Emmaline smiled. "Jones, will you please escort Lady Sherborne out." She held Eloise's gaze. "Again, I look forward to your continued visit."

Chapter 5.

He always possessed powerful, long legs. Unfairly long, she'd always said as a girl. He'd always raced faster than her, an unfair advantage made all the greater by the skirts she'd donned as a small girl.

Eloise grit her teeth, quickening her steps to keep up with the deuced pace he'd set for them. He stalked purposefully through the enormous townhouse. She drew to a stop and waited for him to note her absence.

He turned right at the end of the corridor.

Filled with annoyance at his high-handedness, she tapped the tip of her slipper on the thin, red carpet and folded her arms across her chest.

Lucien came back around the corner, a thunderous expression on his face.

At the menacing stare trained on her, a desire to flee this fierce, scowling stranger consumed her. Eloise dug her toes into the carpet, refusing to be cowed. This was Lucien. He continued, coming closer. The boy who'd taught her to bait her hooks and fly fish. Gone were all traces of the grinning person he'd been.

He stopped with five feet of s.p.a.ce between them. "My lady," he bit out.

Eloise searched for Lady Emmaline before realizing... "Are you referring to me?" she snapped.

"What else would you have me call you, my lady?" She flinched at the coa.r.s.e, clipped tones of his speech. Gone were the smooth, polished tones perfected by a n.o.bleman's son. "What?" he taunted. "Do you wonder what has happened to the fine gentleman you remember?"

"Yes," she said with a bluntness that momentarily froze him. She quirked an eyebrow. "Come, now? Surely you'd not believe I would not note this transformation in you." A transformation she didn't like but certainly understood. When life robbed you of innocence and introduced you to ugliness, you either retreated into yourself, or allowed it to destroy you. She'd retreated. Eloise pa.s.sed a sad glance up and down his beloved frame. Lucien had been destroyed.

She shook free the chill of that thought. No, she had to believe there was still...

"I see the look in your eyes," he spat. "I know what you are thinking."

"Do you?" she tossed back, not knowing where she found the courage to hurl a rejoinder at his harshly beautiful face.

"You wonder what happened to me." He continued as though she'd not spoken. "You see the boy of your youth. A viscount's son."

She sucked in a breath. "That isn't fair," the child's words tumbled from her lips, unheeded, unchecked. "I never cared about that, Lucien," she said wounded by this charge. "It never mattered to me if you were..."

"A n.o.bleman or a servant," he said, his lips curled up in a jeering smile.

Ah, he saw her as a lady now. One who surely valued her new station and likely spurned the life he'd crafted as a servant. Then, he'd been gone many years now. He did not know she'd entered into a glittering world to which she'd never, nor would ever, truly belong. Wedding an earl didn't make a young lady who'd not left the countryside until her eighteenth year a lady or hostess. It merely made her a countess. Eloise took a step. "Do you imagine I would judge you for being a servant?"

His body stiffened at her question.

She advanced toward him. Did he, too, have a desire to flee? Yet, the man she knew him to be possessed too much courage to leave. Eloise stopped with a mere hairsbreadth between them. She tilted her head back and looked up his impossibly tall, powerful form. "I was never that woman, Lucien. You may now spurn my presence here, but you know that. And you may be mean and angry and hurt, but you are no liar." They stood so close she detected the slight, nearly imperceptible narrowing of his steel gray eyes.

Had he always been this blasted terrifying? She swallowed hard and when he remained silent, she asked, "Did I say mean?"

"You did." The ghost of a smile played on his firm, sculpted lips.

Or did she merely imagine the slight grin there? She tipped her chin up. "Because you are. Mean." Hurling that ineffectual charge at him did not eliminate any of the unease around this new, harder version of the young man she remembered.

"And angry," he pointed out.

It didn't escape her notice that he'd omitted the very key word of hurt.

"It seemed worth mentioning twice," she said, her voice breathless with an awareness of him.

