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Fire's Lady

Chapter Three

"If I may say so, miss, you look beautiful," Janine said, fastening the clasp on Alexandra's pearls.

Alexandra, who was finding it hard to think much less speak, nodded her thanks. The nap had refreshed her but it had done little to alleviate the sense of foreboding that had settled across her shoulders just a few hours ago. Not even her best dress, a watered silk affair in a creamy beige with gold straw embroidery curving over the bodice and waist, was enough to spark the slightest excitement over her first formal dinner since she was a little girl.

She touched the pearls, her one legacy from her late father, and turned from the mirror. "I suppose I should be going downstairs now." She glanced at the clock atop her armoire. Dinner was being served at seven and that gave her only six minutes to make her way through the labyrinthine halls and head downstairs to the drawing room.

Janine had proved to be a godsend. She'd awakened Alexandra--who'd been utterly certain that sleep was impossible--and seen to it she had plenty of hot water for her hipbath and a stack of thick, luxuriant Turkish towels to wrap herself in afterward. If it hadn't been for the redhaired maid, Alexandra would still be struggling with her hair and fumbling with her stays instead of standing there, outwardly regal and composed, ready to meet the great Andrew Lowell.

She paused in the doorway and turned to Janine who was gathering up the damp bath towels to bring belowstairs to the laundry.

"Is Mr. McKenna in the habit of dining with the Lowells?" she asked, surprised at how cool and collected she sounded.

Janine shook her head. "No, miss. He comes and goes as he wishes. A formal dinner don't seem like his cup of tea."

Heartened, Alexandra made her way downstairs.

Down in the drawing room Stephen poured himself his second drink of the evening as he waited for Alexandra to make her appearance. This formal dinner had been a stroke of genius on his part. He would welcome Marisa's girl into the fold with all the charm and warmth he could muster.

Chuckling, he took a sip of the cognac. Mustering up warmth wasn't terribly difficult when the object was as beautiful and alluring as Alexandra Glenn. Beautiful as she was, however, he dared not allow himself to be diverted. The whole purpose of tonight's flirtation with candlelight and champagne was to lower Alexandra's defenses, to make her feel she had one true friend at Sea View and that true friend was none other than Stephen Lowell.

He had no doubt that McKenna, awash in whiskey and anger, would disgrace himself in the girl's eyes long before the night was over.

Stephen needed a new set of eyes and ears in the large house when he went to Europe on his art buying trips and who better than the innocent young girl who would be the catalyst of his beloved Uncle Andrew's downfall--and her own.

He had almost panicked when Lowell had announced he intended to find an assistant to help him restore his early paintings that had suffered dismally at the hands of incompetent caretakers. The remark had thrown Stephen into a panic--how could he manage to siphon off a sizable portion of Lowell treasures if they were all neatly catalogued by some eager art student? Stephen, anxious to put his plans into motion, seized control before Andrew had a chance to act upon it himself. He would choose the assistant and, with any luck at all, choose what paintings she saw as well. The fact that the assistant was Marisa's daughter by the great Andrew Lowell was too rich. Stephen, a lover of irony, took especial delight in the layers of shading inherent in this situation.

He'd known of Marisa Glenn for years. It had been easy, incredibly easy, to ease his way into her circle of friends and thus into her bed. The rumor of a daughter modeling in Provence had proven to be true--a gift from the gods, that--and it hadn't taken many champagne suppers to discover the truth of the girl's parentage.

Marisa's anger would fuel his own needs. Perfect, he thought. Absolutely perfect.

He knew he couldn't trust the servants to make certain Andrew received the medicine that kept him almost constantly floating in a semi-conscious state. Stephen had a great deal of foreign travel scheduled in the next few months and Alexandra could ensure--unknowingly, of course--that Andrew's condition stayed exactly the way it was. He needed Lowell malleable and helpless for awhile longer until he was ready to take the final step.

He didn't like the way McKenna poked his nose into everything that went on at the house and he damned sure didn't like that little South Seas whore who waited on Andrew by day and more than likely serviced McKenna by night. The dark-haired bitch had a way of seeing and hearing things that could make his dreams blow up in his face.

That was one thing Stephen wasn't going to let happen, no matter what the cost.

There were a few more key pieces of Lowell artwork that Stephen intended to amass before the last phase of his plan went into action and when it did, he would be sitting upon the largest collection of Andrew Lowell's artworks in the world.

