Thief of Hearts Page 9

  The Admiral’s pendulous eyebrows inched together. Lucy’s pen stilled. Smythe bent to dust a spotless globe, studiously avoiding Gerard’s eyes.

  Interrupting the Admiral’s dictation was simply not done.

  Wagering his dubious future that the man would be unable to resist the flattery of sincere interest, Gerard rose and paced around Lucy’s writing desk as if unable to contain his excitement. “One account of the battle claimed that even after the splinter of lead pierced your calf, you refused to relinquish command. That despite your agony, you ordered them to strap you to the mainmast where you continued to shout the orders that won the battle.”

  “The box, Smythe,” the Admiral snapped.

  Smythe bustled over to a towering secretary and drew out an ornate brass coffer. Gerard rested his hip on the edge of Lucy’s desk, forcing himself to ignore the lemony scent of her hair and the suspicious glint in her eyes.

  With great ceremony, the butler presented the coffer to the Admiral, who drew a key from a ribbon he wore around his neck and unlocked it. Gerard half expected a pair of dueling pistols to emerge. Was he going to be shot for his impertinence?

  “State secrets of the Admiralty,” Lucy whispered to his elbow, her reverent tone chafing his raw temper. “Not even Smythe is allowed a key.”

  Instead of a weapon, the Admiral drew out a newspaper, yellowed and frayed with age. A nostalgic smile played around his lips. “This would be the piece you referred to. I fear my gallantry was greatly exaggerated,” he admitted modestly. “I would never have been able to direct the battle had it not been for the unwavering support of my commanding officers.”

  Lucy began scribbling madly as without further prompting, the Admiral launched into a tediously detailed accounting of the Mediterranean battle that had ended his naval career.

  No one would have guessed from Gerard’s enthralled expression and admiring murmurs that he wasn’t hearing a single word of it. All of his attention was focused on the gleaming coffer lying open on the Admiral’s desk.

  Late that night, Lucy sat at her dressing table, drawing a silver brush that had belonged to her mother through her hair in crackling strokes. Her scalp tingled with pleasure at the sensual coddling. The Admiral was out for the evening, attending another interminable strategy session in the Admiralty Court. Lucy longed to savor each minute that she could call her own, but deprived of her father’s strict accounting of her time, she felt a trifle lost. And alone.

  Perhaps her bodyguard’s restless energy was contagious. In the past week, Lucy had found herself both irritated and bemused by the man’s habits. He never snapped to attention when the Admiral spoke, never checked his watch for the time, never consulted the daily schedule Smythe persisted in supplying him with.

  Henceforth, he was consistently late, always knotted his cravat at the breakfast table, and frequently misplaced his schedule. Lucy had found it in such diverse places as beneath the potted fern in the drawing room, stuffed between the antlers of the moose’s head mounted in the library, and draped like a tricorne hat over the terra-cotta bust in the entrance hall that the Admiral had recently commissioned of himself. The only thing her bodyguard did in an efficient manner was eat, shoveling in amazing quantities of food as if afraid it might be snatched away before he could finish.

  Lucy had no way of knowing if her cheerful despotism was succeeding or failing. Mr. Claremont ruthlessly quenched his every spark of rebellion before she could take triumph in it. As his apathy toward her mounted, she’d had no choice but to escalate her irrational demands. She supposed she was being childish, but schooled as she had been to unquestioning obedience, this harmless bit of mischief was proving to be irresistible.

  She winced as the brush snagged in an invisible tangle. She’d always hated her pale, fine hair. It tended to escape all but the most relentless combs and resisted any semblance of curl. If she had dared to trim it in a fashionable bob as Sylvie had done, she would look like a boyish elf.

  Shoving aside the crystal bottles and snarled ribbons cluttering the dressing table, she studied her reflection as if it belonged to a stranger. Since the Admiral wasn’t there to chide her for her vanity, she gathered the slick fall of hair at her nape and tilted her head to study her features. High cheekbones, a sharply defined nose, and a mouth too wide for her pointy chin, all dominated by a pair of enormous eyes that would have been better suited to a puppy. Or a courtesan.

