He popped another forkful of egg in his mouth. “I should think what I am doing here is self-evident. I have come to lend verisimilitude to my role of your protector.”
“That can be done quite well without your presence in my home at this ungodly hour.”
“I disagree. Oh, yes, we set a number of tongues wagging last night. But as far as the ton is concerned, you are simply compromised. Indeed, most of them are probably waiting for an announcement in the Times. Especially old St. Lyon, knowing who you are and, more importantly, who your brother-in-law is.
“I mean, really Lottie, what is more likely, your imminent engagement or your imminent entrance into the world of the demirep?
“Pleasant though the task would doubtless prove, I could spend weeks kissing you on every street corner and at every public venue in London before it finally became apparent that there was not going to be any announcement in the Times and that you were not simply compromised but well and truly ruined. And then, and only then, would the cautious St. Lyon be drawn into your trap—by then your ruin coming far too late to be any use to me.” He smiled blandly. “I meant ‘us.’
“No. St. Lyon must be convinced, as you so properly pointed out last night, as swiftly and emphatically as possible.”
He took a sip of coffee. “And what more emphatic means of erasing any doubt as to your state than for me to take up residence here? Besides, no rumors are so swift or clarion as those spread by one’s own staff.”
He meant to live here? She stared, straightened slowly, her mouth forming an “O” of shock. Until this moment she hadn’t realized he meant to take the charade so far. Yes, a few early breakfasts, some late evening visits, unchaperoned certainly but…live here?
“But…but…” she sputtered. “I don’t…I mean, I thought if there was some chance that afterward we might…that if some doubt could be left as to my, er,” she fumbled around for a delicate way of saying what needed to be said, “my…state.”
“Oh. You mean you’d hoped you might find some room to wiggle out of being labeled a courtesan?” he supplied sympathetically.
What had happened to the angry, nearly impossible to convince Scotsman? The man who’d sworn and raged at her for even suggesting that she assume the guise of a lady bird? He’d disappeared. Someone had exchanged him for this doppelganger with his fine clothes and elegant insouciance.
“I am afraid we must all learn to live with the choices we make, Lottie,” he said with that same loathsome kindliness.
“Why have you changed? Why are you suddenly so amenable to this plan?”
“I went back to my rooms. I thought about it.” His gaze became shuttered. “I thought about what I would be willing to do to achieve what I set out to achieve and accepted that I would do anything necessary, accept any risk or sacrifice, to see my way to the end of this enterprise.”
She regarded him dolefully, wishing she hadn’t been quite so persuasive. At the same time she realized how absurd she was being.
“Come, Lottie,” Dand said, his gaze softening, becoming once more familiar, amused, ironic. “Yours isn’t the only sacrifice, you know. As soon as your brother-in-law Munro hears of this, he shall chase me to the ends of the earth in order to poke me full of holes with his sword. And your other brother-in-law, the redoubtable Kit?” He laughed. “He won’t rest until he’s had the pleasure of breaking every bone in my body.”
“Not once they are made to understand the whys and wherefores of the situation,” she said. “Besides, they won’t even know it is you.”
His gaze sharpened, but his voice remained light, “One can but hope—”
A sound in the passage brought his head swinging round at the same moment he grabbed her wrist, yanking her from her seat and into his lap.
“Ah!”
He had just time to clamp her firmly around the waist and whisper, “Play along!” when the door swung open and Curtis appeared bearing a domed silver plate. The footman stopped, eyes rounding as he saw where his mistress sat.
“Put it here, Curtis,” Dand said casually, his hand traveling a slow possessive path up Charlotte’s back while Curtis went brick red. She forced herself to take a breath. She could do this. She could.
“There’s a lad. Now, sweetling, are you certain I must feed you?”
It was a good thing she’d turned her head, for her footman would have been amazed to read on her lips a word she suspected she oughtn’t even know.
