Before entering her house, she looked up the façade as if something invisible called for her attention. She caught a flash of a white cap at a window before it disappeared. Jocelyn had been watching them. Or else Mrs. Finley had.
Chapter Fourteen
Clara sat at her library table with paper, ink, and pen. She tried to plan the next edition ofParnassus.
It was not going well. Her mind dwelled elsewhere, not on the mix of essays and articles that might appeal to women readers.
While she ate her dinner, a few hard truths had presented themselves. They demanded attention and contemplation, and since she could not remove them from her mind, she faced them squarely now.
First, Theo had seen her with Stratton and drawn conclusions that were not warranted. She would be lucky not to find her grandmother placing an engagement announcement in the papers before the week was out.
Second, while the two of them had not attracted much attention, they had been seen together. After spending time with each other at Brentworth’s party, rumors were bound to start.
Third, she had learned the history of their families’ old feud, and in telling it Stratton had blamed her father far more than his. She thought that ungallant. If he had not kissed her, she would have pointed out how unfair his interpretation had been. Only he had, and once more caused her to forget too quickly why she was not supposed to like him or to accept his company and how those rumors of his seeking revenge might be true and might even touch on her family.
Four—she sighed heavily when she admitted this—unless her astonishment led her to misunderstand, or unless Stratton spoke in poetic euphemisms, she had all but given him permission to do things to her that she had never realized men did to any women, least of all women like her.
Finally—she sighed again, at her lack of good sense—she might have also allowed him to think she was agreeable to an affair. Which she was not. A kiss now and then was one thing. An affair would be too delicious—no, not delicious! Where had that word come from? Rash and dangerous, that was what it would be.
She repeated those two words again in her mind. She focused on them. She pictured herself explaining that to him. Except he looked magnificent in her imagination, that little smile forming while she disabused him of that entire notion. Then he interrupted her with a kiss, and a hundred sparkles of excitement enlivened her in that fantasy. And in reality too, where she sat on the chair.
She got hold of herself and forced her attention again to her blank paper. She picked up her pen and dipped it, determined to do more this evening than swoon over the Duke of Stratton. She had allowed too much familiarity, and look where it had brought her. To secretly relishing just how dangerous a man could be.
* * *
Adam prowled his house, pacing through its immense chambers and halls. His banyan billowed behind him. He had unbuttoned it because its warmth smothered him. He felt no night chill, even with many of the windows open. Rather the opposite. A discomfort like a fever tormented him.
The heat burned in his head more than his body. Erotic images and impulses lodged there. Nothing had dispelled them. Not reading. Not burying himself in estate accounts. Not itemizing what he had and had not learned about the intrigue surrounding his father’s death.
Immersing himself in those details had been a desperate, futile attempt to break Clara’s hold on him. Everything indicated her father had added fuel to the fire of those rumors and possibly started them himself. The dowager may well have urged him on. Her current belated efforts to forge a peace all but said so.
He still cared about that, furiously so, but thinking about Clara kept interfering with the righteous anger he had carried back from France. Her blind loyalty to her father, seen again just this afternoon, mattered now, even if it had not at first. When he first decided to pursue her, it had been an impulse born of lust and revenge, an oblique way to prod old enemies by taking possession of that family’s most privileged and prized daughter. Now he envisioned her hurt if he discovered things that impugned the late earl.
Duty, duty. He chanted that word in his mind when he found himself making excuses for not doing what he needed to do, all because of a woman. He could not ignore that the more he knew her, the more she weakened his resolve. Who would care if he let history lie buried? Not his mother.
His strides took him to the gallery outside the ballroom. Moonlight streamed in the long windows on one side of the long hall, giving form to the benches and plants and framed images. He walked down its length beneath the gazes of ancestors until he came to his father’s portrait. He had not sought out that painting, but he stopped when he saw it.
He and his father did not look much alike. Adam took after his mother more. His father had been thoroughly English, with a long, full face and intelligent eyes. He wore a white wig in the portrait, and a vague smile. He had looked nothing like that the last time Adam saw him, and it was that last view that remained vivid in his memory now. Perhaps if his father had known what a pistol ball to the temple did to a body, he would have chosen another way.
Duty, duty. He could not turn back, of course. Acknowledging his duty did not banish thoughts about Clara or even cause him to weigh his choices rationally. He strode on, pacing through the night, fighting a battle that he knew a man almost never won, against the urge to possess a woman he desired.
* * *
Not for the first time that night Clara broke out of sleep and into wakefulness. She twisted in her bed, pulling the sheet and coverlet this way and that, turning on her side. While she thumped her pillows, her eyes opened for a moment. Yellow and silver light pooled on her bedclothes. Fully awake now, she looked at her window. The drapes were drawn back, and light from both the moon and the square’s streetlamps filtered in like fairy dust.
She thought she had seen Jocelyn close the drapes. Apparently not. Annoyed by her maid’s carelessness, she hopped out of bed and padded over to do it herself.
“Do not. With no lamp, I will not be able to see you if you do that.”
Her hand clutched the drapery while her body froze in shock. She pivoted. Stratton sat in a chair across her chamber, as relaxed as if he owned the house. In fact, it appeared he had been sitting there some time, from the way his legs stretched out and the manner in which he rested his head on one bent arm’s hand.
“What—How did you get up here?”
“Your housekeeper let me in. I knocked, she arrived at the door in dishabille, and with one look she turned and brought me up. She was good enough to point to your door before continuing to the next level.”
“What bizarre behavior.”
“She seemed to think you expected me.” He drew in his legs and leaned forward while he shrugged off his frock coat.
