A Lady of Expectations and Other Stories

by Stephanie Laurens

  After Eve’s defection he had gone abroad for several years—he had business concerns in India that had occupied him most successfully until the pleas of his estate managers had brought him back to England to face those responsibilities he had neglected. He had believed that he had put aside thoughts of Eva Night until he had come back to London and found himself searching for her face in a crowd or listening for news of her. He had learned that no one had heard of her since she had run away from him. It had been the on dit at the time but Eve was now long gone, her star extinguished, the brief time when they had been the glittering couple of the demimonde all but forgotten. Rowarth had tried to forget it, too, but every so often the memory of Eve would stab him like a wound that had not completely healed.

  Then Lord Hawkesbury’s letter had arrived out of the blue, asking for his help. Yes, he would go to Yorkshire and confront his beautiful, treacherous former mistress. Yes, he would ascertain if she were a member of a dangerous criminal fraternity, as Hawkesbury’s intelligence suggested. And in doing so he would prove once and for all that he was free of the hold she had once exerted over him.

  Criminal she might be. Beautifully, wantonly seductive she most certainly was. Eve’s face still had the vivid animation that Rowarth remembered: her creamy complexion was still dusted with amber freckles, her hair was still a fiery red, and the quick, expressive movements of her body were as ridiculously, dangerously appealing to him as ever. Not even her fearsomely respectable worsted gown and dark blue spencer could hide the lush curves of a figure he had known intimately and already ached to explore again in exquisite detail, unable to subdue the desires of his body even while he deplored her and the hold she still had over him.

  He had not expected to want her.

  He had thought those feelings dead and gone. They should have been—they should have been annihilated, destroyed by her betrayal. He was furious that they were not. Yet he was forced to acknowledge that when he had first seen Eve in the Market Square he had felt all the old emotions of desire and lust and longing as strong as they had ever been and searing in their intensity. He had been told himself then that the memories, the hold she had had over his senses, would never be permitted to cloud his judgment. That resolution had lasted all of five seconds. He had seen her and he had wanted her with a hunger all the more acute for the years of denial.

  But his business with Eve was precisely that—business. He was here on Hawkesbury’s behalf to ascertain her connection to Warren Sampson and to use her, coldly, ruthlessly, to get to Sampson so that the man could finally be arrested. That was his goal, no more, no less.

  “I strongly suggest,” he said, “that you do as I ask.”

  For a moment Eve stared at him, those glorious lavender eyes wide and blank and he wondered if she had even heard him. Then an expression of fury came across her face.

  “You bastard!” she said, picking up a very fine silver hairbrush from the desk in front of her and throwing it at his head. “How dare you come here and threaten to take away from me everything that I have worked so hard for?”

  Rowarth caught the hairbrush absentmindedly in one hand before it made contact. He had always been good at cricket. Eve was looking absolutely furious, her piquant face flushed and her breathing quick and light. But it was more than anger he could see in her face. It was desperation. There was so much passion and rage in her voice that for a moment the principal emotion he felt was admiration that she was as strong as a tigress in defending the things that mattered to her. Memory stirred again; when she had been his mistress he had given her money and had been puzzled when she appeared to have spent it all on nothing. When pressed it had turned out that she had given it all away to feed and clothe urchins living on the streets. Rowarth had protested at her generosity and Eve had turned on him, saying that he was spoiled and privileged and could not understand—all true, of course, for how could an Eton-and Oxford-educated duke ever understand what it was like to struggle to survive? Most dukes would not even care. They had argued passionately and then made love even more passionately and she had lain in his arms and at last confided the truth in him.

  “I did not know my parents,” she had said, her head against his shoulder, her hand resting over his heart, “and I was cold and hungry and afraid more times than I care to remember.” There had been a faraway look in her eyes, as though she were seeing far beyond the walls of her bedchamber. “If I can spare even one child from suffering as I did then that has to be for the good.”

  Rowarth had felt humbled, made to look beyond the comfort that had shielded him since his youth to another more painful existence. He knew that Eve had chosen to become a courtesan only because she had seen it as a way out of such stark poverty.

  “I was pretty,” she had once said lightly, “so I used it to escape.” But he knew those words hid a wealth of bitterness.

  “It is only the rich who can afford moral scruples,” she had once flashed at him when he had commented on the hanging of a youth for the theft of a loaf of bread and he knew that she had felt the same way about the choice she had made in selling herself.

  Or he had thought he had known her until she had betrayed him.

  But that was in the past and nothing to the purpose now.

  He put the silver hairbrush on the desk. He suspected it was part of a quantity of stolen goods that Hawkesbury had said Warren Sampson was almost certainly laundering via Eve’s pawnbroking business. Which brought him back to the matter in hand.

  “You are working with Warren Sampson to pass on stolen goods,” he said. “He runs a housebreaking gang that robs property across the county and then his accomplices bring the items here and you sell them, making him a double profit.”

  She stared at him contemptuously. “That is utter rubbish.” She turned away from him with an angry swish of skirts and took a couple of paces away across the room. She could not get any farther away from him because the office was so small and he could sense the anger in her, still simmering like a pot coming back to the boil.

