A Reckless Desire Read online

  She walked swiftly, scarcely noticing how the neighborhoods changed from the crowded, narrow streets around Covent Garden, north and west toward Marylebone, where the houses were larger and more modern and their occupants more wealthy and more respectable. She knew the way, for Magdalena had sent her there before, carrying letters that she hadn’t trusted to the lodging-house boy.

  This time, however, Lucia was going on an errand of her own; one that, if things went as she hoped, could prove to be a thousand times more important than any of Magdalena’s silly love-notes. With each step she rehearsed what she’d say. She so seldom was permitted to speak for herself that composing the proper words now wasn’t easy, and she’d lain awake most of last night considering her speech.

  All too soon she was standing on the immaculate white marble steps of the brick house on Cavendish Square. She knocked briskly, and because the butler who opened the door remembered her from other visits, he let her inside. After the bustle and dust of the streets, the front hall seemed cool and serene and impossibly beautiful, with its black-and-white stone checkered floor and the grand staircase rising up so gracefully that it might as well be ascending to Heaven itself.

  The butler looked down his long nose and silently held out his hand to her, no doubt expecting another letter from Magdalena.

  “I don’t have nothing,” she said. “The message’s so private, it’s not written. I must speak it to his lordship myself.”

  The butler frowned imperiously. “Careless girl,” he said. “You lost it, didn’t you?”

  She raised her chin, refusing to be intimidated. He was only another servant. He wasn’t any better than she, except that he wore fancy livery with gold lace.

  “I didn’t,” she said, “and I’m not careless, not a bit. I told you before, it’s a most private message, meant for his lordship’s own ears alone.”

  The butler’s frown deepened. “His lordship does not wish to be troubled with no reason. If this is an idle invention born of your wickedness—”

  “It’s not,” she said doggedly. “It’s born out of a private conversation with his lordship last night.”

  He gave her one long, final look of judgmental disapproval.

  “Very well,” he said. “You stay here whilst I see if his lordship is in. Touch nothing.”

  “Very well,” she echoed, not to be impertinent, but because she thought it sounded like a grand and noble way of saying yes. “Although I’d think being his lordship’s butler, you’d know whether he was in or not.”

  He glared at her, saying nothing more. As he headed up the stairs, he passed by a footman standing at attention like a sentry beside one of the doors.

  “Watch her,” he said.

  It offended Lucia to be taken for a thief, simply because her clothes weren’t as fine as his. But she’d come this far, and she didn’t want to be pushed out the door now. She didn’t dare sit on one of the straight-backed chairs along the wainscoting, fearing that it might be considered touching, so instead she simply stood where she was, her hands clasped at her waist where the footman would be sure to see she wasn’t slipping anything of value into her pocket.

  She did let herself look, though. There could be no harm in that, and she looked eagerly, searching for clues to the man whose grand house this was. Not that she found any. A large painting of a sunset over the ocean, a blank-eyed statue of a naked lady, an elaborate vase on a marble-topped table: what could any of that tell her of his lordship beyond that he was very wealthy, which she already knew?

  She sighed restlessly, and touched her necklace again. She hoped he remembered his offer this morning, and she hoped he could do as he’d said. He’d smiled, not as if it were all a jest, but as if he truly believed it was possible. To be able to become a dramatic actress, to earn her own wages and have her own lodgings, and to be finally free of Magdalena and her endless demands—oh, it was beyond imagining!

  She caught sight of her reflection in the looking glass that hung in a gold frame on the far wall. She appeared tiny and insignificant, a small, dark blot in a straw hat in the corner of these magnificent surroundings.

  She sighed again, and steadfastly turned from the looking glass.

  She hoped he remembered her.

  The butler was coming back down the stairs, each step filled with disdain as he came closer to her. She’d no doubt he was going to send her away, and she’d a sickening dread in the bottom of her stomach. Her dream would be over before it had begun, and then—

  “His lordship will receive you,” the butler said, making it clear this was not his decision, but his master’s. “This way.”

