True Story (The Deverells, Book One) (2 page)

No indeed, Olivia preferred darkly
gothic yarns and bloodthirsty horror stories not meant for the ears
of little girls. Should that mean eavesdropping at keyholes to get
her entertainment, so be it. Even if she didn't fully understand
what she heard.

In any case, on that long-ago
occasion, the mention of his name had got her sent up to bed
immediately, saving her from a very dull evening. As she ascended
the stairs, she overheard the adults discussing her.

"One must make allowances for the poor
child, growing up motherless."

"Allowances? Where would
we be if we made
allowances
for bad behavior? Another sliding of standards!
No, no, that girl was impertinent long before she lost her mother,
who was herself a stubborn creature with a distressingly romantic
view of life and her head in the clouds. What my nephew saw in her
I'll never know. A difficult woman."

Was she? Olivia had known her living
mother for eight years and, at the time of this conversation, been
without her for two, yet already shards of memory were breaking
away and leaving her, like pieces of a shattered mirror that
glittered brightly as they spun into darkness. She tried holding on
to the broken glass even when it hurt her small hands and made her
cry, but tears were something she had to hide from her father, who
never wept himself and had no patience for those who did. He was,
of course, cut from the same cloth as Great Aunt Jane, who placed
extreme importance on the immovability of one's upper lip, which
should remain as constant as one's temper and the heat of one's
blood. A passionate display of any kind was anathema in their
family. Surrounded by these strong, rather formidable characters,
Olivia struggled to follow their example and keep her real thoughts
and feelings to herself. Especially those she secretly nurtured
about dangerous men.

By the age of eighteen she thought she
had those feelings fairly well under control. Fairly.

Peering down through the window again,
she watched Mr. Incivility ride away down the busy thoroughfare.
The brim of that tall hat still hid his face, but her gaze followed
him until her breath clouded the view.

So there he went. The notorious True
Deverell. He who must not be mentioned.

She really couldn't see what all the
fuss was about.

A storm in a teacup.

Oops, the tea! Where was her mind
today?

Why, where else should a young woman's
mind be? On the man her ten year-old self once proclaimed she was
going to marry, of course. Whether the poor fellow liked it or
not.

With an unladylike snort of laughter
at her own foolishness, she turned away from the window.

"A man like that uses women for only
one thing," her stepbrother had exclaimed once, when he looked over
her shoulder to catch her reading a lascivious piece about Deverell
in the newspaper. "But the scoundrel would never look twice at you,
Livy, so you are quite safe."

And that, she mused, was precisely
where men like True Deverell went wrong, because they didn't see
her coming and then they tripped over her. Poor mutton-head,
wouldn't know a decent woman if he bumped into her. A fact of which
she now had evidence.

True Deverell. Even his name sounded
as if it ought to be whispered. It slipped off the tongue like a
silky sheet from a bare thigh.

"Olivia," her father
called from his office, "The
tea
, if you please! Or must I send
for it from China?"

Oops.

It was lucky she could blame her pink
face on steam from the teakettle.

Chapter Two

A sniff skyward told him
when, or if, he might soon hope to feed. The creak of the farmhouse
kitchen door and the clang of a spoon, audible to him from two
fields away, turned his direction as sharply as a shepherd's
whistle called dogs to heel.

But when the scraps were
put out, he waited until the other strays had taken their share
before he dove for his, scurrying away with it into the bushes, or
the barn, just as they did.

Once, when he lay curled
up sick in the hay, an old sheepdog bitch brought him some food,
carrying it across the yard in her mouth. Accustomed to his
presence as if he was one of her own litter, her mothering instinct
was too strong to let him suffer. It was the only act of tenderness
he ever knew.

Years later, when someone
eventually asked his name, he chose the first that came to mind;
the name of the half-blind, sweet old bitch that once fed him—
True.

* * * *

London, 1840

There hadn't been time to undress her,
nor even exchange more than a few words. But then he was never much
of a polite conversationalist.

Not that she would mind,
of course. He was not generally wanted for his conversation, but
for one of two things: his money or his skills in the bedchamber.
He was known to be generous with both, although, in the latter
case, he often wondered how the original compared to the fantasy.
Women built things up in their minds and saw only what they wanted
to see. When they found his tastes a little
too
"uncivilized", and they had
their eyes opened to reality, it was then he who was at fault. It
was he who broke their hearts and abused them, destroyed their
innocence. As if he had proven to them that the Beast never would
change for Beauty, a hard truth they could not bear to
believe.

"Oh, Mr. Deverell..."

The woman clawed at his back, her body
pressed urgently to his, her gasping breaths pummeling his
cheek.

But even as her hands wandered, so did
his mind.

The first galloping hooves of thunder
approached over the rooftops, obscuring her panting pleas. The
deep, powerful rumble seemed, to him, like something more than the
warning of a storm and tonight his skin reacted to that vibration
with more eagerness than it did to the touch of a woman.

A happening beyond a spell of bad
weather was coming to change his world, he sensed it. The air was
thick with anticipation for more than a brief tryst. Deverell,
whose life had been unpredictable as the weather itself, just
didn't know what. Yet.

Her hands slipped
downward, under his loosened breeches, her fingernails digging hard
into his tense buttocks. He groaned.
Ouch,
that would leave a mark.
What was it about
women that they always wanted to leave their mark on him? He'd had
nails scraped across him more times than a carpenter's
bench.

