“Once you have his attention, I’ll sneak into Wentworth’s private rooms and search for the diary. Alone, while you remain downstairs.” He fixed a look on her that brooked no argument. “Then at midnight, we’ll leave the party under the cover of all the noise and revelries of the unmasking.”
“I-I have to be gone before then. I can’t remove my mask, can’t show my face—” She turned her head just slightly to the side, to hide her scar, but she couldn’t hide the way she paled at the idea of the unmasking. “No one can see me there.”
“Then perhaps you should stay here.” He would give his right arm if she’d do just that.
“No. I’m going with you.” Then her shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. But Ross noticed. Sweet Lucifer, he noticed everything about her. “But I’m not taking off my mask.”
“Grace, if the unmasking will be a problem—”
“Then don’t take off your mask,” Kit interjected, anticipating Ross’s objection but answering the complete opposite way. “You’ll be leaving right at midnight anyway. No one will notice a single reveler still behind her mask as she heads out the door.”
A flash of jealousy speared Ross at the look of gratitude Grace sent his brother.
“Once you have the diary, you’ll come back here. In the morning, we’ll take all the evidence you’ve gathered straight to St James’s Palace.” Kit’s gaze softened somberly. “Hopefully, they’ll believe you.”
Ross sent up a silent prayer. But he’d never been fortune’s favorite son.
“We’ll need evening clothes,” Grace reminded them. “And full-face masks.”
Kit nodded. “I’ll fetch them and return—”
“No,” Ross cut in. “There’s too much risk that you’ll be followed. Ellsworth has to bring them.”
Kit didn’t argue that point, knowing he was right. “Fine for you. We’re the same size. You can borrow a set of my evening clothes. But for her”—his eyes slid to Grace—“Ellsworth won’t know which of his paramours to request a gown from that would fit her.”
“I’ll fetch my other dress.” She hurried into her bedroom, calling out over her shoulder, “You can use it to match my measurements!”
When she was safely out of earshot, Kit murmured to Ross, “I like that one. She’s got courage.” He grinned. “I like her a lot.”
Ross’s gaze followed after her in a mix of admiration and concern for her. So do I.
Chapter 17
“There.” Ross finished pouring the last bucket of hot water into the small tin bathtub behind the screen in the corner of Grace’s bedroom. “All ready for your bath, my lady.”
“Hmm.” She bent over to dangle her fingers into the water to test its temperature and gave him that taunting smile he’d come to know so well. And liked a great deal. “Well done.”
He set down the pail and watched as she considered half a dozen small bottles of oils sitting on a stand beside the tub. “Don’t be so surprised.”
“I’m not.” Selecting a purple bottle, she removed the stopper and wafted it beneath her nose, then drizzled several drops into the water. Her eyes gleamed mischievously in the soft glow of the lamp burning on the wall sconce. “But if you grow bored of being an earl, you’ve got a second career ahead of you as a footman.”
“I can only imagine the kind of reference you’d write for me,” he drawled sardonically at her teasing.
She laughed, the lilting sound nearly as warm and sweet as the jasmine-scented steam rising from the tub. His chest clenched in visceral response. Being with her like this as she prepared for the evening felt relaxed and familiar. It felt…right.
He hadn’t had that feeling in his life for far too long.
She paused, glancing around the small space behind the large Japanese-painted screen. “Why are there his and her bedrooms up here?” A small furrow creased her brow. “Shaving accoutrements in your room, a bathing area in mine…What kind of artist needs a space like this in his studio?”
“One with a scandalous reputation.” Not technically a lie, although describing the artist’s reputation as scandalous was the understatement of the year. “Vincenzo’s famous for paintings that can be rather shocking. Including nudes. Most likely his models change up here.”
She arched a brow. “Or perhaps this is where Ellsworth meets his mistresses.”
Cheeky chit. “That, too.”
“Where do you meet your mistresses, Spalding?” she challenged with a glint in her eyes. “Do you keep his and her bedrooms above a carriage house, as well?”
Not a chance in the world he’d answer that. “Who can afford mistresses? I’m only a footman in training.”
She laughed again. When the delicious sound faded, she said sincerely, “Thank you for helping to heat and haul the water.” She smiled in gratitude as her hand reached up to unbutton the front of her bodice. “A hot bath is going to be heavenly.”
“You’re welcome.” Instead of leaving, he propped a hip against the wall, as if settling in to shamelessly watch her bathe.
Her hand stilled on the third button. “Don’t you have your own clothes to ready?”
“My clothes are boring.” He trailed a deliberate gaze over her. He did it only to goad her into another match of verbal sparring, taking a perverse pleasure in the chess-like matches of conversation they regularly fell into. But he also genuinely appreciated the view. “Yours are much more interesting.”
She swept her gaze pointedly over him and crooked a brow in chastisement that he wore very little, having stripped down to his breeches to help haul up the water. “Yours seem to be nonexistent.”
He winked at her. “We footmen in training don’t make enough to afford proper attire.”
Her eyes narrowed in rebuke, which only made him grin. “You’ll never finish dressing for the masquerade at this rate.”
