He glared harder. She leaned forward, her voice softening. “Please, Dand. Sit. We can discuss this rationally, calmly. I am not a fool. You have never treated me as one before.”
“You have never acted like one before.”
She sank back in her seat, her hand moving dismissively toward him. “Fine. Rant,” she said in the tone of a governess exhausted by her charge’s temper tantrum. “When you are done, we will discuss this.”
He stared at her, outmaneuvered by her patronization. “Suit yourself,” he capitulated gracelessly and flung himself down in the wicker chair beside her. “Speak.”
Oh, she hated him in this mood: imperious, superior, unapproachable. But she needed him. They needed him. Their plan hinged on acquiring his aid.
She edged forward off the chair, dropping lightly to her knees on the thick, lush grass before him. He looked down at her with a flicker of surprise. Resolutely, she covered his hands with hers and at once felt the restrained tension in them.
His fingerpads were callused and rough, but fine, gilt-tipped hairs lightly covered the backs of his wrists and fingers. The men of her acquaintance had naked hands, white as tallow and as soft. Not Dand Ross. His hands were strong, lean, and intensely masculine. Everything about him was virile and aggressively male. Male, she reminded herself. And in the art of making males do what she wanted them to do, she was an acknowledged expert.
“Dand,” she said quietly, “you know better than I what is at stake.”
His lip lifted in a sneer and he turned his hand over, grabbing her wrist and yanking her forward so that she fell against his lap. Startled, she looked up. His gaze burned down at her. “Don’t. Do not try your lady wiles on me.” His voice was tight with warning. “I’m not a gentleman. I won’t react the way a gentleman would.”
She pulled back, but rather than let her go, he hauled her to her feet, only releasing her when she was upright. She backed away uncertainly as if faced with a pet hound that had suddenly bared his teeth at her. Twice now he’d frightened her with unexpected reactions. She’d thought she knew him. She might be very, very wrong.
Abruptly, the anger left his gaze, leaving only frustration. “There is another way. There must be some other means of getting into the castle,” he muttered.
And suddenly, the sting of tears started in her eyes, and she was angry. Angry at the situation, angry at the damn carriage, angry at Dand for having the effrontery to argue with her when she was willing to do this.
It wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself. How dare he treat her as though she had given no more deliberation to this than she would to which gown to wear? My God, he acted as though she was going into this with reckless abandon, like she thought it was some sort of lark. She tugged her hands from his clasp and stood up, eyes flashing.
“What then?” she demanded.
“I haven’t thought of it yet. But I will.”
“Lovely,” she clipped out. “But, for the nonce, until your formidable intellect has devised a better solution, what say we implement the one plan we do have? Which means that St. Lyon needs to invite me to his castle in Ginny’s stead.”
“Why should he do that?” He met her sharp tone. “I know. Perhaps you can take out an advert in the Times declaring that you are currently taking applications for the position of your protector and offer a special rate to St. Lyon?”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“Loath though I am to offend your delicate sensibilities, may I point out that being a Cyprian is vulgar?” he ground out.
“This isn’t solving anything. I am fully aware it will not be an easy pretense to pull off,” she allowed, moving cautiously toward the point of this interview, “but we’ve devised a stratagem.”
“I am beyond eager to hear it.”
She ignored him. “Early tomorrow St. Lyon leaves for his castle, there to await his guests who, coming as they are from many different places, shall be arriving in trickles over the next month. St. Lyon will be bored, restless. A week or so hence Ginny shall write to him and offer him my company in her place.”
“And you do not think St. Lyon will find it odd that you are suddenly being offered to him like a basket of apples?” he asked with heavy sarcasm. “Besides, aside from the obvious absurdity of anyone thinking you would suddenly embark on a career as a courtesan, I wouldn’t mark St. Lyon as the sort of man who allows another to pick his mistresses for him.
