The Last Hellion (10 page)

The drama of her costume had not struck him before. It did so forcibly now.

Perhaps it was the smoke and hellish noise. Perhaps it was her hair. She'd left off her bonnet, and without it she seemed troublingly unprotected, too exposed. Her thick hair, a soft pale gold, was coming loose from the untidy knot at the nape of her white neck. The tumbled coiffure softened her starkly beautiful features, made her look so young, so very young. A girl.

Above the neck.

Below was the dramatic contrast of her black armor, with the line of buttons sternly marching from waist to chin, ready to defeat and destroy all invaders.

He'd undone those buttons, again and again, night after night, in his dreams.

He wondered how many men here imagined undoing them.

All, naturally, since they were men.

She was the only woman, and there she was, parading herself in front of this mob of low-minded scribblers, every last one of whom was picturing her naked, in every lewd position known to the human species.

He watched her move forward to lean over one of the drunkards and talk to him while he gaped at her bodice.

Vere's hands fisted at his sides.

Then she moved away, and he saw she had a wine bottle in one hand and a cigar in the other. She'd taken only a few steps when he realized she was foxed. She swaggered unsteadily toward a group of men to her left, then paused, swaying, to Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

direct a drunken leer at one of them.

"Big, yes, but not up to my weight," she said, her voice carrying easily over the hubbub. "I make her at five and three-quarter feet. And ten stone, stripped.

Which I should pay fifty guineas to see, by the way."

It took Vere a moment to place the words, then another to place the voice, which wasn't hers. And because the audience exploded into laughter, it took him another moment to believe his ears.

Those were his words. In Vinegar Yard.

But that could not be…
his
voice?

"As much as fifty?" someone called out "I didn't know you could count so high, Your Grace."

She stuck the cigar in the corner of her mouth and cupped her hand to her ear.

"Was that a mouse squeaking I heard? Or was it—By gad, it
is
. It's little Joey Purvis. And here I thought you were still in the asylum."

It was something eerily like Vere's voice, deep and slurred with drink, coming out of her ripe mouth. And those were his gestures. It was as though his soul had entered this woman's body.

He stood frozen, riveted upon her, while the audience's laughter faded to the edges of his consciousness.

She withdrew the cigar from her mouth and beckoned to the heckler with it.

"Want to know if I can count, do you? Well, come along, lad, and I'll teach you how I count teeth—while you pick yours up from the floor. Or would you rather a chancery suit on the nob? You know what that is, don't you, my little innocent?

It's when I hold your head in place under one arm while I punch it in with the other."

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

There was little laughter this time.

Vere dragged his gaze from her to the audience.

Every head had turned toward the doorway where he stood.

When he looked back again, his impersonator's blue glance flicked over him.

Evincing not the smallest quiver of discomfiture, she raised the bottle to her lips and drank. Then she set the bottle down. After wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she acknowledged him with a slight dip of her head. "Your Grace."

He made himself grin. Then he lifted his hands and clapped. The room grew quieter still, until the only sound was the steady slap of his palms.

She planted the cigar between her teeth again, doffed an imaginary hat, and made him an exaggerated bow.

For an instant he forgot where he was, as his mind darted from the present and caught on a memory. Something so familiar, but from long ago. He'd seen this before. Or experienced it.

But the feeling vanished as swiftly as it had come.

"Well done, m'dear," he said coolly. "Vastly amusing."

"Not half so amusing as the original," she answered, boldly eying him up and down.

Ignoring the heat her brazen survey generated, he laughed and, amid scattered applause, strode toward her. As he made his way through the crowd, he saw her beautiful countenance settle into a harder expression, while her evil mouth curled into the smallest fraction of a smile.

He'd seen that coolly mocking look before, but this time he didn't quite believe it. Perhaps it was the smoke and the sickly light, but he thought what flickered in her eyes was uncertainty.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

And there again he discerned the girl within the beautiful monstrosity. And he wanted to pick her up and carry her away from this infernal place, away from these drunken swine with their roving eyes and lecherous thoughts. If she must mock and ridicule him, he thought, let her do it for him only.

