“Send him one of your boys then.”
“He doesn’t like boys either. War wound, they say. No lead in his pencil. Precious little pencil either, if it comes to that.”
“Poor man,” Tess said. “That’s quite a sacrifice to make for your country. Still, if sex fails, money usually talks. Make him an offer he cannot afford to refuse.”
She could hear the voices of the soldiers coming ever closer along the landing and the doors slamming back as they searched the rooms with about as much finesse as a herd of cows in a china shop. Mrs. Tong’s girls were screaming. Aristocratic male voices were raised in plaintive protest. A lot of people, Tess thought, were going to have their most private vices exposed tonight. The redcoats’ raid on Mrs. Tong’s brothel would be all over the scandal sheets by the morning. It would be the talk of the ton.
“Time to make a swift exit,” she said. She moved across to the window. “How far is the drop to the street, Mrs. T?”
Mrs. Tong stared. “You’ll never be able to make this climb.”
“Why not?” Tess said. “There is a balcony, is there not? I don’t want to risk them searching me.” She grabbed the sheets from the bed and started to fashion a makeshift rope.
“That’s my best linen!” Mrs. Tong said. “You’ll ruin it!”
“Stick it on my bill,” Tess said. “Have I forgotten anything?”
Mrs. Tong shook her head. There was a gleam of appreciation in her eyes. “You’re a cool one, and no mistake, madam,” she said. “How about we go into business together?”
Tess shook her head. Only the direst emergency had driven her to take refuge in a brothel in the first place. “Forget it, Mrs. T. Selling sex is not my thing. I don’t even want it when it is offered for free.” She waved. “Thank you for your help.”
She pulled back the curtains and slipped the catch on the long window. There was a decorative little stone balcony outside with a carved balustrade. Tess knotted the sheet around one of the stone uprights and pulled it hard. The sheet held, though whether it would do so under her not-inconsiderable weight was quite another thing. But she had no option other than to take the risk. Lavender slippers and reticule in one hand, she climbed over the balcony, gripped the sheet in her other hand and slid down the chute to the ground, the wide skirts of the gown filling out like a bell around her.
When she was still some distance from the ground she ran out of her impromptu rope and swung gently backwards and forwards in the autumn breeze. She could see Mrs. Tong peering over the balcony above her, still grumbling about the damage to her sheets. Below, there was a drop of at least four feet to the darkened street. For a moment Tess hung there, trying to decide whether to shin back up the rope or risk the jump to the ground. The sheet creaked and slipped a notch. The laces of the gown groaned as well, cutting into Tess’s back as the seams strained.
Then, abruptly, the reticule and slippers were plucked from her hand and a moment later she was seized about the waist and placed gently on her feet.
“Splendid as the view was,” a lazy masculine voice murmured in her ear, “I thought you might appreciate some help.”
Caught.
Panic fluttered in her throat. So she had been right all along. There was no escape.
Stay calm. Give nothing away.
She tried to steady her breath. Something in the man’s touch unsettled her, but deeper than that, deeper and more disturbing still, was the sense of recognition. He had come for her and she could not escape. She knew it and it made her tremble.
She did not even know who he was. She could not see his face.
The gas lamps in the square were out and although the shutters had been pulled back again and faint golden light spilled from the brothel windows it was not sufficient to pierce the autumn darkness. Tess had a confused impression of height and breadth—she was a tall woman but this man was taller, a shade over six feet, perhaps. There was something of resilience and strength about him, of hard chiselled edges and cool calculation. It was in his stillness and the way he was watching her. The impressions confused her; she did not know how she could tell so much whilst knowing so little about him. But her awareness of him was shockingly sharp, intensified in some way by the intimate dark. He still held her, not by the waist but lower, his grip firm and strong on her hips. His touch sent an odd shiver rippling through her. He drew her into the pool of light thrown by the window and released her with meticulous courtesy, standing back, sketching a bow.
