by Louise Allen
He wished she would put some real value on herself, he thought. But perhaps the prospect of the gallows made everything else—honesty, virtue—unimportant. She knew too much, including how to lie and how to act, but she was still too innocent for her own good. He could not stay cross with her any longer, even if letting go of his anger made him vulnerable to the physical attraction that had him aching for her. But he would not trust her over anything but the fact she had no idea what had happened to that sapphire.
‘Celina, have you ever desired a man physically before?’ he asked, seeing the pink turn to deep rose as she shook her head. ‘I know you enough to realise that you will be sorry if you waste that first experience with someone you don’t have strong, real feelings for, someone who does not feel like that about you. You are a romantic. I am flattered you are attracted to me, but I do not sleep with romantic virgins.’
He was wasting his breath, wasting the emotion with which he tried to convince her of the importance of what he was saying. She probably thought he was a complete hypocrite, a rake lecturing a woman he had just been with on the importance of romantic love, of chastity and waiting for the right man.
But he could recall what it had been like to feel that the act of love was sacred and he knew the bitterness of romantic youth on having that belief shattered. His entire adult life had been turned around because of one young woman’s lack of honour and the disillusion it had brought. In his anger he thought of revenge on any society female careless enough to put herself in his power, but he knew in his heart he would never do that. But the men who had trapped and traduced him—they would pay.
‘But I am not a—’
‘Yes, you are, in here.’ He touched his forehead as she frowned at him. ‘You had convinced yourself that you could separate whatever happened with Tolhurst from what is inside you, but, believe me, you cannot.’
She looked away, biting her lip.
‘You have my word that I will help you, Celina. I do not need paying with anything—except truth.’
There was no response, just a tiny shake of her head, so Quinn pressed on with the practicalities, working it out as he spoke. ‘Tomorrow I will write to Gregor to expect us, tie up the loose ends here and you will practise with the macquillage until you can fool a lady’s maid into thinking you use it all the time. Then the day after we will leave for London by post-chaise. And I want you to write down every single thing you can remember from the moment you agreed to go to Tolhurst until the moment you arrived back at The Blue Door. Everything, every tiny detail. Describe it as though you had to paint a picture of each scene. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ Celina nodded. ‘You are looking for clues about the sapphire.’ She yawned hugely, transformed before his eyes from a desirable, beautiful, dangerous creature into a tired young woman with too much to bear on her slender shoulders. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’
‘If you tell me you are sorry one more time, I will turn you over my knee,’ Quinn threatened. He was tired of gratitude, he just wanted honesty. Then he wished he had not spoken, as the image of her squirming in his lap while he stroked that perfect peach-like bottom had the inevitable result. ‘Go to bed.’
Celina scrambled off the bed. ‘Goodnight, Quinn.’ She leaned in as she passed him and dropped a hesitant kiss on his cheek as he was off guard getting to his feet. ‘Thank you.’
Hell. There goes a night’s sleep. He was not certain whether he dreaded the inevitable erotic dreams or the familiar nightmares most.
‘How can you read with the carriage swaying about like this?’ Lina asked, clutching at the strap with both hands as the post-chaise lived up to its nickname of yellow bounder over a particularly rutted piece of road. ‘I would be sick in an instant.’
‘You get used to it. It is worse reading on camelback,’ Quinn said, his eyes fixed on the sheaf of papers she had given him that morning as they set off for London.
‘Really?’ Images of camel trains trekking across boundless deserts filled her imagination. Oh, to be away from here, away to somewhere strange and wild and free. With Quinn.
‘It is like being on a ship in a swell. It rolls back and forth and side to side at the same time and you are a long way off the ground,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on the page as he removed a pencil from behind his ear to make a note. ‘Is this Makepeace a man of means?’
‘He’s a crocodile,’ Lina said, the camels merging into a vision of the River Nile, its banks covered in evil, grinning reptiles. ‘Have you ever seen the Nile?’
