended, ‘until you should want them back. At Falder they had begun to wilt and I thought if they had been mine I would hope someone should watch over them.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.

  ‘Have you read many?’

  She ignored this line of conversation completely.

  ‘Eleanor Westbury is not a woman who would survive being duped. She is young, after all, and her husband of some years is sick…’

  ‘Did Taris send you here?’

  ‘No. I am here because a few weeks ago Lady Dromorne told me that you might defame her character. Given the time you spent alone with her today I wondered if there was indeed some truth in her fear?’

  Taris’s wife was not a woman to bandy her thoughts around and yet all his training told him that she held the best interests of Eleanor Westbury at heart. He could use a woman like her on his side.

  ‘I knew Eleanor once many years ago in Paris and under another name.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘Five.’

  The number lay between them coated in question.

  ‘Her daughter…’

  ‘Is five.’ He finished the sentence for her and leant against the wall, the rushing in his head alerting him to another onslaught of his ailment.

  ‘God.’ Two attacks in two weeks. They never came this close.

  ‘Are you quite well?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Your eyes are turning red even as we speak.’

  He let go of the wall and just made it to the bed. Once horizontal, he felt immeasurably better.

  ‘Could you do something for me, Beatrice-Maude?’ It was the first time he had called her by her name.

  She nodded.

  ‘Could you let the party below know that I have been called away to town and that I send my very sincerest apologies? I need peace and quiet, and that will stop people coming up to see me. Could you also tell Lady Dromorne that I will call on her in town this week.’

  ‘Indeed, brother-in-law, I think it would be most wise if I did just that.’

  He frowned as she let herself out and shut the door behind her.

  I love you. Eleanor had whispered the words beneath her breath, but he had heard them plainly. Lord, he thought as he laid his arm against his face to block out the last bands of light, his hand fisting against pain. She was a wife and a mother and a woman who would not court the danger of ruin. But there were secrets in her eyes and in her words that could be there because of him and her sadness here in England simply broke his heart.

  He had left and gone back to London. In haste.

  Eleanor knew exactly why he had.

  I love you. So, so unwise. Why had she said it?

  She knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question.

  Because the last waves of lust had still been within her, reforming the way she looked at herself, a woman who might enjoy the acts between a man and a woman with a singular abandon. Young. Free. Sensual. No longer scared and careful, the restraints of manners and culture pulling her into greyness.

  Today with Cristo Wellingham she had felt powerful and true. To herself. A woman who could not wait another five years to feel…something.

  Beatrice-Maude was looking at her now as she sipped at a cup of tea from the breakfast table.

  ‘Cristo has been unfortunately recalled to town and he has asked me to give his most sincere apologies. I should imagine that there is much to do when one is newly back in a country one has not lived in for years. He did, however, promise to visit your family when he was able. Mayhap we could all come.’

  Her words brought a smile to Taris Wellingham’s face as he watched her.

  A love match.

  It was said their union was such, but in a town that spawned a thousand marriages a year, few were of that ilk.

  Regret surfaced in an unexpected deluge as she thought of her own marriage. Martin had protected her, but never touched her. Perhaps it was his illness or his age, or the fact that when he had first met her she had been so very near to death, and a pattern had formed. Eleanor remembered the hospital in Aix and the blood and the tiny twin who had been left in the cemetery of the Chapel de la Francis, his body marked with a simple white stone.

  Paris.

  She had called him that. A strong name. A warrior’s name. The name of the beautiful Trojan prince who had stolen Helen from Menelaus, and the name of the city in which he had been conceived. The hair on the crown of his tiny head had been
pure silver. His father’s son. She had never known the colour of his eyes because it had been a full week until the fever had left her and another two before she could even speak. The anger in her solidified and she hated the thick thump of her grief.

  So alone.

  If she had been braver she might have saved him…in a bigger city…with better attendants…

  Shaking her head, she came back into the moment, leaving behind fury, but the light had gone out of her evening and all she wanted to do was to depart Beaconsmeade and go home to Florencia.

