To Seduce an Angel (4 page)

Emma was not so naïve that she didn't know the duke and Aubrey meant to destroy him. They had not directly asked her to kill him, but they had chosen her to spy because they thought her wicked and unnatural, a woman capable of murder. She would have to lie as if her life and his depended on it, lie to him and lie to them. It would take a weaver's skill to keep all the strands of the story straight. Lying on the spot was easy enough. Lying to an angel struck her as a dangerous and unwise.

“Do you have a trunk, Miss Portland?”

Emma blinked at the harmless, necessary question. His gray glance was detached. He did not seem to be distracted by her person as she was by his. She did have a trunk. Aubrey had arranged one for her as he had arranged a past, a convenient history she could bring out when questioned.

She nodded. “At the inn.” She could not repress a quick shudder. Sending for her trunk would signal Aubrey's man, Mr. Wallop, that their plan was working.

“Cold?”

She shook her head, and the tie of her cloak gave. The worn garment slipped from her shoulders, and Daventry reached to lift it back into place. His fingers caught the strings, and in the face of his nearness, his unsmiling concentration on her cloak strings, she dropped her gaze. Her consciousness of him shifted. His bare wrist, strong and masculine in its structure, dusted with springy golden hair, was under her chin. His hands tugged the strings straight. The gesture seemed to enclose them in an intimate space. Emma stared helplessly at his wrist circled by a faint white pucker of skin as if a girl's awkward stitching had raised a rough seam there.

He stood as close, closer to her than any man had stood. Under the thin lawn shirt, his chest rose and fell with his breathing. Her body did not flinch or recoil at his nearness. Instead it quickened and hummed with life. She looked at the scar, which plainly spoke of pain, of a time when he'd been injured or helpless. The helplessness of it lured her closer. Her fingers closed of their own volition around the place, and she drew her thumb along the white ridge.

He froze at her touch, the backs of his fingers warm against her collarbone, where her pulse leapt. Emma had trained herself in stillness to avoid careless blows, but now she held herself still to invite this man's touch as if the mere brush of his fingers woke a hunger in her skin for warmth.

She felt herself lean toward him, the way ponies in the fields on a cold night leaned against one another for warmth. His hands moved away, and she recovered her distance. They stood in a bare little room that smelled of dust and disuse. Daventry was not helpless but very much in control. She had no reason to trust him, and he certainly should not trust her. Tatty would say—
To trust is good. Not to trust is better.

Emma, who knew the look in a jailer's eye, the one that said,
I can do with you as I wish,
did not know what to make of Daventry's expression. She looked at his mouth. A mouth could tell a lot, but it was a mistake to look at his mouth. A warm flush rose in her cheeks as she tried to understand his mouth. There was dominance there, surely. After all, this palace was his. He ruled here, but she detected no cruelty, no threat of punishment. Knowing amusement perhaps, as if he understood her better than she understood herself.

She took a steadying breath. “I should like to discuss the terms of my employment.”

That sardonic lift of his brow came again, making him seem annoyingly older than Emma. “Ahead of yourself, aren't you, Miss Portland? I haven't yet examined your credentials.”

“I have them here.” Emma reached to hand him her papers. She needed to take charge of the conversation some how, to make it brisk and pointed, and not be sucked down into the kind of bodily languor his nearness evoked.

After a pause he took them. “What terms of employment did you imagine were open to discussion?”

“Schoolroom hours, your aims for the boys, when and where I may prepare my lessons, and my days off.”

“Days off? Before you've begun?”

“I shall want every other afternoon for a walk to the village.”

“Someone will drive you.” The lines around his mouth tightened.

“I must walk. For my health.” She could hear the lie in her own voice and fervently hoped he could not. Every other day she was to report to Aubrey's man Wallop. Her real employers would have their information.

The closeness of the previous moment vanished. Emma felt his withdrawal into the stone youth who could not be touched.

“Pull that bell rope.” He waved a careless hand, dismissing her. “Someone will come to lead you downstairs. My housekeeper, Mrs. Creevey, will find you a maid.”

Emma felt disposed of, as if the moment of closeness between them had never happened. She should not care. To glimpse his past pain, whatever had made the scar, would not help her escape.

“Take supper with me and the boys, and then we'll talk again about the terms of your employment, after I've examined your papers.” He bowed briefly, stepped around her, and vanished through a narrow paneled door.

Over his shoulder Emma saw a flash of sky before the door closed and a draft of cold air swirled around her. She pressed a hand to her breast to slow the erratic beat of her heart. She was in a plain room on an upper floor of the hall. Her employer had just stepped through a door into the sky.

 

 

DAV strode across the gray slates of the hall roof, letting the March wind blow away whatever unreasoning desire had overtaken him in the girl's presence. The lowest level of the great roof stretched across the front of the hall between the two great wings. His family worried that he roamed the roof, but among its chimneystacks and turrets his balance was swift and sure. The vast rooftop, nearly an acre in size, was his. He would wager the hall that his grandfather had never set foot on the roof. Dav had seen it on his first approach to the house and felt a surprising release of some tightness in his limbs of which he had been barely conscious. The wide expanse with no walls was for him the hall's saving feature. No one else came up there except himself and the boys.

If he'd lost his balance, it was in hiring Emma Portland. He had acted purely on impulse, on a startling desire to have the girl in his bed. With his fingers on the worn flannel of her cloak he had imagined them skimming the silky smoothness of her breast under the cloth with a vividness that shook him, a desire that instantly undid his family's long effort to bring him back from the streets. She was alone in the world, unprotected. She had wandered into his keeping. A gentleman, he knew, would regard such a woman as completely untouchable, but he'd been ungentlemanly from the start.