Dand’s brown eyes lit with unfeigned delight. “Ah! She’s come over shy! How…delectable. Leave the plate and begone, Curtis. I have a little wooing to do!”
She heard the plate clatter on the table top and a few seconds later the door swing shut. With an angry sound, she pushed at Dand’s chest, trying to scramble out of his lap, but his arms held her firmly in place.
“Just what did you hope to accomplish with that little byplay, besides embarrassing…poor Curtis?” she demanded indignantly, mostly indignantly because held thus she could not help but be aware of his musculature, the easy strength of his arms, the scent of him. Even through linen and wool, the heat of his warm body, masculine and utterly unique in her experience, was hopelessly distracting.
“The servants, Lottie. They are our most important audience in this ruse. They must carry stories and to do so, they must have stories to carry. I suggest we feed their store of tales as often as possible.”
She answered his nonsense by attempting to rise. He would not let her. Instead, he laughed. “Who would have thought it? The rakish, rompish, disastrous Miss Nash, a prude?”
His lips drew close to her ear and whispered, “Don’t go all soft and girlish on me now, little heartbreaker!”
The little warm puff of his breath summoned the ghost of last night’s yearning. “I am not soft. I am not a prude. I am a hoyden, a coquette, a romp, and a flirt,” she announced, her pride stung, her body humming with awareness. “I most decidedly am not a prude.”
“Then stop acting like one. Stay.” His arm shifted, pulling her back, forcing her to relax against him. The ghost took on substance, became a renewed craving. “Stay,” he repeated in an odd voice. “Familiarize yourself with me, my body, my touch.”
It made sense. Perfect sense. As long as he didn’t know of the desire whispering like black rain through her veins, drugging and euphoric. Too potent to be ignored. Too real to be denied. Her arms, still looped in a rigid circle around his neck, began to loosen. Her body began to melt into him as though her very flesh softened in response to his hardness, needing to absorb, accommodate, cleave—
No! Even if she and Dand hadn’t been…comrades? Co-conspirators? Everything in her life’s experience clamored for her to be on her best defense. And that meant being absolutely honest with herself.
To Dand this was all a great game, and London and Paris and everything in between was a chessboard on which everyone was a piece to be moved, manipulated, used for his ultimate goal. But she wasn’t Dand. She couldn’t see everything quite so objectively. The question now was, was she good enough an actress to keep hidden her reaction to him?
She would have to be.
“All right.”
“It’s not a death sentence, you know,” he whispered. Did his lips brush the outer curve of her ear? She shivered. “Besides, as you so cleverly pointed out to me, it is only for a short time.”
She turned, looking up and into his eyes. They were as clear as amber glass, honeyed and warm, wrinkled at the corners with the wry amusement she knew so well.
“In a few weeks, two at the most,” he continued, “we shall enact an equally public and equally passionate disaffection wherein I dismiss you from my life and you, scorned and ruined beyond hope, slink back to our sordid love nest to make what repairs you can of your pitiful life.”
He’d deliberately made it sound like the most overwrought and overheated sort of novel. She could not help but laugh, relieved when he dispensed with the tomfoolery with her ear. Or so she told herself.
“How odious!”
He nodded serenely. “Tragic.”
“That will never do.”
He wasn’t attending. He’d burrowed his nose into the curls at the nape of her neck. She froze. He inhaled deeply, extravagantly.
No. No. She was not a simpering little milquetoast miss, swooning over a man’s attentions.
“What is that fragrance?”
“Jasmine.” She had to remember to breathe.
“Pretty.” His breath sent warm eddies trickling down her spine and set her nerve endings quivering. She bit hard on the tender lining of her lower lip. She wasn’t going to be distracted that easily—and where had he learned this trick, anyway?
“I have a better idea of how to end our faux association,” she said, pulling away from him and trying to sound unaffected. “I shall dismiss you. And in the throes of an agony and despair too great to contemplate, you shall then hurl yourself off London Bridge.” She hesitated, sensing that this might be going a bit far. “Or take the next boat to Egypt.”