The imaginary poacher had been a stroke of pure genius. The entire house buzzed with it and soon it would provide him with the perfect alibi. He didn't give a damn about Marisa's melodramatic scheme to exact revenge for an old debt. He only cared about the here and now, about the riches that could be his the day his uncle died.

And, if Stephen played his cards right, Alexandra Glenn might help make that day come about quicker than he'd ever dreamed.

To Alexandra's intense disappointment, Andrew Lowell did not make a showing at the formal dinner. He was suffering from "intense fatigue," Stephen told her, and she wondered how this would affect her working situation. Although she had had many qualms about her new position, not once during her journey across the Atlantic had she imagined that her job was anything less than secure and the thought was disturbing.

In Andrew's absence that evening, his nephew Stephen presided at the head of the table. Dressed in a fine dark brown serge suit and gold cravat, he looked handsome and quite at home amidst the lush surroundings.

Crystal glasses with stems fine as slivers of ice were set at every place and Arthur, the elderly butler, stood in attendance in the rear of the room making certain those glasses never emptied. Her palate was alternately teased by tangy salads, soothed by creamy sauces, then satisfied by tender cuts of beef and delicate chicken.

It was a scene of stately elegance, an elegance that spoke of generations of finely honed traditions and of unimpeachably fine pedigrees--America's royalty.

Somehow Mr. McKenna didn't quite fit in.

Seated on Stephen's right, Alexandra cast a surreptitious peek in McKenna's direction, trying to put her finger on exactly what was wrong. It certainly wasn't the way he was dressed. He wore trousers and a frock coat of dove grey wool, with a fine wine cravat and delicate gold stick pin. His large frame carried the clothes with a casual grace that she envied as she found herself devoting as much time to worrying about spilling something on her silk dress or losing one of her earrings in her consomme as she did to actually eating. His hair, a rich chestnut brown, was liberally streaked pale blonde by the sun and in the glow of candlelight, his eyes glittered a brilliant blue-green that reminded her of the Mediterranean.

Alexandra despised liars and she would be lying most abominably if she said McKenna was anything but a splendid specimen of a man from the tips of his polished black boots to the top of his sun-bleached head.

She would also be lying if she said he was anything but the most foul-tempered, rude individual she'd ever encountered.

Three times she had tried to engage him in conversation about Easthampton, and three times he had ignored her and refilled his whiskey glass. It seemed the only time he came to life was to skewer Stephen with a look or comment sharp enough to draw blood.

To his credit, Stephen merely shrugged his elegant shoulders and kept their conversation flowing as freely as the champagne.

As they were finishing the main course, Arthur came back into the dining room and whispered something in Stephen's ear.

"Excuse me a moment," Stephen said to Alexandra. "There's a problem with one of the carriages that needs my attention." With a courtly bow he left the room.

"Alone at last," McKenna said, raising his whiskey glass toward her in mock salute. "With a little luck, he won't return."

"Perhaps you would do well to emulate Mr. Lowell rather than denigrating him at every opportunity."

McKenna's thick chestnut eyebrows lifted as he considered her words. "Another convert to the legendary Lowell charm," he drawled as he drained his glass of whiskey. "Why is it I'm not surprised?"

"I should think the reason would be most apparent, Mr. McKenna. Mr. Lowell understands the art of conversation, a skill you apparently have yet to master."

"There are other skills," he said, his blue-green gaze fixed upon her until a blush rose up her throat, "most of which I've mastered quite well."

"How wonderful for you," she murmured, praying Stephen would reappear.

McKenna just laughed and she watched, fascinated, as he refilled his whiskey glass again, growing neither addled nor foolish but sharper with each drink he consumed.

The words leaped out before she could stop them. "You shouldn't drink so much," she said as he reached for the vodka on the sideboard.

He placed the bottle next to his empty whiskey decanter. "Spoken with true womanly concern."

"Drinking to excess can kill," she said, thinking about the wine-soaked farming accidents that had been part of life in Provence.

"I know," he said, polishing off his glass of whiskey and moving to open the vodka. "That's exactly what I'm banking on." He pushed back his chair and stood up, suddenly dwarfing the enormous dining room and everything in it.

"If you'll excuse me, Miss Glenn, I think I'll retire to work on my early demise." With a sardonic bow that was a parody of Stephen's, he scooped up his glass and the vodka and left the room.

Moments later Stephen returned, looking a bit windblown.

