Edward clasped his hands together, remembering the dark night he had invited Mr. Khaffar into his house in Islington for the first time. Damn Lord Granwich and his War Office orders. “Because you saw me through the window in London when I first met with him.”
“I…”
“Don’t deny it, Celine. I would have known you anywhere your…my…” My body heats like a furnace from just the sight of you and I forget who I am meant to be.
“I wasn’t in the tree for very long.”
Edward blinked. “Bloody hell, you were up a tree?”
Celine nodded. “You did have the meeting on the second floor of your house. Most inconsiderate.”
By god so he had. He added tree climbing to Celine’s increasingly long list of un-courtesanlike attributes and stared at her. Had he ever really known who she was?
He cleared his throat. “Be that as it may, Mr. Khaffar and I were having a small business meeting about his accounts. Your untimely intervention meant that I didn’t manage to tell Mr. Khaffar everything he needed to know about his money.” Nor extract any more information about what he was doing with it, or anything that might help him in his mission for Lord Granwich to find out what the hell was in the bloody note Pedro Moreno, the underworld villain, had given Mr. Khaffar not four months before.
Celine stared at him. “Nobody goes to a business meeting armed with a large curvy sword!”
Edward cleared his throat and rubbed his hands together. “I believe they call it a scimitar, where Mr. Khaffar comes from. It is largely part of their ceremonial dress.”
“And they greet their friends by holding these so-called scimitars to their throats do they?” Celine raised her hands up, grasping an invisible sword.
Edward took a step back. “There is no need to be sarcastic. Mr. Khaffar and I merely didn’t see eye to eye.”
Celine drew herself up. “Edward, can’t you see when you are being used?”
Edward raised an eyebrow. He’d met her when she was a courtesan, and now she was spying on him. To what method did she look to define the notion ‘being used’? He lifted his chin. “Yes, Celine. Sadly I can.”
With a huff she swept ahead of him into the back room. “Where’s Robert and the bedroom? I’m having the bed.” She paused and then swept onwards. “You are having the floor.”
Edward ran a hand through his hair again and resisted the urge to bang his fist against the wall. Reluctantly, he followed Celine into the back room, and up the ladder onto the already crowded small landing.
Celine gazed in obvious disbelief as Robert bent and opened the door to the bedroom sheepishly.
“I’ve put some new sheets on for you. Washed them myself not two days ago,” the large man said proudly.
Crowded at close quarters on the landing, Edward peered into the room. It wasn’t just that the bed was large, but also that the room was small. The floorboards appeared briefly leaving enough room for a man to stand freely in the room, whilst there was just enough space on the other side of the bed for a windowsill and a stub of a candle.
“I hope it will be comfortable for you?” Robert looked at Edward hopefully and then nodded at Celine.
Edward sighed and nodded. “I think we might turn in now. Thank you, Robert.”
Robert nodded and backed away down the ladder.
Edward waited as Celine entered the bedroom and turned her back to him.
She put out a hand and pulled a pin from her tumbling hair. “You can wait outside until I am finished.”
Edward watched dreamily as the mass of her hair kissed the creamy skin of her shoulder. “Pardon?”
She slammed the door in his face.
Stunned, Edward leaned back against the door surround. What had he thought, that he would have been given a private show? If only. Their relationship in the past had been…different.
The door opened suddenly as the figure of Celine disappeared over the bed and below the covers. The small amount of floor that remained inside the doorway at Edward’s feet was littered with the long tails of a pair of serviceable heeled boots, several sharp knives and a belt-like affair from which two bags were suspended.
Slowly, Edward stepped in and closed the door.
“I’m going to sleep now,” Celine’s voice was muffled below the tartan blanket that Robert had thrown on the bed. A creamy arm shot out of the covers and whipped the curtains across the window. “You don’t need the light, do you?”