  Sighing, she let her hair fall in a defeated web around her shoulders, thinking it a pity that while she was cursed with so many of her mother’s flaws, she had inherited none of her notorious beauty.

  She pulled a crystal stopper from a bottle of lemon verbena and drew it down her neck until it nestled in the hollow of her throat. The smooth hardness against her tender flesh ignited a strange marriage of indolence and restlessness that made her breath come shallow and her heart beat fast. She became achingly aware of the blush of her breasts beneath the silk of her chemise, the painful cling of the sheer lace against their budding peaks.

  She’d been seized by this inexplicable fever more than once since her encounter with Doom. She would awaken tangled in her sheets, shivering with yearning for some bittersweet fulfillment that drifted just out of her reach. Just as the Retribution and its mysterious captain had drifted out of her life.

  Trailing her fingertips across the heated skin between her breasts, she imagined a lover’s hands in their place. Doom’s masterful hands. Her eyes fluttered shut, but instead of rendezvousing with her phantom lover in the clandestine shelter of darkness, she saw a man’s hands tempered with autumn sunshine. Strong, blunt-fingered hands, their tanned backs sprinkled with ginger hair, gently cupping the fulsome weight of her breasts in their palms.

  Lucy’s eyes flew open. Her expression might have been comical had she not been so horrified. She snatched a hare’s foot from a dish of rice powder to smother the flames in her cheeks, then rose to pace to the window. Her unsettled gaze was drawn against its will to the gatehouse. Although it was well after midnight, a lamp still burned bright within the humble lodgings. Didn’t the man ever sleep? she wondered peevishly.

  A peculiar hollowness had settled in the region of her heart. She feared she would never sleep either. Since wasting time was tantamount to mutiny in the Admiral’s eyes, she decided to surprise him by dabbing the finishing touches on her Cornwall seascape. A frustrated perusal of the room reminded her that she had left her easel in the library.

  She belted a modest dressing gown over her chemise and slipped from the room, stepping over the sandals she’d abandoned in the corridor. Trailing her fingers along the banister, she tiptoed down the stairs, holding her breath without realizing it. She always felt slightly guilty when emerging from her bedroom after her scheduled bedtime.

  She skirted the cavernous entrance hall, darting past the closed doors that veered off the hall like the spokes of a giant ship’s wheel. The bust of the Admiral glowered at her from its pedestal. Giving the squares of moonlight streaming through the bay window a wide berth, she hastened her steps as she approached the forbidding door of the library, wishing only to retrieve her easel before her father returned home to chastise her for invading his sacred domain.

  Her trembling hand reached for the doorknob, expecting to feel the cool reassurance of smooth brass. Instead, her fingers closed over something warm, rough, and decidedly human. She heard a muffled oath and an ominous click. Before she could draw breath to scream, the hand beneath hers had clamped over her mouth. It drove her back until her shoulder blades pressed against the wainscoting.

  A revealing shaft of moonlight penetrated the shadows and Lucy found herself being held at gunpoint by the very object of her wicked fantasies.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I WAS WONDERING WHAT IT TOOK TO make you scream.”

  Lucy glared up at her bodyguard. Claremont seemed in no hurry to remove his hand from her mouth or the muzzle of his pistol from the hollow of her throat. She could feel
the pulse there throbbing wildly beneath its steely caress. Mr. Claremont was obviously not a man accustomed to firing warning shots over anyone’s bow. Behind the veil of his spectacles, she caught a flicker of annoyance in his narrowed eyes, a distant flash of lightning warning of a coming storm.

  She began to squirm. His callused palm lingered briefly against her lips before he lowered it.

  She stole a glance at the pistol, remembering with brutal clarity the various indignities she’d inflicted on him in the past week. The muzzle bobbed as she swallowed. “My father may very well lower your wages if you shoot me.”

  With chilling skill, he disarmed the weapon and slipped it into his coat. “I should hate to be demoted to gardener. Being your humble vassal is so much more fulfilling.”

