CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Desdemona paused outside the door to the library and adjusted her bodice.

She hadn’t seen Harry all day. Yesterday after Blake had left, she’d gone to visit the invalid only to be met in the hall by Magi. Face like a thundercloud, Magi had grabbed her arm and spun her around, advising her to “leave that stupid man alone.” Desdemona had heeded the advice.

But now she wanted to see Harry’s expression when he saw her transformation from dowdy girl to exotic woman. Magi’s deft needlework had achieved wonders on her old champagne-colored dress. The petticoat had been refitted with new tiers of tallow-colored taffeta. The delicate muslin had been separated in front and draped back, exposing the gleaming ruffles. Magi had used the excess material in back to create a cascading train made brilliant with amber beading.

Magi had refashioned the bodice, too, patterning more tiny amber beads on the muslin that crisscrossed low over Desdemona’s breasts. So much breast, thought Desdemona, staring down at a seemingly endless expanse of flesh beneath her collar bone. Courage, she thought.

She took a deep breath and pushed the door open. “The Turkish police just left,” she said.

“Did they?” Harry, sprawled indolently in the chair, did not look up from peeling an orange. A snifter of brandy stood on the windowsill. He must have sent Duraid to his house for it. The Carlisle budget didn’t provide for brandy.

Desdemona stepped fully into the room, adjusting the sweeping skirts. “They say that they found one of Grandfather’s own shabtis at this fellow Shappeis’s house. Perhaps that is why he captured you, Harry, to give himself time to rob us. He must be an amazingly cunning thief. I’m sure Grandfather wasn’t even aware anything was missing.”

“Fancy.” Harry popped a section of orange into his mouth, licking the juice from his lips. Lord, she thought irrelevantly, he had the most sensually fashioned mouth.

“The police were tipped off as to his criminal activities. Apparently he’s suspected in a number of crimes but they’ve never caught him red-handed before.” When would Harry look at her? Until he was giving her—and her appearance—his full attention, she refused to tell him the most interesting part of her story: that the fellow had escaped while being taken into custody.

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maurice is—” He glanced up and whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips. His gaze slued over her. “You’re going somewhere.”

“Why, yes.” She preened, fluffing out the layers of ruffle and lace like an exotic bird. “Blake is escorting me to a concert and then to dinner.”

Carefully Harry set the orange on the ground beside his chair and stood. He’d washed his hair. The late-afternoon sunlight glistened on his damp head. He moved closer, his face a careful study of pleasantness. No appreciation. Simply friendly interest. Damn.

“I see,” he said. “A birthday celebration, is it?”

This close she could smell the sharp, bay tang of his soap. “Lord Ravenscroft is very kind.”

“How is it a kindness to win an evening with a beautiful woman?” he asked gently.

She grinned at his teasing. He did like the dress. “Magi did it.”

“Magi did what?” he asked.

“Made the dress. Well, really remade the dress. Isn’t it lovely?” She twirled around.

“Exquisite.” He hadn’t moved a foot nearer, but with that single, low utterance she felt as if he’d suddenly surrounded her. Her heartbeat answered the odd, unnerving sensation by accelerating, her lips parted. He leaned forward and checked, drawing his head back and clearing his throat.

“Well,” he murmured, his eyes never leaving her face, “now would seem as good a time as any to offer my gift.”

“Gift?”

“Your birthday gift.” He crossed the room and picked up a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper tied with a string. He held it out, the gesture oddly uncertain. “Happy birthday, Desdemona.”

Eagerly she accepted and unwrapped the package. Inside lay a mirror that was—unless she knew nothing about antiquities and her grandfather’s tutelage had been wasted effort—three thousand years old. Square in shape, its rounded corners were studded with tiny, colored stones. The surface, though pitted and uneven, gleamed with a recent oiling.

A woman, a noble Egyptian lady, had once gazed into this mirror. Perhaps it had been a love token from her spouse or her lover.

