Free By Arrangement by Madeline Hunter Page B

thin contentment he had felt with Lady Catherine today.
    Instead, he was losing interest and even considering cutting things short just as they reached the critical moves. His own plans and Edward's had become so intertwined that he had pondered at length whether it would be possible to extricate one from the other. That he even considered such a thing had to do with Christiana. She had him thinking of the future more than the past. He already felt responsibility for her. He considered far too often what it would mean for her if in the end he lost this game.
    He had changed his testament so that she would be a wealthy widow if something went wrong. Funds would be on account with Florentine bankers too. When the time came, he would give Sieg and Oliver instructions for getting her out of the country if that became necessary. But all of that would never compensate her if he failed.
    Her gestures were full of elegance and poise, her hands and arms beautifully angled like a dancer's. It was the way that she moved that made her appear fragile.
    She still expected that her lover would come for her. He didn't doubt her resolve on that for one moment.
    Stephen Percy. Learning the man's name and something of his character had been easy enough, but the knowledge only confirmed David's initial instincts about the affair. Christiana was in for a bad disappointment.
    That her heart would break soon went without saying, but when would she see the truth behind illusions? Two weeks? A month? Never? The last possible. A girl's first love could be a blind thing, and she was convinced that she was in love with this man. Accepting the truth could well be impossible. God knew he had seen that before.
    So young Percy doesn't come for her. Then what? A marriage full of cold duty? He smiled thinly at the thought. He knew well what happened in such unions. The men found mistresses quickly or spent too many nights with the prostitutes on Cock Lane. The more honest wives absorbed themselves with religion or their children.
    And the braver and bolder women … well, they eventually found their ways to the beds of men like David de Abyndon.
    He felt her thin, lithe body against his. He sensed her responses to him, and her fear of them. A tremor flowed through her and into him, and he had wanted to kiss her again and again.
    He had enough experience to recognize the possibilities which those tremors had revealed. But then, he had already sensed them that night in his solar.
    In his memory's eye he saw her sparkling eyes and pale skin and the wide mouth that he couldn't see without wanting to kiss. He imagined her walking toward him, naked and inviting, that beautiful face and mouth finally turned up willingly to his.
    But then her image grew hazy and dim, and another woman's face replaced it. Gaunt and tired, this face was beautiful too despite its weariness. Resting on a pillow with golden brown hair encircling it like a halo, its eyes were finally closed to disappointment and disillusion.
    The image fell away and he could see the entire chamber with its flickering candles and the white sheets on the bed. Clothes hung on pegs along a wall and a fire burned too hotly in the hearth. And sitting on the bed, his graying head buried in that lifeless breast, bent the anguished figure of David Constantyn.
    He hadn't realized until then how much the man had loved her. At night when the house was dark, did he go to her? Did she go to him? Had she slept with him? God, but he hoped so.
    He firmly set aside consideration of the risks that had meant nothing before he met Christiana.
    For both of them, then, he thought.
    “If you refuse this merchant, do you think the other will come?” Oliver asked.
    “He will come,” David said. “I would come. Keep your ears and those of your listeners open, Oliver. Not just for that, by the way. Stay around the pilgrims' taverns. I seek news from Northumberland.”
    “Any particular news?”
    “There is a knight named