Just For Her. Katherine O' NealЧитать онлайн книгу.

      When he spoke, the words sounded as crazed to Jules as they did to him.

      “It wasn’t my intention to blurt it out that way,” she said. “But that is, indeed, what I am proposing.”

      Slowly, incredulously, he asked, “Why on earth would I want to kill your husband?”

      “Because he’s a monster.” She said this with a sense of poise and delicacy, as if she’d just told him her husband was cutting roses in the garden. “And because I shall compensate you for the service.”

      He was still staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.

      Have I? she wondered.

      Deliberately he said, “Let me see if I understand you. You want me to kill the man in cold blood?”

      “Of course not. I’m not a murderess.”

      He shook his head as if to clear it. “What, then?”

      “I want you to kill him in a duel.”

      “What I’m going to do,” he told her evenly, “is leave this house and never look back.”

      He headed for the open doors.

      “Do you know who I am?”

      He stopped again, in the shadows of the terrace overlooking the gardens below. “I know exactly who you are. The Archduchess Maria Theresa Louisa Juliana von Habsburg. Formerly a royal princess of the Habsburg family, recently dethroned by the Great War and sent into exile. Currently wife of British business tycoon Dominic DeRohan. I make it a habit of researching my prospective—donors.”

      “Then you know I can afford to compensate you for your trouble.”

      “On the contrary. I know you have next to nothing of your own except this house and your share of the Habsburg jewels. Not being portable, I care nothing for real estate, but obviously my presence here tonight tells you I care about the jewels. So tell me…will you offer a few choice stones as payment for the…service? Say, for instance, the Marie Antoinette pearls?”

      “I’m afraid I can’t do that. They’re my—birthright, if you will—all I have left of my family. But I do have some household funds at my disposal.”

      He considered her for a moment. “Why do you want him dead? To get control of his money?”

      “I care nothing for his filthy money. I want him dead because he’s the devil himself. Because he killed the two men in the world I cared about. And because I now know it’s the only way I can ever be free of him.”

      He glanced about, taking in the suggestions of furnishings in the darkened room. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take myself out of the light. An old habit, I’m afraid. Since you insist on this conversation, I take it you won’t mind if I avail myself of one of your chairs?”

      “Of course. I’m sorry. I seem to have forgotten my manners. But then, the circumstances are rather unusual. I was rigorously schooled in every aspect of entertaining, but I was never prepared to—”

      “Entertain thieves in the night?”

      “You’re the first thief I’ve ever—met, much less entertained.”

      Suddenly she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation with this man. Once again, her heart began to beat erratically.

      “And you’re the first quarry who ever asked me to do away with her lord and master.” He made his way to the far right corner of the room and a padded brocade chair. Once he sat down, he was completely hidden by the shadows. He might not have been there at all, except that his voice floated to her like a murmur from the bottom of a well. “If you hate him so much, why did you marry him?”

      “I was forced into it.”

      “What of it? Arranged marriages are an ancient royal custom, I understand. Particularly in the Habsburg line.”

      “Except that mine wasn’t arranged. It was coerced. By DeRohan.”

      There was a slight pause. When he spoke, it seemed to her that his tone expressed a more attentive, if still cautious, interest as he asked, “And just how did he manage that?”

      “I’d rather not tell you.”

      “Why not?”

      “Because you’ll think I’m merely feeling sorry for myself.”

      “Ah, but you’ve intrigued me. You wouldn’t expect a cautious rogue like myself to join you in such an intimate conspiracy without an explanation, would you?”

      Jules hesitated. She felt ridiculous, speaking to this disembodied voice, like a schoolgirl called onto the carpet by her tutor. “I suppose I owe you that much. It would help, though, if I could turn on the light.”

      He snarled at her from the dark. “Lady, you so much as reach for that light switch and I’ll be gone before you turn around.”

      She froze in place. “Please don’t go. I’ll tell you what you want to know.” She looked about her in the darkness. She hadn’t planned for this negotiation to take place in her bedroom. She couldn’t very well sit on her bed and talk to him, although she realized the absurdity of thinking anything unseemly at this point. Instead, she began to pace in the moonlight at the foot of the bed, the only glimmer of light in the room.

      “You know about my family, so you must know how devastating the war was to us. The empire was broken up, we were ousted from power, stripped of our Austrian possessions, and sent into exile. My brothers and mother all died in one way or another as a result of the war. My father and I were the only ones to survive. All we had left was this house, which my grandmother had built in the last century, and the jewels my mother had sewn into the lining of our corsets and smuggled out of Vienna just before she died.”

      “Forgive me, but that’s more than most people had after the war.”

      “Believe me, I know how fortunate we were. We had so many friends who’d lost everything. At least we had a roof over our heads. But our accounts had been seized by the new Austrian state. We left Vienna in the middle of the night with what little money we could scrape together. We couldn’t afford to run this house, so we boarded up most of it and lived in two rooms like refugees.”

      “Why didn’t you just sell your jewels?”

      “To do so would have been unthinkable. They were our link with the past, the symbol of what we’d once been. To lose them would be to lose, finally, everything…what was left of our identity. Father always told me, ‘Your mother died to save those jewels. You must never part with them under any circumstance, even threat of death.’ But ultimately, ironically one might say, even they were threatened by—”

      She stumbled on the words. It seemed that she was somehow betraying the father she loved by speaking of such things. Hadn’t he suffered enough, without her airing his weaknesses to a perfect stranger?

      “By what?” he prompted.

      She realized her pride was making her irrational. There was no way to tell it otherwise, so she admitted softly, “Father’s gambling. Something I wasn’t aware of until we were thrown into such close proximity.”

      “Another royal custom