Delighted, Desdemona looked into the shimmering depth. Her reflection wavered, dim and unrecognizable, over the ancient surface.

“Do you see yourself?” Harry asked.

“Not really.” She looked up and smiled. “Harry, it’s lovely.”

“Here,” he said. “You must see yourself.” His hands cupped her shoulders. They were warm and strong and for just an instant his touch seemed to linger. Then he turned her so that the sun caught the mirror’s surface. Her image appeared from the dark, oiled depths of the metal as if conjured with a spell, exotic and glowing. Behind her, she felt the heat Harry radiated, scented the unique, warm masculinity that was his own.

Instinctively she verged back against the protective shield of his body. Her reaction alarmed her and she dropped her head in confusion, pretending to study the mirror more closely. She turned it over in her hand. The back was patterned with a lotus motif, little scratches between the stylized flowers marring the otherwise pristine surface.

She squinted, tilting the mirror to catch the full benefit of the sun, and discovered that the faint lines were not scratches at all but hieratics, the shorthand of hieroglyphics. She peered closer, trying to make out the words.

It was a love poem. Her face flushed. Harry met her gaze, a touch of self-mockery in his own expression.

“Har—” She stopped just in time; to keep from making a fool of herself and faced forward again. The tiny etchings were so faint they would elude casual observation. It was a mirror. Just a minor. “Thank you.”

“I found this last year in a Luxor market and I thought of you. As soon as I saw it, I knew you had to have it. I had thought …” He broke off and shook his head slightly as if rejecting some notion. “You’re welcome.”

His fingers skated along her shoulder to the base of her neck. With his thumb he gently pushed her head forward. “Your hair is coming down,” he murmured in her ear. “Allow me.”

He didn’t give her a chance to argue, not that she would have. His fingers combed up her neck collecting errant strands. Of its own volition, her head fell more fully into the delicious sensation. He plucked a tortoise-shell hair pin from the thick twist Magi had arranged and a loose tendril escaped, falling across her cheek. His hand appeared over her shoulder, his knuckles grazing the top of her breast, causing her breath to stop. But it was a chance contact and his slender fingers reclaimed the tress.

“There.” He sounded as if he, too, had been holding his breath.

“Thank you.”

He stepped away. The sudden removal of his body replaced his screening warmth with cooling air and she shivered, running her hands up and down her bare arms.

“So, you’re off to dine with old Blake,” he said in that odd, stilted voice.

“Yes. He would have been here by now but some message from home delayed him. I hope it isn’t bad news.”

Harry smiled crookedly. “Maybe some gulls plugged up one of Darkmoor’s chimneys,” he offered sardonically.

He needn’t be so critical of Blake’s solicitude for his birthright. “Your cousin loves his home very much,” she said.

“I should say so. All the males in his family see Darkmoor Manor as a sacred trust,” he said without a trace of his usual amusement. “What would you give for a bona fide English manor, Diz?” he asked suddenly.

“Oh, anything. What woman wouldn’t love a manor to play grande dame in?” she answered, distracted by his tension and wondering at its cause.

“And if Blake could give this to you …?” He was quite still, quite grave, ignoring her flippancy. “Or if he couldn’t …?”

“No manor; no Desdemona,” she answered flippantly, trying to cajole him into laughter. He didn’t laugh.

“Why don’t you and Blake get along better?” she asked. “You are cousins. What sparked this rivalry between you? Is it”—she hesitated, uncertain how to go on with this suddenly hard-eyed stranger—“because of what happened at Eton? Or … or the scandal at Oxford that resulted in your dismissal? Did Blake play some part in that?”

He paused, no more than the space of a heartbeat, and yet she had the impression that much was being considered in that brief hesitation. “No,” he finally said. “Even if there hadn’t been any schoolboy rifts, Blake and I still wouldn’t like each other, Desdemona. He had nothing to do with the Oxford debacle. He wasn’t even there. That was entirely of my own making.”

