The Madness Of Lord Ian Mackenzie (18 page)

Beth pulled the covers to her chin. “Oh, dear, how embarrassing.”

“I think it’s worse than that.”

“How can it be worse? They can’t arrest us for spending the night in a pension, can they? Goodness, if lewd behavior is illegal, they’ll have to arrest half of Paris.”

The newspapers would get hold of it. They always did somehow, and the story would leak across the Channel to London.
English Heiress up before the French Magistrates for Fornicating in a Questionable Parisian Hotel. This after Playing at the Evil and Illegal Roulette.

A soft knock on the door made her sit up straight. “It’s me, guv,” came a Cockney voice from the other side. Curry. Beth heaved a sigh of relief.

Ian didn’t bother to cover himself as he let Curry into the room. Curry didn’t pay any attention to Ian’s state of nudity, and laid the garments he’d brought with him over the back of a chair. He calmly unfastened a leather bag and took out a razor, shaving cup, and brush.

“Any hot water to be had in this benighted place, guv?”

“Ring for the maid. Did you bring Mrs. Ackerley’s things?”

“That I did.” Curry kept his gaze on Ian, pretending he didn’t see Beth cowering in the bed. “Her companion wanted to come, but I convinced her it wouldn’t be prudent.” Ian only nodded. He pulled on the drawers Curry held out to him, hiding his lovely anatomy, and sat down to be shaved. He might be at the luxurious Langham Hotel in London, rising after a night of leisure.

Beth realized with a jolt that Curry had done this before. He seemed comfortable with the routine of slipping in the back way to bring Ian fresh linens and shave him after he’d spent the night with a woman.

Beth hugged her knees.
My own stupid fault if I’m jealous.

“Did they see you?” Ian asked Curry.

Curry answered as he stropped the razor. “No, I came up the back alley to the kitchen. The staff are all keeping mum. They don’t want the police in any more than we do.”

“This is too absurd,” Beth said. “Why is Fellows persecuting you like this? And me?”

“It’s his way,” Ian answered.

Not much of an answer, but Ian closed his mouth and leaned his head back as Curry finished sharpening the razor. The maid of the night before slipped quietly into the room bearing a ewer of steaming water, and Curry told her in broken French that she should dress Beth. The girl curtsied, and while Ian and Curry faced the other way,-the maid laced Beth into the clothes Curry had fetched from Isabella’s. The maid’s face glowed with excitement. “He must be very rich, madame,” she breathed. Beth didn’t correct her assumption that Ian was her protector. Last night Beth had been amused that the landlord and servants had supposed her Ian’s kept woman, though it didn’t seem as funny now.

“I suppose we shall have to flee out the back way as well,” she said to Ian. “Mr. Fellows is getting to be an absolute bother.”

“We’ll not go yet,” Ian said.

“Good, because it is still pouring rain.” Beth glanced at the windows. “I do hope the inspector and all his friends from the Surete are soaked.”

Ian tilted his head back, face covered with lather. “Did you send for it?” he asked Curry.

“I did like you said, m’lord. Now please stop talking so I don’t slice you open.”

Ian went silent, and Curry drew the razor up his throat. Beth sat down on the bed she’d enjoyed such a night in and wished for something to eat.

The maid bustled about and shook out Beth’s clothes from the night before, laying them before the fire to dry. Curry shaved Ian in silence, the only sound the scrape of the razor across Ian’s skin and the maid’s pattering footsteps.

Ian seemed in no hurry. When Curry finished, Ian asked the maid to bring him a newspaper and coffee, and tea for Beth. Just after the maid returned with the requested things, someone else knocked on the door. Curry held the razor tightly while he answered it.

Mac stood on the threshold. He came inside, and Curry quickly closed the door behind him.

“Fellows looks like a drowned rat. Don’t worry, Ian. I took care.”

“It is kind of you to come fetch us,” Beth said, trying not to sound impatient. “How is Isabella?”

Mac looked blank. “How the devil should I know?”

“You saw her home last night.”

Mac turned a wooden chair around and straddled it back to front. “I got her into her carriage and paid her coachman to ensure she arrived home and didn’t leave again.”

Beth frowned at him. “You didn’t go with her?”

“No, I did not.”

Most vexing of him. “She showed me the painting you did of her.”

“Did she? That trifle?” Mac spoke casually, but he tensed.

