London's Most Wanted Rake

by Bronwyn Scott

  Chapter Twelve

  What had Alina got herself into now? Channing pushed his hand through his hair yet again a half-hour later. He was dressed, but his hair was going to be a tousled mess at this rate while he listened, questions darting through his mind. ‘If it’s him why hasn’t anyone caught him before?’ Channing sipped at his coffee.

  ‘It’s not him directly,’ Alina explained. ‘He is behind several syndicates that operate under different names. But he’s used other aliases before so it’s very difficult to catch him. Then there’s the embarrassment factor. To catch him means exposing oneself to public scrutiny. He picks victims very deliberately, people who would be reluctant to let others know their finances were in trouble or that they’d been taken advantage of in an awkward business situation.’

  ‘You are potentially courting scandal if your involvement in this becomes known,’ Channing pointed out. Surely Alina had thought of that. If others worried over public censure, it ought to be a sign that she should worry, too.

  ‘Only if I fail,’ Alina reasoned. ‘If I succeed, it might help my rather precarious reputation if it came out I had struck a blow for social justice.’ She shrugged, but Channing could see the determined set of her jaw. She didn’t believe she would fail.

  ‘All right then, tell me how you’re going to catch the thief.’ Channing chose his pronouns carefully. He really meant ‘we’ or even ‘he’ if it came to that. Alina was not going to put herself in danger and for all her impressive research in tracking the man down, he didn’t think she had any idea of what the villain might be capable.

  ‘I’ve co-signed him on a deed to a property here in England that supposedly reverted back to me as part of the settlement and in turn he’s loaning me funds to make improvements on the property for three months. My solicitors are on watch for the very second Seymour attempts to use the deed as collateral.’

  ‘It seems risky—what if your solicitors simply miss their moment?’ If it was that easy to spot, Channing thought, the man would have been caught by now, syndicate or not. Certainly, anyone’s solicitor would notice activity involving a deed.

  ‘Other solicitors are not as diligent as mine.’ She paused here, her eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘Besides, he won’t be able to draw against the deed because the property doesn’t exist.’

  Channing spit out his coffee and gave up all pretensions to bland neutrality. ‘You’ve forged a deed?’

  ‘It’s not really a forgery, it’s just made up.’ Alina said. ‘It’s not as bad as you think. The land actually exists and it’s mine, it’s just deeded under a false name.’

  Channing relaxed slightly. ‘Not that it makes it any better. Seymour will be furious to have been caught and duped. He will come after you. Did Amery know any of this?’

  Alina shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. It had nothing to do with him.’ Channing understood the message completely. This had nothing to do with him either except for the fact that she was involved.

  ‘What Amery knew or didn’t know is irrelevant at this point.’ Alina turned the conversation away from any ethical considerations he might raise, of which Channing felt there were a few.

  Channing raised an eyebrow to indicate he didn’t quite agree with her assumption. ‘Oh?’ Amery had only sensed he was outgunned in the arrangement and his instincts had served him well.

  ‘What is relevant is that Seymour has bolted. I want to be in London, I need to be in London when he acts.’ She started pacing. Maybe coffee wasn’t such a great idea after all. He didn’t need Alina to be more energised than she already was. She would go haring off to London without a thought for the consequences.

  ‘He can’t possibly do any harm today,’ Channing argued. ‘It will take more than an afternoon to get any paperwork through the banks and it’s likely, since he wasn’t planning on acquiring this deal with you, that he’ll need time to think through what he wants to do. You have a few days at least.’ He could see Alina didn’t like his reasoning at all. It was far too sound.

  ‘Think about your position. We can’t both leave the house party a day early. It will look suspicious and, quite frankly, you are not going to London without me. Whether or not you like it, you need a protector.’

  ‘I had Amery,’ Alina protested.

  ‘Not a protector like Amery. He was only good for making you unavailable to the unwanted advances of others. You need someone to be your partner if you mean to do this mad thing.’

  ‘And you think that partner should be you.’ Alina faced him, hands on hips, looking most displeased.

  ‘Yes, I do think it should be me.’ Channing drew a deep breath. ‘Alina, why not me? You know you can trust me.’

  That earned him a steely blue stare. ‘Do I? Well, it seems I have no choice.’ That was his cue to exit.

  * * *

  Could she trust him? Could she trust him not? Alina picked the petals off a summer rose as she strolled around Lady Lionel’s garden. It was good to be alone. The afternoon was warm, the weather and the walk had helped calm her nerves. She’d been agitated after Channing had left. How dare he insinuate himself into her business and then have the audacity to suggest she could trust him after...?

  After what? She had to tread carefully here. After she’d come to England and then proceeded to engage him in a business arrangement, hiring his services to reintegrate her into English society? And all the while she’d mentioned nothing about the desire to establish an intimate arrangement akin to what they’d dreamed of in Fontainebleau? She’d made no overture and neither had he. Therein lay the rub. Of course, she’d been waiting for him to establish his desire to continue as they had been. No overture had come. At the Christmas party, she’d discovered why.

