Page 27 of A Proposition for the Comte
‘No. But he was the sort that Harland enjoyed most—a man of subservience and gratuitous compliments.’
Crossing the room, she poured each of them a drink. The cognac was from Charente and the best that money could buy. This could not go on, these half-truths they were telling each other, for she felt that she was simply standing on air. Squaring her shoulders, she turned.
‘Who are you, Comte de Beaumont, and why are you asking such questions of me?’
‘Why do you think I am here?’ He was so good at turning the question back on the one who had asked it.
‘I think that you are investigating my husband.’
There, it was said, out in the open where she could not take it back.
‘Everything I hear about Harland Addington makes me dislike him.’
She took a good sip of the brandy.
‘There were a few good parts.’
‘Such as?’
‘He spent much of the year away from our estate.’
‘So absence did not make the heart grow fonder?’
She ignored that and posed her own query. ‘Who do you work for?’
‘The Ministère de la Guerre in Paris.’
An unexpected honesty. She’d heard of them, of course, the shadowy and powerful arm of Napoleon’s policing of the city. No small and insignificant group. The shock of it held her still.
‘Your husband is accused of stealing gold sent to him from France for purposes he failed to deliver on. I found a document a few days ago saying as much with his name and yours upon it.’
The words fell like sharpened swords on any hope that he represented a neutral ground or that it was for some other misdemeanour her husband was being followed. ‘I do not know what you speak of. I never signed any such agreement.’
And there it was again, that trust. She told him things she had never allowed another to know before. It was astonishing.
‘If this blows up publicly, you will be implicated.’
I am already, she almost said, almost blurted it out here in the silence and with the cold of the winter licking at the night. But it was not just her story to tell and there was danger for anyone whose identity was exposed. How well she understood that.
Aurelian de la Tomber filled the room as he stood before her, huge and beautiful and overwhelming. He looked as if he was planning to go. She saw him glance towards the door, measuring the passage of space and poised to leave her.
Reaching out, she laid one hand across his arm, feeling the strength in muscle and sinew. For so very long she had been careful, anonymous. For all the years of her adult life she had barely made one decision that only affected herself and her happiness.
‘I am sorry for the lies between us, but I cannot make it different.’
His eyes caught in the firelight.
‘Cannot because you are a part of it or will not because you are protecting somebody else?’
The truth of that observation seared into the heart of her own connections. He was undeniably clever and he told her the way of it without any apology to her sensitivities.
A dangerous man, then. A beautiful one, as well. A man who inhabited her dreams.
‘Say you do not want me here, Violet, and I will leave this second.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t, for the words of denial stuck in her throat. Then she was in his arms, his mouth claiming hers hard. An elemental taking, his tongue probing deep, one hand winding into the bright of her hair. She tipped back her head and opened further, the melting of her resistance simply taking her breath away.
Harland had never kissed her like this. He had never possessed her. This was not a pretty, quiet kiss or an ordered one. No, Aurelian de la Tomber took, greedily and completely, twisting her so that he could come in further, owning the right of it, stamping his need.
