So she’d hired a butler named Davies, a middle-aged, unsmiling man who seemed the perfect caricature of an English butler and who came with excellent characters. Working with him, she’d hired a contingent of maids, footmen, and grooms, some of whom had already begun work, undergoing training and helping to ready the place for opening.
She’d even narrowed her search for a chef down to three, the second of whom had sent over the sample meal Trevor was so obviously enjoying.
“What is this?” he asked through a large mouthful.
She glanced at the card Chef Bellanger had sent along with the meal. “Ah, I believe that is roasted chicken with cognac cream sauce. I gather it meets with your approval?”
“You haven’t tried it?” he asked, as he shoved in another bite.
“I didn’t want to bias you. The decision is ultimately yours. But to my mind, if you want the food here to rival that of the Clarendon, Monsieur Bellanger is the most promising candidate.” They had tasted a meal a few days ago from another applicant, and though it had been very good, she wasn’t convinced it could live up to the reputation of the dining room at their main competition. She lowered her voice. “I’m not even sure that last chef was actually French. His accent seemed a little off.”
Trevor had been watching her silently as he stood at the counter shoveling food into his mouth. “Are you done talking?” he asked through a mouthful of chicken. She nodded, and he scooped up a large bite and held it, balanced on the tines of a fork, to her closed mouth.
She hesitated. She should probably turn away and fetch her own fork. But there was something about having him so close that caused warmth to spread through her body. While he was closeted in his apartment, she was brisk, efficient. But when faced with Trevor in the flesh, God forgive her, she felt a little bit wanton.
So she opened her mouth. The rich cream sauce was spiked with a tangy orange flavor that was unlikely, yet…perfect. “Oh my goodness,” she whispered.
He kept her gaze for a long moment before moving around and peeking under the domed lids of the other plates, one after another. “What else do we have here?” he asked, voice lower than usual.
She cleared her throat and consulted the menu. “Well, we were meant to start with asparagus, so perhaps we should find that and taste the dishes in order.”
Ignoring the suggestion, he upturned another lid. “Aha! The pudding!”
“It’s a chocolate pot du crème,” she said, looking down at the menu. “It’s meant to be served with a dollop of cream, which must be somewhere else—”
“It’s bloody brilliant, is what it is!” His eyes were closed in ecstasy, and Lucy found herself uncomfortably warm.
“We do have a third candidate sending over dinner tomorrow,” she said, “but perhaps I should just tell him we’ve already…” She trailed off because Trevor was holding a dollop of the pot du crème in front of her mouth. But he wasn’t using a utensil this time. The thick cream coated his fingertip. Impelled by some unseen force inside her body, she opened her mouth and let him slide his finger inside. As she closed her lips around his finger, flavor exploded on her tongue, a hint of sweetness—just enough to take the edge off the smoky, decadent dark chocolate. Letting her teeth scrape against his flesh as he slowly pulled his finger away, she couldn’t contain a low moan. What was she doing?
Her eyes were drawn to a smudge of chocolate cream on Trevor’s upper lip. For an instant, the years fell away, and she had a vision of him as a boy, icing sugar on his face. After the Great Cake Heist of 1795, they’d eaten cake for days. It hadn’t been anywhere close to as wonderful as this pot du crème, but for a couple of always-hungry children, it had seemed like heaven. The memory was bittersweet. She’d spent the past fifteen years trying to get away from those children. Trevor sent her away, and she’d been determined not to think about him. Because their lives had been so intertwined, that meant closing the door on those years entirely. But for the first time, she felt a tug of compassion for them, these as-good-as-motherless waifs who faced down the world daily. They’d been brave. Foolish, yes, but also brave.
“You have some chocolate on your face,” she said softly.
“So do you,” he said, using his thumb to rub the corner of her mouth. “My aim was a little off.”
She huffed a small laugh but quickly quelled it when she realized he wasn’t jesting. In fact, he was staring intently at her mouth and rubbing his thumb back and forth across her lower lip—where, she was certain, there was no longer any errant chocolate.
Who was this man? He was the Trevor of her youth, yet he was not. The boy would not have touched her like that. Would not even have noticed her face long enough to bother with a dab of pudding gone awry. The boy had reserved that sort of intense scrutiny for lock picking and cake filching.
The man, by contrast, was causing her stomach to feel like little wings were fluttering inside it.
It was almost as if she wasn’t in the room, which was ridiculous because of course she was. It was her lip he caressed. But he stared so intently at her mouth that the encounter seemed somehow to be unfolding between him and it without her presence mattering at all.
She lifted herself onto tiptoes, and the tiny birds inside her took off, a great, flapping flock of them. They were propelling her toward him, and she wasn’t in charge anymore. She pressed her lips against the spot of chocolate near the corner of his mouth. If she’d thought the chocolate tasted sinful before, she’d been naive. The tang of his skin magnified it, made it magnetic.
“Lucy,” he rasped, his lips moving against her skin as he spoke her name. She waited for more, for him to cry halt. He did not. So she remained where she was, her lips pressed against the corner of his mouth but not moving, the roar of blood in her ears a rushing waterfall.
