“A third body has turned up.”
Damn it. “I suspected as much, from your note.”
Knew with utter certainty, you mean.
But hearing it confirmed proved worse than suspicion. Fact gripped his innards in a vise and threatened to squeeze the humanity right out of him. Fact made him want to turn savage, to rail against a world where innocents could lose everything—and in the most vile ways imaginable. “Who? Where?”
When?
One of their regular “ladies”—a bird of the game, a strumpet, a flash girl, a whore…a harlot (though he tried to dissuade use of these latter two)—“employed” by The Den had been missing for a handful of days. He cringed at the very thought of seeing the young mother as the other two had been. Shredded. Hardly recognizable.
But he had to ask. “Diane?”
“No, thank God. This one had hair much blonder than hers. Wavy too.” When they both knew Diane bemoaned her straight-as-sin dark locks. “And that’s about all I can tell you. I can’t believe this has happened again.” Adam swore, colorfully and loudly, drawing the attention of more than one busy groom.
“Mind your voice,” Blakely said quietly.
“Forgive me.” Adam pressed the base of both palms into his eye sockets and spoke through gritted teeth. “I just cannot rid myself of the sight. No matter that the streets here are dark as the inside of a wild boar’s hairy arse, I still saw way more than I ever needed to. It’s imprinted on my brain.” For a second, it sounded as though his friend were gargling glass as a shudder trembled through his frame. “And, oh God, the smell…”
The flies were already bad enough this summer. After what they’d both helped clean up three weeks ago, Blakely knew whatever Adam experienced this night was more than many could handle.
Adam lowered his hands and gave his head a quick shake. “Never you mind. You don’t need the details. I know you’ve already seen enough yourself.”
And he had. For it had been Blakely who had stumbled across the second body to be found in the general vicinity of his club. Blakely who’d uncharacteristically struggled with a combination of panic and uncertainty upon discovering the gruesome sight without warning…
Thinking instead his nose was simply leading him to an abandoned sack of discarded kittens, a spilt butcher’s cart or some lazy gadabout’s weekly refuse. Not realizing until he turned that last corner, curious, wishing he was enough of a dandy to carry a handkerchief at all times so he could have attempted to blot the stench…
Wasn’t until seeing another form—bent over the prone one on the ground, tucked away in a begrimed alley, doing unspeakable things—that he’d been faced with the true depths humanity could sink to. Not even the tragic circumstances surrounding the appalling, impossible death of his father had affected him so.
He turned to the wall now, braced his hand on the rough plank, and cough-retched, but nothing came up. Pure anger at the monster responsible and absolute conviction that he’d do all he could to stop the madness settled the nausea, thank goodness.
Business still needed tended to, sickening circumstances aside. “Unknown to us or not, she still needs—”
“Already done, E,” Adam interrupted, using the casual abbreviation of his given name they’d finally agreed upon—after the chucklehead kept calling him Fitzwilliam for some asinine reason. “By the time I arrived, there was enough muscle to move her—what was left of her.” Adam swore again. “I brought a blanket. Someone else had a cart. Just like last time, I paid a couple men to start digging. Woke your preacher man to say a few words over her once they were done.”
After news of the first unclaimed, unrecognizable body had reached his awareness, before the attack and death that occurred not far from the club, Blakely had purchased a small plot of land near a parish cemetery, but not officially part of it. He’d then greased the open palm of the man of the cloth sufficiently to ensure a simple burial, doing what little he could and hoping it would be the last. Hoping in vain, as it appeared.
A couple stalls over, several stable boys started up some rollicking, ribald tune.
“Drunk off their arses,” Blakely remarked, seeing the two bottles they’d passed around in the last few minutes, only fractionally envious.
When was the last time he drank to excess? Had he ever? Or even considered loosening the tight stranglehold he forced on himself long enough to sing like an idiot?
