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Chapter One
Later that same evening
Bang. Bang. Bang.
From within semi-consciousness, Olivia was aware that the walls of the townhouse were shaking. Housebreakers have beset us, she thought, unable to move, her mind still viscous with sleep, the pounding seeming to be all around her.
How could a sound be everywhere at once? Was this an earthquake, the kind that Eloisa had experienced in the West Indies as a child, the type that brought down walls and disturbed the ocean?
Her eyes flew open. Suddenly, she was awake. Because she knew. She hoped that she was wrong, prayed that it was so, as she threw on her wrapper and headed for the door of her bedroom. But even still, she knew only one man who would be entitled enough to make such a racket. It was a wonder that she had been able to fall asleep at all, after what had happened at the opera.
Olivia took the stairs two at a time, her feet bare on the lush carpets. The painted walls shone with the hues that Eloisa had been guaranteed would be stylish in Mayfair that season. Indeed, the entire home had been buffed and manicured to a point of almost painful fashion. Eloisa would never allow herself or her daughter, Natasha, to appear desperate for the approval of society—only the house itself came close to showing the intensity of the hopes that had driven them from Paris to London.
Voices rose to meet Olivia as she descended. Even though she had known, in her bones, who it was, when she heard his voice, it chilled her blood.
“I only need to speak with her,” he said, his tone low and controlled, confident and ineffably aristocratic, “I am very sorry to disturb you, madam, but I cannot leave until I have seen her.”
“My lord, my lord,” protested Chassey, the butler and head footman (Eloisa might be rich, but she wasn’t above economy, especially in temporary lodgings), “the lady, much like the rest of the house, is—”
“I suppose you think by virtue of your rank,” Eloisa herself broke in, “that I will overlook you nearly breaking down my door at this unholy—”
Eloisa stopped speaking when she saw Olivia. If the situation had been different, Olivia might have laughed at her expression. Her lips had formed a perfect O of surprise and she almost looked chastened—a rarity for her friend and the woman who was still, technically, her employer.
She didn’t want to look at him. If she could have chosen, she would have kept her eyes trained on Eloisa. A beautiful woman of forty-five, her dark hair well-coifed despite the hour, her skin still gleaming from her nightly cosmetic ablutions, her chestnut eyes kind, Eloisa was a comforting, familiar sight. No, if she could choose, she would never let her gaze dart away from Eloisa, the woman who had given her safe harbor thirteen years ago after—well, him.
But Olivia had never been able to not look at Augustus Carrington, the Earl of Montaigne. Her eyes were drawn to him, even after such a long period, in the same way her face tilted towards the sun on a brisk autumn day. It was a reflex, it seemed, of her blood.
Her first glimpse of him proved a disappointment. Because where she had hoped for radical transformation, a softening of the features that had so hooked her back then, rendering her as defenseless as a fish hung and gutted at Billingsgate market, she saw that he was largely the same. His eyes, cast in a blue so light it seemed otherworldly, cut at her afresh. His mouth, both harsh and full, had not lost its slight pout. That mouth still seemed about to scowl at her. Once, she had been continually surprised to see it break into a smile of surprising sweetness instead.
Going by the intensity of his glare, she doubted that such an outcome was forthcoming at this present moment.
Not that she cared if he smiled at her or not. She wanted him gone. Posthaste.
“I demand an audience with you, Miss Watson. I think I am owed that.”
She flinched. He had no reason to expect such a favor. He had discarded her. She had been gone from London for nearly thirteen years, it was true, but he had made it very clear back then that he was done with her. He had dismissed her in the same way he had been trained to wave a dish away from himself at dinner. In the same way (if one believed the newspapers, which she did) he had moved on from the long string of women that he had been with since.
“You are owed nothing, as far as I can see, my lord.” She was surprised she could find the words so easily when her entire body thrummed with the shock of his nearness. “I will not grant such a request, or any request, from you. Please leave.”
“Really, Olivia.” He reached to take her wrist, as he had done at the opera, and she moved back.
“Don’t touch her,” Eloisa ground out. “I will have you removed, sir. Do not think I won’t do it.”
“I only want to speak with you. In private.” His voice was a scintilla softer now. “I don’t understand, Olivia. I don’t come here to trouble you. I merely want to understand.”
At the opera, she hadn’t seen him before he approached her. In truth, she hadn’t expected to see him. When Eloisa had persuaded her to return to England, she had, of course, dreaded the prospect of meeting him again. But the newspapers made clear that he was hardy a fixture at respectable entertainments. And he was too high-ranking to mix with the crowd of wealthy merchants and baronets that would form their milieu in London. Eloisa had convinced Olivia she had no reason to worry on that score. And Eloisa hadn’t said the obvious, although they had both been thinking it, she was sure—that a man who was a notorious rake, an inveterate bedder of women, of servants no less, could hardly still care about an ex-lover from thirteen years before. As women who had both worked in service—and Olivia technically still did—the Earl of Montaigne’s penchant for dependents could only have one cast in their eyes. It was lecherous, exploitative, abandoned. Disgusting.
