Prisoner of Desire (34 page)

That would be the only way he was likely to have her after today. Unless his gamble paid off. Luck, however, as he knew well, was no lady. She was a teasing trollop attracted only to those who scorned her, a bitch who laughed and turned away from those who yearned for her most.

The carriage drew up before the townhouse. Sitting forward, reaching for the handle to open the door, Emile said to Anya, “I’ll see you inside.”

“Stay where you are,” Ravel said, his voice firm with authority. “My coachman will take you wherever you want to go. I’ll see to Anya, since I need to speak to Madame Hamilton.”

Anya sent him a quick, curious stare, aware of a sense of portent in his words.

“Now see here,” Emile protested. “It is my responsibility to see Anya — Mademoiselle Anya — safely inside. She is in my care.”

“Your care?”

Ravel’s question held such biting irony that Anya saw Jean’s brother flinch. She put out her hand to lightly touch the wrist of the younger man. “It’s most gallant of you, but unnecessary. I will be perfectly fine.”

“If you are sure,” he said, the stiffness of offended pride in his tone.

“I’m very sure.”

Ravel waited for no more, but pushed open the door and stepped down, handing Anya out. At his order, the carriage pulled away. He thought of offering Anya his arm, but the likelihood of her taking it seemed slim. She started under the
port cochère
of the townhouse and he moved easily to walk at her side.

“Do you actually have business with Madame Rosa?” Anya inquired in a sharp undertone as they mounted the stairs to the upper rooms.

“Yes, I do.”

What it could be, she could not imagine, nor could she summon the will to care. She was tired, so very tired. Still there were certain duties that must be observed. There was a light burning in the salon, and rather than stalking away to her own room, leaving Ravel to be tended to by the servants, she felt obligated to see if her stepmother was able to see him.

Madame Rosa sat reading a novel, with her half-spectacles that she sometimes used perched on her nose and a paper knife with which to slit the pages in her hand. She looked up as they entered, then removed her feet from the footstool on which they rested, sitting up straight.

“I was beginning to be worried,” she began, then stopped as she caught sight of Anya’s disheveled state. Her features stiffened. Laying her book and paper knife carefully aside, she took off her spectacles and got slowly to her feet. “Where is Emile?”

Ravel stepped forward. “I am afraid I persuaded him to allow me to escort Anya inside instead. I hope you will forgive my presumption, and my intrusion, Madame Hamilton.”

“Yes, certainly, M’sieur Duralde,” Madame Rosa answered.

The older woman’s manner had little warmth and less cordiality, but she was sufficiently in command of herself to be polite. There was also in her shrewd gaze a measuring quality. Ravel drew a deep breath and took his pride in his hands.

“I realize what I have to say may come as a surprise — then again it may not. Either way, I trust you will consider it well and remember recent obligations. I have come to request from you, madame, formally and with all due respect, the hand of your stepdaughter Anya in marriage.”

13

“NO!”

The answer came not from Madame Rosa, but from Anya. She had not meant to speak, would have thought herself incapable of it for the pain welling up inside her. That single word, resonant with anger and revulsion, seemed to vibrate in the air as she stared at Ravel with her teeth clenched and her head high.

“Why?” His voice was dangerously soft though his narrowed lashes hid the expression in his dark eyes.

She opened her mouth to annihilate him, to say that she had no intention of falling in so easily with his need for vengeance. Something about him as he stood with his hands on his hips in the center of the small, elegant room stopped her. It was not easy to make her stiff lips pronounce the formal reply, still she managed it. “We should not suit.”

“Anya,” Madame Rosa said, a shade of anxiety in her tone as she looked from one to the other, “do not be hasty. Sit down and let us discuss the matter.”

“There is nothing to be discussed. M’sieur Duralde has proposed as duty demands, and I have refused. That is the end of it.”

Ravel made a soft sound of disgust. “Duty has nothing to do with this, and well you know it.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” Anya said, giving him a long, straight look.

There were times when being a gentleman was a great inconvenience, Ravel thought, holding to his temper with difficulty. He longed to either strangle Anya with her own shining hair, or else throw her over his shoulder and take her away to some place where he could hold and caress her until her cold eyes filled with warm and languorous desire and her heart and mind were open to him as he had dared dream once, on a chaise lounge at Beau Refuge, that they might possibly be. His mind was lamentably centered on one thing today, or so it seemed. Dear God, what was the matter with him? Why did she obsess him so? She had beauty and pride and courage, but so did a thousand other women. He was mad to court humiliation, possibly the ruin of carefully made plans, even death, for her sake.

He turned to Madame Rosa. “Your stepdaughter is in danger because of me. I want the right to protect her, as well as make just recompense for having compromised her good name.”

Madame Rosa said to Anya, “That does not seem unreasonable to me.”

“Because you don’t know him,” Anya cried.

“And you do, after a mere few days?”

“As well as I wish to.”

Anya swung away from them, moving to put down her bonnet and strip her gloves from her hands. Polite, she must be polite, she told herself with compressed lips. It was pointless to scream and rail at him, and if she did she might start to cry and that would never do. What would her answer have been, she wondered, if he had come with words of love and desire instead of cold reason? She shuddered to think of it. There was a weakness in her character where he was concerned; she might well have fallen for such a trap.

“Anya,” he began, his voice firm and yet with a raw note in it that seemed to tear at her fragile composure.