His chest moved up and down in deep, rapid breaths and he slowly dropped his gaze to her mouth. Some emotion flashed in his eyes. Her heart pounded wildly. He desires me. Or were those merely her own yearnings? Then, Lucien moved his eyes lower and he settled his stare upon her decolletage. She closed her eyes a moment. There was a place reserved in h.e.l.l for her, because in this instance, she didn't care that his heart had died with Sara. She wanted him and she would never forgive herself if she moved through the remainder of her lonely existence never knowing the taste of him.

Eloise leaned up on tiptoe.

His body jerked erect. "What are you-?"

She brushed her lips against his. She kissed him as she'd longed to for too many years and then with the dream she'd always carried, his lips reluctantly met hers in a hesitant meeting.

Yet he did not pull away. Emboldened, Eloise twined her arms about his neck, twisting her fingers in the thick, black strands of his silken, soft hair. "Lucien," she whispered against his lips. I have missed you. Only, if she breathed those words into existence, he would pull away.

Lucien stiffened at her use of his name and then he folded his arm about her, drawing her close. He slanted his lips over hers again and again. Gone was the hint of warmth, instead replaced with this blaze of fire. He plundered her mouth with his and she welcomed the swift, hot invasion as she met his bold thrust and parry with one of her own.

He drew back and Eloise moaned her regret, but he merely trailed his lips down the side of her cheek. "Lucien," she pleaded. Her words may as well have had the same effect as a bayonet piercing his skin.

He pulled his arm away and retreated...one step...two...and three, eyeing her like she was a two-headed serpent come to destroy. "What are you doing here?" he asked now in total for a third time.

The truth hovered on her lips-the pledge she'd made to his brother, Richard. No, that wasn't truthful. If she couldn't be honest with him, at least she could manage honesty to herself. I love you. "I-"

"You found a t.i.tled lord, did you, Ellie?" he asked, using her girlhood moniker, though it wasn't as warm or teasing as it once had been. "What would Lord Sherborne say to his wife kissing the Marquess and Marchioness of Drake's servant?" His words, cruel and mocking, lashed against her heart.

Eloise fisted the fabric of her gown. "My husband is dead," she managed.

Lucien opened his mouth and closed it. He opened his mouth once more. "I didn't know," he said, gruffly, in his stranger's voice. Not the gentle friend she'd once known.

Eloise shrugged, feigning indifference, though she was anything but. Tension hummed through her body with the knowledge of his kiss at long last, if even from this dark, unyielding man. "How would you?" she asked softly. The man he'd been would have taken her in his arms and cradled her close. He would have allowed her to cry and helped drive back, if not completely erased, the guilt that dogged her. "You left." Me. You left me, as though I was as guilty as your father for that d.a.m.ned commission.

The man he was now did none of those things. The harsh, angular planes of his face remained set in an inscrutable mask, as though she were a nuisance he'd be glad to rid himself of.

"You shouldn't be here," he said, his voice painfully detached. He slashed his hand through the air. "I've created a life for myself and I'll not go back to the life of indolent gentleman."

She folded her arms across her chest, to ward off the chill of his eyes, not knowing where she found the strength to say, "No, Lucien. You shouldn't be here."

He lowered his head, so close his coffee-and-mint breath fanned her face. "Why, because there is no value in the work I do?" She fixed on the one familiar scent, one unfamiliar because it was easier than focusing on the vitriol in his eyes.

Then isn't that what he'd become? Two men combined into a person who was both stranger and a friend of her past?

"I never said that," she said firmly. "I would not pa.s.s judgment on you-"

He snorted.

Eloise buried a finger into the hard wall of his chest and he grunted. "Very well, I'll be honest with you if you'll not be honest with me-"

"How have I not been honest-?"

"You've hidden yourself away from me," her cheeks warmed at the veiled look he gave her. "Your family," she hurriedly amended. "Where is the honesty in that?"

His cheeks turned a mottled red at her charge.

Good, he should be ashamed of the way in which he'd shut her out of his world. "And when I do see you, you're nothing more than a snarling, sneering, brutish beast I don't recognize."

"That is who I am," he spat. He'd respond to that, then. Why? Was that the safer question? What had he hidden from?

She shook her head, dislodging a blonde curl. It fell unchecked over her brow. "No. No, it's not." And because she'd somehow dug deep to find the courage to challenge him, she pressed ahead. "You are the Viscount of Hereford's son," she reminded him.

