by Mary Balogh
“The servants can shop for food,” she said. “And if you object to the clothes I wear, you can send dressmakers here. I have no wish to go out.”
“Is what you are about to do so shameful to you, then?” he asked her. “You really feel you cannot show your face to the world ever again?”
She had answered that the day before. But it would be as well, she thought, if he believed it. Strangely, it was not true. Life had become a practical business, which she must direct and control as best she was able.
He did not speak again for some time. The silence stretched between them while he stared broodingly at her and she gazed back, uncomfortable but unwilling to look away.
“There is an alternative,” he said at last. “One that would bring you fame and fortune and great esteem, Jane. One that would save you from the degradation of bedding with a rake.”
“I do not consider it degrading,” she told him.
“No?” He lifted his free hand and cupped her chin. He ran his thumb lightly across her lips. “I am not intimate with the inner circles of high culture, Jane, but I daresay my word carries some weight almost everywhere. I could introduce you to Lord Heath or the Earl of Raymore, two of the more prominent patrons of the arts. I have every confidence that if either one of them heard your voice, he would set your feet on the road to fame. You are that good, you know. You would not need me.”
She gazed at him in some surprise. He wanted her—she did not doubt that. But he was prepared to let her go? Even to help her be independent of him? Quite unconsciously she parted her lips and touched her tongue to the pad of his thumb.
His eyes met and held hers. And she felt raw desire knife down inside her. She had not intended to provoke such a moment. Neither had he, she suspected.
“I do not want a career as a singer,” she said.
It was the truth even apart from the fact that she could not flirt with danger by going before the public gaze again. She did not want to use her voice to earn a living. She wanted to use it for the pleasure of people who were close to her. She had no yearning for fame.
He leaned forward and set his mouth where his thumb had been. He kissed her hard.
“But you do want one as my mistress?” he said. “On your terms? What are they, then? What do you want that I have not already offered?”
“Security,” she said. “I want your agreement to pay my salary until my twenty-fifth birthday even if you should dismiss me before then. Provided I am not the one to break our agreement, of course. I am twenty now, by the way.”
“For five years,” he said. “And how will you support yourself after that, Jane?”
She did not know. She was supposed to come into her inheritance then—all of her father’s fortune that had not been entailed on his heir. But of course she might never be able to claim it. She would not suddenly stop being a fugitive simply because she had reached the magic age of freedom.
She shook her head.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I will never tire of you, Jane.”
“Nonsense!” she told him. “Of course you will. And long before four and a half years have passed. That is why I must protect my future.”
He smiled at her. He did not smile nearly often enough. And altogether too often for her peace of mind. She wondered if he knew what devastating charm his smile hinted at.
“Very well, then,” he said. “It will be written into the contract. Salary until dismissal or your twenty-fifth birthday, whichever comes later. Anything else?”
She shook her head. “What about your conditions?” she asked him. “We have come to an agreement on what you will do for me. What must I do for you?”
He shrugged. “Be here for me,” he said. “Have sexual relations with me whenever I can persuade you that you want them as much as I do. That is all, Jane. A relationship between a man and his mistress cannot be legislated, you know. I will not even try to insist upon obedience and subjection, you see. You would not be able to keep such a promise even if you could be persuaded to make it. And damn me for a fool for saying this aloud, but I believe it is your very impudence that attracts me. Shall I have Quincy draw up the contract and bring it here for your perusal? I imagine he will be vastly diverted by such a task. I will not bring it myself, Jane. I will not come again until you send for me. I will assume when I do hear from you that the bedchamber abovestairs is ready for use.”
“Very well, your grace,” she said as he got to his feet. She stood up too. A week was going to seem like an eternity.
He framed her face with his hands. “That will have to change too, Jane,” he said. “I cannot have you your gracing me when we are in bed together. My name is Jocelyn.”
She had not known his name. No one had ever used it in her hearing. “Jocelyn,” she said softly.
His very dark eyes were normally hard and quite opaque. It was impossible to see more of the man than he was willing to reveal—and that was usually not very much, she suspected. But for a moment after she spoke his name, Jane had the distinct feeling that something opened up behind his eyes and that she was falling into them.
For only a moment.
He dropped his hands and turned toward the door.
“One week,” he said. “If the renovations are not complete by then, Jane, a few heads are going to roll. You will warn all the workmen involved?”
“Yes, your grace,” she said. “Jocelyn.”
He looked over his shoulder at her and opened his mouth to speak. But he changed his mind and strode from the room without saying another word.
13
ANY OF MICK BODEN’S ACQUAINTANCES ENVIED him his job. There was a certain glamour about being one of the famed Bow Street Runners. The common fallacy was that he spent his working days literally running to earth all of London’s and half of England’s most desperate criminals and hauling them off to the nearest magistrate and the just reward for their dastardly deeds. They saw his life as one of endless adventure and danger and action—and success.
