The man was heavy and limp as a sack of stones. For a moment, as his fingers tightened in it, Neil feared that the cloth he was grasping would not be up to the task. But the superfine breeches held. For an instant longer he dangled Rosen by them and the slippery satin collar of his coat, carefully positioning him, and then—not without some satisfaction—he let go.
Fortunate for you we’re just one story up, Neil thought as Rosen crashed into the welcoming arms of a stately privet. The prickly branches swallowed him up, all but hiding him from view. Only the faintest gleam of white from Rosen’s breeches pinpointed him in the bush.
There was a distant click as the door to the library opened. The sound was unmistakable. Behind him, the lady jumped like a scalded cat.
Neil whipped around instinctively just as she stumbled into him with all the force of a recoiling cannon. The resulting collision almost sent them both over the rail. Had he not had the sharply honed reflexes of a man who was constantly one unhappy surprise away from his own end, he would not have been sure-footed enough to stave off disaster.
“Easy.”
He grabbed her shoulders, steadying them both, but she wasn’t even paying attention. Her back was to him, and her gaze was fixed fearfully on the crimson velvet wall of the once-again-closed curtains. She was rigid as buckram now. Beyond the curtains, someone was speaking.
“I thought you said my son was in here.” The voice sounded like it belonged to an older woman. It was cold, imperious.
“I am sorry, Lady Rosen. Lord Rosen must have left without my seeing him.” The other speaker was male, and clearly a servant.
“Was Lady Elizabeth with him?”
“I really couldn’t say, ma’am.”
“Hmmph.” Cloth rustled and heels tapped sharply on the parquet floor as Lady Rosen marched out. Softer footsteps marked the servant’s exit. With a gentle whoosh and a barely audible click, the door once again closed.
“I take it that you are Lady Elizabeth?” Neil murmured inquiringly into the closer of her ears. Her shoulders were slim and supple beneath his hands. They felt good beneath his palms, warm and rounded. Her skin was pale enough to glow faintly in the light of the barely there sliver of moon that was, at that moment, peeping out from behind a gathering tower of silver-limned black clouds.
The smell of rain was in the air. So, closer at hand, was the tantalizingly faint scent of lavender.
Although he faced a night spent moving around in the open, Neil knew which he found more disturbing.
She nodded, then glanced at him over her shoulder. The brisk breeze caught her hair, sending a strand of it fluttering against his mouth. It, too, had the texture of silk. “That was William’s mother.”
“So I gathered.”
“She’s looking for him. And me. Oh, I must get out of here.”
She pulled free of his hands and whisked around to face him.
“Can you lower me down?” she asked urgently, moving to the rail and looking over. The view encompassed the narrow, lushly landscaped side yard, which was screened from the street by an iron fence and a tall hedge, and the high brick wall of the mansion next door. As he happened to know from his earlier reconnaissance of the area, it was presently empty, its owner having apparently chosen to remain in the country this Season. Its windows were dark and shuttered, and its shelter provided the strip of ground beneath with almost total privacy.
“I have a better idea.” His hands dropped to his sides, although he was ready to swear he could still feel the heat of her skin on his palms. “I’ll get down myself, and then you jump and I’ll catch you.”
She cast a hunted glance over her shoulder. “Fine. Just hurry.”
Vaulting the rail required little effort. Neil dropped lithely to the ground, managing to avoid, with the ease of long practice, both the bush that had cushioned Rosen and the gravel of the walk leading toward the back of the house. He landed on the balls of his feet on soft grass, found his balance, then turned and looked up to find that the intrepid Lady Elizabeth, gleaming ball gown and all, was already clambering over the rail.
“Bother,” she muttered as her skirt got caught.
Neil finally succumbed to that lurking, unaccustomed smile as he was treated to a view of slim, shapely calves sheathed in the finest white silk stockings, blue garters tied around flashing pale thighs, and the sweet curves of a round little derriere that was enticing enough to make his loins ache. Then, as she jerked at it and muttered another imprecation, the skirt came free and quickly dropped to cover most of what had interested him. Although her ankles—delicate, fine-boned ankles—and the lower part of those delectable calves were still on display, courtesy of his vantage point beneath her.
