Carbon

CHAPTER 1 EVER HAD A dream come true? I have. Four times, and this evening, I was hoping for a fifth. “More champagne, miss?” a waiter asked. “Yes, please.” I held out my glass. Tonight, of all nights, I needed the courage it gave me. Or, as my mother would argue if she found out what I’d been doing for these past few months, the stupidity. All around me, partygoers danced and chatted, their faces covered by masks ranging from plain to ornate while they noshed on canapés and knocked back the free booze. At the back of the ballroom, I spotted my mother stumbling into Sir Arnold Hall, inventor of a revolutionary...uh, I forgot. Something to do with aeroplanes. Of course, the masquerade ball had been her brainchild—she’d use any excuse for a party and tonight, celebrating the launch of her daughter’s latest romance novel, she’d certainly pushed the boat out. We even had a flipping orchestra in the corner. There was a slight flaw in her plan, in that few of the guests would recognise the author herself, but Mother didn’t concern herself with such trivialities. If I were a gambling woman, I’d bet most of the partygoers hadn’t read the book and didn’t care that it even existed. Emphasis on most. One of the regular attendees certainly had read Sapphire Duvall’s offerings, or at least her previous release, and he was the only man who mattered to me tonight. Was he here? I pulled my phone out of my clutch bag and checked the screen for a message—the hundredth time I’d done so in the last hour, even though I’d have felt the vibration if one arrived. Please, say he’s here. Mr. Midnight, the object of every one of my dirty dreams for the last month. He hadn’t promised to come—he’d never promised anything—but during Mother’s last four shindigs, he’d texted me by ten. My twin sister Angelica waltzed up, resplendent in a red ball gown quite at odds with my dark blue one. She revelled in the attention whereas I’d deliberately matched my dress to the curtains in a desperate attempt to fade into the background. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked. “Not really.” But she clearly was. A glass in her hand, a man on her arm, and those who recognised her under the jewel-trimmed mask congratulating her on yet another bestseller. “Lighten up, Gus,” she said. “Won’t be long until you can go back to your own world.” She didn’t mean to sound cruel—she never did—but tact wasn’t her strongest suit. Her words stung, a harsh reminder that I didn’t fit in here. As if I needed one. I mustered up a smile. “Two hours and counting.” Angelica drained her glass and whispered something to the man at her elbow, lifting his wrist with delicate fingers to check the time. He wore a Patek Phillippe watch. Expensive. His mask covered most of his face, but I didn’t miss the curve of his lips or the heat he exuded. Clearly, he liked whatever suggestion my sister had just made. “See you in the morning,” she said, giving me a little wave. Three guesses as to what she planned to do for the rest of the night. Once, I’d have been depressed and maybe even slightly jealous over yet another of her conquests, but tonight I forgot her almost instantly as I snatched my phone out of my bag again. Nothing. Had he got bored with our game already? Three months ago, Midnight’s first message had come out of the blue as I pretended to enjoy my mother’s St. David’s Day party. No, nobody in my family was Welsh, and we lived in rural Oxfordshire not Wales, but little things like that never stopped her. When I said she’d use any excuse for a party, I meant it. Unknown: Meet me at midnight. The summerhouse by the pond. At first, I thought the message was a joke. It had to be. Because Meet Me at Midnight was the title of Sapphire Duvall’s latest bestseller, a bodice-ripper set in Victorian England where the object of Lady Anne’s affections asked her to—you’ve guessed it—meet him at midnight. First in the summerhouse, then behind the chapel in the grounds of her family’s country manor, even in the stables. And what they got up to made my mother splutter her tea and hastily flip the pages until Anne was safely laced into her corset once again. Augusta: Surely you’re not serious? Ten rather sweaty minutes later, as I stood with my mother and sister pretending to listen to their conversation, the mystery man replied. Unknown: Only one way to find out... No, I couldn’t. I mean, the idea was preposterous. Yes, Lady Anne had gone, but Anne was a fictional character, not to mention a lot braver than me. Back in her day, the world wasn’t full of serial killers and murderers like England nowadays. Okay, so Jack the Ripper lived in the nineteenth century. And Burke and Hare. But that was completely different. I poured myself another glass of