It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (2 page)

Think, Tommy, think.
“I’m carrying a knife,” she said slowly, “because . . . I don’t own a pistol.”

He nodded at this inanity thoughtfully. “Oh, one should always carry a pistol. In fact, I’m carrying one now.”

And so he was. There it was, gleaming in his hand.
How had he done that?

She stared at it.

“It’s a very fine pistol,” she commented politely, thinking of ways to divest him of it or run, should it prove necessary. A knee to the baubles? A bloodcurdling scream?

“It is. Thank you.”

More silence. He wasn’t precisely
aiming
the thing at her, but he held it with the same casual ease with which he held the cheroot. She had no doubt he knew how to use it. She’d heard about how he allegedly, nonchalantly shot the hearts out of targets at Manton’s with tedious predictability.

“Mr. Redmond, do you really think my intent is murderous? If it was, I assure you I would have done
you
or him in by now, rather than just taking in the sights.”

He made an impatient sound. “You never would have gotten the chance to do me in, I assure you. Come. Do better.”

She inhaled deeply.

“Very well. I carry a knife for protection if I’m out at night. I do know how to use it. And I’m here now because I learned he’d just returned to town, and I’d heard so much about him I simply wanted to see what he looked like. As you may have guessed, we hardly move in the same circles. I swear it on . . . my mother’s memory.”

It came out more piously than she intended.

Though it wasn’t untrue.

“Your Spanish princess mother? Oh,
well,
then. I don’t imagine swearing gets any more sacred than that.”

She flinched. She ought to be angry—she
wanted
to be angry. She felt a faint sizzle somewhere on the periphery of her awareness.

Trouble was, she’d begun to find him interesting. And it was a rare enough sensation, when it came to men.

“I can’t tell you why I wanted to see him, and I won’t. But it’s absolutely
true
that I simply wanted to get a look at the famous Duke of Greyfolk, and I knew he would be in this evening. I swear to you. Call it . . . curiosity. Will you leave it be now?”

Above their heads, the object of her curiosity scratched his great nose and turned a page.

God,
how
she wanted to know what he was reading. The light glinted from an enormous signet ring he was wearing.

“Why are
you
so concerned about the duke’s welfare, Mr. Redmond? Pure heroics?”

He hesitated.

“I shouldn’t like to see him murdered until I can persuade him to invest in one of my projects.”

He’d startled a laugh from her. The self-deprecating humor surprised her. “You didn’t succeed tonight?”

A thoughtful hesitation. A suck on the cheroot.

“Let’s just say that I will.”

She liked the quiet arrogance. No bluster, just a sort of calm certainty. It reminded her of her own.

“Shall we?” Jonathan said after a moment, gesturing with his pistol.

Simultaneously they tucked their weapons away.

“I’m amazed you recognized me in the dark,” he said. “You must have eyes like a cat, Miss de Ballesteros.”

“Difficult not to recognize someone who hardly took his eyes from me this afternoon.”

Another interesting little silence ensued. She could have sworn her frankness had rendered him silent with admiration.

“I couldn’t decide whether I found you attractive,” he said finally.

Her jaw dropped. She coughed a shocked laugh.

“I know I’m supposed to,” he added almost apologetically. And wholly wickedly. “Everyone else does. After all, you’re quite the thing now, aren’t you?”

She could practically
feel
him savoring her discomfiture.

All of a sudden she knew a wayward surge of delight at his pure effrontery.

“As you can see . . . I don’t care what
you
think, either . . . Tommy.”

Bastard was laughing softly now. But not in an unkind way. In a way that invited her to join him. To best him.

There ensued a fraught, invigorating little silence during which they retook each other’s measure. During which they were deciding certain things, silently, about each other.

And then at last she leaned forward confidingly.

“Quite liberating, isn’t it?” she whispered.

And after a moment, his wicked grin lit up the night.

She responded with one of her own.

It was as good as a handshake, that exchange. It was an agreement to like each other.

And later it was
that
she would remember about this particular midnight: the wicked flash of his grin in the dark, like a much more beautiful and dangerous twin of that moon.

She ought to have been warned.

Chapter 2

H
OW DROLL.

Only the Duke of Greyfolk, Jonathan thought dryly, could all but ruin a perfectly good word like
droll
. He suspected he’d clench every muscle in his body reflexively, for the rest of his life, every time he heard it.

He’d strategically, with great finesse and subtlety, obtained an invitation to a dinner party held in honor of the powerful Duke of Greyfolk’s return from a long tour of America. After dinner, over cigars and brandy, the talk had turned to manly things, and Jonathan had strategically, again with great finesses and subtlety, nudged the topic from racing horses to buying horses to investing in general, in a series of moves as planned and elegant as a chess game.

The duke had gazed at Jonathan speculatively, lingering expressionlessly but tellingly on that damned bruise beneath his eye. It was small but rapidly turning a disreputable purple, and looked like what it was.

It’s not what it seems,
Jonathan wanted to protest.

Well, more accurately, it wasn’t
quite
what it seemed.

The duke had tipped back his head and exhaled straight up, obscuring his heavy handsome head in smoke. The devil would likely materialize in the room veiled in just that fashion, Jonathan thought.

“Printing . . . how droll, Mr. Redmond. I suppose every young man needs a . . . constructive . . . hobby.” He returned his eyes to the bruise. One of his eyebrows gave a twitch upward.

It’s not like I make a
habit
out of pub brawls.

“Mass production in
color
.” Jonathan was gripping his brandy snifter so hard he could feel his heart pulsing in his hand. He kept his voice steady; not too eager, not too emphatic. Surely
anyone
could understand the idea’s potential. Particularly a man as allegedly savvy as the duke.

