Page 33 of Lord Ashley's Beautiful Alibi
She chuckled and played on. He closed the double doors and paused as the click of the latch permeated the room. They’d have privacy for this conversation, as she clearly needed. She had come to him in the middle of the afternoon, and he’d ask if she’d arrived in full view of all in the courtyard or come through the servants’ entrance at the back alley. However she had come, he rejoiced that she had come to him.
He strolled toward her. He was so pleased she was here. She wore a gown of silk the color of water, iridescent blue and greens that swirled like eddies over her breasts and the tops of her shapely shoulders and arms. He itched to feel the beauty of her body’s synchrony, but then, to put his hands on her, he’d stop the music. And he had rules. With her for this now, he remained a gentleman.
He’d not talked with her since the financier’s party. It was as if she had disappeared like a sylph. A spirit of air and his imagination. Until yesterday along the avenue as he sat in a street-side café lunching with a winevendeurand she was once more flesh and blood and beauty. “I worried you were ill once more. I asked about for you.”
“So I have heard.”
He stood at the edge of the keyboard. She looked healthy and played with a devotion and an expertise he marveled at. “You are well?”
“I am.”
He sat down beside her. Her fresh spring cologne wafted over him. He clasped his hands together to keep from gathering her close. “I saw you yesterday. You should have come and spoken to me.”
*
“Augustine,” he saidso low she nearly did hear him over her rendition. “Have you stopped following me?”
She continued to play and knew not how she managed. She wished to throw herself into Ashley’s arms, but that would be so rash. So she executed the bars perfectly, though her mind ran to the two men who had tracked her from the baths of St. Denis south to Montmartre.
“Augustine, I’ve missed you.”
Ashley’s words were ambrosia to her, a plea to stop and talk to him, but she used the music as her barricade. She’d rehearsed what she needed to say, but knew not how to trust that she would speak without sputtering with fear.
“Will you stop to talk to me?” he asked in that voice that poured solace on her fear like sweet honey. “It is why you are here, and I don’t wish to fight for the floor.”
She took the piece topianissimo, forcing her mind to reason—and him as he inched toward her. Him, as he put his hands to the keyboard and accompanied her little Mozart song…until she stopped playing. He went on for a few bars. She smiled at him in thanks and praise, but her expression was a pitiful, helpless thing. “You did not tell me you played.”
He put his hands in his lap. “If you talked to me more, you would know much about me. I am thrilled you have come to visit me, Raven.”
She tipped her face up higher to more fully consider his handsome one. His eyes were that hot ice she adored, hoodedand needy. His face much too handsome. The proportions of forehead to cheek to jaw, the wide arches of his brows, the straight line of his nose, his lips. Oh, God, his lips were the wide, firm, manly form that sculptors would envy and emulate. He was too striking for this proposition she had for him. Too kind and much too dangerous to even approach. But she would. “Am I Raven?”
“You are,” he told her with a look that spoke of his fond remembrance and regard. “My beauty from the road.”
He was much too devastating to her reason, as well. She grinned, but it was all pretense. “You mean the one with the breadcrumbs in her mouth?”
“Yes. The one who bit me.”
She rolled her eyes. And began to play again.
He put his hands on hers. “Why are you here? Eh? In the middle of the afternoon?”
She met his gaze. He appeared so cool, so collected, and she was so distraught. She had an urgent need to capture all she could from the moment, if only she had means. And he…he was her means. “Time ticks by.”
He waited, his beautiful ice-gray eyes languid with the sweep of his thick black lashes.
She went back to her keyboard, the music, distraction. He let her play alone. “I need a favor.”
“I see. What is it?”
She began her rehearsed appeal. “If you will help me, I can help you. I have friends, associates, connections who would be useful to you in your trade negotiations.”
“I am certain you would open many doors for me and my mission.” He studied her, searching and finding with his haunting eyes her anxiety. She knew the moment he saw it because he paled. “You bargain with me, Augustine? Why? You needn’t. If it is something I can do, I will.”
She seized her courage. To accomplish what she had to do, she would be safer with him than she was now alone. She paused her play, but did not face him. “I need you to pretend we are lovers.”
She heard him catch his breath.
“Augustine, look at me. Does Vaillancourt threaten you?”
