Authors: Nicola Cornick
“I have no desire to rake over the past,” she said. “I fear I am promised for the next, Sir James. You must excuse me.”
She turned pointedly to Fitz, allowing her fingers to brush his wrist in the lightest of gestures that nevertheless conveyed a hint of promise. She had almost forgotten about Fitz in the tumult of her feelings on seeing Devlin again. Already she had allowed herself to become distracted, which was not good enough when Fitz’s parents’ commission was all that stood between her and life on the London streets.
“Thank you for introducing me to your friends, my lord,” she said. “I hope we shall meet again soon.”
She scattered an impartial smile around the group, noting that Chessie’s response was a rather less than friendly nod and that Emma failed to acknowledge her at all. Fitz seemed impervious to the strained atmosphere and kissed her hand with a gallantry that made Dev frown. Chessie turned away, as though she could not bear to watch Fitz’s attentiveness to another woman.
Susanna started to walk quickly toward the ballroom door. Now that she had escaped Dev her heart was bumping against her ribs in reaction and she felt breathless and shaky all over again. She needed somewhere quiet to go. She needed to think, to try to unravel the tangle of deceit and confusion she was suddenly caught up in.
“May I beg a dance later in the evening, Lady Carew?”
Freddie Walters was blocking her path, his gaze insolent, assessing her like a thoroughbred horse, his touch on her arm more than familiar. His tone said that he already knew everything he needed to know about her, that she was a widow of questionable morals who was probably not averse to a light love affair. The blatant disrespect in his manner set Susanna’s teeth on edge.
“Thank you, Mr. Walters,” she said, “but I have decided to go home. I have the headache.”
“A pity,” Walters murmured. “Perhaps I could call on you?”
“You’re making the lady’s headache worse, Wal
ters.” It was Dev’s voice, cold with a hard edge. Susanna saw Walters’s eyes widen, then, as Dev made a sharp gesture, the other man scuttled off. Dev watched him out of earshot, then his gaze came back to Susanna’s face and fixed there. She had wanted to scuttle away, too, but she had the lowering thought that Dev would simply grab her if she tried to run out on him now. He did not appear to care much for the conventions of the ballroom since he had accosted her in the center of the floor.
“Thank you for your assistance,” she said coldly, “but it was quite unnecessary. I can look after myself.”
Dev smiled. “I am aware,” he said. His gaze, hard and appraising, traveled over her in a manner quite different from Walters’s blatant sexual calculation. It was thoughtful, measured and infinitely more disturbing.
“I was not trying to rescue you,” he added gently. “I wanted you to myself.”
His choice of words and the look in his eyes made Susanna quiver somewhere deep inside. He had removed the feeble threat that Walters posed only to replace it with something far more dangerous. Himself. He was confronting her here, in full view of the Duke and Duchess of Alton’s guests. It was audacious. It was impossible.
“I don’t have anything to say to you.” Susanna kept her voice steady. She had had nine years of learning how to protect herself. It had never been
as difficult as it was now, trying to erect defenses against this man and his perceptive blue gaze and his forcefulness.
He laughed. “You can do better than that, Susanna. What the hell is going on?”
“I have no notion what you mean,” Susanna said. Her pulse was racing. She looked around but there was no refuge. She started to walk slowly to the side of the dance floor. Dev took her arm, adapting his long stride to her shorter steps. To an observer it would look as though they were doing what everyone else did between dances, strolling around the floor, chatting with the casual indifference of social acquaintances. Except that there was nothing casual in the touch of Dev’s hand.
“You owe me an explanation at the very least,” Dev said. “An apology, even—” his tone was sarcastic “—if that is not too much to expect.” For a moment Susanna saw something fierce in his eyes. A passing couple shot them a curious glance. They had caught the tone if not the content of Dev’s words and had sensed the tension in the air.
Susanna deployed her fan to shield her expression.
“It was a long time ago.” She aimed for disdain, cool and dismissive, and hit exactly the right note. “Yes, I left you, but surely you have managed to recover from the loss.” She paused, smiled. “Don’t tell me I broke your heart.”
She had provoked him on purpose and she ex
pected him to tell her she had meant nothing to him. Instead she saw the heat and anger in his eyes intensify.
“I came back to find you,” he said, “two years later.”