Adam slapped the wall with such force that it groaned. Then he did it again, twice, before halting and catching Blakely’s gaze. “My apologies for interrupting your evening out. I—”
“Nay. No regrets.” Blakely took hold of Adam’s wrist and gave a squeeze. “You did exactly the right thing.”
Blakely released him when the muscles relaxed, Adam fisting what must be a stinging palm, but not abusing the blameless wood further.
“The investigator?” he queried, seeking to distract his friend. The one they were looking to hire.
“I’ll have a report on that and the other information we discussed tomorrow night.”
“Very well. Give me but a moment. I shall make my excuses and accompany you—”
Nay! You escorted Francine and her chatty relatives—
Blakely swallowed his words and started over. “I will direct my coachman to wait for Lady Francine and family, and return with you.”
“No.” After outwardly expressing his grief, Adam had crumpled against the wall. It seemed to be the only thing holding his friend up at the moment, despite the steady conviction conveyed in his tone. “It’s unnecessary, E. I rode. The moon’s bright enough, and after what I saw, it helped clear… I couldn’t stomach the thought of walking. Not through London. Not at night.
“Even if I do feel twice as big as most of these city pipsqueaks, I don’t want a damn pickpocket plying his trade anywhere near my person. Nor anything more sinister.”
Pipsqueak? Blakely allowed himself a small smile at Adam and his peculiar turns of phrases, ones he’d learned long ago to stop asking about.
“I need to ride,” his friend was saying, “before I turn in for the night and don’t mind being by myself for a while.”
During the last couple of sentences, Adam’s demeanor underwent a bit of a change, as he shifted, lounging a bit more comfortably—as much as one could against a splintering plank wall. He brightened. “Lady Francine. That reminds me—what’s this I heard tonight at the club—you’ve offered for someone?”
The bawdy song to their right got louder. Lewder.
Blakely was tempted to join in—anything to avoid discussing his arrangement with Lady Francine Montfort.
“When were you going to tell me of this, pray tell?” Adam clipped out the words, echoing the speech patterns of an upper-crust British gent in an accurate imitation of most of their patrons. “I am aghast with insatiable curiosity, my lord.”
“And when you go all mocking and ‘my lording’, dear sir,” Blakely said, his customary polish back in place, while employing every bit of sarcasm his friend had—if not more. “I am rather tempted to plant you a facer.”
Adam guffawed. Straightened from his lounging position against the wall and tipped his—invisible—hat, a thoroughly mocking motion. “I daresay, milord, I should very well like to see you try.”
Bugger the insolent man. They might be near the same height, with Blakely topping his friend by a scant inch or two but the sheer breadth of Adam’s chest, the muscular arms that needed custom-tailored shirts along with extra fabric, meant that any true fight between them would come out a near tie. Had they not proved that the night they’d met?
Blakely was still smiling grimly as he made his way back inside, found the room reserved for tending to one’s personal business of a private nature, and attempted to wash off the nauseating hum of the stables and sordid secrets. Of mews and murder.
Tried to shake off the dark horror of the night and replace it instead with the fresh innocence beckoning to him from a delicate conundrum
of forthright honesty and perplexing stubbornness.
Needed to banish the images conjured in the last few minutes with the untainted passion and clean, sultry taste of his affianced.
The stark contrast of where his mind, and his nose, had just been and what—whom—he now focused on did not escape him. Light versus shadows. Sunshine versus stables. Sweetness versus stench.
Life.
Versus death.
The most basic of differences. Only Francine, each time she’d crossed his mind today, represented so much more than simple daylight or sunshine.
Hope circled round those spiral ringlets, errant thoughts of her ever since last eve prodding his spirits upward, lifting his heels… Somehow making the burdens he carried seem not quite so cumbersome. Made him start to dream.
And that would never do.
Not if he was going to keep the beast locked tightly away, shoved deep, wedged into a box in the far reaches of his being, with the lid bolted tight. “Damn distraction, is what she is.”
And after what he’d just learned?
She was all he wanted to think of.
