Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 0]

by The Spy

  Phillipa entered willingly enough, only to stop in alarm when James draped one arm over her shoulders to guide her across the room.

  Knee-buckling awareness swept her anew. His arm was heavy and warm. She was pressed to James’s side by the weight of it and could feel the warmth from his large hard body seeping into hers. He’d held her this way once before . . .

  His square hand dangled over her shoulder less than an inch from her tightly bound breast. There were layers of linen between, so she must have imagined that she felt the heat of his open palm on her tightening nipple.

  Her throat went dry. Her belly shivered, sending tremors lightly through her midriff . . . and lower still. She felt a single deep involuntary spasm from her own flesh—

  She stepped forward hurriedly, her panic taking her from James’s side in a move that she was vaguely aware might be considered rude. She bowed to the sophisticated man before her, nearly blind to his consequence, so stewed was she in surprise at her own betraying body.

  James stepped up. “Dalton, may I present Mr. Phillip Walters? He has taken over Robbie’s education and is doing remarkably well with the boy. In other words, he hasn’t quit yet.” James turned to Phillipa. “Flip, this is Dalton Montmorency, Lord Etheridge. My . . . friend.”

  Phillipa bowed again, but Lord Etheridge held out one lordly hand for her to shake. Bother. She hoped he wasn’t going to begin the battle of the grip.

  His lordship’s handshake was firm but tempered, thankfully, and his expression benign, even pleased. “So you’re taming the monkey, are you? Any hope for him?”

  Phillipa removed her hand before the man could notice that she didn’t have any knuckles to speak of. “Yes, he’s working very hard. In only a day he’s learned several of his letters and how to write his name.”

  One dark brow went up, making Phillipa wonder what she had said. Those silver eyes made her uncomfortable, as if he could see things with them . . . things such as lies.

  “I see,” he said. “I shall look forward to seeing more miracles from you, young Phillip.”

  Oh. Not good. Phillipa smiled sickly and nodded, backing away. “Well, you gentlemen obviously have somewhere to be. I’ll . . . take myself off to the schoolroom. Tomorrow’s lesson, you know . . . I can speak to Mr. Cunnington later about the bills.”

  She was almost to the door. Two more steps and—

  Collis tilted his head at her. “James, you really should let Phillip out now and then. The poor bloke’s pale as death.”

  James peered at her. Phillipa tried mightily to be less pale. “You’re right, Col. He is a bit wan.”

  ‘Too bad you can’t bring him along tonight. An evening at court would liven him up. Might be good for his career, come to think of it. Meet some people, hear about positions—”

  James’s eyes widened. “No!” He sent Collis a quelling glare. “Phillip works for me.” He turned back to Phillipa.

  One more step. The safety of the hallway beckoned. No perceptive lords, no teasing friends, no disturbing physical responses to her employer.

  “Have you any good rags, Flip? I’ve been snared into accompanying the Trapp girls and their mother to a ball in a few days and I need another bloke. Collis won’t help me out.”

  Collis nodded. “I refuse on the grounds that it might matrimony me.”

  “Come on, Flip. I’ll buy you a new suit if you’ll come along. The girls are twins. And pretty . . . sort of.”

  Phillipa gazed from one man to the other. Why were they doing this to her?

  A ball?

  Twins?

  She was supposed to be a man, she reminded herself. A young, penniless man, in desperate need of connections and influence . . . who would be expected to jump at the chance to improve his situation through an advantageous marriage.

  She felt the door at her back. “Yes . . . very well. If I can get the proper attire in time—”

  James grinned in relief. “Capital. I’ll get my brother-in-law’s valet over here tomorrow and we’ll get you suited up for battle.”

  Phillipa nodded again, forced a smile and a bow, and escaped into the hall, nearly running for her life.

  Battle?

  Later that evening as he sat in the darkness of his carriage after dropping Dalton and Collis off at Etheridge House, James ran his hand through his hair, instantly disarranging Denny’s careful work. No matter. He wasn’t going anywhere but home.

