To Seduce an Angel (16 page)

The dark-haired man shed his padded gloves and extended a hand to Daventry to pull him up from the grass. He strolled to the edge of the ring and picked a towel up off of a stool and applied it to his chest and shoulders. “Is this your grinder, Dav?” he asked. “You ought to introduce us.”

Daventry shook his head and grabbed a second towel. Emma dropped her gaze, her heart pounding. In a flash Will Jones had seen too much. He had investigated her, and she had no idea what he'd found. Emma felt the cold wind through her cloak.

Robin came and tugged her arm. “Are ye goin' to stay to watch us, miss? I'm goin' to draw Finch's cork for 'im.”

Too late, Emma looked away from Daventry. She smiled at Robin. “I'm on my way to picnic.” She held up her empty basket and hoped no one would look inside. “I'll leave you to your exercise.”

When she looked again, Daventry had charge of himself. He cast aside his towel and pulled a loose linen shirt over his head. “Miss Portland, meet my brother, Will Jones, ex-Runner, ex-spy. Will, Miss Emma Portland, grinder to these louts.”

“With all those exes, Miss Portland, Dav will make you think I'm dead and in the history books. Instead of merely his much wiser, somewhat older brother.”

Daventry actually grinned at his brother. “What should I say then—Will Jones, besotted husband, doting father, respectable officer of the law?”

Will gave Emma his hand and a narrow look. “Actually, Miss Portland, I'm at work on the reform of the London police with Peel. Give us a year, and Parliament three or four, and we'll have an effective force in place.”

Robin tugged at Daventry's shirt, and Daventry turned to the boys and urged them into the ring. “Your turn, lads.” They scrambled through the ropes, and Lark opened a sack and began tossing gloves at his companions. They began promising to damage each other's noses, teeth, and eyes.

Will Jones's dark lazy gaze was on Emma. He was not a man to be easily fooled. She could see that he understood at once how it was between herself and Daventry. Tatty would say the candlestick needed the candle. “Do you like Suffolk better than you liked Grimsby, Miss Portland?”

“The hall is beautiful.”

“Dav tells me you're not fond of fish. The fish stink must have made Grimsby unpleasant.”

He was testing her. She gave him a bright smile. His testing meant he did not know everything. “My concern, of course, was my students, and not my supper.”

Her smile had no effect on Will Jones with his sharp, suspicious gaze. He knew something and had come to tell Daventry what he'd found.

Daventry turned back to them. “Tell Xan I'm ready for that match whenever, wherever,” he said to his brother. “I want it.”

One of the black brows lifted in a way that made the resemblance between the brothers plain. “You may be a bleeding marquess, but you don't tell Xan when you're ready for a match. He decides. Even an amateur bout can be brutal.”

Daventry's face changed slightly, taking on that look of command that got obedience from all his people. “You'll both be invited to my first match.”

“Show Xan your moves when he comes then, but don't tell him I knocked you down.” Will Jones turned to Emma. “The family comes here, Miss Portland, but don't be deceived, it's not a visit. It's a bleeding invasion. The parade of carriages will stretch from the house to the bridge. Our mother insists on traveling in style. And safety.”

 

 

SHE'S lying to you, you know. The Grimsby School for Foundlings is a fiction.” The brothers sprawled in easy comfort before a fire in the ancient hall with mugs of dark porter and Mrs. Wardlow's sandwiches at hand.

“That part I'd figured out.”

“But I suppose it doesn't matter, if you want her in your bed.”

Dav knew that his response to Emma Portland would not go unnoticed by his most observant brother. Will had perfected a mask of idle indifference that hid the quick workings of his mind. “It must relieve your fears to know that all my parts are working. I am not irreparably damaged.”

Will swore, but he lifted his ale pot in a toast. “To working parts! At least the two maggots who stole your boyhood didn't take that joy away from you, too. You're sure you want her in your bed?”

“I'm sure.”

“You sent me her papers because you doubt her honesty.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“She has an accomplice.”

“Accomplice?” The word had a nasty sound, and the idea didn't fit with anything Dav sensed in Emma. She might be lying about her past, but she seemed like him, alone in the world. To see her lean against one of the shaggy ponies for comfort, he could not imagine she had a friend in the world, let alone a partner.

“Someone on the outside is either helping or directing her. There is no Grimsby School for Foundlings. Adam confirmed that. But when I wrote to the address in her papers, I got an effusive letter praising Miss Portland's virtues. She or her partner anticipated an investigation. And if that maw worm who had you kidnapped wasn't already dead, I'd suspect him or Bredsell.”

Dav ignored his brother's reference to the men who'd done so much harm to all of them, two of them dead, one in prison. Still those men had acted to please his grandfather, who was very much alive and as determined to ruin them as ever. Norwood's report of the duke's actions against the family proved that the Duke of Wenlocke didn't take well to losing. “What does that make her, do you think? A fortune hunter?”

Will appeared to entertain the idea. His capacity for analysis was as sharp and quick as his tongue. “She appears to be gently bred . . . a maiden?”

“Maiden.” Dav had no doubt of that. Those inexpert kisses of hers were proof.

Will took a long pull on his ale. “So, possibly, some encroaching mamma, who's been following the account in the papers of your sensational rise in fortune, thinks to put her impoverished daughter in your path before we fire you off in society and a queue of applicants lines up from here to Bath to bag a marquess.”

Dav shrugged. In his mother's dreams Dav would wed some paragon of virtue from the highest rank of society. He knew his brother did not believe that women of rank would be lining up to receive Dav's addresses.

