by Louise Allen
Chapter Fourteen
‘…and Lord Dreycott took me in,’ Lina finished, perhaps half an hour later. ‘I have heard nothing from my aunt, so I wrote to Cook, who lives out, the other day, but there has been no reply from there either. Now I do not know what to do.’
‘So this man Makepeace forced you to go to Tolhurst?’ Quinn was looking decidedly sceptical.
‘Yes! What choice did I have?’
‘Run away.’
‘Where to?’
‘Back to Suffolk,’ he said as though it should have been obvious.
‘My father would have thrown me out.’ She was not convincing him, she could see. ‘And my sister had gone, too.’
‘And you say Makepeace told you that and you believed him?’
She had not thought that the man had lied, Lina realised. Of course, that was the sort of lie he would tell. Then the way Quinn was phrasing his questions hit her. He thought she was telling another pack of lies.
‘Your father is a vicar,’ he persisted. ‘Am I to believe he would be seen to throw you out? He would be angry, I have no doubt. Had he ever struck you?’
‘No,’ she admitted. He had whipped Meg, but never her or Bella. ‘But he shouts—’
‘Are you telling me that being shouted at by your father is worse than being deflowered by Tolhurst?’
‘No, of course not. But Makepeace was demanding the money. If he didn’t get it, he would do all those dreadful things at The Blue Door.’
‘He would do them anyway. You are an intelligent woman, you would know that.’
‘You do not believe me, do you?’ she demanded.
‘I believe that you are being groomed as your aunt’s successor by both her and her business partner. You would not welcome the encounter with Tolhurst, but you accepted it as a necessary evil. After that, yes, I believe that you are not responsible for the theft.’
‘Why should I lie to you now?’ Lina wanted to weep. She thought that she had Quinn’s support. Yes, he was right: her story was full of holes if it was looked at objectively, in cold blood. But how to convince a confident, courageous man that at the time she had felt terrified, trapped, without any option but to submit?
Perhaps if she had thrown herself on his mercy right at the beginning, he would have believed her. But now she had lied to him, deceived him, shown herself less than chaste.
‘For the same reason you wanted to be my lover once I had heard Inchbold’s story—because you need me.’
‘I see.’ Lina felt too miserable even to protest. She lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes. ‘So, what happens now?’ He could not throw her out because of the will. They were tied to each other.
‘We must both go to London,’ Quinn said, startling her so much she sat bolt upright. ‘Letters are too dangerous.’
‘We? You will take me? You will help?’
‘Of course.’ Quinn was staring back at her. ‘Do you think I would abandon this—you—now?’
‘But it will compromise you even more if I am caught,’ she protested. ‘If they come back, you can say you were mistaken in the dates or something, but if you do something active, then it makes you an accessory, does it not?’
‘Yes. So we will not be caught.’
We, Lina repeated to herself. We. I am not alone any more. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. ‘I do not know why you should, after I lied to you, but I am just so grateful.’
‘I dislike injustice as much as I dislike lying,’ Quinn said. Lina dropped her eyes from the look in his. He was disappointed in her as well as angry, she realised. ‘We will go to my town house—the one I have purchased and spent one night in so far—and establish you as my mistress, just in case the Runners are still taking an interest. I will write to Gregor tomorrow, tell him to work faster to open it up and employ servants.’
‘The will,’ Lina recalled, and her heart sank. Of course, there had to be a reason why this would not work.
‘There is no reason that you must stay here. You are entitled to, but I do not read that codicil as compelling you to remain here. If I cannot clear your name in six months, then I will send you abroad until I can.’
‘Abroad?’
‘Better than Newgate, wouldn’t you say? But that’s academic—we will face it if we have to.’
The relief that he was not abandoning her made it difficult to think straight, but she still felt so guilty. ‘You would do all this for me after I embroiled you in it, lied to you. How can I repay you? I…I led you on to make love to me when you believed I was not a virgin. But I am not any more. If you still want me, then I will be your mistress, Quinn.’