"I passed McKenna in the hallway," he said, as he took his seat once again. "I hope he didn't subject you to any of his untoward remarks. The man has all the social graces of a ranch hand."

Alexandra, aware of her odd position in the household, remained silent, occupying herself with the chocolate mousse the butler set down before her.

"You violate no law if you tell me, Miss Glenn," Stephen persisted. "McKenna is no friend of mine. I'd welcome an opportunity to give him a dressing down."

"He uttered but a few sentences to me, Mr. Lowell," she said carefully, "and those were limited to one topic alone." Instinct warned her not to reveal her own breach of etiquette where McKenna was concerned. Her cheeks flamed as she remembered the look of contemptuous amusement on the man's handsome face when she foolishly remarked on his consumption of whiskey.

"Miss Glenn?" Stephen's voice was filled with concern. "Are you unwell? Your face has suddenly gone pink."

Mortified, Alexandra took a long sip of water from the heavy Waterford goblet to her right and willed the blush to fade. "It was the champagne," she managed, dabbing at her mouth with a linen serviette. "I am unused to it."

"Raised in France and unused to champagne?" Stephen exclaimed with a laugh. "Most unusual."

"Not when you consider the fact that I grew up far from Paris," she responded. "I rarely was in the city." Marisa had always made certain of that. Their annual visits took place in London or Vienna or the Eternal City.

But not Paris.

Never Paris.

Stephen questioned her about her life in the country and she danced easily around the more unpleasant facts of her life, choosing amusing stories about Paul and Esme and the farm certain to make him laugh. He seemed amused but Alexandra sensed that his attention was somehow divided and soon she grew silent.

Finally he rose to his feet and extended his hand to her.

"Come, Miss Glenn. We'll have brandy in the library and discuss your working arrangements."

She took his hand and stood, her eyes on a level with his.

"I--umm--I had rather thought that would be the province of your uncle."

"And of course it shall be," he said easily, tucking her hand in his arm and leading her from the dining room. "But since he is under the weather, I thought it best to outline your duties so you can begin to acquaint yourself with things tomorrow morning."

What a decent man he is, she thought as they entered the library where he had made it abundantly clear they would not be disturbed. Beneath the charm and flattery, Stephen Lowell was deeply concerned about his uncle's welfare and eager that she begin to earn her keep.

Down on the beach, Matthew McKenna was becoming intimately acquainted with a bottle of fine Russian vodka that one of Andrew's disciples had brought all the way from St. Petersburg in tribute.

He'd shed his coat and tie the moment he left the dining room, ripping open the collar of his shirt and scattering pearl buttons across the marble floor. He thought he'd choke on a piece of tenderloin as he watched Stephen flatter and charm and amuse the girl with his stories of triumphs that were solely a product of his imagination.

Wiping sand off the mouth of the bottle with the back of his hand, Matthew took a long slug of vodka and waited as it slid down his throat and into his belly. Concentric circles of heat swept outward in his gut and he relaxed, knowing it wouldn't be long before the edges of his anger were temporarily softened.

The girl's face rose before him on the darkened beach, dominated by those huge cognac-colored eyes with the long dark lashes she used with the ease of the practiced flirt. Her nose was delicately chiseled; her mouth, lush and full and painfully ripe. Hers was a beauty of contrast: pale apricot skin framed by hair the color of a midnight sky; a fiery spirit coupled with the face of an angel.

Once during the meal their eyes had met and held and it was all he could do to keep from sweeping the food off the mahogany table and having her right there and then, propriety be damned. He had been hypnotized by the way she looked in that gown the color of moonlight. The neckline plunged low at the bodice, exposing her golden shoulders and breasts to full advantage. His palms burned with the need to touch that silky skin. He wanted to pull the pins from her hair and let the long Gypsy-black waves fall down over him as he brought his mouth to her breasts, searing her nipples with the heat of his tongue.

She was a feast and, God only knew, he had been starving for so long. "Get hold of yourself, man," he muttered as the waves crashed against the shore some ten yards away from where he sat. The girl was Stephen Lowell's private property. She was part and parcel of whatever grand scheme he had concocted and only a damned fool would get involved with a woman who was in cahoots with a bastard like Lowell.

Matthew took another slug of vodka and held back a shudder as its slow fire spread through him.

She hid her deception well, though. Her laughter had been uncertain and painfully sweet to his ears; the soft blush that rose over her throat and cheeks, painfully lovely.