Most of the time his job was routine and rather dull. Sometimes he wondered why he was not a dockyard worker or a crossing sweeper. This was one of those times. Lady Sara Illingsworth, a lady of a mere twenty years who had grown up in the country and presumably had no town bronze, was proving to be unexpectedly elusive. In almost a month of searching he had discovered no trace of her beyond those first few days.
The Earl of Durbury still stubbornly insisted she was in London. There was nowhere else she could have gone, he claimed, since she had no friends or relatives elsewhere apart from an old neighbor now living with her husband in Somersetshire. But she was not there.
Something told Mick that the earl was right. She was here somewhere. But she had not returned to Lady Webb’s, even though the baroness was now back in town. She had not contacted either her late father’s man of business or the present earl’s. If she had been spending lavishly, she had not been doing it in any of the more fashionable shops. If she had been trying to sell or pawn any of the stolen jewels, she had not done it at any of the places Mick knew about—and he prided himself on knowing them all. If she had tried to secure respectable lodgings in a decent neighborhood, she had not done so at any of the houses on whose doors he and his assistants had tirelessly knocked. She had not sought employment in any of the houses at which he inquired—and he had asked at all the likely possibilities except the grandest mansions in Mayfair. She would not have been foolhardy enough to apply at one of those, he had concluded. None of the agencies had been applied to by anyone bearing any of the names Mick thought she might be using. None remembered a tall, slim, blond beauty.
And so he found himself yet again with nothing to report to the Earl of Durbury. It was lowering. It was enough to make a man think seriously about changing his line of work. It was also enough to arouse all a man’s stubborn determination not to be thwarted by a mere slip of a girl.
“She has not gone into service, sir,” he said with conviction to an exasperated, red-fa
ced earl, who was doubtless thinking of the hefty bill he had run up at the Pulteney in a month. “She would not have sought employment as a governess or lady’s companion—too public. For the same reason she would not have taken work as a shop clerk. She would have to work somewhere she would not be seen. Some workshop. A dressmaker’s or a milliner’s, perhaps.”
If she was working at all. The earl had never told him exactly how much money the girl had stolen. Mick was beginning to suspect it could not have been much. Not enough to enable her to live in style, anyway. Surely such a young, inexperienced woman would have made mistakes by now if she had had a vast fortune to tempt her into the open.
“What are you waiting for, then?” his lordship asked coldly. “Why are you not out searching every workshop in London? Are the illustrious Bow Street Runners to be outsmarted by a mere girl?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“Am I searching for a murderess?” Mick Boden asked. “How is your son, sir?”
“My son,” the earl said irritably, “is at death’s door. You are searching for a murderess. I suggest you find her before she repeats her crime.”
And so Mick began his search anew. London, of course, had more than its fair share of workshops. He just wished he knew for sure what name the girl was using. And he wished that she had not somehow managed to hide her blond hair, apparently her most distinctive feature.
IT WAS A LONG week. Jocelyn spent far too much of it drinking and gaming by night and trying to whip himself into shape during the day by spending long hours honing his fencing skills and building his stamina in the boxing ring at Gentleman Jackson’s. His leg was responding well to exercise.
Ferdinand was incensed when he learned what had happened to his curricle and was determined to ferret out the Forbes brothers, who had dropped out of sight the day after the duel, and slap a glove in all their separate faces. At first he would not agree that it was his brother’s quarrel. It was his life, after all, that had been threatened. But Jocelyn was insistent.
Angeline had had a fit of the vapors at the news of the broken axle, had summoned Heyward from the House, and then, to divert her shaken nerves, had bought a new bonnet.
“I wonder that there is any fruit left on any of the stalls at Covent Garden, Angeline,” Jocelyn observed, viewing it with a pained expression through his quizzing glass as he rode through Hyde Park at the fashionable hour one day and came across her sporting it as she drove in an open barouche with her mother-in-law. “I daresay it is all decorating that monstrosity on your head.”
“It is all the crack,” she replied, preening, “no matter what you say, Tresham. You simply must promise not to drive a curricle again. You or Ferdie. You will kill yourselves and I will never recover my nerves. But Heyward said it was no accident. I daresay it was one of the Forbeses. If you do not discover which one and call him to account, I shall be ashamed to call myself a Dudley.”
“You do not now,” he reminded her dryly before tipping his hat to the Dowager Lady Heyward and riding on. “You took your husband’s name when you married him, Angeline.”
He was not as impatient as his brother and sister to find the Forbeses and punish them. The time would come. They must know it as surely as he did. In the meantime, let them remain in their hiding place, imagining what would happen when they finally came face-to-face with him. Let them sweat it out.
Several people asked about Jane Ingleby. She had created even more of a stir with her singing than he had expected. He was asked who she was, if she was still employed at Dudley House, if she was to sing anywhere else, who her voice teacher had been. Viscount Kimble even asked him outright one evening at White’s if she was his mistress—a question that won for himself a cool stare through the ducal quizzing glass.
