Page 12 of Thief of Hearts

C HAPTER E LEVEN

G ERARD WANTED TO HOWL WITH LOSS when the pale oval of Lucy’s face emerged from the shadowy interior of the carriage. The warm, enchanting woman he’d glimpsed during their impromptu supper was gone, imprisoned once again beneath an unbreachable veneer of ice. She’d gone whiter than snow, her skin so translucent he could trace the delicate web of veins at her temples. She stepped down from the carriage, ignoring his outstretched hand as if she might crack at his touch.

Sobered by the ominous threat of the lamplight pouring across the lawn, the footmen fled for the servants’ entrance, balancing Fenster’s tottering form between them. Gerard knew the wise thing to do would be to murmur his own excuses and retreat to the gatehouse, but he found he could not abandon Lucy to face that glaring light alone. He escorted her to the door, his fingers hovering inches from her elbow lest she show any sign of faltering.

Smythe and the Admiral awaited them. Smythe stood at attention by the bay window, his robe and nightcap so unwrinkled that Gerard wondered if he slept standing, like a horse. The Admiral was resplendent in a dressing gown of royal purple, his hair a gleaming crown of frost. His cane thumped out an irate rhythm as he paced the parquet tiles.

Gerard knew that he had recklessly jeopardized his position, but he wasn’t sure he would have traded the stolen interlude, not even if it resulted in his immediate dismissal. The rippling notes of Lucy’s laughter had been a song beyond price.

She faced her father, her head bowed like a deposed young queen offering her nape to the guillotine. The mantle of Gerard’s coat was still draped across her slender shoulders.

“Why, Lucinda, darling,” the Admiral boomed, malice dripping from every syllable. “So glad you decided to join us. You can imagine my distress when I recovered enough to join you at Lady Cavendish’s only to discover you’d never arrived. I was quite beside myself with worry.”

Lucy gathered her breath to speak, but Gerard spoke first, blinking mildly behind his spectacles. “There was an accident, sir. Two accidents, actually—”

“Silence, Mr. Claremont!” Lucy’s voice cut like steel. “If my father had wanted your opinion, he’d have paid you for it.”

Gerard had braced himself for the Admiral’s rebuke, but Lucy’s threw him dangerously off balance. He narrowed his eyes, but she refused to meet his gaze. Who was she protecting? he wondered. Herself? Or him?

“You, sir, are only a servant,” the Admiral intoned, implying his status was little better than that of a savage. “I can hardly expect you to honor any measure of decorum. My daughter, however…” He trailed off, circling Lucy, the train of his robe swishing like the tail of a hungry lion crouching to pounce on a lamb.

Gerard shoved his clenched fists into his pockets. If Snow so much as rapped Lucy’s knuckles, Gerard wouldn’t be searching for a new position in the morning. He’d be in the gaol, imprisoned for the murder of his employer.

He should have known Lucien Snow was too cultured to use his fists for weapons. Why should he risk bruising his precious knuckles when he had a weapon as caustic as the contempt he brandished like a cat-o’-nine-tails? Lucy stared at the floor as his arctic gaze surveyed her from the sodden tendrils of her crooked chignon to the soiled and tattered hem of her gown.

When his silence swelled into a punishment all its own, she drew in a shaky breath. “Father, please, I—”

“Hold your tongue, girl. I’ve no use for your lame excuses or pretty fables. God knows I heard enough of those from your mother after I’d paced the floor all night waiting in vain for her return. She’d stumble in at dawn…”—his patrician nose sniffed the air. His cold smile spread as he found what he sought—“reeking of spirits.” He smoothed his daughter’s tousled hair, his mock tenderness an obscenity Gerard could hardly bear to watch. “Her lovely hair tousled…her gown rumpled…her lips swollen from her lover’s kisses.”

Lucy’s nape flushed a guilty pink and Gerard cursed himself, knowing she was remembering that innocent brush of his fingertip against her lips. Smythe shot him a glance, the butler’s pewter-tinted gaze unreadable. It was growing nearly impossible for Gerard to keep his mask of indifference in place over his seething emotions.

“The only thing that amazes me,” the Admiral continued, rocking back on his slippered heels, “is that I am still capable of being disillusioned by the fair sex. Disappointed by the irresponsible and wanton behavior they’ve exhibited ever since Eve took the apple the serpent offered her and caused the fall of mankind. Have you anything to say for yourself, Lucinda?”

Don’t do it , Gerard silently begged. Damn it to bloody hell, Lucy, don’t do it .

She lifted her head to meet her father’s gaze, her gray eyes dominating her chalky face. “I’m sorry, Father.”

Smythe bowed his head, looking every minute of his age.

“Very well,” the Admiral said, restored to benevolence by his daughter’s meek surrender. “I shall search my heart to find forgiveness.”