  There’d been nothing between them but business, but Alina had acted as if there was. The argument that had followed the party had not been well done of her. She’d thrown several accusations at him and a vase or two for good measure simply because she’d let herself be convinced she wasn’t just another job to him.

  * * *

  ‘What the hell do you mean by leaving the ball?’ Channing shut the door behind him with a resounding slam. She was sure the rest of the house would have heard it, if the music hadn’t been playing.

  ‘What do you mean by barging into a lady’s bedroom?’ she fired back, yanking the pins from her hair and making it clear she would not return to the festivities.

  ‘I mean to settle this once and for all.’ Channing was in rare form. He advanced on her with firm strides. She backed up, her knees hitting the back of her dressing table. ‘You asked me to introduce you to society and I have. I have smoothed your way with introductions and with shaping the story of your return to downplay any scandal attached to it. I have done my job and you dare to walk away from me in a crowded ballroom where everyone is bound to notice.’

  ‘You’ve done your job, absolutely, for me, and for every other woman at the party. You’ve made a fool out of me and you’re right. Everyone is bound to notice.’ She threw his words back at him.

  ‘What did you expect? I couldn’t possibly dance every dance with you and make you socially acceptable. Exclusivity was never part of the deal.’

  ‘No, it never was. That’s what your precious League is about, isn’t it? An excuse for promiscuity.’ She all but spat the accusation.

  His blue eyes had narrowed dangerously. He gripped her arm for a moment. ‘You don’t understand anything if that’s what you think.’ He stepped back. ‘The League is to protect men from women like you.’

  She felt as if she’d been struck. ‘You bastard, how dare you! This whole time, you made me believe...’ Her voice threatened to break. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how much these weeks, this introduction to pleasure, had mattered, how close she’d come to thinking the impossible was possible when it had o
nly been revenge to him, revenge for an act he couldn’t comprehend. She was glad now she hadn’t told him the whole of it: her marriage, that day in the park. He didn’t deserve to know. Her hand closed over the vase on her vanity, the object an anchor while her mind reeled.

  ‘What did I make you believe?’

  That was when she threw it. The vase smashed on the door frame, satisfyingly close to his shoulder, close enough to make him flinch. She would not tell him, not ever.

  It was the right decision. They’d returned to town and parted ways. The contract was fulfilled. But town society was not so large in January that she could avoid him. She saw him occasionally at events, always with a beautiful woman, always smiling, always handsome, always at a distance. She never stayed long if he was present. By February she’d succeeded in avoiding him altogether—that, too, was for the best, until now.

  * * *

  ‘Have you decided yet?’ Alina jumped a foot and stifled an undignified yelp at Channing’s approach.

  ‘I hate it when you sneak up on me.’ Alina said crossly. It hardly ever happened. She was usually in tune to his whereabouts whenever he was near. ‘Decided what?’

  ‘Decided if you can trust me?’ Channing fell into step beside her, modifying his long step to hers.

  Alina tossed aside the ruined rose and picked another. ‘That’s a foregone conclusion at this point. I told you my plans. I told you what Seymour was. There’s nothing more to trust you with. Perhaps the real question is whether or not you believe me—do you trust me?’ Trust was an enormous issue between them. They’d hurt each other with that trust before.

  ‘You trust me in bed,’ Channing pressed. ‘You trusted me last night.’

  ‘That was only a game,’ Alina answered quickly. Games were short term, games had ends to them, clear victors and rules. She understood games. What Channing was suggesting went beyond those boundaries. It would bind them together once more for a length of time to be solely determined by them. ‘I can see this through without any help. Your contract is up in two days. I wouldn’t have asked Amery for assistance. I did not hire him for it. It’s not his expertise and I doubt it’s yours.’

  ‘I doubt it’s yours either,’ Channing argued. ‘Do you go after men steeped in fraud often?’

  She gave him a wry look. ‘Don’t be facetious. You know I do not. It’s different. This is my family, it’s not yours. I have to do this for them.’ Catching Seymour would change everything. They had only invested with him as a means of helping her.

  ‘Now we’re getting to the heart of things.’ Channing gave her a gentle smile, his eyes warm. It was a look that invited confidences. ‘You think to avenge your family? Seymour took advantage of them? I did wonder after I left you this morning what had prompted such an interest in bringing the fellow to justice. Perhaps you might be so good as to tell me the details?’

  ‘According to the marriage contracts, the comte was to pay them a large sum of money spread out over the course of several years. The payments would come monthly and they’d last as long as the marriage,’ Alina began to explain. The comte had explained it as a way of providing for her in the future if anything happened to him. Her family could put the money in trust for her, something akin to a jointure or widow’s portion. But the family hadn’t the luxury of saving. They’d needed the income for bills and daily living.

  ‘It became another way in which the comte bound you to him,’ Channing offered succinctly when she finished. She’d left that part out. ‘Those payments were another way to keep you from leaving him.’

  She had not wanted to interject that analysis. It brought up other more delicate subjects that veered into the personal. ‘There was my sister to consider. She will be eighteen next year and my parents wanted to give her a London Season and find her a good match. They could not have afforded that without the comte’s money.’

  Beside her, Channing bristled. ‘Even so, your family should not have allowed you to suffer.’

