Chapter 5 #3
At the last question, her chin jutted defiantly. “I wasn’t traveling alone. I had a servant with me, but I sent him back as soon as we reached Paris. I thought I could reach my mother’s on my own, and I didn’t wish to put him or his wife, whose identity papers I was using, at any further risk.”
Rafe shook his head in disbelief. “Didn’t you know about what’s been going on in Paris? About the massacres?”
“We haven’t had any word from the city in months.
I thought perhaps the trouble was only in the countryside, as it was in ’89, and that I’d be safe in the city.
” She took a deep breath. “My mother is so well-connected, I felt sure she’d know what to do.
” She stared at her fingers tangled tightly in the fringes of the shawl, and when she spoke her voice was bitter. “I misjudged.”
After a moment she looked over at him, certain she would see her father’s disapproval mirrored in his face, but Rafe had settled back in the armchair and in the dim tight of the room his features were too shadowed to read.
“So now that you’ve found me out, what will you do?” Her fingers tensed in the tangled fringe. “Will you toss me back on the street, denounce me for the reward money?”
“Good Lord, woman, what kind of man do you take me for?” Rafe spoke sharply, his voice filled with anger at what she’d suffered and disgust that she might think he’d be party to it.
“If I was the kind of man who would turn you over to those murderers on the so-called committee for public safety, don’t you think I would have left you on the street with those animals today? ”
“Forgive me,” she said quietly. “I find it difficult to judge people these days.”
Rafe rose and walked over to the bed.
Alix looked up, searching his eyes. “Will you help me?” Her voice was steady, her face pale, but proud. “I can pay for your services.”
It struck Rafe that the only payment he wanted was to press her back against the mattress, to her cover her slender body with his own and to kiss her soft lips until the desperation and fear was gone from her eyes.
He started to reach for her, his hand moving slowly toward her face, and suddenly he realized what he was doing.
Good God, he thought with a shock, he was like one of his father’s stallions racing for the hedges.
What on earth was he thinking? He was a gentleman, a gentleman with an almost fiancée, and Alix was a woman in need of assistance, not seduction.
He caught her hand instead and brushed the back of it with his lips. “What else is there for a proper English gentleman to do?”
She studied him curiously. “You’re English. I suppose I should have thought as much from your appearance and, of course, your accent.”
Rafe raised an eyebrow in mock horror. “My accent? Mademoiselle de La Brou, you shock me. I have it on authority that my accent is impeccable.”
“This authority,” she said smiling, “would be a woman?”
He dipped his head. “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”
Glancing at his wickedly curved mouth, the thought occurred to Alix that he must have kissed a number of ladies. She found herself suddenly annoyed. He might have swept her off the street, but he was not going to sweep her off her feet. “And is it the ladies that bring you to Paris?” she asked.
Rafe considered how to respond. Womanizing had always been his explanation for his travels back and forth to France, but he didn’t want to leave Alix with the impression that he was a libertine.
If he was going to help her, he reasoned, she needed to trust that she would be safe with him.
On the other hand, he didn’t like anyone knowing too much about what he did in France.
Rumors had a nasty way of floating back across the English Channel.
He shrugged noncommittally. “I have some unfinished business in France. I am simply here to tie up some loose ends.”
So it was a woman, she concluded. Well, what difference did it make if he was a womanizer or married she thought, as she freed her fingers from the elegant shawl.
This man Harcrest was offering his help.
And she badly needed it. Fate had thrown them together in unusually close quarters, but there was no need to become familiar.
Once she’d found her mother, she would probably never see him again.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
Alix paused. She did, actually, and quite well.
“Oh no, I’m afraid I have no ear for languages.”
At dinner parties with foreigners, she’d found they had a tendency to say the most amazing things in front of her when they thought she couldn’t understand. Fluttering her lashes and putting on her worst accent, she added for emphasis, “The quill of my aunt is on the table of my uncle.”
Rafe gave a mock shudder. “I think things will progress far better if we continue in French.”
Alix’s gray eyes twinkled, and she lowered her lashes to hide her amusement. “As you wish.”
Good Lord, Rafe thought, had she batted her eyelashes at him?
His eyes traveled over her face, the wide gray eyes, the high cheekbones, the slim nose and full soft mouth caught in a slight smile.
Unable to stop himself, he traced the curve of her neck, the graceful arch of her collarbone down to where her pale skin disappeared in the shadowy V of his nightshirt.
He felt his groin tighten as his mind continued where his eyes could not follow.
Breaking his gaze and shifting in his chair, he inquired. “About finding your mother... where should we start?”
Alix explained that her mother had been staying at the house where he had found her. “I’ve given it a lot of consideration,” she concluded, “and I think we ought to break in.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “Did you say break in?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not as if I have a key. And it’s not as if we can go door to door inquiring about the whereabouts of former members of the court. So the way I see it, if I can just look around a bit, perhaps I’ll find some clues as to where she’s gone.”
Rafe found himself fervently praying that Jervis would be able to ferret out some information that would enable him to avoid becoming involved in a burglary.
“I’ve sent Jervis to have a look around,” he said.
“When he returns, we’ll see what he’s found out and proceed from there.
” Silence fell between them, and Rafe cast about in his mind for a way to change the subject from the prospect of committing a crime in a city that currently was far too sensitive to suspicious behavior.
Something too that would keep his mind off what lay covered by his nightshirt.
“Chess,” he said hoping his voice didn’t reveal the disquiet he felt. “Do you play chess?”
The rasping breath of the woman on the floor was disturbing his concentration.
Lamartine stepped over her writhing figure, pushed aside a tumbled chair and went outside.
He glanced back briefly, not at Solange Chaumier, but at the neat farmhouse.
The Chaumier’s single-story stone home was not much different from the one he’d grown up in.
Except for the yard. Lamartine’s eyes surveyed the well-kept vegetable garden and the plump chickens and geese roaming about the house.
His father had been too busy drinking and beating his mother for their yard to ever have been so well tended.
He shook his head as he picked his way through the noisy clusters of foraging fowl.
He had explained in his most pleasant manner that he needed to find Alix de La Brou, that it had been the comte’s wish that he look after her.
Solange had not believed him, had kept insisting that she knew nothing about where Alix had gone.
The moment she’d opened her mouth, he’d known she was lying.
So he then suggested the local revolutionary tribunal might be interested in searching the Chaumier home, said he hoped the citizeness had all her papers in order.
Solange had turned as white as her mobcap.
It had been an idle threat; he’d never dreamed she’d have been so foolish as to lend her identity papers to Alix.
He reached the tree where his horse was tied.
Solange had not wanted to tell him where Alix had gone, but he knew how to get answers.
He flexed his small hands, remembering the feel of her throat, her skin, the flexible cords, the way her eyes had bulged and her mouth had gaped.
She’d resisted, held back details, but in the end, she’d told him what he needed to know.
Alix had gone to find her mother.
He sincerely hoped she hadn’t been hauled off to prison or executed yet. That would be most inconvenient.
He unknotted the reins of his horse and drew them back over the gray’s head.
He supposed it might be possible to send someone else to retrieve her.
But no, he thought, as he climbed into the saddle, if you wanted something done right, you had to see it through yourself.
Lamartine brought his crop down with a sharp crack across the gelding’s flank, and set off in the direction of Paris.