…
you didn't want me to hit anyone else but you
.

He shook off the memory of her infuriating words along with the absurd sense of foreboding they stirred, as they'd done last night.

"I've only one small criticism," he said, pausing a pace away from her.

She lifted an eyebrow.

About them he heard the low murmur of voices. A cough here. A belch there.

Yet he'd no doubt their onlookers listened avidly. They were newsmen, after all.

"The cigar," he said. He frowned down at the one resting between her long, slightly ink-stained fingers. "The cigar is all wrong."

"You don't say!" She frowned down at it as well, mimicking his expression. "But this is a Trichinopoli cheroot."

From an inner pocket of his coat, he withdrew a slim silver cigar case. He opened it and held it out to her. "As you can see, these are longer and thinner.

The tobacco's color indicates a higher quality. Do take one."

She shot him a quick glance, then shrugged, tossed her cheroot into the fire, and took one of his. She rolled it between her graceful fingers. She sniffed it.

It was a cool enough performance, but Vere was near enough to see what others couldn't: the barely discernible pink tinting the curve of her cheekbones, the quickened rise and fall of her bosom.

No, she was not so fully in command of herself as she made others believe. She was not so case-hardened and cynical and impudently self-assured as she seemed.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

He was strongly tempted to lean in closer and discover whether the hint of a blush would deepen. The trouble was, he'd already caught her scent, and that, he'd discovered last night, was a mantrap.

He turned away from her and toward the audience, some of whom had found their tongues, which they employed in obligatory ribald witticsms about the cigar.

"I beg your pardon for the interruption, gentlemen," Vere said. "Do carry on. The drinks are on me."

Without a backward glance—as though he'd forgotten her already—he sauntered out the way he'd come.

He'd come this way, into this hellhole of a tavern in Fleet Street, intending to erase any wrong impressions she might be entertaining about his appearance at Bridewell this morning.

He'd planned to make a great production of returning her pencil—before an audience of nosy scribblers—while indicating with suitable innuendoes that the writing instrument wasn't all she'd lost in the hackney last night.

By the time he was done, she'd be convinced beyond any doubt that he was the obnoxious, conceited, conscienceless debauchee everyone—and rightly—

believed he was. A few more hints would suffice to convince her that he'd only recently emerged from a bawdy house in the neighborhood when he'd come upon Trent and Miss Price, by which time His Grace had altogether forgotten Mary Bartles existed.

Consequently, it was logically impossible he'd come to obtain her release and send her to his man of business to make whatever arrangements were necessary to get her the hell out of London and settled comfortably so he wouldn't have to hear about her ever again or think about her and her bedamned sick baby.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

If any good deeds had been done, Vere would have made clear, Bertie Trent alone was responsible.

As plans went, it had been a good one, especially considering he'd devised it while in the throes of a near-death experience, thanks to the swill Crockford passed off as champagne and a grand total of about twenty-two minutes' sleep.

But Vere had forgotten this very good plan the instant he'd paused in the doorway and discerned the girl under the touseled mop of golden hair.

Now, recalling the faint blush and the quickened breathing, he abandoned the plan altogether.

He'd mistaken her. She was not, quite, what she made the world believe she was.

She was not, quite, immune to him. The fortress was not impregnable. He'd perceived a chink. And being what he was—obnoxious, conceited, conscienceless, et cetera, et cetera—he was duty bound to get inside, if he had to dismantle her defenses brick by brick.

Or rather, he amended while his mouth curled into a dangerous smile,
button by
button
.

Blakesleigh, Bedfordshire

On the Monday following Lord Ainswood's encounter with Miss Grenville at the Blue Owl, the Ladies Elizabeth and Emily Mallory, ages seventeen and fifteen respectively, were reading all about it in the pages of the
Whisperer
.

