To Seduce an Angel (17 page)

The title did not see to fit him, but even without it he could not be sure exactly who he was. His bastard brothers had been the heroes of his youth, not the figures in books. He had wanted to be like them, quick with his fists, indifferent to society's slanders, and self-sufficient. Xander was the careful one. Will was the rebel. Dav did not know who he was meant to be.

To choose his title was to choose a certain kind of power, a thing of paper and words, unlike the power of his fists and wits which he could trust. Choosing to be the Marquess of Daventry would not make him as free as he had been in that astonishing moment of his liberation from his kidnapper, when at fifteen he had stood shivering, near naked and half-starved on that roof above Bread Street, and chosen his own path.

Still, he could not deny that choosing to be the marquess meant he could do things for his family. He could establish the boys in trades or professions of their choosing. He could free his mother and brothers from Wenlocke's hatred. He could reform the law itself that fell so heavily on poor boys. He wanted these things. He had been working steadily and earnestly to achieve them.

The trouble was he could not be both. To be the Marquess of Daventry, he must deny that other self. He tried to picture himself dancing smoothly in a ballroom, holding polite conversation with a demure miss or marrying one. But the only girl his mind could conjure had golden curls and blue eyes, and he wanted to hold her closer than even the most licentious waltz would permit.

Wanting Emma Portland was at odds with all those careful, noble, rational desires of his. Wanting Emma Portland was a different sort of wanting, immediate and insistent. It consumed him. He wanted Emma Portland in the way he had once wanted freedom, the way he wanted to defeat his grandfather.

He had only to hear her name mentioned, and other thoughts fled. He worked his jaw, which still felt the ache of Will's blow. Turning toward her had been inevitable even in the ring where he had learned to block out every competing awareness except his opponent. All his training against his tough brothers had deserted him at the sound of her name.

Will's blow, a mere tap from his brother, was meant as a warning to Dav not to take his eyes off the danger they all faced. He should stay on the path he had chosen and conquer the longing she stirred in him. He owed it to his brothers. They had suffered the full weight of bastardy. As the Sons of Sin, neither Xan nor Will would ever be accepted in polite aristocratic society no matter what service they did the nation. Ironically, each had married a woman of impeccable lineage, while Dav, his mother's son born of her secret marriage to a lord, and now recognized legally as his father's heir, picked a nameless girl of doubtful origin who told him two lies for every truth.

The thunder rumbled closer, and a flash of lightning lit up the sagging belly of leaden clouds. A sudden gust pelted him with raindrops as big as finch eggs and cold as ice. In minutes he was soaked to the skin. He stayed longer, letting the elements blast him until a reeking bolt split the gloom in front of him.

He ran lightly over the slick tiles and slipped inside the bare little room next to schoolroom. The wind slammed the door behind him.

There was no fire in the black grate, but he pulled his soaked shirt off over his head and shook his wet hair back from his face. When he looked up, Emma Portland stood in the doorway with a slate in her hand.

 

 

OH, it's you.” She hugged the slate to her chest. She wore a white lawn shirt under a deep blue velvet gown that echoed the vivid hue of her eyes. “I was in the schoolroom. I heard the door.”

A mad laugh bubbled up inside him. One look from her, and his resolve to forget her, to mistrust her, dissolved. He tossed his wet shirt on an old wooden chair. In the dingy room in the gloom of the storm her bright hair glowed.

He saw her quick intake of breath and the way her fingers tightened around the slate as if she could hold back the look in her eyes. Too late. He'd seen the admission in her eyes in the second before Will hit him.

He reached her and took away the slate, capturing her hands, holding them tight. “You can't look at me like that. At least not when my brother might knock me to Jericho.”

He lifted her warm hands in his cold ones and kissed her fisted knuckles. He must have touched her hands ten times by now, and still the contact had the power to shake him.

“You must sack me. It is what your brother advises.” He could see that she had worked it out in her mind.

“Not what I want.” He leaned down to press a kiss against the side of her throat above the lawn collar, inhaling the sweetness of her.

“Is your jaw very sore?” She freed one hand and reached up to touch his face. He pulled her up against him. She lowered her gaze, and her hand slid to his collarbone.

“I can't not look when you . . . not when you are like this. It's the candlestick wanting the candle.”

She made no sense. What was between them was nothing as tame as a candle flame. He thought it was a conflagration, one of Xander's blazing gas furnaces at the very least. A cold drop of rain ran down his neck. She leaned to him and caught it with her lips. A violent shudder of longing coursed through him. In the cold bare room with its dusty floor and fireless hearth amid the homey smells of rain and damp wool, he looked for a place to lay her down and crush her under him.

He nudged her back until her shoulder blades collided with the wall, and he pressed his whole aching self to her length, lifting her chin, taking her mouth, and losing himself in the taste and feel of her. The first moments were a frantic making up for all the kisses and touches denied in the days since her nightmare had joined them. He kissed her brows, her ear, her neck. Her sweet hot mouth opened to him, and this time, he plunged in.

The part of him that his brothers feared no longer worked was up and proud and nudging at Emma's skirts.

Emma welcomed the fierce pressure of Daventry's kisses. Almost it was as if they fought, as if she wrestled with the angel warrior, a sensual fighting, a struggle not of blows but to see who could give most. Everywhere against her body she could feel the lean sinewy strength of him. His kisses loosed the desperate tension of her limbs, made her float free of the trap, like the embers going up the flue. She clung to his smooth, strong back, feeling the cool skin heat under her touch.