Susanna almost dropped her fan. Two years. She had never known. She felt a mixture of bitterness and regret. It would have made no difference. Two years was far too late. It had been too late from the moment she had run away from him. She could see that now, with the benefit of hindsight. She could see all the mistakes she had made—see, too, how pointless it was to regret them almost a decade later.
“I only wished to ensure that our annulment had been granted.” Dev shot her a look, contemptuous, cold. “But when I called on your aunt and uncle they told me that you were dead.” He spoke through his teeth. “An overstatement of the facts, it would seem.”
Susanna was so shocked that she almost fell. For one long, terrifying moment the ballroom spun before her eyes, the music and voices fading, everything slipping away from her. She put out a hand and realized with blessed relief that they had reached the corner of the room and were standing beside one of the long, arched windows that opened onto the terrace. The cool pane of the glass was against her fingers and a breath of air stole into the overheated room.
She raised her eyes to Dev’s face. His expression
was hard, his mouth a tight line. She could sense the elemental fury in him.
“Dead?” she whispered. It was true that her aunt and uncle had cast her out when she had fallen pregnant and refused to give up her child. She had been disowned, disinherited, dismissed. They had said she was dead to them. Evidently that was exactly what they had told everyone else, too.
The cold crept into her heart. Her family’s callous cruelty had almost destroyed her nine years before. Now she felt their malice touch her again. She had not thought they could hurt her anymore. She had been wrong.
Dev was still speaking. “Was it really necessary to go so far?” he was saying with biting anger. “It was not as though I wished for a reconciliation.”
He stopped. Susanna knew he was waiting for her reply but for a moment she could not find the words. There was so much to absorb, and so quickly; that he had come to find her, that her family had lied to him. It hurt much more than she would ever have anticipated.
“I…” Her chest was tight. She tried to breathe. She knew that she had to stop this now, before Dev realized that she had known nothing of her family’s shocking lies to him. Already he was getting too close. An instant’s slip on her part and she would give herself away. If he suspected the truth he would have endless questions for her; questions about the past, questions about what had happened to her and,
more dangerous still, questions about her life now and why she was in London. She could tell him none of those things. She had to protect herself and her secrets at all costs or she would lose everything. Suddenly she was fiercely glad that she had never told him that their marriage had not been annulled. It could prove to be a useful weapon should she need to defend herself against him.
Susanna straightened, steadying herself. She drew in a deep breath, searching for the right words to drive Dev away from her. He forestalled her. His voice was thick and heavy with emotion, an emotion that even after the passage of nine years cut straight to the core of her and made her feel with an intensity she had not experienced in years.
“Hell and the devil, Susanna,” he burst out, “you were my wife, not some strumpet I had tumbled in a ditch! Don’t you owe me more than this? You walk out on me and then you ask your family to lie to me! Why would you do such a thing?”
There was such passion and honesty in his eyes. Susanna hated herself for what she was about to do, what she had to do in order to protect herself.
“I asked them to lie because I had to be sure to be rid of you,” she said. She made her voice light and uncaring. The words seemed to stick in her throat but she forced them out. She knew she had to finish this and make sure that Dev would hate her so much that he would never question her again. There was no other way.
“I wed you because I wanted you to rid me of the burden of my virginity,” she said. She dragged out a smile, made it vivid, convincing. She knew she was a good actress. She had had enough practice in those lean and bitter years after her family had disowned her, when her skill at dissembling was all that had stood between her and starvation.
“After one night of marriage I had everything I needed from you, Devlin,” she said. “I wanted to know about sex. You taught me.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. He was stony-faced, his jaw set hard as he listened to her cheapen the love they had shared. “It was delightful—” she gave a little shrug, matching the gesture to the dismissive tone of her voice “—but after I had seduced you I had no further use for you.”
That, she thought, should be enough to make him despise her. No man would accept such a blow to his pride. She turned to walk away.
Dev prevented her escape by the simple expedient of catching her wrist and drawing her close to him. Her body stirred to his touch, every fiber of her being waking to him as though they had never been apart. The color flooded her cheeks, heating her skin so that every inch of her felt alive and responsive as never before. She saw Dev’s gaze move over her slowly in precise and insolent appreciation of her state of arousal. His gaze dropped to the neckline of her gown. It had been chosen to ensnare Fitz, and for the first time that evening Susanna wished it
was a little more demure. It felt as though the sweep of Dev’s eyes across the curves of her breasts was a sensual caress.
