A shocked gasp burst from her lips.

He continued his stinging diatribe. "The gossip has begun circulating," he hissed. Her body felt awash in shame with the truth she'd been discovered in Lucien's arms, shame which had nothing to do with his station in the marquess' household and everything to do with her longing for a man who would never want her. "You were seen at London Hospital."

"What?" she blurted and blinked at him.

He slashed a hand through the air. "I've learned you were seen visiting London Hospital without a chaperone, paying a visit to men. In their beds."

By G.o.d, this is what he should find an egregious offense? A hysterical giggle escaped her lips. What would he say if he were to discover she'd been pa.s.sionately kissing Lord Lucien, a man in the Marquess of Drake's employ? He'd likely find that the kind of offense punishable by hanging. Her giggling increased and she buried it in her hands. Her efforts proved futile as it escaped through her fingers, all the more d.a.m.ning for it being the sole sound in the otherwise silent room.

"Do you find this a matter of humor, Eloise?" his barking question more reminiscent to a stern papa with a recalcitrant child than an annoyed brother-in-law. In fairness, he was a good deal more than annoyed.

Not for the first time since her husband's pa.s.sing she gave thanks for the magnanimous terms of the contract that had seen her cared for in the unfortunate event of his demise. Modestly comfortable with earnings of one-third of his properties, he'd seen to it that she'd never be dependent upon another man. She was never more grateful than staring at his rabid brother with spittle forming at the corner of his fleshy lips.

"Do you have nothing to say?"

She composed herself, schooling her features into a collected mask that conveyed little, knowing in his inability to do so, he'd only be more infuriated by her response. "There is nothing shameful in my visits to London Hospital."

His blond eyebrows shot to his hairline.

Eloise took a step toward him, emboldened by his silence. "The men there are heroes." And lonely. A p.r.i.c.k of needle-like pain stuck in her heart in thinking of Lucien as one of those heroes, alone. The solitary man described by the marchioness and it only fed her infuriation with the earl. "And if it brings them a measure of peace, my being there, then I intend to visit." Her voice increased in volume under the force of her emotion. "Whether or not that offends your sensibilities." Her chest heaved. "Have I made myself clear, my lord?"

He sputtered. "Abundantly." He gave a disgusted toss of his head, dislodging an oiled blond curl over his high brow. "My brother would be ashamed by your ac-"

She cut into his words. "If you believe he would be ashamed by my actions, then you didn't know your brother." Eloise strode to the door. "Now, if you'll excuse me, my lord. It is late." She paused and pasted a hard smile on her lips. "And I have plans for tomorrow morning." That now, in addition to her shameful visit with the marchioness, would first include a visit to London Hospital.

He gave her a long, black look and then stalked out of the room.

The tension went out of her and her shoulders sagged with the weight of relief at his departure. She returned to her secretaire and stared at the black ink marring the page, the three word greeting penned, now undecipherable. Only looking at the blank pages before her, the heinous accusations leveled at her by her brother-in-law infiltrated her thoughts and she could not shake them free. Would her husband have found her actions scandalous? Knowing the supportive man he'd been, she would have wagered all her security as his widow, that he'd have supported any charitable ventures.

Eloise laid her arms upon the table and folded her hands together. What would he have said about her relationship with Lucien, though? She lowered her chin to her hands, her gaze absently trained on the thick, gold brocade curtains. She'd spoken of Lucien to Colin quite frequently. He'd, of course, known the stories of her childhood and part of the affection she'd had for Lucien. Much of the laughter they'd shared had been with the memories she'd imparted of Lucien and his brothers. Her marriage had never possessed the burning love that set hearts afire, but rather kind, comfortable companionship. No, there had been no grand pa.s.sion between them.

Unlike Lucien.

She pressed her eyes closed. In the time she'd been wed, in all the awkward visits Colin had paid to her bedchamber, her body had never thrilled with desire for his touch.

Then there was Lucien. Their relationship had never been one of volatile emotion. They were merely two emotionally charged persons who'd had a powerful friendship. Never anything more. Just friendship. Only...Her lips burned with the memory of his kiss upon her lips, the memory of him forever stamped in her heart, mind, and now body. His commanding possession of her mouth had been no act of a friend.

Then, after what she intended, she would stake all the money left in her dowry that she'd not even have Lucien's friendship.

Eloise picked up the pen once more...and wrote.

