Chapter Twelve
Eleanor had watched Nicholas Bartlett leave the Westmoor town house, his hat in hand and a heavy coat shrugged on in the winter chill of the night. She had been waiting for him to go ever since she had said goodnight to Lucy, not to hail or shout to, but just to observe.
He’d looked tired, his fingers threading through the hair at his temple, and she thought of the headaches he had told her of.
His hand was again cradled over his chest in the way he always held it if he thought no one was looking. Jacob had said the wound was substantial. A blade, he had intimated, that had cut the flesh to the bone.
The same blade that had glanced his cheek, perhaps? She wondered whether he would go home tonight as it was still early or whether he would head out again to enjoy the frivolity of the London night life.
If she knew exactly what it was she wanted from him, she would have run after him or waited downstairs to catch him as he left. But she did not even know that.
She had badly miscalculated the effects of being so secretive. Lucy did deserve to know him and Nicholas also needed to understand what had happened between them all those years ago so that he might make a decision based on facts.
The wine from dinner now sat in her stomach, souring her mood. The start of another year and here she was, in the place she had been for the past six of them, worrying again about her future and caught in a limbo.
Well, it would not do at all. She would go and see Nicholas Bartlett and explain her reasoning for such a subterfuge. Fear. Uncertainty. Years of making decisions about her and Lucy’s life that had been entirely her domain.
Eleanor wondered whether the shock of understanding that he was indeed Lucy’s father might have jogged other memories.
The heat of summer. The gauzy thin layers of cotton sheeting on his bed. The sound of her heartbeat as he had leaned down to take one nipple in his mouth.
Her breast rose even now at the memory and she castigated herself for being so shallow, so very bent on the sensual. Last time she had let her heart rule and not her head and look what had happened.
She would go and see Viscount Bromley in the morning before anyone here realised she was gone and she would lay her cards on the table with as much honesty as she might muster. She hoped that it would be enough.
* * *
On arriving home Nick went straight to his library to pour himself a straight whisky. The shock of Lucy’s parentage added to the attack in the carriage had left him shaken and exhausted and he needed to understand just how much of a threat these assailants could be to Eleanor and his daughter, let alone to him. This uncertainty needed to end. He needed now to reclaim his own life, all of it, so that the past and the present could lead to a future that was decent and sustainable.
So he spent the rest of the evening sifting through names on the list that he and the others had drawn up in Vitium et Virtus. He wrote down every single thing he remembered about the two attackers he had met tonight.
Both had carried weapons and had been dark haired. He’d scratched the first assailant on his cheek and the mark would undoubtedly last a while before it disappeared. If he could find this man before that happened...
But how?
Looking through the names, he kept returning to Bowles and Wilshire. Taking another page of paper, he drew a line down the centre and scrawled a list of any interaction he had ever had with either man. Bowles was the one who seemed to have more of a motive to hate him and yet Nick could not imagine why he would want to pay assailants over so many years to try to see him dead.
Unless...
What was it Eleanor had said of him? There is something frightening about him.
The incident at Vitium et Virtus had shown him that, the maid Bowles had hurt with his small sharp knife shaking in fear and pain. What might have happened if he had not chanced upon the pair when he did? Could Nash Bowles have taken things even further? If he had been hanging around the club, perhaps the others might have noticed other situations that were similar?
Nick’s head was starting to ache with all the possibilities and he leaned back against the soft leather and watched the fire.
Flame had always calmed him. He’d spent a month in a cold, hard-floored jail outside New York after being accused of cheating in a card game by a man who was later found dead. It was winter and he had nearly frozen to death by the time they let him out, the charges dropped altogether when witnesses to the murder and the actual culprit had come forward.
After that he had gone into the wilderness and built a fire at his campsite every night right through to the springtime.
Taking a sip of his whisky, he felt the warmth of it slide downwards as the clock on the mantel chimed the hour of three.
Another thought struck him. At Bullock’s Museum the other day when he had met David Wilshire, the man had informed him that Nash Bowles had not forgiven him, a fact alluding to strong feelings especially after six years of absence.
Why would that be? Surely Bowles would have realised his actions at Vitium et Virtus were despicable at the least and moved on?
Outside the moon passed behind a cloud and the room darkened. Nicholas seldom sat up at night with a light on, save for that of the fire. Years of hiding had taught him the shadows were safer places in which to dwell and to be hidden.
He wished Eleanor were here to talk to for only with her did his sadness lift and disperse and he yearned to know more of the little daughter that they had made together.
