A Rose at Midnight Read online

  “So there is someone or something you care about,” Nicholas said. “I thought your emotions had vanished. Don’t think there’s anything Ellen can do to save you. She might be equally fond of you, but she can hardly come haring after us all over the country. You’ve seen the last of her, my pet. Accept it.”

  “I accepted it three days ago, when you dragged me away from Ainsley Hall.”

  “It was four days ago, ma mie. I’m glad to know the time has flown for you. I know I’ve been unspeakably cruel, when all you wanted to do was murder me. I do tend to lose my temper in the face of such minor inconveniences—it’s one of my besetting sins.” He took another sip. Tavvy had risen, moving toward the door.

  “When do you want me back?” he asked, and for the first time Ghislaine noticed that Tavvy seldom referred to his employer by a title or a name.

  Nicholas didn’t bother to glance at him—his dreamy, contemplative smile was all for Ghislaine’s wary figure. “Late tomorrow,” he said. “Take your time.”

  That solved the question of sleeping arrangements, she thought, not moving, not letting her face betray her. She rose slowly, clearing the table, as she let her mind run riot. There was no need for panic, she reminded herself. She had survived far worse than the man lounging negligently at the table, watching her. She had survived, stronger and more determined than ever. She would survive Nicholas Blackthorne.

  The weeks after she and Charles-Louis had arrived in Paris had been a horrific blur. The days they spent hiding—because even rough clothes and dirt couldn’t disguise their patrician origins from a bloodthirsty mob. The nights they spent foraging for food and fighting off the creatures that ruled the night. Creatures that at times had more interest in her beautiful, innocent young brother than in her.

  She knew the day it had happened, far too well. Twenty-three Thermidor on the new French calendar. They’d been two days without eating, and Charles-Louis had been crying incessantly, the rivulets of tears washing the filth from his face. She’d left him in the alleyway behind the wine shop, a safe enough place, while she’d gone to find a scrap of food. She’d found far more than she’d bargained for.

  Jean-Luc Malviver. She could still see him, his ferret-like face with its long, ugly blade of a nose, his thin lips and dark, stained teeth. He’d been young that night, she realized, though to her seventeen years he’d seemed very grown-up. He probably wasn’t much more than thirty, but his face was ageless. Evil, though she hadn’t known it then.

  He’d found her on her knees next to a man who’d just left the wine shop. The man had been too drunk to stagger more than a few paces before he’d collapsed on the pavement, passed out.

  She’d been watching him from her corner of the shadows, and she’d moved quickly, kneeling to relieve the corpulent bourgeoisie of his purse, when a cruel hand had clamped down on her shoulder and hauled her upright.

  He swore when the light caught her face. “There are better ways to make a living, my beauty,” he said, pushing her hair from her face with a filthy hand. She was equally filthy from her weeks of living on the street, but she recoiled anyway.

  “What’s your name, hein?” he demanded. “You mustn’t have been in town long, to still be making ends meet. I can take you someplace where you’ll have pretty clothes, a bath if you so desire, and good food. Lots and lots of food.”

  She stared at him, mute, defiant. She was still innocent enough, despite their weeks in Paris, not to understand what he was talking about, but she knew if she spoke he’d recognize the difference in their voices, in their accents. And she’d been an unwilling witness to too much violence against anyone with pretensions to gentility.

  She tried to pull away from him, but it was useless. She considered calling out for help, but she knew with crushing certainty that she would be trading one devil for the next. She had no choice but to stumble after him as he dragged her along the streets, her puny struggles making no inroad on his determination.

  “You’ll like Madame Claude’s,” Malviver had said. “All you have to do is be agreeable, and you’ll have a better life than most of your sort. Be glad you were lucky enough to be born with a pretty face. It’s better than the streets, my girl.”