The laces of the perfidious gown chose that precise moment to snap. It slid from Tess’s shoulders and crumpled artistically about her waist before sighing down to the ground like a swooning maiden. As she was left shivering in her bodice and drawers, her companion laughed.
“What a perfect gown,” he said.
“It’s a little premature,” Tess said coldly. “We have only just met.”
She knew him now, recognising him with another ripple of disquiet. It was his voice that gave him away, so low and mellow. It was very different from the clipped British accents she was accustomed to hearing every day. Only one man had that languid drawl, as dark and smooth as treacle. Only one man in the ton was an American by birth; a man who was as dangerous and exotic and seductive as he sounded.
Rothbury.
Viscount Rothbury was the man sent to capture her.
Tess knew him a little. He was an old friend of Alex, Lord Grant, her sister Joanna’s husband, and of Garrick, Duke of Farne, her other brother-in-law. Until earlier in the year, Rothbury had been plain Owen Purchase, an American sea captain, who had most unexpectedly come into a title. Now that he was a viscount the ton fawned upon him but he seemed as indifferent to society’s favour as he had been to their previous disregard. He had visited Alex and Joanna in Bedford Square on several occasions, but Tess had always kept out of his way. She met many handsome men on a daily basis. Almost all of them evoked no emotion in her whatsoever. Occasionally she would feel a faint interest in a man who was witty and intelligent, but the sensation was gone almost as soon as she had felt it. She had long ago assumed that any natural desires she might once have felt had been crushed out of her by the vile experiences of her second marriage. She had assumed she would never feel a physical attraction towards any man. She had grown not to expect it and she did not want it.
Rothbury challenged those assumptions and she did not like it.
It was not merely his physique—tall, broad shouldered, durable, strong. Tess supposed that he was handsome—no, she was obliged to admit that he was handsome—in a rugged manner that was far too physical for her comfort. She preferred men who were no physical threat, men who had spent their morning in company with their barber and their tailor rather than in riding or in swordplay; men who were brushed, pomaded and as au fait with fashion as she was. Rothbury had fought for the British against the French at Trafalgar and later for the Americans against the British at North Point. He had been a sailor, an explorer and an adventurer. Tess preferred men who had never travelled farther than their country estates.
And then there was his manner, incisiveness cloaked in those deceptively silken tones. She was not fooled for a moment. Rothbury pretended to be indolent when he was in fact one of the most intelligent and perceptive men of her acquaintance.
Her awareness of him was as sharp as a whetted blade. It disturbed her.
He was still watching her. Assessing. Unsmiling. Evidently he had recognised her too, for he gave her another immaculate bow.
“Good evening, Lady Darent,” he said. “What an original way to exit a brothel.”
“Lord Rothbury,” Tess said coolly. “Thank you—I never follow the crowd.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mrs. Tong gesturing wildly at her. The bawd seemed to be trying to indicate that this—this—was the man responsible for the raid on the brothel, the man she had been talking about as lacking the wherewithal to sow any oats, wild or otherwise. Rothbury had certainly kept that quiet from his fri
ends, Tess thought, but then no doubt he would. She sensed he was a proud man and it was unlikely he would wish to speak of his incapacity, or for it to become common knowledge. It was not the sort of piece of information one simply dropped into polite conversation.
She tried not to stare at his pantaloons. She had far more pressing matters on her mind other than whether Rothbury was capable of continuing his family line. Such as the fact that she was in a state of déshabillée and Rothbury was still holding her shoes in the one hand and her reticule in the other, with the incriminating papers only a rustle away. She was within an inch of being unmasked as well as undressed.
“You might wish to put your gown back on,” Rothbury said. “It’s optional—” an ironic smile tilted his lips “—but both of us might be more comfortable.”
His narrowed gaze had started at her bare toes and was now travelling upwards with unhurried thoroughness, considering the nimbus of red-and-gold hair that fanned about her bare shoulders and finally coming to rest on her face. His green eyes, as cool as a shower of ice, met her blue ones and there was an expression in them that made the breath catch in her chest.
