child jumped again he pulled back in surprise and delight. No sight needed. Just touch and feel. A first for them both. Entire, complete and elemental. The beginning of a journey that would take them places neither had even dreamed of.
‘If I had lost you tonight…’ Taris could not finish and swallowed heavily before beginning again. ‘If I lost you, I don’t think that I could live.’
Tears welled in her eyes.
‘Others may now know of your secret. I heard people talking as we left the Davis function…’
He stopped the words by laying a finger upon her lips. ‘I love you, Beatrice-Maude Bassing-stoke.’
His voice was rusty, as if the words were ones he had not thought to say. ‘I love you so damn much that it hurts.’ His hand fell across his heart, opened like a fan. ‘Here.’
She saw him take in a breath, finding time and fighting an emotion that was too new and too foreign, secrets and privacy overwhelmed by the honest confession of love. His love for her!
Laying her palm across his, she held on to the warmth and brought his fingers to her lips, kissing each one by one by one, smiling as he turned towards her.
Then she forgot to think at all.
Epilogue
Doctor MacLaren delivered two healthy sons in September, the second baby arriving twelve minutes after the first.
When the ministrations of the birth were finally completed and they had a moment alone together, Beatrice watched her husband run his fingers across them, gently, as they lay in the bassinet by her bed. She watched how he checked the number of fingers and toes and the fragile lines of their bodies. Still, there were things that he could not know by touch and she tried to give them to him.
‘Their hair is black like yours, Taris, and the colour of their eyes is…undecipherable.’
He laughed and the gold ring she had placed on his marriage finger four months earlier glinted.
‘They are very small and very perfect. Almost as perfect as my wife,’ he added and looked up.
In the light you could see the opaqueness in his eyes had worsened and Bea knew that the darkness he had always feared would soon come.
Yet it did not matter! Surrounded by love and released from pretence, her husband had finally accepted the fact that the worth of a man was not something measured simply by his ability to see.
No, it was measured in love and strength and honour and decency.
And family, she added as the door to their bedroom opened and the rest of the Wellingham family streamed in.
This book is dedicated to
Frances Housden and Barbara Clendon
for their help with my writing.
Château Giraudon, Montmarte, Paris—early November 1825
Lady Eleanor Jane Bracewell-Lowen could not quite focus on the form of the man who carried her, could not through the dizzy grey fog of lethargy see the expressions on his face or hear the cadence of his words. With a growing dread she tried to shift her weight so that he might let her down, let her escape, but even that was impossible. Nothing on her body worked and the tight mesh of the heavy wig she wore brought a strange dislocation.
She was naked! She knew that, for she had felt his hands on the curve of her breasts and in the warmth beneath her legs. Rough. Lewd. She could not even turn away in protection. Nay, sheer apathy held her caught against breath that smelt of hard liquor and bad teeth.
‘You’re too beautiful for une pute. When you finish here we’ll treat you well below.’
Une pute? A whore? Two words that did make sense. Eleanor closed her eyes against the horror of truth, this small movement all she could muster as shock made the hairs on her arms stand out straight against the chill of the night.
‘I … am … not a … whore.’ The sounds came out as only nonsense, no meaning in them as she failed to form the letters on her lips, just gibberish, fear making her feel sick.
A door opened and warmth beckoned. Beyond the darkness in a circle of light, a solitary figure sat at his desk writing.
‘Monsieur Beraud sends you a gift, Comte de Caviglione.’
She stiffened. The man she had come to see! Perhaps he would help her. If only she could speak clearly …
Silence was the only response.
‘He said that she was new to the game.’
At this the man in the shadows stood. Tall and blond, the expression on his face matched exactly the wariness of his words. His eyes were the deepest of brown.
‘Did you search her for weapons?’
‘I did much more than that, oui.’
In one movement the blanket was gone and Eleanor was set down on to a bed.
‘Merde!’ The tall man’s curse was rough. ‘You stripped her?’
‘In readiness, you understand. It’s rumoured to have been a while since you last had a woman and it’s my master’s view that the bile of celibacy can make any man cantankerous.’
Dark eyes wandered across her own and Eleanor failed to summon the energy to protest.
‘A whore who even now readies herself for your use, mon Comte, though if you do not want the gift, I could take her below …’
‘No, leave her.’ The blond man raised his hand, a flash of heavy gold rings caught in the light, the expression on his face guarded.
She tried to blink, tried to warn him, tried in the singular and only way that she could to alert him to the wrongness in all of this, but the second was gone as he looked away, his hair falling across his face as he turned.
Beautiful. At least he was that. Closing her eyes, she was lost into the ether of nothingness.
Cristo Wellingham waited until the minion of Beraud had gone before crossing the room to slide the heavy slats of oak into place.
He had never trusted locks, for a soul well versed in the art of picking them could take but a moment to force his way through any door. Neither did he trust the fact that Etienne Beraud had sent this whore to him as a gift. The man was a scoundrel and a cheat working for the French police in a way that was blatantly illicit and this ‘offering’ was undoubtedly
