"No, she won"t." Isabel popped the last bit into her mouth and stood up, then walked to the piano. "She won"t catch me."
"The moment she discovers the snaps are missing, she"ll know who did it, since you are the only child in the house." Grace glanced at Dylan again. "Well," she amended, "perhaps not the only one."
He grinned at that. She stiffened in her chair, watching as he began to lick cream from his fingers, one by one. An innocent enough thing to be doing, but the slow, deliberate way he did it and the laughter in his eyes told her he wasn"t thinking about anything innocent.
Shameless man. She lowered her gaze to the table.
"Papa?" That word broke the spell as Isabel turned toward them. "May I play your Broadwood Grand? It"s so much better than the pianoforte they moved into the nursery."
He glanced at the clock and shook his head. "I must work this afternoon. You may practice on it tonight before bedtime, if Mrs. Cheval has nothing else planned for you."
"That would be fine," Grace said. "Perhaps, Isabel, you should take your bath now. You have cream and crumbs all over you."
"Take a bath at three o"clock in the afternoon?" Isabel looked at her askance.
"Find Molly and tell her I said to draw you a bath now instead of after dinner. That way, once we have eaten, you will have a full two hours to play your father"s piano before bedtime."
Isabel needed no further coaxing. She started toward the door, then stopped and gave her father a hopeful look. "It would be much better for both of us if I had a Broadwood Grand, too."
"I do not think so." Dylan pointed toward the door.
"Papa!" Isabel gave a heavy sigh. "I thought at least you would understand how important it is to have a good piano," she said with all the injured dignity an eight-year-old child could summon, then turned and left. The footman just outside the room closed the doors behind her.
"From the look of things," Dylan said, "I have fallen from grace."
"Never. You are her father. She adores you already."
"Only because I let her have a few brandy snaps."
"No, it isn"t. Little girls always adore their fathers." Grace leaned back in her chair with a sigh. "All I know is that she has exhausted me. A whole day with her has left me feeling akin to limp lettuce."
"I suspect that is her intention."
"Oh, yes. She wants to wear me down, hoping I will find that giving in to her demands is easier than fighting with her about everything."
"Not a very effective strategy on her part, I"ll wager. German, mathematics, no food between meals. What an excellent governess you are, for you are a bit like an army general."
Grace sat up straight in her chair, indignant. "An army general? No, indeed!"
"I am grateful I am not in your charge," he went on, ignoring her protest, "for I would never get away with anything."
"I am soft as b.u.t.ter compared to the governess I had when I was Isabel"s age. Mrs. Filbert. She was very much the army general, very strict, and always emphasizing self-discipline."
"Ah, self-discipline! That explains why you keep staring at that last brandy snap with such longing, yet you will not just take it."
"I have not been staring at it."
"My apologies," he said gravely. "I don"t believe you about your cook, by the way. No child goes through life without ever stealing sweets from the kitchen."
"I did," she said and began to laugh at his obvious disbelief. "Truly. I was always a very good girl."
"Were you, now?" he asked, his opulent lashes lowering as he looked at her mouth. "You never did anything naughty?"
"No," she said, refusing to get all fl.u.s.tered by that question and the improper way he asked it.
"Never?"
Not until I scandalized everyone, shamed my family, and ruined my reputation.
"Never."
"Why not?"
The question was serious, and she blinked, disconcerted. "What do you mean?"
"It"s a straightforward question. Why were you a good girl all the time?"
"I-" She broke off, unable to answer him, for she"d never thought about it. "I don"t know."
He pushed the plate a bit toward her.
"No, I won"t have any," she said with firm resolve. "I am attempting to set a good example for your daughter."
"I know. But Isabel isn"t here right now, is she?"
Grace caught the movement of his hand and looked down as he took the last brandy snap from the plate. He leaned forward, bringing it close to her lips. She caught the scent of brandy and ginger and felt the sharp sting of hunger.
She looked up above the brandy snap just a bit, enough to see his mouth, enough to see that he was smiling at her.
"Go ahead," he dared, his voice low and beckoning. "I won"t tell on you."
Her throat went dry, and she could not move. He was absurd, sneaking sweets from his own cook and pretending it was something forbidden. It was absurd that he could do this to her, hold out a brandy snap and make her feel as if it were the apple of Eden.
"You must have been very naughty when you were a boy," she accused, her words coming out in a choked rush, her fingers curling around the arms of her chair.
"Very," he agreed. "When I wasn"t stealing brandy snaps, I spent my time-" He broke off and pressed the confection to her mouth, touching cream to her lips. "I spent my time trying to trick Michaela Gordon into letting me see under her petticoats."
"Who was Michaela Gordon?" she whispered, her tongue tasting cream as he pushed the end of the pastry into her mouth.
"A very pretty redhead," he said lightly. "The vicar"s daughter."
