I am alone with you in the house tonight, Eleanor, I doubt that I would have the temperance to sleep in a separate bed.’
‘Is that a warning, my lord?’
‘No, ma chérie. It’s a certainty.’
Florencia’s cry brought their attention to her.
‘Look, Mama. Patch is chasing his tail.’
‘Just as I am chasing mine,’ he murmured to himself and was again confused by Eleanor’s returning smile as she slipped from his side to view the puppy’s antics with their daughter.
The room the housekeeper showed him to overlooked the front of the house and was larger than any bedchamber he had ever been in. Divided into two separate spaces, he was interested to see the shape of a piano beneath a large dustsheet. Pulling it aside, he ascertained the instrument to be a Broadwood and his curiosity quickened. It had been an age since he had sat at a piano and played. Positioning the stool, he placed his fingers over the chords before letting them sink into the keys.
Like coming home. Almost sacrosanct.
As he closed his eyes the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ spilled into the room, the waves of tension building and resolving. All the broken cords of his life were in that tune, the hell ship, his father’s distance and the loneliness that had kept him bound in France.
His fingers found notes that had never left him. In Paris he had only ever heard the mistakes, but this afternoon in the sunlight under a clear blue sky he heard the music, peaceful, meditative, the harmony and feelings speaking to him.
Eleanor was in the pulse of the rhythm, in the tension and release as the line he created widened into a broad arch, lilting through the silence, hanging across his heart like a banner.
The muscles in his arms quivered, unused to such an exacting toil, but still he did not stop, could not stop, the stormy third movement taking over from the first. Passion and wild accents reigned now, the ferocity of the sforzando notes and the fortissimo passages unbridled.
Like Heaven and like a home.
Eleanor.
His fingers paused on the keys as her name loosened anger and he knew for certain, in that one small second of silence, that if he ever lost her he would never be found again.
Listening from the hallway outside the room, Eleanor leaned against the wall with an outright astonishment.
He played the piano as skilfully as she had ever heard anyone do so, even without the little finger on his right hand, the flamboyance of his style suiting the piece with an unquestioned exactness. When had he learned? She remembered the piano in his room at the Château Giraudon, but here in England she hadn’t heard even a whisper of his brilliance.
When the last of the notes faded into quiet she walked into the chamber. Cristo sat with his eyes closed and the sun from a wide window on his hair.
‘It is good to play again,’ he began as if he had known she was there outside all along and there was a softness in the tone of his voice that she had not heard before. His glance now took in every part of her.
‘It is a beautiful tune.’
‘Beethoven’s piano Sonata number fourteen in C-sharp minor. Many call it the “Moonlight Sonata” because legend has it he wrote the piece whilst playing for a blind girl at night.’ He hesitated. ‘A compelling anecdote, I would imagine.’
‘In Bath I went to many piano recitals and, even given my untrained ear, yours sounded more skilled than all of them.’
He laughed. ‘Have dinner with me in here and I will play you others.’
Her eyes flickered to the large bed on the far wall, almost on the same proportions as the room, and she blushed.
‘Practice makes perfect,’ he quipped, the edge of a seriousness in his words contradicting humour as he stood.
Eleanor swallowed. When it actually came to it the whole madness of ever imagining she could seduce such a man seemed most unwise. If she had any sense she would scuttle from this room and hide, but the vision of them both on the bed in the moonlight was startling, like the song he played come to life, exotic, unbridled and passionate.
‘I am the father of your daughter …’
And of your son. She almost said it.
‘And a man who would never hurt you! Take a chance, my Eleanor. Take a chance on me and live.’
It was if he had read her mind, the years since she had last truly lived filled with greyness. Only one night five years ago, yet she remembered every second as if it were yesterday.
But seduction was more difficult when words were required and the way he was looking at her indicated a definite need for them. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. Clearing her throat, she began uncertainly.
‘There are towels in the cupboards and the maid will be up with water for a bath should you wish it.’ The domestic details steadied her, made the scene more normal. In the distance she heard Florencia and knew that he had heard her too.
‘Dinner will be at eight in the blue salon.’
Pulling the banter back, he answered promptly, ‘I shall look forward to it.’
She dressed carefully that night in a dark blue gown that she had put aside for exactly this purpose. Seduction was an art form, after all, and a woman of almost twenty-five with only one night of loving behind her needed all the help she could muster.
She did not wear undergarments and the feel of the silk bodice against bare skin was exciting, her womanhood beating in a throb between her legs.
Anticipation.
Even the perfume she dabbed profusely on parts of her body that she had not before added to the tension.
Her hair she wore unadorned, the length of it spilling across her shoulders and down towards her hips, curling in the damp. She had dismissed her lady’s maid for the night to sit in the nursery.
She wished she had the courage to wear nothing. To turn up at the dinner table wearing only stockings and pearls, but a lifetime of caution harboured inside her and she was still not quite certain of his intent.
Could this be just another night for him, just another coupling?
She shook her head firmly, but it was not the action of a woman who would place much weight on warning. No. It was the knowledge of one who finally felt whole and welcomed what might happen next with all her heart and soul.
Cristo Wellingham was the man she had loved from the very first second of meeting him and every other suitor dulled in comparison. In Bath over the last months there had been many who offered more than just a casual friendship, given that Martin never accompanied
