Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

T he clash of metal on metal, the flash of light on the blades, filled Lucien's senses, his left-handed swordplay a poor match for Cassandra's skill. His stomach clenched with the horrifying possibility that he might wound his sister or die by her hand.

Suddenly a hard voice snapped something in Italian. Cassandra hesitated for a heartbeat, long enough for Simon to lunge in and grab her wrist.

"Cass, stop!" Simon barked in the tone that had halted battle-drunk soldiers. Her hand was shaking, the blade trembling. Its tip, red with blood, swam in front of Lucien's eyes. His vision blurred in a combination of shock and pain as Simon pried Cassandra's fingers off of the hilt and slipped the weapon from her hand.

The minute it was free she gave her head a shake, as if startled awake. Her eyes widened as she stared at the bloodstain spreading on Lucien's torn shirt.

"The guard came off your sword," Simon explained, curving one hand over Cass's shoulder. "I know you didn't mean to hurt him."

Didn't she? Lucien wished he were as sure as she dropped the sword and buried her face in her hands.

Chaos erupted, Lady Elliot fainting into her husband's arms, the terrified Elliot boys clinging to Will. Simon, Penelope and Paola clustered around Cassandra while Arkwright and Grace rushed toward Lucien.

Grace, pale, yet calm, examined the wound.

"How bad is it?" Arkwright asked her. "Do we need to summon a surgeon?"

"It's just a scratch," Lucien growled, his cheeks starting to burn. "The sword point glanced off."

"You're dashed lucky it's not worse!" Arkwright exclaimed.

But it was Grace who filled Lucien's vision. Her cheeks flushed, gaze intense as she pressed her wadded up handkerchief upon the slice to slow the bleeding. It had violets embroidered on it or some such. Absurd to notice that now. She motioned to a maid whose cap had slipped askew. "Susan, run ahead to heat some water and have it taken to the morning room then fetch a fresh shirt. Will, take everyone to the tents and have Ives set out luncheon. I'll take Lord Everdene to the house and get him cleaned up."

Lucien frowned. Strange, that Grace should be the one escorting him to the house instead of presiding over the tea tables set beneath cloth canopies. Yet he was glad. Her grip on his arm was gentle, yet firm as she guided him toward the manor.

"You'll get blood on your frock," Lucien warned.

"It won't be the first time. Or have you not met my brothers?" She kept her tone light, but he could see the worry creasing her brow as she looked at her stepmother who lay in a fluttering heap, being plied with smelling salts, demanding far more attention than the one who was actually bleeding. "What am I going to do with her?" she huffed in exasperation. "She faints at the sight of blood."

"She'd best get used to it if she's to play mother to those little hellions," Lucien observed between gritted teeth.

"Blood and toads. What more could a stepmother ask for?" She smiled to herself. "Bennet is quite enamored with the little creatures. Lady Elliot not so much."

Grace and Lucien had reached a set of doors in the terrace, and she led him inside. He had visited The Willows as a boy, but it was wholly different now. The tasteful mural he remembered had been obliterated by silk wallpaper boasting a flock of vulgar peacocks that glared out at those who entered. He blinked, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. He'd swear one or two of the birds wore a black moustache. A number of furnishings were obviously new and garish. There were scrape marks on the floor where the older furniture still stood, as if the heavy pieces had been dragged to and fro.

By the time Grace and Lucien reached a rather pleasant room at the far end of the hall, he was feeling queasy from a combination of the wound and the memory of his sister's eyes. Hate-filled, yet also frightened. So vacant it chilled him. What had put that expression on her face?

Grace settled him on a wooden chair beside a table that the maid had prepared. Steam rose from a basin of water. Beside it, a stack of clean bandages sat next to the kit of medical supplies no mistress of a household could be without.

He thought of how long that battered, leather case had been in Grace's charge. Had Grace become skilled in such wifely duties when she should have been reveling in all the pleasures the London season could offer a lovely young debutante? The thought troubled him.

"Let us get this shirt off of you so we can see just what we have here," she said, quickly unknotting his cravat and moving to the placket of his shirt. He caught her hand.

"Perhaps a footman might aid me. You, a young, unmarried woman?—"

"Lord Everdene, I shed my innocence about medical matters five years ago. You needn't fret about my sensibilities."

