Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  She hadn’t expected an answer. But it came anyway, from somewhere deep inside of her.

  Who do you want to be?

  It was all the answer Jenny needed. The world thawed. Noise returned, almost deafening after that slice of tranquility. But despite the frenetic worry that boiled around her, she carried that still center inside her. It did not waver. No mere fear of poverty could budge it.

  Behind Ned, Gareth reached out toward his cousin’s shoulder. He stopped, inches away. Ned huddled in his chair, and didn’t glance behind him. Finally, Gareth drew his hand back and wiped it against his trouser leg.

  Jenny smiled and picked her own cards from the leftovers and arranged them in order in her hand, from lowest to highest.

  Ned gathered up his cards—a handful of carefully constructed threes and fours—and sighed. He let a card fall on the table. Jenny trumped it easily with the jack she’d dealt herself. She took the next trick, too, and yawned as she did.

  She’d managed at least one thing. Ned clutched his cards, holding them as if they mattered. For the first time since she’d seen him that evening, he cared about losing.

  Across the thin table, Ned’s despair was as palpable and acrid as the smoky air Jenny breathed. Already, she’d managed to convince him he had something to lose. Jenny wanted to smile. Instead, she played her next card.

  It was the two of clubs. Ned stared in disbelief. Every card in his hand could beat it. Tentatively, he selected one and placed it on the table. He won the next round, too. They were left with one card each in their hands, and an even score.

  “You’re cruel,” Ned said bitterly. “Trying to show me how close I could come?”

  He threw the four of diamonds on the table. Gareth set his hands on Ned’s shoulders.

  For one last time, Jenny was Madame Esmerelda again, smiling that mysterious smile at two men who had no idea what would happen next, but every expectation of a poor result.

  She placed her card gently on the table.

  Ned and Gareth stared, twin expressions of shock writ over their faces. Neither moved. Then Gareth reached out one finger to prod its edge—gently—as if somehow, he could not believe what he had seen.

  Ned found his voice first. “You lost. You lost on purpose.” He scratched his head in confusion. “You lost ninety thousand pounds on purpose.”

  Jenny hopped off the table and leaned down, picking up the coins Ned had scattered onto the floor. “No, Mr. Carhart. I lost sixteen pounds, five shillings on purpose.” She stacked his winnings gently atop the final cards. “And eight pennies. You shouldn’t forget the eight pennies.”

  Ned stared at the coins. “But why? I don’t understand.”

  Jenny shrugged. “I told you I was a liar and a cheat. I didn’t tell you who I planned to cheat.”

  Ned shook his head. “What kind of idiot cheats himself?”

  There was no need to respond to that one, not even with a wry gesture at the culprit. Ned flushed pink.

  “When you first came to me, Ned, I had a choice of lies. You wanted to know if there was anything in your future besides unhappiness and irresponsibility. I could have told you the truth. The truth is, people rarely change. The truth is, men who drink too much often lead foolish, irresponsible lives. The truth is, you had too much money and not enough sense to ever grow into the kind of man you yearned to be.”

  Ned flinched with every sentence.

  “So I lied to you.”

  “You told me what I wanted to hear.” His voice was small.

  Jenny shook her head. “I told you what you needed to hear. I still see it, you know. When I look at you, I still see a boy growing into a man, honorable and tall. I see a man who will one day command respect.”

  Ned’s hands shook and his eyes glistened. “Another lie?” His voice trembled. “You don’t know what it is really like, what I have thought—”

  “It is as much a lie today as it was then. And isn’t it strange? Since I’ve known you, you’ve become intensely loyal, unwilling to let others look down on those who matter to you. I watched you grow into that falsehood I told. Not despite the lie, but because of it.”

  Jenny picked up the stack of coins on the table. Sixteen pounds. Every penny she owned in the world. She reached across the table and took Ned’s right hand. The metal piled nicely into his palm.

  “Just because I cheat,” she said, “doesn’t mean I cheated you. You see, there is nothing on this earth so powerful as a lie that can come true.”

  Ned let out his breath in a shudder. “Madame—”

  “Jenny.”

  Ned shut his eyes. “Jenny. You don’t understand. I’ve made a mess of my life. It wasn’t much to start with. And—” His other hand closed on top of hers. “And you told me the darkness would not return, but it does. How can I fight it for the rest of my life?”

  “What do you need to do today? Think of that. Don’t let it out of your mind. And once you’ve taken that step, look to tomorrow. You don’t need to figure out your whole life all at once. Just take one step at a time.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Ned mused.

  “That’s an illusion. It’s very, very hard. But if you keep going, you’ll get there.” Jenny stood up and gently pulled her hands from Ned’s grip. She leaned across the table and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Carhart,” she whispered.

  And then she turned. Her skirts tangled about her ankles as she hastened from the room.

  GARETH TOOK ONE LAST LOOK at Ned. His cousin was staring at the coins collected on the table, a look of shock on his face. He looked up at Gareth. His eyes reflected Gareth’s own dazed confusion. And for the first time since that dreadful evening when Gareth had walked in on that debacle with Lady Kathleen, Ned’s eyes flared with hope.

