Heart of the Tiger

by Lynn Kerstan

  But this time, it was going to be Jermyn Keynes, Duke of Tallant, who required stealth. This time, he was the only one with something to lose. So long as Michael stayed out in the open, the duke would find killing his troublesome younger brother—without being caught at it—all the more difficult.

  Michael had learned better than to pass up any advantage, however slight. And lacking the slightest concern for the consequences, he was free to strike at will, even with fifty witnesses looking on. Turning, he grinned at David. “Tell me about Beata’s.”

  “Oh. You’d like it. Good wine and brandy. Gaming. Other things you wouldn’t like so much, like dancing and musicales. I play there rather often. Well, you’ll see. She built a villa on the Thames not far from Chelsea Hospital, and just lately she added cottages and flats for residents. I’ll take you there to meet her, but,”—he flushed—“but you’ll need to clean up first. Shave. Haircut. Decent clothes.”

  Michael glanced down at his scuffed boots, buckskin breeches, open-necked shirt, and leather waistcoat. “I’ve only one change of clothes, and it’s worse than this. All I could carry with me had to fit in a saddlepack. The luggage I sent on a trader won’t be here for another month or two.”

  “Oh.” David looked him up and down. “We can’t wait that long, can we? But I know a tailor who can outfit you overnight, for the right price. We’ll call there now, and by tomorrow morning, you’ll be fashionable enough to meet Beata Neri.”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Michael under his breath.

  Beata Neri had the sort of lavish beauty that caused men to strike poses and write bad poetry. Enthroned on a canopied gilt chair in her elaborately decorated parlor, she was wearing an iridescent gown of velvet and silk in the colors of a peacock’s tail. A soft velvet hat crowned her mass of heavy black hair, with a sapphire clasp holding the feather that curled over her smooth cheek.

  Michael, approaching the dais, guessed her age to be a few years above his own six-and-thirty. She had elected to receive him alone, in state, and she was smiling.

  He stopped just beyond the expected spot, decided not to bow, and regarded her with open curiosity. As exotic and confident as a maharani, she was clearly a woman accustomed to getting her own way.

  “You needn’t play up to me,” she said in a rich, slightly accented contralto. “I have already decided to have you.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “And I haven’t decided to stay.”

  “But you will. Are you as uncivilized as you look?”

  “It’s the other way around. I look a good deal more civilized than I am.” He glanced down at the black greatcoat he could hardly wait to shed. He had already untied his cravat and tossed a starched collar out the carriage window. “Fairfax dragged me to a tailor, who did his best on short notice. You must pardon them both.”

  “He has become quite the fashion plate, our David. Because the younger men emulate him, he cannot bear to set a poor example . . . or to sponsor one.”

  “Then he is sure to find me a continuing disappointment. How long is this inane conversation to carry on?”

  “Would you prefer to do something else?” She arched an elegant eyebrow. “I wouldn’t mind. And I see you have already begun to undress yourself.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “Is that why you’ve decided to have me?”

  “Not originally. But the idea has considerable appeal. You would be a distinctive change from my previous lover, and I do relish variety.”

  “So do I. But you, Signora Neri, are very like my own previous lover—intelligent, beautiful, and demanding. Also treacherous. She sold me out.”

  “I trust she got a good price.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” The signora’s cynicism was nearly a match for his own. “Is there a minimum acceptable fee for betrayal?”

  “I count it a few pennies above whatever she can earn by other means. How else is a woman to make her fortune, unless she inherits one or elects to whore herself, in marriage or out of it? I chose to wed three men with large fortunes and poor health. Do you find that shocking? Perhaps you did not pay your mistress enough to retain her loyalty.”

  He thought of David Fairfax, that paragon of misdirected loyalty, who would not sell his devotion at any price. He had known a few others of such integrity, but not many.

  He thought of Priya Lal, who had revealed his secret hideaway to the Earl of Varden. It wasn’t the lack of money that led her to betray him, because he had long since made her wealthy. It had been the lack of attention.

  He looked at Beata Neri and knew he could not give her what she plainly wanted, although an unruly sector of his anatomy clamored for a recount. On its behalf, perhaps he ought to reconsider. Were he to seek a relationship, it would have to be with a woman as soulless as he. And he’d just met one.

  He grinned at her. “Is there enough money in all the world, signora, to buy your loyalty?”

  “There is scarcely enough to buy my interest for half an hour. But I expect you could hold it, birbante, if you tried. And I rather expect you won’t try, which I regret. Still, I shall offer you one of my new casinas. The rent is high and the tenure day-to-day, because someone who interests me more might later apply for residence. In such a case, I would ask you to depart.”

  “Understood. I presume there are advantages to staying here?”

  “Beyond the one you have rejected?”

  He released a whoosh of air. “You have taken insult. Don’t. I am poison. Having me here will put you at risk, and before I am finished with what I came to London to do, there will be more trouble than you can manage.”

  He thought that had done it. He’d spoken the exact truth, and she was astute enough to hear it in his voice. When she rose, shaking out the sleeveless caftan edged with gemstones that she wore over her gown, he was sure she meant to dismiss him.

