The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (5 page)

“This one can,” she said, smiling. Ridiculous triumph swelled in her chest.

For once, Lord Gargoyle seemed to be at a loss for anything to say.

Chapter Three

Sebastian had survived three days with that maddening little governess in his house, and he began to think he was making some progress. He might, at least eventually, be able to look at Rachel Covington without his lungs tightening so sharply he couldn’t breathe.

He made himself enter the chamber assigned to her, as usual not bothering to knock. The habit irritated her, which suited him fine. Petty, but it soothed him a bit every time he nettled her, made her straighten her spine in that nun-like way, and jab out her chin to pierce him with her icy governess glare.

It neutralized the memory of that damned unsettling kiss she’d given him.

Better still, it reminded him she wasn’t
Sal.

Not a bit like Sal.

Well, he
really
should have knocked this time.

The girl had her back to him, lifting the weight of her loosened hair from her neck as her lady’s maid—Sal’s maid, Jenny—fastened her into a gown. A gown he recognized as one of Sal’s favorites. Not Miss Covington’s usual serviceable woolen gray, but a plum silk which skimmed lustrously over her body and left her arms bare and glowing in the lamplight.

He froze.

The air went thick and cold and hard to breathe as wet sand.

Sal
. He was looking at Sal.

Her hair gleamed fire-bronze as it always had, though it was a good deal longer than he was used to. He recognized the exact shape of her slender back, and the familiar white length of her fingers as they lifted her curls. The precise angle of her neck, the crook of her elbow, the lush curve of her hip that had driven many otherwise-intelligent men to fatal distraction.

His universe lurched.

Emotions he could hardly name rushed in at him, against all rational control: grief, confusion, and a mad desire to run to her, lift her from the ground and spin her about and scream and weep and laugh. And beg her forgiveness again and again.

It took every scrap of will he possessed to hold himself where he stood. To squeeze shut his eyes. To let the seconds pass until sanity returned.

Thank heaven, Miss Covington didn’t turn towards him until after he’d opened his eyes again, and had pulled himself back under control. And when she did turn and find him standing there, she
blushed
. Blushed clear down to her collarbone, a charming rosy shade, and raised a modest hand to hide the plunging neckline of her gown.

Not a gesture Sal would have made. Not in a thousand years.

Instantly, his universe righted itself.

He sucked in a rich gulp of air.

And grinned at her, a deliberately mocking grin. “How very charming you look, my dear,” he drawled, letting his eyes drift casually, assessingly over her form, as any other man who’d walked in on her might have done.

As his eyes swept upwards again, they met her gaze for a moment, and he was surprised to find her eyes looking vulnerable. Nervous. Not remotely like her usual calm, Quakerish self.

At that, a new relief swept through him, relief to the very core of his bones. He almost laughed.
She would fool no one
. No one who’d known Sal would ever take this shy, uncertain, blushing creature for one of the most brazen courtesans in Western Europe.

The game was up. It was all over. He could wash his hands of her.

His smile became utterly genuine.

But then her maid turned from smoothing out the fabric of the skirts, and fixed him with a beaming look. “Oh, Lord Hawkesbridge!” Jenny exclaimed. “Isn’t it amazing?” She stretched out her arms, gesturing at Miss Covington like a prize sculpture. “If I hadn’t pulled that awful gray frock off her and unwound that knot of hair with my own fingers, I’d swear it was Sal herself standing here!”

His lungs constricted again.

Jenny had been Sal’s lady’s maid for years.

And her confidante, the closest thing Sal had allowed herself to a female friend. Jenny had known Sal clothed, naked, asleep, awake, drunk, exhausted, injured, exultant, at her best and at her worst, in her very most private moments.

“Truly, Jen?” he managed to choke out. “You’d take her for Sal?”

“Oh, yes, sir! Of course! Every inch identical!” Jenny—plain, honest, country Jenny—never lied. She was staring at Miss Covington, shaking her head in apparent wonderment, her brown eyes glazing with tears. “Oh, forgive me, Miss,” she said, her voice breaking as she pressed both hands to her mouth. “You just . . . you look just like my mistress!” The tears spilled over Jenny’s cheeks. “It’s like having her here again! A miracle!” The maid’s face crumpled then, and with a great choking sob she ran from the room.

Sebastian watched Jenny go, largely because the alternative would have been to continue gazing at Miss Covington.

His heart pulsed, and he felt acutely conscious of being alone in the room with her.

And painfully aware of her bed, just a few feet away.

What the deuce
? He’d never felt the least awkwardness with Sal, never been susceptible to the charms that worked so well on other men. They’d been alone thousands upon thousands of times. Slept in the same room, even, or in the same hayloft or wine cellar or in the dirt under some scraggly bush, whenever a mission demanded it. There’d never been the least temptation to transgress the terms of their friendship.

So why did his skin on the side nearest Miss Covington seem to chafe and glow as if he were standing before a fire?

At last, Miss Covington broke the lengthening silence. “Well, what do you think?” she asked quietly, a slight tremor in her voice. “Do you find me at all convincing?”

“Convincing?” He turned slowly to regard her, trying to conceal the emotions washing through him. Lord, she looked so unsure of herself. As if her gray dresses had been armor, and that armor had been stripped away.

Soft
. That was the word that came to him. Underneath that prickly, fierce exterior, she was
soft
. He could see it now, with her hair loose and waving over her shoulders. With all that vulnerable white skin exposed.

With her eyes gleaming, almost pleading with him.

Oh, she was not Sal. Sal was . . . Sal was hard.