He said no more because she was already making quick work of his buttons, the fabric falling open, her soft knuckles brushing against his chest. He shouldn't have noticed when she grazed a flat nipple. He was bleeding, for Christ's sake. But the intimacy was undeniable. "I can unbutton the rest," he said to spare himself the sensations.

At last, he finished and tugged the shirt tails from the waistband of his breeches. He set aside the blood-soaked handkerchief that clung to his wound, then carefully pulled his arms from each sleeve.

Grace surveyed the wound with a discerning eye, dipped a cloth in the basin, and began to carefully clean the blood away. Glancing down, he saw the slash from the center of his breastbone, tapering off to just above his left pectoral. The edges of the wound were purpling.

"You were very lucky," Grace said. "I won't need to stitch it."

She said it as if stitching a man's chest was little different than the samplers women were forever embroidering.

"This will sting a bit," she warned, applying some sort of salve from a tin. It did. But not in the way she meant. Those delicate, deft fingers moving upon his bare skin distracted him from the discomfort. His breath quickened, and she caught her bottom lip between her teeth.

After setting the salve aside, she took up clean bandages and formed a pad the length of his wound.

"I'm glad it's no worse," she said. "I couldn't see everything that happened clearly, but I think it might have been disastrous."

"It wasn't."

Grace took hold of his hand and raised it, bidding him hold the pad and one end of a rolled of bandage in place. Once he did so, she began wrapping a long strip of cloth around his torso. Once. Twice. Three times. Her fingertips brushed beneath his arm, across his back, and he couldn't help imagining them doing so under very different circumstances. Circumstances he had no business envisioning.

"Cassandra seemed…not quite herself," Grace said, so close to him that her breath warmed his shoulder.

"She has been under a great deal of strain."

Grace was gliding those fingers against the sensitive skin under his arm again. He flinched away.

Her gaze leapt to his. "I'm sorry. Did that hurt you?"

"No."

It was a lie. She was killing him with her tenderness, the concern in her eyes, the satiny pink of her lips mere inches from his own, awakening feelings he hadn't ever experienced before.

No one had ever looked at Grace the way Lucien Harcourt did now. He was staring down at her with those ice-blue eyes as if he could see to the very core of her, all of the guilty secrets she kept locked inside. Anger and grief at her mother for dying, hurt and the sense that Papa had betrayed her with Helen, that urge she sometimes got to charge out the front door of The Willows and keep running…

God knew, she saw truths in Lucien's eyes that left her shaken as well, his defenses torn away in the aftermath of his sister's attack. Lucien Harcourt, stripped bare in more ways than just the magnificent breadth of his hair-roughened chest.

As she pinned the ends of the bandage and tucked the ends in snugly, she looked up at him and forced a smile. "That should hold. I had Susan fetch one of Will's shirts for you. I'm not sure you'll be able to button it all the way."

"It will do. Thank you."

"If you wish, you can rest in one of the guest rooms, or I can have Susan summon the coach to take you home."

"No. I will return to the picnic."

"To make certain Cassandra knows you are all right," she said softly.

He stared down into her face, his gaze a tangible force, as if he were a predator caught in a snare, while someone tended him. He cocked his head just a trifle to one side as if her understanding confused him.

She stilled, his intense gaze pulling her in.

"What is it about you?" he murmured. "Your kindness, humor? The way you deal with the world…capable, unflinching? It's like I can't help myself." He framed her face with his hands, his fingertips masterful, and Grace felt warmth spread from the skin he touched to her breasts, her belly. He focused on her—not her whole face—but one feature at a time, the freckles on her cheekbone, the vulnerable curve where her earlobe brushed her jawline, the swell of her bottom lip, as if he were choosing the sweetest berry to taste. She pressed her thighs together, feeling her secret places soften.

He smelled of the herbs in the salve, the soap she'd used to cleanse him, and something uniquely his own. And she wanted to discover all of the secrets of that sensual mouth.

"No," he whispered against her hair. "It's not that I can't help myself. I just don't want to stop."