Strange, that. Jocelyn had never before been secretive about his mistresses. Indeed, he had often used the house for dinners and parties when he wished them to be a little less formal than such occasions at Dudley House inevitably were. His mistresses had always also been his hostesses—a role that would fit Jane admirably.
But he did not want his friends to know she was in his keeping. It seemed somehow unfair to her, though he would not have been able to explain if he had tried. He told them she had had temporary employment with him and was now gone, he knew not where.
“A devilish shame, Tresham,” Conan Brougham said. “That voice ought to be brought to the attention of Raymore. She could earn a more than decent living with it.”
“I would have offered her employment myself, Tresh,” Kimble said, “on her back, that is, not with her voice. But I feared I might be trespassing on your preserves. If you hear where she is, you might drop a word in my ear.”
Jocelyn, feeling unaccustomedly hostile to one of his closest friends, changed the subject.
He walked home alone later that same night despite the danger of attack by footpads. He had never feared them. He carried a stout cane and he was handy with his fives. He would rather enjoy a scuffle with two or three ruffians, he had often thought. Perhaps any ruffians who had ever spotted him had been intelligent enough to estimate correctly their chances against him. He had never been attacked.
The mention of Jane Ingleby had made him unbearably restless. It had been five days, and it had seemed more like five weeks. Quincy had personally taken over that silly contract on the second day. To Jocelyn’s surprise she had signed it. He had expected her to haggle over a few small details out of sheer perverseness.
She was officially his mistress.
His virgin, unbedded mistress. How everyone who knew him would jeer if they knew he had engaged a mistress who had banished him from his own house, insisted upon a written contract, and kept the relationship unconsummated a full week after he had made her the proposition.
He laughed aloud suddenly, stopping in the middle of an empty, silent street. Ornery Jane. Even during the consummation she would doubtless not play the part of timid, shrinking virgin being deflowered.
Innocent, naïve Jane, who did not realize how clever she was being. He had desired her a week ago. He had yearned for her five days ago. By now he was on fire for her. He was finding it difficult to think of anything else. Jane with her golden hair, into whose web he could hardly wait to be ensnared.
He was forced to wait two more days before a note finally arrived. It was characteristically brief and to the point.
“The work on the house is complete,” she wrote. “You may call at your convenience.”
Cool, unloverlike words that set him ablaze.
* * *
JANE WAS PACING. SHE had sent the note to Dudley House immediately after breakfast, but she knew that often he left home early and did not return until late at night. He might not read the note until tomorrow. He might not come for another day or two.
But she was pacing. And trying in vain not to look through the front-facing windows more often than once every ten minutes.
She was wearing a new dress of delicate spring-green muslin. High-waisted, with a modest neckline and short, puffed sleeves, it was of simple design. But it was expertly styled to mold and flatter her figure above its high waistline and to fall in soft folds to her ankles. It had been very costly. Accustomed to the prices of a country dressmaker, Jane had been shocked. But she had not sent the Bond Street modiste and her two assistants away. The duke had selected them and sent them with specific instructions on the number and nature of garments she was to have.
She had selected the fabrics and designs herself, favoring light colors over vivid ones and simplicity of design over the ornate, but she had not argued over the number or the expense, except flatly to insist upon only one walking dress and only one carriage dress. She had no intention of walking or driving out any time soon.
He would not have given her carte blanche over the house renovations if he had not intended coming back, she thought as she leaned close to the window yet again early in the afternoon. He would not have sent the modiste or the contract. Indeed, he h
ad sent the latter twice, first two copies for her to peruse and sign and return, and then just one copy to keep, with his own signature—Tresham—scrawled large and bold beneath her own. Mr. Jacobs had witnessed her signature, Mr. Quincy his.
But she could not shake the conviction that he would not come back. The week had been endless. Surely by now he must have forgotten her. Surely by now there was someone else.
She could not understand—and did not care to explore—her own anxiety.
But all anxiety fled suddenly to be replaced by a bursting of joy when she saw a familiar figure striding along the street in the direction of the house. He was walking without a limp, she noticed before turning and hurrying to open the sitting room door. She stopped herself from rushing to open the front door too. She stood where she was, waiting eagerly for his knock, waiting for Mr. Jacobs to answer it.
She had forgotten how broad-shouldered he was, how dark, how forbidding in aspect, how restless with pent-up energy, how—male. He was frowning as usual when he handed his hat and gloves to the butler. He did not look at her until he had done so. Then he strode toward the sitting room and fixed his eyes on her at last.
Eyes that looked not only at her dress and face and hair, she thought, but on everything that was her. Eyes that burned into her with a strange, intense light she had not seen there before.
The eyes of a man come to claim his mistress?
“Well, Jane,” he said, “you have finished playing house at last?”
Had she expected a kiss on the hand? On the lips? Soft lover’s words?
“There was much to do,” she replied coolly, “to convert this house into a dwelling rather than a brothel.”
“And you have done it?” He strode into the sitting room and looked around, his booted feet apart, his hands at his back. He seemed to fill the room.