The Perils of Pleasure

by Julie Anne Long

  He pictured how he might go about it: tipping Madeleine Greenway’s silky head back into his palm and taking her lips with his own, that first sweet, dark taste of her mouth, her tongue. Dragging his fingers slowly, slowly, down over the silky skin of her throat to snag in her bodice, dragging the bodice gently down to free her breast for his fingers, his palm, his tongue. Easing her back down over their spread blanket, pushing her dress up to her hips, looking down into her dark eyes while he fitted his own hard, hungry body between her legs. Her arms around his neck, pulling him closer—

  That white heat roared through his veins again, and he nearly closed his eyes. Christ.

  It had been too long. Too long.

  He took in a steadying breath. And made his decision.

  Colin dipped his hand into his coat pocket, leaned down against the wall, slid down to sit next to her, a distance of a foot or so away, and rested his closed hands on his knees.

  She spared him a wry glance from those dark eyes. And a tiny, rueful smile.

  “Hold out your hand, Mrs. Greenway,” he commanded softly.

  She looked askance at him. “Why?”

  “Oh…just do it. I want to read your palm.”

  She snorted softly in disbelief. But out came her hand, palm up.

  And he settled the little crystal bottle of lavender water gently in it.

  She went still. She stared at it for a moment, looking almost frightened. And then:

  “Oh.” It was part gasp, part laugh, and all pleasure. All in all, a glorious little sound. When Colin heard it, he knew he’d thoroughly surprised her and that she’d let down her guard for the very first time since he’d set eyes on her, and that it was absolutely the best gift he’d ever given.

  “I stole it from the countess.”

  For a moment it seemed she couldn’t speak. The candlelight picked out the facets of the bottle, setting each one aglow in turn, and Madeleine seemed transfixed.

  And then she found her composure. “Stealing. Admirable of you.”

  “It’s the least I could do. You bought me a very fine hat.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, admiring the little bottle together.

  And then she turned her head slowly to him, her soft smile fading. Their eyes met, and Colin felt it again, like a fuse racing along his spine, a peculiarly spiked, shockingly compelling desire. Now. He should do it now. Perhaps cradle her jaw in his hand and lean in and—

  He breathed in, breathed out, and battling every instinct he possessed, slowly turned his head away again.

  They were quiet together for a few moments longer.

  Then Colin clasped his fingers together and spread them out, stretching them.

  “We’ll take it in turns,” he pronounced arrogantly.

  She jerked her head toward him, predictably bristling at the tone of command. “We’ll take what in—”

  “Sleeping.”

  A little pause. “You will take the first sleeping shift,” she, again predictably, insisted.

  He pretended to mull this over. “All right,” he agreed, with feigned ill grace. “Don’t touch my stick while I’m sleeping.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Eversea.”

  Despite themselves, they both enjoyed the innuendo. He was smiling as he unfolded the blanket, and so was she, a little.

  And Colin was inordinately pleased that he’d managed to give Madeleine Greenway a little of her strength back.

  He wrapped himself in the blanket and stretched out there on the surgery floor in his stocking feet, which he hoped smelled better now that the doctor had given them a washing, as Madeleine Greenway would need to share another small room with them and she was not one of his brothers.

  “You’d best wake me for my watch,” he warned.

  “I will,” she promised. Sounding amused now.

  He watched Madeleine Greenway through slit eyes, sitting quietly, her profile, that straight nose and that soft-looking lower lip of hers, lovely in the semidark. He pretended to be asleep so he could simply watch her—it was the sort of trick one perfects when one is the youngest of mischievous brothers—adjusting his breathing to deep and even, and keeping his eyes open to mere slits.

  And she was more or less still for a long while, apart from turning the bottle into the soft light to admire it. The facets winked like the mirrors used by smugglers to signal ships. And she moved only a few times more while he watched. Once, to open up the lavender water and hold it up to her nose. She touched her fingers to it, touched her fingers to her throat, and closed it carefully.