He shrugged a dismissing shoulder. “I’m your selfless servant, here to help you however you need.” He gestured toward the room. “Light your lamps, fetch your water…” He opportunistically drawled, “Wash your back.”
Her lips pressed into a tight line. “I’m quite fine on my own, thank you.”
“Pity,” he sighed, yet made no move to leave.
Reaching the end of her patience, she snapped, “You cannot stay and watch me bathe!”
“Why not?” He glanced over his shoulder at the bed and the gold satin ball grown laid out for her. Ellsworth had gotten it from one of his paramours and sent it over, along with all the accessories necessary for her to be tonight’s shiniest jewel. “After all, I’ll have to help you dress when you’re finished.”
“Only with the final hooks that I cannot reach on my own.”
“Pity. Ah, but there is a corset to be tied.”
“No, there’s not. That dress’s bodice is based on the old-fashioned Italian dresses. It’s reinforced and doesn’t need a corset to hold me in place.” Her cheeks pinked alluringly at that explanation. When he didn’t reply to that, she eyed him suspiciously. “Aren’t you going to say that’s a pity, too?”
“To you wearing one less layer of clothing?” he asked in a seductive purr, raking his gaze over her. “Heavens no.”
Her faint blush turned positively scarlet. Her reaction had him pondering all the other delicious things he could do to her to deepen that blush, to turn her soft breath into pants, and to part her lips beneath his so that he could take possession of that enticing mouth. He’d only been teasing her, but now—
Pity indeed.
“Stop that,” she admonished, although her protest could just as easily have been a soft plea to continue, for all the lack of force behind it. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Can’t help it.” He took another languid look over her, from head to toe. This one, he noted with selfish pleasure, made her tremble. “You’d blame a man for wanting to watch a beautiful woman bathe?”
“Something tells me that you want to do far more than watch,” she grumbled warily.
&
nbsp; He feigned wounding. “Am I so easy to read?”
“Like a library.” When he began to protest, she continued, “With every book spread open wide.” She cut him off before he could interrupt, “Beneath magnifying glasses.”
He threw back his head and laughed. Sweet Lucifer, how much he enjoyed sparring with her! More than with any other woman he’d ever known. Spirited, sassy, so very quick—a man could cut himself on that sharp mind of hers. A beautiful body to arouse the senses, a wit to challenge the intellect, and all of it wrapped in a woman whose mystery only served to draw him more strongly.
With a grimace of irritation, she shooed him away. “Go on! Go!” She took his shoulders, turned him around, and pushed him away. “Out from behind the screen!”
Calling out as he walked away, he repeated her words from Sea Haven, “You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”
A high-pitched growl of frustration broke across the room. Seconds later, a wet flannel smacked him in the middle of his back.
“Unlike all those other women you’ve known,” she called out, safely hidden from view behind the screen as she undressed—and for the moment safe from his retaliation—“I prefer to bathe in peace.”
“All those other women?” He bent over to snatch up the wet facecloth and set it aside on the dresser. He enjoyed raising her ire more than he should, but he couldn’t help himself. She was beautiful simply passing from moment to moment, possessing more presence than most of the women in Mayfair. But when she was angry, she was downright glorious.
A part of him wanted nothing more than to enrage her, just to see how magnificently she’d glow.
“I cannot even begin to imagine how many there must have been in your life,” she taunted.
The sound of softly splashing water arrested him in mid-step. His gut tightened reflexively at the image that played through his mind of Grace slipping seductively into the warm bath. Naked.
“Thousands and thousands,” he quipped. Not a single one of them like you. The raw honesty of that thought startled him.
When she laughed, he smiled wickedly to himself and turned around to look at the screen. The temptation to walk back to her was nearly irresistible.
“More like half the women in England,” she corrected amid more soft splashes and the exotic scent of jasmine wafting its way across the room to him, “if rumors are to be believed.”
“Rumors can’t be trusted,” he threw back wryly. “It was far more than that.”
“Well, you are a rake, after all.”
And who are you? Besides the woman who was driving him to distraction?
He rubbed at the tension knotting at his nape and trailed his gaze around the room, hunting for any clues to her identity that she might have accidentally left in view…Nothing. After all this time with her, he was still no closer to learning her identity, and the more time they spent together, the more she drove him mad. The most alluring yet mysterious woman he’d ever met, and the most damnably frustrating.
Tonight, they would walk into the lion’s den. He needed to be able to trust her, to place his life in her hands. How did he do that, when he didn’t even know who the hell she was?
His gaze fell onto the bed. He shook his head at the juxtaposition of the threadbare travel bag she’d carried with her halfway across England sitting next to a satin gown that cost more than Alice Walters would make in ten years at her apothecary shop. She was a daughter to one gentleman, a wife to another…yet also a mother who willingly became a fisherman’s widow to protect her child. How did he reconcile the two very different parts of her life?
Who the blazes was she?
Throwing a glance over his shoulder at the screen, he crossed to the bed. “If you need any help washing your back, just ask,” he called out, continuing with their taunting flirtation because she expected it. “I’m very good at washing women’s backs.” Only a fleeting guilt pricked at him as he searched her clothes. “And other places.”