  She was quick to leap to their defence. ‘They did not forsake me. They’d hoped this investment would create an income that would free them from financial dependency on the comte. But it didn’t work out that way and I couldn’t allow them to be ruined.’

  ‘So you stayed and endured whatever it was that bastard doled out,’ Channing said with quiet anger. He didn’t even know the half of it.

  ‘Yes, I stayed. What else could I do? It was my desperation that caused them to turn to Seymour’s offer.’ In hindsight, she wished she had not confided in them. If they hadn’t known how desperate she was, they never would have risked it. ‘It was my fault it happened at all and it was my fault for what happened next.’

  Channing caught her eyes in a solemn gaze. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Seymour offered to marry Annarose in exchange for clearing the debt that the property now carried. All my father had to do was allow the marriage and turn the property fully over to Seymour. The debt would disappear. Annarose was only fifteen.’

  The last implied myriad things: the complete corruption of Roland Seymour to prey on an innocent girl as a means of ‘resolving’ a family’s crisis and the intensity of her own desire to bring him to justice.

  Channing nodded slowly, the slow blaze growing in his eyes affirming he understood entirely. Families were important to him. She’d seen him with his own at Christmas. He had sisters and an older brother. ‘Do they know what you’re planning?’

  Alina shook her head. Her family wasn’t like his. They’d defend each other to the death. Her family hadn’t the strength or the resources to do that. ‘They don’t know and they can’t know. My mother has enough to worry about besides that. You won’t tell them?’

  She didn’t truly believe he would or that he’d ever have the opportunity to. She couldn’t imagine on what occasion Channing would ever meet them. Her father’s health had failed after the disaster with Seymour. They wouldn’t come to London. It would be her job to bring Annarose out next year. She yearned to find Annarose a good man. Surely there was one out there, one that would keep her safe.

  Channing’s gaze studied her for a moment and she felt far too vulnerable as if he saw every secret she’d ever kept. ‘You feel guilty.’

  ‘Yes, it nearly ruined them. It did ruin my father. I should have stopped it. I would have stopped it if I’d been here. I should not have started it at all.’ She should have kept her desperation to herself. She’d smelled a rat when her father had first written to her about it. If she hadn’t been so far away in France, if her odious husband had given her leave to come home when she’d asked, it might all have turned out differently. Annarose would not have been endangered. ‘I tried, you know. The comte would not hear of it. He feared I would not return and he denied me the permission.’

  Channing’s gaze had not moved from her. ‘How did he deny that permission?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’ She moved away from him, trying to put a literal distance between herself and the conversation, but he reached out and took her arm. She’d not meant to share even that much, but it had tumbled out.

  Channing’s grip was firm. He was not going to let her walk away from him. ‘Was that why he branded you or was that because of me?’

  He’d kept his voice low, but Alina found herself looking around anyway. They were alone and yet she wanted to scold him, to tell him to hush for voicing such words out loud. They were horrible words that should not be uttered. Anger radiated through his touch, tightening his grip on her arm. ‘Tell me, was it because of me?’

  She held his gaze, the hard stare meant to scold him for invading her privacy. ‘It was neither.’ She wanted him to leave it alone. It was none of his business and the current nature of their relationship did not entitle him to make it so, but Channing disagreed.

  Channing had set his jaw in a firm line, his arms crossed as he blocked
the path. ‘Tell me, Alina. What did he do?’

  What had he said last night? Everyone needs a champion? She’d never told anyone. Now the comte was dead and she was here. That part of her life was over. ‘Knowing can change nothing, not for the better any way.’

  ‘Try me, let me decide.’ Channing stood firm.

  He would be repulsed when he heard. Perhaps that was what she needed in order to drive a wedge between them, one last reminder of why it could only be business between them. Alina drew a deep breath and spat out short, declarative sentences devoid of emotion and detail. ‘He locked me in my room. He took away my clothes. For two weeks, he sent trays twice a day with the sparsest of meals until I had to choose between my own stubbornness and my health. I would be of no use to anyone sick, so I relented and stayed in France.’

  Alina braced herself. He would pity her now, the one thing she hated above all else. It was why she’d not told anyone of the many things that had occurred. She didn’t want pity, didn’t want people looking at her and seeing the poor, misused wife. But Channing’s face was impassive, unreadable, except his eyes. They burned.

  ‘After that, I knew if I wanted to be free of him, I’d have to have something to hold against him, something to bargain with. It wouldn’t be enough simply to defy him.’ And she’d begun to plot, alone or almost so. There’d been no one in the household she could trust except Celeste. ‘It didn’t take long to discover how deep and how dark le comte’s vices went and then one night those vices worked in my favour.’

  Channing was silent, his gaze thunderous in the sunny afternoon. ‘I wish you’d come to me from the start.’ It was one of those carefully layered comments gentlemen of good breeding made when they did not want to speak directly. He did not mean just the start of the Seymour gambit.

  ‘How could I?’ Alina replied softly, knowing he heard the layers in her response as well—how could I have left the legal and religious promises of my marriage vows, made myself an object of bigamy, shamed my family, caused them certain financial ruin?