Where Passion Leads (Berkeley-Faulkner #1)(118)

The lamp was low as she struggled to wake from comforting dreams, but a brilliant flood of light entered the room. The door was open, she realized, and she snapped into wakefulness. The light was from a massive chandelier in the main hall beyond this room.

Rosalie shot up from the bed, freezing in place as the door was closed again.

“Turn up the lamp, please,” a gruff male voice requested, and with trembling hands she complied, nearly burning her fingers on the hot glass. The darkness was banished to the extreme corners of the bedroom, lamplight filling the air with a sultry whiteyellow glow.

The man in the room was easily twice her age, his face pale-skinned, his hair startlingly dark in contrast and frosted with charcoal gray. He was a large man with a spare, fit physique, dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes and a formal white cravat. His features were vaguely saturnine, his nose thin, his brows thick and black, his mouth slender and dark in color. What frightened Rosalie was not his build or his features but the expression in his eyes. They were black and gleaming, like two onyx stones. His gaze traveled over every inch of her, widening with bewilderment and then with a hunger that caused a deep recoiling inside Rosalie’s midriff.

“Lucy,” he said, his voice corrugated with emotion. She regarded him with wide eyes, her lungs expand ing and contracting deeply, her skin gleaming like pale satin in the light. Lifting the back of a slender hand to her perspiring forehead, Rosalie brushed away the collecting dampness there, still watching him with a trapped, hypnotized gaze.

“I’m . . . I’m not Lucy,” she said.

He shook his head slowly. “No. You’re her daughter.” “Yes.” She would have started inching toward the closed door, but he was still standing there, staring at her as if about to devour her. “I’ve been locked up, tied and gagged for days,” she said, her voice strengthening into tautness. “Why have you done this to me? Who are you?”

“I am sorry about that, Miss Doncaster.”

“That’s not my name,” Rosalie said sharply. “I am Rosalie Bel—”

“It doesn’t matter what your name is,” he interrupted, moving a few steps closer to her. She shrank away from him, moving to the wall as she avoided the bed. “Lucy belonged to me, and you’re her daughter. And you belong to me.”

“Lucy . . . belonged to you?” she repeated in a whisper, her face mirroring her confusion. What did he mean? He was far too young to be Lucy’s father. “Are you . . . a Doncaster?”

He snorted at the idea, shaking his dark, gray-frosted head. “I am the Earl of Rotherham.”

Rosalie could feel her face fade to a sickly hue. “I don’t understand,” she managed to say. “She never belonged to you. She was in love with George Brummell—”

“Be silent!” he exploded, and his face went through a terrifying contortion before he regained control of himself. Rosalie quivered but kept her gaze fastened unflinchingly on his, and slowly his mouth curved upward in a thin smile. “So fearless, are you?” he questioned.

“Was my mother afraid of you?”

“Had she been faithful, there would have been no reason for her to fear me. I loved your mother very much. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I loved everything about her with a passion that no one could understand, certainly not your coward of a father. I loved her shyness, her serenity, her soft skin, and her long hair . . .” He reached out to a lock of Rosalie’s hair and kept it in his hand, fondling it with his white, slender fingers. “Your hair is even longer than hers was. And you have her eyes . . . did you know that?”

Rosalie shook her head jerkily.

“Doncaster blue,” Rotherham continued. “Only the Doncasters have eyes that color . . . dark blue, almost violet.”

“Oh,” Rosalie breathed in surprise. “I thought they were from—”

“You thought that since his are blue that your eyes were his,” Rotherham finished for her, and he gathered another lock of her hair in his hand. “No. Not at all. Brummell’s eyes are not so bright as yours, not so passionate and expressive.”

“Say whatever you like about him,” Rosalie said, her skin crawling as she saw him wind her hair through his fingers. He was planning to bed her, she realized, and the thought turned her stomach. A picture appeared in her mind for a fleeting instant, of his white hands running over her body. Her lips twisted in a trembling half-smile as she continued. “Nothing will change the fact that he is my father and that Lucy chose him over you.”

Rotherham swore at her. His hands pressed on either side of her head, framing her face in a tight vise. Ineffectually Rosalie tried to bolt away, gasping as his body pressed hers against the wall. He was aroused, and she felt the straining shape of him against her abdomen. As she let out a disgusted sob and tried to pull his wrists away, he jerked her hair tighter. Her eyes were slitted from the pressure of his hands near her face.

“Why don’t you scream?” he asked, his thin mouth so close that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “Would it do any good?” she whispered. “No. I will not scream, because you wish me to be afraid of you, and I am not. I am merely revolted by you, just as my mother was.”

“You are a whore, just as your mother was,” Rotherham spat, bringing his body so tightly against hers that she expected to hear her bones crack. “I know all about your affair with Berkeley—everyone knows about it. But now you’re my whore, and I will have you for all the times that I wanted Lucy and could not have her.” “You’re insane! I am not my mother!” she cried hoarsely.