Lucy. He wondered if she had been given a middle name.
A pile of notebooks he had taken from Vitium et Virtus sat on the table beside him, tomes that described some of the day-to-day happenings at the club that had been kept as a reference by Jacob, Frederick and Oliver ever since he had left. He flipped over the first page of the top book and smiled as he slanted it to firelight. Jacob presumably had drawn a couple in full mask at a ball. The notes below described the night in detail—those who had attended and those who had won or lost at the card tables.
The rest of the book was in the same vein, he saw, as he kept on turning the pages, though towards the end a passage from two weeks ago caught his whole attention.
‘Nash Bowles has been harassing a number of the patrons with his particular kind of unsuitable lust and when confronted by Oliver he asked if we believed Nick to be dead. Oliver’s hand was injured by Bowles’s blade and he told him to forget Nicholas for it was no business of his anyway.’
Nicholas could almost hear Oliver giving the warning in his direct manner. But why would Bowles even ask such a question?
He could well have been killed a number of times in the Americas, but it was too far-fetched to imagine Nash Bowles paying for someone to stalk him thousands of miles from home.
Yet Nicholas felt as though he was missing things. It was late and he was tired and the stamina he might have had in his early twenties was wilted at almost thirty. His searing headache probably did not help, nor the throbbing pain in his left hand and fingers. Stretching out, he grimaced as a shot of white heat buried into the bone at his wrist without warning and did not relent.
He’d been hurt so very often. The gunshot at his thigh. The more recent knife wound to his face and hand and the strips of scarring on his back from the jail in Boston. But this time everything was different for he did not want to be shunted on to another location to find safety. This was where he must stand up and meet the one that wished him harm, head on and with determination. He had the help of his friends and the resources of the Bromley fortune. He had the motivation and he also had the fury.
His eyes went across the darkened stains of blood on the breast of his jacket and the dried brownness of it on his fingers. He should wash, he knew, but somehow such stains gave him strength and courage. A badge of resolve and tenacity, his vehemence harnessed by something more than just himself now. He had a daughter to protect and he had Eleanor. It was time to bring the fight out into the open and end it once and for all.
Leaning back in fatigue, he gave consideration to the fact that it was now the second day of the new year.
A sign. A direction. He closed his eyes and dozed.
* * *
The doorbell rang before the hour of ten in the morning, waking Nick with a start for he wondered just who on earth would come to see him this early.
‘Lady Eleanor, my lord.’
She was there in his library even as his man stopped speaking, pushing in behind him and coming into the room.
‘Thank you, Browne. That will be all.’ He tried to keep the surprise at seeing her from his eyes, but he was disorientated and cold and his arm hurt like hell. Last night’s soiled clothes were still upon him although he hoped he had washed all the blood off his face.
‘You have not slept?’
Her words were laced in question.
‘Did you?’ He made a point of looking across at the time.
‘No. I lay awake all night and wondered what I should do.’
‘Honesty,’ he drawled, ‘may have come a little late for me, Eleanor.’ Her eyes were ringed in the same darkness he knew his own would be.
‘There is no good time to tell a man you have not seen in six years, and who cannot remember you at all, that he is now the father of your child.’
He laughed at that because the words were so quintessentially Eleanor.
‘Were you going to enlighten me if I had failed to guess the truth or made no progress in regaining my memory?’
When she lifted her left hand to her temple in a gesture of complete worry he saw she wore her small braided bracelet with the colourful beads around her thin wrist and the fight went out of him just like that.
‘I want to know you, Eleanor. I want to remember you.’
The blue in her eyes blazed.
‘Well, I am running out of days to try and help your recall. After tonight—the sixth day we spent together—I do not know what happened next, for it was the last time I saw you.’
‘What happened the last time I saw you, Eleanor?’
‘You asked me for dinner at your town house.’
‘Here? Alone? Just us?’
She stood stock still and quiet against the backdrop of his dimly lit library. Her lips were pursed and her hair was jammed under another of her horrible hats. There was a pin in the felt, enamelled in the colour of the butterfly wing he had seen in Bullock’s Museum, the one that had exactly matched the blue of her eyes.
‘I was young and foolish and my mother had just died and I was lost in thrall to you, lost in the hope of something I had no knowledge of. That is why I came here, then.’
A tear ran down her cheek, the splash of it darkening the lighter collar of her cloak, but she made no attempt at wiping it away, merely watching him through the awful horror of truth. She looked beaten and some hard-formed part of him broke with her distress as he stood to move forward.