  It wasn’t terribly late. A fellow bent on self-distraction might find any number of lively companions and barely legal activities to indulge in until dawn. As evidenced by his reaction to the woman in the park, he was sorely in need of some relief.

  It had been so long since he’d held someone in his arms. He missed the feel of a woman’s skin, the silken stroke of her hair upon his flesh.

  Dear God, what hair she’d had, that mystery woman. Long and deeply red, if the dim lamplight had shown the truth. She’d smelled good as well. Unperfumed and clean, with only her own distinctly female scent to tease his senses.

  Of course, he was so deprived he’d likely have been stirred by a piece of garden statuary. Lavinia was proof that he couldn’t trust his instincts in this matter.

  No, expiation was the only route. Work and more work, until his tormented sleep became dreamless, until justice might make slight and inconsequential amends to the men who had died because of him . . .

  James snorted at his own melodrama. He was tired to the bone and less than rational at the moment. In a perfect example of governmental hypocrisy he’d been called to court to receive another award for his “sacrifice.” The very deed that had officially never happened.

  The new medal weighed heavily on his chest, like a brick over his heart making it rather difficult to breathe. James held it up by the ribbon and examined the golden disc in the intermittent light from the street lamps shining into the half-open carriage.

  The side which faced the world held a relief of George’s profile, or at least the profile from a few years ago. There were decidedly more chins on the version he had recently left at the palace.

  He flipped the medal to the other side, the one he was expected to wear against his heart. Raised arches of acanthus leaves surrounded his own name, and the large deeply engraved words “Virtutis Honor.”

  James let the medal drop. Courageous Honor. Oh, yes, to be precise he had taken a bullet in the shoulder that had been meant for the Prime Minister. Not so much an act of courage as it had been his duty to undo what he had wrought with his affair with Lavinia.

  He rotated his shoulder, feeling the pull of damaged muscle and tendon. Small price to pay for his stupidity. Never enough for letting his libido lead him into the clutches of a beautiful French spy who had played him like a penny whistle while he sang out the names of his comrades.

  She’d plied him with drugs she’d called aphrodisiacs—drugs that he’d taken willingly, even eagerly, mind you—and when he’d lain spent and gasping in her bed, she had led him to speak of things he ought to have died rather than revealed.

  He didn’t remember revealing anything, not even after she’d given up any pretense of love for him and had him captured and beaten, imprisoning him on a ramshackle boat a short way off the English coastline. He’d believed that he had successfully resisted, even in his drugged fog. Yet the resulting deaths proved that belief false.

  He did remember escaping, however. He recalled the long, nearly impossible swim to shore and the dragging journey on foot and by charitable cart-driver back into London and to his sister’s house.

  And nothing could ever wipe from his memory the moment when Simon Raines had told him how many of the Liars had died. Nothing could wipe out the fact that even now, his best friend and fellow liar, Ren Porter, lay silent and unresponsive in a bed in a private house here in London, as did the last codemaster, Weatherby, both with the finest of nurses and very little hope of recovery.

  All of them attacked once they were revealed to Lavinia and her cohor
ts.

  Revealed by him. The hero.

  Virtutis Honor.

  His stomach hurt.

  Chapter Nine

  Not terribly far away, in a less fashionable but still very respectable part of town, lay two men in a darkened room.

  The nurse Mrs. Neely shadowed her candle with one hand when she entered, despite the fact that neither of her charges were likely to complain of being disturbed by it. Still, she was careful in every way. This was the best position she had ever had. She would not jeopardize it.

  Mrs. Neely had worked in a few hospitals and private sanitariums in her time, but never had she been treated with as much respect and generosity as she was given by Mr. Cunnington and his friends. Most nurses were considered only slightly better than drudges and many were. It was one place to go for a servant who could not keep a job with a quality house staff.

  But Mrs. Neely’s father had been a physician, though never a wealthy one, and had imparted to her his own vocation to heal the sick. When she’d originally been hired to care for these two poor gentlemen, she’d taken one look at them both and lost her heart.