  And then again, much later, when he was still watching, she brushed her knuckle roughly against the corner of her eye. And the candlelight told him that the knuckle came away damp and shining like the crystal bottle she held.

  And damned if he could sleep for a long time after that.

  Chapter 14

  “Your coffin is ready, Mr. Eversea.”

  If he ever emerged from this ordeal, Colin thought, he might harbor fond thoughts and gratitude for Dr. August, but he would not be inviting him to any dinner parties. He suspected his idea of humor would result in a greater than usual number of awkward silences.

  It was a simple pine coffin, freshly banged together and still sweating resin, the sort most criminals were loaded into after they were hung in the Old Bailey if they didn’t have families to take their bodies away. The kind thousands of people every year were sealed up into before they were buried in pauper’s graves, and that the hospital produced by the dozens.

  No one would question the transport of a coffin away from the hospital. The doctor was very clever.

  Dr. August had asked that it be delivered at dawn, and there it was now, right outside his surgery door. Madeleine was to play the role of the relative come to fetch the body away, and this, too, would hardly be questioned. The city was generally relieved when relatives turned up to take bodies away, as the burial of paupers was a burdensome expense for London.

  “I managed to put breathing holes on the left side of it with an awl, Mr. Eversea. As long as you keep your head turned to the left, you won’t suffocate. Try not to sneeze, however, lest you want the assistants carrying you out to the cart to drop dead of terror and thus break all your limbs. They think you’re headed for the pauper’s cemetery. And they’ll be here any moment.”

  Colin and Madeleine peered into the coffin. It had thoughtfully been lined with straw for his comfort. As though he were a broody chicken getting ready to lay.

  Madeleine didn’t particularly enjoy watching Colin climb into the coffin. But then again, she was grateful to have a few moments to herself, to think.

  She’d shaken Colin awake for his shift at watch, as promised; wordlessly, with a groggy half smile and a salute, he’d righted himself against the wall as she tipped down to the blanket. And she had slept a few hours, a shallow sleep that ran active, vivid, almost feverish dreams through her mind, and she remembered seeing Colin Eversea’s face in them. She didn’t feel rested.

  She did, however, smell like lavender water.

  Madeleine lifted her wrist up on pretense of tucking a hair behind her ear, and surreptitiously brushed the inside of her wrist against her nose, because there was a tiny starburst of pleasure in her chest every time she did. Imagine Eversea Colin stealing the lavender water from the countess.

  He’d noticed her lavender scent. Colin Eversea was, in fact, unnervingly good at noticing things.

  He wasn’t at all what she expected. No: this wasn’t true. He was everything she’d expected from everything she’d read about him—he was irritating, frivolous, arrogant, disconcertingly charming. It was just that she would not have suspected his intelligence had depth, that his wit was in part defense, that his charm was a result of, in part, startlingly acute perception and even…grace.

  Madeleine had grieved her family five years ago, deeply, darkly. But in truth, apart from moments of weakness that inevitably took her over, grief no longer owned her. Gra
nted, the shadows of it remained around the edges of her life, giving it depth and dimension. It had both softened and strengthened her.

  And now he knew. Colin Eversea had witnessed her weakness, skirted it with sensitivity, made her laugh, and then he’d given her lavender water. If he’d touched her at all last night, she would have gone easily to him, this man who knew how to seduce and had made rather a career of it. She didn’t doubt for a moment how badly he’d wanted to. She wasn’t naive.

  But he hadn’t.

  This morning, after they breakfasted on some of the countess’s donated food, they both bathed modestly—more of an inadequate dabbing of faces with water from the doctor’s basin and cotton wool from the surgery cabinet—and then Madeleine shook out her long, dark hair, combed it with her fingers as best she could, and repinned it, using a mirror found in the doctor’s surgery for guidance.

  Colin Eversea had watched all of this in unabashed, avid silence.

  She’d pretended to ignore him for a little while. And then she really couldn’t, so she slid him a wry glance.

  “I would pay to watch you do that.”

  He’d said it idly, but the words contained a low fervor that landed arrow-sharp at the base of her spine, rayed through her. For a sweet, utterly shocking instant she couldn’t breathe.

