The librarian, Cristo guessed. He saw her speak to him for a few moments before traversing the room, picking one book from this shelf and another from the next. He doubted that she truly wished to read such tomes when he noticed one to be on the progress of the burgeoning railways, a book he had already struggled through a few months before.
Still, with an armful of reading material, she had given herself an excuse to wend her way towards the chairs at his end of the room, for there were places here to sit undisturbed and make one’s choice as to what to take home.
‘Lord Cristo! I do hope that we can make this very quick,’ she said as she finally stood before him.
Her voice was exactly as he remembered it, though now she spoke in English, the King’s English, each vowel rounded and proper, a thread of irritation easily heard.
‘Thank you for coming, Lady Dromorne.’
Her whole face blushed bright as their eyes caught and he noticed that her hands shook as she sat down and placed the chosen books in her lap.
‘I cannot stay very long at all, my lord.’
‘Are you recovered from your malade of the other day?’ Damn, he should not have used the French word for illness, he thought, for the frown on her forehead deepened considerably. He regrouped. ‘You look very different …’ Another mistake. He usually prided himself on his tact, and yet here he was like a tongue-tied and obtuse youth.
Fury marred the blueness of her eyes.
‘Different?’ she whispered, the anger in it making her undertone hoarse. ‘If it is the past that you are referring to, I should think that it might be wise to know that I should not hesitate to relate back to your family your own part in our unfortunate meeting, should you choose to be indiscreet, my lord.’
He ignored her rebuke. ‘Why were you there, then? In Paris, at the Château?’ He wanted to add ‘dressed as a whore’, but the rawness of the word in the light of all she had become seemed inappropriate and so he tempered his query.
She looked around, checking the nearness of any listening ears. ‘I was in the city visiting a good friend and I was at the Château Giraudon because of my own foolishness.’
‘You came in with the other women there that evening? Women who were prostitutes.’ He could no longer skirt around the issue.
She nodded. ‘I had heard that the Parisian fashionable set were somewhat … daring in their dress, or their lack of it. I took it to be a truth when we were all bundled inside together. I certainly had no thought to join them.’
‘God.’
‘The brandy, however, was all my own fault and I have not touched a drop of alcohol since.’
‘God,’ he repeated again, and drew his hand through his hair. Not her fault, but his own. He should have seen that she was everything the others were not, should have read the clues with more acumen and aptitude. He was a man paid for uncovering duplicity, after all, and yet he had let himself be duped by a pretty face and an unexpected gift. His conscience pricked sharp. If a man had treated his sister as he had treated Eleanor, he would have killed him.
Cristo suddenly wished he could have spirited her away to some far-off and unreachable location, and one where he could replace the lines of worry on her forehead with laughter and ease.
He was surprised how very much he wanted that.
Yet still there were unanswered questions! ‘There was a letter left in the folds of the bed-coverings that morning when you left. I presume it was your doing?’
‘It was.’
‘Had you read the missive?’
‘The envelope was sealed in wax. I would hardly break my dead grandfather’s trust.’
‘Your grandfather?’
‘I was Eleanor Bracewell-Lowen before marrying Martin Westbury, the Earl of Dromorne. Nigel was my brother.’
Her short, sharp nod encompassed a wealth of censure and the history between them solidified again. Every time he met this lady his world spun into an unbidden and opposite direction.
Nigel Bracewell-Lowen’s blood dripping onto his hands as he tried to stem the flow from the wound in his throat, the empty brandy bottle before them denoting another evening of unbridled excess. Wild youth and wilder morals. Consequences had had no credence in the riotous foolhardy waywardness of Cristo’s pubescence. Until Nigel!
‘My father killed himself the following year.’ Her voice again, layering guilt. ‘So it is well that you know that you have already taken the full measure of happiness from my family.’
He shook his head, at a loss for words as he reached out for her hand, and in that second he knew that he had just made the second biggest mistake of his life.
It was like the newfangled electricity tingling up his arm and pouring into the very depths of his soul, filling it up with need, lust, urgency and spineless warmth.
Snatching his fingers away, he looked straight at her. The blood had run from her face, the blush now a pale and ghostly white as the books on her lap fell to the floor.
Everyone looked. The librarian with his thick spectacles, the two women over by the door, and the group of men who perused the latest daily newssheets! Yet instead of bending to pick up the volumes, he could do nothing save gaze back at her and remember.
Remember the way she had felt beneath him, lying on burgundy velvet as he had teased her into response. Remember her wetness and abandon and seduction.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ The man at the desk was now right beside him. ‘Are you quite well, Lady Dromorne?’
Cristo had to give Eleanor her due as she smiled and turned to the librarian, her voice husky.
‘I am all right, thank you, Mr Jones. This gentleman was just asking me about the lending system here. He is new to London and it seems that he may want to join.’
The librarian’s face brightened considerably.
‘If you will follow me to the desk then, sir, I would be pleased to show you the details.’
Cristo stood, just as Eleanor did, her wedding ring catching the light when she straightened her bonnet. Further and further away from the woman in Paris, the fetters of responsibility and obligation chained across feeling. Married. Happily.
He could do nothing save stand and watch her leave, and the hand with which he had touched her lay fisted tight in the pocket of his jacket, fingers curled around self-reproach.
She should not have gone, should not have met him alone or allowed him to touch her, because now blackmail was the very least of her worries.
Leaning back against the seat beneath the trees in one corner of Hyde Park, she liked the way summer crept into the shadows. Misty almost, overlaid with the dust of sunshine. Her heart beat with a rhythm she had felt only once before and she pressed down hard on the sensation, needing this small time to recover her wits.
Forgotten.