Leaning heavily on his cane, he marched up the stairs, the train of his dressing gown rippling in his wake. Lucy stared after him, her bedraggled appearance making her look like a little girl swallowed by her mother’s clothes.

Gerard moved to touch her shoulder, beyond caring what Smythe heard or thought. “He has no right.”

Her chin came up, its defiant tilt making his heart contract. Her soft voice was edged with bitterness. “He has every right. He’s perfect, you see. I’m the only mistake he ever made.”

Shrugging away his hand, Lucy mounted the stairs after her father, her shoulders rigid beneath Gerard’s coat. As he turned away, blinded by rage and frustration, his booted foot came down on something spongy.

He bent to discover the penny-bunch of lavender. He picked it up and brought it to his nostrils. The fragile bouquet was crushed almost beyond recognition, but a hint of its elusive fragrance clung stubbornly to the battered blooms. He remembered Lucy’s shy smile as he had tucked it behind her ear.

A feast fit for a beggar king…and flowers for his lady .

He crumpled the trophy in his fist as Smythe padded around the entrance hall, killing each of the lamps with an efficient flick of his wrist before disappearing into the drawing room to do the same. For once, Gerard welcomed the darkness. It suited his mood.

He narrowed his eyes as he felt someone watching him, savoring his impotent rage. His vision slowly adjusted to find the bust of Admiral Sir Lucien Snow smirking down at him from its oaken pedestal.

He lashed out a fist, toppling it. It crashed to the parquet floor in a satisfying explosion of terra-cotta. Someone behind him politely cleared their throat.

Smythe, Gerard thought, his temper briefly sated by the reckless offering. Of course it would be the Admiral’s loyal henchman, the all-knowing, all-seeing Smythe.

He swung around, his unrepentant posture daring the man to challenge him. “Terribly sorry. I must have bumped it in the dark.”

Smythe’s mild tone held no hint of reproof. “Understood, sir. It might have happened to anyone. I’ll fetch a broom.”

Gerard scowled as he watched the butler’s nightcap bob back into the shadows, wondering if he had an ally or an enemy in the Admiral’s enigmatic servant.

No one came banging on Gerard’s door the following morning. After spending half the night gazing into the dying embers of his fire and the other half tormented by dreams, he slept until ten, waking to discover a slim envelope had been slipped beneath the gatehouse door. Torn between relief and regret, he ripped it open, fully expecting to find his dismissal.

Instead, he discovered a note from Smythe informing him that his services as bodyguard would not be required for several days as Miss Snow would not be venturing out. However, the Admiral would appreciate his continued assistance in organizing his memoirs. A terse postscript in his employer’s own handwriting notified him that the price of the bust he’d so clumsily shattered would be extracted from his wages each month in modest increments.

Gerard would have smiled at the last had his eyes not drifted back to Miss Snow will not be venturing out…

Was the Admiral’s daughter to be imprisoned in her room like a medieval princess in disgrace? he wondered, crumpling the note in his fist. If so, why should he give a damn? Lucinda Snow was not his concern. If she chose to spend her life writhing beneath her father’s tyrannical thumb, who was he to interfere? Yet he was haunted by his glimpse of another woman—a spirited, laughing woman who had stuffed sweetmeats in her pockets like a mischievous child.

His desperation to be free of Ionia and its young mistress grew as the next few days drifted by in a monotonous stream. He’d never been a man given to loneliness, having long ago learned to tolerate the bleak solitude of his own company, but now a yawning emptiness gnawed at his gut. As the last stubborn leaves surrendered to the ravages of impending winter, he began to wear thin on his own nerves. Each day it grew harder to be civil to the Admiral just for the opportunity to rifle through his personal correspondence or spend a few unguarded moments in the library. His deferential replies hung in his throat, stymied by self-contempt.

He slept poorly, rising before dawn each morning with no prompting to stalk aimlessly across the grounds. He’d forgotten how merciless London’s late autumn could be, but he preferred its frigid cold to the familiar chill seeping through his soul. A chill caught in a twisting warren of alleys along the river and nursed beneath layers of damp stone a world away.

Although he kept reminding himself that the Admiral’s daughter was a distraction he could ill afford, his ambling journey always led him to the sprawling old oak that stood like a battered sentinel beneath her window. He would lean his shoulder against its grizzled trunk, turn his collar up against the wind whipping off the river, and search the shrouded window for a flutter of curtains or a flash of white.

Lucy huddled in the velvet cushions of her window seat, her icy feet tucked beneath a quilt. She peered through the crack separating the lace and damask draperies, watching her bodyguard watch her window. She couldn’t pinpoint the moment when his presence had become a comfort instead of an annoyance. She only knew that whenever she crawled out of her cozy bed to find him there, she felt safe, protected from harm by the glowing talisman of his cheroot.