Tess gave a shiver and grabbed the slippery lavender silk and made the best job she could of wriggling back into it. The night air was cold and nipped at her skin and she was grateful when Rothbury wrapped the soft fur-lined cloak about her, its luxurious folds blocking out the autumn chill. But her feet were still bare. She had had no time to put on stockings and now her toes were very cold.
“If I might have my slippers, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “I doubt they are your size.”
She looked down at his feet, handsome in gleaming Hessians that shone in the faint flicker of light from the only street lamp left burning. She found she was trying to remember the scurrilous gossip she had heard about the correlation between the size of a man’s feet and the size of his cock. Was it that men with big feet were well endowed in other regions of their anatomy as well, or that small men had disproportionately large cocks? Lady Farr was having an affair with her jockey, who was extremely short. And Napoleon Bonaparte was also a short man but rumoured to be a prodigious lover…. And why was she thinking about sex when she tried never to think about it at all, and why was she thinking about it now, at this most inappropriate moment when she should be concentrating on nothing more than escape? And in conjunction with Rothbury, whose own proportions had, presumably, been utterly ruined by a mortar shell or bullet.
To her surprise Rothbury went down on one knee and presented the shoe to her with a grin that was pure wickedness, his teeth a flash of white in a face tanned by a climate somewhat more tropical than London in winter. He slid one slipper onto her foot, his palm warm for a moment against the arch of her instep, and she felt a strange and disconcerting flicker of response deep within her.
“Thank you,” she said, forcing the tiny slippers onto her feet where they pinched like malicious crabs. “Just like Prince Charming.”
“I missed the bit of the fairy tale where Cinderella visited the brothel,” Rothbury said. He straightened up. “What were you doing there, Lady Darent?” His tone was still as courteous as before but that courtesy cloaked an edge of steel. Tess’s instinct for self-preservation snapped another warning. Rothbury was the government’s man here, the man sent to hunt her down. She was tiptoeing across a tightrope. One false step and she would fall. The only advantage she had was that he did not know the identity of the person he was hunting.
He was still holding her reticule. Behind him, Tess could see a posse of dragoons rounding up a few ragged protesters. There had been a riot that night and the street was littered with rubble and broken spars of wood. The gas lamps were smashed and someone had overturned a carriage. One of the shutters on the Temple of Venus hung off its hinge. Torn newspapers flapped in the wind. It was quiet now. Once the soldiers arrived the mob had faded away as quickly as they had come, and only the faint smell of burning hung on the cold tide of London air.
Tess shrugged, bringing her gaze back to Rothbury’s impassive face.
“Why does anyone visit a brothel, Lord Rothbury?” she said lightly. “If you have an imagination, now would be the time to use it.” She arched an ironic brow. “I assume you are questioning me on some authority and not simply because you are impertinently curious about my sex life?”
Rothbury shifted. “I am here on the authority of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,” he said. “There was an illegal political meeting at The Feathers Inn tonight. Do you know anything about it?”
Tess’s heart bumped erratically. “Do I look like the sort of woman who would know anything about politics, Lord Rothbury?” she said. “I have absolutely no interest in it at all.”
She saw Rothbury’s teeth gleam as he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “Then you will have equally little interest in the fact that I am hunting for a number of dangerous criminals including the radical caricaturist known as Jupiter.”
Fear breathed gooseflesh along Tess’s skin. She was no dangerous criminal. She was a philanthropist and all she wanted was reform. All she had ever worked for was to alleviate the appalling poverty and misery of the poor. But the Home Secretary did not see it that way. He saw the reformers as a threat to public order and a danger that he was set on obliterating forever.
She swallowed the sawdust in her throat. Not by a flicker of an eyelash could she betray any knowledge of the reformers’ cause, still less that she was intimately involved with it. But under the perceptive gaze of this man she felt her defences stripped naked.
Pretend. Playact. You have done it before….
“You are hunting criminals in a brothel?” she said, affecting boredom. “What a singular way to combine business with pleasure, my lord. Have you found any?”
