Perilous Pleasures (15 page)

For he couldn't mean what he'd just said. Despite his sweet words—and what he could make her body feel—he wooed her only to keep her from leaving, because his teacher had ordered them wed. Because he wouldn't get the Dark Lord's powers unless he wed her.

She mustn't fall for it. If she let his haunting looks—or passionate embraces—seduce her, she would spend a lifetime regretting it. They were just more illusions with which he would ensorcell her. She must shatter them. Brutally. Before the desire he could arouse in her stole away the last of her will.

“I have no magic.” She hurled the words at him like bombs. “I'm just a harlot's daughter, the bastard of the bitch who murdered your sister. How can you forget that?”

He flinched, and a pain knifed through her vitals. Then he took a step back, and in a voice filled with anguish he said, “You're right. We have no choice. I
must
undo the spell.”

L
ike a sleepwalker, Zoe let him lead her over to a long wooden bench that stood against one wall. When he bade her lie back, she did so. He hovered over her for a moment, and she wondered if, like her, he was still feeling the echoes of that kiss that had bound them for a moment, despite the violence with which she'd forced him to release her.

Now, when it was too late, his words sang in her inner ear.
He found her beautiful. He wanted her past bearing.
Could he have meant them, despite everything? Had she ruined everything by striking out just now and reminding him who she was?

But if she had, it was too late for regret. The decision in his eyes told her he would end it now—whatever it was they'd begun.

In a firm tone, he bade her close her eyes. She tried to obey, but as her lids dropped shut, she couldn't help but steal one last peek as he prepared himself, once more, to do his magic. His waves of russet hair shadowed the sharp planes of his strong cheekbones, but his gold-flecked eyes were hidden by his long lashes. She was glad she could no longer see them and imagine they held emotions it was impossible could be there. It made it easier to let him go. With a last reluctant sigh, she let her lids fall closed.

He took a deep, shuddering breath and whispered the magic word, “
Codladh.
”

She felt herself go limp as she resigned herself to letting his magic do its work. As she waited, she heard his ragged breathing. It filled the silence that stretched out after he'd invoked the spell. She heard the soft rustle of his homespun shirt and the creak of the floor as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. In the distance, running like a silver thread through the heavy silence, she heard a coach rattle to a stop, its iron wheels clattering on the cobblestones. Harnesses jangled as new horses were brought in to replace the winded ones. It was only as she heard the passengers scattering from the coach, calling to one another as they embarked on the brief interval allotted them to eat, that it hit her.
She was wide awake.
The spell hadn't worked. It hadn't sent her back into the twilight sleep of trance.

“Lord Ramsay,” she said in a small, scared voice. “I'm not sleeping.”

“I know.” His tone was grave. “It's just as I feared. I've lost your trust. Without it I can't put you back under the spell.”

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Perhaps if you used a different incantation?”

“It isn't the words that do the magic, but something else—something I've forfeited through the misuse of my powers.”

“But I want you to enchant me. Isn't that enough?”

He peered at her intently, raising his eyes in an odd way. Then he shook his head. “It's no use. I can't undo the spell.” The note of defeat in his voice frightened her.

“Does anyone else know how to undo it?”

“Only the Dark Lord, but he's dead.”

He sank down beside her on the bench as if he could no longer find the strength to stand. She could hardly bear to have him so near. Every atom of her body seemed to resonate with his, bridging the few inches that separated them as if they were connected by an electrical fluid. She was helpless before the power of the magical bond that he had trapped her in.

Her words burst out before she could control them. “If only I could put a spell on you!”

“I fear to imagine the spell you would wish on me now.”

“I wish only that you might feel for me what I feel for you.”

“Only that? That I should love you, too?”

“Only that. But what does it matter what I wish?” She refused to meet his eye, but stared down at the surface of the bench where long pale lines of heartwood shot through the darker grain. “Wishes accomplish nothing. When I was young I wished I might be wanted instead of always in the way. I wished that my father, the duke, might come to visit me and learn how I had struggled to make myself worthy of him. But he never did, not once. What I might wish has never mattered to anyone. Why should it matter to you?”

“Because it does,” he said. “Because I vowed to give you happiness.”

Why did he have to remind her of what he couldn't do?

“You've taken too many vows already,” she said harshly. “I wouldn't have you feign love for me to fulfill another. Vow or no vow, you can't make yourself love me if the love isn't already there.”

“How would I know if it's there or not? I've no experience of such things.” He bit his lower lip. “I've been a celibate all this time, with no desire to experience love. All I know of love is what I shared with Charlotte.”

“But she was your sister. That's different.”

“Is it? We were twins, she and I. We shared our mother's womb.”

Twins
. That made his loss even more devastating, and her own plight that much more desperate. Whatever he might wish, he could never love her if her mother had killed his twin.

“I loved Charlotte and my loving her caused her death.” His hands tightened into fists. “Had she not loved me so well, she might have stayed at home when I went to France and be living now. But I begged her to come join me, I missed her so. And she died there—like an animal.”

He locked his hands together in his lap, where they twisted together like thick vines. “I gave
her
that love you wish me to give you—gave it in full measure, and it killed her. Think twice before you wish my love upon yourself.”

He looked the way he had after the cottar's child died. And he needed her as much as he had then. Taking a deep breath, Zoe reached over and gently untwined the fingers of his hand before taking it in her own. “I can't help but desire your love, however dangerous it might be. You've given me no choice with your spell. It's
you
who have the freedom to love or not.”

“I know,” he said. “And that I must make such a choice will be my punishment.”

“Why punishment?”

“Because you won't be happy without my love, but if I give it to you, I'll be betraying Charlotte. You live only because she died.”