  He dreamed that night of the ship he had taken when he left England. The Hell Ship. The Hell Captain. Things done to his body that he had never told anyone, an eighteen-year-old green boy straight out of Cambridge. The sears of whiplashes on his back ached in memory.

  The canker of secrecy had eaten him up, piece by piece, catapulting him into the underworld of Paris with an easy transition.

  Wrong. It was all wrong.

  I love you. Eleanor’s whispered words. The first right thing in his whole damn life.

  Feeling the movement of somebody else in the room, he opened his eyes. Ashe sat above him.

  Cristo knew he had heard his secrets as he turned away, anger leaving only heartbeat in his ears.

  ‘Smitherton got to you, didn’t he? At Cambridge?

  God, and he promised me that he wouldn’t. That’s what you were doing in Paris?’

  ‘I could have left.’

  ‘No.’ The word was rough with fury. ‘No one ever leaves until their very soul is gone. It’s the way he works it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he got to me first and it was years before I could loosen the grip of it all. Wasted lonely years that taught me only how to hate.’

  The light breeze from outside billowed the gauze curtains into a soft cloud, a summer night in the heart of Kent so far from the paths that they both had travelled.

  ‘Buy the damn Graveson property, Cris, and come home.’ His brother’s hand lay across his arm.

  ‘My lawyers got it yesterday. That’s why I was late down to Beaconsmeade.’

  Laughter lit Asher’s eyes, the amber in them so very like his own. ‘This calls for a toast.’ He filled two glasses with lemonade and handed one over.

  ‘To family.’

  With a headache pounding his temples, Cristo smiled. ‘Everything has a pattern, Ashe. And Graveson is the very first link of the chain.’

  An hour later when Asher had left, Cristo sat up on the side of his bed, watching the candle on the side table burn.

  I love you.

  If he had had even a little bit of decency in him he would pack up his things and return to the Chateau Giraudon. Away from temptation, delivered from evil.

  He could only hurt her. Then he amended. He could only hurt them both with his reappearance and this damnable attraction simmering between them.

  I love you.

  He had said the words to himself a hundred times. I love you enough to leave my husband? I love you enough to risk my daughter’s name? I love you so much I would throw caution to the wind and follow you to the edge of the world?

  Reality stung and the ache in his heart was a sign-post to a more virtuous truth. He should leave her to the life she was living and a family who had taken her as one of their own.

  His name held only a little of what Martin Dromorne offered her, dogged as it was by scandal and mayhem. Oh, granted his brothers had gone out of their way to make him a son of Falder, but even that truth was cankered.

  A half-brother. A bastard child. The son of a mother whom he had killed in childbirth and had been sent away summarily, no place in the hearts of her relatives for the reminder of such tragedy!

  It was Alice who had saved him. Alice with her kind eyes and an open heart that had never once wavered in its love. And in the end he had failed her as well with his wild anger and bad choices.

  He seldom allowed himself the time to wallow in self-pity but tonight, with the circumstances heavily weighed against him, he did. He frowned at the notion of a virtuous withdrawal from London for he knew he would never do it.

  Fighting for what he wanted to have and hold was far more his style, but he would need to be careful and prudent.

  ‘Bide your time,’ he whispered and the candle caught the breath of the words and flickered.

  ‘I love you,’ he added and this time the flame barely moved.

  Eleanor spent the next few days pleading tiredness when anyone suggested an outing. Even the park seemed dangerous, an open space that might bring her face to face with the one man in the world she could no longer even bear to think about.

  I love you.

  She screwed up her eyes and swore beneath her breath, the silence in the blue drawing room making the memory worse. Why had she said it? Had he heard? Was he laughing with a friend at this very moment somewhere in a club in London as he remembered her ill-advised confession?

  Certainly Cristo Wellingham had not contacted her at all and Sophie and Margaret lamented the fact that he was not at the dances that they had chosen to attend. Disappeared. Gone. She hoped with all of her heart that he had said nothing about her to Lady Beatrice-Maude or the Duchess of Carisbrook.

  ‘You need to get some colour back in your cheeks, Lainie.’ Diana had entered the chamber with her small basket of tapestry threads and a pair of spectacles. ‘We could go shopping if you wish, for I have some colours I need to procure,’ and held up her stitchwork. Eleanor saw the picture to be a Christmas one, a hearth dressed in gold and silver and the full moon in the window to one side.