  “I barely know the man,” she snapped. “And what I do know I dislike intensely. It is both insulting and plain wrong to suggest some criminal conspiracy between us.”

  Hawkesbury had suggested that Eve might be Warren Sampson’s mistress, a cozy arrangement if they were in bed and business together. And Rowarth was not simply going to accept her word that it was not so. Just the thought of her tumbling between the sheets with Sampson made him hot with rage and thwarted desire. Madness, when he had sworn he did not care and did not want to want her.

  “Shall we sit,” he suggested evenly, “and discuss this calmly?”

  She gave him another look of searing disdain. “If we must. If it will hasten your departure.”

  He bit back a reluctant smile. Never had a woman seemed so anxious to be rid of him. But then, Eve had always been different.

  “I shall want to see your accounts in due course,” he said. “I need to trace every one of your transactions.”

  “How tedious for you,” Eve murmured.

  “I suppose that they are in order?”

  “Of course not.” Eve glanced at the tottering plies of paper on the desk and the floor. “You may have taught me to read and to compute mathematical sums, Rowarth, but you could not make me like it.”

  The memory touched him on the raw. It was true that she had been illiterate before he had taught her. There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he thought of the sweetness of those lessons and the gifts he had brought her, the books she had painstakingly learned to read, the columns of figures she had haltingly added up while he had joked that at least that way she would know how much money she was giving away to the poor. He slammed the door on such memories. Evidently she had moved on and was able to calculate Sampson’s wealth very accurately and certainly well enough to profit by it.

  “It was not the only thing that I taught you,” he said harshly. “You may have been a courtesan but you were not a tutored one.”
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  Color lit her cheeks at his reference to the fact that she had been a virgin when he had taken her to his bed.

  “I do not recall you having any complaints,” she snapped.

  He had not. It had been blissful. He recalled the sweetness of Eve’s lissome body stretched beneath his hands and the pure physical compatibility that they had achieved. And then he thought of her running from him.

  “Such debate gets us nowhere,” he said harshly. “Now, tell me the truth about Warren Sampson this time.” He met her eyes directly. “Was he the man you left me for? Are you his mistress?”

  “I do not believe that you have been hearing me,” Eve said wearily. She felt sick to her soul that Rowarth, who had once loved her, should now hold her in nothing but contempt. “For the last time, Rowarth,” she said, “I barely know Warren Sampson. I am neither his mistress nor his business partner, nor,” she added with emphasis, “his associate in any way.”

  Disquiet stirred in her. It was true that for the past couple of months she had been aware of some very valuable goods passing through the pawnshop. The silver hairbrush was one such item and there had also been some silver plates and a couple of gold snuffboxes. A rather dissolute young man whom Eve had recognized as Tom Fortune, younger brother to the squire, had brought the pieces in. The workmanship on them had been superb and Eve had given him a good price for them. She had asked no questions at the time for she was well aware that people were very sensitive about bringing in property to pawn for money and one of the reasons her clientele liked her was because she was so discreet and kept their secrets. And yet she had not been comfortable about the transaction. A sixth sense had told her that something was wrong even as she had tried to persuade herself that Tom Fortune was probably only selling off the family silver to pay his gambling debts.

  Her disquiet turned to foreboding. Could Hawkesbury be correct, not in his suspicions of her, but in the fact that Warren Sampson might be using her shop to launder stolen goods? Sampson was a deeply unpleasant man, grotesquely, ridiculously wealthy with a fortune that had been made in the mills of Leeds and Bradford. On more than one occasion Eve had caught him looking at her with speculation and lust in his eyes and she had shuddered to imagine that he might know her secrets, her background, her past. What Warren Sampson might do with such knowledge was terrifying. But he had said nothing and had always treated her with outward respect, and Eve had told herself that she was imagining things. Nevertheless, he always made her skin crawl.

  Rumor, which swirled around Fortune’s Folly like the current of the River Tune, said that Sampson had added to his money through various criminal activities but nothing had ever been proven. Now it seemed that Hawkesbury was set on finding that proof and that Rowarth would use her in any way possible to bring Sampson down.

  Eve shuddered. She knew that if Rowarth had Hawkesbury’s authority he could enforce whatever he wished and if Hawkesbury believed her guilty of criminal activity then she had no hope. Suddenly she felt so tired, so vulnerable to this man and to the insidious appeal that he still had for her and so miserable that he had nothing but disdain for her now. It appalled and distressed her that he had accepted Lord Hawkesbury’s commission to bring her down.

  But such regrets would not save her. With a sigh, she gestured Rowarth to a seat on one of the rather rickety wooden chairs at the side of her desk. Accounts and correspondence spilled from the table onto the floor. She gave vent to her feelings by giving the papers a violent shove so that the ones still on the desk cascaded onto the floor.