He was a fool, that's what it was. A goddamned fool with no more brains than a rutting bull. He'd been led down this same path by Madolyn ten years ago and see what that folly had brought him.

A wife who bedded half of California, who gambled away his money and opened his house to foreign trash.

A wife who blamed him for the death of their son and was determined to see Matthew in his grave for it.

Son-of-a-bitch.

He tilted the bottle back and poured the rest of the vodka down his throat.

Let his whore of a wife spread her legs for every man capable of climbing into her bed.

Let Stephen take the beautiful Miss Glenn, whose feigned innocence was as dangerous as Madolyn's feigned outrage.

Matthew owed allegiance to one person living and that person was Andrew Lowell. He'd stay and see to it that no harm befell the person who'd snatched him from a back alley fifteen years ago and helped him grow into a man.

But once he'd paid his debt to Andrew, it was anyone's guess.

Stephen Lowell had chosen well for, indeed, Matthew McKenna was not in the library when they entered and she dared not examine the small tug of disappointment that settled over her as she took her seat in the leather wing chair while Stephen instructed Arthur to bring them coffee.

A salty ocean breeze shook the French doors and she was grateful for the small fire crackling cheerfully in the grate. She had little to choose from in the way of formal dress. Both this gown and her russet silk bared a considerable amount of bosom and during dinner she wished she had a fichu to drape across her shoulders against the chilly air.

What a lovely man Stephen was, so thoughtful and polite. He had resolutely kept his eyes from straying to her breasts and she appreciated the way his gaze stayed north of her shoulders.

It had not been that way with Matthew McKenna.

Time and again she had looked up from her dinner to find his mysterious blue-green eyes raking insolently over her as if he knew each curve of her body beneath her ivory dress.

As if he knew my innermost thoughts.

His gaze had made her uncomfortable, as if her stays had somehow tightened their hold around her ribcage. Odd rippling sensations had sprung to life inside her belly, sensations she'd never known before.

She shook her head in an attempt to dislodge the disturbing images gnawing at the edges of her mind. She was nothing to him. Hadn't he made that clear from the first moment he came upon her in the foyer? From that very first second, he'd done his best to make certain she understood the inexplicable hatred he felt for her--and the fact that she was unwelcome at Sea View.

She had done nothing to engender such hatred; God only knew, she hadn't even been in Easthampton twenty-four hours. Had he planned on becoming Andrew's assistant and she had somehow done him out of the job? But, no--hadn't Janine told her just a few hours ago that Matthew McKenna was here as a guest.

It doesn't matter, she told herself as Arthur toddled in with a tray of coffee and sweets. She would simply see to her duties and steer as clear of the terrifying Mr. McKenna as she could and hope that, in time, the situation would somehow right itself. Stephen smiled at her and pulled a matching wing chair opposite her at the round game table.

Thank God for you, Mr. Lowell, she thought as Arthur poured the coffee.

Without Stephen as a champion, Sea View, for all its magnificence, could prove a most uncomfortable place to be.

After finishing the vodka and tossing the empty bottle into the sea, Matthew climbed the long, rickety wooden steps up from the beach.

The lamps were blazing in the library and, moving quietly in the darkness, Matthew rounded the house and stood in the cover of a pair of huge rose bushes, and listened to Stephen as he outlined the girl's duties. The ocean breeze rattled the open French doors and he was of a mind to barge into the room, half-drunk and certainly mad, and confront the beauteous Miss Glenn and the obsequious Mr. Lowell with all his suspicions.

But, to his surprise, a light also burned in Andrew's second floor suite and, with a glimmer of regret, Matthew entered the house through the kitchen door and took the back steps upstairs. Stephen and his money-grubbing schemes were nothing as compared to the greater danger at hand: Andrew's rapidly failing health.

Rapidly he moved down the hallway, his boots grinding beach sand into the Persian carpet that Andrew, in a long-ago fit of excess, had mercilessly cut down into runners.

Andrew's woman, Dayla was coming from Andrew's room as Matthew approached. Her luminous dark eyes were shadowed with fatigue and she looked more fragile than usual.

"A problem?" he asked, his voice a rough whisper.

She shook her head, her shimmering black hair moving like a sheet of satin. "He sleeps now. The dreams...the fever..." Her slender shoulders rose and fell with her sigh. "There is no change."

She moved down the hallway to fetch cold water and Matthew stood in the doorway of the dimly-lit bedroom and watched the man sleep.

