Scandalous Brides Read online

  “Benno does know the back ways of Venice, true.” His grimy face still reflected dismay at the loss of being alone with his abductee. Yet other, more mercenary, concerns soon took over his disappointment. “Benno does not come cheap, signor.”

  “No, indeed. I never supposed Benno did.” Nicholas reached into his many-caped greatcoat and withdrew a hefty purse, clinking invitingly with coins. Benno snatched at it, but Nicholas deftly held it out of his reach. “This is a small payment. There will be another purse when our task is complete and the lady is out of Italy.”

  “Signor ...”

  “If you accept this payment, Benno, I expect service. If you take it into your head to cheat me, I Will find you and you will regret it. Are we understood?”

  “Oh, yes, signor, yes! Benno would never cheat you. Never. I am an honest businessman.”

  An honest extortionist and kidnapper. How novel. “Good. See that you remain so.” Nicholas delivered the purse into Benno’s eager hands. “Then listen closely. This is what I require. I want a gondola, a covered gondola, waiting tomorrow afternoon at a location I will send you word of. I will need blankets, and a quantity of laudanum.”

  “Oh, yes, signor. Benno will take care of it all.”

  “Excellent. Now get out of here. I will send you word shortly.”

  Benno’s shuffling footsteps soon died away, and Nicholas was alone in the dark, stinking alleyway. But he did not see the tottering piles of refuse, or the rats who peered at him from the shadows. He only saw Elizabeth, as she had been on the terrace, pale in the moonlight, smiling up at him after he had kissed her so improperly.

  He felt again the way she had leaned into him, the way her mouth fit so perfectly with his. The cool silk of her hair in his fingers. The trust shimmering in her eyes.

  She was extraordinary, unlike any woman he had ever known before. Sophisticated but with a glowing innocence still in her eyes, alluring and beautiful but totally unaware of it. The way she moved, and laughed, and thought was utterly unique. He could have spent months, years, watching her, studying her, and still never have discovered all the facets of her. She was always surprising him.

  He knew she would be beautiful and fascinating when she was ninety.

  And it was when he realized this, last night, that he had known he had to move. He had to make this business over and finished before he could not do it at all. Before he snatched up Elizabeth and ran with her, to Turkey or China or America, or anyplace where they would never be found and where he could spend all his days watching her.

  He had to forget about her. He had to think only of Peter, and his promise. He owed the man his life! And all Peter wanted in exchange was...

  Nicholas’s very heart.

  “Elizabeth,” he whispered. “My dear. I am so very, very sorry.”

  But only the rats were there to hear him, to watch him cry for the first time in years. The first time since he had been told Peter was dead in Spain.

  That afternoon, with no warning, the heavens opened and a deluge poured down. And Venice was impossibly dismal.

  Georgina lay on the settee, wrapped in her warmest dressing gown after being caught in the rain on her way home from a sitting, and became engrossed in the latest horrid novel from England. Elizabeth sat in her corner, attempting to work some more on the Katerina Bruni portrait. Her brush moved over the canvas methodically, but she could not seem to concentrate on the courtesan’s pouting expression, or on giving her green eyes the sparkle that was so much a part of her.

  Elizabeth’s thoughts kept flying to the kiss again, and Nicholas’s strong shoulders beneath her hands. When she tried to shade a long curl, she instead saw him smiling down at her as they floated on a sun-drenched canal while he tried to steer their gondola.

  Her brush moved of its own accord, and she soon found she had painted in the margins of the canvas, not the dusky Katerina, but a laughing Nicholas.

  “Oh, no!” Elizabeth stared, aghast, at her painting. “This must cease!”

  “What?” Georgina looked up from her book. “Did you say something, Lizzie?”

  Elizabeth tossed her brush aside and went to look out the window at the unceasing rain. The gray torrent had driven all the merrymakers indoors, and the city was deserted. Only a few bedraggled streamers and blossoms gave a tiny splash of color.

  “I said this rain has to cease,” she said, tracing one fingernail through the mist on the windowpane. “Or it will ruin the Vincenzis’ party tonight.”

