The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(99)

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Lucette had never plunged a blade into living flesh, and so was surprised at how easily she did it. The dagger in her right hand went straight through the fabric of Laurent’s shirtsleeves and into his forearm, which made him reflexively drop the pistol he’d been holding in that hand. Her left-hand dagger did not quite so easily find a mark, skittering across the buttons of his jerkin. With a wrench, he pulled her blade out of his arm and backhanded her with the other hand.

“Bitch!”

Behind her there was the sound of scuffling, which faintly recalled the time she’d come across the brothers in Wynfield’s stables, but she knew this was far more deadly. Laurent struck her again, so that her vision blackened and she fell awkwardly backward, half sitting on the floor. With black spots still dancing in her eyes, she watched Laurent raise his pistol.

And then a sword, knocking the pistol aside, and before she could react the blade plunged into Laurent’s stomach. He fell with a terrible gurgling, and Lucette thought dimly that she had to get up, she couldn’t keep sitting on the floor with a man dying three feet away, she must…

It was Nicolas who pulled her up, who ran his hands along her body. “Did he hurt you?” he asked urgently.

She shook her head, which made it ache worse, and then Julien was in her vision as well and she could breathe deeper.

His lip was split and he had a welt along his cheek, but he appeared otherwise unhurt. Beneath the relief, confusion pounded through her: Why had Nicolas killed his ally?

For her sake, apparently. “Bastard was told not to touch you. Ever.” Nicolas bent to his son’s former tutor, who was still twitching a bit, and studied the wound Lucette had made in his forearm. “Although I must say your provocation was extreme.”

When Nicolas moved again, it was to make a clean sweep of the various weapons in the hall. Laurent’s pistol and sword, Lucette’s thin bodice daggers—they looked like toys in his grasp—everything except Nicolas’s own sword and dagger, he locked in the silver cupboard on the wall across from the fireplace.

At last Julien moved to stand between his brother and Lucette. “Nic, let’s go now. If you leave her alone, Lord Exeter will allow us through his line. We can be halfway to the coast by morning.”

Nicolas seemed not to have heard him. All his attention was bent to Lucette, who met his gaze fiercely. “Little spy,” he purred, and he was only partly amused. “Did I give you enough mysteries to puzzle out at Blanclair?”

“What did you do to the maids?” she threw back at him in challenge.

Julien looked bewildered, but Nicolas grasped it at once. “Was it Anise leaving that set you off? Or had you picked up on that before?”

“Before. There were four maids who left their employment at Blanclair with no more than a message left for the cook, all within the last five years. Five maids, once Anise left. Even after Anise left, you used her to send me a message naming Julien as working against me. Did you kill the others?”

“Of course not! What do you take me for? I paid the bitches well to leave without notice and with a promise not to return. With the money I paid, they would have little need to look for work for some time to come.”

“Why pay them off? What did they learn about Nightingale?”

“So focused on politics—I thought women were supposed to be good at understanding the personal.”

But it was Julien who spoke up in quick understanding. “You seduced them,” he said flatly, “as well as you could. But when they came too near to discovering that the seduction could only go so far…well, you would do nearly anything to protect that secret.”

“As would any man. Don’t you sneer at me, Julien. What do you know of the hell those Huguenot bastards left me in? Better to die, I thought, for a long time. But then I realized that I wasn’t absolutely, entirely unmanned. Did you know that, in some few cases, it’s possible to feel arousal? Possible for desire to flood you body and soul until there’s only one release? And when that one release is impossible…what then? Don’t you dare mock at how I managed in the face of such provocation.”

Lucette did not care to imagine the details of Nicolas’s accommodations for his desire. She might once have felt sorry for him; that time was long past.

Perhaps Julien was beginning to feel the same, for there was no apology or guilt in his voice when he answered, “I don’t care who you use or how you use them, except for Lucette. She’s not leaving here with you. I’ll kill you first.”

“With no weapons? Come on, Julien, let’s fight as we used to.”

“You have weapons.”

“And you have your manhood whole and entire,” Nicolas snapped. “Seems a fair trade to me.”

“Agreed,” Julien said flatly.

“Julien—” It slipped out of her without warning, but Lucette managed to bite off the instinctive protest. Nothing could keep these brothers from battering one another. All she could do was try and tip the scales toward Julien. Nicolas’s control was tenuous at best—she might be able to exploit that. And if not, she still had one surprise left to her.

And then, for the first time since entering Wynfield, Julien locked eyes with her and smiled as if it were only the two of them. “Lucie mine,” he said, “you are the cleverest, wittiest, most exasperating woman I have ever, in my lifetime, had the good fortune to meet. Also, you are far more beautiful than your mother.”