“Not a trifle. It’s beautiful. She travels with it—obviously, or she could not have shown it to me. She takes it everywhere, she says.”

“Doubtless trying to find the perfect spot to throw it into the sea.”

“Of course not.”

Mac clenched the chair so rightly Beth feared he’d splinter the wood. “May we not speak of it?”

“As you wish.” Beth frowned, but she dropped the subject. By the time Curry had got Ian fully dressed and Beth had drunk a cup of tea, someone else knocked on the door. Mac hastened to open it, but he slipped out into the hall without letting Beth see who it was. She heard a rapid exchange of French, and then Mac came back in with his pugilist valet, Bellamy, and a man in a long black-buttoned cassock and rosary.

“Good heavens,” Beth bit out. “Are we having a fancydress party? So many more people to slip out the back.”

Ian turned around. “We are leaving by the front door. Be damned to Fellows.”

“I thought you said he was ready to arrest us.”

“Why should he?” Ian’s voice hardened, and he glanced at her with a look she didn’t understand. “He has no reason to arrest a man for spending a night in a pension with his wife.”

Beth stopped. “But I’m not your…”

She took in the priest, Mac’s expression, Curry’s innocently blank face.

“Oh, no,” she said, her heart sinking. “Oh, Ian, no.”

They all stared at her, Curry with amusement, the priest with a worried frown, Bellamy nonplussed, Mac in impatience. Only Ian remained expressionless. He could be a man waiting for someone to tell him whether or not there were any eggs for breakfast.

“Why the hell not?” Mac asked. “Ian likes you, you get on, and he needs a wife.”

Beth squeezed her hands together. “Yes, but perhaps I don’t need a husband.”

“A husband is exactly what you need,” Mac growled. “It will keep you and my wife from running about in illegal casinos.”

“Mac.” Ian’s voice was quiet. “I’ll talk to Beth alone.”

Mac ran his hands through his russet hair. “Sorry,” he said to Beth. “I’m a little on edge. Marry him, do. We need at least one sensible person in this family.”

Without waiting for her reply, he got the priest, the maid, Bellamy, and Curry out of the room and shut the door. Rain beat against the windows, the sound grainy in the silence. She was aware of Ian’s gaze boring a hole in her head, but for once she couldn’t look at him.

“I determined not to marry.” Beth tried to sound determined, and failed. “I decided to live as a wealthy widow, traveling, enjoying myself, helping others.”

Her words sounded feeble, even to herself.

“Once you are my wife, Fellows can’t touch you,” Ian said as though he hadn’t heard her.

“His superiors ordered him to stay away from my family, and when you marry me, you’ll be my family, too. He can’t arrest you or harass you. My protection, and Hart’s protection, will extend to you.”

“It hasn’t much stopped him from bothering you, has it?”

“He won’t be allowed on the grounds of Kilmorgan, and Hart will make trouble for him if he tries to approach you anywhere else. I promise you this.”

“Didn’t you say Hart was in Rome? What if he doesn’t want his protection extended to me?”

“He will do it. He hates Fellows and will do anything to thwart him.”

“ But…”

The suddenness of it all took her breath away, and she groped for arguments. She found one.

“Ian, there’s something you
don’t
know about me. My father was never a French aristocrat. He told people in England he was a viscount and they believed him. He could ape the manners of the nobility very well indeed. But he was as lowborn as any in the slums of the East End.”

Ian’s gaze slid away from her. “I know. He was a confidence trickster fleeing arrest in Paris.”

Beth’s breath left her. “You know?”

“When I decide to learn about someone, I learn everything.”

Her throat tightened. “Do your brothers know?”

“I saw no reason to tell them.”

“And you still want to marry me?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Because I’m not the kind of woman a duke’s son should marry,” she almost shouted. “My background is sordid—I was little better than a servant. I’d ruin you.”

He lifted his shoulders in a very Ian-like shrug. “Everyone believes you the daughter of an aristocrat. That will be good enough for the stuffy English.”

“But it’s a lie.”

“You and I know the truth, and the people who prefer the fiction will be satisfied.”

“Ian, you will make me a confidence trickster myself, just like my father. I’m no better than he was.”

“You are better. You are a hundred times better.”

“But if someone found out… Ian, it could be horrible. Newspapers…”

He wasn’t listening. “We don’t fit in, you and me,” he said. “We’re both oddities no one knows what to do with. But we fit together.” He took her hand, pressed her palm to his, then laced their fingers through each other’s. “We fit.”