“And even if he did, a man in St. Lyon’s situation must ask himself why his would-be mistress would offer a substitute when by doing so she is robbing herself of a potentially wealthy protector.”
Charlotte took a deep breath. He would not like the solutions she had to his objections. “The problem of why Ginny would offer a substitute is not as great a difficulty as you would suspect,” she said. “Apparently becoming a procuress is the next obvious step in the career path Ginny has chosen.” Her attempt at drollery was lost on him. His agate colored eyes, once so warm, were now flat and cold as river stones.
She attempted a smile. “St. Lyon will accept me as a substitute because…because he has…shown some interest in me in the past.”
She’d been wrong. He hadn’t used up his vocabulary of descriptive expletives. At least she assumed they were expletives from the tone in which he delivered them. Abruptly he surged to his feet, startling her so much that she scrambled back.
He glared at her. It must be more difficult than she’d realized for him to allow her to rush into danger when he’d sworn to keep her safe. Her heart turned in her chest, but then she steeled herself against softening. Everyone made sacrifices. Everyone compromised. If the need was great enough.
“Dand, there is no one else,” she said, taking a step toward him. “Our group of conspirators is very small and there are scant few women amongst us. Scant being two, Ginny and I.
“Even if there were another woman, one who St. Lyon found desirable, one who could be trusted, who knows the plans of the castle and understands what she is looking for, St. Lyon would never allow a stranger into his fortress at such a time. He will be suspicious of anyone he does not know—”
“Exactly!” Dand seized on her last sentence. “St. Lyon will be suspicious of anything untoward, anything out of the ordinary. And what could be more out of the ordinary than that you suddenly decide to accept him as a lover when you could have any man in the ton for your husband?”
She smiled wanly at this gross exaggeration.
“It will never work. Besides,” he went on, turning and walking away from her. “St. Lyon would never risk his position in society by ruining a peer’s virginal sister-in-law.”
She took a deep breath. “He won’t be risking anything.”
He stopped, his back to her. “Why is that?”
“Because by then I shall be a Fallen Woman.”
“What?” He turned around.
“By the time St. Lyon gets Ginny’s letter all society will be abuzz with the story of my fall from grace. He is a creature of the ton, Dand. His friends in London are bound to write often, keeping him apprised of all the latest on dits. Which is why I need your help.”
She closed the small distance between them, her skirts brushing the yellow rosebush and sending a shower of petals swirling to the grass. She reached out hesitantly. He stared at her approaching hand as though it were unsheathed steel but did not move. Tentatively, she placed her palm on his chest. He was warm, so alive. So masculine. “I need you to be my seducer,” she whispered.
He stared at her for a long moment, his shock apparent in the slight widening of his eyes, the manner in which his dark brows snapped together before he muttered, “You’re mad. Are you sure it wasn’t you and not Mrs. Mulgrew who got run over by that horse?”
She edged closer, lifting her face, willing him to meet her gaze. “Dand. There is no one else I can ask. You only have to appear to be my lover. Stay late at my house. Go to a few public functions. Look smitten.
“Just t
hink,” she gave him a puckish smile, “you will be the instrument of my downfall. Most men would find that a rather choice role.”
Abruptly he stepped away, breaking contact with her. He would not be cajoled. “Stop trying to handle me. I am not one of your wet-nosed pups.”
No. He was not. He was entirely unlike any man she knew. Had ever known. She’d been wrong to try to manipulate him. She had more respect for him than that. Her hands fell to her sides and her coquettish smile evaporated. “This plan will work.”
“Oh, yes. It sounds entirely plausible. You jettison your reputation and your future because you are overcome with passion for some nameless tramp.”
“No one in London knows who you are. I’ll have it put out that I knew you in York, that we were childhood sweethearts or some such thing, but then you bought a commission. You have just sold it and returned and upon being reunited with you after all these years I threw caution to the wind and took you as my lover.