Even as she said it, Lina knew she was making a mistake. Quinn’s face hardened and his hands closed into fists on the arms of the big chair, but when he spoke his voice was calm. ‘If I give you money for sex, you say that makes you a whore,’ he said. ‘If you give me sex for protection, what does that make me?’
‘A bodyguard?’ Celina ventured, her cheeks flaming. Pride, male honour, this man’s honour. She understood none of it well enough, it seemed, and now she had blundered again.
Quinn felt the anger and the tension dissolve. He wanted to laugh for what seemed the first time all day, and controlled the impulse, afraid if he began he would not stop. His innocent courtesan-in-training had managed to put her dainty foot in it, yet again. And this time, he was convinced, she had meant it as a genuine gesture, offering him the one thing of worth she possessed: herself.
He wished she would put some real value on herself, he thought. But perhaps the prospect of the gallows made everything else—honesty, virtue—unimportant. She knew too much, including how to lie and how to act, but she was still too innocent for her own good. He could not stay cross with her any longer, even if letting go of his anger made him vulnerable to the physical attraction that had him aching for her. But he would not trust her over anything but the fact she had no idea what had happened to that sapphire.
‘Celina, have you ever desired a man physically before?’ he asked, seeing the pink turn to deep rose as she shook her head. ‘I know you enough to realise that you will be sorry if you waste that first experience with someone you don’t have strong, real feelings for, someone who does not feel like that about you. You are a romantic. I am flattered you are attracted to me, but I do not sleep with romantic virgins.’
He was wasting his breath, wasting the emotion with which he tried to convince her of the importance of what he was saying. She probably thought he was a complete hypocrite, a rake lecturing a woman he had just been with on the importance of romantic love, of chastity and waiting for the right man.
But he could recall what it had been like to feel that the act of love was sacred and he knew the bitterness of romantic youth on having that belief shattered. His entire adult life had been turned around because of one young woman’s lack of honour and the disillusion it had brought. In his anger he thought of revenge on any society female careless enough to put herself in his power, but he knew in his heart he would never do that. But the men who had trapped and traduced him—they would pay.
‘But I am not a—’
‘Yes, you are, in here.’ He touched his forehead as she frowned at him. ‘You had convinced yourself that you could separate whatever happened with Tolhurst from what is inside you, but, believe me, you cannot.’
She looked away, biting her lip.
‘You have my word that I will help you, Celina. I do not need paying with anything—except truth.’
There was no response, just a tiny shake of her head, so Quinn pressed on with the practicalities, working it out as he spoke. ‘Tomorrow I will write to Gregor to expect us, tie up the loose ends here and you will practise with the macquillage until you can fool a lady’s maid into thinking you use it all the time. Then the day after we will leave for London by post-chaise. And I want you to write down every single thing you can remember from the moment you agreed to go to Tolhurst until the moment you arrived back at
The Blue Door. Everything, every tiny detail. Describe it as though you had to paint a picture of each scene. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ Celina nodded. ‘You are looking for clues about the sapphire.’ She yawned hugely, transformed before his eyes from a desirable, beautiful, dangerous creature into a tired young woman with too much to bear on her slender shoulders. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’
‘If you tell me you are sorry one more time, I will turn you over my knee,’ Quinn threatened. He was tired of gratitude, he just wanted honesty. Then he wished he had not spoken, as the image of her squirming in his lap while he stroked that perfect peach-like bottom had the inevitable result. ‘Go to bed.’
Celina scrambled off the bed. ‘Goodnight, Quinn.’ She leaned in as she passed him and dropped a hesitant kiss on his cheek as he was off guard getting to his feet. ‘Thank you.’
Hell. There goes a night’s sleep. He was not certain whether he dreaded the inevitable erotic dreams or the familiar nightmares most.
‘How can you read with the carriage swaying about like this?’ Lina asked, clutching at the strap with both hands as the post-chaise lived up to its nickname of yellow bounder over a particularly rutted piece of road. ‘I would be sick in an instant.’