“A moment,” Dev said, and his voice was very soft amidst the hubbub of the ballroom, the tinkle of the music and the clamor of voices, soft but with an edge of steel. “This time you don’t walk away from me until I am ready, Susanna. This time you stay at my pleasure.”
D
EV LOOKED AT HIS FORMER
wife’s exquisite, defiant face and felt his temper soar dangerously again. She was damnably beautiful and his body reacted to the temptation she presented even as his mind dismissed her as the most conniving, duplicitous little harlot that had ever lived. He wanted to kiss her; to take that wide, sensuous mouth with his own, to bite down on the full lower lip and slide his tongue into her mouth and taste her again with all the explosive passion they had known before. He wanted to prove her indifference to him to be a sham. He wanted to strip the silver gown from her pale limbs and plunder her body ruthlessly until she was utterly quiescent in his arms.
It was hell being a reformed rake. He had given up other women when he had become betrothed to Emma but Dev knew that he was not really reformed at all. He might as well admit it. This dangerous attraction he had to Susanna was proof enough. Given half a chance, a quarter of a chance, he would like to ravish Susanna, to take her with merciless abandon and revel in the experience. Never had chastity
seemed so unappealing an option. Never had his betrothal seemed so dull and colorless in contrast to the appeal of his treacherous former wife.
He could feel Susanna’s pulse hammering beneath his fingers. The silk of her glove gave her no protection from him. He knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
And yet he was also ready to strangle her. Disloyal, deceitful Susanna Burney, who had seemed so radiantly innocent, had taken him royally for a fool. He had thought that he had seduced and wed a naive young girl. Instead she had been using him to gain a little worldly experience.
Dev exerted absolute self-discipline to keep himself under control. He felt a raw edge of anger as cutting as a blade. A moment before, when he had challenged Susanna about her family’s duplicity, he had felt a fleeting uncertainty. He had seen the shock in her eyes and thought that she must have been in ignorance of their vile pretence. Her mocking words had swiftly put paid to that idea. Instead of being a victim she had been at the heart of the plan to deceive him.
He looked at her. She was watching him and despite that fierce attraction that locked them together there was also a derisive glint in her green eyes. He wondered how it was possible to be so mistaken in a woman. The Susanna Burney he had known at eighteen had seemed so shy and sweet. It was difficult to see how she could have changed into this brazen
creature. On the other hand he had to accept that it was almost ten years ago, he had been eighteen years old and perhaps not such a man of the world as he had liked to imagine. Doubtless he had been the one who was naive. His judgment had certainly been spectacularly flawed when it came to his adoring bride.
“There was no need to wed me if all you wanted was to be rid of your virginity,” he said grimly. “You should have told me. I would have been happy to oblige you—without the benefit of clergy.”
Their eyes tangled. He saw the sensual heat flare again in hers, turning them a darker green, bright as emeralds. In a split second he was transported from the bustling ballroom to the intimate darkness of their marriage bed. They had had one night only, one night of sweet desire and passion richer and deeper than his most vivid dreams. She had been the first and only woman he had loved. That sense of intimacy had been more frightening than the reckless pleasure he had found in her arms. That emotion had been strong and profound enough to bind him to her forever. Then she had run out on him the next day and ripped everything apart.
Now she stood looking at him with cool disdain, the desire banished from her eyes.
“You misunderstand,” she said. “Marriage was a necessity. I had no wish to be a whore.”
Dev looked her over with studied contempt. “In
your case I am struggling to tell the difference,” he said.
Susanna’s eyes narrowed to an inimical gleam. “Then let me explain it to you,” she said. Dev watched her slender, gloved fingers trace a pattern on the windowpane. “It was so tediously dreary in my uncle’s house,” she said, “and we were poor and I did not care for it. I knew I was pretty and clever enough to seduce a rich man into marriage but I needed experience as well as beauty. No one was going to look twice at me buried away in that village, the dull schoolmaster’s little niece.” She moved slightly and the diamond necklace at her throat sparkled, rich and malevolent. “I was afraid that I would be stuck there forever, expiring with the boredom of it all.” Her hand moved to caress the glittering stones at her neck. “So I contrived a plan. To wed you, learn what I needed from you and then move on to better things.” Her gaze came up to meet his.