  “Indeed, it was meant to be in their grand gardens. Such a shame if it is spoiled, and you do not get to dance under the stars with the divine Nicholas!”

  “Oh, Georgie, really.” Elizabeth’s rebuke was faint. She had daydreamed of dancing under a star-strewn sky in Nicholas’s strong arms.

  “Is that all that is worrying you, Lizzie?” Georgina put her book aside, and sat up.

  “What else could it be?”

  “I do not know. Nicholas? The two of you looked so happy at the opera yesterday. You could not stop looking at each other.”

  “Oh, yes, it was lovely!” Elizabeth paused. “And... and last night, he kissed me.”

  “Lizzie, how marvelous!”

  “Yes. Marvelous.” Elizabeth’s voice was small, even to her own ears.

  “Then what is wrong, dear? You are attracted to him, he is attracted to you, you are spending time together....”

  Elizabeth left the window and went to sit next to her friend, tucking an extra lap robe around her chilled shoulders. “Georgie, I need your help.”

  “Whatever you need, Lizzie. You only need ask.”

  “I need you to tell me about your marriages.”

  Georgina’s eyes widened. “My marriages? But, Lizzie, you know all about them! And none of them lasted long enough to be really interesting.”

  “I know their names, but I do not know about them. About your feelings for them. Your letters when we were apart were always about your work, the people you were meeting. Never about your husbands.”

  “Well.” The unflappable Georgina Beaumont somehow seemed at a loss for words. Her mouth opened and closed a few times before she spoke again. “Well, Lizzie, you know I will tell you whatever you want to know, but why this sudden desire to know this?”

  “I do not know! I thought perhaps, oh, this is so foolish... I ... I wish to know more about men.”

  “Oh.” Georgina fell back against her pillows. “But, Lizzie, you know about men! There is Stephen, as silly as he is; Paolo; Luigi; the Duc d’Evagny, who wanted to give you carte blanche...”

  “Oh, them! I never felt the least bit tempted to confide in them. To be intimate with them.”

  “As you do with Nicholas.”

  “I may be. Yes. But...”

  “But what?”

  “But if I give in to my feelings, will he turn on me? Betray me, as Peter did? Are all men like Peter?”

  “I see.” Georgina chewed thoughtfully on her thumbnail. “Dear, it is quite understandable that you should feel this way, that you should be so wary of giving your trust again. Peter treated you shockingly. I knew he was a bad ‘un, even when we were at school. It is a miracle you can even think of being close to another man.”

  “Yes! That is just what I fear.”

  “Well, Lizzie, let me assure you that not all men are like Peter Everdean. They are out there, oh yes, and you must be careful of them. Like my second husband, Sir Everett.”

  The two women shuddered in concert. The late, unlamented Sir Everett had been quite wealthy; indeed, his wealth had paid for the small villa at Lake Como. But he had also been quite fat and quite temperamental. He had bred yappy French poodles on his country estate, and Georgina had often been compelled to tend their kennels.

  “You must always avoid men who wear corsets and gorge themselves on fig pudding at all costs,” Georgina now admonished. “I would never have looked twice at him, if I hadn’t been so desperate when Jack died. And then, you see, there are m
en like Jack.”

  The friends sighed in remembrance. Captain Jack Reid had been tall, blond, charming, dashing in his regimentals. He had been a younger son with few prospects, but all the girls at Miss Thompson’s had been quite in love with him. Georgina, older than Elizabeth and quite dashing herself, had been the envy of the school when she had eloped with him to Gretna Green and then gone with him to Portugal. He had been killed there.

  “Oh, Lizzie,” Georgina said. “Our rough months in those drafty billets were... perfect.”

  “Jack was handsome,” Elizabeth answered.

  “And as good as he was handsome.” Georgina twisted on her wrist the narrow pearl bracelet he had given her, which never left her person. “He was not the most intellectual man, true, but he loved that I wanted to be an artist.”

  “What of Mr. Beaumont?”

  “Ah, well, Lizzie, you needn’t fear that Nicholas will be another Mr. Beaumont.” Aloysius Beaumont, wealthy cit, had been all of seventy-six when he had married Georgina, and seventy-seven when she buried him. He had been elderly, but generous.