  Instead, she descended regally from her dais and took his arm. A tall woman, she turned her black eyes, deep with mystery, to his. “Vieni, rogue. Let me show you my home. We are in the Sala dei Medici, and beyond that door is the gaming room. I claim five percent from the losers and ten percent from the winners, who are more likely to pay. Do you gamble?”

  “Devotedly. I also drink.”

  “My cellar is excellent. I’ll not charge for what is served you in the public rooms.”

  “Because you want me there? Why is that?”

  “For the same reason I wish you to become my tenant. Fate did not decree me to be born a queen, so I built for myself a palace. Now I contrive to draw to it the most fascinating people in England. They come for many reasons, to be sure. I offer gaming, musicales, masquerades, theatricals, and banquets. Scholars enjoy my library. Politicians and investors gather in private rooms for private meetings. I select the guests who are admitted here, and I ensure their return by providing what they most delight in. Can you guess what that is?”

  “No. And I don’t like crowds.”

  “But I require them. And it is scandal that draws them to my Palazzo. Unpredictability. A frisson of danger. You will give them everything they wish and probably more than they had hoped for. Perhaps I shall place a notice in the Times that you can be found here.”

  He laughed. “Do that and you’ll be sorry for it. Bad enough you want to put me on exhibit, like a monkey in a cage.”

  “Ah, no.” She stepped back and regarded him for a moment. “Not a monkey. Un lupo, I think.”

  “There are no wolves in England.”

  “Not until now.”

  They were passing through a large courtyard with a fountain at its center, weaving through a maze of neatly trimmed box hedges studded with ornamental trees. “My lover went out to India a little more than a year ago,” she said. “Perhaps you have met him.”

  “India’s a big country.”

 
“He should not have gone there,” she said reflectively. “For all his considerable intelligence, there is a naiveté in him I find troubling. Or perhaps it is an overrefined sense of honor that does not permit him to see the lack of it in others. I advised him to refuse the errand on which he was sent, but he assumed I spoke from pique. Not so, although it is true I regretted losing him. But when he returns, I shall not have him back.”

  “To punish him?”

  “To educate him. In all his life, he has been denied nothing. To always get what you want is unnatural.”

  “You appear to manage it.”

  “Not today. Are we not agreed that I want you? But you would remember, I am sure, if you had encountered him. He is exceedingly beautiful, in a way quite different than you are. People call him the Archangel.”

  Michael barely caught himself before he stumbled over a box hedge. He swore.

  “Ah.” Stopping, she turned, a smile on her full lips. “Then you did meet him.”

  “After a fashion,” he said between clenched teeth. “We . . . quarreled. I hurt him.”

  “Then I was wrong. On that occasion, he did not get what he wanted.”

  “I cannot stay here, of course.” Michael scanned the maze and had just decided to plow through it to the nearest door when a hand wrapped around his wrist. He looked down at slender fingers tipped with long manicured nails.

  “I thought you had come here to face trouble,” she said. “Not to run from it.”

  He shook her off. “That doesn’t mean I want to draw it to me. Your Archangel has already got in my way. The next time, he won’t survive the experience.”

  “If you say so. But before you turn me down altogether, come see the rest of my palace. You might change your mind.”

  She led him through a bewildering assortment of rooms, and then out a wide set of French windows. They were at the top of a long sloping hill, and beyond it, the Thames surged with the force of the incoming tide. Near to where they stood were several buildings, a pair of cottages to their right and three tall houses to their left. “My guest residences,” she said, “completed only a fortnight ago. One of them could be yours. Ah. I see the tenants of the Chioscho delle Rose. Shall we go meet them? Perhaps they will provide me a reference.”

  Shading his eyes against the early-afternoon sun, he saw three people near the river. One sat in a wheeled chair with his legs extended on a platform. A female wearing a black cloak and bonnet stood beside him. And Hari Singh, crouched behind the chair, appeared to be examining its wheels.

  Chapter 3

  It had seemed a good idea at the time, Mira was thinking, to convey her father down to the bank of the Thames for a bit of sunshine and fresh air. He had enjoyed watching the river traffic while she fed a heel of stale bread to the ducks. But when she’d tried to push the chair back up the hill, something went wrong with one of the wheels. It refused to turn, and despite the strength she’d developed during three years of steering him around, she was unable to make any progress. Nor did she wish to leave him alone while she went in search of help.

  She had been on her knees, wrestling with the recalcitrant wheel, when a deep, accented voice spoke from behind her.

  “Might I be of assistance, memsahib?”

  Turning her head, she looked up, and up, and up. The man, wearing a loose tunic over khaki trousers, was built like a tree and seemed nearly as tall. He had a heavy black beard that appeared to be rolled up around his jaw, full cheeks, a beaked nose, and the kindest eyes she had ever seen. They were the rich brown of molasses, under bushy eyebrows and a red turban.

  “Indeed you can,” she said, rising. “I am most grateful. This is my father, Edgar Holcombe, who can understand you perfectly although he is unable to respond. We need only transport him to our cottage at the top of this hill, but the left wheel refuses to turn.”

  He bowed to her father. “I am honored, sahib. My name is Hari Singh. Might I examine the wheel?”