And, yet, when he had come up behind her at the opera, as the crowds were dispersing towards their carriages, and the crush was at its height, he had taken her wrist and said her name and she hadn’t felt repulsion. She had felt weak. No, not weak. But something close to it. She had felt desire. That same old surge of it, the way it had been back then. It sopped through her instantly with a force that she hadn’t thought possible. Or, at least, not anymore. Not since thirteen years ago.
Olivia still wanted him. Even after all this time.
Now, he stood in the dim candlelight, the graceful lines of his body evident through his evening clothes, his otherworldly stare as destructive to her self-control as ever.
“No.” She closed her eyes to make the refusal easier. “Leave.”
“The lady has made herself clear, my lord,” Chassey interjected, picking up the honorific, the good butler even at such a moment as this one.
“Yes, sir,” Eloisa repeated, refusing to use the courtesy the way Chassey had, still resisting the acquaintance. “Your presence is unwanted.”
Eloisa knew all about her and Augustus, of course. Olivia had been broken when she had first come into Eloisa’s employ. Eloisa had been broken, too, having recently lost her husband. Eloisa and her husband had returned to London in the hopes that doctors here would have a treatment for his disease, but the attempt had failed. Eloisa needed a maid for the return journey to France and had hired Olivia. The strictures of employee and employer had broken down quickly when they realized that they were both reeling, albeit in different ways.
“Olivia, I just want to understand,” Augustus repeated, “I have not come to hurt you. I thought, at the opera—I must have startled you.”
“And to make up for such a violation you decided to wake me and my entire household in the middle of the night?”
“I am sorry for the disturbance I have caused.” He turned to Eloisa and gave a little bow. It was awkward. And, on him, with his handsome self-possession, nearly endearing.
No. It was not. He was a letch, an exploiter of women, practically a monster. She had been fooled once—had she learned nothing?
“But I had to see you, Olivia. I have looked for you, wondered what happened to you, for years. Once I found you, once I was able to ascertain your address, I had to speak with you immediately. I was terrified you would alight again before I ever got the chance.”
Olivia froze at his words. They didn’t make sense. Not at all. He had gotten rid of her. He had discarded her with nothing more than a note and ten guineas. The dismal note had broken her heart, but the ten guineas had seemed orchestrated to rob her of her spirit. He hadn’t needed to give her the money to get rid of her. The note alone would have been enough. Then the papers had started calling him the Ten Guinea Lord. It was what he gave every maid that crossed his path, allegedly. After he ruined her. For her troubles.
When Olivia had read that, her humiliation compounded.
She had merely been the first.
Her gaze fell on Eloisa, whose expression now looked a trifle perplexed. He was not quite behaving like the man they had read about for years in the papers. Yes, even in Paris, they read the London scandal sheets. Even when one factored in the mean-spirited hyperbole of those writers, the truth about Lord Montaigne was plain. After all, didn’t she know it for her own self?
No, she wouldn’t let him sweet talk her out of her own reason. She had no idea why he was at her door hours past midnight—nor what he wanted. But it didn’t matter.
She leveled him with her gaze.
In his eyes, she saw a strange pleading look, as if his emotions were stronger even than his language. But she couldn’t abide by such nonsense. She wasn’t a lady from his world, the kind who could afford the luxury of erotic drama. She never had been.
“I am sorry for whatever confusion you have suffered, my lord. But I must decline your request. It would be fatal to my reputation if I were to grant a private audience to the Downstairs Menace. After all, as a humble companion, I am little above a servant myself.”
When she spoke the moniker, the Downstairs Menace, the one they used in the papers, he stepped back. She saw something behind his eyes shutter. A vulnerability that had been there blew out like a candle. She couldn’t help feeling a pang of sorrow at the sight. He had seemed sincere, truly. But she had to remember that he wasn’t. That he couldn’t be.
And besides she was a different person now. She wasn’t a maid in his house any longer, a thousand ranks below him and a thousand times more naïve. She was a woman of three-and-thirty nearly engaged to another man.
His expression returned to a neutral cast. This surprised her. She had thought he would bang out of the house and that would be that.
“I see that the scandal sheets have given you a strange impression of me, Miss Watson. Many people have odd notions of me, so I am not unused to being misjudged. Although I thought we knew each other better.” He turned to Eloisa. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, ma’am. You’re right, of course. It was quite savage of me.”
His gaze fell back on Olivia. His eyes felt intimate, probing, as if he was calling all that had passed between them once into the present. Her body heated under her wrapper. Her flannel night clothes that had felt utterly appropriate for the season now seemed far too warm.
“But rest assured, Miss Watson, this isn’t over.”
“Leave,” Olivia repeated, even though he had already turned his back. “And don’t come back.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
She hoped that only she could hear the sob threatening in her throat.
But he turned.
And, inexplicably, unaccountably, the man winked.
Then he walked out the door.
End of Excerpt
