She stole a look at him from beneath the shelter of her lashes. Her heart skipped in her throat. In the
mere space of days he had descended from mildly rakish to barbarous. His jaw was shadowed, his thick hair tousled. His waistcoat was rumpled and his white shirt lay open at the throat. Emily remembered
only too well the feel of him beneath her fingers. With his long legs stretched out before him and his
eyes glittering beneath the ebony silk of his lashes, he didn't look the sort of gentleman to seduce his ward. He looked the sort to ravish her.
Emily experimented by striking an off-key chord. A muscle in his jaw twitched dangerously. She hid her smile behind a frown of concentration. As she finished the minuet, his shoulders slumped and he tossed back the rest of the Scotch in a relieved swig. Shooting him a sly glance, she hooked her fingers and started at the beginning again.
Justin choked. He shot out of the chair, his face darkened with emotion. "For God's sake, woman!
You're not some wind-up monkey beating a drum. Must you play like one? "
Emily froze, her fingers poised over the keys.
His sisters gaped at him in open-mouthed shock. They had seen their brother frustrated, morose,
angry, elated, and white-faced with shame beneath his father's taunts, but they'd never seen him show deliberate cruelty to anyone.
His breath seared the back of her neck as he folded his hands over hers, forcing them out of their rigid stance.
"Loosen your fingers," he commanded. "Stop clawing the keys like a bloody cat. "
He massaged each of her knuckles until her hands went limp in his rough embrace. "There. Can you
feel the difference?"
"Yes," she murmured. "I can feel it."
She could feel other things as well. The press of his muscled thigh against her back. The whisper of his breath against her cheek, its Scotch-warmed fragrance as intoxicating as fresh sin. She gazed down at their linked hands. His knuckles had yet to lose their island tan.
She could also feel his fingers on top of hers, stroking them toward the waiting keys. A shimmering
chord vibrated on the air.
"That's it," he said, his voice softening to husky velvet. "Don't attack the keys. Stroke them. Possess them. Make them your own."
He reversed their positions, slipping his hands beneath hers until they rested lightly in the cup of her palms. Her hands looked pale and delicate against the swarthiness of his own. He began the piece, not merely playing the keys but seducing them with his touch. She could feel the music reverberating through his powerful tendons. She turned her head to watch his face, captivated by the play of emotions over his handsome features.
"Music isn't like sewing, Emily. It's feeling and not skill that separates mastery from mechanics. Listen to this piece. It's deceptively simple. But hear it as Mozart did. See the dancers twirling around the ballroom. See two lovers meet and touch hands."
The final note chimed with the crystalline purity of a bell. Their gazes locked in its echo.
Justin felt his breath quicken. Emily smelled like burnt vanilla and her ringlets made her look like a forlorn cocker spaniel, but all he wanted to do was graze his lips against the creamy flesh of her throat and sink his teeth into the inviting fullness of her lower lip.
She gazed up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. "Like this?"
She slipped her hands beneath his and played the piece with the flawless accuracy of any schoolgirl accustomed to a music teacher rapping her knuckles for each error.
Justin straightened. His voice sounded tight, as if something were caught in his throat. "Yes. That will
do very nicely."
As he spun on his heel and marched out of the room, Olivia Connor buried her face in her embroidery, her plump ringlets dancing with amusement.
* * *
The next day Emily ducked into the kitchen, seeking an escape from Lily. Justin's sister had devised
some gruesome new coiffure for that night's dinner party, and had been trailing her for hours,
brandishing an iron and some alarming tongs that looked better suited for shoeing horses. She doubted
if any of Justin's sisters even knew the kitchen had been moved out of the basement in recent years.
They seemed to be caught in a web of perpetual girlhood. Emily thought Justin ought to boot both
them and their shiftless husbands out of Grymwilde to start homes and families of their own.
The kitchen was in an uproar. Cooks and maids scurried from oven to table, their aprons streaked with flour and their faces flushed from heat and exertion. Damp tendrils of hair escaped their crooked caps. Gracie, the toothless old cook, hovered over an enameled caldron, stirring and muttering under her
breath like one of Macbeth's witches. The salty tang of mussel chowder hung in the air.
As Emily sidled around the coal box, Gracie cocked her bulbous nose and sniffed the air. "Check the buns, Sally. I smell somethin' burnin'."
Emily sighed and blew a singed ringlet out of her eyes.
Gracie's pink gums cracked in a smile. "Never mind, Sal. It's only Miss Emily. And how are ya today,
my dear? Come to pilfer another o' my raisin buns, have ya?"
"Not today, Gracie. I just came in to . . . warm myself."
It was true there was little enough warmth in the drafty old house. The fire in Justin's eyes had been banked to an unnatural coolness that made her shiver.
One of the maids burst into tears over a pan of clotted-cream sauce and Gracie bustled over to comfort her. Emily wandered down the long galley, hoping to alleviate her boredom by peering into this pan or that one. At the sight on one of the tables she let out a cry of dismay.
"Can't cook those till it's time to serve 'em," one of the maids explained, brushing past with a tray of steaming buns. "The duchess likes 'em nice and fresh."
Emily knelt and rested her folded arms on the table, bringing herself eye to eye with a glass tank of live lobsters. Pity touched her at the sight of their shiny claws bound by thick twine. They looked helpless
and trapped.
Just like her. She imagined her own arms hobbled by ruffles, her legs by crinolines.
She cocked her head sideways, studying the lobsters. Did they dream of the sea as she did? Did they
hear its haunting rhythms? Taste its pungent tang?
At least the lobsters did not wake in the night, dreaming of a man garbed not in a crisp waistcoat and trousers, but a pair of faded dungarees. They never ached to remember his dark hair tousled by the wind, his stern features softened by laughter. She reached into the water and stroked a sleek head, surprised by the burn of tears in her eyes.
"There you are, Em!" Lily's shrill tones grated down her spine. "I've found the most enchanting coif in this magazine. Do you think Gracie might give us some egg whites to stiffen your curls?"
Groaning, Emily dropped her head. The lobsters' stalked eyes seemed to glint with sympathy.