  So simple, the words. So mundane, really. But this was desire. As fresh and potent as if she’d never felt desire before in her life.

  And such were the dangers of Colin Eversea’s charm. And there was a peculiar terror in this for her, too.

  Madeleine’s last glimpse of him before the coffin lid closed over him was a smile and raised brows. It wasn’t a good moment, but in a way it was a relief. Because she wanted very much to be alone with her thoughts.

  Allegedly the beleaguered family member pressed into driving him away to the pauper’s cemetery, she hovered next to the coffin and tried to look quietly bereft and not terrified. Perhaps “pale” would be interpreted easily as either. Given how cold her hands felt inside her gloves now, she could well assume she was now pale.

  As it turned out, the two men who arrived, summoned by the pull of a bell to carry the coffin out and hoist it into the cart, were disinterested in both her and the contents of the coffin. They had something else to discuss.

  “One hundred pounds fer Colin Eversea!” one said to the other. “Can ye imagine!”

  One hundred pounds for Colin Eversea. This was the other thread that had run through her restless dreams. One hundred pounds, and she could be free again.

  Madeleine was scarcely spared a glance as the two men performed the grim and practical little duty of sliding the pine box into the back of the wagon, and mercifully neither noticed the neat pattern of holes drilled into one side, obscured momentarily by straw.

  Then they marched off again in their heavy work boots, duty done.

  The man allegedly worth one hundred pounds lay very still in his wooden box.

  Dr. August was distant and polite throughout the loading of Colin Eversea. As he handed Madeleine up into the cart, he pressed several pound notes into the palm of her hand without a change of expression. Five of them, she counted, tucking them into her sleeve surreptitiously.

  She cracked the reins over the thick back of the horses someone had found to do the duty of transporting the coffin—did they belong to the hospital?—then turned her head and saw Dr. August mouth the word:

  Godspeed.

  Silence and force of habit woke Marcus Eversea early. He was alone in the London town house because his perhaps permanently stunned family—the Everseas had done a lot of things over the years, but never had one of them vanished from the gallows in a puff of smoke—had returned to Pennyroyal Green, Louisa included, to prepare for his wedding.

  Marcus, regretfully, lingered in London because he couldn’t fight his nature or his blood.

  By nature he was a thorough man, and a man of commerce, a lover of money, and there was an important meeting of the Mercury Club this week involving formal approval of a new member. He refused to miss it.

  By blood he was pure Eversea. Which meant he was suspicious of all things Redmond.

  And the new Mercury Club member just happened to be Isaiah Redmond’s man of affairs.

  It was a trifle unusual to promote someone of Mr. Baxter’s social status to the stature of full Mercury Club member, but perhaps because Isaiah Redmond himself had put forth Baxter for membership, and perhaps because Baxter had acted as unofficial secretary for the Mercury Club since its inception and shown significant competence in managing its affairs, no members had yet objected—outwardly, anyhow. Baxter had in fact been an informally approved and acting member for some months now, enjoying the considerable benefits of membership: the Mercury Club’s fine dining room and offices and handsome, modern carriage; entrée into social circles denied him as a mere man of affairs; opportunities to combine his money with the fortunes of other successful men and thus increase his own fortunes considerably.

  Marcus had begun to wonder if he objected. He was as egalitarian as the next man when it came to doing business with others of lesser social rank.

  Nevertheless.

  A look at the club books was in order. But Marcus in general found numbers pleasantly lulling, and he thought a good look at the books might divert him from the piercing awareness that his headstrong younger brother was likely still alive, and perhaps furtively, resolutely, threading his way even now back to Pennyroyal Green and to a blue-eyed, golden-haired woman who was bound to marry an Eversea one way or the other.

  Given the fact that Colin wasn’t precisely dead, Marcus knew he ought to give Louisa an opportunity to cry off. But the very idea of it was such a physical pain, it held him unseeing and motionless in the town house foyer for an instant.