It was only when he glanced farther up, toward her face, that he realized the best had been yet to come. The exigencies of holding on to the rail apparently required the use of both her hands. Which meant that the beautiful full globes of her breasts were totally bared. Bathed in moonlight, they were perfect opalescent teardrops that rose and fell enticingly with her every breath.
He was, after all, human. And male. His body stirred sharply and painfully. He swallowed, and stared.
“Close your eyes,” she hissed, scowling down at him. She was on the wrong side of the railing, clinging like a cat in the precise place where he had gone over, the one place where it was easiest to avoid both bush and gravel, her toes balanced precariously on the tiny sliver of stone on the outside of the iron bars.
“Drop. I’ll catch you.” Recovering his focus with an effort, Neil became aware that he was still smiling a little even as he positioned himself beneath her.
“I said, close your eyes.”
“If I close my eyes, I might miss.” His tone was reasonable. He held up his arms for her, prepared to spend the next few minutes persuading her that she could safely drop into them.
Apparently, she harbored no such doubts.
“Cawker,” she said severely, and dropped, plummeting like a small golden bird shot out of the sky. She fell into his arms in a rustle of silk and a swirl of red curls, surprisingly heavy for so small a package. His arms closed around her automatically even as he took a step back for balance. For a moment she simply lay there, cradled like a babe in his arms, blinking at him and looking slightly stunned while she recovered her presence of mind and he once again inhaled lavender and treated himself to the view.
Her breasts were soft round globes still jiggling with the aftermath of her landing. Her skin was creamy perfection. In the moonlight, the circles around her nipples were simply dark, and the nipples themselves darker still. His response was instinctive, atavistic. His body hardened to granite; his breath caught; his pulse speeded up.
It took every ounce of self-control he possessed not to lower his mouth to taste one of those small, jutting buds.
Fortunately, he possessed a great deal of self-control.
“You may put me down now.” She recovered faster than he did, once more snapping her arms closed over those delectable breasts, glaring at him with well-founded suspicion written all over her face.
“You’re welcome.” There was irony in his tone as he set her on her feet, knowing that it was folly to do anything else, however tempting the possibilities might be. She’d roused him to lust, but there were plenty of other women available to slake it if he chose. In any case, big-eyed innocents such as she had never been his style.
“Oh—thank you,” she said belatedly as she swept her bright hair back from her face with a quick toss of her head. “I really am very grateful for your help.” Her arms remained tightly clamped over her bosom; a worried frown marred her brow as she glanced toward the shadowy garden at the back of the house. “If you will come around tomorrow—no, wait, you can’t very well call on me under the circumstances, can you? Very well, then. I always walk in Green Park around ten in the morning. If you’ll meet me there at, say, the Folly at ten minutes past, I’ll have your money for you.”
She was pr
actically bouncing on her toes, glancing nervously around, clearly eager to be gone. Neil felt a small pang of regret as he realized that this amusing flicker of warmth that had so unexpectedly appeared in his otherwise cold and disciplined existence was getting ready to go out, and succumbed to temptation for the first time in years.
“I prefer to collect my payment immediately.”
Without waiting for her response, he caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. Even as her eyes widened, he bent his head and touched his mouth to hers. Her lips were warm and soft, slightly moist and parted with surprise. The kiss was a nothing, a mere sampling of the charms he regretted not being able to thoroughly explore, but she jerked her head back and jumped away from him as if burned.
“You cad.” Her voice quivered with outrage. Her eyes shot sparks at him. “How dare you?”
“Payment in full.” He bowed slightly, already regretting what he had done. “Now, if you’ll provide me with your erstwhile beau’s direction . . . ”
Her face was easy to read, even by moonlight. It was clear that indignation at him was struggling with the pragmatic need to get the situation quickly resolved. Pragmatism won out.