‘It was not your fault, Eleanor. It was all mine. I was older than you and arrogant, and what I desired I took. I am sure that that was how it was and it should not have been so.’
But she spoke then with the utter conviction of the damned.
‘No. When you kissed me that first time at Lackington’s I wanted it all, more, everything that you knew. Two days later I peeled away my bodice even as you tried to stop me in your bedchamber and by then it was far too late for the both of us. I had not worn undergarments, you see.’
‘Hell.’ He did see. The most beautiful woman in all the world offering her naked body to him without conditions or reservation. Even a saint would have had a hard job denying such a gift and he had never been one.
Had he said he loved her? Had he at least given her that to hold on to as a troth in the many years of his absence? He could not ask because a negative answer would lessen everything. He needed to make things right. He needed to court her in the way the sister of a duke would expect to be. He needed to reinstate her absolute value.
‘Come to dinner tonight, Eleanor. Here. With me.’
For a moment he thought she might not answer him at all, but then she did.
‘Why?’
‘I want for you to understand that it was not all a lie, our past. That the truth was there, too.’
‘What time should I come?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
He breathed out because the relief was so great.
‘I am not sure of who I was six years ago, but I was not the man I should have been and I am sorry for it.’
She smiled at that. ‘Perhaps I was different, too. Sillier. More unwise.’
He shook his head. ‘I cannot even imagine you as that, Eleanor.’
‘Immature then. Impossibly romantic.’
* * *
She could sense his closeness and his urgency and the stretched want of him and she knew a madness that had been there before in her. Uncloaked again. Let free.
Touch me and we shall both burn down to ashes.
She wanted to warn him as she had not, then. She wanted to shout such concern out loud here in the quiet of his library in the dulled light of a grey morning.
But she didn’t because every single part of her tingled with the need to feel him against her. She had never met another like him. Then and now. But especially now with his strength and his distance and a hardness that had risen from all that was softer.
‘May I kiss you, Eleanor?’
‘Yes.’ The word tangled in her throat even as she whispered it when he came closer. An elemental knowledge. The shivers chased each other across her skin and pulled up her spine.
Yet she didn’t go lightly into his embrace, for she was no young girl any more, the tears from before dried salt upon her cheeks. No, she went with hesitation across the few footfalls and came up against warmth; the quiet silence between them full of sound, breath and heartbeat.
Her defences were breached and broken, every reason she knew she should not be here drowned by the arguments that she should. Her arms came around him and she closed her eyes against the moment, only feeling. With trepidation she took in a breath and waited.
One finger touched the line of her cheek, feather-light. ‘You are so very beautiful, Eleanor. More beautiful than any woman I have ever known and you are brave, too, which I thank you for.’ She looked at him then, directly, as his hand travelled upwards tracing the tip-tilt of her nose and the shape of one eye and then threaded through her hair at the temple, all the time the pressure building.
His mouth came across her own, sealing intimacy, the heat of his flesh and the push of his tongue. He was greedy in what he took, shaking away her small offering and coming in further. His good hand cradled her head so that the kiss could deepen and he could know every part of her, her whole body bound up in his own. Wanting.
And then the dam broke, the gentleness replaced by only need and the hot savage touch of his lips against hers. She pushed against the tautness in her own desperation.
Do not make this gentle, Nicholas. Do not kiss me as if I might break. Please.
As though he understood he suddenly brought his mouth in from a different angle and took her without restraint, a demanding kiss that promised everything. Sensation scorched through her body, in her stomach and between her legs and in the tight pull of her nipples against the lawn of her petticoat.
This is what she had dreamed of for all those years. Exactly this. And her release came with barely a warning, the edges of lust opening and beaching across the shattered pieces of her soul.
Only him. Only her.
She clung to him as if he was the last salvation between her and eternity.
* * *
He could feel her release, strong and then stronger, the clutching waves of passion making her throw back her head and groan. No longer a duke’s sister. No longer the careful Eleanor Huntingdon who seldom showed her colours either. Here with him she was somebody else. Dangerous. Vulnerable. Recklessly unsafe. The sting of her fingernails carved small troughs down the side of his neck.
He knew now that he could take her, that he could simply lift her up and carry her to his bed. The old Nicholas would have done exactly that and without compunction, but something inside him had changed and instead he drew her close to his body and held her, the hard ache at his groin pressed into her cloak.
Not like this, he thought. Not again.
But his heart thumped with the shock of her and the want, for all the shadows of who he had been were pushed into a corner by her light.
