Her Dearest Sin

“You think…you think that a common soldier would be invited to the king’s reception?”

She was pleased with the tone of her disclaimer. Disbelieving. Holding almost a note of ridicule.

“Hardly a common soldier,” he said, closing the distance he had opened between them.

At his approach, her heart began to pound again. She knew it would be disastrous to let her fear gain control. Julián delighted in making people afraid. Then he delighted in using that fear to destroy them.

That was something she had sworn on her father’s grave she would never let him do to her. With the thought of her father, it seemed that she could smell the acrid richness of the cigarillo the Englishman had been smoking in the garden.

The taste of it was suddenly on her tongue and her lips, along with the memory of his kiss. No one had ever kissed her like that before. No one had ever kissed her at all except Julián. And his kisses were nothing like the Englishman’s.

“What is it?” Julián asked, his voice sharpening with suspicion.

He crossed the few feet that separated them and caught her chin in his fingers again, gripping hard enough that she flinched from the pain.

“What were you thinking?” he demanded.

She had let down her guard, something she could never afford to do. No mental excursions into more pleasant circumstances. Especially when he was like this.

“The scent is bringing back my headache,” she lied.

“I saw something in your eyes,” he said.

She shook her head, brow furrowed as if in confusion.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“There was something in your face when I mentioned the Englishman.”

Deliberately she widened her eyes, shaking her head again. “You’re imagining things,” she said.

“It should be easy enough to ascertain if you’re lying.”

His voice was no longer threatening. It was almost caressing, instead. And she knew from bitter experience that this was when he was most dangerous.

It would be easy for him to procure a list of the officers who had accompanied Wellington to Madrid. Those would be only names, however, and unless he saw the Englishman’s face—

“Tonight’s isn’t the only entertainment planned for the English envoy,” he went on, destroying that comforting hope. “There will be half a dozen activities at which Wellington and his staff will be expected to make an appearance. It’s so fortunate I was wise enough to arrange it so that I should instantly know that particular officer again.”

Hearing his mockery, she hated him with a renewed swell of emotion, an indulgence she had not allowed herself in a long time. The memory of the thick, reddened scar with which he had marred the visage of the man who had tried to help her was too clear. As was the pain that had been in the Englishman’s eyes as he had watched her examine it.

“If I find you have lied to me about his presence in the envoy’s party,” Julián warned, “you know what will happen.”

Despite the threat, she said nothing. She had learned that with Julián the truth often served her no better than a lie. His punishments were as capricious as his rages.

If she confessed what had happened in the garden tonight, the punishment he threatened might still be carried out in retaliation for the clandestine meeting. Just as swiftly as it would be when he discovered she was lying. And it was always possible that he would never discover that.

Anything is possible, she thought, clinging to the thinnest thread of hope. Maybe the Englishman would take to heart what she had told him. Maybe he would heed her warning and avoid the entertainments Julián had mentioned. Maybe—

“The truth,” Julián demanded again.

Without a heartbeat of hesitation, her choice made for her by her previous experiences with his sense of fair play, she lied to him once more, “I have told you the truth.”

His lips lifted into one of his rare smiles.

“Have you, my dear?” he asked softly. His thumb released her chin to trace across her mouth. “I wonder.” His smile widened, his thumb moving along a line that matched the one he had carved in the English soldier’s cheek.

“Shall I send for your maid?”

Her heart stopped, but she controlled her face, fighting that fear. “There is no reason for that,” she said. “Please, Julián, I swear on my father’s grave that I have told you the truth.”

Perhaps she would go to hell for that, but it was better than sending someone else.

His eyes held hers a long moment. “Almost I wish…”

She didn’t ask, because she knew what he wished for—some excuse to vent his rage at her. Now he would have to try to suppress it at least until he had proved her a liar. And when he had—

He bent, putting one hand on the top of the littered vanity and slipping the other beneath the fall of her hair. With that one, he gripped her neck strongly enough that even had she dared, she would not have been able to turn her head. His mouth fastened over hers, his tongue demanding entrance.

She didn’t respond. She never did, because it made no difference to him. He preferred her impassivity. Or even, as she had learned very early in their relationship, her resistance. That was a mistake she had never made again.

As her guardian kissed her, the movement of his mouth hard, almost brutal, tears burned at the back of her eyes. Unwillingly she remembered the touch of another man’s lips. Another man’s kiss. Another man.

He isn’t a man, she had warned the Englishman. She had known from what she had seen in his eyes that he didn’t believe her. And so, even as Julián’s mouth moved against hers, her mind raced, frantic to find before it was too late, some way to prevent what was about to happen to him.

Chapter Three

“My lord?” the Viscount Wetherly’s batman called hesitantly.

Harry opened one bloodshot eye, briefly assessing his man’s face. He was standing in the doorway to the viscount’s bedroom, carefully out of range of whatever could be reached and thrown at him from the bed.

“Go away,” Wetherly said, closing the eye again.

He had found nothing in those open Yorkshire features to alarm him. If Sin had gotten into serious trouble, there would surely have been some hint of it in Malford’s revealing countenance.

“There’s a fishmonger in the kitchen, my lord…”

The viscount’s eyes opened again, very wide this time, despite the dull ache in the back of his skull. He should know better than to try to drink a Sinclair under the table, Harry acknowledged, even if that were the only way to guarantee he would know where to find him come morning.

“A fishmonger?” he repeated, imbuing his tone with every ounce of aristocratic outrage he could muster. “What the hell should I have to do with a fishmonger? Do I look like the cook, you bloody fool?”

“Indeed, no, my lord, but—”

“Go to hell and take your bleeding peddler with you,” Wetherly ordered. “You’re interrupting my sleep.”

There were a few blessed minutes of silence, during which the viscount tried to relax the muscles that had been tightened with his unaccustomed anger. Just as it seemed he might succeed, his man spoke again.

“He is really quite insistent, my lord. Otherwise, I should never have dreamed of awakening you. Your instructions concerning Captain Sinclair seemed so urgent, however—”