"You would attempt to peek under the petticoats of a vicar"s daughter," she said around the small pastry he had between her lips. She tasted whipped cream and took a bite before she could stop herself. It shattered in his hand, and she swallowed a mouthful of pastry and cream. He pushed the ends of two fingers against her lips, and she parted them, taking in what remained of the brandy snap-a few crumbs and lots of cream. Some of it must have ended up on her face instead of in her mouth, for Dylan began to laugh as he pulled his hand back.
She couldn"t help laughing too, a laugh smothered by the fluff in her mouth. She swallowed it, but she could still feel the slick sweetness of cream on her lips, and she licked it off.
His lashes lowered a fraction, and his smile vanished. He reached out again, pressing his cream-covered fingertips to her mouth.
Oh, G.o.d.
Desire came over her like a wave of warm honey as she looked at him. Her eyes started to close, and she felt her lips parting against his fingers just as the thought crossed her mind that he must have done this sort of thing a hundred times before.
Grace jerked back, coming to her senses. He let his hand fall away, and he just looked at her, all amus.e.m.e.nt gone. Her breathing was a rapid rasp in the silence, and a hint of something undefinable came into his eyes, something that got past their opaque blackness, something almost tender.
"You have cream all over your face," he said, confirming her suspicion. He glanced down, reaching toward his breast pocket for his handkerchief, but his hand was still coated with whipped cream. He grasped the triangle of white linen carefully with the tips of two fingers, then pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her.
She took it and dabbed at her mouth and chin. At least a hundred times before, she said silently, trying to harden herself against that look in his eyes. She handed the handkerchief back to him, watching as he used it to clean the whipped cream from his fingers.
Like Etienne, he was an artist, but his hands were not the long, fine-boned hands of her late husband. No, Dylan"s were blunt hands, big, with wide palms and strong fingers, not like those of any other artist she had met. But they knew just how much force to use when playing a piano and just how much gentleness to use when caressing a woman.
"You have wonderful hands," she blurted out without thinking and could have bitten her tongue off.
"Thank you," he said. Several seconds of silence pa.s.sed, but he did not resume his task. "Grace?"
She did not look up. "Hmm?"
"We are just friends now, aren"t we?" She forced her gaze up to meet his. "Yes."
Deviltry entered those black eyes once again. "d.a.m.n."
Chapter Nine.
The opening was brilliant, the rest was s.h.i.t. Dylan groaned in creative agony and scratched out what he had just written. These chords should make the feminine theme richer, deeper, more sensuous, but they didn"t. Something was wrong.
Exasperated, he dropped the quill onto the sheet of music that rested atop the piano, a sheet already marred by many ink blots and scratches- the pitiful result of this afternoon"s efforts. He studied the paper before him, looking at something which could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered musical exposition. He wanted to tear it into pieces and throw it in the dustbin.
Instead, he reached for the bottle of brandy at his elbow. Staring at the blotched, stained screed on his piano, he downed swallows of brandy, and his thoughts drifted past the music itself to his muse. Three weeks now she had been in his home. That first afternoon with her had brought a wave of inspiration that had lasted him a week, taking him through the first half of the opening exposition, the masculine theme. The night after they had eaten brandy snaps with Isabel, he had begun the second half of the exposition, trying to create the feminine theme based on the vague bit of melody he had first heard that night at the Palladium.
He had spent countless hours at his piano during the past fortnight, yet he had nothing to show for his efforts but a great deal of frustration and a handful of half-formed ideas in his folio. The feminine theme was simply not coming to him. What little he did have felt so forced, pulled out of him by sheer will.
He glanced at the mantel clock and realized he"d been sitting here for nine straight hours. He looked around and noticed that daylight had come and gone, a servant had been in the room to light lamps and draw the draperies closed. Obsessed with his work, he hadn"t noticed the time pa.s.sing, and now it was almost eleven o"clock. By this time, he was usually out enjoying some of London"s pleasurable diversions.
His preoccupation with this symphony had not diminished his need for distractions. He still spent his nights at gaming tables, parties, and his club. During the past two weeks, he had visited some of his more disreputable haunts, including two or three of his favorite seraglios and c.o.c.k-and-hens, dallying and flirting with the courtesans, but never going upstairs with any of them. And why not? Because none of them were Grace.
Friends. Still an unappealing idea.
Dylan picked up the sheet of composition paper on the piano and studied it for a moment. Somehow, having his muse be merely a friend was not very inspiring. He crumpled the page into a ball and tossed it behind him onto the chaise longue, where it joined the dozen or so already there.
He could go out. Dylan downed another swallow of brandy. He didn"t want a distraction, he told himself, not right now. He wanted to try again. Taking a deep breath, he put his hands on the keys, fighting to get past the noise in his brain and concentrate. He played chords over and over, tinkering with them dozens of different ways, trying to find a way to make them work in the theme, but they did not work. No matter how many ways he tried to improvise on them, they just did not work.
