A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal (10 page)

Perhaps she did see. Perhaps she saw him more clearly than most people did.

Or maybe she didn’t see him clearly at all, for suddenly he wondered if he would have helped her, regardless, out of sheer, libidinal curiosity. Such pluck she had. What would it take to make her tremble?

“Perhaps I’d help you only for the pleasure of it,” he murmured. “What do you think?”

She came closer. Simon put his elbow on his thigh and leaned in to meet her. Her father would have died several years sooner, no doubt of apoplexy, if only he’d foreseen this moment: his despised heir and long-lost daughter inclining toward each other like lovers. “Can’t cozen a cozener,” she said.

Her self-possession was a gorgeous thing. A dare he had no intention of resisting. “Rarely,” he said. “But it’s always fun to try.”

One slim brow lifted. “Maybe you should just give it to me straight.”

He felt his smile widen. He would give it to her straight anywhere she liked. On a whim, he reached out to touch her face.

She went still. Those magnificent blue eyes locked on his as he stroked her cheek. No, not magnificent: they were too much like Kitty’s eyes. Yet beneath the grime, her skin was as soft as new velvet, and the discovery made his own skin prickle. A peculiar pleasure flooded through him, sharp edged, greedy, curiously prideful. It was a feeling he associated with the discovery of a rare genius, some talent that others had overlooked—a pirate’s triumph, really: the thrill of finding and seizing buried treasure.

All for me
, he thought.

“Take your hand away,” she said, “or I’ll knock your teeth in.”

He almost invited her to try. She fenced so well with her wits. It might be entertaining to see what she could do with her fists.

But their surroundings called for a gentler seduction. He had a good many books on his desk too fragile to bear her weight if he were to push her down atop them.

He withdrew the reluctant hand to his thigh, where it dug into his quadriceps in the effort to behave itself. What would she look like once he’d cleaned her up?
Like Kitty
, his mind insisted, but his intuition spoke differently. The light in her eyes seemed too militant and keen now to be confused with her sister’s.

“Honestly, then.” He paused to clear the hoarseness from his voice. Had he ever had a woman quite like her? He didn’t go trawling in the East End for bed sport, of course. But this bizarre attraction seemed to have less to do with her dirt than with her demeanor.

Due to the circumstances, his lust also contained an element of possessiveness. Quite novel, this covetous feeling. But natural. For his plans to succeed, nobody else must have this girl. Only him.

Indeed, she might well have been fashioned just for him. No family to placate. No tiresome expectations of romance and chivalry. No expectations whatsoever.

It dawned on him that her mood had changed. She had scooted forward to the very edge of her seat and now rested her weight on the balls of her feet, poised to spring up and flee.

He forced himself to sit back and cross his legs, creating the picture of a man at ease. It wasn’t that
he wouldn’t enjoy catching her. But it always worked better when a woman wanted to be caught.

His posture communicated the desired message. She eased back in her chair.

He gave her a pleasant smile and borrowed her language. “To tell it to you straight, then: I inherited the earldom and a few crumbling and unprofitable estates. Your father took great pains to see that I inherited nothing else.”

She watched him expressionlessly. “Why?”

He shrugged. “He thought very highly of the Aubyn lineage. My conduct … failed to satisfy him. At any rate, all the true wealth went to his daughters—at this point, to Katherine. As a result, everything left to me stands at risk. The estates are going to seed. I’ve no money to support or improve them, and this is widely known, or will be, soon enough. Paired with certain other considerations”—chiefly, his reputation—”this prevents me from finding a quick solution to my financial difficulties, such as—”

“Marrying an American,” Nell said. “Somebody with money, like that Churchill bint.”

“Yes, like that Churchill bint.” Such marvelous language she used. “So, you see, I am—”

“Well screwed.”

Her words—their hot, immediate effect—caught him off guard. He pressed his lips together, eyeing her up and down. “Hmm.” So many possible replies. Such restraint on his part.

“Precisely,” he said on his exhale. “Yet your miraculous reappearance offers …” He smiled. “Another route. I can help you reclaim your true place in the world, Nell. But I will have to ask you to make it worth my while.”

“And how would I do that?”

Curious that he couldn’t yet manage to read her tone or expression. He was accustomed to understanding people. Often he understood them even better than they did themselves.

He might have taken her inscrutability to mean there was no depth to her, but even their short acquaintance proved otherwise. Conversely, she might be opaque because her depths were so foreign, so purely lower class, that he simply had no hope for getting a grip on them without prolonged exposure.

Well. It seemed he’d turned into a snob, which made this next bit all the more ironic.

“You’ll do it very simply,” he said. “Marry me.”

T
he world looked different from behind glass. Nell pressed her forehead to the window, felt the tickle and brush of the gold tassels that hung from the upraised shade. Puddles lined the road, the work of last night’s rain, and they reflected back her passage, her pale face peering out from a vehicle large and black like a monster, lacquered to a high gloss, pulled by four strong horses with hides of steel gray.

She slid a palm up the polished wood paneling and took hold of a hand strap wrapped in velvet. They were flying through the street. She felt weightless. Released from earth, adrift in the scents of oiled leather and polished wood and something woodsy and male: St. Maur, sitting across from her, smelled as she’d always imagined a forest might. Nottingham, say. Or high Scottish mountains. Dark and a touch wild.

Possibilities, possibilities. They spiraled in her brain no matter how she tried to fix her wits on the goal.

She couldn’t even feel hopeful. She was dazed. This couldn’t be real, any of it.

“Almost there,” said St. Maur. She sat back into her seat, her hand closing now on a button sewn into the maroon leather cushion beneath her, holding herself down. He was real enough. Beneath the brim of his silk top hat, his thick hair waved down his temples, disorderly, black as ink. With one arm stretched out along the back of his seat, his long legs casually
crossed, he looked at her. He had a smiling mouth and watchful eyes. A bad combination to win a girl’s trust.