‘You get used to it. It is worse reading on camelback,’ Quinn said, his eyes fixed on the sheaf of papers she had given him that morning as they set off for London.
‘Really?’ Images of camel trains trekking across boundless deserts filled her imagination. Oh, to be away from here, away to somewhere strange and wild and free. With Quinn.
‘It is like being on a ship in a swell. It rolls back and forth and side to side at the same time and you are a long way off the ground,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on the page as he removed a pencil from behind his ear to make a note. ‘Is this Makepeace a man of means?’
‘He’s a crocodile,’ Lina said, the camels merging into a vision of the River Nile, its banks covered in evil, grinning reptiles. ‘Have you ever seen the Nile?’
‘Yes. And the crocodiles,’ Quinn added, looking up and smiling. ‘But has he money?’
‘I have no idea. He is very anxious to get his teeth into The Blue Door and to do disgusting things that would make higher profits. Why? Surely he could not have stolen the sapphire?’
‘I agree. I don’t think he would risk alienating a good client by staging a theft while one of his girls was on the premises.’
One of his girls. That is me, Lina thought, trying not to be hurt by Quinn’s choice of words. She had to accept that he classed her as a courtesan. He had taken her virginity and that, she knew, put her on the wrong side of the wafer-thin line that divided decent women from their fallen sisters. One thrust of that hard body and she was ruined, but for him she had been lost before that, ruined from the moment when she had chosen to stay and not flee from Makepeace.
It was strange being shut up with him in the post-chaise. Yesterday’s flurry of activity had given her little time to reflect on the events of the previous evening, yet now she was alone with the man who had taken her virginity, the man she still wanted with a passion that she knew she did not have the vocabulary of words, or actions, to express.
The rake had vanished. So had the man amusing himself by playing the country gentleman. This was the traveller and the adventurer now, planning an expedition, heading into danger. And she could see the scholar, too, in the concentration on her story, the search for clues, the precise notes.
‘I need to get inside The Blue Door and talk to your aunt,’ he said, frowning at the page. ‘I imagine that will not be difficult?’
‘It will not be, provided she is well,’ Lina agreed. ‘But she suffers from a stomach complaint that sometimes lays her low for days at a time. She was ill with that when I left.’
‘Then you must tell me how to reach her rooms. Makepeace will want to help clear the smear from the name of the establishment, but I am assuming he does not know where you have gone and we cannot risk him deciding to ingratiate himself with the authorities by betraying you.’
‘So you accept I have reason to fear him?’
‘Of course.’ Quinn raised one eyebrow. ‘Brothel keepers are rarely people of finer feeling or elevated moral standards.’
‘I had better come with you,’ Lina said, pushing away the logical conclusion that he classed her, and her aunt, in the same category. ‘The house is a maze.’
She expected him to refuse, point blank. Instead he looked at her, while he pushed a lock of tawny hair back behind one ear. ‘It would be dangerous.
Besides the risk of you being captured, there is a strong probability that I will run foul of the doormen and you could end up in a fistfight.’
‘I have no doubt that you would deal with them.’ And without hesitation, either. He was used to living where violence was an everyday occurrence and, even if she had not overheard Michael’s awestruck comments about the training sessions in the barn, she knew he was hard and fit.
‘Do I frighten you?’ Quinn asked, startling her out of her recollections of his naked body.
‘Yes,’ Lina said.’ Yes. You are outside society, outside convention. You are free in a way I do not understand.’ And I love you. The realisation drove the breath from her lungs and the blood from her face. In all her daydreams it had never occurred to her that her true love might be utterly out of her reach.
‘I would never hurt you,’ Quinn said as he reached for her hands, obviously thinking her reaction was alarm. ‘Not more than I have already,’ he added under his breath.
