[Samuel Barbara] Lucien's Fall(Book4You) by Unknown

the storm, did you?"

    He yowled again and bumped into her skirts. Madeline bent to lift him into her arms, the big lug of a tomcat, battered and arrogant and yet still in need of attention. As she rubbed his massive head, a ragged purr rattled from his throat and he tucked his nose into the hollow of her shoulder.

    She laughed. "Silly cat."

    Some disturbance in the ordinariness of the maze caught her eye. Madeline looked back, letting her eye rove slowly over the details she knew so intimately but didn’t immediately see anything amiss. A sprinkle of blackish feathers, rather mangled, lay on the grass, evidence of Boss’s breakfast. "I thought I smelled bird breath," Madeline said.

    Boss meowed in reply but didn’t lift his head. Luxuriously, he settled more closely into the crook of her arm.

    Madeline started to walk on, thinking she must have imagined the disturbance, when a slight, uncommon sound came to her. It sounded like a moan.

    With a frown, she headed for the center of the maze, wondering if some new servant had become lost and had had to spend the night in the place, in that cold and horrible storm. "Hello?" she called.

    There was no answer.

    Boss stirred at her hurrying steps but made no move to get down. She was glad of his heavy warmth and didn’t even mind the small pinpricks of his claws as he held on.
    "Hello?" she called. "Is anyone here?"

    Sounds traveled oddly in the maze because of the claire-voies and the muting of the bushes. It was impossible to pinpoint where a sound originated. But Madeline had not imagined it. That moan had been as human and real as her own breath.

    She checked every hidden spot along the route, some behind a simple wall, others in hidden circles accessed from secret places—tiny mazes within the maze. She found no one. At each window cut into those hedges, she paused to look through, calling out.

    Nothing. Until she turned the last corner into the very heart of the maze. There, looking for all the world as if he were dead, lay Lucien Harrow.

    Madeline froze, clutching the cat to her chest as if he were some living shield. He protested mildly, touching his cold wet nose to her neck in reminder of her human duty to felines. Absently, Madeline rubbed his body.

    Lord Esher lay flat on his back on an old gray stone bench, one leg bent at the knee to brace him from toppling onto the ground, the other flung along the length of the bench itself. One hand touched the earth, the bright white of his lace cuff making his brown, graceful fingers look even darker. He wore only a cambric shirt, unlaced at the neck, tight dark breeches, and a pair of muddy boots. His hair had come loose and spilled over the gray stone in glossy abundance, and his jaw was covered with a dark shadow of bristly beard. In the center of that roughness, his beautifully cut mouth was vulnerable.

    The sheer length and breadth and stillness of him took away her breath. She thought he must have stumbled here drunk and passed out, and the moaning she had heard was only the well-deserved misery of too much drink. Still she couldn’t seem to move. That hard pulse pounded, that painful aching that seemed to shimmer to life every time she saw the big, lazy, drunken oaf. It made her chest hurt.

    Abruptly, she put the cat down and launched herself forward, moving over the grass in a blur, halting only as she came up even with him. Clutching her skirts, she said,
    "Lord Esher! Wake up!"

    He did not move. Not a muscle or a twitch of a finger. But his eyes opened. The color was almost green, the color of the sea, and the whites were bloodshot in the extreme. She noticed his flesh looked quite pale and was drawn tight over his cheekbones. Well she recognized the signs of debauchery on a man’s face— heaven knew, she’d seen it often enough as a girl.

    "Get up," she said harshly. "I dislike drunks littering my garden with their foulness."

    He still said nothing. Only gazed at her. It was disconcerting.

    "Are