Wait...was her name... Violet? Iris?
Lily? Something floral, he was almost certain. For now, "Miss
Pridemore" would have to do. It was unlikely he would have reason
to know her as anything more.

Below his chamber, a masquerade party
was at full clamor. Such events at his London house were legendary
for their Bacchanalian quality, and True continued the tradition,
despite the mellowing of a once insatiable, impatient appetite for
all things wicked. And people came, despite the host's dark
reputation— or because of it, in some cases. But frankly, he'd
begun to find these parties deadly dull. Too much of a good thing,
perhaps? Tonight he'd taken the chance to slip away quietly for
some time alone, and when Miss Pridemore came scratching at his
door he almost hadn't let her in. Then he decided he needed
something to help him sleep, so why not? He wasn't the sort for
warm milk and a wooly cap— if he ever resorted to that, they might
as well dig his grave.

There were too many
distractions tonight, however. Internal
and
external.

Over the woman's head, through his
open window, he watched clouds roiling and bubbling, waiting for
another brilliant, jagged spike to part the sky. To his eyes, that
raw, untamed beauty was far more exciting than the carefully
cultivated prettiness of the willing young creature on his bed. It
couldn't be helped; his attention was seized by the striking,
untamed view above the black silhouette of spires and
chimneys.

As a stronger breeze pushed at the
curtains, he felt the first drop of rain, like the damp thumbprint
of a parson, christening his brow

"Oh, Mr. Deverell," the woman beneath
him exclaimed in a louder voice, sensing perhaps that his mind was
elsewhere. "What must you think of me?"

"
Think
of you?" He finally looked
down at her. Was she blushing? Hard to tell in the dim light of one
oil lamp, but the odds were against it. A bashful woman wouldn't
come knocking on his door, and one attired in frilly garters
beneath layers of costly lace and silk petticoat, meant for them to
be seen and appreciated. He'd only seen women dressed this way in
Parisian bordellos.

"Being engaged...and yet sneaking into
your room. Like this." She ran a fingernail down his bared chest,
and trailed it through the dark curls of hair. "I don't know what
came over me."

A few years ago he wouldn't have cared
that she had a fiancé, anymore than he would care if she had a
husband. If a woman grew bored and came seeking him out for a
stolen interlude, why disappoint her? Women were created for sport.
They existed for man's pleasure.

Except for his own daughter, of
course, he thought sharply. Damn.

And there lay the crux of the matter—
the reason for these unsettled thoughts.

He was the father of a fifteen
year-old girl and constantly reminded of this discomforting fact:
where once he was the fox, now he was the farmer.

He suffered a painful pinch in his
gut, followed by a rapid deflating. Again he looked down at Miss
Pridemore, who must have a father somewhere and who he really
shouldn't have let into his room.

It was no good; he had completely lost
the desire to proceed.

Abruptly he rolled off the bed and
pulled up his breeches. "I'm afraid I must say good evening, madam.
It was a mistake to let you into my room tonight. Forgive me, but
I'm much too tired and won't be able to entertain you after
all."

The pink ribbon of her mouth unraveled
downward at the corners. Her eyes looked puzzled. "I...I suppose I
ought to call off my engagement now."

"Whatever you think best," he
muttered, bemused. "I am the last man in the world to ask about
marriage and commitment." Searching in the dim light for his shirt,
which had previously been tossed to the carpet, he added, "But
since you came after me like a bitch in heat tonight, I'd advise
you to carefully consider your motives in marrying. Before you ruin
a few innocent lives."

He really thought he was being
helpful.

Apparently not.

The silk slipper, hurled at the back
of his head, narrowly missed as he ducked at the same moment to
retrieve his shirt.

"A bitch in heat?" she exclaimed. "How
dare you?!"

"In what other way might your behavior
be described?" He saw no insult in it. Dogs, in his opinion, were
an improvement on the human race. They knew what they needed to
survive and went after it without excuses, procrastination and
guilt. Dogs didn't lie.

"As if you did not encourage
me!"

"Encourage you? Madam, when you
arrived at my door with such clear intentions I thought it only
polite to let you in."

Like most women he'd known, however
briefly, she preferred another view of the circumstances that got
her to his bed. God forbid, she take any responsibility on her own
shoulders. "You are a wicked seducer! I don't know how you can look
at yourself in the mirror."

He began to wonder if she was an
actress. She was certainly performing now.

And then she added, "Attempting to
deflower your own son's fiancée!"

"I beg your pardon?"

More rain blew in at his window, but
he made no move to close it.

She snatched her slipper from his
hand. "That's right, Mr. Deverell. Your own son. What do you
suppose Ransom will have to say when I tell him about
this?"

Ah. He might have known. History
repeating itself — or rather, reversing itself, since it was he who
once seduced his own father's fiancée.

This was unfortunate. He wasn't on the
best of terms with his eldest, legitimate son and this would
certainly put another cat among the pigeons. Ransom was a hot-head,
always looking for an excuse to side with his mama, despite the
fact that she'd never been the maternal type and used her children
as nothing more than weapons and leverage against her former
husband at every opportunity.

He cursed under his breath— didn't
approve of his offspring at these parties, but some were old enough
now to do as they pleased. And they did, taking after him in more
ways than he cared to admit.

Ransom, he thought crossly, needed
something to make use of his time and intelligence. Both were
clearly being wasted. Better amend that at once.

"I didn't see my son downstairs
tonight."

"That's the trouble, Mr. Deverell."
Her laughter scratched at the air. "He says you never do see
him."