They were not supposed to be reading the scandal sheet. They were not allowed to peruse even the respectable newspapers that arrived daily at Blakesleigh.

Their uncle, Lord Mars, allotted time every day during which he read aloud those portions he deemed fit for innocent ears. His ears, and his eyes as well, Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

were not so innocent, for he'd been a politician all of his adult life. Privately, he read everything, including the scandal sheets.

The paper the young ladies were studying late this night, by the light of the fire in their bedroom, had been liberated from a large stack of periodicals belowstairs, awaiting the rag and bottle collector.

Like others liberated before, this one would be consigned to the flames as soon as they had gleaned as much as they could about their guardian's doings.

Their guardian was the seventh Duke of Ainswood.

They were Charlie's daughters, Robin's sisters.

The firelight at present made fiery threads in the pair of auburn heads bent over the paper. When they finished reading the accounts of their guardian's encounter with Miss Grenville at Crockford's and the Blue Owl, matching pairs of sea-green eyes met, and both youthful countenances wore the same expression of mingled perplexity and amusement.

"Obviously something interesting happened in the hackney when he 'escorted'

her from Crockford's," said Emily. "I told you Vinegar Yard wasn't the end of it.

She knocked him on his arse. That had to get his attention."

Elizabeth nodded. "And obviously, she's pretty. I'm sure he wouldn't have tried to kiss her if she wasn't."

"Clever, too. I wish I had seen how she did that trick. I understand the pretending-to-faint part, and I can picture the uppercut, but I still can't picture how she dropped him."

"We'll figure it out," Elizabeth said confidently. "We simply have to keep trying."

"I'm not going to try smoking cigars," Emily said, making a face. "Not with Uncle John's cheroots, at any rate. I did it once and thought I should never eat Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

again. I cannot think how she did it without puking all over Cousin Vere."

"She's a journalist. Only think of the filthy places she must enter to get her stories. She can smoke cigars because she has a strong stomach. If you had one, you wouldn't get sick."

"Will she write about him, do you think?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "We'll have to wait and find out. The next
Argus
comes out the day after tomorrow."

It wouldn't arrive at Blakesleigh, however, until Thursday at the earliest. Then it would pass through several hands, including the butler's, before it joined the stack of discards.

They both knew they must wait at least a week after its arrival. Their Uncle John never read aloud from the
Argus
, not even the fictional
Rose of Thebes
. Its hoydenish—and that was putting it mildly—heroine might have an unfortunate effect upon the suggestible minds of young ladies.

He would have been appalled if he had realized how closely the two young daughters of his wife's brother identified with the fictional Miranda. It was just as well, then, that he didn't know they considered the wicked Diablo the hero of the story, else Lord Mars would have concluded their minds were disordered by grief, and sent for a physician.

But Elizabeth and Emily had learned very young to live with heartache. They had grieved hard with each loss, and raged, too, because their father had told them it was natural to feel angry.

In time, the rage eased, and the painful grief subsided into quiet sorrow. Now, two years after losing their beloved father and nearly eighteen months after the death of the "baby" brother they'd doted upon, their natural zest for life was returning.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

The world was no longer uniformly black. There were dark moments, to be sure, but there was sunshine as well. And one bright beam of sunshine was their guardian, whose doings afforded no end of vicarious excitement in what, at Blakesleigh, was a stultifyingly tame existence.

"I'll wager anything that half the letters Aunt Dorothea gets from her friends are about him," Elizabeth said, after a long sigh about the waiting period.

"I doubt the gossips know any more than the
Whisperer
does. They get everything secondhand. Or third-hand." Emily looked at her sister. "I'm not sure Papa would approve of our nosing about in Aunt Dorothea's correspondence box. We should not think of it."

"I'm not sure he'd approve of no one telling us anything about our own guardian," said Elizabeth. "It's dis-respectful of Papa, who named him guardian, isn't it? Remember how he would read his friends' letters, and laugh, and say,