Edward blinked as he was plunged into darkness. He couldn’t move his feet or he would stand on a plethora of knives and he couldn’t walk forward because there was no room. He could leave, but then—his hand inched towards the door—he could feel his control beginning to slip. Edward fumbled for the doorknob but couldn’t reach it. If he left, then in the velvety warm familiar darkness he would miss his chance…
As an animalistic urge coursed through him, he cast away his normal precise motions, ripping off his jacket, and pulling his chemise roughly over his head. Falling on the bed he pushed his boots quickly off his feet and crawled up the narrow space Celine had left between her body and the wall.
Shivering, he pulled himself under the covers and turned towards her body.
“Do you realize that this is the first time we have ever been in bed together?” he murmured, his hands slid across the sheets as if they belonged to someone else.
The silence gathered in the room.
He caught at the sheets with his strong hands. “It’s not that I never wanted to become intimate with you, Celine—”
A large snort rent the air and then the sound of a large exhale of breath whistled past his ears. A chewing sound was his only warning before Celine turned over and with a flick of an unwitting arm slapped him in the face.
Good god. She was already asleep! He shivered. The slap to the face washed all the warmth from his body. Mechanically he lay on his back and straightened his legs stiffly, as the events of the past two hours ran themselves again through his mind, the large black carriage rumbling towards them as Mr. Khaffar threatened him, his only glimpse of Celine a pair of eyes behind an enormous gun before it fired, and Mr. Khaffar screamed like a stuck pig behind him.
And then Celine leaping from the moving carriage in a blaze of rippling red, drawing out yet another gun and with deadly calm threatening them both.
And still his body had heated with desire.
Then she was gone, back on the coach, with a staggering gazelle-like leap. And she had expected him to follow her.
Edward hunched onto his side, facing away from Celine, feeling the passion ebb further away from him as realization hit him. From the moment he had started running, Lord Rochester had taken over his body. Not Mr. Fiske. Lord Rochester was the one that had learnt to climb trees, to run like the wind, to make his body as fluid as the river, and to hunt in the forest in the dead of night. Mr. Fiske had only woken up when the carriage had stopped to find Celine pressed into the side of his body as if she belonged there, as if they could not be prized apart.
He grunted. And again it was Rochester that had pulled the clothes from his body and urged him into the cold bed alongside Celine.
The sounds of sheets ruffling turned him on his back again. He opened his mouth to speak, but again, Celine’s arm fell like a hammer, her elbow clanging against his bare shoulder, her hand coming to rest lightly against his cheek.
Gently he brought his arm up and shifted awkwardly on his side to face her. He couldn’t see her face in the total darkness. Her hand fell to beside his face. Slowly he kissed it, gently as he had done in the year before when everyone had joked about the accountant and the courtesan. They hadn’t seen that he’d treated her as gently as a Dresden doll, as if she was a woman he wanted to marry, not a courtesan with whom to spend night-long intimacies. It had nearly broken him, for in the potent proximity of Celine, he had wanted both. And when he had seen her kiss Bill Standish in Regent’s Park…he had finally sp
lit asunder.
As desire and rage warred inside Edward, he softly brought up his hand and took her hand in his, pressing it against his chest. I am Lord Rochester, his heart tattooed in a strong rhythm against her hand again and again. He bent his head and kissed the soft skin of her knuckle and pressed his head back into the pillows hard, feeling the soft warm smooth skin of her hand against his. I am Mr. Fiske thundered at counterpoint in his ears against the strong beating in his chest.
“Gods I’ve missed you,” he breathed, closing his eyes. “I need you, Celine. Why did I ever let you go?”
CHAPTER 3
Celine lay tensely still in the velvet darkness, holding her breath as her trapped hand rubbed tantalizingly up and down against Edward’s hard chest. It was almost as if he was punishing her. She’d overdone it with the snoring, she knew that. And she’d had to slap him when he had started talking about…intimacy. She knew all too well that they had never been together. It had always seemed that for Edward, his work was his passion, the endless late nights with enormous ledgers, business meetings with members of the ton.