Beneath her mouth, his jaw clenched, became hard like iron, and his breath, already short, took on a ragged quality. Warmth pooled low in her belly like that chocolate, liquefied and hot. Every second they stood there, unmoving, something coiled more tightly inside her. It was almost painful, but it was impossible to imagine stepping away.
He moved only an inch. Less than an inch. His lips grazed hers, and though they barely touched hers, the warmth in her belly became fire. How was that possible? They weren’t even kissing, not really, and yet she felt as if she were at the gates of Bedlam.
A thought crept in. She tried to push it away, but it persisted. This is why Mary had fallen victim to her bouts of suicidal behavior. This—this unnamable compulsion—would grow and grow until it took over, displacing everything else, everything that made her herself. Unlike Mary, she wasn’t capable of producing great works of philosophy with the potential to change the world, but she did have a life. A hard-won life she’d made for herself through sheer force of will. Trevor was helping her—she’d had no choice but to permit it given his logical argument that their arrangement would benefit them both. But she needed to remember why she had agreed to stay only for six months. Because men were dangerous—even him.
Perhaps especially him.
So she stepped away.
He gave a quiet huff of what sounded like frustration as he raked a hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said as the awkward reality of their current circumstance rushed in all at once. What on earth had possessed her to be so bold? And here she’d thought, based on the instruction she’d received at Miss Grisham’s, that men were the ones prone to rash urges like this.
“No, I’m sorry.” He strode to the servants’ table and drummed his fingers on it. “That contravened...” He heaved an exasperated sigh. “Everything.”
He was correct. So she moved away and located the dish with which they’d been meant to start their tasting. “Will you have some asparagus?”
“Lucy,” he said quietly, “won’t you tell me the name of your last employer?”
So they were back to that, were they? She shook her head. The hotel was going to open soon. His shining J
ade. His beautiful home. And he was correct to insist they keep any hint of scandal away from it. So she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t risk him doing anything rash. Not when he was so close to having everything he’d ever wanted.
“No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
He’d only been going to wash his face. But when splashing cold water on his heated cheeks did nothing to calm him, he picked up the pitcher and poured its entire contents over his head.
Then he threw the pitcher against the wall, and it shattered into a satisfyingly large number of pieces.
He stared at his waterlogged reflection in the mirror. One didn’t kiss one’s employees. He couldn’t argue with that little adage. But worse, one didn’t kiss Lucy Green. Or Lucy Greenleaf, or whoever the hell she was. Because Lucy deserved better than to be tied to a gutter rat like him. And underneath all his money, that’s what he still was. What he would always be. He was a spy, for God’s sake. He spent a good deal of his time chasing after the world’s most unsavory criminals. In some ways, he hadn’t left Seven Dials at all.
The great admiration he’d felt for Lucy when they were children was still there. There was no one like her—whip smart, fiercely analytical, quick to laugh, and capable of being sweet even in the face of so much suffering. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms back then, but Lucy had been his best friend.
That was all still there. It had only taken an instant, when he’d opened the door to find her standing outside in the rain, for all that regard to come flooding back.
The problem was that lately, it wasn’t just regard he felt.
He thought of her arms, fully concealed in one of the prim, long-sleeved dresses she had adopted once he’d appointed her manager, and he wanted them twined around his neck. Her mouth giving way under his. That long curtain of hair he knew was hiding under her demure chignon fanned out on his pillow. Every single part of her inspired some ungentlemanly imagining or other. For God’s sake, they hadn’t even kissed properly this time, not really. She’d merely pressed her lips against the corner of his mouth. But it had been enough to shoot a lightning bolt of lust through him, to make him want to take her upstairs and…
Which meant he was no better than the beasts he’d saved her from that horrible day her mother decided she was ready to take up the family profession. He was supposed to protect Lucy, not subject her to the base urges of a gutter rat.
“No,” he said into the empty room, forcing his voice to be calm, to not shake. That he wanted her was of no consequence. He was better than the men who had preyed on her. He had free will. Discipline. Drive. It’s what had gotten him out of Seven Dials and into an apprenticeship. From there to the army. It’s what had built the Jade.
And more importantly, it was what had gotten Lucy out of Seven Dials, and into a better life.
He had done it before, and he could do it again.
Reaching for a towel, he stooped, intending to clean the mess he’d made when he’d given in to his animalistic instincts and hurled the pitcher at the wall. But he paused. He had maids now. Rich scions of industry didn’t clean up after themselves when they had tantrums.
And that’s what he was—a rich scion of industry. It was time he started acting like one. He yanked the bell pull. In due course, a young woman appeared, curtsying excessively but otherwise looking very much the part of a chambermaid. Lucy had done a good job with the staffing. “Clean this up.” He swallowed the “please” that formed automatically on his lips. “And send a footman to meet me in the library. I’m going to need a letter delivered tonight.”
Trevor wasn’t home when the Earl of Blackstone arrived the next day—indeed, Lucy had no idea where he’d gone, so she rushed to receive the aristocratic guest in one of the newly furnished parlors on the main floor.