‘I know.’ Lina let him take her hands, curled her fingers within his for a second before freeing herself. She must not indulge her need to touch him, for she was frightened now with the vision of their parting all too plain in front of her. What was she going to do, feeling like this about a man who would be gone from her life within months? ‘I…’ Love you. I will always love you. ‘I trust you, Quinn.’
‘Then rest, relax. We will defeat the dragons together.’ He went back to reading her narrative for what, she was convinced, was the fifth time. Dragons. My knight, set on a quest to rescue a very tarnished damsel. And he said together. Does he really mean that? Can he possibly mean to treat me as an equal partner in this when he does not entirely trust me?
‘Of course we will,’ Lina said. ‘Although I am not very experienced with adventures,’ she added. ‘Or dragons.’ It was only fair to warn him. ‘My sisters always said I was the timid one.’
Quinn stared at her. ‘Timid? I hardly think so. You ran away from home and got yourself to London. Had you ever travelled by yourself before?’ She shook her head. ‘Then you climbed out of a window to escape from Tolhurst’s house and got to Simon. You coped with the shock of his death and my arrival.’
Lina bit her lip at the satirical tone in his voice when he said that. Her subterfuge was not forgiven. ‘I—’ Well, yes, she had done those things. Perhaps she was not totally lacking in courage.
‘You stood up to the Runner, too, even though you were so frightened. That takes nerve.’
‘I did not do it very well,’ Lina muttered, thinking how utterly she had relied on Quinn. Without him she would have simply collapsed, she was certain.
‘Rather too well, perhaps,’ Quinn said, his eyes on the papers. One corner of his mouth twitched, just a little.
What would he do if she changed seats, curled up next to him and kissed that provoking hint of a smile? He would probably pick her up and deposit her firmly back where she was now, she concluded, not certain whether that was a good thing or not.
His actions had meant that, even though she had lost her virginity, it was, perhaps, not as bad as it sounded. There was no risk that she was with child, she had acquired none of the experience of a lover, even though he had seemed to find her attempts to caress him convincing. If there ever was another man, perhaps he would believe her a virgin still. More lies. And besides, she could imagine wanting no other man but Quinn, ever.
> But now he certainly appeared well able to resist whatever it was about her that had so aroused him when he thought to make her his mistress.
Of course he could. She had lied and had put him in a position where he had to lie, too, or betray her. And then she had let him make love to her believing she was a woman of experience, a woman who had been married. Instead he finds himself deflowering a virgin and that obviously outraged his honour even more than the lying. It is a good thing I was already ruined by my association with The Blue Door or he might have felt honour bound to—to marry me?
Oh, yes, that is likely, Lina mocked herself. It was better to jeer at the thought than to take it seriously, even for a moment, for the pain of dreaming was just too great. The daughter of an obscure country vicar marrying a baron? Even if she had been utterly respectable, it was highly unlikely. But now, she was quite impossible. Quinn had enough of a problem with his own reputation and retrieving that, without involving himself with her. He would need to make a careful, well-judged, marriage to someone of the utmost respectability who would not mind when he took himself off on his travels for months at a time.
‘Don’t sigh,’ he said without looking up. ‘You must not get despondent or you will lose your will to fight and you need every drop of that.’
‘I’m not despondent, exactly,’ Lina said. ‘But how is getting into The Blue Door going to help?’
‘One thing at a time.’ Quinn tapped his teeth with his pencil and frowned at her notes. ‘You told your aunt that you could not recall whether Tolhurst had been wearing the ring when you arrived, but now you think he was?’
‘I was in such a state when I got home that I could hardly think straight,’ she admitted. ‘But writing everything down like that, I began to recall. He made me undress and he was… I tried not to look at him but he was taking off his own clothing and I saw a blue flash, which must have been the ring catching the light.’
‘Which side?’
‘The left side. And it was the left hand that Reginald Tolhurst, his son, lifted to feel for a pulse. But I must have been wrong, imagining things, because the ring was not there then. He laid his father’s hand back on his chest and his fingers were in plain sight.’