Even in sleep Andrew's distress was obvious: the labored breathing, the rapid fluttering of his eyes behind the lids, the way his long aristocratic hands plucked at the bedclothes with staccato movements. For eighteen years, Andrew Lowell had been the foundation of Matthew's existence--the father he'd never known--and now he could but stand there, helpless as a child, and watch a great man sink closer to death.

The once powerful body was now frail as a babe's; the flesh stretched taut over large bones grown brittle with time. The wild black leonine hair was no more than a memory; his gaunt face was framed now by thinning strands of snowy white. Only his eyes, those eyes that blazed with intelligence and genius, were as Matthew remembered: a dark rich gold unlike anything he had ever seen, tempered now by illness and dulled by pain.

For years Andrew had battled the recurring malaria that had caught him long ago in the South Seas but he had worsened drastically the over previous summer. For a time it had seemed as if Andrew would win the battle once again but during Stephen Lowell's annual holiday visit, Andrew had taken a sudden, violent turn for the worse and his condition since had been day-to-day.

Was time ever kind? Matthew wondered as he stood there, wishing he could breathe for Andrew, be his eyes and ears and heart. It was small payment for all the man had done for him...

Matthew McKenna was born the seventh and last child of Kathleen McKenna, the twenty-five year old kitchen maid of the Fifth Avenue Lowells, the most powerful and influential family in New York City. Her husband Joseph had died in a Pennsylvania mining accident just weeks before his fourth son's birth. He had been searching for a better future; instead, he left Kathleen with seven hungry mouths to feed and a future darker than the tunnel that snuffed out his life.

Kathleen did what she had been trained to do: she coped with adversity. Gathering her children around her, she taught them about hard work and she taught them well. From grade school age on, the McKennas worked when they weren't at school--they delivered newspapers, they wrapped fish, they cared for the grounds in Central Park during the summer and helped care for the ice on the skating pond during the winter.

From Micky right down to little Patty, they understood that this was life as they would know it and they knew better than to waste Ma's time with foolish questions that any beggar on the street knew had no answers at all.

They all understood--all except Matthew.

Oh, he worked alongside the best of his siblings but he never believed the notion that what there was, was all there could ever be for him.

How could he?

Standing in the empty foyer of the Lowells' mighty brownstone with its parquet floor and marble arches and crystal drinking glasses that cost more than Ma made in ten years on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, Matt found himself gripped by a hunger for more.

"God determines how we spend our lives," Father O'Byrne said at Mass each Sunday. "We are but puppets in His hands, here on earth to do His Will and His Will alone."

But Matthew refused to believe it was God's will that he spend his life standing on a windy streetcorner hawking papers or rotting in a market cleaning fish for the carriage trade and on the morning of his fifteenth birthday, he told Andrew Lowell exactly that.

"I ain't like the rest of them," he said, hands jammed in the pockets of his mended trousers. "I got plans. I'm gonna be important."

Andrew Lowell, who had just returned from two years in Russia studying Eastern influences in painting, hadn't laughed as one might have expected. "Speak your mind, boy," he'd said, motioning for Matthew to sit opposite him. "I want to hear these plans of yours."

How Matthew had struggled to find the words to express all that he wanted from life to a man who stayed in palaces with Czars and princes, and danced with women in jeweled ballgowns who smelled of French perfume, not lye soap and kerosene. But whatever it was he'd said to Andrew that day, the man had somehow heard and, miraculously, understood, encouraging the dreams of a boy whose accident of birth did not encourage dreaming.

From that moment on, Andrew opened the door to education and refinement just wide enough for Matthew to push through. With the artist's help, Matthew left New York just after his seventeenth birthday and headed West to seek his fortune.

Before his twenty-fifth birthday, he was a millionaire.

Then came marriage to the wild and beautiful Madolyn Porter, whose riches equalled his own. The only good thing to result from their unfortunate union was a son with a face like a cherub whose death had shattered the last of Matthew's dreams for the future.

It was in a bar on the lower East Side eighteen months ago that Andrew found him. Lowell opened his home once again and by the time Matthew emerged from his whiskey-fog, Andrew had already begun his pitiful final decline.

Andrew moaned low in his sleep and Matthew found himself awash in feelings he had little experience in handling. Loyalty and love, respect and compassion were tangled up somehow inside him and he didn't know what to do to relieve the pain.

The only thing he understood was that he owed Andrew Lowell his life.

And he would do his damnedest to make certain that Andrew didn't die one second earlier than God had planned.

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