  The house had been too warm, filled with girls with young faces and old eyes, clean hands and soiled bodies. When she’d fought they’d hurt her; when she’d refused to cooperate they’d forced her. Madame Claude had surveyed her, satisfaction on her grim face as she offered Malviver a handful of coins. Her satisfaction had increased when the rough brute of a woman who’d bathed Ghislaine and clothed her and poked her unmercifully announced that she was the last living virgin in the decadent city of Paris.

  “She’ll be worth a fortune,” Madame Claude had chortled gleefully. “I might find it in my heart to give Malviver an extra sou for the treasure he brought me.”

  That was the first time she’d heard his name, the man who’d sold her into whoredom for a handful of coins. It had taken time, endless time, but she’d killed him for what he’d done to her. Just as she would kill Nicholas Blackthorne.

  Tavvy had brought her water before he took himself off. While she had no desire to act as Blackthorne’s scullery maid, washing the dishes at least delayed the reckoning she knew was coming. And with his dark, fathomless eyes watching her from beyond the fire, Ghislaine suddenly experienced the first strains of cowardice she’d felt in many, many years.

  She scrubbed. As a Frenchwoman, she knew how to scrub, and the three-legged table was spotless. Nicholas simply sat there, his legs stretched out in front of him, his neckcloth long since discarded, and watched her as she bustled around the room.

  “Are you ready to alight, ma mie?” he inquired lazily, when she was trying to decide whether she could get away with washing the floor. “Or are you still planning to put off the inevitable?”

  She stood very still, watching him. She wasn’t going to fight him—he’d already proven it would do no good. There was no knife within reach—Taverner had seen to that—and there was nothing else she could do, nothing short of trying to shove him into the fire. It was inevitable.

  “I am hardly going to assist at my own rape,” she said flatly. “If you want me, you’ll have to make me.”

  He smiled then, and his decadent beauty was remarkable in the flickering firelight. She wondered stonily how she could resist him. And realized with sudden dawning horror that she was not sure if she could.

  “I’m very good at making people do what I want,” he said softly, rising from his seat. The fitful light cast a large shadow behind him, so that he looked even taller than his formidable height, and quite dangerous. It wasn’t an illusion, Ghislaine told herself. He was the greatest danger she had ever known. And for reasons she didn’t want to contemplate.

  He moved slowly across the room, graceful, lethal. She remained still, awaiting him, telling herself to hold still when he touched her, telling herself to close her eyes and retreat inside herself and it would soon be over. Telling herself that fighting him would only make it worse.

  But when he reached out and touched her shoulder, something inside her snapped, and she slapped him across his elegant, beautiful face, as hard as she could.

  Chapter 11

  Nicholas’s head whipped back from the force of her blow, but his fingers neither tightened nor released her shoulder. “That was unwise of you, Ghislaine,” he murmured, but there was no disguising the tight thread of anger beneath his indolent tone. “Don’t you know what they say about me?”

  “Get your hands off me.” She tried to squirm away, and this time his hands did tighten, painfully.

  “They say I’m half-mad. A bad ‘un, through and through, with no sense of decency or honor. They say to cross me is to put one’s life at risk. Most people steer clear of me and my hot temper.” His voice was as thin and mocking as his smile.

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Half-mad.”

  He stared at
her for a long, meditative moment, and there was no discerning the expression behind his dark, fathomless eyes. “Surely I must be,” he said. “To still want you.” And he pulled her up against him, his mouth coming down on hers, hard.

  She struggled, but it was useless. He was far too big, too strong, his arms holding her tight against his aroused body as his mouth plundered hers. She tried to push, but her hands were trapped between their bodies. She tried to jerk her mouth away, but while one of his strong arms held her immobile, his other hand was free to hold her chin still for his marauding mouth. He tasted of the brandy he’d drunk with abandon; he tasted of the coffee she’d made him. He tasted of anger and determination and sex. She only wished he tasted of poison.

  She stopped her struggles, for a brief, deceptive moment. And brought her knee up, hard, between his legs.

  He was too fast for her. He moved, just in time, spinning her around and falling onto the bed with her beneath him, his mouth never leaving hers, and she wanted to scream.