  Now dread of a different variety washed over her as she hurried after him up the stairs. The words that she’d so carefully composed last night had vanished from her head, with nothing to replace them but a babble of incoherent desperation.

  The staircase didn’t lead to Heaven, but to a short hallway with more heavy paneled doors. The butler stopped before one and knocked, and a muffled voice from within told him to enter. He did, standing to one side to announce Lucia, and she’d no choice but to enter, immediately dropping to a deep curtsey, her head bowed.

  “The young person, my lord,” the butler said wearily over her head.

  It wasn’t until then that she realized she hadn’t given her name, nor had the butler bothered to ask it. Once again she’d been reduced to insignificance, one more example in a life full of similar indignities. But this time the slight didn’t wound so much as it made her forget her nervousness. It irritated her. She was tired of being overlooked. She was after all a Di Rossi, and she longed for the attention of the center stage as much as anyone else in her family.

  “I have a name, sir,” she said, her head still bowed in her curtsey. “I am not merely a ‘young person.’ I am Lucia di Rossi.”

  To her chagrin, she heard his lordship make an odd, snorting half laugh. She hadn’t meant that as a jest, but as a declaration. Oh, already things were not going well!

  “Come here to me, if you please, Lucia-Young-Person-di-Rossi,” he said. “I must see this prodigiously brave woman who dares correct Mr. Crofton.”

  She rose as he’d asked, and crossed the room to where Lord Rivers sat in a leather armchair. Beside him was a small mahogany table laid with a white cloth, a silver coffeepot, and a large porcelain cup filled to the brim with lethal-smelling coffee. Although it was the middle of the day, only the curtains to one window had been drawn, and most of the room remained in a murky half-light.

  It was, however, obvious that the room was being kept that way at his lordship’s orders, and to Lucia the reason for those orders was clear enough, too. In the three years that she had been with Magdalena, she had become familiar with how a gentleman looked in the morning after a rich and eventful night, full of riotous company and strong drink.

  Lord Rivers had that look. He was sprawled in the armchair, his long legs stretched before him and his head resting against the back of the chair. There was, she suspected, ample reason for that inky black coffee and nothing else for his breakfast. His golden hair was loose and rumpled around his face, and his jaw was dark with the beard he hadn’t yet shaved. He wore a yellow silk dressing gown over dark linen breeches; he hadn’t bothered to close the gown, and a wide stretch of his bare chest was on display. Rolling from his bed (or another’s), he hadn’t taken the time to locate either shoes or stockings, and his bare feet were thrust haphazardly into embroidered backless slippers.

  “I know you,” he said, squinting at her. “You’re Magdalena’s girl.”

  “Forgive me, my lord,” she said. “But I’m not her girl. I’m her cousin.”

  He turned his head slightly to one side, considering her. “But she treats you as a servant.”

  “As a Di Rossi, I work for our company however I can,” she said carefully. “All of us who are in London do the same. My uncle is our maestro di balleto—ballet-master—and it is for him to decide what roles each of us shall ta
ke for the good of the family. I am a tiring-girl, helping the dancers with their costumes and performing other errands for them.”

  She hoped that would suffice as an explanation. She’d no wish to have to describe exactly why she did what she did.

  To her sorrow, it wasn’t. He leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on the chair’s arms to study her more closely. In the half-light, he apparently didn’t see what he wished, and he waved his hand toward the butler, who was still standing by the open door.

  “Crofton, the curtains,” he said, not looking away from Lucia. Dutifully the butler drew them, and sunlight flooded the room. Lord Rivers winced and blinked, but still continued to look so intently at her that her cheeks warmed beneath his scrutiny.