"d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n." Dylan plunked his elbows down on the keys, a discordant sound that matched his state of mind but was of little use to his composition. He rubbed his eyelids with the tips of his fingers, listening as the clock chimed midnight. Another hour gone, and still not a decent note to show for it. Five years of nothing but noise, then regained hope and a half-formed first movement, then nothing but noise again.
Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps Grace was right and muses didn"t exist. Perhaps he had been right five years ago, and what he heard now was only whispers, shadows of what had once been sonatas and symphonies.
With each pa.s.sing moment, fear gripped him tighter and tighter, until it clawed at his insides like the talons of desperate birds. He wanted... oh, G.o.d, what he wanted... to be himself again, to be the man who could sit down and write a flawless sonata as if he were writing a letter, to be the man who never struggled to bring out what he saw and heard and felt, the man who could say anything with notes and melody. To be again the man who had never needed to worry about failure and who had never known the meaning of self-doubt.
After the accident, he had sat here many, many times, just like this, trying for hour upon hour when it did no good, saying that if only he sat here long enough, something would happen, some key would unlock and everything would be right again. So many times he had walked away in despair, until one day, he had just not sat down, had just not hit the keys. He had stopped trying. That was the day his soul had begun to die.
From his earliest memory, he had always known what he was meant to do-to take all the turbulence of his soul and turn it into something finite, something of form and shape and substance that could be written down in notes and clefs on staffs of five and not be lost.
He was an egoist, no doubt, to believe with absolute conviction that what was in his soul was worth recording for mankind, but it had always been like breathing to him. He"d never had a choice. If he did not give voice to what was inside him, he would eventually cease to exist, not by putting a bullet in his head but by the death of his soul.
The clock struck quarter past midnight.
His hands ached, the whine was a searing pain through his head, and here he sat, staring at a row of black and ivory stripes. He had to finish the theme. Without theme, there was no exposition. Without exposition, there was no music. Without music, he had nothing. He was nothing.
What had he been thinking? He couldn"t write a symphony. He didn"t even have enough for a sonata. Those thoughts whispered to him, slithered through his mind like serpents, threatening to extinguish his hope. He would not let it happen. He rose to his feet with such force that he sent the piano bench toppling backward, feeling only the overpowering desire to get away, to replace pain, fear, and desperation with something else, something pretty or amusing or mind-numbing that would get him through yet another night.
He opened one of the doors leading out of the music room and started toward the stairs to go up and change clothes, but then he heard a faint, mournful sound that got past the noise and fear, a melody coming from down the corridor to his left. He paused, listening to Grace"s violin.
Since that afternoon with the brandy snaps a fortnight ago, she had been avoiding him, and he had let her do it. He had no intention of leaving their relationship a platonic one, but she was not ready for more than that, and he was not ready for less. They had been at an impa.s.se these past two weeks. Perhaps he could end that impa.s.se tonight.
Dylan turned and headed down the long corridor to the library, and the music became louder as he approached. It was the poignant melody of Pathetique. He paused outside the closed door for a moment, then turned the handle and went inside.
She was sitting on the settee of ivory brocade under the window, her eyes closed, so absorbed in her music that she did not hear him come in.
She had retrieved her instrument from the music room a day or two after their dinner together, when she had played for him. He had noticed its absence, and he realized now that she must be using this room to practice in the evenings after Isabel was in bed.
The polished wood of her instrument gleamed in the candlelight, and her hair shone like gold against the aubergine velvet draperies behind her. Without making a sound, he closed the door and leaned back against it, then he shut his eyes and listened.
He remembered how afraid she had been to play for him that night they had dined together, and how unjustified her fear had been. She lacked the rare touch of brilliance and the driving egoism to be a true virtuoso, but she was a very good violinist, and it was a pleasure to listen to her.
The music stopped.
He opened his eyes to find her studying him, her violin tucked under her cheek, and her bow poised above the strings.
"Don"t stop," he said as she lowered her instrument and bow to her lap. "Not on my account. I am thoroughly enjoying myself."
Somehow, without even smiling, her face lit up like a candle. Giving women compliments was second nature to him, and yet the pleasurable glow in her face at his words made him feel deuced awkward all of a sudden, and unexpectedly touched. "Please go on."
To his disappointment, she shook her head. "I have been practicing for some hours, and now that I have stopped, I appreciate just how long I have been playing, for my hands are beginning to ache."
"I know that feeling well." He clenched his fists and relaxed them with a grimace. "Especially today."
"Have you been composing since this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"And how is it coming?"
"It"s not," he answered lightly. "I am quite put out that my muse has not given me any a.s.sistance."
"Hasn"t she?" Grace set her violin and bow in the open case that lay on the floor beside her feet. "Most ungenerous of her."