The slight stiffening of his body indicated the volatile tension running through him but d.a.m.n it, she had waited years to say her piece to him.

"And that matters because he is a n.o.ble."

"It matters because he is your father," she returned.

"My father is dead." He spoke in such deadened tones, her body chilled over.

"No, he is not," she said when at last she managed to speak. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from pointing out that soon he would be. In his fury, that truth likely wouldn't make a difference to Lucien. Eloise reached for his hands and went still as she belatedly registered the loss of that precious limb. An aching pain pressed on her chest, but she buried those futile regrets. He'd never accept or welcome her sympathies and he deserved more than those useless emotions anyway. "It is time you return to the life you left. Your father, your brothers." Me.

A hard, mirthless grin marred his lips, a cruel rendering that said he'd noted her misstep. "You do not approve of my new station, Eloise?"

She took his remaining hand between hers and ignored the nearly imperceptible narrowing of his eyes. "I would never, ever demean the work you do. I think it is admirable." How many gentlemen would forsake the comforts known, even as a third born son, and instead embrace a life of servitude? That was the man of character he'd always been-the man she'd fallen in love with. Eloise turned his palm over, the large, callused hand, a hand that no longer belonged to a gentleman. Different. And yet, the same. The same hand that had caught her as she'd jumped from a fallen birch tree into the lake upon his father's property. The same hand that had plucked the splinters from her fingers when she'd landed in a bush of thorns.

"I don't need your lies or plat.i.tudes," he spoke into the quiet and reluctantly she released her hold upon him. Lucien looked back and forth, of course the one who registered the place in which they discussed these intimate matters. He flexed his jaw. "If this is about me," it was, "then do not come back. Let me live now as I would."

They studied each other in silence; him icily aloof, she seeking signs of the past etched on the harsh planes of his face.

She touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. "You were never indolent. You were..." Kind. Gentle. Loving. All things good. "You were never indolent," she repeated instead, knowing he would only reject her words of regard. She pressed her fingertips against his lips and cut off whatever spiteful reply he'd toss at her. "It is time you come home."

With that she marched down the hall, him trailing silently behind her, strangers once more.

Chapter 6.

Lucien stared at the wide, closed double doors Eloise had just departed through. He had relied on his intuition to serve for the four years he'd spent on the Continent. The one time he hadn't used his intuition had seen him with a Frenchie's bayonet in the flesh of his left arm. It was a wound that, ironically, ultimately festered after he'd returned from battle. The loss of that arm had taught him the perils of not trusting his instincts.

It was that same intuitiveness that indicated there was more at play in Eloise being here. Now.

Something had brought Eloise into his life, once more.

And if he remembered at all the gap-toothed, grinning child with sun-reddened cheeks and an unfortunate tendency of repeating back anything he and his brother, Richard, had said, he'd be wise to be wary about the woman she'd become.

He gave his head a clearing shake and started down the corridor, the memory of Eloise and her d.a.m.ned, perfect mouth and her bold kiss emblazoned on his mind. His body still thrummed with a hot awareness of the feel of her in his arms. He blamed the surge of desire still coursing through him on the fact that he'd not had a woman since he'd left his wife and gone off to battle.

Lucien entered one of the marquess' parlors. He came to an abrupt halt. Two maids, at work glanced up from their tasks. Annoyed that he'd be prevented even a moment's solitude, Lucien waved them back to their work. The young women hastily averted their gazes, but not before he detected the flash of fear in their eyes. Over the years, he'd been an object of fear, pity, and sympathy. He tightened his mouth and wandered over to the window. Then, people had good right to fear him. Life had transformed him into a foul, sneering beast. There had been only two individuals who seemed unfazed by his presence, the marquess and marchioness. He frowned. No, that was no longer true. Now, there was a third person uncowed by his miserable presence. Eloise.