‘Yes. And the crocodiles,’ Quinn added, looking up and smiling. ‘But has he money?’
‘I have no idea. He is very anxious to get his teeth into The Blue Door and to do disgusting things that would make higher profits. Why? Surely he could not have stolen the sapphire?’
‘I agree. I don’t think he would risk alienating a good client by staging a theft while one of his girls was on the premises.’
One of his girls. That is me, Lina thought, trying not to be hurt by Quinn’s choice of words. She had to accept that he classed her as a courtesan. He had taken her virginity and that, she knew, put her on the wrong side of the wafer-thin line that divided decent women from their fallen sisters. One thrust of that hard body and she was ruined, but for him she had been lost before that, ruined from the moment when she had chosen to stay and not flee from Makepeace.
It was strange being shut up with him in the post-chaise. Yesterday’s flurry of activity had given her little time to reflect on the events of the previous evening, yet now she was alone with the man who had taken her virginity, the man she still wanted with a passion that she knew she did not have the vocabulary of words, or actions, to express.
The rake had vanished. So had the man amusing himself by playing the country gentleman. This was the traveller and the adventurer now, planning an expedition, heading into danger. And she could see the scholar, too, in the concentration on her story, the search for clues, the precise notes.
‘I need to get inside The Blue Door and talk to your aunt,’ he said, frowning at the page. ‘I imagine that will not be difficult?’
‘It will not be, provided she is well,’ Lina agreed. ‘But she suffers from a stomach complaint that sometimes lays her low for days at a time. She was ill with that when I left.’
‘Then you must tell me how to reach her rooms. Makepeace will want to help clear the smear from the name of the establishment, but I am assuming he does not know where you have gone and we cannot risk him deciding to ingratiate himself with the authorities by betraying you.’
‘So you accept I have reason to fear him?’
‘Of course.’ Quinn raised one eyebrow. ‘Brothel keepers are rarely people of finer feeling or elevated moral standards.’
‘I had better come with you,’ Lina said, pushing away the logical conclusion that he classed her, and her aunt, in the same category. ‘The house is a maze.’
She expected him to refuse, point blank. Instead he looked at her, while he pushed a lock of tawny hair back behind one ear. ‘It would be dangerous. Besides the risk of you being captured, there is a strong probability that I will run foul of the doormen and you could end up in a fistfight.’
‘I have no doubt that you would deal with them.’ And without hesitation, either. He was used to living where violence was an everyday occurrence and, even if she had not overheard Michael’s awestruck comments about the training sessions in the barn, she knew he was hard and fit.
‘Do I frighten you?’ Quinn asked, startling her out of her recollections of his naked body.
‘Yes,’ Lina said. ‘Yes. You are outside society, outside convention. You are free in a way I do not understand.’ And I love you. The realisation drove the breath from her lungs and the blood from her face. In all her daydreams it had never occurred to her that her true love might be utterly out of her reach.
‘I would never hurt you,’ Quinn said as he reached for her hands, obviously thinking her reaction was alarm
. ‘Not more than I have already,’ he added under his breath.
‘I know.’ Lina let him take her hands, curled her fingers within his for a second before freeing herself. She must not indulge her need to touch him, for she was frightened now with the vision of their parting all too plain in front of her. What was she going to do, feeling like this about a man who would be gone from her life within months? ‘I…’ Love you. I will always love you. ‘I trust you, Quinn.’
‘Then rest, relax. We will defeat the dragons together.’ He went back to reading her narrative for what, she was convinced, was the fifth time. Dragons. My knight, set on a quest to rescue a very tarnished damsel. And he said together. Does he really mean that? Can he possibly mean to treat me as an equal partner in this when he does not entirely trust me?
‘Of course we will,’ Lina said. ‘Although I am not very experienced with adventures,’ she added. ‘Or dragons.’ It was only fair to warn him. ‘My sisters always said I was the timid one.’