  ‘It’s for Geoffrey’s mother,’ Diana said as she saw her looking. ‘She asked me last year if I would do one and I was determined to begin it early. You could all come up to Edinburgh for the Yule season. Martin always loved Scotland.’

  ‘I am not certain…’

  ‘Because of his health?’

  It was the first time his sister had even mentioned the topic and Eleanor nodded.

  ‘You need to get out more, Eleanor. At your age I was—’ She stopped. ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ The tears that welled in her eyes were dashed away on the material of her sleeve as Eleanor turned to the window. ‘It’s just sometimes I think I should be a better wife to your brother.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Diana laid down her sewing and came to put her arms around her. ‘He could not have wished for a more caring helpmate. But he is a good thirty years older than you, Lainie, and sometimes that must be difficult.’ She paused briefly. ‘Is it morning sickness, perhaps, that makes you so up and down, for lately you have seemed very emotional?’

  For a second Eleanor could not quite work out the change of conversation.

  Morning sickness? My God, Diana thought she could be pregnant? She shook her head vigorously, and her sister-in-law retreated a little.

  ‘It was just after you fainted at the theatre and I thought… But of course not! Martin hardly has enough energy for the daytime, let alone the night. Besides, another child with his problems…’ She let her words tail off.

  Another child?

  The whitewashed hospital walls with the small effigy of the Mother Mary built into a shelf filled with dried rosemary. Bile rose in her mouth. She had hated the smell of rosemary ever since. Cloying. Smothering. The doctor had been a man of high principle and he had known she was unmarried. As such, he had not even attempted to hide his condemnation when she had delivered a child who had failed to take a breath. Even his words had been ones of blame.

  ‘Every babe needs a father and this is the Lord’s way of making certain of it. Be thankful for your reprieve.’

  Be thankful for your reprieve. The words still had the propensity to make her feel sick. He had smiled as he said it before placing her baby into a basin on the floor and leaving it there. Cold. Untended.

  No cuddles or gentleness. No prayer for an innocent soul as it went into Heaven. Eleanor had tried to say the
communion herself, but the incantation had been muddled, and the red wash of her own blood had left her mute and terrified.

  Paris. Lost in guilt and censure and fear.

  ‘Lainie? Are you quite all right? I shouldn’t pry, of course, and you have the perfect right to tell me to mind my own business.’

  Shaking her head, the anger twisted back into some workable thing. She had had much practice in tethering it, after all, though her ill-advised confession to Cristo in the forest had changed things somewhat and all for the worse.

  ‘I love you.’

  What if she had stayed with Cristo in Paris as his mistress, would her son have lived? If she had gone to him and told him and pleaded her case? Their case. An eighteen-year-old girl in limbo in a land that was not home.

  Choices, good and bad, and now other decisions, the stakes rising again because of her daughter!

  ‘Ever since Beaconsmeade you have been distracted. I should never have left you alone in the woods, of course, and I kick myself for following my daughters.’

  ‘No. The fault was mine. Exploring the pathway was such a silly idea.’

  ‘Indeed, it was one I could not for the life of me understand. You are usually such a cautious girl, Lainie, which is probably a characteristic my brother saw in you that appealed the most for, God bless him, he is exactly the same.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Eleanor led Florencia around the park on her daughter’s tiny pony enjoying the summer day. She had not heard a word from Cristo Wellingham in well over a week and for that she was glad, the respite from the constant fear of seeing him lessening her worry.

  ‘When I am bigger, Mama, I will buy the very best, best horse and race it around the park.’

  Her father’s daughter, for all had heard the rumours that Cristo Wellingham was in town to select prime horse flesh.

  ‘Not too fast, darling, for there are always people in these places.’ Lord, Eleanor thought grimly. Already I am clipping her wings just as my mother clipped mine.

  ‘All I want is a pet, Mama. Even just a kitten…’ There was a tone in her voice that was sullen, a tone she had heard more often of late when Florencia addressed her—almost five and needing the boundaries only a strong father might offer.