Will sat up, leaning forward. “As flattering as that fantasy might be, it's unlikely. A fortune hunter takes care to disguise her own lack of fortune until she's hooked her man, but this girl frankly admits she's penniless, right?”

Dav nodded.

“No one else answered your notice, did they?”

“No.”

“I don't like it. Do you see anything suspicious in her actions here?”

She has nightmares, silk dresses, and a need to hug shaggy ponies, as if the poor beasts could comfort her for some terrible loss.
He didn't voice those puzzling observations. None of them fit her paper account of her life or his brother's sense that she was acting out of some calculation. “She does know teaching. Some part of her story must be true.”

“You think she taught in an actual school somewhere. So why invent the Grimsby School and the false references?”

Dav shrugged. The lie puzzled him, too. When she talked about her former students, he could swear that she spoke of real boys. She knew more about teaching than lovemaking, of that he was sure. “She wanted this position.”

“Even more suspicious.”

“She had no idea who I was.” He remembered the moment in which neither of them had been what the other expected.

The idea caught Will by surprise. “She came here in answer to the notice, right? To be hired by the Marquess of Daventry, didn't she?”

“Yes, but she didn't know that person was me.”

“That means she's no fortune hunter.” Will sat up, his countenance dead serious.

“Maybe it means she's an honest woman.”

Will's raised brow expressed his full contempt of that possibility. “Even if she's honest, she's not what our dear mamma wants for you. Sophie wants nothing denied you because of birth or history. She has her heart set on welcoming you home from West End ballrooms where you left blue-blooded maidens in a swoon over you. Oh, and she wants to attend your grand wedding at St. George's.”

“You and Xan have that covered. You each married into remarkable respectability.”

“A bleeding miracle in my case. The poor bishop turns apoplectic every time he thinks of where his daughter sleeps at night.”

Dav smiled. Will had a sumptuous apartment with a bed fit for a sultan hidden in the depths of one of London's worst rookeries. It was satisfying to contemplate his sister-in-law Helen's pompous father, the Bishop of Farnham, dealing with that fact. The bishop had made a name for himself with his books of sermons on the subservient role of women before his daughter Helen had defied all his ideas with her courage and her love for Will.

“I don't like you having this woman sleep inside the house, Dav. Where have you got her sleeping?”

Dav lifted his ale to his lips without answering for a minute. “Not in the barn.”

Will swore again, thoroughly.

“I'm not defenseless. I've got Adam Digweed, and you and Xan can vouch for the staff. You hired them all.”

“Adam has been away for days.”

“She hasn't murdered me in my bed if that was her plan.”

“Has she any money?”

“Some, I think. She's made purchases in the village.”

“Anything of note?”

“I haven't examined her packages.”

“You might give her a week's wage, and see what she does with it.”

“You think she'll leave. Am I free to follow her?”

“Of course you're free. You're a bleeding marquess.”

Dav didn't say anything, letting his brother think about the meaning of those words.

“I'm not thirteen or even sixteen any longer.” The real problem was to get Xan and Will and even Mamma to recognize him as he was. For three years he had been that lost boy for whom they searched. Now he did not think they could see the person in front of them.

“I know, but as long as Wenlocke lives, he's your enemy.” The statement was as close as Will could come to a plea.

“You think if I leave this gilded prison, he'll strike.” Everything about the ancient room in which they sat proclaimed his grandfather's ambition and power through the centuries, power he'd meant to pass on to a proper heir, not a courtesan's son like Dav. Family crests adorned the ceiling panels above them. Fine ancient weapons decorated the oak walls. The Jones brothers had wrested this ancient power from the duke in the courts. In spite of everything Wenlocke had done for seven years from the moment he'd prompted Archibald March to arrange Kit Jones's kidnapping, Kit was Marquess of Daventry. He was Dav, or at least he was learning to be him.

“I've no doubt of it. It will take me a few days more to find out where that letter really came from and to trace Miss Portland's journey here, if I can. In the meantime, watch her.”

“You can count on that.”

“I can see that she has qualifications that Hodge lacked.”

Will rose to leave. “Don't bed her,” he advised. At the door he stopped and looked back over his shoulder as if a thought struck him. “You haven't, have you?”

“Not your affair, Brother.”

“Well, you can bleeding wait, at least until after the family comes. And let them judge her.”

“Go before the rain closes in.”

DAV saw his brother off for London with no further warnings about Emma Portland. Will had said enough to remind Dav of the choice he faced. He sought the roof. The boys were at their tea. The late afternoon clouds had thickened and grown darker, and the wind blew stiff and chill out of the west. He heard the low rumble of distant thunder. He needed the roof. On the roof he might even solve the puzzle of who he was.

In the hall he could put on the clothes of a marquess and inhabit the rooms of a marquess. He could look at the papers his father had carefully hidden to protect him and read his dead father's letters, full of hope for their future together. He could meet with his estate manager and read about tithes in his library, but on the roof he could not be dishonest with himself. The things he had done to survive marked him as indelibly as the white puckers of skin around his wrists and ankles marked him with the shackles of his two-year captivity.

The roof of his magnificent hall covered near an acre, but he could go nowhere from that roof. In London when he'd climbed free of Timothy Harris, the huge man who'd kept him for two years, the city had stretched out before him. He had learned to leap and scramble almost anywhere in London by rooftop paths over the slates among the chimney pots. Here, where he could see for miles across acres that legally were his possession, he could go nowhere, except down through the house. He could go forward by choosing fully and completely the new identity his family wanted for him.