Quinn stared at her. ‘Timid? I hardly think so. You ran away from home and got yourself to London. Had you ever travelled by yourself before?’ She shook her head. ‘Then you climbed out of a window to escape from Tolhurst’s house and got to Simon. You coped with the shock of his death and my arrival.’
Lina bit her lip at the satirical tone in his voice when he said that. Her subterfuge was not forgiven. ‘I—’ Well, yes, she had done those things. Perhaps she was not totally lacking in courage.
‘You stood up to the Runner, too, even though you were so frightened. That takes nerve.’
‘I did not do it very well,’ Lina muttered, thinking how utterly she had relied on Quinn. Without him she would have simply collapsed, she was certain.
‘Rather too well, perhaps,’ Quinn said, his eyes on the papers. One corner of his mouth twitched, just a little.
What would he do if she changed seats, curled up next to him and kissed that provoking hint of a smile? He would probably pick her up and deposit her firmly back where she was now, she concluded, not certain whether that was a good thing or not.
His actions had meant that, even though she had lost her virginity, it was, perhaps, not as bad as it sounded. There was no risk that she was with child, she had acquired none of the experience of a lover, even though he had seemed to find her attempts to caress him convincing. If there ever was another man, perhaps he would believe her a virgin still. More lies. And besides, she could imagine wanting no other man but Quinn, ever.
But now he certainly appeared well able to resist whatever it was about her that had so aroused him when he thought to make her his mistress.
Of course he could. She had lied and had put him in a position where he had to lie, too, or betray her. And then she had let him make love to her believing she was a woman of experience, a woman who had been married. Instead he finds himself deflowering a virgin and that obviously outraged his honour even more than the lying. It is a good thing I was already ruined by my association with The Blue Door or he might have felt honour bound to—to marry me?
Oh, yes, that is likely, Lina mocked herself. It was better to jeer at the thought than to take it seriously, even for a moment, for the pain of dreaming was just too great. The daughter of an obscure country vicar marrying a baron? Even if she had been utterly respectable, it was highly unlikely. But now, she was quite impossible. Quinn had enough of a problem with his own reputation and retrieving that, without involving himself with her. He would need to make a careful, well-judged, marriage to someone of the utmost respectability who would not mind when he took himself off on his travels for months at a time.
‘Don’t sigh,’ he said without looking up. ‘You must not get despondent or you will lose your will to fight and you need every drop of that.’
‘I’m not despondent, exactly,’ Lina said. ‘But how is getting into The Blue Door going to help?’
‘One thing at a time.’ Quinn tapped his teeth with his pencil and frowned at her notes. ‘You told your aunt that you could not recall whether Tolhurst had been wearing the ring when you arrived, but now you think he was?’
‘I was in such a state when I got home that I could hardly think straight,’ she admitted. ‘But writing everything down like that, I began to recall. He made me undress and he was… I tried not to look at him but he was taking off his own clothing and I saw a blue flash, which must have been the ring catching the light.’
‘Which side?’
‘The left side. And it was the left hand that Reginald Tolhurst, his son, lifted to feel for a pulse. But I must have been wrong, imagining things, because the ring was not there then. He laid his father’s hand back on his chest and his fingers were in plain sight.’
‘I see. Reginald is not the heir?’
‘No, his elder brother George has inherited. He was away, I think.’
‘Good,’ Quinn said, as though that confirmed something he had been thinking. He folded the papers and set them aside. ‘Do you play chess?’
‘No.’ Lina watched apprehensively as Quinn removed a small box from the valise on the seat beside him and opened it to reveal a travelling chess set. ‘I do not expect I will be any good.’
‘No, Celina.’ Quinn shook his head at her as he put the board on the seat and began to set out the pieces. ‘No defeatist talk. You can do anything. Now, this is a pawn…’
Chapter Fifteen
Chess lessons were one way of taking her mind off her troubles, Lina thought, even if one of those troubles was sitting opposite her maintaining a scrupulous distance and patiently explaining for the fourth time what the difference between a rook and a knight was.