At first it had been a relief; a client, no a mark that didn’t demand the mechanical gifts of an experienced woman. But then, as Edward continued to ‘keep’ her in lodgings in Mayfair it had become unbearable. For Edward was a closed book, he gave away nothing. And in return Celine learnt nothing, nothing apart from the fact that she had helplessly become attached to the strangely buttoned up and elusive man. And she couldn’t even put a finger on why.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to pull her hand away, but Edward’s strong grasp tightened as she attempted to draw her arm through his. It was sheer torture, after all this time, where once she would have moved straight into a man’s embrace, now, now she held back, afraid of what she might do, so very afraid of the feelings it might unleash.
He whispered something into the pillow next to her which she couldn’t catch. Clenching her other hand she crammed it into her mouth, biting back the silent scream.
Edward had already gone by the time she woke the next morning. Celine forced her eyes open, her arm that Edward had held, heavy and aching. She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all. Shuffling to the edge of the lumpy, large bed, she dangled her legs over the edge and wiped at her eyes.
The edge of the door nudged against her foot as it opened.
“I’ve brought you some hot water.” Edward edged in around the pile of knives. His hair was set into the customary bowl cut, and despite the warmth of the cottage, he already wore the stiff scratchy brown jacket she knew he had taken off to get into bed. Turning his back to her, he bent stiffly and set the pitcher of steaming water at the foot of the bed, meticulously in the center of one of the floorboards.
He stood and stared at her. Celine shivered as his gaze took in the tip of her bare toe to the top of her unruly black locks of hair. Slowly his hand crept inside his coat and he grasped something before backing silently out of the door with measured steps.
Gingerly she crossed the bed and picked up her boots from the floor. She draped them across the mattress, the soles pointing upwards to prevent the dirt from rubbing against Robert’s sheets. Standing on the small amount of floor that she had made free, she picked up the cloth that Edward had left with the water and began to scrub.
Her face was the worst part. All the artfully applied kohl and rouge stained the cloth. She had to wring out the flannel five times before she managed to fully clean her face. Crouching down, she looked under the bed for the belt and bags she had discarded the night before. They had been kicked a short way underneath. Reaching out and picking them up, she shook the dust from the bags, and opened them, spilling their contents on the bed. A small pot of kohl, a mirror the size of a penny, and a brush fell out.
Slowly Celine traced the edge of her eye with the kohl until the blue of her irises stood out against her wan cheeks. Breathing heavily she did the same to the other eye. Powder, rouge, they were all in her bags. With them she could change from a maid, to a courtesan, to a well-bred lady.
Edward expected a courtesan, and that was what he was going to get until later that day. Pulling her boots on with economical movements, she hitched up her skirts and tied the belt and bags around her waist. Letting out the skirts again, she picked up the knives from the ground and pushed one into a boot, one into the hem of her dress and the last she deposited back in the bags with the rest of the makeup.
Downstairs, Gunvald and Silver already sat at the small kitchen table in the cottage front room, familiarly rubbing elbows with Robert and Edward.
They stared at her as she emerged into the sunlight that flooded through the open cottage door.
“How do you always look so…together?” Silver asked. Her brown hair had leaves in it.
“Probably ’cause she had a bed to sleep in, lass,” Robert rumbled. “Many’s a time I’ve laid up under a hollow in a tree and woken looking like a carriage has rolled over me. Always wished for me bed, but I was looking after a young lad see—”
Edward scraped his stool backwards and stood. “I’ve finished my breakfast,” he said brightly. “I’ll be waiting in the carriage for you all.”
And without a final glance he walked stiffly out of the front door.
“Well!” Celine strode forwards and took the stool Edward had vacated.
As she sat down at the table Gunvald gave her a level glance. “Pardon me for saying, Celine, but are you quite sure your man Edward is all he says he is?”
Gunvald paused to slap Robert on the back as he coughed. He picked up his plate and moved to the cottage hearth.