He was saying,
We are adrift and no one wants us, not the real us. We might as well drift together. Not, Please marry me, Beth. I love you.

Ian had told her that first night at the theatre that he could never love her. She couldn’t expect that. On the other hand, as Mac pointed out, they got on. Beth had learned not to be startled at his abrupt speeches, not to be offended when he looked as though he hadn’t heard a word she said.

“The priest is Catholic,” she said faintly. “I’m C of E.”

“The marriage will be legal. Mac saw to that. We can have another ceremony when we return to Scotland.”

“Scotland,” she repeated. “Not England.”

“We’ll go to Kilmorgan. You’ll be part of it, now.”

“Do stop trying to make me feel better, Ian.”

He frowned, Ian always taking her words literally. She went on. “A lady likes to be wooed a bit before she’s thrust into marriage. Offered a diamond ring and so forth.”

Ian’s grip tightened. “I’ll buy you the largest ring you ever saw, covered with sapphires to match your eyes.” Her heart skipped a beat. His gaze was so intense, even when he couldn’t meet hers directly.

She remembered the breathless moment when he’d actually looked at her when they’d made love. His eyes had been so beautiful, fixed on her as though she were the only person in the world. The only person who mattered. What would she give to have him look at her like that again?

Everything she had.

“Blast you, Ian Mackenzie,” she whispered.

Someone tapped on the door, and Curry stuck his head around it. “The rain’s slackened, and the good inspector’s getting impatient.”

“Beth,” Ian said, his grip crushing.

Beth closed her eyes. She hung onto Ian’s hands as though he were the only thing between her and drowning. “All right, all right,” she said, her voice shaking as much as her. body. “We’d better do it quickly, before the inspector storms the battlements.”

And it was done. Beth’s eyes were heart-wrenchingly blue as she repeated the vows. Then the marriage was sealed by the priest, witnessed by Curry, Mac, and Bellamy. Ian slipped a plain ring he’d instructed Curry to bring onto Beth’s finger, a placeholder until he could buy her the wide sapphire band. When he kissed her, he tasted the heat left over from their lovemaking as well as her nervousness.

They walked out together, Ian holding an umbrella over both himself and Beth. Ian pointedly ignored Fellows and the crowd of Paris police and journalists who waited on the opposite side of the street.

Ian’s carriage pulled forward as they emerged, blocking Fellows’s view. The man strode around the carriage anyway as Ian was handing Beth in.

Fellows’s eyes were grim, his mustache soaked with rain. His stance bore the furious exhaustion of a man who’d stalked his prey all night and now saw it slipping away.

“Ian Mackenzie,” he said heavily. “My friends in the Surete have come to arrest you for abducting Mrs. Beth Ackerley and holding her hostage in this inn.”

Beth gazed out of the carriage, a warm, lighted haven from the rain. “Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, Inspector. He didn’t abduct me.”

“I have witnesses who saw him drag you out of that gambling den and hustle you here.”

Ian slowly folded his umbrella, shook it out, and stowed it inside the carriage. “Mrs. Beth Ackerley is no longer here,” he said, focusing on the pension they’d just left. “Lady Ian Mackenzie is.”

He turned and climbed into the carriage before Fellows could begin to splutter. Mac came out of the pension, a wide grin on his face, followed by Curry with a valise, and Bellamy with a basket of wine and bread Ian had bought from the hotelier.

“You lost that round, Fellows,” Mac said, clapping the inspector on a soggy shoulder. “Better luck next time.” He climbed up into the carriage and thumped down opposite Beth and Ian, smiling broadly at them. Bellamy climbed up with the coachman, but Curry sprang into the coach and slammed the door in Fellows’s face. The inspector’s eyes were hard as agates, and Ian knew he’d thwarted the man only briefly. The battle had been won, but the war would rage on.

They left immediately for Scotland. Beth had only a few hours to pack and say good-bye to Isabella, because Ian was suddenly in a tearing hurry.

“Oh, darling, I’m so happy.” Tears wet Isabella’s lashes as she gathered Beth in a right hug. “I’ve always wanted a sister, and you are the best I can think of.” She held Beth at arm’s length. “Make him happy. Ian deserves to be happy, more than any of them.”

“I’ll try,” Beth promised.