The Bargain

by Jane Ashford

He kissed her again, the pressure of his desire pushing her backward until she reached the wall of the room. He pressed her against it with his whole body in a kiss that seared through him, setting fire along his bones. One of his thighs parted her knees, and she made no move to resist. Instead, she clung, as if she wanted more of him.

  Alan heard himself groan. He was burning up. He was relentless and exultant and half-mad. His hands ran along Ariel’s thighs, pulling up her many-layered skirts in a froth of glittering material.

  “Back here?” inquired an intrusive male voice. “I don’t see…”

  Jerking as if he had been shocked, Alan tore away from Ariel, leaving her limp against the wall. He turned to meet the intruders on their privacy, a man and a woman in fancy dress who were obviously looking for the same. His face taut, he more or less snarled at them. After one startled look, they ducked back the way they had come.

  But they had broken the spell. Appalled, Alan faced the fact that he had been on the verge of taking her right here in Carlton House. “God,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his face.

  “Alan?” murmured Ariel softly.

  He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t speak to her. If he did, all would be lost once again. Before she could say more, he turned his back and strode out of the room.

  Ariel leaned on the plaster, trying to get her breath back. She was still dizzy with the feel of hard muscles and the fresh masculine scent of him. The compelling rhythm of his heartbeat still beat in her, and memories of auburn hair curling on his neck and mesmerizing blue eyes blurred her vision.

  Ariel felt as if prickles were running along every inch of her skin. This was what her mother had continually warned against, said some part of her brain. But she didn’t care. She took one deep breath, then another.

  Where had Alan gone? she wondered. He could not have left her here. He would not have abandoned her in this house. In a moment he would reappear, and they would talk.

  She concentrated on recovering her breath, on slowing the hammering of her heart. Moments passed before her legs felt wholly steady again. She straightened and moved away from the wall. Surely it was time for him to come back?

  She heard footsteps approaching. Tidying her costume, which was rather crushed in the front, she prepared to face him.

  “Hullo?” Lord Robert Gresham appeared in the doorway, peering in as if he half expected to find a wild animal awaiting him. “There you are,” he added. “Alan asked me to escort you home.”

  “He what?”

  “Wanted me to see you home,” he repeated.

  “Where is he?” replied Ariel in a dangerous voice.

  “Had to go.” Lord Robert spread his hands. “Pressing engagement. Very sorry and all that.”

  “How dare he!” burst from Ariel.

  Lord Robert started back.

  “Of all the… the wretched, cowardly…”

  “Alan ain’t a coward,” interrupted his brother. “In fact…” He moved farther into the room and assumed a wise expression. “Not a good idea to make him angry. You wouldn’t know it, but underneath, he’s got a rather hot temper. I remember one time when we were out on the river—”

  “He has a temper!” exclaimed Ariel. “He?”

  Lord Robert was nodding. “You don’t notice right away, but…” He stopped abruptly as Ariel’s teeth showed in what was distinctly not a smile.

  “I’ll show him temper,” she muttered. “Not a good idea to make him angry?” She blew out a breath. “I’ll show him what is not a good idea!”

  Lord Robert made a small sound, rather like a bleat. Ariel turned on him. “What?”

  He made the sound again. “Ready to go?” he answered in a higher-than-normal voice.

  “Quite ready,” she informed him, and she swept out of the room, leaving him in her wake.

  Eleven

  On her way downstairs the next morning, Ariel walked past the open door of her mother’s former bedchamber. A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she stepped inside, puzzled. Prospero lounged magnificently on the coverlet of the huge four-poster bed. “You shouldn’t be in here,” Ariel said. “Come down to the kitchen. We’ll get you something to eat.” Prospero had charmed Ellen and Hannah from the day of their arrival, and there was no problem finding tidbits.

  The cat ignored her. He stretched himself out at full length, extending his front claws luxuriously, and yawned.

  “You’ll leave fur all over that silk,” said Ariel, reaching for him.

  Rolling quickly over, he slipped from her grasp. Finding himself at the front corner of the great bed, he fixed his attention on one of its posts. This massive carved timber, six inches square, rose to the low ceiling. Bess had wanted a bed to match her old house, and she had convinced one of her noble friends to part with this relic of an earlier age.

  Rising up on his hind legs, Prospero sank his front claws into the thickest part of the post, which was carved into small panels with a rosette in the middle of each side, and began to sharpen them on the iron-hard old wood.

  “Don’t do that!” cried Ariel. She grabbed for him again.

  Prospero evaded her fingers, gazed at her with his great golden eyes, and enthusiastically returned to the post. Ariel heard the click of his claws on the wood.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come here.” She took him firmly around the middle to pick him up, but at that moment, one of the cat’s claws caught in a crack. He tugged to free it, and one side of the bedpost opened like a tiny door, revealing a hidden cavity stuffed with papers. Prospero mewed in surprise and sprang to the floor. Ariel stood staring at her mother’s secret hiding place. “The bed,” she murmured. “I should have thought of that.”