“Anyone who knows my reputation will believe that,” she said dryly. “Then in a week or so, we will part company. I shall pretend to have come to my senses, too late to save my reputation, but not too late to realize that life as the wife of an impecunious ex-captain of the Light Guards is not to my liking. Again, this will surprise no one.
“I will then let it fall in a few well-placed ears that my good friend Ginny Mulgrew has helped me determine my options and convinced me that my best course lies in following her example and procuring a wealthy protector. St. Lyon.”
“Wake me, please,” he implored the sky above.
“Stop that!” This was not a plan she wanted. It was simply the only plan they had.
“I won’t be party to such madness.” He turned, but she would not let him go. She darted around in the front of him, her hand pushing hard against his chest, stopping him.
“Yes, you will,” she said. “Because you know how many lives might…can be saved if I can find this letter. Just as you know how many lives might be destroyed if I don’t.”
“It will never work.”
“It may not,” she conceded. “But we have to try. I have to try. And if it fails…well, at least I will know it was not because I valued my reputation over the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people. Dand…” The sunlight shimmered in her eyes, making it hard to see his face, read his expression. “How could I live with myself if I didn’t make an attempt to get that letter? How could you live with yourself if you didn’t help me?”
“How can I live with myself if I do?” His voice was low, poisoned. He lifted his hand, his fingertips hovering inches above her cheek, tracing a line in the air as if he were caressing her.
“You will have to. Just as I will.”
His hand fell to his side.
“Besides, I may not have to become St. Lyon’s mistress,” she offered hopefully. “He might take a dislike to me. Or he might discover that I am far too fastidious for his tastes. Or too mercenary. I am only going there as his potential mistress, Dand. It isn’t a fait accompli.” She prayed this last was true. It was to this faint hope she’d clung since she’d made her decision. “Help me.”
“You don’t have a bloody clue what you’re asking of me, do you?” he muttered, his heart beating thickly beneath her palm.
“The oath? The Rose Hunters’ sacred vow of seeing to the well-being of all the Nash women?” He must help her. She turned around, trying to find the words to convince him and spied a single yellow bloom drooping forlornly from the end of a tremulous branch. She bent over, plucked it, and rose, holding the flower out to him.
“You swore you would do whatever was asked of you. I’m asking you to help me.”
“I did not vow to aid in your destruction,” he said fiercely, refusing to even glance at the bloom nestled in the palm of her hand.
“I know. But I would trade your vow to protect me for your aid in saving the lives of a multitude.”
A shudder coursed through him and his jaw clenched. She picked up his fisted hand and pried open the long fingers, carefully placing the rose within it and then, just as carefully folding his fingers back over it. “I think it a rather good trade,” she jested weakly, praying he would accept. “Please, Dand.”
With a curse, he crushed the blameless bloom he held and jerked his hand free from hers. He was always pulling away from her, she realized, and she was always finding some excuse to touch him. “How?”
Quickly, while he was willing to listen, she outlined the plan she and Ginny had devised during the long hours before dawn.
“You’ll have to take a false name. Too many people recognize the name Dand Ross from Helena’s encounter last year. Then, come and go as if my home were your own. Act like a lover.” She shrugged, smiling a little. “Pretend to ruin me.”
He did not return her smile. “Make no mistake, Lottie. Whatever I do, the world will never know it as pretense,” he said with chill sobriety. “You will have to live with the results of this masquerade for the rest of your life.
“In the end, even should you succeed and the war is won and Napoleon defeated, there will never be a public disclosure explaining your motives and your noble goal. There will be no celebration, no gala hero’s reception for you. The papers will not write a retraction of the condemnation that will seep into every society column. No one will say ‘thank you.’
“Whispers will continue to follow you. Shoulders will continue to be turned. Ladies will cross the street to avoid meeting you and young Turks will cross the street to meet you. In the eyes of the world, you will be ruined.”
“I understand.” She had some inkling of what the future may well hold. She’d seen something of the life Ginny led. “Will you help me?”