“No one has taken your hat?” she said, unable to temper her dismay as she came upon him standing with the offending object in hand. He bowed, and she recovered herself and dropped a curtsy—she was no better than the servants she’d been bemoaning! “My apologies, my lord.”
He did not respond, looking around with what she was beginning to recognize as his signature brand of almost clinical scrutiny. “You’ve made remarkable progress here, Miss Greenleaf. I don’t mind telling you I’d been starting to worry a little that the place wouldn’t be ready on time.”
“We’ve only just over a fortnight. And we don’t even have a chef yet.” She grinned in spite of her worry. “But I think we shall be making an offer to one presently. Oh, and we’ve had our first two bookings! Some Americans in town on business have written, and so has a local gentleman who is moving from London shortly and has to vacate the rooms he’s been letting.” She stopped. She was doing the nervous-talking. Lord Blackstone was an investor, yes, but that didn’t necessarily mean he cared to hear about every last detail. “I’m sorry. You’re here to see Mr. Bailey.”
“Yes, he wrote to me last night, and I’ve come bearing a reply.” He tapped his chest. No doubt he had a letter somewhere on his person.
“I’m afraid I don’t know when he’s due back. I’ll be happy to convey your note to him, my lord.”
She held out her hand to receive the letter, but he hesitated. When she extended her hand closer to him, he even recoiled a bit. Did he not trust her?
“This is a rather…personal letter.”
Well, that stung. How would they ever get the investors to accept her as manager if Lord Blackstone couldn’t even bring himself to hand over a letter?
“I assure you,” she said, her voice rising though her rational self knew he’d meant no offense, “that while I may have had a common childhood, the school I attended did an exceedingly thorough job drilling us in etiquette. So I do have the good sense not to pry into other people’s private correspondence, my lord.” It was true, but she checked herself before she could say any more. What was she doing, delivering a poorly veiled setdown to an earl? And an investor, at that.
“Please forgive me. I meant no insult. Trevor has told me a great deal about his childhood. He’s risen above his upbringing. It seems you have, too.”
Lucy wasn’t quite sure what to say, so she offered vague agreement. “Indeed, my lord. Trevor has certainly made quite the life for himself.”
“It’s rather remarkable that he pulled himself out the way he did.” He narrowed his eyes at her so that she almost expected him to produce a quizzing glass to aid him in his efforts. “It seems almost impossible that you both managed the feat.”
“The credit for my flight from Seven Dials belongs to Trevor, too,” she said quietly. It seemed important to make this clear, given that she was talking to Trevor’s close friend.
“May I ask?” He trailed off but was still regarding her with his singular scrutiny.
She hesitated a moment, but it wasn’t as if any of it was a secret. It seemed Trevor had told Lord Blackstone everything except his role in sending Lucy away that day—probably because he felt it wasn’t his story to tell. “One day an extraordinary thing happened,” she began, trying to think where to start. “A man arrived in a carriage. A very fine man. He wore pumps and a powdered wig. We all laughed to see someone so odd and remarkable. He simply drove up, a peacock amidst all the chaos and squalor, and announced that he was going to take a boy away—one boy—and send him to school.”
“But that wasn’t Trevor,” the earl said. “He escaped via an apprenticeship.”
Lucy nodded. “You can imagine the clamoring that followed. None of the boys cared about learning, of course, but we all knew that this mysterious thing called school would come with a warm bed and plenty to eat.
“After a mad scramble, he selected a boy named Hugh. That would have seemed to be the end of it, but Trevor told me later he overheard the man arguing with his wife, who had stayed in the carriage. She wanted a girl, she said. If he could be a benefactor, then she wanted to be a benefactress. She was quite put out by not having her whim indulged. The man assured he
r they would come back another day soon so she could choose her own waif. ‘One urchin at a time,’ he told his wife.”
The perceptive earl did not miss a beat. “I gather she did come back.”
“Yes. She came back a week later, and Trevor made sure it was me she took.”
She expected some surprise at the unlikely tale, an expression of astonishment, the raising of an eyebrow at least. But Lord Blackstone remained implacable.
“I wonder that he didn’t arrange things so that he was the boy taken the first time.”
“He was the only boy who wasn’t madly jockeying to be chosen,” she said, remembering. “He simply stood at the back of the crowd and watched it all as if he were a decade older than his years.”
“Why was that, do you think?”
“We never discussed it, but I believe it was because he wouldn’t leave me.” Back then, she silently added. Now? He seemed to be working very hard to avoid her.
The earl just nodded.
“Who wouldn’t leave you?”
Neither of them had heard him coming. Trevor strode into the room, and his sudden appearance jolted her. To think, the last time she’d seen him, she had taken his finger into her mouth! A moment later, he was followed by the Countess of Blackstone.
“Ah, here you all are.” Emily smiled at her husband.
Lucy pulled the bell to summon a footman and collected the countess’s wrap and bonnet, trying to hide her unease. Though she knew it was impossible, she couldn’t help feeling that somehow, just by looking at Lucy, Emily would know that she had kissed Trevor the night before. That she would see the confusing, low-burning frustration that had dogged her all night.
The Likelihood of Lucy (Regency Reformers Book 2) Page 10