That isn't altogether true, a silent voice jeered. Her olive-hued skin had gone waxen at the sight of him and his empty coat sleeve. Lucien had long ago accepted the physical loss he'd suffered on the battlefield. He'd even learned to live with the frequent nightmares of soldiers being cut down in battle and their agonized cries as they sucked in a last, shuddery breath of life. Yet, with Eloise's sudden, unexpected and unwelcome appearance, he'd mourned the loss of his arm. The slight tremble on her slightly too-full lips had conveyed louder than any words the one loathsome emotion he abhorred more than all others-pity.

He didn't want pity. And he most certainly didn't want it from her.

He growled and the maids jumped in unison. Lucien ignored them and they resumed their daily task.

His resentment at her visit with the marchioness spiraled. How dare she come here and question the honest, respectable life he'd carved out for himself. He'd been one quick, slightly awkward hand movement away from ending his life and then Lady Drake, in her tenacity, had pulled him back from the edge of despair.

The truth of those dark days, he could at last admit. In her steadfast devotion, Emmaline had roused thoughts of the girl who'd been friend to him and Richard through the years. The marchioness had sustained him to the point he'd not taken his life as he'd wished, but ultimately it had been the memory of Eloise, there with her crooked lower row of teeth and the dimple in her right cheek.

From the windowpane he absently studied the maids' meticulous, practiced movements and then shifted his attention to the street below. A grand, black lacquer carriage not unlike the one Eloise had arrived in rattled by, a loud, rolling reminder of the vast difference between them. As children, those differences hadn't mattered. Somehow, their roles had shifted and he, Mr. Lucien Jonas, son of a viscount, now served tea and held doors open for married ladies.

My husband is dead...

His gut clenched at the whispered admission. Not for the first time since she'd arrived did he feel like an utter b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd kicked the kitchen cat. He'd spent the past five years hating his father, hating life, hating that he'd never known his child, held his wife as she died and selfishly never considered Ellie Gage, who'd been a friend. A faint smile turned his lips. A friend, when that is the last relationship young boys ever sought to forge. His smile withered. She too had known loss, no less great than his own.

"Jones, we've finished."

He started and found the young maids patiently waiting, expressions familiarly blank. He gave a nod. They dipped polite curtsies and scurried from the room.

Lucien took a slow, lonely turn about the empty parlor. With the fresco ceilings and gilt frames, the s.p.a.ce was still more lavish than any of his viscount father's holdings.

You shouldn't be here...

Eloise's softly spoken words filtered through his mind and melded with the definitive command issued by the marquess earlier that morning. Their charges and concerns all rolled together until their voices blended as one in a cacophony inside his head. He pressed his fingers against his eye in an attempt to blot out the noise of it.

He didn't belong here, yet he didn't belong in his past.

There was no place for him. There was no station that, after his years of fighting and coa.r.s.ened manners, he truly belonged.

The marquess had presented him an option: life in London in this post he detested where servants feared him, and worse, he'd have Eloise thrust painfully back into his life. Or the respectable post as steward in the countryside where he'd be forced into remembering the person he'd left behind. He tried to bring her memory up, to draw forth Sara's plump cheeks and lush hair, but the image blurred and shifted as Eloise's face danced behind his eyes. "d.a.m.n you, Eloise, what have you done?"

And worse...what had brought her here.

With the bond forged between him, Eloise and his brother when they'd been just children, Lucien suspected just what that something was. Or rather who. The muscles of his stomach clenched involuntarily. For years he'd shut his family out of his life. He'd buried the memory of his brothers, father and Eloise, resolved to never see them again. Yet, here was Eloise. And where Eloise was, surely his brothers and father were to follow. Now, he'd wager the sanity he'd secured in these recent years, that his eldest brother, Palmer, had his hand at play here. He fisted his hand at his side.

A bell rang and he welcomed the blessed diversion provided his employer. Glad to thrust memories of Eloise from his mind, he stalked out of the room and strode down the corridors with determined steps. He entered the same parlor Eloise-nay Lady Sherborne-had entered a short while ago. He froze. The marchioness cradled her child, not quite two, upon her lap.

The agonizing regrets flooded him. Of the child he'd never even known, of the wife who'd carried that child for nine months, while he'd missed the opportunity to see her grow round. He cleared his throat and the marchioness jumped. "Forgive me," he said, sketching a bow. "You called, my lady?"