The Countess Conspiracy

by Courtney Milan

  “Now,” Benedict said with a smile, “we’ll work out the details of his guardianship as soon as we have a chance. But at the moment, I believe you have a woman waiting for you downstairs.”

  SHE WAS WAITING FOR HIM in the entry, her eyes alight.

  When he turned the corner, she beamed at him.

  “My lady,” Sebastian said. “Have you given any thought to the offers you’ve had? Cambridge? Harvard? King’s College?”

  “I’ll have to find out more. The terms. I’ll have to think it all through.”

  Sebastian came down the stairs slowly, stalking toward the woman he loved. “Me, personally? I’m partial to Paris. And I’ve always wanted to be a faculty spouse. I think I shall do well with that.”

  “Paris is nice, but…” Violet stopped and looked up at him. “A what?”

  “A faculty spouse. I could hold teas for all the other faculty spouses.” He grinned at her. “I’d do an excellent job.”

  “Sebastian,” she said, “are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Oh, no.” He put his arms around her and drew her close. “Just hinting that you ought to ask me.”

  Violet burst into a laugh. “Well. Then.” She put her head against his shoulder. “Next Tuesday? That will surely keep the gossip going.”

  He could smell her, sweet and enticing, could feel himself breaking into a smile. “Next Tuesday it is, then. And how clever of you to steal my coach and bring it out here. If we’d both come out on horseback, it would have been extremely inconvenient for my purposes. Guess what I’m going to do with you on the way back?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes dark. “Am I guessing? Or are you giving me a choice?”

  He found himself smiling. “Both. It’s been…quite a while.”

  “Indeed,” she smiled up at him. “I’m exhausted after everything that has transpired.”

  He tipped her chin up and kissed her. “Well, then. We’ll have to make sure you sleep very, very soundly tonight.”

  Epilogue

  Two years later.

  MEET ME AT CASTEIN’S BOOKS. Your very own servant, Violet Malheur.

  Sebastian smiled, folding the paper that had been delivered to him into quarters before sliding it into his breast pocket.

  “Gentlemen.” He stood.

  In the low light of the gentleman’s club, the other three men with him blinked up at him uncertainly. Sebastian reached out and began to gather the papers strewn about the mahogany surface.

  “Malheur,” one of them complained, “I had almost got it. Just a few moments longer, and I’m certain I would have understood what you were saying. Just start again—start with the second-order corrections you made to the insurance rates, and then—”

  “It’s no good,” Benedict said, leaning back in his chair and favoring Sebastian with a smile. “He has that look in his eye. And I happen to know that his wife has been out of town—so I think we can guess who sent him that note.”

  “Yes, well,” the other man groused. “Wives. They’re all well and good, but…ah…” He stopped, his words slowing, and then glanced up at Sebastian, as if remembering who Sebastian’s wife was.

  “She’s just back from Vienna,” Sebastian said. “She was giving a presentation there. I haven’t seen her in six days.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing,” Sebastian said. “We’ll meet tomorrow at ten in the morning.”

  They took his departure with good grace, in part because Benedict gathered them in. The Underground would transport him faster than any carriage; Sebastian stepped down into its bowels. But he didn’t head to Castein’s Books after all—that had closed nine months ago.

  What was the point of code, after all, if everybody could understand it? This one meant: To hell with all of our responsibilities. Come find me as soon as you can.

  He made his way home, scarcely tolerating the men who brushed elbows with him on the cars. The traffic seemed abominably slow today; he found himself glancing at his watch, over and over.

  He didn’t bother going through the front door. He let himself in through a side gate, jogged down the brick path, past the shrubbery, heading straight to her greenhouse.

  I’ve missed you, her note had said. And he’d missed her, too.

  Most of her experiments were now housed at King’s College, in a massive greenhouse that she ran. This one, sitting behind their home, held only a few curiosities that she played with in her spare time. Those, and a host of memories.

  She was standing in place holding a pair of calipers, measuring the leaf of an orchid. She didn’t look up at his entrance. She didn’t even blink as he came up behind her.

  But when he slid his hands around her waist, her eyes shivered shut and she leaned back against him, and her instrument fell to the table.

  “I missed you.” Her hands joined his.

  “I missed you, too.” He kissed her ear. “Next time, I’m coming with you.”

  The skin of her neck was soft, delicate. She sighed when he nibbled at it.

  “Next time,” she said, “they’ll want to talk to you, too. After all, you are the…”

  He tasted the edge of her collarbone, and she let out a little sigh.

  “The coauthor,” she said, “of…”

  His hands slid up her stomach.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Sebastian.”

  “My most lovely Violet,” he said. “When I come with you to Vienna, you will not be thinking of me as your coauthor. You’ll think of me as the man who made you too hoarse to speak the next morning.”

  “Oh,” she said with a smile. “I suppose we should see if that’s possible. Shall we practice now?” She turned her head to him.

  “Practice implies that there are imperfections.” He found the edge of her jaw, tilted her head up. “That we must find some way to improve.” Her lips were soft against his; she let out a ragged breath as he kissed her. “And you,” he whispered, “you are already perfect.”

