The Last Hellion

by Loretta Chase

  Susan had several toys. The battered wooden duck with its frayed pull string was her favorite.

  If she was sulking, though, as it seemed she was, the duck wouldn’t cheer her, Lydia knew.

  “Either she ate something that disagreed with her—a stray Pekingese, for instance—or she’s in a sulk,” Lydia said. “I’ll go out and have a look at her.”

  She left the dining room and started for the back of the house. Before she’d taken more than a few steps, she heard paws thundering up the stairs from the kitchen.

  The servants’ door flew open and Susan burst through. In her blind rush through the hallway, she bumped into Lydia and nearly overturned her.

  The knocker sounded, and Bess hurried out from the parlor to answer the door.

  Lydia recovered her balance and hastened after the excited dog. “Susan, heel,” she ordered. To no avail.

  The mastiff thundered on, sideswiping the maid. Bess stumbled and caught the door handle. The door swung open, Susan pushed through, knocking Bess aside, and leapt upon the man standing on the doorstep. Lydia saw him stagger backward under the mastiff’s weight a moment before her foot struck something.

  Lydia toppled forward, saw the wooden duck skid sideways while she headed downward. An instant before she could land, she was jerked up and hauled against a large, hard torso.

  “Plague take you, don’t you ever bother to look where you’re going?” an all too familiar voice scolded above her spinning head.

  Lydia looked up…into the laughing green eyes of the Duke of Ainswood.

  A quarter hour later, Lydia was in her study, watching His Grace inspect her books and furniture as though he were the broker’s man, come to assess the property for a debt action. Meanwhile, Trent—he was the one Susan had tried and failed to knock over—Tamsin, and Susan had departed for Soho Square—because Ainswood had told them to go for a walk.

  “Ah, Life in London, by Mr. Pierce Egan,” the duke said as he took the book from the shelf. “It’s one of my favorites. Is this where you learned what a chancery suit on the nob was?”

  “I am waiting to learn why you have invaded my house,” she said frigidly. “I told you I would come to collect you at nine o’clock this evening. Do you want the whole world to know we’re acquainted?”

  “The world found that out a month ago in Vinegar Yard. The world witnessed the introduction.” He did not look up from the book. “You really ought to get Cruikshank to illustrate for you. Purvis is too Hogarthian. You want Cruikshank’s slyer touch.”

  “I want to know what you mean by strolling in here as though you owned the house—and bringing Trent with you.”

  “I needed him to draw Miss Price out of the way,” he said, turning a page. “I should think that was obvious. He will keep her busy trying to fathom the mystery of Charles Two, which will prevent her speculating about my unexpected arrival.”

  “You could have achieved that purpose by not arriving at all,” Lydia said.

  He closed the book and returned it to the shelf. Then he eyed her, slowly, up and down. Lydia felt a hot prickling at the back of her neck that spread downward and outward. Her gaze slipped to his hands. The longing they’d stirred in her last night rippled through her again, and she had to back away and busy her hands with tidying her desk, to keep from reaching for him.

  She wished she’d experienced a schoolgirl infatuation when she’d been a girl. Then she would have been familiar with the feelings, and disciplined them as she’d disciplined so many others.

  “I’ve asked Trent to take Miss Price to the theater tonight,” he said.

  That brought Lydia back to business with a jolt. Trent. Tamsin. To the theater. Together. She made herself think. She must have an objection.

  “Jaynes won’t be available to fleece him at billiards,” Ainswood continued, distracting her. “And I can’t leave Trent to his own devices. I considered drawing him into our conspiracy—”

  “Into our—”

  “—but the prospect of having Trent’s unique brand of help—as in tripping, breaking things, walking into doors, knives, and bullets—made my hair stand on end.”

  “If he’s so troublesome, why in blazes have you adopted him?” Lydia asked, while she tried to get her mind off the absurd images Ainswood painted and back onto the right track.

  “He entertains me.”

  Ainswood moved to the fireplace. The study being small, he had no great distance to travel. It was more than enough, though, to display the easy, athletic grace with which he moved, and the form-fitting elegance with which his garments hugged his muscular frame.

  If he’d been merely handsome, she could have viewed him with detachment, Lydia was sure. It was the sheer size and power of his frame that she found so…riveting. She was hammeringly conscious of how strong he truly was, and how easily he wielded his strength. Last night he’d carried her in his arms effortlessly, and made her feel like a mere slip of a girl.

  She’d never felt that way before, even when she was a girl.

  At present he made her feel stupid as well, like a besotted adolescent. She hoped she was not looking as idiotishly entranced as she felt. She dragged her gaze away, to her hands.

  “You needn’t be uneasy.”

  The deep voice called her attention back to him.

  Ainswood rested his elbow on the mantel and his jaw upon his hand, and gazed at her. “I told him you’d asked me to help you with a difficult assignment of a highly confidential nature,” he went on. “I asked him to take Miss Price to the theater, to ‘allay suspicions.’ He didn’t ask whose suspicions had to be allayed or inquire why going to the theater would allay them.” Twin devils danced in the green eyes. “But then, a man who imagines a girl can dig her way out of a stone dungeon with a sharpened spoon can imagine just about anything. So I left him to it.”