Rather than ask her aunt or the unpleasantly impatient Patience—both of whom he nodded to, then moved swiftly on, before they or anyone could waylay him—Blakely made his way back to the refreshment tables where he’d been handed the blighted note. Took a deliberate, hearty inhale all the way into his lungs… And let his nose lead him where he wanted to go.
You’re going to defile her if you don’t take care.
He ignored the scold.
The garden last night, her exuberant, uninhibited response—even when he was purposefully approaching his lascivious worst—had to have been an aberration. No prim little miss of the ton—a duke’s daughter, no less—could be as innocently wanton as he recalled.
As untutored yet ardent.
Just how far are you intending to corrupt her?
However far she’d let him.
“Franny!”
Her name was a veritable shriek.
Francine looked up and blinked, having removed her spectacles to rest her eyes as well as her brain so the whirlwind that circled closer was nothing more than a whimsical blur.
“I mean, Francine!” This time, a happy shriek, as her cousin rushed forward and pulled her up for a tight hug. “Oh, dearest, you heard all of that, did you not?”
Temperance released her only to plop down on the settee and tug Francine down beside her. “Or at least enough to realize the truth?”
The spontaneous hug had quite taken her aback. For it felt lovely. “Several truths, if I am not mistaken.”
“Oh, Francine—and forgive me, it may take a short while for me to stop with the detestable ‘Franny’. I never, never wanted to hurt you. Have been counting the days until ghastly Patience’s nuptials and going-away afterward will render her wretched self gone from the house so I may confide in you once again!”
“Temperance?” Francine retrieved her hands and fumbled with her spectacles, sliding them over her ears and up her nose to see the welcome sight of her dear cousin, all blonde, ethereal hair—with the slightest tinge of red—and pale green eyes exuberantly beaming at her, the tepid muslin gown of pastel pink not doing a thing to subdue the vivaciousness the younger woman exuded. “Tempest?”
“I know! I know. My sister has been so very jealous of you. Fiendishly obsessed with it, if truth be known. Threatened constantly to steal jewelry or some such nonsense from Mother and place it among your possessions, trying to see you ousted from our home. I could not bear to see that happen through nought more than her odious selfishness. Especially not when you were so distraught over your parents—and so very young.”
Francine had to stifle the absurd laugh that threatened to bubble forth—she might have been a mere sixteen when she came to live with her aunt, but dear Temperance had not yet turned twelve.
Her cousin leaned in close as though offering the utmost of clandestine confidences. “Lest we forget, we both know what happens to young ladies cast out without any financial or familial wherewithal. I could not be the instrument of your ruin.”
In her youth, Temperance must not have realized how they could have simply gone to her new stepfather—or mayhap, she didn’t know him or his character sufficiently at that point. But so easily they could have sought his counsel and rendered Patience’s outlandish threats ineffective. There was no conceivable way her aunt would have cast her out, not given Francine’s standing as the daughter of a duke, nor given the funds ultimately involved, but perhaps neither did Tempest know where her dowry monies came from, that so much of what she and her family now enjoyed had been funded through Francine’s inheritance, the portions her father’s will had left to his sister, on behalf of her own children.
Now that the thought flitted across her mind… How was it Uncle Rowden hadn’t maintained management over the money? Most likely, her aunt had not remarried when her father’s will was drawn up. Certainly, her father had no notion that his sister, once married to a vicar, had since turned to gaming and the like.
None of those points mattered now, not when Temperance’s animated, bright presence proved such an unexpected and joyous balm.
“As I matured and started to rebel against her, anytime I emulated you or even so much as mentioned you in conversation, she renewed her threats, adding to them in ways that do not bear repeating. I was always concerned that Mother was just self-centered enough to believe her claims. Can you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?”
“Of course.” Francine swallowed the emotion knotting her throat. “Have you any idea the relief I now feel? At being able to converse with you as we did in the beginning? On equal footing once again.” Which was the absolute truth. But neither was she about to reverse years of learned self-sufficiency upon the strength of one conversation or one night. Time—and her cousin’s actions henceforth—would demonstrate the veracity of the claims.