  It would do no good. There would be no one to hear her. She’d survived rape before; she could do so again. She closed her eyes, closed away the sight of him, and withdrew, curling up in that small, dark place inside, away from him, away from everyone.

  She was barely aware of the moment when his mouth left hers. She lay very still, waiting for him to rip the dress off her. Perhaps he intended to be more frugal, simply tossing her skirts over her head and pulling them back down when he was finished. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t feel a thing.

  His hands slid across her cheeks, his fingers entwining in her long, tangled hair, and she felt the fall of lace against her bruised mouth. She waited, waited for the violence that would help her descent into forgetfulness, but nothing came. Nothing but silence, broken by the crackle of the fire, the harsh, gradually slowing sound of his breathing.

  Finally, unwillingly, when the silence had grown so that it filled the room, she opened her eyes. He was straddling her body, looking down at her, an odd expression on his face. “You’re back,” he said.

  She braced herself, waiting for the assault to begin once more. But he made no move, his hands still cupping her face, his eyes intent. “Back?” she managed to echo, her voice a rough whisper. It sounded as if she’d been screaming for hours. Perhaps she had.

  “From that little world where you go,” he said, his thumbs brushing, caressing, her soft mouth.

  Long ago, one of the older women at the inn where she used to cook tried to explain to her the joys of married sex. It wasn’t the act, so much, the old woman had said. A messy, overrated thing, as far as she was concerned. It was the holding, before and after, that mattered. Sex was simply the trade-off wives had to make.

  Ghislaine had scoffed at the notion. No amount of tenderness before or after could make the act bearable. To be sure, a younger matron, one with a brood of six hopeful children, had differed with old Mag, informing Ghislaine that with the right man, sex wasn’t the price she had to pay; it was the reward.

  That notion struck her as even more absurd. Still, lying beneath Nicholas Blackthorne, his hands in her hair, she could begin to understand the sweetness of a soft touch. And sympathize with those women who were willing to pay the price.

  It took all her formidable will to resist the seduction of his warm hands on her face, but she managed. “If you’re going to do it,” she said in a hard little voice, “then I wish you’d get on with it. I’d like some sleep.”

  If she expected to goad him she failed. Instead, a mocking smile twisted his mouth. “You know, my pet, it’s damned hard to rape a woman who doesn’t fight. And it’s just as difficult to make love to a woman who simply lies there in a trance.”

  “My apologies,” she snapped.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could convince you to show a little more enthusiasm for this project? No? Then maybe we should both concentrate on getting some sleep.”

  To her astonishment he released her, climbing off her body and sinking down on the pallet beside her. The moment he moved away she tried to bolt off the bed, but his hand shot out and caught her wrist, hauling her back against him, her skirts covering his long legs. “That doesn’t mean I’m about to let you go,” he said, levering himself up on his elbow. “I need my sleep as much as you do, and I’m frankly more concerned with my wellbeing than with yours. The only way I expect to be able to sleep well is if you’re taken care of. I’d hoped to seduce you into a nice little puddle of acquiescence, but since that seems unworth the effort, we’re simply going to have to resort to bondage.”

  “Bondage?” she said, her eyes widening in the fitful light.

  “Bondage,” he said, pushing himself off the bed.

  She tried to bolt once more, but he simply caught her around the waist and threw her back down on the bed, none too gently. “I wouldn’t do that again if I were you,” he said calmly. “Next time I have to throw you down on the bed, I might not mind your passivity. Stay put, and count your blessings.”

  “Merci,” she said, her voice rich with sarcasm.

  “You never let up, do you?” he said, sitting down beside her, taking her wrists in his. He’d become adept with his neckcloth, only the jerky deftness of his hands betraying his tension as he bound her hands behind her back. “That’s one of the things that I admire about you, Ghislaine.” Leaning forward, he flipped up her skirts, exposing her legs, and she jumped.

  “You promised…” she began, as she tried to squirm away from him.

