The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie(37)

Fellows was breathing hard, rubbing his throat, but he wasn’t cowed. “You can hide Lord Ian behind the duke as much as you want, but in the end, I’ll get him. That terrifies you, doesn’t it?”

Mac growled. Beth pictured another outburst of violence in this quiet, sunny park, and she stepped between them. “Do as Mac says,” she begged Fellows. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

Fellows turned hard hazel eyes to her. “One last warning, Mrs. Ackerley. Don’t throw in your lot with them. You do, and I won’t be merciful.”

“Didn’t you hear her?” Katie said, planting her hands on her hips. “Be off or I’ll call the police on you. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? A Scotland Yard ‘tec arrested by the French coppers?” Mac put his hand on Katie’s shoulder and pushed her toward Beth. “Get your mistress home and make her stay there. Tell my . . . Tell her she needs to look after Mrs. Ackerley better.”

Katie opened her mouth to snap at him, but she took one look into Mac’s eyes and quieted. “He’s right, Mrs. A,” she said meekly. “Best we go home.”

Beth gave Ian’s retreating back one last look, and then gazed up at Mac. “I’m sorry,” she said, her throat tight. Mac said nothing. Beth ignored Fellows and let Katie turn her toward the lane that led to the Rue de Rivoli. She felt Mac’s eyes on her all the way, but when she glanced back, Ian had entered the coach and was sitting with his head turned from her. He never once looked out at her, and she walked away with Katie, the garden’s brilliance blurred by her tears.

“I’ve lost her, haven’t I?” Ian grated.

Mac landed next to him in the carriage with a thump, and slammed the door himself.

“You never had her, Ian.”

Ian let familiar numbness flow over him as the coach started. He rubbed his temple, the rage having brought on his headache.

Damn the demon inside him. Seeing Fellows reach out and touch Beth—and worse, Beth do nothing to stop him—had unleashed the beast. All he’d wanted was to wrap his hands around Fellows’s throat and shake him. Just like Father—

Mac sighed, cutting through the memory. “We’re Mackenzies. We don’t get happy endings.” Ian wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and didn’t answer.

Mac watched him a moment. “I’m sorry. I should have sent the bastard packing the minute you told me he was in Paris.”

Ian sat back, unable to speak, but his thoughts spun, words tumbling over words until he had to keep mute. He looked out the window, but instead of the passing streets, he saw Beth reflected in the glass, her hands white lines on her beautiful face.

“I’m sorry,” Mac repeated wearily. “Damn it all, Ian, I am so sorry.”

Still gripping Ian’s arm, Mac rested his forehead on lan’s broad shoulder. Ian felt Mac’s distress, but he couldn’t move or say a word that could offer any comfort. Mac’s studio was not what Beth expected. He’d rented a shabby apartment in the Montmartre area, two rooms to live in on the first floor and a studio at the top of the house. A far cry from what she pictured a wealthy English aristocrat would live in.



A man built like a pugilist with iron gray hair and hard brown eyes opened the door. Beth stepped back in alarm, clutching her satchel to her bosom. This was a man one would find in a wrestling match or a brawl in a pub, not answering doors in Paris.

But no, he seemed to be Mac’s valet. Isabella had told her that the four brothers picked up their unconventional valets off the streets, thus saving them time and expense at the agencies. Curry had been a pickpocket, Bellamy a pugilist, Cameron’s valet a Roma, and Hart’s a disgraced clerk to a London financier.

The sneer left Bellamy’s thug like face when Beth said who she was. Looking almost polite, he directed her up three flights of stairs to the door at the top.

The studio covered the entire floor, with two huge skylights letting in the gray Paris sky. The view, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Beth saw across rooftops down the steep hill to the flat plain of Paris and cloud-bedecked hills in the distance.

Mac was perched on a ladder in front of an enormous canvas, his hair covered by a red kerchief that made him look like a Gypsy. He held a long paintbrush in his hand and scowled bleakly at his canvas. Paint splattered his hands, face, painter’s smock, and the floor around him.

On the eight-foot canvas that reared in front of him, the figures of a pillar and a plump naked woman had been roughed in. Mac was concentrating on the folds of a drape that just missed the woman’s intimate parts, but the model kept twitching.