The wind whipped his hair and tore at his coat. Lucy shivered in empathy. As he thrust his hands deep in his coat pockets and turned to trudge toward the kitchens, Lucy pressed her palm to the cold glass and whispered, “Good morning, Mr. Claremont.”

Five grueling days had passed since Lucy’s banishment from polite society when Gerard arrived in the library one morning to discover the spacious room deserted. Seizing the rare moment of privacy, he captured the Admiral’s chair and began to rifle through a yellowed stack of ship’s logs. He started guiltily when Smythe appeared in the doorway.

Shoving the logs beneath a sheaf of perfumed letters from a married countess who had once believed herself enamored of the Admiral, Gerard said, “If you could learn to do that in a puff of smoke, I do believe we could get you a job on the stage.”

“I’ve always fancied the circus myself, sir. The elephants, you know.” Smythe continued to stand there, humming tunelessly beneath his breath.

Eager to continue his search before his employer trundled in, Gerard drew on the rapidly failing reserves of his patience to gently inquire, “May I help you, Smythe?”

The butler snapped to attention, clicking his heels. “I came to inform you that Admiral Snow has stepped out for the morning.”

“The morning?” Gerard echoed cautiously. “As in the entire morning?”

“The entire morning, sir. He requested that we not wait lunch for him.”

Gerard eyed Smythe suspiciously. Why had the butler taken such pains to inform him of Snow’s extended absence? Was this some sort of trap? Was the Admiral going to spring out of the chimney and yell “Ah ha!” to catch him at some perfidy, real or imagined? His grim fantasies were only fueled when Smythe made it a point to draw the carved teak doors shut behind him, enclosing Gerard in the hazy gloom of Lucien Snow’s sanctuary. The distinctive fragrance of the Admiral’s pipe smoke lingered on the air.

Stroking his freshly shaven chin, Gerard paced like a cat left to guard the cream, too skeptical to believe his good fortune. The immaculate surface of the Admiral’s desk beckoned to him, the polished brass of the hourglass winking a naughty temptation. The secretary towered over him, its shadowy cubbyholes begging to unfold their secrets. He might never have another opportunity such as this.

Drawing off his boots, he eased open the library doors, edged his way through the deserted entrance hall, and bounded up the curving staircase to the second floor.

Gerard’s knuckles hung poised in the air, an inch from Lucy’s door. He slowly lowered his hand to the brass knob. Why give her an opportunity to refuse him? He’d already concocted a lame fable about a suspicious character lurking about the lawn beneath her window. He had no intention of telling her the suspicious character was him.

He turned the knob, prepared to tactfully, if grudgingly, withdraw if he caught her in some alluring state of dishabille. But as the door swung open, granting him entrée to the deserted room beyond, he wasn’t sure he could have retreated had someone held a gun to his temple.

His weighted steps lured him in like a man who had wandered in a barren desert for decades only to stumble upon an abandoned harem, a perfumed bower ripe with the memories and promises of sensual pleasures. His starved senses reeled beneath the subtle assault.

Lucy’s refuge was the antithesis of the spartan masculinity that pervaded the rest of the house. A welcoming fire crackled on the brick hearth. Swags of ivory lace draped the testered bed, enveloping the rumpled bedclothes in a gauzy veil. The furniture was inlaid with satinwood, its delicate lines curved and embellished with fanciful curlicues. Plush rugs of dizzying varieties overlapped the floor as if every rug that had ever dared to mar the Admiral’s polished planking had found its way here, rescued by Lucy’s generous hand.

Gerard grinned as he circled the room, delighted by his discovery—the flawlessly groomed, impeccably coiffed, never-a-ribbon-out-of-place Miss Snow was an abject slob! Captivated by the room’s untidy charm, Gerard ran his palm over the unmade bed, tweaked the toe of a pink stocking slung brazenly over the canopy, buried his fingers in the seductive waterfall of silk and lace spilling from the half-opened drawers of the wardrobe.

An abject slob with decidedly decadent taste in undergarments, he mused, caressing the creamy silk of a champagne blond chemise between his forefinger and thumb. He surrendered it with lazy reluctance. It would hardly do for Lucy to return to find him fondling her intimate apparel.

Pausing at the cluttered dressing table, he brought the unstoppered mouth of a cut-crystal bottle to his nostrils, dizzied by the clean, lemony fragrance that was so distinctly Lucy. A wheeled tea cart, tarnished with age, crouched near the window seat, its surface littered with miniature clay pots overflowing with a profusion of blooming gloxinia.

Gerard stroked one of the fuzzy, veined leaves, thinking how like their mistress they were, prickly in appearance, but sheer velvet to the touch. A patchwork quilt lay abandoned in the window seat. He fingered its frayed hem, smiling to imagine Lucy engulfed in its cozy depths. As he let the edge of the quilt fall, a fat sketchbook tumbled to the floor.