No, Sal was
hardened
. That was the word. He saw it now, crystal clear, in the contrast: Sal had carried her armor within her very skin, everywhere, always. There’d been a constant barrier about her, a forbidding challenge in the set of her jaw, a look in her eye that said her claws were bared. Her fierceness had gone down to her very core. Whereas this young girl . . .

The differences between Miss Covington and Sal fairly screamed at him.

Yet Jenny, her lady’s maid, had been fooled. Jenny, who knew Sal so intimately, said it was like having Sal here again. If Jenny could be fooled, then others could be fooled as well.

His instincts as an agent kicked in.

He’d been at the Game far too long to deceive himself. Back in Helm’s office, he’d seen something in Miss Covington, something fierce and steely. A different fierceness from Sal’s, but formidable nonetheless. Surely that had not all depended on her attire.

The task might be even harder than he’d thought. They might yet be forced to abandon it. He
hoped
they’d abandon it. But duty was too strong in him to ignore her potential.

A good agent never undermined his partner. Never. If this mission went forward, loss of confidence in her ability to impersonate her twin could be fatal, to one or both of them, to agents all across the field, and their chances were slim enough as it was.

If what he truly wanted was to end this now, to send this soft girl somewhere safe and make his own endless, waking nightmares go away . . . well, he forced those feelings down. Crushed them, pummeled them, beat them into pulp.

And if it meant the last little vestige of his heart was to be crushed, pummeled, pulped along with them—
well
, the most cynical voice within him said,
that might be a nice side benefit
.
Be rid of the damn thing, once and for all
.

He smiled, the sort of lazy, aristocratic smile Miss Covington no doubt expected of him.

“The resemblance astonishes, my dear,” he assured her. “Aside from the length of your hair, you look like your sister. To the most precise degree.”

Miss Covington let out a sigh, seemingly gratified, and blushed again. She turned and regarded herself in the cheval glass. “Did she look just like this? Truly?”

The intense way she studied herself betrayed no trace of vanity, and it struck him that Miss Covington hadn’t seen her twin sister since late childhood.

It was her sister’s image she was seeking in her glass.

A chill went down his back. He was very much afraid of what he would see next, what he did indeed see next.
Damn it all
—tears springing to her eyes.

He was not in the habit of comforting women. In truth, he spent little time with the sort of women who needed to be comforted. He greatly disliked the sensation it was creating in the center of his chest.

Before he considered what he was doing, he’d reached out his hand and touched his fingertips to Miss Covington’s shoulder. She tensed a bit, but she let his fingers rest there a few moments as she dashed her tears away.

Without a word, he dropped his hand back to his side. Even such a little touch was something Sal would never have accepted from him. Sal would have swatted his hand away. Stamped a heel into his instep. Snapped an elbow into his ribs. All while calling him vile names in a remarkable assortment of languages, for daring to imply there was anything vulnerable about her.

The two of them had supported one another, of course; they’d willingly have died for one another. He’d die for her now, God knew, by the cruelest tortures, if it would bring her back, give her even five minutes more of conscious life. But comfort? No. They acknowledged only strength.

Why had he never realized that before?

Ah, well, now he had yet another subject to keep his brain brewing in the middle of the night.

Miss Covington turned back to him with a tentative smile, though her posture had tightened, became more correct again. “Forgive me,” she said, brushing her hands self-consciously over the silk of her skirts. “I’m just a little . . .
disoriented
right now. All this is confusing.”

“Yes,” he heard himself murmur.

She tilted her head a bit, looked at him perceptively. “For you too, of course.”

“Of course,” he repeated perfunctorily, though he didn’t care to pursue the thought.

He swallowed hard. Damn it all, why did Jenny not return? How long could it take a lady’s maid to have a good sob, then get back to care for her new mistress?

A mistress who, by the by, was in dire need of having her hair dressed, of having it
cut
a foot or two shorter preferably, as was the fashion, instead of hanging loose halfway to her knees. Instead of spilling everywhere in wanton tangles, reflecting firelight with a flare like a siren’s call, so any male in the vicinity might feel compelled to reach out to catch some silken strands between his fingers and . . .

He thought seriously about slapping himself.

He needed a return to normality. So he cast his gaze over Miss Covington again, assuming the air of a jaded connoisseur, which, in the usual run of his life, he was.

“That gown looks well on you,” he told her, with a judgmental quirk of his lips. “A shame to abandon your old dress, though. So practical, that dark wool. Ready for a prayer meeting, or a funeral, at a moment’s notice. And with cloth that thick you’d survive a snowstorm overnight, given a decent pair of boots.”

Her eyes flashed at him, and for a moment he expected he’d get the sharp edge of her tongue. But then she seemed to decide not to take up the challenge of his insult. “I prefer this color to gray, actually,” she declared. “And I prefer the silk.”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. “Interesting. Unexpected.”

The color was coming up in her cheeks again. “Why should it be unexpected? What fool prefers the scratch of wool to the slide of silk?”

The slide of silk. He really wished she hadn’t used that phrase. Quite without his conscious permission, his eyes skimmed down the gleaming fabric to where it cupped her breasts. Quite lovely breasts. The wool had concealed, somehow, both her slenderness and her curves.

Where in hell was Jenny
?

“I’m not the fool who’s been wearing woolens,” he managed to say.

Miss Covington made a tsking sound with her tongue. “A governess cannot wear silks, even if she could afford them. The lady of the house would have her flogged.”

He hadn’t expected to laugh any time within this conversation, but he laughed now. “Flogged? Is it really as bad as that for governesses?”