She had no idea what he was talking about, until he lowered his mouth to the hollow behind her ear, tracing a warm path down to the cove where her collarbone arched. Fire trailed in his wake as he tasted her. The tip of his tongue found her pulsebeat. Then his lips were on hers, exploring with a skill that made her knees melt. She flattened her hand on his bare chest for balance, felt the edge of his bandage and pulled away from him, clutching her hand against her breasts.

"Your wound," she stammered. "I shouldn't have…"

"You didn't. I did." Those piercing blue eyes regarded her as if she was a puzzle he was attempting to solve. "It seems every time I see you, I take the most appalling liberties. I'd ask your pardon, but I'm not sorry."

She swallowed hard. "Neither am I."

He drew away from her, solemn. "And that is why we had best return to the tent." He offered her his arm, and she laid her hand gently upon it as the two of them headed down the hallway. Partway through the corridor, he paused, staring intently at the objectionable wallpaper. "That peacock is sporting a mustache," he exclaimed.

"I'm afraid it's the latest fashion for wallpaper hereabouts," Grace said.

"I thought I was hallucinating, perhaps going into shock." The ghost of a smile touched his lips, then he squared his shoulders and stepped out into the sunshine.

The rest of the company was beneath one of the awnings, the adults speaking a little too heartily to cover up their distress as they picked at the repast Grace had planned. Cassandra sat beside her maid in a breach of etiquette, the Italian woman peering out with her lone, fierce eye like a raven guarding treasure.

Grace saw Cassandra's gaze fix on Lucien, the strange vacancy of earlier gone, replaced by wells of pain and confusion. What was wrong between brother and sister? Between the Harcourt children and their father? She remembered her own father's warning about the family's havey-cavey doings. The countess vanishing for decades, then reappearing. The daughters swept away from England. Rumors swirled as to the reasons for their banishment, and where the countess had been.

If only Mama were here, Grace could ask what had happened, sure she'd receive a forthright answer instead of her father's evasions. But Mama was gone.

Grace did her best to play hostess, despite the crackling of tension beneath the overly polite conversation and half-hearted games.

Two hours later, when the last of the Harcourt horses and carriage were brought around, Lucien lingered. He drew her aside as the others traded farewells.

"Thank you," he said, only the deep lines in his face betraying that he was still in pain.

"Thank you for what? Tending your wound? I was worried you'd been hurt badly."

"Once again, you managed an uncomfortable situation with grace, humor, and a skill I've seldom seen. This is the second time I owe you my thanks."

Her cheeks burned at his praise. She glanced down at the thickness of the bandage visible beneath the borrowed shirt and a lump formed in her throat. "You will keep the wound clean, won't you? Have your valet change the dressing often."

"He will not be such a tender nurse as the one I had today."

"Lucien…"

He touched her cheek. "You mustn't fret. I have taken care of myself for a very long time."

He looked so alone, even with his friend and his family. Solitary in a way that twisted her heart. But there were moments she glimpsed the man behind the mask, the man she'd come to know in those stolen times when his guard had been stripped away. Rare moments, when he'd seemed more real, more vulnerable, something in his eyes she couldn't forget. The farthest thing from cold.

What would it be like to be the woman who stepped past those walls, drew out the man she'd glimpsed so briefly when he'd caught her in the kitchen at Everdene Hall, when he'd kissed her in the morning room just hours ago. When his eyes had glowed, bluer than ever, with a spark of longing he couldn't hide. Not just physical desire, but something deeper.

Her pulse fluttered, as she met his ice-blue gaze. "Penelope has invited me for tea next week," Grace said. "Perhaps your cook could make more of those pink cakes."

He looked down, twisting the signet ring on his finger. "I won't be there," he said. "It's best if I return to London as soon as possible."

"Lucien, I don't understand…"

"Surely you can see the effect I have on my sisters. I make Jane so nervous she can barely speak when I'm in the room, and Cassandra…well…you saw what happened today." After a moment he looked at her. "Perhaps the one thing I don't regret about this interlude at Everdene Hall is my time with you, my Lady Grace."

His voice turned husky, tender, worlds away from those echoes of boyish mockery. He smiled, a smile that buried itself deep in her chest. He took her hand, bent his dark head to kiss her fingertips. Then he swung up on his golden horse and rode away.