The Midnight Man. Charlotte MedeЧитать онлайн книгу.
and favorite novels, was smashed, fractured glass creating a crystalline sparkle on the frayed Persian rug.
Her canvases, her paintings. She stiffened as if she had just been struck. Her work had been slashed into ribbons with an unholy vengeance and flung against the wall.
She covered her mouth with her hands. Her back slid down against the wall until she was almost sitting on her knees, bent over. She was going to be sick. It was then she noticed something else, a detail that had caught her unawares earlier. The aroma, the sickly sweet aroma of a cheroot. Raising her head, she caught the small orange flame on the far side of the cavernous room. It glowed from the chair nestled in the corner where the wall met the ceilinged windows. A dark outline sat in the deep shadows, a curl of smoke mocking her.
Her throat went dry, her nausea dissipated by pure, undiluted rage.
“Who are you—you sick bastard!” Her hands shook as she quickly righted an overturned lamp, grasping clumsily for a match to light the wick.
She heard the faint sound of a pistol being cocked. But before she could respond, the man’s voice said, “Allow me.”
Frozen, she watched as he rose and pushed aside the heavy fabric from the window. Harsh sunlight escaped through the gap, glinting off his pistol still trained on her with iron resolve. She stopped breathing.
That low gravel voice. “Hello again, Lady Hartford. Surely you didn’t think I wouldn’t find you.”
Chapter 4
She stood a pale ghost, eyes wide with fury. And for a moment, Nicholas Ramsay believed everything he’d heard about her.
That she was wild, reckless, mad.
He let the heavy fabric of the curtain fall back against the window.
“You sick, sick bastard,” she repeated as though in a trance. She moved slowly toward him amid the carnage of the room, oblivious to the gun that never wavered in his hand. A small part of his brain told him that she was more than he had expected, more beautiful, more willful. And more dangerous.
“Only a monster, a diabolical fiend, could wreak such destruction.” She breathed fire, continuing her walk toward him. “Shoot me, I don’t care, because if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to exact my revenge on your black soul.” She glanced scornfully at the pistol; then he saw her eyes alight briefly on one of the palette knives balanced perilously on a small end table. Her right hand convulsed at her side as she clutched at the handle. The angle she would have to swing it toward him was wide as a canyon. But it didn’t stop her.
In a seamless movement, he closed the gap between them, knocking the knife from her grip. He could feel her heart hammering against him as the muzzle of his pistol cut into her side. The dark gloss of her hair was silk against his chin, her slenderness hiding a tensile strength that was surprising. She was vibrating, from anger, exhaustion, and shock.
“Get it over with,” she spat, her violet eyes clouded with pain. “I would rather die than tolerate this heinous destruction. Or rot in some asylum with vengeance eating away at my sanity. What are you waiting for?”
He was reluctant to release her, time decelerating to align with the ebb and flow of her breathing, the pulse point beneath the translucent skin of her throat, the plushness of her lips. She’d stopped struggling and he felt an immediate, gut-clenching need.
He hadn’t liked it at Congais’s last night, and he didn’t like it now. Women had come and gone like common currency in the past two decades of his life, assuaging his desires from London and Paris to Buenos Aires and Jakarta. Making it doubly hard for him to account for his groin tightening like a fist. It didn’t help him feel any kindlier toward her.
“I’m waiting for you to stop acting like an hysterical she-cat.”
She jerked against him, brushing up against his hardness. His jaw clenched.
“What do you expect? Coming in here, laying waste to everything I value.” She glared at the discarded palette knife lying at her feet. “I would kill you if I could.”
“I’m not easy to dispatch and a few have tried. Although you’re the first woman, as far as I can tell.”
“Let me go.”
“If I do, it looks like I’ll have to kill you.” Which would defeat the purpose of it all. He pulled her closer to make his point, the slender roundness of her buttocks against his hardness an agony more exquisite than the most evil torturer could devise.
Her shoulders slumped and some of the fight went out of her. He felt sorry for her. Almost. But then sentiment was not in his nature, and if it ever was, it had been driven out of him long ago.
As though she had pulled a switch, her body became sinuous, the lines and curves melting into his hands. “Let go of me and we can discuss this,” she said softly, deceptively.
“You’ll behave?” he asked into the silkiness of her hair.
Immediately, she stiffened. “Behave? Bloody hell—I’m not a child,” she bit out through clenched teeth. “Women are not children and needn’t be addressed as such.”
“I fail to see the distinction,” he murmured conversationally. In his experience, women, whether high born or low, were after much the same thing—to be taken care of, pure and simple. And class divisions made little difference.
“Sod you!”
“Watch your language,” he mocked, but he loosened his hold, still keeping an arm around her waist. “Are you ready to have a civil discussion?”
Her silence was not convincing. He slid the pistol into his waistband and eyed the still-open door of the atelier. The room looked as though it had been on the receiving end of a monsoon, and he’d seen a few in his time in the farthest reaches of the globe. To his experienced eye, the chaos didn’t look to be the handiwork of London’s street runners. He took in the savaged canvases, the broken glass. More like someone nursing a malevolent, savage hatred.
Someone like him.
He began backing her toward the iron stairs leading to what he already knew was the rooftop, stopping when the motion of his body sent her ankle against the bottom step. He pushed her down until she was sitting. Oil from a broken flacon coated the step and seeped into the hem of her skirt.
“Don’t even think of moving.”
She glared up at him with molten disgust. “What is it you want? Other than to wantonly destroy something you can’t even begin to understand.”
With a hand on the banister, he leaned over her. “You believe I’m responsible for all this.” He deliberately crushed a piece of glass under his booted foot.
The deep blue of her violet eyes darkened. “I don’t know how you’re involved with Sissinghurst, but trust me, I will make you pay.” Despite her brave words, she had the appearance of a brilliant butterfly pinned under glass. Exactly the way he wanted her.
He knew that she still wore the same plain blouse and skirt, with its paint-flecked apron, beneath her serviceable cloak. The fact that she didn’t look or act like the spoiled heiress she undoubtedly was made no difference to him.
“I take that to mean that you didn’t believe me last night when I said that I can help you, Helena.” He reached out to run a finger down the side of her face. He expected her to flinch, but she held still.
“So it’s merely coincidence that you’re here amid this outrage.” Her voice escalated from shock to betrayal. “And at Madame Congais’s earlier?”
“I didn’t say that.” His fingers followed the line of her jaw to the point of her chin. Her skin was petal soft in contrast to the glitter in her eyes. “As I recall, you didn’t hear me out, given your rather hasty departure.” The finger made a slow descent along her throat.
She licked her lips,