garish yellow fruit punch from a daffodil-patterned jug and sighed. Angelica would go, but Angelica had more courage than I did. People always expressed surprise when they found out we were twins, seeing as we weren’t identical, and I quite understood why—I was the mouse to her lioness, the water to her fire. The “other” daughter. The one without fame and all the trappings that went with it. The one who’d never stepped out of the box I’d carefully constructed around myself as a schoolgirl. “Angelica,” my mother bleated, interrupting my thoughts. “You simply must tell Petronella about your new book. And, Augusta, be a dear and bring us another bottle of rosé.” Fine, so I was the waitress to Angelica’s lioness. Why did Mother make me go to her flipping parties? I hated every second of them. And at a quarter to midnight, while Angelica dissected the plot of Sapphire Duvall’s debut novel and got several key points wrong, I was sent to the wine cellar for my sixth trip that evening. And that time I kept walking. Right out of the house, across the lawn, past the swimming pool and the tennis court, through the rose garden, and as far as the pond. I hadn’t planned to go there. I hadn’t even thought about it. Okay, so I had thought about it, but not seriously. I mean, the whole idea was crazy, right? But my feet walked me across the estate until the summerhouse I’d played in for hours as a child stood in front of me. Of course, since my mother had a hand in the design, it wasn’t simply a wooden hut. No, its hand-finished oak walls had been built by a master carpenter, and a sought-after designer had furnished the roomy interior. Three or four times a year, Mother would sit there and read a book for a morning before she got bored. Not one of Sapphire’s—Mother preferred memoirs. The rest of the year it lay empty, except when I borrowed it in the warmer months. Or possibly this evening. Did Mr. Midnight really exist? Before I could slap myself over how insanely stupid the whole idea was, I tapped in the combination to open the door, and the creaking hinges reminded me how little use the place got. Now what? A minute ticked past, and my toes began to get a little chilly. I still had time to leave. But the part of me that actually believed in Sapphire’s stories kept my feet planted next to the floral chaise longue, my whole body trembling in the dark. At least, until the nearby screech of an owl brought me back to reality. Had I lost my mind? Lady Anne might have found love on her foolhardy jaunts, but that was hardly realistic, was it? In my twenty-seven years, I’d been touched by love twice—the childhood crush I’d never quite grown out of and my husband. And look how both of those episodes ended. The boy I used to sit next to at school moved to a different county, and my husband died. I desperately wanted to believe it would be third time lucky, but the realist in me came to the fore, and my feet finally came unstuck. What was I thinking? I should have been heading for bed with a mug of hot chocolate, not hanging around wishing for fantasy s*x with a stranger. Oh, but it had been a really, really long dry spell. Seven years. Seven long, long years. Halfway to the door, the soft crunch of footsteps on the gravel path outside stopped me dead in my tracks. Was it him? Lady Anne grabbed the back of the chaise longue, and her knuckles turned white as her heart beat so hard it threatened to burst from her corset. “Identify yourself,” she said. “Who goes there?” Me? My knuckles turned white, all right, but I choked on my words, and when I did force them out, the high-pitched squeak was plain embarrassing. “Hello? Is someone there?” A silhouette appeared in the doorway, lit from behind by a sliver of crescent moon. I squinted in a bid to identify the man, but the darkness veiling his face gave me nothing. “You know who it is,” he said, voice low. “I’m quite sure I don’t.” He stepped forward, closer, closer, until I felt the puff of breath on my cheek. “Turn around.” “Why? What are you going to do?” “You know that too.” Lady Anne gasped as her mysterious suitor trailed a finger along her cheek, a light touch, but not an innocent one. That single digit promised forbidden delights, sweetness and scandal if she did not stop him that instant. She reached up to bat his hand away but instead pressed his palm against her cheek. “Sir, what are your intentions?” The scoundrel clutched her skirts in one hand and lifted them slowly, oh so slowly. Only the thin cotton of her bloomers stood between the lady and her honour. Her breath came in short pants, bosom heaving as his hand rested on her thigh. “We should not be doing this,” she whispered. “Then I bid you to walk away.” Walk away? Her knees trembled so much she