Chapter 9.

The following afternoon, Eloise stood outside the Marchioness of Drake's townhouse. She'd written the note. Eloise frowned at the door. "It is a good deal harder being furtive when the gentleman in question is in fact-" Her words died as Lucien pulled the door open.

He glared down at her.

-It was a good deal harder to be furtive when the gentleman happened to be the butler.

She gave him her winningest, I-do-not-have-any-underhanded-actions-planned-that-will-make-you-hate-me-forever smile and completed her step. "Hullo, Lucien."

"Remember yourself, madam." He gritted his teeth so loud, even with the s.p.a.ce between them and the carriage rattling by, she heard the snap of them. He glanced up and down the street and, for the span of a heartbeat, she thought he intended to slam the door in her face. For all his ire with her for making a nuisance of herself, he was first and foremost a gentleman and had a sense of honor where responsibilities and obligations were concerned. He motioned her inside.

A nervous stone settled in her stomach and before her courage deserted her, she sprinted up the steps. "Lucien," she greeted.

The footman who rushed forward to help her out of her cloak paused at the familiarity between her and the head servant. Lucien turned a glower on the handsome, liveried servant who gulped audibly and hurried off with her aquamarine, muslin cloak.

"You needn't be so surly with-"

"I'll not have you telling me how to handle my responsibilities." Odd, she should forget he was a servant and not the master of this great home. "Would you have servants gossiping about you?" he demanded on an angry whisper. "Imagine the scandal of the Countess of Sherborne carrying on with the Marquess of Drake's butler."

She considered her brother-in-law, the earl, last evening. Oh, she could very well imagine his outrage. If he'd been foaming at her visits to London Hospital, he'd have suffered an apoplexy for her extreme familiarity with Lucien. She gave a flounce of her curls. "No matter."

He took a threatening step toward her, backing her away. "No matter," he repeated on a menacing whisper.

Her back thumped against the doorframe and she shook her head. The door rattled at her back.

"Why, Eloise? Because you still harbor some illusion that I'm that n.o.bleman's son?"

She pointed her eyes to the ceiling. "Well, you are a viscount's son. That can't be undone." No matter how much he wished it. A startled squeak escaped her as he tugged her into an opened room. He closed the door behind them. Had it been anyone other than Lucien, she'd have trembled with terror. She swallowed hard. Even so, he was quite menacing in his ire.

He flexed his jaw. "Do you prefer the viscount's son to the servant, then?"

I prefer you in any way and every way. With one arm, two arms, no arms. "Well, the viscount's son was ever more charming."

His eyebrows dipped in a threatening fashion. It was so very wrong, but she reveled in his absolute lack of control. If he were indifferent toward her, their past, his family, he would be composed and unaffected...and he was not.

Lucien lowered his mouth close to hers and whispered against her lips, "Or perhaps you delight in the prospect of tupping a mere servant."

Eloise slapped him. The force of her blow snapped his head back. The stinging sound of flesh meeting flesh echoed in the corridor.

She widened her eyes. Oh, G.o.d, she had hit him. Granted she'd planted him any number of facers when he'd schooled her on lessons of defending herself. "L-Lucien," she whispered and covered her mouth with her palm. But this was different. This was Lucien the man whom she'd missed. He might be a foul fiend now, but for everything that had come before, he did not deserve her violence.

He touched his fingers hesitantly against the mark she'd left upon his skin and flexed his jaw several times.

She shook her head. "I am so sorry," she said on a rush, not because she feared him but because she'd struck him. Even if he had deserved it, she still would never inflict hurt-He'd certainly known enough of that. "I..."

A slow grin turned his lips up. Not the vicious, angry sneers he'd bestowed upon her too many times in a mere handful of days, but a true smile that reached his eyes. The silver flecks danced in the gray-blue depths. He was mad. There was no accounting for his unexplainable humor. "I find some rea.s.surance in knowing you put the lessons I gave you through the years to good use."

She smiled. "You remember that?"

Lucien chuckled. "Remember allowing you to slap me and punch me to be sure you knew how to properly defend yourself?" He touched his cheek once more. "Yes, I remember that well." His hand fell back to his side and his smile died, replaced by the unyielding, black look perpetually worn by him. "Have you had need of the lessons I imparted?"