The crazy thing was that such a mad desire would also please his brothers. They feared that he was too damaged to want a woman in spite of some careful efforts to revive his wounded sensual appetites and one memorable evening they had arranged for him with a professional. Well, he could tell them they had succeeded. He wanted the new tutor in his bed.

He had had to touch her, and then he had had to leave her before he became more obvious and even more foolish. She had unnerved him by touching his scarred wrist as if some instinct of hers knew the real man. Cuffs and coats hid his past easily enough in most company. But today because the boys had been restless without their regular lessons, he had given in and led them in a pirate game, more like the life they'd led in the streets than the one he was training them to live. For an hour he'd forgotten Daventry and gone back to being “Boy,” their leader, as he had been in London, in those years when he'd had no name.

Faced with Emma Portland he had not known who he was. He had acted out of his street habit of seizing an opportunity the moment one appeared. Take first. Think second. Yet hiring her separated him from the boys, making him not their leader so much as their guardian with power to shape their lives. It had to be. It was one more step in becoming Daventry, his grandfather's heir, not Kit Jones, the boy he'd once been, son of London's most notorious courtesan.

He stopped halfway across the roof and slid down its slope to the low balustrade. The wind blew hard, sweeping away the last clouds of the storm that had passed. It whipped his hair about his face and made his shirt flap like a loose sail.

It would take his family no time to get the news of his hiring the girl. Every caution of the past four years since he had been reunited with his mother and brothers had been designed to protect him from his grandfather's malice. Everyone who served him was a guard as well as a servant.

The old duke, who, when he discovered Dav's existence, had ordered him kidnapped, continued to threaten Dav's mother and older brothers. Wenlocke seemed to know every move of Xander's business and Will's career and endlessly put blocks in their paths. Whether Xander and his partners sought patents and charters to bring gas lighting to more streets and cities in England, or Will struggled to create a modern police force for London, the Duke of Wenlocke interfered.

The family had built protective layers in all their dealings with the world. Hiring Emma Portland broke the main rule of staying alive—let no stranger near. He laughed at himself. It was precisely the interruption his safe life needed.

They all expected the old duke to die, but he lived on, possibly on hatred itself, and while he lived he threatened them all. They claimed not to mind. Dav's sisters-in-law made jokes of the large footmen who accompanied them everywhere. His brothers assured him that the whole family was in the fight. But Dav was going to change that. Since they'd won in court and he'd come to this house, he had been studying how to free them and himself from the old man's hold.

His oldest brother Xander had given him the wooden sword and told him to wait. Xan had the sword made with an iron-weighted hilt so that Dav might strengthen his arms. In the beginning he could barely lift it above his waist or swing it with any speed. Now it was as light to him as a sword of lath. His palms were callused and his grip strong, but in conversation with Miss Portland it had suddenly seemed a boy's weapon, not a man's. He had been quick to send it off with his wards.

It had served its purpose. Now he wanted to be free of it, free of his family's caution. Whatever they thought, he was ready to take on his grandfather. Tomorrow Henry Norwood, his old solicitor, who had led the battle against Wenlocke in the courts, would bring Dav an account of all of his grandfather's actions against him. And Dav would plan the defeat of his grandfather.

He crossed the roof to the south side. His wards needed a tutor. He'd hired one. He'd acted on his own, and he would handle the consequences.

He would shake off Emma Portland's influence. The next time he saw her he would make sure he was armed in gentlemanly and civilized trappings. He would have her credentials investigated. He had given her the fortnight she wanted. Then she would be gone from his house and his mind.

EMMA counted off a full five minutes before she opened the door through which Daventry had vanished as if he were indeed an angel warrior who could ascend the ether. She took the knob in her hand and slowly turned until she felt the mechanism engage. A fraction of a turn more, and the door opened with a barely audible click. She would practice. She must be flawless in door opening if she meant to escape. In the meantime a spy must spy. Tatty would say that if you wanted eggs for breakfast, you had to endure the cackling of chickens.
At least until the French army came to consume them all.

There was no sign of Daventry, only a wind-scoured stretch of gray slate roof across the front of the house. At least he had not simply stepped on a cloud. The roof had levels above levels. Directly in front of her a narrow portion about a yard wide stretched along the base of an upper wall. To her right the slates sloped steeply down to a low balustrade. Above the upper wall was another roof with towers and copper cupolas turned verdigris with age and wide, tall chimneystacks, each topped with a row of distinctive round pots like chess pieces for an ogre. The wind blew sharply, scattering threads of smoke from the chimneys and whipping her skirts about her legs so that she gripped the doorframe.

The airy, unconfined space with only sky and wind for walls made her giddy. There was a door opposite to the south wing of the house, but no other way up or down that she could see. Apparently Daventry had simply walked through the air, as another man would stroll through a salon. But he was no ordinary gentleman. He unsettled her with his sword and his scars, his quick intelligence and his knowing looks.

She shivered and stepped back inside. She must treat Daventry Hall as just another prison. Escape, that was her goal. She knew what to do. In a rough wooden chair in the sparsely furnished room, she sat and used her nail to pull a loop of thread from the hem of her blue overdress. When she had eased a long enough piece from the fabric, she broke it off and wound it round the doorknob. She and Tatty had learned such tricks to mark their way about their prison. As their gowns frayed, they'd grown cleverer and bolder, using different colors and different knots to map a path for their escape.