So there it was. He'd admitted at last the reason he could never ever love her.

She must honor his honesty in facing it, and probe the rotting wound his words had revealed to her, as deftly as he had examined hers. The time had come to ask the question she'd never before had the courage to pose. “Tell me now,” she said. “What exactly did my mother do to Charlotte?”

Her insides quivered at the risk she'd taken. But whatever she might have yearned for or he had vowed, they could not live together, married though they might be, unless they faced this ugly truth together and found some way to heal it. If they couldn't, enchanted or not, she must leave him.

His lips went white, he was pressing them together so hard. He cleared his throat, not once, but twice. Then speaking so quietly she could barely hear him, though he sat so near she could see the blood pulsing in the furred hollow at the base of his neck, he said, “Isabelle betrayed my sister to the Committee of Public Safety—the murderers who caused the Terror.”

He paused, letting that sink in. Then he continued, “She did it to save her own life—and yours. She'd been accused of consorting with a marquis. A price had been put on her head. So she stole my sister's identity papers and escaped the guillotine by pretending they were hers.”

Zoe's heart sank. Until this moment she'd hoped that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding. Thoughtless though her mother was, she was never intentionally cruel, and Zoe had not been able to picture her as a murderess.

But at the height of the Terror her mother might have had no choice. She'd always explained that they'd made their escape from France thanks to the influence of a mysterious gentleman, one of the many who had been enamored of her. But that was the kind of story her mother
would
tell. Especially if the truth was more unsavory. And Lord Ramsay's words made it all too likely that it was.

For Zoe remembered those papers. They
had
saved their lives, and they had come, seemingly, out of nowhere.

The memories came flooding back—how in the days before they'd left Paris, they'd been desperate, with her mother wailing that there was no way out and that they'd both soon die on the guillotine. Then everything had changed. Her mother had disappeared for several days, leaving her alone in their apartment with instructions to open the door to no one. When she'd come back, she seemed giddy with relief, but would say nothing except that she'd obtained the papers that would make it possible for them to leave France safely.

Her mother had kept the precious documents in her bosom as they fled, guarding them as ferociously as if they had been diamonds. When they'd reached the port, an official had demanded them, and Zoe remembered the long, frightening moment when he'd scowled at one document, saying it couldn't be Isabelle's. He'd let his insolent gaze sweep up and down her mother's lush form, reveling in the power he had over them. Then he'd announced that he must consult the regulations and had motioned her mother to follow him into a little cubicle behind his office. She'd done as he commanded, and after the door had snapped shut on both of them, Zoe had been left alone in the outer office, where she'd passed the time practicing the courage her eleven years had given her so many opportunities to master.

When, fifteen minutes later, the door to the little chamber had opened to disgorge her mother, the official's cravat had been crooked, and his trousers had lost their crease, but he'd let them continue on their journey to safety, unmolested.

“My mother did what it took to keep the two of us alive,” she said quietly. “I can't make excuses for her. But even so, stealing is a far cry from murder. Why do you accuse her of that?”

Ramsay took a deep breath before answering her. His hand grasped the edge of the bench they sat on and squeezed it tightly. “Your mother didn't just steal my sister's papers.”

“What else did she do?”

“She knew the Committee needed a victim, so to put them off her trail, before she fled she wrote a letter to the Committee, telling them that the young woman taking refuge at the laird's estate was a noblewoman in hiding. As soon as they received it, they sent someone to arrest her. With her papers gone Charlotte had no way of disproving their accusation—and I—I who should have protected her—I wasn't there to defend her. I was in Paris. I'd told the Dark Lord I'd gone to watch the demonstration of a new surgical technique, but it was a lie.

“As I told you, once before, when I was young, my passions were very strong. I didn't want to believe what the Dark Lord had told me, that I must take a vow of chastity. So I went to Paris to find myself a woman. I told myself I must learn more about the flesh before I could renounce it. I found a beautiful, seductive woman to teach me all a well-paid Parisian whore could about my accursed nature. There was a lot to learn. It was five long days until I'd finally had my fill of her and returned to Morlaix—where I found my sister dead.”

Zoe felt a wave of sadness wash over her. No wonder he so feared unleashing those passions again. But his tale just made it that much clearer that he could never love her.

She struggled to make some reply. But for a long time, none would come. At last she said, “Knowing all this, how could the Dark Lord have wanted you to wed me? How could he have asked such a thing of you?”

“I don't know and not knowing torments me. If I could ask him just one question, that would be what I'd ask. But he's gone far beyond where he can hear me. And yet”—a trace of hope lit up his features—“I
can
ask the Ancient Ones to give me counsel. He taught me how.”

He strode toward the center of the room and pulled his ancient bronze knife from its sheath. Grasping it by the copper green hilt so that the golden point curved downward, he held it before him. Then he stared at it in silence as the moments crept by, fixing his gaze on the glinting blade as if he expected it to give him an answer.

At length, he let his arm drop to his side and turned back to her. “The Ancient Ones speak, but their message is confusing. Either our marriage is yet more of my penance or the Dark Lord knew some reason why I should forgive your mother which he didn't have time to tell me.” He flung his knife onto the bench.

She felt a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could she live with a man who believed their marriage was a punishment? But the anguish in his eyes begged her not to judge him too quickly. He was trying, and indeed, his next words reflected that.

Speaking so slowly it was as if he'd pulled each word out of a wound in his own flesh, he asked, “If I
could
forgive your mother, would you still want your freedom?”

She turned away, unwilling to let him see the answer that must be shining from her eyes. If only she had her mother's ability to lie.