“He lives at 29 Beecham Street.” With that, and another searing glare meant to wither him, she was gone, darting away toward the dark garden at the back of the house. Neil watched her until the shadows swallowed up even the golden gleam of her gown, and then, deliberately shrugging off a ridiculous sensation of loss, he turned his attention back to Rosen.
He must have hit him harder than he’d thought, because the man was still out. Neil fished him out of the prickly privet—not without difficulty, because he had an aversion to staining his linen, which due to the circumstances was in perilously short supply—and rolled him onto the ground. Then, in the interests of both providing a cover story to explain Rosen’s battered state and maintaining his own solvency, he swiftly went through the man’s pockets. The pocket watch and snuffbox were of no interest to him, although he took them anyway to make it appear that Rosen had been robbed, but the thick wad of the ready Rosen was sporting was enough to keep him in relative comfort for a number of days. As he pocketed the notes with pleasure, Rosen’s eyes flickered and he murmured something incomprehensible through slack lips.
Not without some satisfaction, Neil hit him again.
And that’s for pretty Lady Elizabeth, he thought.
After that, it was short work to hoist the man to his feet, support him so that he looked drunk, with an arm draped limply around Neil’s shoulder and Neil’s hand hooked in the waistband of his breeches, and drag him away from the house. By putting himself to so much trouble he was, he reckoned, even more of a fool than he’d already proved himself to be by allowing the winsome Lady Elizabeth to live. An unwritten rule of his existence was that he never helped anyone but himself, but somehow or another she’d tapped into a vein of chivalry that he’d thought had bled out long since, and here he was: cleaning up a mess that was none of his making.
His mouth twisted ruefully at the thought even as he tightened his grip on Rosen, who, deadweight, was heavy as a man-sized chunk of lead.
The easiest thing to do would be to simply kill the man and have done.
Even as the thought slid through his mind, it was followed by another.
The lady would undoubtedly object.
Neil realized that it was the first time in a long, long while that he had considered someone else’s needs besides his own. And it was definitely the first time in his memory that the other person’s well-being actually won out. If he killed Rosen, Lady Elizabeth would very likely consider herself a close cousin of the murderous Lady Macbeth—ah, his Shakespeare was coming back to him in spades tonight—with blood on her hands. If he abandoned him, which was equally tempting, the inquiry when Rosen was found might well embroil Lady Elizabeth. And for whatever obscure reason, he was resolved to do his possible to get her safely out of the fix in which he had found her.
Damn the chit anyway.
At thirty-one well-hardened years of age, he was far too old and far too experienced to be swayed by a damsel in distress, big blue eyes, soft, kissable lips, and a truly memorable pair of breasts.
Yet here he was, clearly not as impervious as he had thought.
Which was something he undoubtedly needed to rectify if he wished to live out his natural life span.
By passing through the back gardens of adjacent houses before emerging with his burden at the corner of Grosvenor Square and Brook Street, Neil was able to avoid the line of carriages with their nosy drivers and restive horses waiting in front of the elegant mansion where the ball was being held. He paused in the shadows, waiting unseen while a tired kitchen maid unexpectedly hurried out a close-at-hand door, obviously bent on some errand. A party of noisy toffs complete with top hats and canes piled into a carriage farther along, and he took good care they didn’t notice him either. Otherwise, the area was deserted. Oblongs of light from the windows of the houses he skirted were the only other obstacles he encountered, and he avoided those. Rosen was breathing hard, reeked of cologne or some foul hair pomade, and drooled besides. Neil gave a grimace of disgust as he half carried, half dragged the man away from the sanctified air of one of London’s toniest blocks into the narrow backstreets and alleys with which the area was honeycombed. There, gaslights smoldered smokily on distant corners, lending an eerie yellow glow to the fog that was beginning to roll in to clog the streets, but everywhere else the gutters and streets were so dark as to make it impossible to discern the identity of anyone. Only a few women were out at that hour. The decent ones hurried along, their heads bowed and concealed by the hoods of their cloaks, the others loitering in hopes of picking up a protector for the night. The men were a mixed bag, gentlemen, drunken and otherwise, mingling with a more sinister sort. Despite the hour, traffic as he neared Piccadilly was heavy. A bath chair carrying an overweight man in an advanced state of inebriation, evidenced by the fact that he was singing immoral ditties at the top of his lungs, trotted past. Crested carriages trundled noisily over the cobblestones on their way to or from the Opera House, or perhaps a private party or a gentleman’s club. Finally Neil judged that he had gone far enough, spotted a cab, and hailed it.