  Ariel had always believed that her mother had some cache in the house where she hid papers and valuables. It was the sort of thing Bess would do. She had delighted in secrets, and she had never trusted banks or any other institutions. But search as she might, Ariel hadn’t been able to find the hiding place. She’d been over the house from top to bottom. She had gone through every box and drawer. She had emptied each wardrobe in the attic and the wine bin in the cellar. She had even tapped on the paneled walls and floors looking for concealed hollows. She had tried to follow her mother’s likely thought processes, and deduce the place from there. But although she felt certain the cache was in Bess’s bedchamber somewhere, it continued to elude her, and she had more or less given up hunting. Now here it was, open before her.

  She reached up and pulled one sheaf of papers from the cavity, and then another. The hollow was surprisingly large, extending up into the post for a foot or more. By the time she had emptied it, a small pile of rolled and folded paper lay on the bed, some of it looking years old. After pushing her arm into the bedpost and feeling around to make sure nothing else was there, Ariel pushed the tiny door almost closed, and then sat on the bed to look through what she had found.

  She started with the largest bundle, tied with red ribbon. This turned out to be documents associated with the house, some of which Bess’s man of business had been asking for; Ariel was pleased and relieved to find them. Setting these aside, she unfolded a larger parchment. It was a legal document recording a loan of three thousand pounds that Bess had made to a woman named Flora Jennings. In the top left-hand corner, Bess had written “sold ruby.”

  Ariel stared at it in amazement. This was a huge sum of money, given to someone she had never once heard her mother mention. Bess had been generous with small sums, even careless sometimes, but she did not part with amounts like this. Ariel examined the document more closely. The address listed for Flora Jennings was in a very poor part of town—an area where three thousand pounds would be a fortune. It wouldn’t be sneezed at anywhere in London, Ariel thought, frowning at the page. Why would Bess have lent this much?

  Setting the parchment aside, she opened another.
This one was the deed to a house in the same area as the Jennings address. It also had the notation “sold ruby” written in the corner. Why would Bess have parted with this fabulous jewel for such purposes? Ariel wondered. Why would she have wished to own a house in a back slum?

  Utterly bewildered, she put the deed with the loan document and continued her examination. Many of the other papers were letters. Scanning them quickly, Ariel grew embarrassed. Her mother had kept expressions of affection from many of the noblemen with whom she had formed connections over the years, revealing a sentimental streak that seemed at odds with Ariel’s memories. Or had she kept them as a kind of insurance? Ariel was certain Bess would never have stooped to blackmail, but she would not have hesitated to expose secrets in order to protect herself.

  Stacking the letters in a single pile, she put them back inside the bedpost, gathering the remaining documents to take to her own room. When she had set them on her desk and was sorting those to go to the solicitor from the others, she stopped suddenly and closed her fists, overcome by a sadness so deep it was frightening. Was she really never to see her mother again? Was Bess to disappear forever in a fog of mysteries and secrets?

  Moments passed in a dark blankness. Ariel groped in it, trying to find her way. She couldn’t just stay in the house, she thought finally. The walls were beginning to close in on her. She was starting to feel helpless. She needed to do something. Her eyes fell on the documents before her on the desk. She would visit this Flora Jennings, she decided, and ask her point-blank why Bess had lent her such a huge amount of money.

  This resolve made her feel better, but only for a moment. She couldn’t go into that part of town alone. And she couldn’t ask Lord Alan Gresham, who had been her escort on other perilous forays, to accompany her. She couldn’t even think of him, in fact, without becoming furious and confused. On the one hand, he insisted that there was no such thing as love and that he had no interest in romantic encounters. On the other, he kissed her until she could barely stand. He helped her and abandoned her, encouraged and criticized her, leaving her totally uncertain what would happen from one moment to the next. He was intolerable!

  But who would take his place? No one could, an inner voice insisted. Ariel dropped the papers onto her writing desk, and stood looking at the floor. She would go mad if she did nothing.

  And then she remembered that Lord Sebastian Gresham owed her some service. She had given him a splendid plan for winning his Lady Georgina. She would send a note round asking him to escort her.

  The note was duly written and dispatched, and it received a prompt reply. But instead of Lord Sebastian, it fetched his brother Robert. “Sebastian had duty this afternoon,” Ariel was told. “He couldn’t get away, so he sent me.” Lord Robert looked extremely curious. “What’s this about a plan of campaign for winning the Stane girl?”

  “Did you come in a carriage?” Ariel asked.

  “Rode over,” he replied.

  “Then we will need a hack.” She began to tie the strings of her bonnet under her chin.

  “Where are we going?”

  Ariel eyed him. “There is a call I must make,” she answered. “And it is not in the… best part of town.”

  “Down in the City?” he wondered. “Solicitor or something like that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Where then?” Lord Robert inquired.

  Reluctantly, she told him.

  “That can’t be right. That’s in a back slum, ain’t it?”

  “It isn’t the best of neighborhoods,” Ariel temporized. “But I must go there.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “I’ll tell you all about the plan of campaign I suggested to Lord Sebastian,” she offered.

  “Well, but…”

  “It is imperative that I visit that address,” she declared. “That is why I asked for your escort.”