Selecting a knife and fork Celine pulled some bacon from the table onto a clean plate and started to eat. “What he is, Gunvald, is mine.”
Silver winked at her across the table. Celine pretended not to see.
“You didn’t have to come with me,” she said shortly. “I was going to come here, to the north alone.”
“Pithadora was alarmed for your safety. She asked me to go with you.” Gunvald’s face softened. “I would have come with you if you had asked. Silver and I,” he paused, “we tread in your footsteps.”
“Not just us, Gunvald, the others too.” Silver stared at her across the table.
Celine drew in a breath. “We all do what Pithadora asks us. After all, who—”
“—watches the watchers? Yes I know.” Silver sniffed. “But you are always at the sharp end of the action, brushing up against the dangerous elements. We merely support you.”
“And save me from my madcap schemes. But you won’t be able to do so on an empty stomach so eat up.” With flaming cheeks Celine finished speaking and pushed some more food into her mouth.
Their goodbye to Robert was brief. The large man pushed a basket into their hands ‘for the journey’, but all the time he looked over their shoulders to the carriage beyond.
Pulling back her skirts, Celine took the more ladylike approach to getting into the carriage and settled herself back onto the seat opposite Edward, folding her hands on her lap. Gunvald’s heavy steps up onto the coachman’s perch echoed loudly into the still carriage.
“I do hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Silver said brightly at the coach door, throwing in Big Bess and Silent Sally, as well as two other small pistols, and a long sword. “I’ve got something we can all do on the way down to London that will keep us occupied.”
Edward cleared his throat. “What kind of thing, err…Silver?”
“Cleaning these guns. Can’t help noticing Robert gave you a nice flintlock of your own to look after, Mr. Fiske, so you can add them to the pile and we’ll look them over too of course.”
Celine blinked and stared at Edward. Robert had given Edward, Edward who patently couldn’t do anything without measuring it up meticulously beforehand, a gun? “Perhaps you could give Mr. Fiske a short lesson in how to use it, Silver? It might help if he comes up against Mr. Khaffar again and he still doesn’t wa
nt to be rescued.”
She watched Edward as his chin came up. His face flamed. “Thank you, Celine.” His jaw was stiff, but he still managed the even tones she knew so well. Pulling out the flintlock from behind himself he held it by the barrel and peered down the hole. “Is this the way you are meant to hold it?”
“Oooooh no!”
Before Celine could reach out, Silver had grabbed the gun from Edward’s hands and pointed the barrel out of the window. “Good god, it’s already primed and ready to fire! Whatever was Robert thinking?”
“He did say that we needed some protection,” Edward’s tones were meek. “After you told him about Mr. Khaffar and his band of bloodthirsty men at the breakfast table in quite lurid detail he was most concerned that I should protect myself.”
“Why just you?” Celine narrowed her eyes.
Edward pulled his wrinkled breeches straight over his knees. “He said that everyone else could look after themselves, and that I was most in need of some protection.”
Silver snorted, but with one look from Celine, bent her head firmly back over Edward’s flintlock. “This is a very fine gun,” she murmured.
“It doesn’t matter whether it is a fine gun or not, Edward is a businessman, Silver, he’s never shot a gun in his life!” It was reprehensible that Robert had given him a gun without showing him how to use it.
“Perhaps you can teach me how to use it?” If Edward’s voice hadn’t been more deadpan and nasal than usual, Celine would nearly have missed the twinkle that came and went in an instant in his eyes. Good god. She’d never seen it before. Was he laughing at her? Was he laughing at all?
“I would like you to remember that you are the one who gave me my congé!” Celine whispered hoarsely, the tension constricting her throat.
“All he said was that he would like you to give him a lesson in how to use his gun, Celine,” Silver warned quietly.
“But…” How could she tell Silver that Edward had a twinkle in his eye? “But…”
Maddening Minx Page 3