The Secret to Seduction (2 page)

And then he seemed to truly notice them, and immediately his posture changed as though he’d thrown off a cloak. All was welcome, ease, grace, smiles.

And when he finally stood over them, and Sabrina looked up into his face, her lungs ceased to draw in air.

This
was the only sort of man who could possibly suit this house.

Much more imposing from a mere few feet away, he was lean but broad-shouldered, more than a head taller than Sabrina, and she wasn’t a tiny person. There was a hint of Geoffrey in the deep-set eyes, but his jaw was angular, his cheekbones cut decisively higher, the planes and hollows of his face starkly, in fact rather uncompromisingly, defined. And his eyes were startling: blue, pale, crystalline. Brilliant with light. His brows, severe dark slashes over them.

The Libertine.

Absurdly, she thought:
Debauchery suits him.

Somehow she’d expected a softer man, with Byronic curls and haunted eyes and perhaps an air of dissipation.

“Welcome to my home. I am Lord Rawden.”

And his voice: low and elegant, resonant as a cello. Not raw from too many cigars or too much drink.

Mary and Sabrina curtsied as he bowed low.

But beneath the grace, Sabrina could sense the remnants of his anger, and something else, too. Her eyes darted toward where the woman had been standing; she saw, in the distance, the scarlet pelisse retreating deeper into the front garden.

And she knew what she’d sensed. Whatever the woman had said to him had been intended to cut, and Sabrina suspected it had.

And as Sabrina watched him stride over to issue instructions to the housekeeper who had come to stand on the stairs leading up to the house, compassion was the least of a crowd of unfamiliar things, many of them uncomfortable, this man had prodded up in her in an instant.

She sensed it was all second nature, the grace and the manners, no more effort for him than breathing; she also sensed that he had taken her in with a glance of those fiercely intelligent eyes, summed her up, silently dismissed her, and had moved on to other far more interesting things in his mind.

She decided then and there that the Earl of Rawden would most definitely take note of her before this house party was over.

CHAPTER TWO

G
RANTED, AS SCANDALS went, it had been a particularly bad one—beginning with champagne, progressing to being prodded from the nude, fragrant embrace of a countess by her livid husband, and culminating in a duel—but for Rhys Gillray, the Earl of Rawden, it really ranked no worse than any of the other scandals gleefully attached to his name over the past few years. And the scandal had done nothing to actually aggravate his reputation. After all, when one poured more whiskey into a glass of whiskey, the whiskey didn’t become more potent. The glass only became more full.

Then again, if one
ceaselessly
poured whiskey into the glass, it would inevitably spill over and create a bit of a mess.

With the addition of this latest scandal, angry husbands and infatuated women had seemed everywhere underfoot in London, which had made going about the usual business of amusing himself more awkward than he preferred.

In short, he found himself at last confronted with a bit of a mess.

Serendipitously, shortly after the duel—during which nothing but pride had been wounded, as both men were crack shots but tacitly interested in continuing to live—word had reached him that La Montagne was finally, after so many years, officially his again. Restored to the Rawden title.

La Montagne.
The home’s name amused the poet in him. He’d planned and executed its acquisition the way a mountaineer planned an expedition. It represented the pinnacle of his dreams. It was as vast as a bloody mountain.

And so forth.

On the whole, Rhys preferred his metaphors more subtle. His own were said to seep into a reader’s bloodstream like a fine wine: stealthy, intoxicating, perhaps even a bit dangerous. Seduction on the printed page.

He understands women,
women crooned.

What bloody nonsense. He understood
seduction.
The two were not necessarily the same.

Regardless, he would ensure that La Montagne never again left Rawden hands. And if at the cornerstone of his fortune and his struggle to regain the Rawden lands were blood and a secret more than a decade old, Rhys told himself that everything came with a price. He’d made a difficult choice years ago to regain all he had, and some days he could convince himself that life was like war: bitter, desperate choices were often made in the name of survival, and some inevitably survived at the expense of others.

Other days it haunted him, cost him sleep, until he needed to do something, anything, to drown out the voice of it. But this, he decided, was the price. And it was a price he could endure, for there was nothing to be done about it now.

In fact, a trial took place in London as he stood in his grand home. And the trial might have worried him more had he not known that his secret was buried as deeply as La Montagne’s ancient cornerstone. He paid as little attention to it as possible, the way one might avoid staring a wild animal in the eye.

Still, he would not be displeased when it was over.

He’d disguised his retreat from London as a house party by inviting Wyndham, an artist so cheerfully debauched that he might just consider a country house party a novelty. Lady Mary and her friend came by virtue of an old school chum, Lord Paul Capstraw. And his cousin Geoffrey had sent a note round begging an audience, and Rhys expected him with a certain impatience and wry resignation.

But in a regrettable fit of madness, he’d also invited Sophia Licari.

Bloody Sophia.

So he hadn’t precisely fled the
ton.
But in truth, he thought, rather darkly amused, he could not find fault with the timing of the news. Because there were other reasons he’d decided to leave London.

A few nights earlier, as he’d marked off the paces of the duel, and stood to fire at the other earl he’d cuckolded, it occurred to him even then—even
then,
as he pointed a pistol at a man, and the other man pointed a pistol at him—that he was bored. That his pulse had scarcely increased, that the outcome scarcely interested him.

This succeeded in unnerving him, and it took a very good deal to unnerve Rhys Gillray.

The other reason was that he hadn’t been able to write a word in weeks. And this unnerved him, too.

