Page 56 of A Proposition for the Comte
‘Swift. You are libidinous and mischievous and strong.’
‘Aurelian.’
‘Yes, Violet?’
‘Make love to me again.’
‘Ah, my red-headed libidinous lady, that I will.’
The following day when he came to escort her to Wake’s Hotel he looked more beautiful than she had ever seen him. Dressed in his city clothes, the green of his jacket brought out the gold of his eyes and slim-fitting breeches showed off the line of his legs.
In the early afternoon among company it was if they were different people altogether, her hand on his sleeve, his courtly manners, the way she could barely glance at him without feeling how he had made her feel when he was inside her.
The waiters ushered them to an alcove near the double-sashed front windows. Outside it was grey and cold. Inside, though, the burgundy of the plush decor added a warmth and a richness.
‘I hope you will enjoy the meal, Violet.’
Aurelian’s words were quiet and she saw him glance around to take in the faces of the other three or four couples. He sat against the wall, side on, his chair tilted to the room. A place where he could see everything that went on around him.
‘It looks lovely.’
The waiter had come with a bottle of wine and he spoke of its recommendations at length. ‘It’s French,’ Aurelian explained after the waiter left. ‘From the Luberon, a region where the sun shines always. I know it well for my family has land there.’
The de la Tombers were as wealthy as Antonia had proclaimed them to be and that fact worried Violet. Almost every pound she had salvaged from her marriage to Harland had gone into retaining the town house in Chelsea. She was existing now on the crumbs of money left and, apart from a small amount of jewellery, she had little to her name. She could never have afforded to come to eat at a place like this.
The bubble of pleasure shivered somewhat and she took in a deep breath. She was ruined in so many ways that it made no sense at all for Aurelian to be here. Courting her.
She could see others in the room watching them, or watching him, a man who looked as if he was born to the high life. Why had he detoured and become a spy? What had made him turn his back on a life of ease?
‘I was relieved when my husband died.’ It slipped out unbidden, this travesty, and could not be taken back.
‘Relieved enough to take the blame for his passing?’
She did not answer.
‘I told you of my wife and how I failed to protect her. She was drowned in the river. What I did not say was that Veronique was with a lover at the time, a friend whom we both knew. A man who decided if he could not have her permanently then no one else would.’
‘Where is this man now?’
‘Dead.’
‘By your hand?’
‘No. By his own. He found a pistol and shot himself the day her body was brought up from the Seine.’
These secrets he gave were welcomed because she saw in them a distance she understood.
‘I found survival in a cause after that, the cause of freedom and justice and Napoleon Bonaparte’s New France. For even now knowing all that he wasn’t, he was still a man of bravery. He wanted the people who’d been disenfranchised by history to rise up again and take their allotment in what was owed. He wanted the power himself, too, of course, the new leader of a changing France.’
‘What of the aristocratic de Lorraine-Lillebonnes? Were they to be a part of this new guard, too?’
‘I think my father was too caught in the old ways of privilege and would have found it difficult to have given away any rights. As for me? I have walked in my job in both the camps of plenty and of poverty and once you do that it is impossible not to understand that people are all the same really. They want food and shelter and an occupation that is honourable. They want a dream, too, and the chance for more. And they need to love. A spouse, children, family, a place. To love well is to belong.’
His words sent a chill across her. She had never loved well or been loved or belonged. Her mother had died when she was ten and her father and his new wife had found her to be a nuisance. Harland had not loved her, either, despite his proclamations of doing so in the first month of their courtship. He’d loved money. He’d loved his position in society. He’d coveted more of both and tried to use her to obtain it until he’d realised he couldn’t and so he had thrown her away, too.
Amaryllis Hamilton was the closest she had ever come to loving since losing her mother, a woman who mourned a husband taken too soon and whose poor financial position had made it imperative that she seek shelter at her family home of Addington.
‘Once I thought I’d be a famous jeweller. I dreamed of necklaces and rings and bracelets wrought from the purest gold imaginable. When I mustered the courage to show Papa the designs I’d drawn in my journal he only laughed. He said that it was foolish to want things one could never have and that I would be married before the summer was out and happy with babies and a great house to run. I truly think that he believed this. He made me believe it, too.’