The duke gazed at him impassively for a second longer. And then he turned to the man next to him. “Now, that Lancaster Cotton Mill . . . The damned solicitor seems to have requirements for sale known only to him. He keeps requesting additional financial details before he’ll approve a purchase. Ah, but of course he’ll sell it to me eventually.”

There were scattered chuckles. Because of
course
the duke always got what he wanted.

“Did you decide to buy the racehorse?” someone asked him.

“They’re holding an impromptu race outside Holland Park in a few days. I’ll decide then whether he’s worth the money they’re asking for him. They say he’s the fastest seen in a decade.”

Just like that, the subject had been changed and Jonathan was dismissed and forgotten, because it was the duke’s prerogative to dismiss and forget anything he pleased.

He would, of course, try again at the horse race outside Holland Park in two days.

Jonathan was as interested in horses as the next man, and if
he’d
the capital to spend at the moment, he’d buy one, too.

But it spoke volumes about his father, Isaiah Redmond, that he’d considered the duke the easier of two titans to conquer, and so he’d begun there.

Because that’s what he intended to do in Sussex: conquer.

Droll
. Finding Thomasina de Ballesteros holding a
knife
outside the duke’s window seemed a fitting conclusion to the night. For a moment he’d sympathized with what appeared to be murderous intent.

He smiled slowly. Imagine finding the woman who haunted the fantasies of bloods the ton over, the sole reason his friend Argosy had dragged him to the Countess Mirabeau’s salon, crouched and tense as a feral cat outside the duke’s tall windows. He didn’t believe for a moment her presence there had been idle curiosity or pure impulse. She’d looked
just
a bit too comfortable in the shadows.

Even if he’d never seen her lurking outside of the Duke of Greyfolk’s house at midnight, even if she’d never said
I carry a knife for protection if I’m out at night. I do know how to use it,
he would have
known
Tommy de Ballesteros was trouble.

It didn’t prevent him from liking her.

She was officially the only woman of his entire acquaintance who had ever said such a thing, and she’d managed to sound sensible doing it. She didn’t tolerate fools, which amused him. In fact, talking to her had been a bit like taking off tight boots at the end of a long day: she had felt peculiarly comfortable, peculiarly
spacious,
in the way other women simply weren’t, by contrast.

And he liked her laugh. Quite a bit. He wouldn’t mind making her do it again.

He handed his coat and hat to the footman and now stood in the doorway of the parlor of the Redmond House, surreptitiously watching his sister Violet, who was being looked after by their mother while her husband was on business in London. She was ensconced on the settee, clicking away with knitting needles, some scarflike object unfurling at the end of them. Her shiny dark head was bent in concentration, and in the cool pale light pouring in the window, she looked like a serene, exemplary representative of English womanhood. Someone could paint her just so and call it
The Sussex Madonna
.

And then the Redmonds could hang it in the parlor, and her family would gather round it and point and roar with laughter. For a more accurate name for such a painting would have been
Appearances are Deceiving
.

“What are you making?”

She whirled. “Jonathan!” Her face lit. “Don’t stand there gawking. You look splendid, if a bit dusty. Tell me how I look.”

“Radiant. But if you get any bigger we’ll have to haul you about in a sedan chair. Or perhaps we can buy you a stylish cart and have it pulled about by a little white donkey.”

She squawked in outrage and hurled a ball of blue wool at him.

Or she tried. Her arm snagged on her bulging stomach, and the wool ball instead dribbled impotently to the floor.

They both watched it roll to a listless stop at Jonathan’s feet.

He handed it back to her, scrunched his eyes closed, leaned toward her, and sat obediently still so she could throw it at him again.

It bounced feebly off his chest.

They both watched it wobble to a stop a few feet from the window.

“Feel better now?” he asked her.

“No. But now will you fetch it for me?”

“Of course.” He retrieved it and handed it back to her.

“Now will you fetch me some marzipan? And perhaps some raspberries?”

He turned an incredulous stare upon her. “Woman, you have me confused with your willing slave, the Earl of Ardmay. And where on earth would we find raspberries at this time of year? Oh God, you aren’t going to cry, are you?”

She considered it. “Not this time,” she decided thoughtfully. “But I think the baby needs raspberries.”

“I hope you have a girl and that she’s
exactly
like you.” He delivered this like a curse, and flung himself into a chair next to her, slouched, and hoisted his booted feet up onto a little upholstered stool. He would get away with this as long as his mother didn’t see it.

“So does Asher,” Violet said dreamily.

“He’d wish differently if he’d grown up with you, and had to pull you out of wells by your elbows and the like.” Violet had once threatened to throw herself into a well over an argument with a suitor, and had one leg over before she was pulled back by the elbows, and everyone in England seemed to know this. “I warrant that big mane of hair of his will be gray by the time your child is two years old. And he’s an earl, after all. He’ll want a boy.”

“Honestly. The way all of you do go on about the
well
. I never made it all the
way
into the well, and I didn’t intend to. And besides, Asher’s done a good deal more for me than that.” She smiled dreamily again. “The things that man can do . . .”

Jonathan clapped his hands over his ears. “No! Not one more word.”

She laughed.

“But you do look very well and so radiant it borders on the cliché, Violet, even if you are huge.”

In truth, she looked a little weary to Jonathan. The faint lavender crescents beneath her eyes worried him. He supposed it was difficult to sleep comfortably when one was carrying living cargo, and possibly the earl’s heir. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy for Violet, but then Violet wasn’t known for making
anything
easy.