Desdemona? That was the second time Harry had called her by her given name. He never called her Desdemona of his own volition. She wasn’t sure she liked it. “I haven’t any right—”

“You have every right. I would insist you take it”—he smiled crookedly—“but I’m just not sure I have the courage to bequeath it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oxford was a … an extraordinarily difficult time for me, Desdemona.” She stared at him in amazement. “I … I was sent down for cheating.” He expelled the last word in a rush of air.

“Cheating?” She knew very well that cheating was one of the gravest sins a gentleman could commit. But this was Harry, and certainly he’d never pretended he was a gentleman.

No, it didn’t surprise her in the least, she found, that cheating had been the reason for Harry’s expulsion. What did surprise her was the lack of censure she herself attached to the transgression … and the transgressor.

Indeed, she was far more amazed by the fact that Harry had needed to cheat in the first place than she was that he’d cheated at all. Harry was so intelligent. Some would say brilliant.

But even more unsettling than her lack of censure regarding his cheating, she realized that beneath her surprise, she was touched with annoyance that Harry, who, after all, made a career of cheating or something as near like it as made no difference, was so obviously distraught by his long-ago crime.

It seemed to her that he should have come to terms with his past by now. It seemed self-pitying. And that did not fit the Harry she knew. More and more often in the last week, she was confronted with evidence that she did not know Harry Braxton. Not at all. She did not know what he wanted, what motivated him, his desires or goals. The idea unnerved her, hurt her with a sense of betrayal.

Yes, she thought studying him despairingly, this was not the Harry she knew. His breath was ragged and his complexion pale. His recitation had cost him much in the way of self-composure. She scowled.

“As I said,” he went on, “Oxford was not easy for me—”

“You know, Harry,” she cut in gruffly, unwilling to let him reveal more self-pity, unwilling to relinquish the idea of him she’d held for so long, that he was cavalier and unrepentant and self-reliant, “Blake has not had an easy time of it, either. Your difficulties, though dissimilar in nature, ought to create empathy between you two, draw you together, not distance you.”

“Blake? What difficulties? Is Darkmoor’s pasture being defaced by a flock of sheep?” he asked bitterly.

“Don’t be horrid. You might attempt to see that others have grievances just as important to them as yours are to you.” He looked as if she’d struck him. Instantly she was contrite. This was Harry. If nothing else he was her friend. For the longest time she’d assumed he had no pain, no private sorrows. Whether she considered them worthy or not was not at issue.

“Forgive me for my pettiness and my self-indulgence,” he said stiffly. “Pray tell me what Blake suffers?”

It was all going wrong. He’d kept so much back from her over the long, intimate years of their association: Eton, Oxford, his family, this contest between him and Blake. She worried her lower lip, considering how to answer.

If she could effect a reconciliation between Harry and Blake, might not a slight betrayal of confidence be worth the price? “Blake’s mother … she is not … she is not a very nice woman.”

“Blake’s mother is a tart,” Harry said flatly. “What of it?”

She was stunned by his insensitivity. “Harry! How can you be so heartless? Imagine what that would do to a little boy … the confusion, the disappointment! And Harry”—she moved toward him, took his hand, and pressed it between hers imploringly—“the one woman he loved, Miss Lenore DuChamp, she, too … that is, I suspect she was not faithful.”

“Not faithful?” His grip tightened around her hand and he tugged her close, searching her face as if Lenore DuChamp’s perfidy was of great importance to him.

She went willingly, until she stood as near him without touching as possible. She angled her neck to meet his aqua gaze, placing her free hand against his chest. It was like laying her hand on sun-heated stone. “Yes.”

“Are those Blake’s words or yours?” he demanded urgently.

“Mine. He said that he’d found her in a highly suspicious situation … with another man.”

A wide grin broke out across Harry’s lean face. For the first time since she’d entered the room, he relaxed and looked amused. Once more he was the master of the situation and himself. The old Harry. The Harry she knew.

Or thought she knew.

“So there was more to the story than Blake told me,” he murmured.

“It’s not funny.”