He said she was an earl’s true-born daughter.

Madness.

Yet what cause had he to lie?

The idea was like a firecracker, exploding again and again in her brain. She shook her head at herself and looked back out the window.

People looked smaller from this height. The swift passage blurred their faces into generalities: open mouths, upturned eyes. Gawking at the grand coach barreling past. Leaping back to save their feet or their necks.

She was used to being the one who nearly got run over. She knew that fists were lifting in the wake of this carriage, angry, hopeless insults offered silently. Nobody in these fine vehicles ever noticed them.

“You could slow down,” she said.

“I thought you were in a hurry.”

She was. Once he’d said he could get Hannah free for her, her amazement, her skepticism, had collapsed. Next to that offer, doubt seemed irrelevant, questions only a waste of time. “I am in a hurry,” she said. “Makes no difference. You could slow a little.”

He eyed her for a moment. Then leaned toward her—causing her to suck in a breath. The slight curve of his mouth acknowledged how she tipped away, ever so slightly, as he lifted his knuckles and rapped on the window behind her. She felt the warmth of him as he hovered near. Her pulse kicked up a notch; she found herself holding her breath as a face appeared at the window: one of the footmen.

A little pane in the glass popped open. “Your lordship?”

“A touch slower,” said his lordship, and sat back, slowly and smoothly, like the coiling retreat of a snake. His eyes met hers. He lifted an expectant brow.

She set her jaw and kept mum. It was common decency to slow down. He didn’t deserve thanks for it. His story made no sense, either. The letters weren’t proof of anything. One of them had been from Michael, the greatest liar on the earth. Now she knew how he’d gotten that windfall last year: he’d conned the old earl of fifty pounds.

But the other letter? Maybe the penmanship had born a slight resemblance to Mum’s, but nothing decisive. Anyway, it couldn’t be true. If not her mother, then who had Jane Whitby been? Certainly not the sort of woman who stole someone else’s baby.

The coach turned under an archway into a small courtyard bounded by stone walls. Gravel crunched as the vehicle rocked to a halt. The door opened, a man in dull green livery letting down the narrow stair.

St. Maur rose, a large man in a small space. She drew her legs tight to the bench, but the adjustment proved unnecessary: an easy duck, a twist, and he was stepping down onto the ground, the watery sunlight gleaming off his hat brim, casting his eyes into deep shade.

He ran a quick thumb and forefinger over the brim, straightening it. The footman stepped forward to brush down his long black coat. He tipped his head back until his eyes found hers.

“This won’t take long,” he said. “You’ll wait in the coach.”

Suddenly a hundred possible problems occurred to her. Anxiety brought her off the bench. “But how will you know that it’s her?”

“Sit back down,” he said, and then stepped back, watching, waiting for obedience.

She gritted her teeth and took her seat again, stiff with resentment. He wasn’t
her
master. She’d make that clear as soon as circumstances allowed it.

“Hannah Crowley,” St. Maur said calmly—while one hand checked the other for the fit of his glove, smoothing, tugging, as the footman continued to hunch at his heels, brushing the jacket,
thwip thwip thwip
. “Do I have that right?”

“Yes, but they may try to trick you into freeing somebody else. Say they’ve got a friend of their own inside. They might try—”

“They won’t,” he said. No boasting in his voice: just a simple statement of fact. Nobody would dare to play tricks on him.

The footman straightened and backed away, leaving St. Maur alone, framed by the doorway against the ugly gray face of the prison. He tilted his head in question. “All right?”

Slowly she nodded.

He gave her a faint smile. “Have a bit of faith,” he said. He turned on his heel—nodding as he mounted the steps to someone out of sight.

The door thumped shut in her face.

She sat back.
Have a bit of faith
. The instruction seemed more comical the longer she dwelled on it. Faith in him? Why? Why in God’s name should she have a drop of faith in a man like him? The clothing he wore probably cost a year’s salary at the factory. He’d just walked into a prison as lightly as though to a dance. Ordinary fears had no purchase on him. He probably thought her quaint for worrying.

Have a bit of faith
. Was it so easy to trust in his
world? Could it be that he simply had no concept of a situation in which wariness would profit him? When life was easy, when the floors lay even and carpets softened them, you didn’t even have to watch where you stepped.

His voice lingered with her in the silent compartment. Gorgeous. Low, smooth, posh—his vowels so clipped they might have been chipped from diamonds. Mum had spoken like that. People had laughed at her for it. Said she nursed too many airs for the pennies in her pocket.

A scrap of fabric lay on the opposite bench. It gleamed in the low light of the side lamp. She plucked it up. Slippery-soft, the color of a summer sky. Fine white embroidery at the edges.
SR
picked out in the corner.

She slipped the scrap into her pocket. Just in case, she told herself.

Her head fell back against the bench. In case
what
? Did she really mean to humor this lunatic?

I took you
, Mum had said.

Mum had refused to speak of Rushden after that night. Soon, she’d not been lucid enough to speak at all. But—
I took you
, she’d whispered.
I thought it for the best
.

Mum had always been a touch mad. But what would it make her to have stolen someone else’s baby?

To have stolen
me.

Nell swallowed. Too strange, almost sickening, to think that that girl in the photograph might be more than her half sister. If St. Maur was right, they’d shared a womb.

But Nell had known a pair of twins, the Miller
girls down the road. Inseparable, those two. Finished each other’s sentences. Cared for each other before even their husbands. Such a bond as that—could a girl forget it? She’d looked into Katherine Aubyn’s photograph and seen nothing that spoke to her heart—only to the blackest parts of her, envy and bitterness and anger.