  Yet she met his gaze, refusing to give in and look down. If he studied her, then she could study him as well. She’d only seen him by the candlelight in the dressing room or by the lanterns in the street as he’d handed Magdalena into his carriage. He was more handsome than she’d realized—astonishingly, achingly handsome, with his golden shock of hair, his bright blue eyes (albeit bluer this morning for being a bit bloodshot), a jaw fit for a marble god, and a full, sensuous mouth that smiled easily. The glimpse of his bare chest, firmly muscled, was most distracting. He was the only gentleman that Magdalena welcomed back into her company once they’d ceased being lovers, and seeing him now like this, Lucia understood why.

  “Why aren’t you a dancer, too?” he asked bluntly, looking her up and down. “You’re a little wisp of a girl, to be sure, but with a few good meals and the usual paint and spangles, you’d do well enough in the chorus.”

  Her blush deepened. “I am clumsy, my lord,” she said, equally blunt. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be, considering it was the truth. “They tried to make me a dancer, but no matter how hard I tried to follow the steps, I could not hear the music.”

  “You don’t hear the tune?” he asked curiously.

  “Not like the others, my lord, no,” she said with long-standing resignation. “I hear the music, but I cannot sense the pattern or the rhythm of it like the others do, or figure out when or where to place my feet. I was the despair of my uncle, and he banished me from his classes, and from the corps.”

  His brows rose in skeptical disbelief. “A Di Rossi who cannot dance?”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said softly. It was a disgrace she always had with her, an agonizing defect that had kept her from ever being completely accepted into the sweeping embrace of her large family. Her uncle had called her willful, and beaten her with his maestro’s baton when she’d stumbled. Her cousins had laughed at her, and called her a waddling goose and worse. Even her own father had been mortified, and when he drank too much he’d wept from the shame of siring such a daughter.

  “A Di Rossi who cannot dance,” he said again, marveling. “Who would have thought it possible?”

  “But that is why I have come to you, my lord,” she said fervently. “Last night you offered me the first chance I’ve ever had to change things, a chance to make them all see that I’m more than their chambermaid.”

  He leaned back against the chair. “I did?” he asked uneasily. “How in blazes could I have done that?”

  Her heart sank. He didn’t remember. But now that she’d come this far, she’d no choice but to continue.

  “You did, my lord,” she said, taking another step closer as she willed him to remember. “You said you could make me into a great actress who could play queens. You said you could teach me to be better than Madame Adelaide, that you could—”

  “Everett’s wager,” he said slowly. “You’re the girl he wanted me to transform, aren’t you?”

  Now that he’d remembered, she wished he’d show more enthusiasm.

  “Yes, my lord, yes, yes,” she said, eagerness and desperation making her talk too fast. “I would be the best student any teacher ever had. I’d make you so proud of me, my lord. You’d see. I’d make sure you’d win that wager from Lord Everett.”

  He sighed. “Do you truly believe I’ve the power to change you like that?”

  “I do, my lord,” she said promptly. “I must. Because if I don’t, my lord, all I’ll have ahead of me is an entire life of being ordered about by Magdalena, and that—oh, I do not think I would survive that.”

  “I know I couldn’t,” he agreed. “Given time, she’d make a turnip weep and beg for mercy.”

  He was obviously considering it, his expression thoughtful.

  “Please, my lord.” She pressed her palms together in dramatic supplication. “It might have seemed no more than a gentlemen’s wager to you, but to me—to me it was the purest, rarest magic, like a gift from the very heavens.”

  He rose abruptly in a great swath of yellow silk and went to stand at one of the windows, his arms folded across his chest and his back toward her.

  Was he dismissing her? Had her plea been too much, too impassioned? Even though she had lived in London for most of her life, she still forgot how much more reserved Englishmen were.

  “Forgive me if I’ve spoken too much, my lord,” she said sadly to that imposing back. “But it’s only that—”

  “Can you read?”

  “Yes, I can read,” she said, taken aback that he’d ask that. Just because the Di Rossis danced did not mean they were unlettered fools.