“Found her in bed with another man, did he?” Unholy glee sparkled in his amazing eyes. “Now that would put one off one’s feed.”

“No!” she refuted. “I mean, I am sure I don’t know and I certainly didn’t ask.”

“Too bad.”

“Harry.” She smoothed the linen covering his chest beseechingly. He stared down at her fingers, tan against the pristine white. “Harry, be nice.”

“I’m trying. God knows, I’m trying.”

She was lost in the sudden starkness of his gaze, the paleness of his face, the bruised flesh that looked fragile, vulnerable. It was a mask. Harry was the least vulnerable man she knew. Idly he rubbed her wrist with the pad of his thumb, a gentle hypnotic motion that sent shivers up her arm. Too many shivers. She pulled away.

“Harry,” she tried again. “Can’t you see how trying it has been for him.”

“What? For whom?” he asked in a distracted voice, his gaze traveling over her features.

“Blake. All the women he has ever been close to have disappointed him, let him down. His mother is running his estate into the ground, besmirching the family name.”

He shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts, or denying something. “Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. More a spot here and there than a regular besmirch.”

“How can you be so unkind? Blake cares about Darkmoor Manor. He loved Lenore DuChamp. He wanted to love his mother. How can you mock his pain? How can you not pity him?” she demanded.

“His pain.” His manner went flat, his voice lost all inflection.

“Yes!”

He swung away from her, a single liquid motion that denied the battered appearance of his face or the wounds she knew had yet to heal beneath his clean white shirt.

“Harry?”

He pivoted slowly. A sharp smile cleaved his face. The smile of a devil, or a man bedeviled. “His pain? Let me tell you three things about old Blake, Diz, my love. He didn’t have perfect parents, he won’t inherit a debt-free legacy, and most important, he’s never forgotten either circumstance.”

“A sensitive child—”

“Any child. A thousand children. A million children have had harder lives than Blake. He has health, position, money, respect. Others have had no parents, no food, no bloody home to obsess about. Look outside, Dizzy.” He thrust his arm out, jabbing his finger toward the window. “Do you think there is any street brat out there who would not trade his life for Blake’s ‘pitiable’ one?”

He lifted his hands toward her and then abruptly changed his mind, the gesture becoming one of contempt and dismissal. Involuntarily she flinched. He swore.

“No,” he went on, “his mother isn’t going to win any maternal awards, and his beloved Lenore is human and his house has a draft. So what?” He spoke hotly, so hotly in fact that it left no doubt in her mind that whatever lay between Blake and Harry was passionate and primal and, more, had not begun with whatever had happened at Eton and Oxford but merely surfaced there.

“Ever since Blake was a boy,” Harry went on, “he has acted as if the world owed him an explanation for why his life wasn’t perfect. Perfect.” He spat the word and flattened his palm against the wall, staring outside into the fading afternoon light. “Well, if anyone deserves an explanation, it isn’t Blake. And if he should get to spend his life standing in line waiting for an answer, I bloody well better get the place ahead of him.” He turned his head, but not before she saw his hurt and bewilderment. “I want answers, too. There are things that I should—” He broke off, but just for a second as if his anger was too great to contain. “Why isn’t Blake’s mother more virtuous? Why the hell can’t I—” He stopped.

She stared back at him, her eyes widening in recognition. She’d glimpsed the other side of Harry’s facile, glib facade. Injury. Hurt. Deeper and more painful than anything she’d ever sensed before. She’d been wrong. There was no self-pity here, only an old burgeoning hopelessness.

“Harry, what is it?” She seized his arm. He trembled.

“Desdemona?” Blake called from the hall.

She barely heard him. “Harry, what were you about to say?”

He shook his head, the movement sharp with self-contempt, and stared at her from across too far a distance. In his countenance she read an anguish and pride she’d never descried before.

“Please,” he said softly, “do me the kindness of leaving. Before Blake comes in.”

Before she could act, he walked out into the dying light of the courtyard. He closed the doors behind him.