A Seduction in Scarlet (Aphrodite's Club 1)

“I am wearing a ball gown, Marcus. I am wearing a locket containing my dead husband’s hair. I have no luggage and no money. You can’t take someone off the street without a hairbrush and a change of clothing and expect them to be happy.”

“What locket?” he demanded, ignoring the rest.

She lifted it from between her breasts. He stretched out his hand, frowning. After a moment’s hesitation, Portia undid the clasp and held it out to him.

She expected him to examine it and give it back, but instead he sprang across the intervening gap and snatched the locket, releasing the coach window just enough to toss it out.

“That’s one less thing you have to worry about,” he said triumphantly, his face a wicked smiling mask.

“Oh, Marcus!” Her voice shook with tears.

He groaned, and reaching out, lifted her into his arms. She squeaked, but he settled her onto his lap despite her voluminous skirts and the miles of shot silk. Her elaborately dressed hair tickled his chin. She didn’t struggle, perhaps she was beyond it, but neither did she lie trustingly against him as he wished. Instead she sat stiffly, unwillingly, refusing to yield.

He spoke gently, holding her hands tightly in his. “Portia, he’s gone and you’re with me. I want to spend my life with you. Doesn’t that mean more to you than a society that worships a lock of hair from a dead man, even if he was a hero? It’s bloody morbid, Portia. You’re young and beautiful; you should live your life to the full.”

“With you?” she asked, blinking, trying to pull her hands away.

“Of course with me! Who else?”

“They’ll find us.”

“By then it’ll be too late,” he said smugly. “You’ll be compromised.”

“Marcus, you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t just act as you wish. There are rules. There are laws!”

He did know that. He understood the dangers of his actions and he accepted them. She was worth any risk. And like his aunt Minnie, he was an optimist who believed that if you trusted in yourself and your instincts, things had a way of sorting themselves out. He did trust in himself, he always had. Why couldn’t she do the same?

“Why is my daughter sitting on that man’s lap?” They’d woken Mrs. Stroud and she was staring at them with wild eyes.

Hastily, Portia slipped back into her own seat, her face bright red, expecting recriminations. But her mother had already forgotten.

“Where are we?”

Portia reached across to pat her hand. “We’re nearly there,” she assured her, relieved, and then went very still as it occurred to her that there was something very wrong indeed. Her head turned sharply and she stared at Marcus. “We should have reached Cambridge by now.”

“We’re not going to Cambridge. I told you that wouldn’t do.”

“Then…”

“We’re all going to Duval Hall, you and your mother and your maid, and me.”

“Duval Hall?” Mrs. Stroud demanded. “Where is that? Do I know it?”

“It’s home,” Marcus said with satisfaction and pride. He grinned. “We’re going home.”

Marcus’s home was a flat, bleak landscape, much of it marshy with occasional sheets of still water. Hundreds of birds filled the gray sky, and she could smell the sea. It seemed alien and vast and empty of human life, and yet strangely beautiful.

A house stood on an island before them. It looked as if it had been formed from the land itself, a hotchpotch of styles, some of them quite ancient, with a wall enclosing them all.

“Duval Hall,” Marcus said with pride. “My home.”

There was something very sinister about Duval Hall. In fact it looked rather like a prison, Portia thought. Had he brought her here to this place to lock her up? She turned to her mother, intending to reassure her as much as herself, and found Mrs. Stroud gazing about with bright eyes, showing more interest than she had during the entire journey.

The coach rattled across the stone causeway, through the open gate in the wall, and into a cobbled courtyard.

Inside the wall it was not so bleak, and the shelter it gave allowed for a garden where there were even mature trees growing. They might have entered another world from the flat emptiness of sky and land outside.

As they climbed from the coach, weary and rumpled, servants came hurrying to greet them, their smiles shy and curious. They were pleased to see Marcus, she could tell. “Young master,” they called him, and he gave them instructions as if it was perfectly natural for him to take charge.