“You were no one, Devlin,” she said gently. “You had no money and precious few prospects. But I could see that you could be useful to me.” Her eyes were bright and hard. “I wanted to be young and beautiful and intriguing enough to lure a very rich man into marriage. It was not good enough to be a courtesan. I had to be respectable enough to catch a husband—” her luscious mouth turned up in a little, private smile “—but improper enough to know how to please him in bed.” She turned away from him so
that all he could see was her reflection in the glass of the window and that lingering smile.
“I flatter myself that I was rather good,” she said. “I posed as a widow. I had many suitors.”
Dev could believe it. She was beautiful enough to tempt a saint and there was a knowing air to her, a sensual allure that was provocative enough to make any man want to please as well as possess her. Of course she would set her sights much higher than merely being a courtesan. That would have been a course from which she could never have regained respectability. Instead, as a beautiful widow she would have drawn suitors like moths to the flame. They would have begged for her notice. Only he knew the venal heart beneath her lovely facade.
“So you killed me off as well as yourself,” he said coldly. “How very tidy of you.”
“Oh, I never mentioned your name,” Susanna said. “No one ever asked about my first husband. I suppose that if they had I could have admitted to the annulment and painted our marriage as a youthful indiscretion.” She raised her brows as though inviting his congratulations. “Yes, it was a neat plan, was it not?”
“I’m still having trouble with the difference between a courtesan and a woman who buys herself a rich husband with her body,” Dev said.
Susanna shrugged, apparently indifferent to his disapproval. “You are too particular. We all use the advantages we are given.”
She had been given plenty, Dev thought grimly. That angel’s face, that lissome, lovely body—and a grasping nature that cared nothing for the pain she inflicted on others. It was a pity he had not been able to see past the obvious when they had first met but he had been a youth confronted by a beautiful girl. He had not been thinking with his head but with a different and far more basic part of his anatomy.
He felt cold at the sheer calculating callousness of Susanna’s plan. She had been an adventuress from the first. She had wed him, learned from him the arts she needed to please a man in bed and then left him to pursue bigger, richer prey. Armed with her annulment she would indeed be free to remarry. He could see how much the combination of her youth, beauty, wit, experience and the tiniest hint of a mysterious past might appeal to a wealthy older man. Hell, it was obvious that Fitz was already in thrall to her. Even he could barely look at her without wanting to plunder every inch of that exquisite, perfidious body, and he knew what a lying, conniving strumpet she was.
“You mistake if you think that you are not a whore,” he said. “You have whored yourself out for money whether it is by marriage or not.”
The candlelight shimmered on some expression in Susanna’s eyes that was, for one tiny second, utterly at odds with her brazen words. But then it was gone and all that was left was contempt.
“You should know, Devlin,” she said. “Are you not doing precisely the same thing, catching an heiress
with your good looks and charm?” Her perfect brows arched. “If I am a whore, what does that make you?”
Dev took a furious step toward her—and stopped when he saw the triumph in her eyes. She was glad she had been able to goad him into near-indiscretion. He drew in a deep breath.
“You are also mistaken if you think you learned all there is to pleasure a man in one night at my hands,” he ground out. “But should you wish to extend your experience I am, of course, at your disposal.”
“As you were nine years ago.” She smiled, not one whit discomposed, as cool as spring water. “I thank you but there is no need. I have addressed the deficiencies in my education in the past few years.”
Dev was sure that she had. There had been her remarriage to Carew, who had presumably been an affluent baronet. Perhaps there had been other lovers as well, or even previous marriages. And now she truly was a rich widow and he suspected she was hunting another trophy. A marquis, perhaps…
He had been played. He had been used—comprehensively, ruthlessly. Susanna had seen him as a mere stepping-stone to better things. He, the fortune hunter, should appreciate her strategy. He did not.
Suddenly he could see Chessie’s hopes for the future vanishing like mist in the sun. He could see just how vulnerable both he and his sister were with no more than foothold in the ton. One false step, one
piece of bad luck, could send them tumbling back into the void of poverty and despair that had been their childhood on the streets of Dublin. Dev had experienced both unimaginable wealth and abject poverty several times; as the son of a compulsive gambler he had known the extremes of rich and poor before he was barely out of short trousers. That fear, that knowledge, had driven him ever since. He could not permit Susanna to steal Chessie’s future or ruin his own plans. He would have to keep her close, watch her every move.