  Not romantically, Lord no, not at her age. But never had a patient needed her the way these two did. She fed them, bathed them with the help of a footman, combed their hair and shaved them, read to them and talked to them day in and day out.

  Those were her orders and she never neglected them. She’d even taken it upon herself to read up on the subject of such deep loss of consciousness. There was some speculation that routine exercising of the limbs kept them from atrophy, and with the permission of Mr. Cunnington, she’d begun such a program at once.

  Her reward had been to see a bit more color in the cheeks of her young man, as she called him. His name was Lawrence but she’d been told to call him Ren in the hopes that he might more likely answer to it.

  She drifted to Ren’s bedside and let the tiniest glow fall on him. Yes, he looked much better now. The terrible bruising and swellings on his face and head had gone down significantly in the last six weeks, and the scars would fade somewhat in time. So young and handsome with that curly hair of his. So badly beaten . . .

  She turned to step to the other bed. Poor Mr. Weatherby. He rather reminded her of her own beloved Frederick, God rest his soul.

  Angus Weatherby had been found on the cobbles below his own bedroom window, four stories above. Not a mark on him except where he’d landed on his head on the old stones of the street.

  She’d been told to call him Angus, but she simply couldn’t refer to a gentleman of her own age in such a familiar fashion. So she called him Mr. Weatherby, and sir, and sometimes even held his hand and reminded him of all the odd and wonderful times they had seen in England over the last fifty years, and invited him to come along with her to see a few more.

  But he never responded, her fine silver-haired gentleman friend, and she was beginning to lose hope for him. His face had sunken and grayed, and every day it seemed he breathed a little more shallowly and lost a little more ground.

  A tear came to her eye as she bent to lay a forbidden kiss on Mr. Weatherby’s brow. The Lord might forgive an old woman her fancies, she supposed.

  With her vision blurred by her fond grief, and her candle still carefully shadowed, Mrs. Neely might also be forgiven for missing a tiny, momentous event. Atop the sheet on the other bed lay a slack and open hand, one whose fingers had not moved of their owner’s will for many weeks.

  But as Mrs. Neely mourned what might have been, there came a hint of the future for her other patient as two fingers of that hand jerked in a small stuttering movement, as if to catch her attention.

  She missed that call, but all was well. She would catch the next one.

  Phillipa paced restlessly in her room. By all rights she ought to be catching up on all her many months of sleeping ill, but she was far too disturbed to undress for bed.

  She had a problem.

  Why couldn’t James Cunnington have been either obviously evil, with his nature evident in a ratlike face and manner, or else benignly elderly, with angelic blue eyes and white hair? Why did he have to be so—so—

  Abruptly, she sat in the chair by her fire and covered her face with her hands. So manly. So broad and warm and inappropriately unbearably delicious. Never in her sheltered existence had she felt such a response to a man. It was all she could do to breathe in his presence.

  Sighing, she flopped back in her chair and stretched her legs toward the fire. So lovely, to allow her body such freedom as a man. She could flop, and stretch, and most probably scratch without reprisal. A lady could do none of those things.

  A lady must not touch her face or person, or adjust her clothing in the presence of others. A lady must never let her spine touch the back cushions. Heavens, what were they for then?

  Still, a lady had some recourse, subtle as it was. A lady knew the language of the fan and could spell out her attraction with the tiniest of gestures. A lady could flutter her lashes just a bit, or lean ever so slightly forward, or stroll and pose to flirtatiously show her figure to advantage.

  But Phillipa could not flirt with Mr. Cunnington. Nor when he affected her as he had a number of times today, could she allow her attraction to show.

  She was not a gentleman. Yet if truth be told, she was no longer a lady either. Should it ever be revealed that she had dressed like a man, had lived unchaperoned with a man—heavens, had seen him nearly naked—she would be branded a hussy and a whore.

