The Seduction (6 page)

Alden sat for a moment,
staring at the house and the scattering of cattle in the grounds.

His
cows - unless he lost
this wager.

His fields, his crops,
his woods, his fish in the ponds.

His inheritance, with all
of its encumbrance of tenants and retainers, as well as the responsibilities
he'd voluntarily taken on, believing at the time he could afford it.
Gracechurch Abbey, his ancestral home and the seat of what little power and
wealth he had ever possessed - until the madness of one night's gaming.

Α
fierce possessiveness took him by the throat.
Nowhere else and nothing else
had ever belonged to him. Nowhere else in the world bore his name. He was on
the edge of losing it forever.

He
must
bed Juliet Seton by the end of the
week. He could imagine nothing more enticing. Her round ankles and graceful
wrists; the smooth, creamy skin. He wanted his hands on her, his lips. He
wanted to bury himself in her soft, female flesh.

Yet as he remembered her face, severe, lovely,
bent over the shelled peas, the desire almost dissolved in a sea of questions.
She seemed to be a lady, yet she lived by herself and did her own work? No one
had no family at all - no cousins, uncles, aunts. Even if she had no living
relatives, a respectable widow always had friends, social connections, to find
her a home. How could this Juliet be completely alone in the world?

It spoke uncomfortably of disaster, like her
name. Or of a forbidding secret. This Miss Parrett she'd mentioned - who the
devil was she? And why Manston Mingate?

Damnation! He didn't
want
to know. There
was a fortune at stake. Α fortune and more lives than just theirs - one in
particular whose existence meant more than all the rest combined.

For a moment he thought of riding up to the house
and routing Sherry out of bed. Sleepy blue eyes would open and stare up into
his. Plump arms would wrap joyously about his neck. Then the child's tutor
would subtly admonish Lord Gracechurch for costing the boy his sleep and
exciting him over nothing.

Mr. Primrose would be right. Alden couldn't stay.
He had a widow to seduce.

It was his one undisputed talent. It would not be
difficult to find excuse enough in himself to do it. What was her virtue to
Juliet Seton? She wasn't an innocent. She had been married. He would steal his
prize and take her locket as proof, but he would pay for that theft with a
wealth of pleasure - worshipful, delectable, slow. Whether her marriage had
been happy or sad, she would not be the loser.

Perhaps she wasn't even a lady, but an actress
practiced in aping her betters. There was, after all, only one other thing -
besides tragedy - that could account for her living alone. That one thing was
sin.

His qualms dissolved in a cornucopia of
voluptuous images. Alden turned his horse's head and rode back to Manston
Μingate and the tiny room at the Three Tuns.

JULIET FACED THE NEXT MORNING WITH Α
HEADACHE. IT WAS overbearingly hot, threatening unreleased thunder. She had
slept badly, disturbed by dreams. George glowered at her, his black brows
beetled together, as she ran endlessly down the corridors of a great country
mansion, throwing open door after door. Every room was empty, but when she
reached the window at the end of the hall and looked down into the courtyard,
Mr. Alden Granville was there. Golden, graceful in the sunshine and far too beautiful,
he flung himself back into a border of massed white flowers. Α wave of
scent rushed up to envelop her.

"The bees!" she shouted through the
window. "The bees!"

He looked up from the multitude of petals, his
shirt collar open to reveal his strong white throat, and laughed - while the
flowers began to buzz angrily, so that she awoke with a start.

Juliet climbed from her bed and walked to the
front window. Her garden lay beneath her in its orderly rows. So he claimed to
have met a. Mr. Seton in St. James's. Perhaps he had, but he had not met
George, her disastrous husband. Plus, if Mr. Granville had been in London then,
he would have heard of the scandal. Though, of course, there was no reason why
he should connect it with her. Seton had not been her name at the time.

She forced herself to be calm, not to panic, but
the dark fear beat at her heart. He had revealed a further deception in that
last formal speech and court bow - the gesture of a man who knew his own power
and had the conceit to show it or hide it as he desired. He was not merely a
gentleman down on his luck, he was an aristocrat.

Why had he chosen not to reveal that?

And why was he here, in Manston Mingate?

Barely conscious that she had laid one palm over
her locket, Juliet turned from the window. Very probably she had seen the last
of him anyway. Alden Granville would hardly return to be faced with some menial
task in exchange for another chess game. And with poor Tilly sick, there was a
great deal of work to do and no time for a headache or thoughts of this man.

After her regular chores, Juliet draped herself
in her blue smock and went through the house to her stillroom. It was time to
bottle her cowslip wine. Two and a half pounds of sugar, two lemons and four
quarts of wild cowslips, gathered in May, had been added ο each two
gallons of pure water. The wine had been fermenting in the barrel for a month.
Several bottles had been ordered by the parsonage, more by Mistress Caxton in
Upper Mingate, the next village. It was one of Juliet's small sources of extra
income.

She opened the tiny north-facing window and left
the outside door ajar so that air from the shadowed courtyard could flow
through the room. The floor beneath. her feet was flagged with stone, making
the place invitingly cool. Α cast-iron handle worked a pump which brought
water up from the well when she needed it, splashing the excess into a shallow
stone sink. She took her crates of clean empty bottles and began to transfer
the bright liquid into each one, content, concentrating on the task.

Α man' s voice dropped into the silence,
like honey from a comb.

"'Neither must you let it work too long in
the butt, as it will be apt to take off the sweetness and flavor of the fruit
or flowers from which it is made. Let your vessels be clean and dry, and before
you put in the wine, give them a rinse with a little brandy,' " the voice
read - then with a flash of humor: "Alternatively it seems to me you may
drink the brandy and save yourself a great deal of work."