  He wore no cravat or waistcoat and his rumpled coat hung open over his shirt in a scandalous disregard for propriety. Lucy was thankful her father hadn’t returned yet. He would have undoubtedly given Claremont a scathing dressing-down for his slovenly attire. But, she thought with uncharacteristic whimsy, if the man were dressed down any further, he’d be ambling around the house naked.

  Shocked by the wayward thought, Lucy steeled herself to project an aura of abject indifference. It was more of a challenge than she cared to admit, especially with her disturbing vision so fresh in her mind and the moonlight sifting through the burnished chestnut of her bodyguard’s hair.

  She clutched her dressing gown closed at the throat. What had seemed modest only minutes before now seemed the worst sort of enticement beneath his penetrating gaze. “May I inquire, Mr. Claremont, as to why you were sneaking about the house in such a nefarious manner?”

  “It’s my job,” he replied coolly. “I check the security of the house every night. Doors. Windows.”

  She arched a skeptical eyebrow. “The library?”

  “You’ve caught me, Miss Snow. I confess.” She leaned backward as he leaned forward and said in a sinister whisper, “I like to read.”

  Lucy sniffed. “You won’t find any novels in my father’s library. He collects only works of consequence.”

  “Then if you’ll excuse me, miss, I need to check the grounds before I retire.”

  As he gave her a curt nod and turned to go, Lucy lifted her head, surprised by how much his dismissal stung. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be left alone in the darkened entrance hall. Didn’t want to traverse the deserted corridor to her room by herself. The empty feeling in her midsection had intensified to a longing ache.

  “Mr. Claremont?”

  It was the tentative note in her voice that stopped Gerard. He bit back an oath. Was this infernal child-woman destined to thwart his every objective? He could still feel the shock of her cool, silky fingers closing over his. When he’d dragged her into the moonlight to find her wrapped in that delicious concoction of lace and silk, he’d felt the blood drain from his roaring head and rush to other, even less rational, areas. Gerard reminded himself savagely that he’d been so long without a woman, he’d probably be equally affected by the sight of Smythe in a dress.

  He swung around, his muscles coiled with tension, fully expecting her to tilt her chin in that imperious manner of hers and command him to fetch her slippers in his teeth or empty her chamber pot.

  Her chin was set at a regal angle, but he would have almost sworn it quivered just a bit as she opened the library door and beckoned him inside. “I came to fetch my easel. Would you please carry it upstairs for me?” Her smile lacked its usual brittle confidence. “You always seem to be around when I need you.”

  Gerard steeled himself against a dangerous surge of empathy. “That is what your father hired me for.”

  Lucy was not spared his implication: no man would tolerate her company without being paid for it.

  Her most recent artistic effort sat in a bright puddle of moonlight beneath the window. As she packed up her scattered watercolors, Gerard dared do no more than cast the secretary towering over her father’s desk a hungry glance.

  Lucy was gathering her brushes when Mr. Claremont came to stand behind her, too close as always. His physical presence was like an invading touch. It made her skin tingle.

  Trying to divert herself from the disturbing spice of his bayberry shaving soap, she plunged a stiff paintbrush into a water pot. “Don’t be shy, Mr. Claremont. What do you think of my latest effort? Many of my father’s associates have told me that I might have enjoyed a career in the arts had I not been born a mere woman.” She wiped the paintbrush on a rag, modestly awaiting his praise.

  Claremont rocked back on his heels and squinted at the watercolor. “It makes me wonder if you’ve ever seen the sea.”

  Lucy pinned him with a disbelieving gaze. There was no trace of teasing or mockery in his face. For once, he looked utterly serious. Lucy didn’t want to admit that his opinion mattered one whit to her, but she couldn’t quite hide her mild hurt.

  She tilted her head, examining the watercolor from all angles. “You don’t care for it?”

  He shook his head and she knew a brief moment of relief as she waited for him to soothe her wounded ego.

  “I loathe it.” His opinion was offered with such blunt candor that Lucy found it almost impossible to take offense. He leaned over her shoulder, pointing as he spoke. “Oh, it’s technically proficient. You’ve got the light right and most of the colors.” His voice deepened and softened, so close to her ear that his warm breath stirred the tiny hairs at her temple. “But there’s not a shred of life in it. Not an ounce of passion.”