  Small price to pay for her father’s life. Of course, she could have become a whore in fact, weeks ago. A woman could not walk the streets of that section of Cheapside and not gather a few suggestions from the rough and common men she passed. She’d been offered money, liquor, narcotics, even protection.

  There was a difference, wasn’t there, in being labeled a whore and actually being one? She’d done her best to protect her honor and her personal virtue, yet she had lied and she was in fact living in a most scandalous situation.

  Well, reputation or no, she knew who she was. She idly reached for her braid to twist it in contemplation. Finding nothing of course, she let her hand drop.

  At least, she used to know who she was.

  “Merde,” she muttered to the coals. “Merde, merde, merde.”

  She must remember why she had come here. Her father knew James Cunnington in some respect. If she could only discover how, then she would know what to do.

  Her mission was clearly to investigate . . . but where to begin?

  She thought about this fine but austere house. Mr. Cunnington obviously spent most of his time in his study, surrounded by that clutter of books and papers. Papers that might very well tell her what she needed to know.

  Phillipa stood abruptly and walked to the door of her bedchamber. There would be no better time than the present. With the master out until late, Denny had retired hours ago. Robbie was fast asleep.

  Her hand on the knob, Phillipa took a deep breath and swallowed, trying to ignore the trembling in her stomach.

  As she stepped into the darkened hallway, she had to admit that a certain amount of her disquiet was due to excitement. After all her years of living in near seclusion with her father, it seemed she had a taste for adventure after all.

  When James arrived home to the darkened house at midnight, the last thing he expected to see in his study was Phillip sprawled upon the floor in front of James’s own desk, his hands in his hair and his brow furrowed as he studied something before him.

  “Doing a bit of light reading, Mr. Walters?” James was careful to keep his tone easy. He had every intention of getting some answers for this intrusion, but it might yet prove to be more innocent than it seemed.

  Phillip sat up quickly, barely catching the book before it tumbled from its perch on his stomach. “Oh! Mr. Cunnington.” The fellow scrambled about, trying to set the study in some kind of order.

  James let his gaze travel over what used to be a lovely ordered disorder. Now it was a
true disorder. Opened books lay on every surface, papers lay spread across the carpet. James knelt to pick one up. Last month’s bill from the butcher?

  He raised an enquiring gaze to Phillip.

  Phillip sat back on his heels and stammered nervously. “I was searching for a bit of paper.”

  James waited. Phillip swallowed. “I—I had an idea that I could make a—a primer for Robbie.”

  “Could you not purchase one?” James knew very well one could. He’d bought one for Stubbs.

  “Not—not one that spoke of things he’d recognize.” Phillip wet his lips, seeming so nervous that James almost felt sorry for him. “The ones I found were too—too exotic. I think Robbie might need something . . . something a bit closer to home. M-markets instead of maharajahs.”

  James blinked. “Carts instead of castles?” It was a brilliant idea. The very thing for city-bred Robbie.

  Phillip nodded quickly, seeming frankly relieved. “Only I cannot draw a cart. Or a cat. I was looking for things to copy . . .” He waved a hand at the mess.

  “Among my personal accounts?”

  “No—my apologies, sir. I was searching for a bit of paper to practice on, but I—I cannot even draw a straight line.”

  “I can.” The words were out before James even realized it. “I’m no Sir Thorogood, but I can sketch basic things.”

  Phillip looked up, surprise in his narrow face. For the first time, James noticed how green Phillip’s eyes were. The fellow would be quite a lady-killer, once he finished growing.

  He had quite a way to go yet, but James did think the fellow looked a bit better already after a few good meals. And here Phillip was, up late, working hard to find a way to teach the unteachable Robbie. That showed sincere dedication.

  He’d done a good thing when he’d brought those two together, James decided. The thought sat comfortably on his beleaguered soul. A good thing, small as it was, that perhaps lessened the sum total of his sins.

  “I’ll help you if you like,” James said.

  Phillip stood and nervously began to gather the paper and books together. “Do you think we’ll find twenty-six items?”