could barely stand. Instead, she bent from the waist over the chaise longue, lost in ecstasy as the stranger had his wicked way. Was that what Mr. Midnight wanted to do? Have me bend myself over the furniture while he got his rocks off? Talk about forward. Because the idea was...it was...uh, kind of hot, actually. Augusta! No! I didn’t know who the man was, anything about him, or worse, where he’d been. But hang on, wasn’t that the whole point of surprise, illicit s*x? He trailed one finger down my jaw, and according to the script, sorry, the book, I should have clasped his hand to my cheek. But instead, I turned my head so his finger slipped into my mouth, then sucked. Heat shot through me, right from my eyeballs to my hoohah. Or my velvet glove, as Sapphire would have called it. Say something, Augusta. Tell him to stop. Tell him this is totally inappropriate and you need to get the wine from the damn cellar and go back to being bored out of your mind at the party. His other hand slowly lifted my silk skirt, leaving a burning path along my thigh as it got higher, higher... “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing,” I blurted. Oh, way to go, Gus. You sure do have a knack with words. He answered with a throaty chuckle as one finger slid under my knickers. Not bloomers but boring white cotton bikini pants, ten pounds for a pack of five from Marks and Spencer. Tomorrow, I’d burn every pair I owned. “Miss Fordham, your body knows exactly what it’s doing.” Really? I’d had s*x precisely twice in my life, both times with my husband and neither could be described as awe-inspiring. Romance novels spoke of shattering into a thousand pieces, of fainting with sheer pleasure, but when Rupert rolled off to the side, I wasn’t even sure whether he’d come or not. I certainly hadn’t. “My body’s lying.” “No, your mouth is lying.” Dammit, he was right. You could have fried an egg on me, such was the heat coursing through my veins. I’d probably scorched him. “Do you... Do you have protection?” I felt rather than saw his smile. “I came prepared.” Well, at least one of us did. Before I could back out, he nudged me forwards over the padded chintz, and I grabbed onto the edge of the chaise longue. The hand under my dress continued its lazy exploration while his other arm wrapped under my breasts, lifting them upwards in a way no bra ever could. Soft lips kissed their way up the side of my neck until I twisted around to meet them with my own. He tasted faintly of mint with a hint of wine over the top. Had he drunk it for courage like I did? There was certainly no way I’d have been in that position sober. A thousand sensations washed through me, from fear to euphoria, from heat to goosebumps, but when he pushed my knickers to one side and gave me all of him, I got the strangest feeling of...of rightness. Like my entire life—every thought, every decision, every success, and every tragedy—had conspired to lead me to this moment. With him. A perfect stranger. “So f*****g tight,” he whispered. There was a good reason for that, but I managed to refrain from letting it slip out. Instead, I bit my tongue as he showed me that each love scene I’d imagined and each lover I’d dreamed of could all roll into one and come true with the right man beside me. Or rather, inside me. “Why did you send me that message?” I whispered when he slid out of me and smoothed my dress down. “Because it was written in the book.” “But why me? Why not my sister?” After all, she made no secret of the fact she moonlighted as Sapphire Duvall. He leaned in closer, nuzzling me with his lips. “Because your sister didn’t write that story. You did.” I stiffened in his arms. How the hell did he guess that? Only three people knew my secret—me, my sister, and our accountant. Even my parents didn’t have a clue who was really behind Sapphire’s novels. “You’re mistaken,” I tried, but even to my own ears, my words sounded hollow. “Again, your body tells me otherwise. Was it everything you hoped?” And more, so much more, but I didn’t want to stroke his ego. “You missed the part where he teased her with freshly picked strawberries.” His muscular arms dropped away, leaving me bereft. “We need to save something for next time.” “Next time?” He paused halfway to the door. “What? After tasting your sweetness, you didn’t think I’d abandon you to some scoundrel, did you?” “Uh, I... I don’t... I didn’t think...” Two seconds, and he’d closed the distance between us again, but this time he picked up my hand and pressed his lips to the back of it in a chaste kiss. “Until we meet again, fair lady.” As his feet crunched away on the path, I gathered up my scattered sanity. Next time? Would I be crazy enough to do this twice? Who was I kidding? Of course I would.