She shivered at the lethal edge to the question that promised harm to any man who may have been the recipient of her wrath. "No, Lucien," she a.s.sured him. "I've lived quite an uneventful, staid life of a wedded young lady and now a widow." Her breath caught as he touched an unexpected hand to her cheek, cupping the flesh.

"And are there no scoundrels who've made a nuisance of themselves for a place in your bed?" He ran his thumb over her lower lip.

Her lips parted under the slight gesture. It was a seductive, teasing caress. Yearning for more, his kiss, more of his touch robbed her of practical thoughts and logic. What had he said? She tried to drum up an answer to his question. "I am not the scandalous sort, Lucien," she said at last, finding an answer. "I never have been." She couldn't keep the trace of hurt from those four words. With everything Lucien knew about her, how could he believe her capable of such indecency?

Lucien continued to move his coa.r.s.e, callused thumb higher. He gently rubbed the birthmark at the edge of her lip. "Ah, but that's not what I asked."

"Wh-what did you ask?" Her head fell back, knocking noisily against the door, and she tried desperately to dredge forth that question that had so offended.

"I asked if there were scoundrels vying for a place in your bed."

She wet her lips and his gaze dipped, following that slight movement. "I'm a widow, Lucien." For the limited interest she'd received when she'd made her Come Out, the moment she'd come out of mourning, she'd been besieged by a sea of suddenly interested, eager gentleman who desired nothing more than a "place in her bed" as Lucien so succinctly put it.

The grays of his eyes darkened, very nearly black. "Mr. Jones," he corrected.

She frowned. "Your name isn't Jones and I won't call you that. You are Lord Lucien Jonas and that is who you'll always be." He continued to study her through his thick, hooded gaze. At one time she'd known his thoughts better than she'd known even her own. Now, she probed, searching for hint of what he was thinking.

He wanted to kill every b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd dared put an indecent offer to her.

Wanted it with the same, savage ferocity that had driven him to bloodl.u.s.t in the thick of battle, an overwhelming, almost crippling sentiment that had nothing to do with the girl Eloise had been and everything to do with the woman she'd become.

And worse...the man he now was.

Lucien took in her full, red lips wondering at the men who'd also kissed her lips. Whole men. Gentlemen. n.o.blemen with intact limbs and unscarred bodies. Men who'd never entertained such vile, cowardly thoughts as ending their own lives and who'd languished in a hospital for years, willing themselves to die.

For the first time, he wanted to be whole again. For her.

"I used to know what you were thinking," Eloise confided softly. "No more."

"What I'm thinking would have you wilting in this parlor," he said with a matter-of-factness that brought her lips down in a small frown.

She squared her shoulders. "I'm far more resilient than you'd take me for."

A snide contradiction hovered on his lips, but something gave him pause, and he called the words back. A mature glint to her eyes, eyes that once had bore an innocence he'd shared in as a child. Yes, it seemed life had happened to Ellie, too. It wasn't his business, and yet for some inexplicable reason, he needed to know. "And have you taken a lover?" he asked with a bluntness that brought a crimson blush to her cheeks. That blush also served as an answer more powerful than a thousand words. A woman capable of that telling, innocent gesture had not accepted any of those indecent offers. Some of the tension eased from his frame.

"No," she said, confirming his silent supposition. She stroked his jaw, the sweetly, soothing gesture brought his lids closed, feeding a hunger he'd not realized he'd had for a warm, gentle touch. This touch. Eloise's touch. "I am lonely." Her wrenching admission brought his eyes open. "Yet even in my loneliness, I crave more than that empty meeting of two people."

He knew that same loneliness. Had known it since he returned from the Continent to confront a life in which the only person who'd sustained him through countless battles, was dead and gone, and with her, the son he'd never known. Only in this moment, with Eloise here, for the first time, he didn't feel alone. Lucien knew better than to ask dangerous questions that would only yield more dangerous answers. "What do you crave?" And yet, the question came anyway.

A wistful smile hovered on her lips. "You still don't know, do you?" she said, a quiet awe underscoring that question.

He stiffened.

She shook her head. "You never really saw me, did you?"

A blinding panic built inside his chest as he sought for words to stop the flow of the admission on her lips.

"You never realized that I loved you."

Oh, G.o.d.

He staggered away from her. His heart thumped loudly, deafeningly in his ears, drowning out logic and reason and leaving him with a numbing dread to the implications of Eloise's declaration.