Susanna inclined her head to him with mock civility. “Good evening, Sir James,” she said. “I wish you good luck with your fortune hunting.”
“Do you?” Dev said, politely incredulous.
She smiled. “About as much as you wish me luck with mine.”
Dev watched her walk away, her figure a silver flame in the sinuous dress, the diamonds sparkling in her hair and the heels of her silver embroidered slippers tapping on the floor.
Keep her close… In some ways it would be no hardship. In others it would be the most dangerous thing that he could do.
S
USANNA WAS STILL SHAKING
as she climbed into the carriage. She did not expect Dev to come after her again—she had made very sure that he would not—but the antagonism of their encounter still beat through her blood with primitive force. It was impos
sible to believe that once upon a time she and Dev had made love with such exquisite tenderness. Now there was nothing left.
She remembered Dev’s bitter condemnation of her, the disgust in his eyes, and she felt shot through with regret. There had been no other way to drive him away from her. She could not afford for anyone to uncover the truth about her past, not now when so much was at stake. This was her last job. With the money the Duke and Duchess of Alton would be paying her for separating Fitz from Chessie she would at last have sufficient funds to settle her debts, return to Scotland and provide a home for her twin wards, Rory and Rose, the children of her best friend. The three of them needed to be together, to be a family once again as they had been in the beginning. Susanna’s heart ached with a sudden fierce pang that made her breath catch in her throat. She hated this life, hated playing a role, hated the deception and hated most of all the fact that there was no one who knew, no one she could confide in. She was on her own. She always had been, from the moment her aunt and uncle had thrown her out, pregnant, destitute, seventeen years old.
She touched the diamond necklace at her throat. They were borrowed plumes, like the carriage and the house in Curzon Street, the beautiful gown and the silver slippers. Nothing was real. She was a counterfeit lady, a Cinderella whose carefully constructed world might vanish in a puff of smoke if anyone
found out the truth. She touched the dress gently, almost reverentially. When she had been selling such gowns for a living, her head spinning with tiredness from the long hours working in poor light, her fingers sore from the needle and cut by the thread, she had dreamed of wearing such a beautiful creation and being the belle of the ball. Tonight she had been that fairy-tale princess, yet beneath the layers of silk and lace she was still little Susanna Burney, a fraud who feared discovery.
Once again Dev’s face rose in her mind’s eye, hard, unyielding, his expression full of scorn. He was the one of whom she had to beware. If Dev had suspected for a moment that she had been thrown out onto the street, disowned, disinherited, abandoned, he would start to ask all the difficult questions she wanted to avoid. He would uncover her past and ruin the future that was so close within her grasp.
Susanna leaned her head back against the cushions of the seat and closed her eyes. If only… If only she had not run off to marry Dev secretly in the first and last impulsive action of her life. If only she had not had the idea of going to Lord Grant, Dev’s cousin, the next morning, to confess and ask for his support for them. If only she had not run back to the perceived security of her aunt and uncle’s house and had tried to pretend nothing had happened. If only she had not been pregnant with Dev’s child… One disastrous decision had set in train a course of events that had led to the poorhouse and to places
in her own mind that were so full of despair that she never wanted to go there again. The tiny body of her child wrapped in its pitiful shroud, the words of the priest, the gray dawn mist creeping over the Edinburgh graveyard…
With a gasp of pain Susanna buried her face in her hands, then she let them fall and stared into the darkness, her eyes dry. She must never think of that again. Never. The dark clouds hovered like beating wings. She pushed them away, closing her eyes, breathing deeply, until she felt the panic subside and the calm seep back into her mind. She had lost her own daughter but she had Rory and Rose to care for and she clung to them with the fierceness of a tigress. She had given her word to their mother, there in the bitter dark chill of the poorhouse, in the cold hours before Flora’s death, and sometimes it seemed that the gift of the twins was both penitence and blessing to her. She had lost Maura but she could make amends now and she would never, ever let Rory and Rose down, which was why it was imperative that Dev must never learn the truth and scupper her plans.