Juliet looked up. Mr. Granville stood, as golden
as the wine, in the doorway. He held her little leather-bound housekeeping book
and was reading aloud from it.

She set down the wine bottle before she should
drop it, flushed with her awareness of him.

Today he wore a blue velveteen coat over a long
waistcoat embroidered with silver thread on peach satin. No longer in riding
boots, he had walked from the Three Tuns in black buckled shoes, a little dusty
from the road. Except for the lack of powder in his hair, it was the grooming
any gentleman might use to make a formal call on a lady: a lady he was
courting. But, of course, he was not courting. He was here in the village for a
week and bored, that was all. His comment about her late husband had been random.
It meant nothing. They had met only because Mr. Granville had been ill,
momentarily helpless.

Yet he was not helpless now. His presence filled
the room, a bold masculine power, tempered only by his grace and the laughter
barely hidden in his voice. In spite of everything, Juliet knew that she wanted
it, the humor and the intelligence. In spite of everything, she wanted
him,
to
fill the dreadful void of her days.

But it was too late. Too late. Thanks to George,
her days must remain forever empty.

Oh, God, don't let this happen! Please, please,
please!

"'When the wine has done fermenting, bung it
up close, and after being properly settled, it will draw to your wishes.' Will
it, Mistress Seton?"

"What are you doing here, sir?" She
hated the panic she could hear in her voice.

"I'm sorry. It was unforgivable for me to
startle you. Let me assist you."

She pulled back, almost wildly. “No! Let it be!
Why have you come back?"

He closed the book and set it on the slate shelf.
"Only to play chess, ma'am. One game a day was our wager, was it not? You
gave me your word."

"Ι have a great deal to do."

"Then allow me to help. That was also part
of our bargain."

"No! Later! Ι can do this by
myself."

"Then I’ll wait unti1 you're finished.
Ι sha11 be in the garden." With a slight nod of his go1den head, he
was gone. Juliet leaned against the stone sink and 1aid her forehead against
the cold pump handle. The iron was beaded with tiny drops of condensation.
After a moment she rubbed the moisture over her face with both hands.

She had taken α wager! She had promised!
Α chess game each day for a week.
And foolishly, foolishly, she wanted it, because
the wine and the bees and the flower garden couldn't play chess, and the
villagers couldn't challenge her wits, and underneath all of her care and her
efficiency, she was hideously lone1y.

As she turned, her elbow caught the half-filled
wine bottle and sent it toppling toward the floor. Somehow, in a desperate
swoop, she caught the green glass before it shattered on the stone, but liquid
spilled across the front of her skirt, soaking her with the wild scent of
cowslips. She sat down on a three-legged stool for a moment, while her damp
petticoats clung to her legs.

Damn him! Damn him and his golden charm and the
lovely, enticing curl to his lip. Damn him and his deliberate ruse to pursue
her!

For she saw it clearly now. The offer of a chess
game. He had mown it would disarm her and he had known he wou1d win. But his
illness had been genuine enough, so cou1d his presence otherwise be a
coincidence? Had he once met some Mr. Seton? The innkeeper had very likely
spoken of her and told Mr. Granville she was widowed. There cou1d not be any
real threat there, could there?

He was bored. No more. It was just chance that he
was here. She had taken a wager. She had promised.

Why not meet it with audacity?

With a wry smile, Juliet took up the clean towel
lying by the sink and mopped her skirts. She looked about the small room at the
neat rows of bottles, the whitewash peeling s1ightly from the spot on the north
wall where the damp crept in, the scrubbed shelves and the worn stone floor:
all the evidence of her years of struggle and discipline.

Whether she ignored it or tried to laugh at herself,
loneliness contaminated her days, immune to her attempts to chase it away. She
had been lonely even when Miss Parrett shared the house. Now loneliness waited
in the empty corners and echoed about the garden. Yet she had won something
close to equanimity - a kind of calm, practical acceptance - through hard work
and a saving sense of humor.

Now this man, with his insolence and his
certainty of conquest, threatened her life like a summer thunderstorm, with its
towering clouds swept by high winds and carrying hail, to batter down her
flowers and her runner beans, flood her hen coop and her beehives, and ruin all
hope of security for the coming winter.

Α vision of the golden Mr. Granville
incongruously found among her staked runner beans caught her out. She felt a
gurgle of laughter. It welled up to swamp all of her prudence and reticent
pride, and tinge her thoughts with a bright edge of hysteria.

Juliet swallowed her mirth and methodically
continued her bottling. If Mr. Alden Granville wished to wait among the sweet
peas, he would have to wait for two more hours at least. Maybe another bee
would come along and sting him in the meantime.

LORD
EDWARD VANE REINED IN HIS MOUNT
SUPREMELY elegant, he sat his horse with careless grace and stared across the
valley toward Manston Mingate. The church spire towered above a thick grouping
of trees, but no houses were visible. Α black tricorn sat firmly on top of
his wig. His face was as heavily powdered as always, though he had replaced the
heart-shaped patches that he wore for evening with plain round ones. They did
little to disguise his smallpox scars.

Sir Reginald Denby scowled at his back. He did
not like being forced to straddle a horse.

"So Gracechurch has begun the courtship, has
he? Already gained access to her house? Damn his eyes! How the devil did he do
it?"

The duke's son tapped
gently at his lip with the butt of his riding crop. "Courtship? You think
he intends to wed her? My dear sir, nothing is less likely,
Ι
assure you."

"
I think he will ravish her-"

"But this lady is
hardly a virgin plucked fresh from the school room, who would simply squeal
and faint into the arms of a lover.
Ι
fear Mistress Juliet would very likely unman one with a glance -
though not Gracechurch, of course, if rumor is correct. He has such a lovely
reputation.
Ι
would so like to
discover that it's true."