  “Well,” Ned said, “What are you waiting for? Go after her.”

  Gareth turned and fled. He dashed downstairs, out of the too-hot hell into the chilled air. She was disappearing into the fog down the street.

  He ran after her. “Jenny. Wait.” She turned around. He caught up with her and grabbed her elbow. “You can’t—”

  The words choked him. If she’d just demonstrated anything, it was that she could. After all, she had. It was he who hadn’t been able to do what was needed.

  “It’s not safe,” he finished idiotically, “for a woman to walk alone. Let me call you a hack.”

  She swallowed. “I haven’t any money to pay one.”

  “I wasn’t proposing to leave you with the fare.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I wasn’t proposing to let you walk out without a word, either.”

  Not that any number of words would ever encompass what he felt now.

  She’d once accused him of seeing the worst in people. Perhaps that was because Jenny saw things outside the bounds of his comprehension. And not only did she see them, she spoke of them. And they became real on the strength of her hope.

  Her gaze traveled down to the hand he’d clamped on her elbow.

  “Very well,” she said slowly.

  He went through the motions of hailing a hackney driver and delivering her direction. Then he followed her into the hired conveyance.

  A terrible lump built in his breast.

  He wondered how much of Jenny’s success as Madame Esmerelda had been built on the strength of that peculiar talent. Real hope, masked in mumbo jumbo and fraud. If he saw the worst in people, it was because he’d traded his own hope in years ago when he’d let Lord Blakely own the lion’s share of Gareth’s life.

  Now he saw hope again and he didn’t want to let it go. He didn’t want to let her go.

  Gareth had not believed in Ned. He hadn’t really believed in his own sister. These days he scarcely believed in himself, either. He’d not believed he could find any measure of happiness in London. Before he’d met Jenny, his days had stretched in front of him, false and hollow, a line of dire backbreaking responsibility, untempered by any true joy.
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  He desperately longed for her benediction, for a measure of the grace she so easily bestowed on others.

  “So.” He kept his tone light. Jocular. He didn’t dare betray how important the question was to him. “You look at my sister and see a powerful woman. You look at Ned and see an honorable man. I must seem a veritable giant of a fellow. Whatever do you see when you look at me?”

  She responded to his tone with a casual smile. “Oh, all manner of wicked things.”

  Ah. So he was nothing but a bloody good shag. Gareth swallowed his leaden disappointment. I was serious, he protested internally. But maybe she had been, too. Maybe she uncovered by intuition what he had always known by logic: that there was no grace for him. She had told him he must be very lonely. She had been right—she’d seen through his pompous, arrogant mask, right to the bleak darkness inside of him that yearned for companionship and friendship.

  Maybe that was all this meant to her. Sex and sympathy.

  Gareth shut his eyes and fought for nonchalance. “Wicked things? What am I doing to you?”

  She whispered in his ear. Her hand fell on his thigh. Despite the black roil in his gut, his body tensed, and he vowed to do every one of those things to her, and more. Tonight. Maybe, if he did them well enough she would see more than there was, in violation of all the laws of nature. Maybe he could fool her into believing there was more to him than a cold man with a deep-seated loneliness.

  But her smile stretched too wide, her laugh pitched too high. She, too, was holding something back. It came to him. Those words she’d said—everything you own, pitted against everything I own.

  She’d had no clients recently.

  But she’d said—he’d been certain of it—that she had some money saved. He’d given the matter no more thought. Just as he’d thoughtlessly assumed she had a maid secreted away somewhere to assist her in putting on a gown.

  “My God, Jenny,” he interrupted, “you really mean you couldn’t pay the fare.”

  She looked away. “It’s none of your concern, Gareth.”

  “Not my concern! You told me you had money saved. What the devil did you mean by that?”

  “I did,” she said stiffly. “I had four hundred pounds. It’s been…misplaced.”

  His head pounded. “First, four hundred pounds hardly signifies. I pay White more than that in a year. And second, why did you say nothing to me? What am I to you?”

  “You aren’t my banker, that’s for certain.”

  His hand closed around her wrist. “What else can’t you pay, Jenny?”

  She sighed. “Everything. It’s not a problem. I had a plan.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  She exhaled slowly. “I planned to sell everything I own and leave.”

  “Leave.” His fingers convulsed on her wrist. “Leave me.”

  “Leave London,” she clarified, as if that would ease the pain that spread like a net of fire, sharp pinpricks settling under his skin. Her pulse thumped through the wrist he clutched. It was steady and even. Staid. Her heart beat in a normal tempo. Of course; it was only his that constricted into a cold, dark lump.

  “Ah. And leaving me would just be an unintended consequence. One you had not planned to inform me about.”

  “I would have told you. Eventually. I didn’t think I meant that much—”

  He kissed her, hard and fast, before she could finish that horrendous lie.

  “Humbug,” he said when he let her go. “I know I never know the right thing to say. I’m a damned nuisance. But you’re not stupid. You know I adore you.”

  She was silent. She should not have been silent. She should have been throwing herself at him, professing her own adoration. Jenny, the woman who saw strength and courage everywhere else, had nothing to say about Gareth.

  Well. He’d wanted to know how she saw him.