The inside of the house was just as vast and echoey as the outside; the sound of their footsteps bounced from the smooth marble floors and all those other hard, gleaming surfaces up to the endless ceiling as Sabrina and Mary were led into it and ushered up a flight of marble stairs to their rooms. On the way they passed rooms that had no specific purpose Sabrina could discern but that were nevertheless stocked with curving, complicated furniture, paintings, and myriad shining things. The sheer size of the rooms exerted an almost dizzying pull; it was like peering from the shore out onto the sea.

Sabrina exchanged a glance with Lady Mary, who inhabited one of the larger homes in Tinbury. The entirety of which could have fit neatly into La Montagne.

Mary’s eyes were wide. “Cor!” she mouthed to Sabrina. Louder, she said, “And look, Sabrina! Here’s the library! I imagine we will lose you to books while we’re here.”

Sabrina peered in as they passed, gained an impression of soft darkness, then moved on lest she indeed become lost. For Mary knew her well, and was very likely correct.

They were taken in two separate directions on the third floor, and Sabrina was left to discover her room on her own.

She circled it almost tentatively, like an animal sniffing out new territory. It was snug by the standards of the rest of La Montagne, she suspected. A healthy fire leaped in the hearth, and it had been burning for some time, she surmised, as the room was filled with warmth. Shades of lavender and gray surrounded her—in the carpet—which proved plusher than spring grass and featured fringed ends, and in the chairs and counterpane and curtains, which hung in heavy twilight-colored folds, gleaming dully. Sabrina fingered them; they looked like ball gowns. She began to wonder just how many dresses she could make from one.

And then she playfully wound herself all the way up in one and stepped out to admire herself before the mirror. She turned this way and that.

She did have a best dress packed in her trunk. It was about five years old, but the color was timeless, or so she’d been assured, and tremendously flattering, as it was a sea shade, and made her eyes shine almost as green as new leaves. It was cut low enough to show just the top of her bosom, the sleeves were puffed, and it was in fine enough condition, as she seldom wore it in Tinbury. There was a spot near the hem from a splashed ratafia last Christmas, but one would only notice it if one were perhaps admiring her slippers. She hoped no one intended to examine her slippers, as they were rather older than her dress.

Sabrina smoothed the curtain down in front of her. She decided that she looked well in mauve, too. She smiled at that decision. And then glanced up only to meet the eyes of the housekeeper in the mirror.

She whirled about. “Oh! Mrs. Bailey!”

She blushed and reflexively curtsied, inadvertently using the curtain instead of her skirts, which made her eyes burn with horror. Mortified, she released the curtain, and watched, helplessly, as it spiraled and whipped from around her as though she were a mummy being unwrapped.

It fell back into place against the window with a soft rustle.

Mrs. Bailey watched the curtain fall back into place with no discernible change of expression: no censure, no twinkle of amusement. Sabrina had the sense that she might have been discovered stark naked, sawing away at a cello, and Mrs. Bailey still would not have flinched. Then again, if Mrs. Bailey was employed by The Libertine, and if any of the rumors about him proved to be true, she’d no doubt seen things a good deal more thrilling than a girl in a curtain dress.

“May I bring up some tea and refreshment, Miss Fairleigh? You’ll find a basin of water in the corner. Dinner will be served at eight o’clock. The earl will dine with you then.”

Meaning, perhaps, that the guests would entertain themselves until he deigned to join them.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bailey. I should like some tea, if it’s not too much trouble.” And then she nearly bit her lip, because the job of housekeepers such as Mrs. Bailey was to take trouble for guests, and she suspected she’d revealed how callow she truly was.

“I shall bring tea, then, Miss Fairleigh. Will there be anything else?”

Did she dare ask the question?

“Can you tell me whether a Mr. Geoffrey Gillray has arrived?” Sabrina tried not to sound too eager about it.

“He has not yet arrived, Miss Fairleigh, though he is expected today.”

Sabrina wondered if she had been indiscreet in asking, but then realized the housekeeper probably cared little about the affairs of a girl she’d never before seen and would likely never see again after this fortnight had passed.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bailey.”

Rhys strode back into the house, back into the sitting room where Wyndham was enjoying a cigar and waiting for Rhys to join him for a promised game of billiards.

Wyndham took one look at his face, plucked his cigar from his mouth, and asked, “As usual, I see she’s done wonders for your temper. Why in God’s name did you invite Sophia?”

Rhys gave him an incredulous, speaking look.

Wyndham smiled slightly. “Besides that.”

“Because she’ll…prevent me from being bored. Because she might sing. If the moon is in the correct phase, that is. If the color of the room suits her.”

“If the dinner is to her liking,” Wyndham contributed.

“If the temperature is just so,” Rhys added.

There was a pause.

“God, why
did
I invite Sophia?” Rhys groaned.

Wyndham laughed.

He’d invited Sophia because she was his talisman against boredom, he supposed, and he had a horror of boredom. Ever since the publication of
The Secret to Seduction,
trembling, fawning women were everywhere he turned. He hadn’t lacked for feminine attention before, of course, as he was an earl, and a war hero, and far from ugly. But with that bloody book of poetry, he’d inadvertently robbed himself of the pleasure of conquest.

Apart, that was, from Sophia.

With Sophia Licari…well, he was reminded of the time he’d dangled a watch so a cat could chase the dancing reflection of it. The beast would pounce on the spot of light, only to lift its paw in surprise to discover it had caught nothing at all. But when the reflection darted away again, the cat had continued the chase. Dazzled in spite of itself. Chasing just to chase.

He suspected Sophia had no substance, that she was all reflection, a vessel for a glorious voice, but he never could quite put a finger on her charm. It was the wondering that made him come back, that kept him curious enough to play her games. He supposed she had a right to keep from being bored as well. Perhaps experimenting with prodding his temper was
her
way of entertaining herself.

And Sophia was to singing what The Libertine was to poetry. He could forgive her almost anything when she sang.