  Marcus had fallen incurably in love with Louisa Porter when he was thirteen years old, at a picnic. Colin had stolen her bonnet and he had rescued it, and when he’d handed it to her, and for some reason—her shy gratitude? The quiet amusement in those remarkably blue eyes?—he’d handed over his heart along with it. He supposed he was the only person in the entire world who’d known how acute his condition was, since every young man in Sussex had spent at least a little time being in love with Louisa, and since everyone in Pennyroyal Green had so thoroughly enjoyed watching Colin be in love with Louisa Porter, for Colin did it with considerable imagination and little restraint. The way he did most things.

  But Marcus was determined to do it best.

  And to do it forever.

  But all the things he’d ever wanted to do or be he’d acquired through sheer focus and determination. Marcus knew he was handsome; Marcus knew he was by all estimations a catch. But Marcus was not Colin, and he couldn’t make Louisa Porter love him through sheer determination.

  And though he’d never indulged in a dramatic thought in his entire life…he didn’t think he could bear it if she did cry off.

  A half hour’s gallop later through mercifully not-yet-teeming London streets cleared the uncharacteristic melodrama from his mind. He was welcomed through the handsome, columned Mercury Club entry by a sleepy-looking but efficient butler, the club books were retrieved for his review, and he settled into one of those enveloping dark brown chairs in the sitting room for a good flip through.

  A few pages in—he loved a good, orderly set of numbers as much as Colin loved poetry—his mood improved. The records were impressively meticulous. In handwriting bold and uniform, columns of dates, purchases, expenditures, names of tradesmen and employees were neatly recorded.

  And then, superstitiously, Marcus turned to the date when everything in his life changed.

  The date Roland Tarbell was killed, and Colin taken to Newgate.

  According to the entries, coal, eggs, and milk had been delivered to the Mercury Club kitchens on that day; a harness repairman—the club had authorized the purchase of their beautiful carriage last year—paid. The date had been cataclysmic for Everseas, but
somehow mundane life had gone on as usual elsewhere.

  The nerve of life.

  Marcus flipped the page. The day after the murder, Marcus noted, employees of the club had collected salaries: Mr. Baxter himself, a Mrs. Lund, a Robert Bell, a Martha Cuthbert, a Daisy Poe, a host of male names he recognized as footmen. Curious, he flipped backward through the book; salaries were generally paid the same time each week, and Mr. Baxter’s own wages had gone up a few hundred pounds over the past year. This had begun after the murder.

  Marcus mulled this, tapping his thumb thoughtfully on the page. Just because he divided his life as “before the murder” and “after the murder” didn’t mean this had any particular significance.

  But interestingly, Robert Bell was also the name of Mrs. Redmond’s carriage driver. Marcus was well acquainted with the man; the community of expert drivers was an elite and relatively egalitarian one, as it was considered fashionable for young bloods to drive their own carriages, and they all needed to learn from people who actually drove carriages for a living. Marcus had in fact received a few lessons from Robert Bell in The Row, which is how he’d honed his skill with the ribbons.

  Robert Bell was a common enough name. Doubtless he was simply a footman or a stable employee. A club whose membership in part required them to be skilled drivers would have no need to employ a driver.

  Nevertheless.

  Out of curiosity, Marcus flipped back through the book to see where Robert Bell’s name began appearing. He found the first reference to him three months earlier. But he’d been paid on different dates each time, and not always on the same days as the rest of the staff.

  Interesting, but not necessarily troubling. Still, the irregular salary implied that Robert Bell was not a regular club employee after all.

  Marcus closed the books, satisfied and impressed with the records, but unsettled. He sat with the sensation, struggling to define it, testing it against how he felt about Louisa and the uncertainty his life had become since Colin vanished from the gallows in puffs of smoke.

  But in moments he knew the feeling had nothing to do with Louisa. The sensation was more…a compulsion. A compulsion he had no idea how to direct. He did know it reminded him of the day that something had sent him running over Eversea land to the offshoot of the Ouse trickling through it…just in time to pluck Colin out before he drowned.