  Now he knew.

  Chapter Nineteen

  BY THE TIME THEY REACHED Jenny’s home, separate factions in Gareth’s head had broken out in a pitched battle. He could not help but respect what she’d done for Ned. He’d not known what to think, what to say. And when she’d laid that final card…He’d thought, in that second, that he was more than a little in love with her.

  But she was leaving. She was leaving him—the Marquess of Blakely. There were no words for the fury that made him feel. Black rage boiled up. Without even trying, she’d walked into that gaming hell, her hair billowing around her like an aurora. She’d done with ten minutes and sixteen pounds what Gareth had not accomplished in two days. What he could not have done, if he was honest, in two years with sixteen thousand pounds. And she was leaving him, as if he were nothing to her.

  She opened her door, unaware that Gareth was engaged in a fierce battle for his soul.

  He reached for her before she could move. He caught her lips against his. Damn her, but she kissed him back without reservation, her hands roaming over his tense body. How well she knew him. How well she knew to touch him like that, running her hands down his abdomen, her fingers points of pressure against his skin.

  Hot rage. Fierce love. Intense anguish. And above it all, that damnable knowledge that she was leaving him. She was leaving him. God. He pushed her against the wall roughly, pressing his hips against hers.

  She moaned against him, opening to his touch. If there were light, she would have seen the black marks that his coal-dark heart must be leaving against her skin. But there was nothing but murk inside. Murk and midnight. He unbuttoned the fall of his trousers and lifted her against the wall. He pulled her drawers down and pushed her petticoats up. And then, arms trembling, he thrust into her in one stroke.

  She was wet and welcoming. She sank around him, and firm, tight bliss shot from his groin clear to the top of his head and then down again. The muscles of her passage gripped his member; she wrapped her legs around him. Pulling him against her. Welcoming him inside her.

  He took what she offered. Every stroke sent longing spiraling through him. He didn’t want to just flood her with his seed. He wanted to flood her with his entire being.

  If he could bring her to climax before him, maybe he could make her forget that it had been he who’d been impotent to do anything about his cousin.

  If he did it twice, maybe she’d forget she’d ever planned to leave.

  Illusions all, but with her body clenched around his, illusions were what he needed.

  And so he angled himself inside her. He circled his hips against hers while her moans grew sharper. Louder. Harder. Her hands raked along his back. And then she clamped down on him. Hot, hard waves crashed through her and into him. She screamed his name, her body tensing in his arms. Gareth rode those waves.

  But in this thing, too, he was outside his skills. He’d intended to calm down, to take her to pleasure once again. But he couldn’t stop. Not with her body pulsing warmly around him. Instead, he let out a groan and pumped hard. Pleasure propagated down his stiff cock and out his groin. It filled him like dark, warm water. He grabbed her close and spent himself inside her with a wordless roar.

  The fire passed gradually. And there was nothing around him but the dark of the night and the velvet warmth of her body.

  He shivered inside her, pushing her against the wall. Not letting her go. His muscles trembled with the effort of holding her legs high on his hips, but he would be damned if he’d give up this closeness. Instead, he pressed into her. She sighed warm air against his neck.

  She didn’t say anything.

  She didn’t have to.

  She was still planning to leave him, and the very thought choked all returning coherence from his mind.

  The rage of lust had burnt from him. And now on this charred battleground, he realized that the war inside him had ended. Peace had broken out. But the surrender that had been negotiated was not a strict win for either party.

  Gareth would not let Jenny wrap him up like a convenient package, brought to his knees. He’d make her need him as much as he needed her. More
. She’d thought to let him go with no more than a sigh and a kiss goodbye? He would show her, once and for all, that she was wrong. She should have cared for him enough to not say goodbye.

  His thoughts distilled until nothing was left but a single chant, repeated over and over.

  “You’re not leaving,” he growled in her ear. “I’m going to keep you.”

  Her chest expanded against his in a shivering breath. She turned her head away in rebuttal.

  He kissed her ear. “Are you planning to go any time before tomorrow at two?”

  She shook her head. Her hair pressed against his lips.

  “Good. I’ll come ’round then and take you for a drive.”

  He couldn’t let her go. He wouldn’t.

  NED HAD READ IN travel diaries about northern climes where, when winter reigned, the sun disappeared for months. In summer, the sun would never set. That’s how he’d classified his life. It fell into two parts: years of near-frenetic bliss, followed by months of darkness. Until last night, the two had never met.

  But last night he’d won a portion of hope at five-card loo.

  The Duke of Ware lived in a stone edifice in Mayfair. Solid blocks of stone, once white, now streaked with generations of London soot, stretched up four stories. The dark walls terminated in a slate roof, the steep line of which was interrupted by blackened chimneys and rectangular attic windows. The house was every bit as imposing as Ned had imagined it.

  Ned took a deep breath and walked up the steps to the door. If Ned had asked, Blakely would have come with him.

  But Ned hadn’t wanted to delegate his life to another. Not again. Madame Esmerelda had lied to him; Blakely had shoved him around. In the end, none of it had made any difference. The darkness he’d feared had enveloped him anyway.

  Still he stood, waiting to take one tiny step forward.