  Mira watched him drop to one knee and run his thick fingers around the axle.

  “With the proper tools,” he said, “I can easily repair this. In the meantime, sahib, will you permit me to carry you to your residence?”

  “That would surely be a great imposition, Mr. Singh. Perhaps you could fetch footmen from the—” She saw her father’s index finger move up and down. “I beg your pardon. It seems my father would be pleased to have you carry him. You don’t mind?”

  “Not if he will be comfortable to travel in my arms. How did he convey his will to you?”

  He looked so interested that she felt compelled to oblige him. “We communicate by several means. Father is able to blink, and his lips move a bit. I can tell when he is amused, or when he is displeased. But mostly he tells me ‘yes’ or ‘no’ by moving his right forefinger. There are other methods, much slower, which we use in private. I can pass beneath his hand a large card with the alphabet inscribed on it, and he lowers his finger to the letter he wishes to choose. In that way, he speaks to me.”

  “A most impressive achievement, memsahib. It is kind of your father to trust me. If you will hold the chair steady, I shall lift him now.”

  As Mira took hold of the grips, she felt a strange tingling in her head, heard a sound that wasn’t a sound. She glanced up the hill and saw Beata, her lapis and turquoise robe billowing in the cold November breeze. Beside her was a wide-shouldered man with overlong black hair and a bronzed face.

  Mira froze in place. She took a deep breath, willed her heart to cease pounding.

  Hari Singh’s voice came to her as if from a great distance. “Here is Michael. Together we will transport your father without the need to remove him from his chair.”

  Not Tallant, then. Not the duke. Only the younger brother, athletic and forceful as he strode beside Madonna Beata, who always tried to give the impression of floating when she walked. Clasping her trembling hands, Mira lifted her chin and awaited his arrival.

  “Ah,” said Beata, addressing the man as they drew closer. “This must be the Sikh person David spoke of. He is your bodyguard?”

  “My friend.”

  “It appears your friend has found your neighbors, then.” Beata stopped a little distance away. He halted as well, his gaze fixed on Mira.

  A cold shiver passed through her. His eyes, the famous Keynes eyes, were nearly colorless, transparent as water. They seemed to look through clothing and skin and flesh. Revealed nothing of his thoughts.

  Beata laid a possessive hand on his forearm. “This is Mr. Edgar Holcombe and his daughter, who took residence a few days ago. They keep too much to themselves. Mira, several gentlemen acquainted with your father are to be here this evening, and they will be disappointed if you fail to join them. Eight o’clock, my dear, in the Camera Dorata. Michael, your friend is very large. I shall therefore put you in the Casina del Pavoni. It is a good deal more expensive than the other casinas, but you will enjoy a view of the river. And now I must go. My steward will make the arrangements.”

  She rose on tiptoe, brushed a kiss on Michael’s jaw, and swept back up the hill.

  And all that time, as Mira was blisteringly aware, he had not taken his gaze from her own heated face. Nor had Beata troubled to introduce him to her. A clear sign, Mira understood, that she had reserved him to herself.

  “The chair is broken,” said Hari Singh, pointing to the wheel. “If Mr. Holcombe is agreeable, we shall transport him to his residence.”

  At last Michael Keynes turned his attention away from her, although the intensity of it continued to burn her skin. He gave a slight bow to her father. “Sir, I am sure Hari could manage by himself, but I will gladly help, if you will entrust yourself to us.”

  Hari Singh was watching her father’s hand. “He has no objection. The gentleman is unable to speak, Michael, but he communicates quite well. You should take th
e front, I believe.”

  To her astonishment, Michael Keynes peeled off his caped greatcoat and jacket and held them out to her. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” she said, taking them, relieved that her hands remained steady. “We are grateful for your assistance, Lord . . . That is, I don’t know what title you hold.”

  “None.” A corner of his mouth quirked with amusement. “There’s a courtesy title floating around for the second son, but I never attached myself to it.”

  While she watched, he hunkered beside the platform on which her father’s legs were stretched, examining the underpinnings of the chair. “It looks secure enough,” he said over his shoulder. “Tilt it up, Hari. Are you ready, sir?”

  With the only good view of her father’s moving finger, she voiced his response. “He is.”

  “Here we go then.”

  A little fearful, she stepped back to give them room to maneuver. And although she observed them closely, she could not later have described how they lifted the chair. It seemed effortless, for all that it could not have been, and in a short time her father had been raised over their heads. Hari Singh, bent a little because he was taller than his friend, was holding the axle bar between the wheels. She couldn’t tell what Michael Keynes had chosen to grasp. The two men were off before she knew it, moving with ease, bearing the heavy oak chair and its passenger as if they weighed no more than a pair of umbrellas. She had to rush to catch up.

  “Where are we going?” Michael Keynes asked as she came alongside him.

  “Our cottage is to your left, the one nearest the villa.”

  He corrected his course, and she found herself looking at his back, the buff-colored waistcoat stretched tight across it, the muscles of his shoulders and arms outlined by his cambric shirt. A powerful man, slim hipped and lean, fearsomely attractive. If she hadn’t known who he was, and if she were capable of admiring a male physique, he might have stirred her.