“No, no,” he corrected gently, refusing to release her and nuzzling her neck anew. Little tremors of pleasure sifted over her skin. “You see, if I dismiss you, then your subsequent decision to take another lover soon afterward can be logically attributed to the fact that in your misery you are seeking to recapture with another those moments of sublime pleasure and happiness you found with me.”
“I beg to point out how disastrous such an impression would be to my mission,” she returned politely, turning abruptly in his embrace and thus bringing her lips dangerously close to his. His gaze dropped to her mouth, feasted on it.
“Why is that?” His lips parted a fraction. His head angled as if he was about to—
“Because,” she squeaked. She tried again. “Because no man—especially St. Lyon—would willingly measure himself against a previous lover, especially one he has been led to believe is superior.”
Dand frowned, but his gaze remained fixed on her mouth. Was there a bit of something on it? Delicately, she made an exploratory swipe of her tongue along her lower lip. Dand’s pupils blossomed with darkness. His chest, which had been rising and falling with such deliberate cadence beneath her, stilled.
“No,” she said, trying to find her footing in the face of his riveted attention, even though she suspected it was feigned. “It will be far better if I give you the old heave-ho, in which case St. Lyon will be bound to believe that my experience with you was so dismal that upon its dissolution I at once set out to seek reassurances that it need not always be so.” She smiled sweetly, leaning in and cupping his jaw in her palm. His beard was like the finest sandpaper, but his skin was warm. “N’est-ce pas?”
“We can decide on the particulars later.” He looked distracted. A little…befogged. He pulled back abruptly and rose to his feet, lifting her as he did so and setting her to his side as easily as if she were a child. “For now, where would you like me to have my things brought?”
“What? Oh.” She felt a little light-headed. Too little sleep, too many sensations. “You shall not have much room,” she said. “So don’t go moving a lot of things in here.”
“I don’t have a lot of things,” he replied.
Of this she had no doubt, but his admission brought to mind something that had been niggling at the back of her mind since last night. “Where did you come by these clothes and the ones you wore last night? And how came you to look so well groomed in so short a time?”
“Oh. That. Easy enough. I simply nipped over to Munro’s town house and borrowed a few things from his wardrobe. We always were of a similar build.” He leaned back in the chair. “I’m glad to see what with the good life he’s been leading he hasn’t run to fat.”
“You broke into the marquis of Cottrell’s home and stole his clothing?” she asked, unable to keep the admiration from her expression.
He shrugged with elaborate modesty. “Well, I am a spy, Lottie.”
“And,” she motioned toward his perfectly clipped head of hair, his smoothly shaved jaw, the intricate folds of his cravat, “the rest?”
“The ladies on Barrow Street were most obliging.”
A little white hot spurt of some unidentifiable but extremely unpleasant emotion rippled through her.
“You won’t be needing their ministrations in the future.”
One brow shot up inquiringly.
“Now that you are…otherwise engaged, it would never do to have you seen coming and going out of low brothels.”
“They weren’t low,” he replied with a hint of a smile.
“I don’t care!” She composed herself. “You mustn’t be seen coming out of any brothel or house of pleasure. At all.”
“I wouldn’t be seen.”
“You won’t risk it,” she said through grated teeth.
“Can you tie a cravat, then?”
She’d never had occasion to try, but she wasn’t about to tell him this and risk having him shoring off to some doxy’s eager hands. “Of course I can.”
He tilted his head, studying her with notable skepticism. “And you learned this…?”
She smiled secretively. Let him think what he would.
“I see,” he said shortly then, with an offhand smile, “I had best find out what the driver has done with Ram’s clothing. I should hate to bring into question your much vaunted discrimination by appearing in Hyde Park this afternoon in anything less than sartorial.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Why, yes,” he answered. “I am rather.”