Tempest squeezed her forearm. “I have missed you so. You have no inkling how very difficult it has been, to pattern myself off her, to call you Franny—a thousand apologies on that—so she would never suspect a thing.”
Francine grinned. “I confess, if I never hear that name again, it will be too soon. Really, cousin, you belong on the stage. All this time—feigning?”
Temperance giggled, sounding for the first time tonight her younger age. “I know! Playing the pudding-head can be thumping fun, I admit. ’Twould serve Mother right if I did walk the stage. I vow, after her betrayal—did you hear that part? Trying to gamble me? As though I were nought more than one of her handwritten vowels?”
“I did. Forgive—”
“Nay! I am so thankful you know. Really, ’tis a monstrous weight lifted.” Temperance circled her eyes skyward. “I cannot believe I was so naïve as to think things might improve once Patience became engaged, especially before you. She always considers everything such a competition.”
“A competition? With me?”
“Constantly! You do know that was why she took such an instant dislike to you? She thinks she has been found wanting since the moment you moved in. ’Twas not long after you came to live with us, while you were still very much grieving…emotionally if not visually. We had gone out walking, shopping more likely, the four of us, and I overheard more than one of our acquaintances remark to Mother how very much you and I looked alike, as though we were the sisters, and Patience the extended relation. That put her nose out of joint unlike anything I have seen before or since.”
Tempest chuckled. “Not that her nose has ever appeared as though it were quite in joint, as it were, but still, she took strong aversion to hearing compliments about you and I from that moment onward.” She sobered and leaned in. “She is every bit as wretched as Mother, and I have felt so very alone, pretending for all these years to find you as unpalatable as they. I swear, that has never, never been the case. I have been vastly relieved—in alt!—over your own engagement. And to Lord Blakely, no less!
Knowing that you have found someone for yourself has been utterly divine.”
Not ready to discuss her Lord Blakely, not with everything still so very new between them, Francine instead proposed, “Let us make a fresh start, shall we? However you need to maintain peace between your sister and mother, please do so, and with my blessing. Inconsiderate family members or not, they are still yours, and I would never take them away from you. And what is all this—please forgive me, but aye, I confess to raptly listening once I recognized your voice—have you and Lord Wylde now broken things off?”
“We have.” Temperance sighed, as though already regretting her decision, but when she spoke, her voice held conviction. “Lord Wylde is such a dear. He even agreed that we will wait and make the announcement after Patience’s wedding. If I do anything to take the attention from her before the ceremony, we both know she would find something else to bemoan or become vindictive over—you should have heard her vicious complaining after Lord Blakely’s visit this afternoon. ‘How Franny rated a marquis when I am younger than she is! It’s not fair!’ I was quite tempted to thump her in the bone box, but refrained.”
Of a sudden, she stopped speaking, aimed her eyes toward the ceiling, deep in thought. “Hmmm.” Her gaze returned. “Could I be forgiven for wondering just what Mother lost—or perhaps won—in order to get Lord Hansen to take Patience off our hands?” They both shared a stifled giggle over that. “Amusement aside, I need time to consider what treachery I have learned about Mother tonight, and how best to go on.”
“Speak to your stepfather, mayhap?”
“That is something to consider, certainly. But I do not want to rush anything. Ergo, Lord Wylde and I agreed to maintain the farce until after Patience’s marriage is accomplished, and then I shall act the shrew in public, before soundly slapping his face or some such scandalous nonsense, and bidding him adieu. Hopefully, if I appear distasteful enough, that may help preserve whatever reputation he may still lay claim to. Restore or at least prevent further damage.”
“That is remarkably magnanimous of him—permitting a second jilt when the first was so very public. He—”
Ensnared by Innocence: Steamy Regency Shapeshifter Page 11