“No!” She whirled to face him, slapping down the gloves she held upon the small table beside her. “No, I’m not going to marry you. Never! Do you understand me?”

She despised him. There was no reason, then, not to show himself entirely despicable. “Never is a long time. What if I were to say to you, marry me, or your half-sister’s fiancé dies?”

She stared at him with the color draining from her face. Through stiff lips she said, “You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“It’s inhuman. You couldn’t kill a man for such a reason; I know you couldn’t.”

“Your trust is touching, if misplaced.”

Trust. That was the ingredient that was missing in her relationship with this man. There were things about him she did not understand, things she suspected him of hiding. And yet she was as certain as she could be of anything that he would not be able to deliberately destroy Murray because of her. He might challenge him in the heat of anger, and match swords or pistols with him if it was required, but to carry a vendetta so far was not his way. It was astonishing how sure she was of that much, when she was sure of nothing else.

She lifted her chin. “It doesn’t matter. This is a bargain already concluded between us, or so I thought. As I remember it, you swore you would not seek Murray out. If I cannot depend upon your word given then, how can you expect me to do so now?”

Somewhere in the back of his mind there stirred reluctant admiration for the firmness of her stand, for the logic of her mind and the way she spoke. It was short-lived. He had played his last card and there was nothing left for him to do except leave the game. He should have known how it would be, and yet it was hard to accept that the physical intimacy they had shared, the sweetness of her surrender, had meant nothing. His gaze rested on the firm curves of her lips, and the memory of the feel and taste and scent of her was like a bleeding canker inside him.

“I don’t expect it,” he said, the words quiet yet with an undertone of steel. “From you I expect nothing at all. But of one thing you can be sure; this isn’t the end of it.”

The door closed behind him. Anya stood still, staring at nothing.

Madame Rosa, her gaze pensive upon her stepdaughter, spoke finally. “Ah,
chère,
was that wise?”

With a visible effort Anya roused enough to give the older woman a weary smile. “Perhaps not, but it was necessary.”

“Was it not also a trifle — hasty?”

“Who can tell?” Anya shook her head as if to dismiss unpleasant possibilities, then as a thought struck her, went on. “What did he mean by ‘recent obligations?”

Madame Rosa gave her a bland look. “Did he say that?”

“It appeared he expected the reminder to guarantee your approval, even your championing of his cause. Has it?”

“Chère!
What are you saying?” Madame Rosa’s tone throbbed with her distress. “You must know I want only what is best for you.”

Anya sighed, rubbing a hand over her eyes. “Yes, I do know. Forgive me.”

They said no more. Anya went slowly from the room. In her own bedchamber, she tidied her hair. Attracted by the fluttering of a moth at the French doors, she moved toward them, pushing them open to step out onto the gallery that overlooked the courtyard.

The last of the twilight had faded and dark had fallen. There was a blaze of light and the bustle of activity around the kitchen on the lower floor across the way, and the smell of shrimp and oysters simmering in a rich sauce and sugar being turned into caramel floated upward. It did not tempt Anya’s appetite. She did not think she could face dinner. She would have something light in her room after she had bathed away a little of her weariness; then she was going to bed and sleep the clock around.

“Anya, is that you?”

The nearest pair of French doors opened and Celestine looked out. She had been dressing for dinner, for she was wearing a wrapper of pink challis and her hair spilled down her back. She looked very young and appealing, and also troubled.

“Yes,
chère.

Celestine opened her mouth to speak, then, as she caught sight of Anya’s face in the lamplight pouring through the doorway, said instead, “Oh, what has happened now?”

“Not a great deal,” she said in wry tones. “Did you need something?”

“Only to talk to you for a few minutes.”

Anya, catching her half-sister’s quick glance over her shoulder at her maid, assumed the matter was one of some little delicacy. She had often been the repository of Celestine’s girlish confidences over the years, and could not refuse to listen now. “Of course. Would you like to come to my bedchamber when you are dressed?”

“Never mind,” Celestine said, her gaze still searching Anya’s face. “It isn’t important.”

“Are you sure?”

“In the morning will do just as well.”

“Tomorrow is Mardi Gras,” Anya reminded her.

Celestine gave her a bright smile. “Yes. Are we still going into the street?”

There was nothing Anya felt less like doing at that moment than joining a crowd of boisterous merrymakers. She could not spoil Celestine’s pleasure, however. “We are indeed.”

“Lovely. I thought you might have changed your mind after…”

“No, nothing has changed,” Anya said as Celestine paused in embarrassment.

“I will see you in the morning, then,” the other girl said happily.

Anya agreed and, when Celestine had gone back inside, turned to reenter her own bedchamber. She had lied. Everything had changed. Everything.

Three hours later Anya lay in her bed staring up into the darkness. She was too tired to sleep. Her bath had refreshed her, but, though she had lain for some time in the hot water scented with oil of damask roses, it had done little to relax her. She was so tense that the muscles in her legs quivered and she had to force herself repeatedly to unclench her jaws. Through her mind ran over and over again the image of the brutish faces of the men who had laid hands on her at Beau Refuge. She had been made to feel vulnerable, unable to protect herself, and she did not like it. She had always thought of herself as strong and self-sufficient, and to be handed such graphic proof that it wasn’t so was unsettling, incensing, it made her long to smash something. Ravel was a part of that rage. He had shown her that she was vulnerable also to the needs of the flesh, and for that she would not easily forgive him.