  Unable to resist the seductive timbre of his voice, Lucy’s gaze was drawn from the painting to his profile. The moonlight silvered its rugged planes. His eyes shifted from amber to jade in the capricious light. If Lucy could have sketched him in that moment, he would have never dared to call her passionless.

  His hand arched in the air, painting her a vision more vivid than any rendered from paint and water. “The sea at dawn is a cathedral, Lucy.”

  Her breath caught at the unexpected music of her name on his lips.

  “It’s where darkness is conquered by light in a battle that’s been waging for all eternity. To watch the sun weave that first gleaming thread on the horizon is an invitation to worship, a call to fall on your knees, renounce your cynicism, and embrace the belief that a world as corrupt as ours can be washed clean with nothing more than the spill of the waves against the sand.”

  Lucy couldn’t breathe. She’d long ago resigned herself to being unworthy of love, but the aching knot had moved to her throat—a knot of yearning tainted by agonizing jealousy of something a man could adore so much. She had hoped Claremont’s company might ease her loneliness, but instead he had sharpened it, made its edges more jagged.

  The lamps of the Admiral’s carriage appeared through the bay window, winking in and out among the trees as the vehicle negotiated the curving drive. Panicked more by the foreign emotion than her father’s approach, Lucy tore herself free from Claremont’s spell and snatched up her paints and brushes.

  She tore the offending watercolor from the easel and tucked it under her arm, beyond caring that she was crumpling it. “For a man who’s made physically ill by the very suggestion of the sea, Mr. Claremont, you seem to have developed a certain poetic affinity for it.”

  He folded his arms over his chest. “A common phenomenon, Miss Snow. Don’t we all secretly find irresistible that which is most dangerous to us?”

  His lips tilted with the mockery she’d come to expect from him, but it was the somber challenge in his eyes that sent her fleeing from the library, easel forgotten, to the tranquil haven of her bedroom.

  The following evening Gerard learned to his immense frustration that he was to accompany Miss Snow to a Lady Cavendish’s supper party. He awaited her in the entrance hall, watching the rain dance down the beveled panes of the bay window. Its plaintive melody made him crave a smoke. The footmen had lit fires in the drawing room and library to burn off the damp, but the entrance hall was al
ready touched by the chill of approaching winter.

  Gerard could feel it coming in his bones. Days too short. Nights too long. The inescapable darkness. He wanted to be far from England when it arrived, safe in a place where it was always warm and the misty rain nourished the trees instead of stripping them bare with remorseless fingers.

  A light footstep drew him back to chill reality. He turned to discover Lucy descending the stairs. If not for her wretched interference, he thought, he might be on his way to that place even now. Yet a treacherous warmth surged through him at the sight of her.

  Her customary white muslin had been replaced by cream silk so sheer he could see the blush of her pink stockings through the graceful folds of her skirt. A wide belt woven from gold filigree girded her waist just below her breasts, accentuating their gentle curves. Her hair had been caught in a loose Greek chignon, artfully arranged to appear disheveled by a lover’s hand. Gerard cursed himself to realize just how badly he wished it had been his.

  The classical fashions suited her slim form. She glided down the stairs, Persephone freed from the Underworld, bearing the seeds of spring in her lace-gloved fingers.

  Gerard couldn’t resist the familiar impulse. As she stepped off the last stair, he brought her hand to his lips and pressed a gentleman’s kiss to her palm, his lips lingering against the perfumed mesh of lace and skin.

  Their eyes met over her upturned hand—hers wide with surprise, his narrowed in challenge. If this were another place, another time, Gerard thought. If he were another man …

  Realizing how ludicrous they must look, she in her finery and pearls, he in his crudely tailored tailcoat and a hat that had been unfashionable two seasons ago, he dropped her hand.

  Smythe emerged from nowhere to drape a cashmere shawl around her shoulders. Gerard scowled, thinking the garment too fragile to protect her from the cold rain.