  “A spoon?” she said blankly. “Out of a dungeon?”

  “Miranda, of The Rose of Thebes,” he said. “That’s how she’ll escape, Trent believes.”

  Lydia came out of her fog with a jolt. Miranda. Bloody hell. She gave the desk a quick survey. But no, she hadn’t left the manuscript out. Or if it had been left out, Tamsin must have locked it away. Letting her in on the secret had been an act of trust—not to mention less complicated than subterfuge would have been, with so quick and perceptive a young woman in the house.

  Tasmin had also put away the Annual Register and Debrett’s Peerage. But Lydia’s notes and the Mallory family tree she’d begun lay square in the center of the desk. She casually pushed them under a copy of the Edinburgh Review.

  “You’re not going to stab me with a penknife, are you?” Ainswood asked. “I didn’t give the game away. I know you wanted to surprise her tonight. I collect you’ve already fabricated an assignment.”

  “Yes, of course.” Lydia shifted position to perch on the edge of the desk, her derriere resting on the Edinburgh Review. “I’m supposed to be digging up dirt on a literary rival. There’s no chance of their comparing stories. She would never disclose my doings.”

  “Then what’s got your back up?”

  He came away from the fireplace and made a circuit of the desk. Lydia stayed where she was. “I suppose the possibility of her declining Trent’s invitation hasn’t occurred to you,” she said.

  “I heard they had an interesting encounter yesterday.” Ainswood rounded the corner of the desk and paused a pace away from her. “It seems she bore Trent’s blithering for rather a long while.” He bent his head and in lower tones said, “Maybe she fancies him.”

  She felt his breath on her face. She could almost feel his weight upon her, and the lashing strength of his arms.

  Almost wasn’t enough. Her hand itched to reach up and grab his pristinely starched neckcloth and pull his face down to hers. “I doubt it,” she said. “She…” Lydia trailed off, belatedly realizing that his neckcloth was indeed crisply starched and that, moreover, those form-fitting garments fit without crease, wrinkle, rips, o
r stains.

  “Good grief, Ainswood,” she exclaimed softly. “What’s happened to you?” Her astonished gaze moved up to his head. “Your hair is combed.” Her attention drifted downward. “You haven’t slept in your clothes.”

  His powerful shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I thought we were discussing Miss Price and Trent, not what I wear to bed.”

  Lydia would not be diverted from her subject. “I collect you took my suggestion and hanged your valet, and found a responsible replacement.”

  “I did not hang him.” He leaned in closer, and Lydia caught a tantalizing whiff of soap and cologne. “I told him—”

  “That’s a most agreeable scent,” she said, tilting her head back. “What is it?”

  “I told him,” Ainswood went on tautly, “that you did not approve of my manner of dressing.” His big hands settled upon the desk on either side of her. “I told him my life was henceforth rendered weary, stale, and profitless.”

  She closed her eyes and sniffed. “Like a pine forest…far away…the faintest trace carried on the wind.”

  She opened her eyes. His mouth was but an inch from hers.

  He drew back, retreated out of reach, and brushed something from his cuff. “I’ll tell him you were transported and burst into poetical raptures. I’ll tell him you were rendered utterly useless for intelligent discussion. Still, you haven’t argued about my arrangements for Trent and your companion—which ought to be marked down as a miracle of some kind. Until tonight, then.”

  He turned away and started toward the door.

  “That’s all?” she asked. “That’s all you came for—to tell me about your plans for Trent?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t look back, didn’t pause, but strode through the door and slammed it behind him.

  Grenville had very sensibly stuffed her thick golden hair under a battered cap. The trousers were supposed to be sensible, too. As she’d told Vere, she was stripped for action—in a dark-colored masculine shirt tucked into the waistband of the trousers and a spencer over that—with no skirts or loose garment ends to catch or tangle in anything.

  And so, because the spencer reached only as low as her waist, and because the secondhand trousers were worn tissue-thin in the rump and the fit there was a tormenting fraction too tight, Vere’s own nether regions were stirring for action.

  The wrong kind.

  Keep your mind on the job, he commanded himself as her foot left his laced fingers and she swung up onto the privy.

  They were in the backyard of Coralie’s house.

  Vere adjusted the dark kerchief—slit, like hers, for seeing and breathing—that hid his face, and climbed after her. From the roof of the outdoor necessary, it was an easy reach to the ledge outside Coralie’s back window. The window was closed only, not bolted, so Vere had no trouble prying it open with his pocketknife.

  Coralie had long since left, and moments earlier, Vere had checked on the remaining occupants. A pair of servants were belowstairs having a row, by the sounds of it. Nonetheless, he checked again for signs of first-floor occupancy before climbing in. Grenville followed close behind him, swinging her long legs over the sill.

  “Light closet,” she murmured, the words barely audible. “Unused, evidently.”

  That was unsurprising. Coralie had moved to Francis Street very recently.

  Grenville’s study was a converted light closet, he recalled. The cramped space at the back of the house had one small window to let in daylight, and a doll-size fireplace. With the desk and chair and wall-to-wall books, it was an open invitation to conflagration.