  Lord Robert looked torn between doubt, gratification, and reluctance. “Why ain’t Alan taking you?” he asked, then frowned. “Has he forbidden you to go? Because if he has, I won’t have anything to—”

  “He has not,” declared Ariel. “Will you come, or shall I go without you?”

  “Where is he then?” responded Lord Robert stubbornly.

  “Busy with his own affairs, I suppose.” Inspired, she added, “He always has a great deal to do.”

  “That’s true.” He considered. “You’ll tell the whole story—about Sebastian—if I escort you?”

  Ariel nodded.

  “Well… all right. Is it true he really means to tie the knot this time?”

  She nodded again.

  “So what did you tell him?” he prompted.

  “To ask her questions,” she responded.

  “Questions?” he echoed, puzzled.

  “To seek her opinion on various matters, to ask her advice,” she elaborated.

  Lord Robert looked bewildered.

  “It all comes from The Rake Reformed,” she went on. “In that play there is a young woman who is courted by all sorts of gentlemen. All of them tell her how lovely she is and how she has captured their hearts, but none of them cares a whit what she thinks or what she wants in a… a larger sense, beyond a glass of lemonade between sets at a ball.”

  “Larger sense,” he repeated, as if he had never heard the two words put together before.

  “She has been constantly treated as an empty-headed doll, you see. But the hero of the play truly wishes to know more about her. That is the key, as I told Lord Sebastian. He must be truly interested.”

  He looked at her. “You think some scheme from a play will impress an heiress who’s been brought up in the midst of the haut ton?” He shook his head. “It ain’t going to work.”

  She smiled. “Let us discuss the matter again in two weeks’ time,” she said. “And then we will see.”

  “Huh. I’d give you ten to one odds it don’t work.”

  “Five pounds,” Ariel answered. “I’ll bet you five pounds it does work.”

  “Females don’t place wagers,” he said, scandalized.

  “Are you afraid you’ll lose to a woman?” she wondered.

  “I won’t lose.”

  “Then we shall consider it settled. Now, can we be on our way?”

  Lord Robert shifted from one foot to the other. “I don’t know…”

  “You are not going to cry off on me now!”

  “No, but… Here now, stop that!” He suddenly jumped on one foot, shaking the other in the air.

  Startled, Ariel looked down to find that Prospero had materialized in the room and had apparently applied his claws to the shining surface of Lord Robert’s Hessian boots. “No,” she said. “Leave them alone.”

  “That animal hates me,” declared her visitor. “Whenever I come here he goes for my boots.”

  “Perhaps there is something in the polish used on them that attracts him,” suggested Ariel.

  Lord Robert looked dumbfounded. He seemed to be completely at a loss for something to say, and when a knocking sounded from the entryway, he responded, “Someone at the door,” with visible relief.

  Ellen was already opening the door, and in a moment Lord Alan Gresham was striding into the front parlor, looking surprised to find one of his brothers there. “Good day,” he said.

  As if nothing had happened between them, Ariel thought, her anger flaring up once again. What was it about him that made the room suddenly feel too small, and changed the atmosphere so that it was difficult to catch a breath?

  “I need to speak to Miss Harding privately,” he informed Lord Robert.

  “Of course.” The latter started toward the door with some eagerness.

  “You promised to escort me on my visit,” Ariel reminded him sharply.

  “What visit?” asked Lord Alan.

  “That doesn’t ma
tter. You must wait for me,” she told Lord Robert. “I’ll only be a moment.”

  Lord Robert shuffled his feet. “Er, I…”

  “Why don’t you go and speak to Hannah,” Ariel finished.

  He brightened slightly at this and hurried from the room.

  “What visit?” repeated Lord Alan. “And what is Robert doing here? Was he looking for me? I don’t understand why—”

  “You wished to speak to me?” interrupted Ariel icily.

  “Ah.” His expression shifted. “Yes. I thought… it seemed to me important that we discuss last night.”

  “Really?” Ariel put all the sarcasm she could into the word.

  He nodded. “The, er, incident went quite against our agreement, and was… unacceptable.”

  “Is that what you would call it?”

  “You have my apologies, of course.”

  “Do I?” She was something more than angry by this time, Ariel thought, though she wasn’t entirely sure what the muddle of feelings included. She did know that they made her hands tremble.

  “Most certainly. My behavior was beyond the line, and completely out of character as well.”

  He seemed remarkably undisturbed by the idea, Ariel thought. Indeed, he talked about kissing her until she was limp as if it were some abstract event that had little to do with either of them.

  “That is why I have devoted a good deal of time since then to analyzing the occurrence.”

  “Analyzing,” echoed Ariel.

  “In an attempt to explain it,” he added. “And you will be happy to know that I have found the answer.”

  “Have you indeed?” He looked very pleased with himself, she thought, and not the least bit self-conscious in her presence. She, on the other hand, was not only trembling, but felt as if she might shriek or cry at the least provocation.

  “Yes. I have concluded that Carlton House is the problem.”

  She stared at him. “The house?”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “Not the building itself, of course, but the pernicious atmosphere there. Everything about the place works to disturb the balance of the bodily humors, perhaps the very balance of one’s mind. And then one ends up doing things that would be unthinkable anywhere else.”