  “I promised nothing.” He sounded completely impersonal. “I’ll take you when and where I want to. And how. For the moment, I’m simply going to tie your ankles. I don’t want to have to worry about you creeping around looking for a weapon while I manage to catch up on my sleep.” He was as good as his word, tying her ankles and pulling her skirts back down around her. He stared at her, then sighed. “I have the feeling, my pet, that it might be a very long night.” He stretched out beside her, and she did her best to move away from him. The bed, however, was concave, and she simply rolled back, up against him.

  He stared down at her with unholy amusement. “The question that remains, ma mie, is what do we do with that mouth of yours.”

  She glared at him. “Apart from gagging me, there’s not a damned thing you can do.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong.” He slid down beside her, cupped her face with his long fingers, and brushed his mouth against hers, very gently.

  “Don’t,” she said, trying to pull her head away.

  “Grant me this much,” he said, and it wasn’t a request. “Since I’m being such a good boy tonight.” He kissed her again, just as gently, his lips clinging to hers for a long, breathless minute.

  She couldn’t fight him. Not with her limbs tied, not with his hands holding her face still, not with his mouth so impossibly soft and gentle that it brought tears to her heart.

  He nudged her lips apart with his own, using his tongue this time, not as invader but to stroke her, seduce her, tasting her lips, the sweet inside of her mouth and tongue, as he wrapped his long, lean body around hers.

  She shut her eyes, wondering if she could escape from this, the most devastating assault of all. She could feel him through the thickness of her skirts, and she knew he was thoroughly aroused, even though he seemed to have decided against raping her. Perhaps he thought he could seduce her. She would simply have to show him it was a lost cause.

  But he was demanding nothing from her, content to hold her in his arms and kiss her, lingeringly, every inch of her trembling mouth, before traveling up her face, to press his lips against her fluttering eyelids, then moving down to the unbearably sensitive lobe of her ear. Something was burning inside her, something she told herself was disgust.

  She closed her eyes, trying to shut him out, trying to calm the pounding of her heart, trying to still the racing of her pulses, but when his mouth finally touched hers again, starting at one comer and nibbling on her lower lip, she could
n’t keep from moving her own lips, to catch his, to keep him there, to kiss him, and his quiet little sound of pleasure brought an answering rush to her own heart until she suddenly realized what she was doing…

  A cry of anguish was torn from her as she tried to pull away from him. But for all the gentleness of his mouth, his hands were still inexorable, holding her still for his merciless gaze. “What’s the matter, Ghislaine?” he murmured. “Afraid you might like it?”

  There was a trace of blood on his mouth, blood that must have come from her own mouth, bruised from his earlier harsh kiss. She stared up at him, shocked to realize she wanted to kiss the blood from his thin, mocking mouth. She wanted to kiss him, again and again and again. It was like a drug, one that wiped away common sense and safety, honor and revenge, the past and the future. All that mattered was the damp sweetness of his mouth against hers.

  “If you kiss me again, I will kill you,” she said fiercely.

  He shook his head. “Tell me something new, my angel. You’re already planning to gut-stick me the first chance you get. I might as well enjoy myself in the meantime.”

  “By raping a bound woman?”

  “No, love. By seducing a woman who is not quite certain whether she hates me more than anyone she’s ever known, or is still torn by an adolescent passion she never had a chance to outgrow.” Then, even as the words struck a death knell in her heart, he released her, kissing her once more, a brief, hard kiss on her bruised mouth, before sinking back beside her.

  She could feel his body pressing along hers, the heat and hardness of him. Once more she tried to edge away. Once more she slid back.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He sounded almost meditative in the darkness. “You’re keeping your chastity by only a thread. If you keep bumping against me I might regret my first act of nobility in at least twenty years.”

  Ghislaine held still. The thought of her chastity was a joke, a sour one, one she was tempted to share. Except that it would give him license to touch her again, and she didn’t think she could bear it. Her heart was inured to cruelty, to harshness and brutality, even to rape. It was pathetically vulnerable to gentleness.