A raucous noise penetrated Dav's sensual haze. Emma tugged his hair and twisted away. The boys were coming up the stairs. The sound became their feet pounding, their shouts and bursts of laughter. He could hear Adam's deeper voice trying to quell their uproar. He released Emma, her lips ripe and swollen. He had loosed the golden strands of her hair, and her blue dress bore the dark imprint of his rainsoaked body. Her eyes said she wanted to avoid discovery.

He grabbed her by the arm and hustled her to a closet, tucking her inside with one last searing kiss. “Wait, I'll lead them away.” He turned back, snatched up his damp shirt and pulled it over his head. The garment felt like ice. His whole warm, throbbing body, protested, the shift from Emma's warmth to cold reality.

In the closet Emma kept her jaw clamped shut on her chattering teeth as Daventry directed the boys away from the little room. They had come looking for Emma, and Daventry sounded easy and indifferent as if he not the moment before been pressing his body to hers. For a moment Emma thought she had dreamed their heated encounter. But the chill of the closet and of her damp skirts was real.

Her breasts felt aching and swollen against her stays. Between her thighs she felt heat and dampness and a throbbing ache.

She could not deny what was happening between them. But it was very bad luck, like getting a thousand evil eyes, or having Fausto on guard duty every day. It was the worst luck imaginable to find in an enemy's kisses a sweetness she had never tasted.

It was bad luck for both of them. It was what Aubrey and Wallop wanted. They wanted Daventry to be careless around her, blinded by desire, unable to see the threads that connected her to his enemy. But Adam had returned, and Daventry's brother plainly knew that Emma Portland was a lie.

She recovered her senses. Daventry had a divided nature. He had come to her from the roof, from the storm itself and given in to his desire for her. But the boys had reminded him of his other self and its cares and duties. He had easily assumed them and left her in a closet.

She slipped out into the dim room. The last light of day made faint gray squares of the windows. She pressed her face against the glass. Rain drummed on the roof and slid down the other side of the cold panes. She would not escape tonight, and when she did, she would leave all thought of him behind. He was not a father, a mother, a grandmother, a brother, a cousin, a home, a name. She would take nothing except what she needed for the journey. She had not betrayed him yet. Nothing she had told Wallop would help in the duke's war against Daventry. If the rain ended soon, she would get away before she did Daventry any real harm. And in her catalogue of losses, the loss of him need not overshadow the others.

She told herself a few more lies as she stood there, letting the cold take over her body. Memories were light, she told herself. One could carry a sack of a thousand of them and not feel weighed down for a journey. And if the memory of a few kisses seemed a burden, why, then she'd just toss them out of her pack.

RAIN delayed Will's return to London past his appointed hour. His twins were asleep, but his wife was awake, leaning up against the chocolate silk pillows in their great bed, her long tawny gold hair in a loose braid hanging down between her lovely breasts. She was scribbling something with one of his pencils in a moleskin notebook resting against her bent knees.

Undressing for her appreciative gaze was one of the pleasures of married life he liked to indulge, and though he was weary of the journey and worried about Dav, Helen's smile invited him back into their secret world.

He shed his outer garments and boots and stood beside their bed to undress. A fire still warmed the room, and his thoughtful wife had placed his favorite French brandy on the table by the bed.

A counterfeiting case he'd worked on when he'd first become a Runner had uncovered this secret warren of linked apartments north of the Strand. Once the crooks had been routed, Will had refitted the place to suit his work. The main room retained the original oak wall panels, door pediments, and wide plank flooring of a time when the neighborhood had been the most fashionable in London. A friend in the trade, leaving her profession to marry, had offered Will her grand sultan's bed with its tangerine damask hangings and posts like young palm trees.

In time when his work with Peel was done, Will planned to move his family to a respectable West End square, but for now he preferred to remain close to the work he was doing, and Helen didn't mind. She had taken over the role of running the boys' school at the top of Bread Street, where she and Will's assistant Nate Wilde and Dav's boy Robin had once faced a terrible enemy.

“Coming to bed?”

“I need to think.”

“Then you must not stand before your wife in all your glory.”

He paused with his hands on hips about to shed his smalls. He had been undressing absently, and now Helen's gaze turned his thoughts. “Would it help if I got under the covers, madam?”

She laughed. “Likely not. But tell me, did you send the false tutor packing?”

Will shook his head. He had explained before the trip what he'd discovered about the tutor his brother had hired without consulting any of them. Helen, who had been there the night they'd recovered Dav from his kidnappers, knew the danger of the family's enemies as well as anyone.

He lifted the covers and slid naked into bed beside his wife. He kissed her slowly, pressing his body to hers, savoring all the places where her softness yielded to his weight. For a moment there was a danger of forgetting everything except Helen, but she broke the kiss.

Her deep brown eyes searched his. “I think you need to talk first.”

Will shifted up against the pillows and took up his brandy. Beside him Helen settled herself on her side, facing him, her fingers drifting over his ribs, her way of letting him know that she was there, waiting. He supposed he was no different from other husbands in that before he married he had not imagined the intelligent companionship of a wife would be so helpful. He knew it now. Thinking about a problem with Helen beside him, whether he asked for her opinion or not, meant he had better ideas.

Now the problem was his youngest brother. Neither Will nor Xander, their eldest brother, believed that Wenlocke's threat to Dav had ended. But Will saw what he believed Xan missed—Dav's impatience with the constraints they'd imposed on him for his own safety.