Gerard squatted to examine it. He shuffled through page after page, the shame he should have felt at such blatant prying suppressed by pure amazement.

No insipid watercolors these, but charcoal sketches, etched in bold, passionate strokes. He’d never dreamed the delicate blooms of a gloxinia could be reproduced with such sensual violence. He laughed aloud to discover tucked among the floral sketches a crude caricature of a Royal Navy officer worthy of Hogarth in his heyday. Lucy would undoubtedly deny it if he pointed out how much the bloated prig resembled the Admiral.

His laughter faded as he flipped the page to find a young woman, little more than a girl, with the same bell-shaped flowers twined in her dark hair. Her mischievous smile was marred by an aura of indefinable sadness.

The sketchbook was snatched from his hands. “Mr. Claremont! What in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

Lucy stood over him, her hair damp, her silk negligee clinging to her body in all the wrong places. She hugged the sketchbook to her chest as if to shield both it and herself from his hungry gaze. Gerard’s excuses failed him, driven from his mind by that haunting sketch and the lemon-scented musk of Lucy’s freshly washed skin.

“Who was she?” he asked, rising slowly to his feet.

Lucy didn’t have to take a second look at the sketchbook. “My mother.”

“You remember her?”

“Of course not.” Lucy’s voice was brisk with disdain. “She had the grace to die of childbed fever a week after my birth, sparing my father any further embarrassment from her scandalous behavior.”

Bravo, Lucy! Gerard thought. He wished nothing less for the Admiral than a taste of that magnificent sarcasm. “It appears to be a remarkable likeness. Was there a portrait? A miniature?”

She dodged his relentless pursuit, seeking refuge in the forest of potted blooms. “Smythe described her for me.” Lucy’s free hand drifted over the plants almost absently, correcting the angle of a crooked pot so its leaves could drink in the meager light. “Gloxinia were her hobby. All of these came from clippings rooted from her flowers. Smythe cared for them until I grew old enough to tend them.”

Gerard’s jaw tensed. Any man who would fight for twenty years to keep a woman’s spirit alive, both in these frail blooms and in the even more fragile memory of her daughter, was not a man to be underestimated.

“I don’t know why she chose gloxinia,” Lucy went on, plucking away a dead leaf. “They’re the fussiest flowers in the world. They have to be watered from the bottom. They only favor the morning light.”

Gerard could barely conceive of what it must have been like to be the Admiral’s bride. “Perhaps she needed something to nurture.”

Lucy rewarded him with a flash of silver in her gray eyes. “That’s rubbish! She wasn’t the nurturing sort. She was a woman of weak moral fiber who cared for nothing but parties, champagne, and her latest lover, whoever he might have been that particular week.”

Gerard knew Lucy was too bitter to recognize the inconsistencies in her own behavior. Even as she denounced her mother, she tenderly nursed her sole link to the woman and struggled to resurrect her, if only as a ghost sketched in charcoal.

Gerard realized then that the Admiral had not banished Lucy to this cozy haven. She had retreated here of her own accord to punish herself for her mother’s sins, be they genuine or existing only in the Admiral’s twisted memory. He suspected this wasn’t the first time she had willfully shut herself away from her father’s unfounded accusations, his bullying, his rigid tyranny of her time.

Gerard advanced on her, hand extended, more determined than ever to goad to life the vibrant spirit he’d glimpsed in her art. “I want to see more of your work.”

Both the gloxinia and her mother were forgotten as Lucy clutched the sketchbook with both arms. “I think not, sir. Your position may give you license to spy on me, but not to snoop through my personal belongings.”

“Come now, Lucy,” he coaxed, favoring her with a shameless smile that had melted wills much sterner than hers. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Those sketches are quite impressive.”

She backed against the tea cart, rattling her precious pots. “And you, sir, are quite impertinent.”

“So I’ve been told.”

He reached for the sketchbook, but she ducked beneath his arm to make for the open door. Gerard’s reflexes had been honed on fleeter prey than she. He slowed her flight by pressing a stocking foot to the hem of her negligee, then caught her around the waist, fully intending to tickle her into submission if necessary.

But he had not wagered on the lush feel of her in his arms, her trembling acquiescence to his playful embrace. His body betrayed him without remorse, damning him to hell and back for his own rash folly. He touched his lips to her hair, breathing in its soapy scent, drinking in its silken texture.

“Don’t!” Her piteous whisper seized his heart. “I don’t like to be touched.”

He rubbed his cheek to the velvety softness of her temple, groaning hoarsely as her body melted against his in helpless response. “On the contrary, Lucy. I think you’d like very much to be touched.”

His splayed fingers were recklessly parting the folds of her negligee to prove his point when the forgotten sketchbook slid from her arms, spilling at their feet a flawless drawing of a majestic schooner drifting out of the mist, a single stark word etched on its bow.

Retribution .