“Not yet,” Rothbury said. The tone of his voice sent another warning shiver down her spine. She looked at the reticule with its incriminating papers still sitting snugly in the palm of his hand. If he opened that and saw the cartoons …
“You mentioned Lord Sidmouth,” she said. “I do not recall him. Would I have met him at a ball or a party, perhaps?”
“I doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Lord Sidmouth is not a man much given to parties.”
Tess shrugged, as though the conversation was now thoroughly boring her. She glanced towards the door of the brothel, standing open now with light shimmering across the cobbles of Covent Garden Square. “Well, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “Delightful as it is to stand out here in the cold chatting to you, I really am quite exhausted. Worn out, in fact, by my excesses tonight. And I am sure that you have work to do.” She smothered a delicate little yawn, improving on the point. “So if you will hand my reticule over and excuse me, I shall take a carriage home.”
Rothbury weighed the little bag in one palm and Tess’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that at all costs she had to keep her expression blank. If she grabbed the reticule off him or made it clear in any way that she was protective of the contents, Rothbury would look inside and she would be clapped up in the Tower of London as a political prisoner faster than one could say seditious cartoon.
“What do you have in here?” Rothbury said.
“The contents of a lady’s reticule are private only to her,” Tess said. Her mouth dried. “Surely you are gentleman enough to respect a lady’s discretion?” she pressed.
“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Rothbury said. “It feels like a pistol,” he added. “You must like playing dangerous games with your lovers.” His tone was dry.
“I only shoot the ones who fail to satisfy me,” Tess said, smiling sweetly.
She saw Rothbury smile in response, the warmth spilling into those green eyes like sunlight, a long crease denting his cheek. The smile did strange things to Tess’s equilibrium. Rothbury placed the reticule gently in her outstretched hand. Tess’s fingers closed about the silk and brocade and she felt the relief flood through her, so powerful that her knees almost weakened. Then she realised that there was
no rustle of paper, no folded sheets beneath her touch. She gripped a little tighter, desperately trying to make out the outline of the papers. Her stomach hollowed with shock.
They were not there.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE HAD THE PRETTIEST FEET he had ever seen.
It might not have been the first thing about Teresa Darent that most men would have noticed, but Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, was never attracted to the obvious.
He handed Tess up into a hackney carriage and watched as she kicked off the lavender silk slippers and tucked her feet up under the gauzy skirts of the gown. The slippers were far too small for her—Owen had noticed that fact when he had held one of them for her to put on earlier. The gown also could not belong to her. Owen was no expert on feminine attire other than in the removal of it but he had a certain amount of experience of the female form and he knew that a woman with Tess Darent’s opulent curves—and Tess Darent’s flamboyant reputation—would not wear a gown that was two sizes too large. So the outfit was borrowed, which raised the intriguing question of what Lady Darent had been wearing when first she had arrived at the Temple of Venus and why she had needed to change her clothes.
Tess Darent interested Owen. She had from the first time they had met. It was not merely that she had the face of an angel and the reputation of a sinner. Public opinion held that she was as shallow as a puddle, mercenary, amoral, extravagant. She was an arbiter of fashion who had turned spending money into an art form. She simultaneously outraged and fascinated the ton with her profligate marriages and her decadent behaviour, and she was generally considered an utter featherbrain. There was no reason on earth he would find her interesting. Except that some stubborn instinct told him that she was not at all what she seemed….
“Thank you, Lord Rothbury.” Tess smiled at him prettily from the depths of the darkened carriage. The lavender silk gown shone ethereally in the faint light. Taken with the cloud of bright hair tumbling over her shoulders, it made her look impossibly alluring. Owen’s body reacted with an unexpected stab of desire. He wanted to peel that gown from her shoulders, to see it tumble to the floor as it had done before, to reveal the impossible curves and luscious, sensual plumpness of the body beneath. He remembered the pure line of her throat and collarbone when the gown had slid off her, so true and pale and tempting. He wanted to press his mouth to the hollow of her throat and taste her skin.
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