Bundling Rosen inside, he gave the man’s address, reluctantly handed over a pony for the fare, and stepped back.
The carriage took off with a jerk, and his unwanted problem was thus removed from his life. He was once again free to get on with the business that had brought him hotfoot to London.
He only hoped things worked out as well for Lady Elizabeth.
Perhaps, one day, he thought as he faded back into the shadows of the alley from which he had emerged, sparing her would count for something when the ledger of his sins was being tallied. But then again, against so much sin, probably not.
With that, he dismissed her from his mind.
Only to find that his brief inattention to his surroundings had already cost him dear.
“Top o’ the evenin’, Angel,” Fitz Clapham said as he emerged from a recessed doorway, his hoarse cockney voice making him instantly identifiable despite the darkness, or the curly-brimmed hat that was pulled low over his face and the muffler he’d wound around the collar of his coat for further concealment of his features. Clapham was a good deal shorter than Neil and a good deal older, but strong and muscular as a Brahma bull and deadly as a thrown knife. In the small, insular world of assassins for hire, he was known as one of the best. “Keep your ’ands where I can see ’em, now. Tsk, tsk. Did you really think you’d seen the last of me?”
Considering that the last time he’d seen Clapham the man had been gutshot and lying in a pool of his own blood as hired bodyguards converged on him in the courtyard of a French château, Neil thought he could be pardoned for assuming exactly that.
“What do you want?” he asked, although he knew. On the very edge of his peripheral vision, he watched as the other denizens of the alley, the o
nes who were there for purposes of their own and wanted no part of this, slunk away like cats in the night. He was already calculating the time it would take to reach for his pistol, which still resided in the pocket of his greatcoat. His conclusion was, too much. If his hand made so much as a move in that direction, he’d be dead before he touched it.
“Ah.” Clapham smiled and pushed his coat aside so that Neil could see the gleaming barrel of his pistol, which, as Neil had known it would be, was aimed at his heart. “You made me look bad, you know. I didn’t appreciate that.”
That would have been two years previously, when they had both, with neither knowing of the other’s assignment to the same job until they’d spotted each other on the premises, been dispatched to remove the former head of French intelligence from the world of the living. Clapham had failed, felled by an alert bodyguard’s fusillade of bullets. Neil had succeeded.
As he always succeeded. Not one failed mission in more than a decade’s worth of state-sanctioned murders.
In some small way, he was proud of that.
“It wasn’t my intention,” Neil said.
Clapham nodded. “Still.” Then, to someone behind Neil, he added, “Check ’im for weapons. ’E’ll ’ave a pistol, for sure, and ’e carries a toothpick in ’is boot.”
Clearly, Neil realized, Clapham had seen him make use of the slender, silver-handled knife he always kept concealed in his right boot to dispatch the sentry who had, as he had thought at the time, done for Clapham. Even as he had the thought, Neil became aware of two more figures behind him, slowly closing in on him from either side. Although they, too, were cloaked in fog and shadows, Neil didn’t have to see their features to know who they were. Unlike himself, who always worked alone, Clapham frequently employed two associates, Moss Parks and Toby Richards, especially when the assignment promised to be more difficult or dangerous than usual. Unlike Clapham, they were stupid. But they were equally deadly.
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