“With your reputation, I would have thought you’d prefer your women dirty.”
He smiled at that barb—and at the frumpy night rail as he set it aside. He paused to consider her belongings, all spread out before him. There was nothing there to give any clues to who she was. Not even a monogrammed hairbrush or hand mirror. “Is that how you prefer your men? Disheveled, sweaty…” He grimaced painfully at his own uncontrolled behavior around her. “Shamelessly eager and panting for you.”
From behind the screen, there was a silent pause. His arrow had stuck home.
What he wouldn’t have given for a glimpse of her at that moment, sitting there naked and stunned that he dared say something so blatantly sexual to her, her sensuous lips parted and her eyes glazed with arousal. Would her nipples be puckered into hard, little points, ready and aching to be suckled? Would her bare thighs be warm and slick with soap? Would he taste the jasmine clinging to her skin, the tangy taste of it on his tongue when he licked down her body, until he had to duck his head into the water to reach—
“I prefer them to be gentlemen,” she countered, once she’d found her voice.
Defying the softly splashing water’s siren song, he took a moment to gather himself. “Then that leaves me out.”
She gave a loud, haughty sniff and sarcastically drawled, “Pity.”
He grimaced. He deserved that jab, yet he also found it alluring. Only Grace could make him want her more by attempting to drive him away.
He reached for her bag and searched it, checking every inch. “Perhaps you haven’t been around enough sullied men,” he mumbled, frowning into the bag.
“Perhaps you haven’t been around enough unsoiled women.”
“Dear God, why would I want that?” At that moment, there was only one woman who concerned him, and it was all he could do to shut out the images of her naked body bathing in the warm, soapy water and focus on the task at hand. “After all, half the women in Europe are simply holding their breaths as they wait for me to wash their backs.”
He barely registered the splash of water behind him or her reply to that as he ran his fingertips over the inside of the bag. Then he felt it—a tear. Only a small rip in the lining, but its straight line was a purposeful cut, not the kind gotten through wear or accident. He carefully reached beneath the lining, and his fingertips brushed over something small and hard. He pulled out the hidden object and held it up.
A gold ring, decorated with rubies and diamonds. It shimmered brightly even in the dim lamplight, leaving no doubt that it was real.
He held it up toward the lamp and read the faint inscription on the inside of the tiny band…To S, Love always D.
Was it a leftover memento from her previous life? Had to be. She was beautiful, but living under the pretense of being a fisherman’s widow wouldn’t have brought her anywhere near the kind of man who could afford to give her a bauble like this. Neither was she the kind of woman who sold her intimacies. Had to be from her gentleman husband then, who had to be D. S…her initial?
Fresh frustration spiked inside him. If a few letters were the only clues he had, he would never be able to piece together her identity.
Love always. His chest constricted at that, but he refused to consider why. It couldn’t be jealousy. Not of a dead man.
No, it was betrayal. She’d misled him by implying that she hadn’t loved her husband. But this—keeping a ring like this was an act of love.
“You make it very difficult to trust you, Spalding,” a soft voice said from behind him.
He froze. Caught. Christ. Rapidly trying to think of any viable excuse for what he’d done, he turned to face her—
And lost his breath.
She stood in front of the screen, wearing only a large towel wrapped around her, with her toffee hair falling loose around her bare shoulders and down her back. Her skin was pink from the hot water, with jasmine-scented droplets still clinging to her bare arms and legs. She reminded him of that Botticelli painting of Venus being born from t
he sea, with all of nature begging to be allowed to worship at her feet.
But it was her gaze that arrested him. She looked at him not in anger, but with acute disappointment.
He’d rather have had her rage. It would have been less biting.
“When you didn’t answer, I thought you’d left to dress.” She lowered her gaze to the bed and the clothes he’d gone through, and her disappointment deepened. “If you wanted to search my things, you could have simply asked. I would have let you.”
Damnation. He gritted his teeth. She would not make him feel guilty about being cautious. Not with everything he was up against. His survival depended on tonight’s search going perfectly, and he wouldn’t let it be jeopardized because a former society miss refused to divulge her name.
“I did ask,” he countered. “But you refused to tell me who you are.”
“I told you that I would tell you later.”
“You said when we reached London. We’re in London now.” He pinned a narrowed gaze on her. “Who are you?”
She paused, as if she might surrender her name after all. But then she shook her head, as obstinate as ever in keeping her secrets. “You wanted me to trust you, and this is how you repay me. By showing no trust in me.” She held out her hand. “Give me my ring, please.”
Her refusal to answer even now stoked his anger, and he stalked toward her, forcing her to retreat. The hand that had been outstretched now clutched at the towel to keep her covered from his eyes. Oddly, that only aggravated him more.
“I’m supposed to trust a woman with my life when she refuses to tell me her name?” he shot back, backing her up against the wall. He held up the ring in front of her and demanded, “Who’s D?”
“My late husband.” She snatched the ring away and drew her hand around it in a tight fist, as if afraid he might try to take it back by force.
“That’s not what I meant.”
She countered defiantly, “I know.”
With a frustrated growl, his patience snapping, he leaned in and trapped her between the wall and his body.
How the Earl Entices Page 17