  Thank you!

  Thanks for reading The Countess Conspiracy. I hope you enjoyed it!

  • Would you like to know when my next book is available? You can sign up for my new release e-mail list at www.courtneymilan.com.

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  • Or you can follow me on twitter at @courtneymilan.

  • Reviews help other readers find books. I appreciate all reviews, whether positive or negative.

  •You’ve just read the third full-length book in the Brothers Sinister series. The other books in the series are:

  ½. The Governess Affair (a prequel)

  1. The Duchess War

  1½. A Kiss for Midwinter (a companion novella to The Duchess War)

  2. The Heiress Effect

  3. The Countess Conspiracy

  4. The Mistress Rebellion

  4½.Talk Sweetly to Me(a novella coda)

  If you’d like to read an excerpt from The Duchess War, Robert and Minnie’s story, or The Heiress Effect, Oliver and Jane’s story, please turn the page.

  The Duchess War: Excerpt

  The Duchess War

  available now

  Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly—so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.

  But that is precisely what she gets…

  ROBERT BLAISDELL, THE NINTH DUKE OF CLERMONT, was not hiding.

  True, he’d retreated to the upstairs library of the old Guildhall, far enough from the crowd below that the noise of the ensemble had faded to a distant rumble. True, nobody else was about. Also true: He stood behind thick curtains of
blue-gray velvet, which shielded him from view. And he’d had to move the heavy davenport of brown-buttoned leather to get there.

  But he’d done all that not to hide himself, but because—and this was a key point in his rather specious train of logic—in this centuries-old structure of plaster and timberwork, only one of the panes in the windows opened, and that happened to be the one secreted behind the sofa.

  So here he stood, cigarillo in hand, the smoke trailing out into the chilly autumn air. He wasn’t hiding; it was simply a matter of preserving the aging books from fumes.

  He might even have believed himself, if only he smoked.

  Still, through the wavy panes of aging glass, he could make out the darkened stone of the church directly across the way. Lamplight cast unmoving shadows on the pavement below. A pile of handbills had once been stacked against the doors, but an autumn breeze had picked them up and scattered them down the street, driving them into puddles.

  He was making a mess. A goddamned glorious mess. He smiled and tapped the end of his untouched cigarillo against the window opening, sending ashes twirling to the paving stones below.

  The quiet creak of a door opening startled him. He turned from the window at the corresponding scritch of floorboards. Someone had come up the stairs and entered the adjoining room. The footsteps were light—a woman’s, perhaps, or a child’s. They were also curiously hesitant. Most people who made their way to the library in the midst of a musicale had a reason to do so. A clandestine meeting, perhaps, or a search for a missing family member.

  From his vantage point behind the curtains, Robert could only see a small slice of the library. Whoever it was drew closer, walking hesitantly. She was out of sight—somehow he was sure that she was a woman—but he could hear the soft, prowling fall of her feet, pausing every so often as if to examine the surroundings.

  She didn’t call out a name or make a determined search. It didn’t sound as if she were looking for a hidden lover. Instead, her footsteps circled the perimeter of the room.

  It took Robert half a minute to realize that he’d waited too long to announce himself. “Aha!” he could imagine himself proclaiming, springing out from behind the curtains. “I was admiring the plaster. Very evenly laid back there, did you know?”

  She would think he was mad. And so far, nobody yet had come to that conclusion. So instead of speaking, he dropped his cigarillo out the window. It tumbled end over end, orange tip glowing, until it landed in a puddle and extinguished itself.

  All he could see of the room was a half-shelf of books, the back of the sofa, and a table next to it on which a chess set had been laid out. The game was in progress; from what little he remembered of the rules, black was winning. Whoever it was drew nearer, and Robert shrank back against the window.

  She crossed into his field of vision.

  She wasn’t one of the young ladies he’d met in the crowded hall earlier. Those had all been beauties, hoping to catch his eye. And she—whoever she was—was not a beauty. Her dark hair was swept into a no-nonsense knot at the back of her neck. Her lips were thin and her nose was sharp and a bit on the long side. She was dressed in a dark blue gown trimmed in ivory—no lace, no ribbons, just simple fabric. Even the cut of her gown bordered on the severe side: waist pulled in so tightly he wondered how she could breathe, sleeves marching from her shoulders to her wrists without an inch of excess fabric to soften the picture.

  She didn’t see Robert standing behind the curtain. She had set her head to one side and was eyeing the chess set the way a member of the Temperance League might look at a cask of brandy: as if it were an evil to be stamped out with prayer and song—and failing that, with martial law.

  She took one halting step forward, then another. Then, she reached into the silk bag that hung around her wrist and retrieved a pair of spectacles.

  Glasses should have made her look more severe. But as soon as she put them on, her gaze softened.

