her chin, lifting her face to him. And then, the brush raised menacingly in his right hand, he looked down into her eyes for a long, silent moment.
She concentrated on letting nothing of what she was feeling be reflected in her eyes or in her expression. No fear. And no defiance.
She had learned that the best—indeed, the safest—way to deal with Julián, no matter his mood, was to present him with a facade of absolute calm. She made no further attempt, therefore, to convince him that what she had told him was the truth.
“Where were you?” he asked again.
“I have told you where I was,” she said evenly. “And I have told you why I had taken refuge there. Do you wish to hear the explanation again?”
“What I wish to hear is the truth.”
He did not raise his voice, but after all these months in his control, she could no longer be lulled by the fact that he might appear to be reasonable.
He wasn’t. There was nothing at all reasonable about his anger.
She eased a breath, swallowing carefully before she opened her mouth again. “The heat and the stench in the ballroom—”
He released her chin, and then, without releasing her eyes, he hurled the hairbrush at the mirror. Not heavy enough to shatter the glass, it fell onto the dressing table, overturning several of the pots and bottles arrayed there.
One of them was a perfume, the same scent she had worn to the palace tonight. As the smell permeated the heavy air, he paced away from her, his angry stride carrying him halfway across the room before he turned.
“Was your English friend there tonight?”
Her heart leapt into her throat, beating strongly enough that she prayed he wouldn’t see it pulse beneath the thin silk of her robe de chambre.
“Was he one of those bastards with Wellington?” he demanded.
He doesn’t know, she realized in relief. If he had seen the English soldier whose face he’d ruined, the tenor of this questioning would have been very different.
If Julián had known with certainty that man had been in attendance at the ball, he would not have waited until they’d reached the house. He would have dragged her from the carriage as soon as they had left the lights of the palace behind. This confrontation would have taken place in the street and not in the privacy of her bedroom.
“My…friend?” she repeated as if puzzled by the reference.
“The gallant Englishman you met by the river.”
“You think…you think that a common soldier would be invited to the king’s reception?”
She was pleased with the tone of her disclaimer. Disbelieving. Holding almost a note of ridicule.
“Hardly a common soldier,” he said, closing the distance he had opened between them.
At his approach, her heart began to pound again. She knew it would be disastrous to let her fear gain control. Julián delighted in making people afraid. Then he delighted in using that fear to destroy them.
That was something she had sworn on her father’s grave she would never let him do to her. With the thought of her father, it seemed that she could smell the acrid richness of the cigarillo the Englishman had been smoking in the garden.
The taste of it was suddenly on her tongue and her lips, along with the memory of his kiss. No one had ever kissed her like that before. No one had ever kissed her at all except Julián. And his kisses were nothing like the Englishman’s.
“What is it?” Julián asked, his voice sharpening with suspicion.
He crossed the few feet that separated them and caught her chin in his fingers again, gripping hard enough that she flinched from the pain.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded.
She had let down her guard, something she could never afford to do. No mental excursions into more pleasant circumstances. Especially when he was like this.
“The scent is bringing back my headache,” she lied.
“I saw something in your eyes,” he said.
She shook her head, brow furrowed as if in confusion.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“There was something in your face when I mentioned the Englishman.”
Deliberately she widened her eyes, shaking her head again. “You’re imagining things,” she said.
“It should be easy enough to ascertain if you’re lying.”
His voice was no longer threatening. It was almost caressing, instead. And she knew from bitter experience that this was when he was most dangerous.
It would be easy for him to procure a list of the officers who had accompanied Wellington to Madrid. Those would be only names, however, and unless he saw the Englishman’s face—
“Tonight’s isn’t the only entertainment planned for the English envoy,” he went on, destroying that comforting hope. “There will be half a dozen activities at which Wellington and his staff will be expected to make an appearance. It’s so fortunate I was wise enough to arrange it so that I should instantly know that particular officer again.”
Hearing his mockery, she hated him with a renewed swell of emotion, an indulgence she had not allowed herself in a long time. The memory of the thick, reddened scar with which he had marred the visage of the man who had tried to help her was too clear. As was the pain that had been in the Englishman’s eyes as he had watched her examine it.
“If I find you have lied to me about his presence in the envoy’s party,” Julián warned, “you know what will happen.”
Despite the threat, she said nothing. She had learned that with Julián the truth often served her no better than a lie. His punishments were as capricious as his rages.
If she confessed what had happened in the garden tonight, the punishment he threatened might still be carried out in retaliation for the clandestine meeting. Just as swiftly as it would be when he discovered she was lying. And it was always possible that he would never discover that.
Anything is possible, she thought, clinging to the thinnest thread of hope. Maybe the Englishman would take to heart what she had told him. Maybe he would heed her warning and avoid the entertainments Julián had mentioned. Maybe—
“The truth,” Julián demanded again.
Without a heartbeat of hesitation, her choice made for her by her previous experiences with his sense of fair play, she lied to him once more, “I have told you the truth.”
His lips lifted into one of his rare smiles.
“Have you, my dear?” he asked softly. His thumb released her chin to trace across her mouth. “I wonder.” His smile widened, his thumb moving along a line that matched the one he had carved in the English soldier’s cheek.