9
St. Bride’s Abbey
October 1792
“Y OU STAY WITH me awhile,” Brother Toussaint told the lad with the impertinent tongue. “The rest of you are dismissed.”
The other four boys, Ramsey, Douglas, John, and Christian, set down their wooden practice swords and with reluctant backward glances at Dand Ross, straggled out of the empty stables, clearly wondering what Dand had done now. But if the boy felt any unwillingness to be separated from his friends, he showed none.
He waited with practiced patience, scuffing his toe at an ant that crawled by. Something in that guileless countenance troubled Toussaint. Was it something in the way the lad moved? Nothing like the Munro boy’s predatory grace, but a quality one noted only when he walked away, his spine straightening, his shoulders squaring with a sort of imperial authority. Where had the boy learned to walk like that, and, more interestingly, why did he go to pains to hide it?
Or maybe it was the watchfulness that hid behind the puckish glint of his eyes? Whatever it was, something about the boy reminded Toussaint of death and disdain, guillotines and bloodied ermine robes. But if his suspicions were correct that meant that one of the most exalted families in France had mislaid their scion in a Highland abbey. What were chances of that?
Then why did something in Toussaint insist Dand Ross was so much more than the Scottish orphan he and Father Tarkin claimed him to be? Were the rumors true? he wondered. Sometimes at night, in the throes of a nightmare, did Dand Ross cry out in French?
“They don’t know you at all, do they? The rest of them?” he mused aloud, thoughtfully rubbing his hand over his head.
The boy blinked at him, perfectly guileless, which itself was a lie; the boy was slippery and filled with worldly knowledge. “Aye, Brother,” the youngster replied glibly. “They know me right well, I’d say. Enough to call me the devil’s own.”
“And are you?”
“Nah,” the lad said with a cheeky grin. “Father Tarkin wouldn’t have no demon in his flock now, would he?”
“I don’t suppose he would,” the onetime captain in Louis X’s Royalist guard answered, his deeply seamed face troubled. The opponents of the Royalists would go to great lengths to wipe out any pretenders to the French throne. How much money could one get for the information that St. Bride’s harbored a member of the royal family? A great deal.
The abbot had speci
fically asked Toussaint to watch this one, to do what he could to refine him because, Father Tarkin had told him, he thought Dand Ross had potential. But potential for what? Toussaint wondered.
He tilted his head, studying the innocent face. Nothing there but an entirely likeable young rapscallion. Except…the eyes, which held his gaze so winningly, held too much amusement, too much awareness for one so very young.
“How long have you been here, Andrew?”
“They call me Dand, sir.”
“How long?”
The boy shrugged and pulled at his collar, looking about uncomfortably, just a boy hoping to find the answer that would release him from an adult’s unwelcome questioning. “Don’t know. Close to three years, I’d guess. Father Tarkin must have it in a book somewhere. Why?”
Toussaint smiled narrowly. A child did not question his elders. Especially his ecclesiastic elders. “Do you like the switch, Dand Ross?”
“No, sir.” There was a grim little bite in his quick response. So ho! The boy disliked authority, did he? No surprise there. He was the most likely of the quartet to find trouble, to do what he’d been especially bid not to do.
“Then mind your tongue, boy.”
“Aye.”
“You have been here longer than any of the other boys I have been asked to train.”
Dand pondered this a few seconds, though Toussaint had the notion he knew to the day when each boy had arrived and under what circumstances. “Except for Dougie Stewart. He was here afore me.”
Toussaint already knew this, of course. He had made it his business to find out as much as he could about these five boys Tarkin wanted taught the martial arts. It seemed a very odd directive for an abbot to make.
Christian MacNeill and Ramsey Munro’s histories were easy enough to trace. Douglas Stewart had arrived as the only survivor of the epidemic that had destroyed his family. John Glass had been sent from his uncle’s home after his newly made widow decided that her obligations to house and feed her husband’s relatives did not extend to nephews.
My Surrender Page 11