  “And rather nice, when he could recall who I was,” Georgina said. “And if it were not for him, we could never have had the things we do on the pittance Sir Everett’s children allow me.”

  “And what a shame that would have been! Every grocer and dressmaker in Italy would be destitute,” Elizabeth teased.

  “So, my dear, perhaps you should take a chance with Nicholas. You need not tell him quite everything, even if you are lovers. He may turn out to be your Jack. Or at least an amusement.”

  Elizabeth hugged Georgina, but in her heart she was screaming, But what if he does not want to be my Jack?

  Chapter Nine

  “You are very late.”

  Nicholas paused at the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, still poised over the candle he was lighting. Slowly, he turned to look at her.

  Elizabeth sat, very still and pale, in the corner of the dark foyer, hands folded in her lap as she watched him. She was dressed for a party, in sky-blue muslin trimmed in white satin ribbon, her hair plaited and caught up in ivory combs.

  She looked like the Parmigianino Madonna, all slender neck and mysterious, downcast eyes.

  “I thought perhaps you had had a contretemps with an irate client,” she continued, coming to take the flint from his frozen fingers and lighting the candle herself. “You are not one to forget a party.”

  He slapped his open palm against his forehead. “The Vincenzis’ party! I was to escort you. I am sorry, Elizabeth. I was just... walking. I lost track of the time.”

  “That is quite all right. As it is raining, we can’t go out into their lovely gardens anyway. Everyone will be smothering in their tiny ballroom. Georgina has gone ahead.” She smiled up at him, her mouth turning suddenly down as she saw his hair dripping onto the carpet. “You must be frozen through! Come into the kitchen where there is a fire, before you catch the ague.”

  Nicholas allowed her to lead him into the warm kitchen, and fuss over him with towels and warm kettles. But he, who had never had a modest day from the time he could toddle away from his nurse and pull off his nappy, balked when she asked him to remove his shirt.

  “Wh—what?” he stammered.

  “I said you should remove your shirt,” Elizabeth answered calmly, stirring at the brewing tea. “It is soaked through.”

  “I am not certain that is a very good idea.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, please, Nicholas! Do not go missish now. Your teeth are chattering, and if you make yourself ill I will not see a farthing of payment for a month.” She slanted him a sly smile. “I already saw a great deal on the terrace last night, you know. I promise to use my artistic detachment and refrain from ravishing you here in my kitchen.”

  Nicholas couldn’t help but laugh at himself. He was behaving rather like a spinster aunt, shivering in wet clothes in order to preserve a doubtful modesty. This, after all, was a woman he had held, kissed... planned to kidnap. He pulled off the sodden shirt and leaned back in his chair, relishing the heat of the fire and the cozy sounds of Elizabeth’s tuneless humming and the soft patter of the rain.

  “Here we are!” Elizabeth arranged the tea service on a small table, and sat beside him to pour. “A nice pot of tea, some brandy if you need something a bit stronger, and even some sandwiches Bianca had put away in the pantry.”

  “It looks lovely,” Nicholas answered, gratefully accepting the liberally laced cup of tea she offered. “But I do not want you to waste your evening waiting on me. You should be at the party.”

  Elizabeth waved away his protest. “Not at all. This is ever so much nicer than yet another party. I’m quite enjoying the quiet. And the company.”

  “So you tire of the social whirl?”

  “A bit. I love the gatherings—Venice is a delight, and there are so many artists here.” She paused to take a thoughtful bite of sandwich. “But at times it can be rather overwhelming, and I forget the perfect pleasures of a good fire on a rainy night.”

  “Carnivale will soon be over.”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do then? Stay and watch Venice in its Lenten solemnities?”

  “Settle down to my work, you mean?” Elizabeth chuckled. “Yes, I do need to do that. The Bruni commission will not wait forever, and I have a few things I am working on for myself. Georgie has suggested we take a villa in the country for Lent, somewhere nearer Venice than her home at Lake Como.”

  “Do you approve of this plan?” He listened to her carefully, straining for a glimpse of wistfulness, longing for a return to English aristocratic country life. If she could be persuaded to return on her own ...