  He’d read her wrongly. Her eyes hadn’t been narrowed in scorn; she’d been squinting. It hadn’t been severity he saw in her gaze but something else entirely—something he couldn’t quite make out. She reached out and picked up a black knight, turning it around, over and over. He could see nothing about the pieces that would merit such careful attention. They were solid wood, carved with indifferent skill. Still, she studied it, her eyes wide and luminous.

  Then, inexplicably, she raised it to her lips and kissed it.

  Robert watched in frozen silence. It almost felt as if he were interrupting a tryst between a woman and her lover. This was a lady who had secrets, and she didn’t want to share them.

  The door in the far room creaked as it opened once more.

  The woman’s eyes grew wide and wild. She looked about frantically and dove over the davenport in her haste to hide, landing in an ignominious heap two feet away from him. She didn’t see Robert even then; she curled into a ball, yanking her skirts behind the leather barrier of the sofa, breathing in shallow little gulps.

  Good thing he’d moved the davenport back half a foot earlier. She never would have fit the great mass of her skirts behind it otherwise.

  Her fist was still clenched around the chess piece; she shoved the knight violently under the sofa.

  This time, a heavier pair of footfalls entered the room.

  “Minnie?” said a man’s voice. “Miss Pursling? Are you here?”

  Her nose scrunched and she pushed back against the wall. She made no answer.

  “Gad, man.” Another voice that Robert didn’t recognize—young and slightly slurred with drink. “I don’t envy you that one.”

  “Don’t speak ill of my almost-betrothed,” the first voice said. “You know she’s perfect for me.”

  “That timid little rodent?”

  “She’ll keep a good home. She’ll see to my comfort. She’ll manage the children, and she won’t complain about my mistresses.” There was a creak of hinges—the unmistakable sound of someone opening one of the glass doors that protected the bookshelves.

  “What are you doing, Gardley?” the drunk man asked. “Looking for her among the German volumes? I don’t think she’d fit.” That came with an ugly laugh.

  Gardley. That couldn’t be the elder Mr. Gardley, owner of a distillery—not by the youth in that voice. This must be Mr. Gardley the younger. Robert had seen him from afar—an unremarkable fellow of medium height, medium-brown hair, and features that reminded him faintly of five other people.

  “On the contrary,” young Gardley said. “I think she’ll fit quite well. As wives go, Miss Pursling will be just like these books. When I wish to take her down and read her, she’ll be there. When I don’t, she’ll wait patiently, precisely where she was left. She’ll make me a comfortable wife, Ames. Besides, my mother likes her.”

  Robert didn’t believe he’d met an Ames. He shrugged and glanced down at—he was guessing—Miss Pursling to see how she took this revelation.

  She didn’t look surprised or shocked at her almost-fiancé’s unromantic utterance. Instead, she looked resigned.

  “You’ll have to take her to bed, you know,” Ames said.

  “True. But not, thank God, very often.”

  “She’s a rodent. Like all rodents, I imagine she’ll squeal when she’s poked.”

  There was a mild thump.

  “What?” yelped Ames.

  “That,” said Gardley, “is my future wife you are talking about.”

  Maybe the fellow wasn’t so bad after all.

  Then Gardley continued. “I’m the only one who gets to think about poking that rodent.”

  Miss Pursling pressed her lips together and looked up, as if imploring the heavens. But inside the library, there were no heavens to implore. And when she looked up, through the gap in the curtains…

  Her gaze met Robert’s. Her eyes grew big and round. She didn’t scream; she didn’t gasp. She didn’t twitch so much as an inch. She simply fixed him with a look that bristled with silent, venomous
accusation. Her nostrils flared.

  There was nothing Robert could do but lift his hand and give her a little wave.

  She took off her spectacles and turned away in a gesture so regally dismissive that he had to look twice to remind himself that she was, in fact, sitting in a heap of skirts at his feet. That from this awkward angle above her, he could see straight down the neckline of her gown—right at the one part of her figure that didn’t strike him as severe, but soft—

  Save that for later, he admonished himself, and adjusted his gaze up a few inches. Because she’d turned away, he saw for the first time a faint scar on her left cheek, a tangled white spider web of crisscrossed lines.

  “Wherever your mouse has wandered off to, it’s not here,” Ames was saying. “Likely she’s in the lady’s retiring room. I say we go back to the fun. You can always tell your mother you had words with her in the library.”

  “True enough,” Gardley said. “And I don’t need to mention that she wasn’t present for them—it’s not as if she would have said anything in response, even if she had been here.”

  Footsteps receded; the door creaked once more, and the men walked out.

  Miss Pursling didn’t look at Robert once they’d left, not even to acknowledge his existence with a glare. Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, made a fist, and slammed it into the hard back of the sofa—once, then twice, hitting it so hard that it moved forward with the force of her blow—all one hundred pounds of it.

  He caught her wrist before she landed a third strike. “There now,” he said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself over him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

  She stared up at him, her eyes wide.

  He didn’t see how any man could call this woman timid. She positively crackled with defiance. He let go of her arm before the fury in her could travel up his hand and consume him. He had enough anger of his own.

  “Never mind me,” she said. “Apparently I’m not capable of helping myself.”