With Eleanor he could live again. With her he could be healed of bitterness and of loss. The smell of violets made him smile into her hair, soft curls of brown and gold tumbling under his chin.
She was so fragile in her honesty that it frightened him.
Take it slow, he thought. Let her get used to you and know you. Let her understand that this was a mutual want and that they had all the time in the world to understand it.
‘I am sorry.’ Her words, hot against the skin at his throat.
‘For allowing me to kiss you?’
Her head shook. ‘For being so...wanton.’
He laughed at that and his grip strengthened. ‘You think I might want a milk-sop girl who hardly moves or breathes, but simply stands there as I kiss her?’
‘I do not know.’
And she didn’t. She had made love to him for one night all that time ago and then been thrown into the lonely winter of widowhood for six long years until tonight. Until now.
‘You are perfect, Eleanor. In every way possible.’
She stilled and pulled back, looking up at him as if he was giving her an untruth.
‘Tonight I will show you exactly how I mean it.’
‘The dinner?’
‘And more if you will allow me. Much more if you stay with me.’
The beat of his heart was heavy as he offered her himself.
He would remember this moment, this second scrawled into faulty memory. In the reds of the fire and the warmth of her skin. In the grey of the morning and the silence in the room, save for breath between them, ragged in need.
He’d been trapped in time for so long and to suddenly be released to feel again, to walk and love and laugh, was overwhelming. The joy of her filled him, overflowing, her fierceness and her beauty, the grace of rediscovery, the benediction of touch. He let her go when she pulled away because he wanted to do nothing to frighten her.
‘I will see you tonight, Nicholas.’
It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name and he was heartened by the fact. Then she readjusted her hat and was gone.
* * *
Eleanor lay down upon her bed when she got home and buried her head in a pillow.
My God, had that just happened? Had she truly been so very shameless? He had known what had transpired inside her for he had said as much and yet he’d stood there, composed and collected, watching on as she simply went to pieces.
Even now the echoes of what she had felt gripped her insides, sliding their treachery into the heated folds of her skin.
In penance or in vindication, she knew not which.
All she did know was that for years she had felt nothing, wanted no one, the emptiness and void of her life without Nicholas welcoming oblivion.
It was for Lucy that she had kept going, kept breathing, kept imagining that he would come back, alive and whole and loving.
Well, here he was, offering her his bed and his touch and his body. Not the love words yet, she thought with a frown, and remembered how distant he had been last time after she had allowed him everything.
She rolled over and looked up at the ceiling. Tonight she would go to his bed and know him again. Her hand came over her mouth, in both worry and in delight. But she would not falter, not now, when the world was being offered back to her, without condition.
She was twenty-four years old, soon to be twenty-five, and she had slept with only one man for one night in all her life. Him.
She felt breathless and light headed and slightly sick.
She had been thinner then, more girlish, but the long lines of eighteen had formed into softer curves at twenty-four. Would he like the change? Would he notice the small white marks of motherhood that had appeared across her stomach, muted, she knew, but nevertheless there?
She sat up, her hands held tight across her middle as the worry inside her grew. What if he did not love her in the same way? What if she got pregnant again and he left, this time for greener pastures and more beautiful women?
But the night was like a treasure offered, a place to start again, a way of reconnection that was as absolute as the desperation she felt for him. She would not give the chance of it up for anything.
Crossing to the mirror at her dressing table, she sat at the stool there. The woman who looked back at her was a stranger, for excitement pooled in her eyes and the streak of animation on her face made her look so completely different. Almost beautiful. When she moved, her smile ran into the rainbow edges of the glass and she saw herself a dozen times or more, stretching back into the distance.
Multiplied. Proliferate. That was how Nicholas Bartlett had made her feel right from the very first second of meeting him.
A small sound at the doorway alerted her to the presence of another and she turned to see her daughter there, three dolls all tucked in a basket that she held.
Opening her arms, she waited until Lucy was within them and turned to the mirror again, her child on her lap.
‘What do you see, Lucy?’
‘Me and my mama. You are smiling a lot, but your hair looks messy.’
‘I see my beautiful daughter and her three small friends.’
‘I see rainbows there—’ little fingers touched the bevelled edges ‘—and here I see your eyes. They are bright blue and mine are brown. Where does eye colour come from?’
‘From your mama and your papa.’
‘But mine is gone.’
‘No.’ Eleanor squeezed tight and looked at Lucy through the glass. ‘No, he is not gone for good, my darling, and one day soon you shall meet him and he will love you.’
‘All the way to heaven and back?’
‘That’s a very long way, but, yes, all that way and more.’