She stepped away from the door, and advanced toward him. And G.o.d help him, he'd have chosen to face down Boney himself again and all his armies on the fields of battle than this young woman who'd have him reenter a world he no longer belonged in. "I don't expect those words from you, Lucien," she said pragmatically. "I know your heart was and forever will belong to Sara, but I wished I'd told you, even as I would have humbled myself at the feet of a man who loved another, because then mayhap when you returned from battle and found your wife and child gone, you'd have known there was another who desperately loved you and ached to help you resume living."

"Stop." The plea tore from him, desperate and hoa.r.s.e. He didn't want to imagine a world with Eloise silently loving him and him having so callously forgotten her. He was shamed by the wrongs he'd committed in dismissing her from his life.

Eloise proved more relentless than Wellington's soldiers at Waterloo, continued walking and stopped when the tips of their feet brushed. "And I know what happens from here, you'll forever resent me for it, but know I did everything I did for that love of you." She inclined her head. "Now, I really must see the marchioness."

He managed a jerky nod, even as her words confounded him. He focused on the overwhelming relief of the pardon and he spun on his heel. He didn't wait to see if she followed, knowing from the soft tread of her satin-slippered feet that she followed him from the parlor and trailed behind at a sedate, respectable pace. Lucien was never more grateful to step foot into another parlor. He cleared his throat. "The Countess of Sherborne," he said coolly.

The marchioness seated at the windowseat with a book on her lap, glanced up. She smiled and moved her gaze between him and Eloise. Never more had he resented his new post in the marquess' household, being made an object of scrutiny to Eloise. If he were still the viscount's son, he would have wheeled around and left. Instead of this pained, prolonged moment of waiting to be dismissed.

"That will be all, Jones," the marchioness said, politely inclining her head.

Lucien gritted his teeth. He should be glad to be well-rid of Eloise and the memories she represented. Yet, what was this niggling deep inside to remain precisely where he was and d.a.m.n the marchioness' orders to the Devil?

What in the h.e.l.l?

Eloise stepped into the room, her impossibly large eyes trained on him and as he took his leave, he rather thought fighting down those b.l.o.o.d.y Frenchmen on the field of battle would be preferable to facing these two determined women.

Chapter 10.

Eloise stared at the door Lucien had just fled through. He may as well have been a stranger to her now, with a gaping hole in the years of their friendship, but she well knew the look of horror she'd roused in his eyes with her admission. Hurt and fury warred for supremacy with outrage ultimately triumphing. How dare he treat her as though she were nothing more than a stranger? Why, if he returned, by G.o.d she'd clout him upon his head.

"Would you care to sit?" Emmaline questioned softly.

She jumped and flushed, turning her attention to the oft-smiling marchioness. "Uh, yes, thank you." The woman eyed her with a knowing gleam in her kindly eyes. Eloise claimed a seat on the powder blue sofa, reminded once more of the horrible person she herself was because of the niggling resentment that settled in her heart. The marchioness' presence had pulled Lucien back from the pit of despair...when Eloise hadn't been even a memory he'd carried.

She ran her fingers over the rose etched in the blue upholstery, the pale hue putting her in mind of that sky she and Lucien had once gazed at. Eloise picked her gaze up and found Emmaline patiently waiting. She forced her fingers to cease their distracted movement "I do not know if you remember what I'd mentioned several days ago." She looked to the doorway, ascertaining he was truly gone and then shifted her attention to Emmaline. "About Lucien...Lieutenant Jonas...Jones," she corrected a third time.

Emmaline glided over. Her sapphire blue skirts rustled as she claimed the spot beside Eloise. "I remember any number of things you shared with me." She waited and gave an encouraging nod.

"About..." Aware of a sudden of the volume of her voice, Eloise spoke in a hushed whisper. "Lieu...oh bother, would you be horribly scandalized and outraged if I were simply to refer to him by his Christian name?" she asked, never one to prevaricate.

A little laugh escaped the other woman. "Not at all. I imagine having been acquainted as children you are ent.i.tled that freedom."

"Yes, I suppose you are indeed correct." Eloise liked the marchioness more and more. And with every word to leave her lips, Emmaline chipped away at the unfair jealousy she'd carried since learning of Lucien's relationship with the lovely woman. "I had mentioned that a familial matter brought me here." Which was largely true, but not totally true. Her love had driven her search and determined effort to find him. She drew in a slow breath and tried to dredge up the words.