  “Not just claptrap and nonsense, either,” he said. “Can you read true English?”

  “Of course I can,” she said. “I have even read many of your English playwrights, too, so you needn’t ask that.”

  He nodded toward the window. “Ma sei più al tuo agio con la madrelingua, l’italiano di Napoli.”

  Because he was still turned from her, she didn’t bother to hide her dismay. He’d just declared that she was more at ease in her mother tongue, the Italian of Naples (which wasn’t true), and he’d turned it into a self-righteous little statement that was designed more to display his own facility in that language than to test hers—hardly an auspicious sign of a sympathetic teacher. He wasn’t alone, of course. Every other Englishman that she’d ever met who’d claimed to speak Italian was much the same. They might know the words, but they hadn’t the heart or the passion to speak proper Italian, especially Neapolitan Italian. Living in the shadow of a volcano, as everyone in Naples did, changed everything.

  Not that she could tell Lord Rivers that, not at all. She’d learned that much about male pride from observing how deftly Magdalena had managed that fragile article with her various lovers.

  “You speak Neapolitan Italian as well as any Englishman, il mio signore,” she answered sweetly instead, a bold-faced lie if ever there was one. Then she switched to French. “Mais ma mère était française, pas Italienne.”

  He turned around quickly with surprise, the dressing gown whipping about him. “You speak French, too? Ah, that is, votre parlez, ah, parlent français?”

  “Oui, mon seigneur,” she answered, and then returned to English, for the sake of sparing him. “My mother danced with the French Opera. I was born in Paris.”

  “Er, ah, so you were,” he said uncomfortably, and in English, too. “I can hear it now.”

  She smiled, trying to be encouraging. He might be unnecessarily vain of his Italian, but at least he realized that his French was abysmal.

  “I will learn in whichever language you care to teach, my lord,” she said. “Though I should prefer English, for it is the English stage I wish to conquer.”

  “You must obey me in everything,” he said, clearly relieved to once again be in unquestionable charge, “no matter how foolish it may seem to you. I will devise a plan of lessons that must be studied and followed. You will not be permitted to disagree.”

  “I won’t, my lord,” she said promptly.

  He nodded. “If we are to do this properly, you must resign your position at the Royal, and devote yourself entirely to your studies with me.”

  Her eyes widened. “But I’ll have no earnings, my lord. Ho
w shall I support myself if I cannot work?”

  “You won’t need earnings,” he said, standing there like some great, golden, pagan god who could order the world to his liking. “Not while you’re with me.”

  That made her uneasy. “I cannot simply disappear from the company, my lord. Who would take my place? Who would do my tasks?”

  “I should think any maidservant from the street could do them,” he said. “But I’ll speak to Magdalena, and arrange to pay for another girl who’ll take your place while—”

  “No!” she cried, and instantly retreated. “That is, my lord, I should rather that my cousin and the others not know of this…experiment until it is complete.”

  “But they must know something,” he reasoned, “because you’ll no longer be in their midst. For you to make the most progress, I’ll want you to stay here with me. If I am to devote all my waking hours to you, I expect you to do the same.”

  She ducked her chin, her cheeks hot. “Forgive me, my lord, but I…I cannot do that. I wish to be an actress, yes, but I don’t want to share your bed.”

  He smiled, bemused. “You truly aren’t a dancer, are you? You don’t have the necessary wantonness, or the predatory heart that goes with it, either.”

  Her flush deepened. “No, my lord.”

  “I don’t expect you to be my mistress,” he said, smiling still. “You’ll have a bed of your own in a room of your own, with a latch on the door if that makes you feel safer. I shall expect you to attend me throughout the day, and I should like it if you dined with me, but you have my word that your virtue shall be safe. Entirely safe.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said softly. There couldn’t be a better arrangement, and she was fortunate he felt this way. Yet even so, a small, perverse part of her wished he didn’t find her so unbearably plain and undesirable that the very notion of it made him smile.