Sophia James - A Proposition For The Comte

‘Perhaps.’

‘So your first questions will be to Lady Addington.’

He nodded, hating to have her name so carelessly tossed into the ring. ‘She is scared somehow and isolated. When she speaks there are shadows in her words.’

‘How long were you in her house?’

‘Four hours and I slept for three of them.’

Shay finished his brandy and got up to pour himself another. ‘She made quite an impression on you, then, for such a brief acquaintance.’

‘There were many books in French in the downstairs library, though the whole place looked shabby and in need of redecoration.’

‘The twin persuasions of loyalty and greed.’

‘But that’s not enough, is it? I need a reason. She is a lady and a gentlewoman. She is delicate and thin. Her hands are soft. Her heart is kind.’

‘The husband, then? Lord Addington? How did he die?’

‘In an accident in the Addington stables. One of his prize stallions booted him.’

‘Were there witnesses?’

‘None.’

‘Easy to apply such a death, then, if you had the motivation. Enough gold might give you that.’

‘There’s something else, too.’ He waited until Shay returned again before beginning.

‘Violet Addington’s father, Wilfred Bartholomew, was a northern businessman made rich by his acquisition of jewellery shops.’

‘A man who knew his way around gold, then, and how to stretch its worth.’

‘And his sister left England years ago to marry a Frenchman and settle in Lyon. A family connection?’

Shay stood against the warmth of flame. ‘I miss it sometimes, Lian, all the energy of intelligence. I miss it until I kiss my wife and son and understand the impossibility of ever inviting danger to arrive again at my hearth.’

Lian knew exactly what it was he spoke about. ‘When I get out I will be like you and never look back. It will be a relief.’

‘Then do it soon, for you appear as if you have not slept well for a year.’

‘That’s probably because I haven’t.’

‘Here’s to Lady Addington, then, a woman who fills you with light and sleep.’

The music was the ‘Duke of Kent’s Waltz’. Violet had always hated the piece and she gritted her teeth together to try to block out the anger inside that arose unbidden. The country-dance tune had been the one she had been playing on her small piano at Addington Manor when Harland had found out her father’s will had left him all the Bartholomew wealth and he reasoned he no longer needed to be conciliatory.

She’d dressed with care tonight, though her ancient green high-necked gown was plain. Harland would have loathed it because it did nothing to dampen down her vivid colouring and consume some of the flame. She remembered her husband wrapping her hair around his fist and pulling her into him, not in gentleness but in a burning anger.

‘Stop showing yourself like you do, Violet. Stop being brazen. You are no longer a simple commoner, but the wife of a viscount. Act like it.’

Tonight she had caught the length of her tresses up and added a turban to hide them, though there was no help for the fire-flamed tendrils that kept escaping around her face.

‘Your hair is reminiscent of the shade a street prostitute might favour.’ Harland had let her know of all the connotations of the colour after their marriage and for the first few years she had taken to dyeing it a dark brown.

Since coming out of an enforced mourning a few months ago, she’d often worn bright hues, six years of anonymity enough of a punishment for any woman with sense. But she had yet to release her hair from the confines of habit and thus the turban had stayed.

‘Violet.’ The call of her name had her turning and a friend, Lady Antonia MacMillan, caught at her arm. ‘I’ve been waiting an age for you to come and thought you must have decided to stay home.’

‘I was at the Wilsons’ ball for the early part of the evening and did not realise the lateness of the hour.’

Amara had taken herself off to sit along the side of the room. Violet thought she would join her after talking with Antonia. Tonight she felt tired and a bit restless. It had been over two weeks since rescuing her stranger from the frozen street and she thought he might have contacted her somehow. But he hadn’t.

‘Well, I am so glad you have arrived for you need to catch sight of the Comte de Beaumont. He has most recently returned from Paris and has set the ton alight. There are, of course, a few whispers of his past which only help to make him more...alluring.’

‘Whispers?’ She smiled at the theatrical voice Antonia used.

‘He was once heartbroken. His young wife drowned.’

The sadness of such a thing washed across Violet. For young lovers to be parted for ever by such adversity was shocking, though a little piece of her also thought if Harland had been snatched away by ill fortune in the first month of their marriage she would have remembered him with far more fondness.

‘He is tall, handsome and clever and I have been doing my very best to catch his eye all evening, but to no avail whatsoever...’

Such words produced a wariness and she hoped that Antonia would not throw herself at the man in her company. She was here at the Creightons’ ball for the light conversation and not for the machinations of attraction, so when Mr Douglas Cummings crossed the floor to ask her for the next dance, Violet assented.

Cummings was a man who sorely needed a woman to boost his morale and confidence and a shudder went through her. Once she had been that sort of a wife to Harland.

The anger that sat close made her breathe in deeply. It was why she came to these soirées night after night and stayed late into the early mornings so that when she reached her home and her bed she would be weak with exhaustion and would sleep. Dreamless.

She was thinner than she had been in years, the generous curves that her husband had delighted in at first now lessened. A changed and altered appearance; but it was the inside she truly worried about, for there were weeks when she felt empty save for an all-consuming fury.

It was on the third turn of the room dancing in the arms of Mr Douglas Cummings that she saw him, standing over against the wall and surrounded by people. She felt her footing falter.

‘Are you quite well? We can sit this dance out should you wish it.’ Cummings’s words held question.

‘No, it was only a misstep.’

Her voice sounded off even to her own ears, but she wanted to pass by again to make sure that it was truly her mysterious stranger and the best way to do this was by using the waltz.

She tried to smile and concentrate, on Cummings, on the dance steps, on her heartbeat that sounded louder and louder in her ears. Then he was in sight again, twenty feet away, speaking with a woman whose hand rested in a daring fashion across his chest.

There was no sign at all of the wound above his right ear. Tonight his hair was en queue , tightly tied back, and was much longer than anyone here wore theirs. He looked different from the man who had been pale and drawn and trussed up in a nightgown in her house.

He looked magnificent.

Who was he?

As though she had spoken out loud he looked up and their gazes caught across the space. Shocking. Unfathomable. For the first time in a long, long while Violet felt her body rouse into heat. Breaking the contact, she turned back to her dancing partner.

‘There are many people here tonight, almost a crush.’ If each word held a quiver, Cummings had the good grace not to comment upon it.

‘It’s the speciality of the Creightons. Invite anybody and everybody and hope that in the mix there is scandal and mayhem. They thrive on it and it is why the invites are so sought after.’