  Realizing that Rowarth was waiting, with impeccable manners, for her to sit first, she pushed some books aside and took a chair. He immediately sat down opposite her. His presence seemed to fill the space between them, powerful, authoritative. The room suddenly seemed too small, cramped and close, and it was nothing to do with the piles of goods that were stored in there. It was simply that Alasdair Rowarth had always been the most overwhelming man that Eve had ever met and she felt angry that he could still affect her in such a profound way.

  To cover her nervousness she tilted up her chin and subjected him to a stern appraisal.

  “You cannot have any evidence at all to back up these ridiculous accusations,” she said. “They are absolutely untrue.”

  Rowarth inclined his head. His hair, glossy and thick, shone in a ray of sunlight that penetrated the dusty window. He looked self-assured, Eve thought, with all the confidence that privilege and position could bring. It only served to make her feel all the more vulnerable.

  “The Home Secretary’s agents have had your shop under observation for several months,” he said. “They know that you are fencing stolen goods.” He picked up the silver hairbrush again and looked thoughtfully at it. “I am sure you are aware there have been a number of robberies locally.”

  “No,” Eve said. Her immediate instinct was to protect herself and Joan and all she had worked to build up. But she could see as soon as the words left her mouth that Rowarth did not believe her. His gaze rested on her face with the perceptive intensity that she remembered. She blushed and saw the corner of his mouth lift in a smile, as though she had just confirmed her guilt. She could have kicked herself.

  “If stolen goods are being passed through this shop it is entirely without my knowledge,” she temporized.

  Rowarth held her gaze, his own implacable. Eve shivered to see the coldness there where once there had been nothing but heat and sweetness for her.

  “That does not make you innocent,” Rowarth said.

  “It makes me a victim of Sampson’s criminality,” Eve said sharply, “not an accomplice.”

  Rowarth raised his brows in blatant disbelief but he did not challenge her immediately. Instead he picked up a monograph of some very naughty erotic drawings that Eve had failed to notice was lying on the desk. As he flicked through the pictures Eve started to feel unconscionably heated, her mind conjuring up visions of the past, of her body locked with Rowarth’s in the most intimate and sensual of embraces, his mouth hot against the bare skin of her inner thigh, her cries of need as his tongue flicked her tender core, the bliss as he took her, pushing her to the extremes of pleasure…

  She tried to steady her breathing. Her pulse was fluttering like a trapped butterfly. Her skin tingled and she felt light-headed. She fanned herself surreptitiously, watching as Rowarth assessed the saucy sketches, brows slightly raised, a faint smile still on his lips. Her fingers were itching to snatch the book away from him and put an end to her embarrassment. And then he looked up and the turbulent desire in his eyes flared strong and elemental, and Eve felt the need knot in her stomach and almost gasped aloud.

  “What an interesting variety of items you must take in here,” Rowarth said, a rough undertone to his voice. He shifted, clearing his throat. “These, I would guess, are the property of Mr. Tom Fortune. I hear he has an extensive library of such books.”

  “I never divulge details about my clients,” Eve snapped. She pulled herself back from the brink of sensual awareness. If Rowarth could exercise such control against the ghosts of the past then so could she.

  Rowarth’s gaze had moved on to a rather fine ruby bracelet that was nestling in a cut glass bowl.

  “That is pretty.”

  “It’s made of paste,” Eve said quickly and untruthfully. The bracelet was not in fact a fake, but Eve was desperately hoping that the Dowager Duchess of Cole, who had brought it in, would find the funds to buy it back. She had seen the look of despair on Laura Cole’s face when she had pawned her jewelry and had guessed that it was of great sentimental value. She had given the Dowager Duchess a very generous sum for she knew that Laura Cole and her little daughter were poverty-stricken.

  Rowarth permitted the rubies to slide through his fingers before looking up at her. “You seem reluctant to sell.”

  “I was not aware that you were buying,” Eve said. “I thought you were here to threaten me instead.”

  “Touché.” He smiled at her
suddenly. It was devastating. “You fight damned hard, Eve.”

  “I always did.”

  “I know.”

  For one short, achingly fragile moment their eyes met and held and Eve’s heart tumbled to see the tenderness in his, and then it was gone, swept aside by a coldness so bitter that she felt shrivelled and frozen. Rowarth broke the contact, stretching in his chair, muscles rippling beneath the blue superfine of his coat. “Hawkesbury’s intelligence is that you are extremely liberal in the sums you offer to clients, sometimes giving far more than an item is worth,” he said. His voice had chilled, too. “Apparently if you know a client is attached to a particular item you will keep it safe for them to reclaim when they can afford it, rather than sell it. If you know some of your clients are pawning their last stick of furniture in order to buy gin to drink themselves into a stupor, you will try to persuade them off the bottle.”

  “And your point?” Eve asked tartly. “I thought that you were the prosecution not the defense.”

  “My point,” Rowarth said with an edge to his voice, “is that such generosity would make you vulnerable to blackmail. You do not have the skill to make your business profitable by legitimate means and so it seems you have resorted to illegitimate ones in order to keep afloat. Perhaps Sampson was able to blackmail you into his bed and his business because of your poverty?”