He stared into her resolute face for a long, silent moment before finally grinding out, “Damn it all to hell! All right.”
“Thank you.” Her body relaxed.
“All right,” he repeated again. “But only until I can devise another plan. Is that understood?”
“Entirely,” she breathed. “Believe me, there is nothing I desire more than for you to come up with an alternative.”
He looked her over with thinning lips. “St. Lyon leaves for Scotland tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must be compromised soon, yes?”
“As soon as possible,” she agreed.
“Where are you going tomorrow evening?” he asked and then, with something near bitterness, “You are, I assume, going somewhere?”
“Yes,” she said. “I had planned on attending a subscription ball at the Argyll Rooms.”
“Excellent. A public venue.” He frowned thoughtfully. “I daresay I should be able to scrape up something.”
She tilted her head inquiringly. “For what?”
His eyes glittered with a hard light she was quite unused to seeing in their warm, brown depths. “Why, for the opening performance of The Ruin of Miss Charlotte Nash.”
He strode toward the south part of the city. Tension set the broad shoulders and lined the lean visage, making those who would approach fall back before his approach. He ignored the increasing poverty of the area through which he traveled, moving heedless of any danger amongst the rookeries that lurked like poor relations at the backside of the fashionable districts.
Chance and misfortune had him ensnared, trapped him by circumstance and wretched necessity. This wasn’t part of his plan. This merry-mouthed slip of a girl whose dancing eyes and saucy tongue hid a resolve as tenacious as his own, a dauntless heart that equaled his in cool and unflinching determination. She was not supposed to play an active role in these next few weeks. Damn, but she was making things difficult for him.
It was his own bloody fault, of course. He should have realized that she would be a problem from the first moment he’d set eyes on her. She wasn’t beautiful like the blond Helena. Nor handsome like dark Kate, but she was more fascinating, with her devil-may-care eyes, vibrant cinnamon curls, vivacious manne
r, and audacious mouth—a creature of sensuality as well as intelligence.
He should have stayed away from her, but he’d grown soft over the last year or so. Too many near misses with the Dark Summoner, he suspected, made him want to savor life before he entertained death. He closed his eyes, shaking his head, nearly laughing because it was so absurd. So divinely ridiculous.
He wouldn’t let it matter. Nothing before had ever forced him to deviate from his agenda, not Father Tarkin, not his “brothers,” not this Nash girl. Charlotte. Nothing.
Fate had set him on this road years before, decades before. The same road that had led him to St. Bride’s, the same road that had led him to those fateful associations with the others, the same road upon whose length he had honed his skills with sword and fist and mind. And as he, better than anyone knew, you cannot go back again.
So he would go forward, even if it killed him. He would use the tools presented to him to complete the task he had set before himself years earlier. He might admire Charlotte Elizabeth Nash. He damn well wanted her. He could even—no.
He wasn’t going to let emotions stand in his way. He would find a way to make this work.
He always had.
7
The Argyll Ballrooms, London
July 19, 1806
CHARLOTTE PAUSED on the threshold of the Argyll Rooms fighting uncharacteristic nervousness. Inside, candlelight ricocheted off a hundred mirrors, throwing light like confetti, sparkling on diamante-spangled bodices and winking in diamond stickpins, glossing ropes of pearls and gleaming in pomaded hair and shining satin waistcoats, here picking out the tip of a tongue surreptitiously wetting lips, there catching the glimmer of white teeth.
She knew these people. She’d met many on her arrival in this great city five years before when she’d been unofficially launched into society by her surrogate family, the Weltons. Like the Weltons, most of those in attendance tonight were kindly if slightly ramshackle types, no more likely to judge their fellow than themselves. There was Lady Partridge, concern over which sweetmeat to eat puckering her heart-shaped mouth, the perpetually befogged Mrs. Hal Verson, and sweet, handsome Lord Beau Winkel.
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