They were in London now, rattling over cobbled streets she did not recognise, working their way south towards Mayfair. Quinn had told her the address: Clifford Street. Not one of the great squares, but a very respectable, obviously fashionable, street running east off Bond Street. Just how wealthy was Quinn? she wondered, eyeing his plain breeches and coat. He had gems and silks, business affairs in Constantinople and now there was the house they were drawing up in front of, which, if it was not rented, had cost him a pretty penny.
‘That is Gregor’s next door.’ Quinn nodded to an identical portico with plastered hood and elaborate ironwork.
‘You both bought one?’
‘Yes. Seemed a good investment,’ he said, helping her down. ‘Now I am going to spend time here, then I will buy more property. London is expanding by the day.’
‘Welcome.’ Gregor stood on the top step of his own house, grinning at them. ‘You have brought me some excitement, just when I was getting bored with London.’ He ran down the steps and joined them on the pavement, his eyebrows lifting comically as he took in Lina’s changed appearance. ‘Madame! A masquerade?’
‘Good afternoon, Gregor.’ She dropped a slight curtsy, making his grin spread wider.
‘No, this is not a masquerade,’ Quinn said and she saw the Russian’s eyes narrow at the edge to the words. ‘Come, we will walk and talk where we cannot be overheard.’
‘I would like to go inside first,’ Lina said. The idea of walking, in broad daylight, without checking that her disguise was intact gave her palpitations. In fact, she was not certain she had the nerve to do it even then.
‘Of course, I should have thought.’ Quinn obviously thought she needed to retire for more intimate reasons.
‘Shall we all go in and have a cup of tea and then go out?’ she suggested and to her relief the men followed her past the butler and through the front door, almost cannoning into her as she stopped dead in the front hall. ‘How wonderful!’
And it was. A lofty hall with a great hanging lantern, a dramatic sweep of stairs with wrought-iron banisters and an array of massive panelled doors. ‘So large and grand.’
‘I am intending to entertain,’ Quinn said, much as he might have announced he was about to declare a small war. Lina cut a sideways glance at him and saw his expression; he looked grimly amused.
Now
what is that about? she wondered as Gregor introduced the new butler, a middle-aged man called Whyte, to Quinn. ‘I’ll speak to the rest of the staff later,’ he was saying. ‘Tea in the drawing room now and please send Miss Haddon’s maid to show her to her room immediately.’
Gregor had selected a pleasant, plain, young woman who had an air of discretion and common sense about her. ‘Prudence, ma’am,’ she said, bobbing a curtsy. ‘This way, please, ma’am.’
The bedchamber, after the Gothic eccentricities of Dreycott Park’s furnishings, seemed modern and airy and luxurious. Lina sat before the dressing-table mirror patting rice powder into her cheeks and touching up tiny smudges of candle black under her eyes while Prudence dealt with loose hair pins. Lina wondered what the girl thought of serving someone who was all too obviously the paramour of her master.
They drank tea in the elegant drawing room, the men exchanging news about business matters, some new publications, domestic trivia that Gregor had dealt with. He was discreet about how he had spent his time otherwise, Lina noticed, although she suspected he would be less inhibited when she was absent.
‘Berkeley Square,’ Quinn said, grounding his tea cup. ‘You would like an ice at Gunter’s, I am sure, Celina.’
And if I said no, I would find myself there anyway, Lina thought, not sure whether to be amused or irritated. The men escorted her punctiliously, leaving her feeling rather like a small prisoner between two large, if unlikely, jailers. She kept her head down, expecting a Bow Street Runner to jump out at any moment and point an accusing finger at her.
‘Nervous?’ Quinn asked as they paused at the kerb, waiting to cross Bond Street.
‘No…yes. Yes, I am,’ Lina admitted.
‘Well, stop looking as though you have something to hide or are going to faint with nerves,’ he said. ‘You are behaving like a girl about to make her come-out dithering on the edge of the dance floor. Remember, you are my mistress and act like it.’