  “Oh, yes. The country would be very conducive to my work.”

  “So you do tire of city life?”

  “Not a bit!” She poured herself another cup of tea. “I am having a wonderful time here. So many patrons eager to spend their money! And we must come back here in the spring, anyway.”

  “Return? Why so?”

  “I received a letter this afternoon, a new commission. To restore the Veronese frescoes in Lady Deake’s Ca Donati. I am to begin work on them in April, when Lady Deake returns from Rome.”

  “What?” Nicholas almost fell from his chair in his shock. “Lady Evelyn Deake—you will be working for her?”

  “Yes.” Elizabeth frowned. “Nicholas, whatever is the matter? This a perfect commission; every artist in Venice has been vying for it. It is a great honor to be so singled out, even by someone as thoroughly irritating as Lady Deake.”

  “Elizabeth.” Nicholas knelt before her, her hands between his. If Elizabeth spoke with Evelyn, if Evelyn told her who he truly was ... all would be lost. “Listen to me. You have traveled all over Italy. You have seen so much.”

  “Yes, that is true.” He voice was puzzled, her forehead creased in concern as she looked down at him. She obviously thought him moon-mad.

  Still he plunged on, hardly knowing or caring that he was babbling. “Perhaps it is time you expanded your experience, discovered a new culture.”

  “A new culture? Such as France?”

  “Perhaps. Or even... England.”

  She snatched her hands from his. “England!”

  “There are many fine artists there ...”

  “Absolutely not! There is nothing to be learned there. This is my home, and here I will stay.” She took a long sip from the brandy bottle, sitting there marble still, eyes closed, until she visibly composed herself. “Oh, Nicholas, do sit down. What is wrong with you tonight? First you walk about in the rain, and now you are full of England for some reason.”

  Nicholas reluctantly sat back in his chair, watching her, the glitter of her eyes as she suppressed tears, the mulish set of her dainty jaw. Never had he known such desperation before. He had thought himself quite prepared to do anything to take her back to England and Peter, and then go on with his life. Now he trembled with something very like fear that she would discove
r the truth from Evelyn’s painted lips, that her laughter and kisses would be lost forever when she knew.

  As they would when she was kidnapped by himself and the nasty Benno.

  He did not want that, he saw now. He only wanted to go on like this always, sitting beside her in a firelit kitchen with the rain whispering at the windows.

  “There is no reason,” he said, smiling at her in reassurance. “No reason at all.”

  Elizabeth lay awake for long hours that night, watching the silvery fall of rain outside her window and thinking of Nicholas’s words that evening.

  She knew him so little. For all his charm, his dimpled grins, his wondrous kisses, he was yet a stranger. She knew nothing of his motives, his past. She had not wanted to ask, for fear of opening the Pandora’s box of her own past. And he was such fun, so good at his job, that it had not seemed all that important.

  Until now. Now, when he had shown her such seriousness, such barely veiled desperation. She had never thought to see that in his merry countenance. He had been so earnest when he urged her to give up Lady Deake’s patronage and return to England. His intensity as he had gripped her hands had been almost frightening.

  Could he truly miss England so much himself that he hoped his employment with her would take him back there? That seemed so flimsy an excuse. She would not have thought him such a patriot as all that. In her speculations on his past, she had supposed him to be fleeing England like herself, in search of adventure and fortune. Or perhaps fleeing a broken heart...

  “Of course!” Elizabeth whispered to herself. “It was the mention of Lady Deake that brought on this rage to leave Venice.”

  They had been conversing so closely at the opera. Elizabeth shuddered at the memory of Lady Deake’s bright curls nodding near Nicholas’s shoulder as she giggled up at him.

  Lady Deake must have been a part of his past, or had at least known him before. And if he had been moving in such a smart set as that, he was not the middle-class soldier she had supposed him to be. What a coil!

  He had been living under their roof, eating his meals across the table from her, watching her paint, teasing Bianca, bantering with Georgina. He was not intrusive, did not at all mind their erratic ways, and was very good at his job, willing to deal with very unpleasant people to collect what was owed to her.