  That wasn’t the fire he’d been worried about at the time. It was the way she’d looked at him. The blinking astonishment—as though his combed hair and clean, unrumpled clothes constituted one of the world’s wonders—should have been comical, but he’d been too irritated to laugh. He’d felt hot and uncomfortable, like a schoolboy in his Sunday best, trying to impress the object of his calf-love.

  That wasn’t the worst of it, though. He’d discovered moments later that a pair of ice-blue eyes could transmit heat and drive a man’s temperature up to the danger point. He’d had to hurry out then, before he lost control.

  In his haste, he’d failed to inform her of other changes in plans. Doubtless she would play him one of her rotten tricks, to pay him back for sneaking in her servants’ entrance at half past eight and bullying her into the carriage he’d hired.

  She’d wanted to take a hackney. It was more anonymous, she said. She apparently believed him stupid enough to arrive in one of his own vehicles—complete with ducal crest screaming his identity from the door.

  She truly did believe his mind was stunted, Vere brooded as he felt his way through the tiny back room.

  As though her brain were infallible.

  It hadn’t dawned on her that Coralie’s house was but a few streets from Soho Square, which made it logical for Vere, who was coming from farther away, to collect his partner-in-crime en route, instead of her going out of her way and having to backtrack.

  Not that there would have been any point in telling her. He was sure she hadn’t attended to more than a word in twenty of what he’d said to her in the study. She’d been too busy staring at him, watching every move he made, as though she had him under a microscope.

  In his misspent life, he’d undressed any number of women with his eyes. If they’d returned the favor, he hadn’t paid much attention. Today he’d been pulsingly conscious of the blue gaze that seemed to penetrate layers of immaculately tailored clothes as though they’d been transparent.

  Naturally, his rod had started swelling for sport, and then she’d got that dazed, dreamy look and started talking poetry, and…well, then, as you’d expect, his brain had closed up shop and left the thinking to his breeding organ.

  It was a miracle he hadn’t thrown her down on the desk and relieved her of her maidenhead then and there, he reflected irritably as his fingers settled upon the door handle. Again he listened. No signs of life. Cautiously, he cracked the door open.

  One small lamp feebly lit the room, casting uncertain shadows. “Bedroom,” he said in an undertone.

  “You take the left side, I’ll take the right,” she whispered.

  He slipped into the room and moved noiselessly to the opposite door. She trailed close on his heels. Starting from the door, they began to search their assigned territories for jewelry.

  The room was a mess: gowns, underthings, footwear strewn everywhere.

  In his mind’s eye, Vere saw a similar scene, but in his own bedroom, and in his fancy it was dragon’s wear scattered about: a wanton trail of discarded black garments ending in a tangled heap of chemise, corset, and stockings, beside the bed. Upon the bed lay a luscious expanse of woman, smoky hot, and…

  “Good God.”

  Vere’s glance shot toward his companion. For one mortifying moment, he feared he’d said what he was so lewdly thinking. But no. Her masked countenance was not turned toward him. She was on her knees, staring into an open hatbox.

  He dropped the petticoat he’d just fished out from under a footstool, crossed the room, and knelt beside her.

  In the flickering lamplight, bracelets, earrings, rings, necklaces, seals, chains, and brooches winked up at him from the box. The hopeless tangle looked like a magpie’s nest, with pieces knotted and woven with one another. That, however, was not what had elicited Grenville’s breathless exclamation.

  She took up an object from the top of the glittering heap. It was a silver stickpin. The head was artfully carved to depict two body parts conjoined in a manner expressly prohibited by both church and state.

  He snatched it from her. “Never mind puzzling over that,” he whispered. “Are Miss Price’s things in there?”

  “Yes—along with, apparently, every piece of jewelry in the Western Hemisphere. Separating them will be like untying the Gordian knot. She’s hooked rings through chains and necklaces and—oh, everything is either attached to or tangled wi
th everything else.”

  She crawled away, searched through a heap of clothing, and drew out a chemise. She came back, laid it on the floor, and dumped the hatbox’s contents onto it. Then she gathered up the edges of the garment and fashioned a bundle.

  “Find me a garter,” she said.

  “Are you mad? We can’t take everything. You said—”

  “We have no choice. We can’t stay here all night trying to work loose the pieces we want. Find me a—Never mind. There’s one.”

  She snatched up a stray garter and tied the bundle with it.

  Vere relieved his feelings by jamming the obscene stickpin into a nearby bonnet.

  She started to rise, then froze.

  Vere heard it, too, in the same instant: footsteps and voices approaching…rapidly.

  He lunged at her, pushed her down, and shoved her under the bed. He flung a heap of gowns and petticoats onto the hatbox and pushed it into a corner, then dove under the bed, in the same moment the door opened.

  Chapter 9

  It seemed to go on for hours: the mattress jerking violently above, the French girl alternately crying out in pain and begging for more while her partner alternately laughed and threatened in a vaguely familiar voice that seemed to slither over Lydia’s skin and into her belly, leaving her chilled and faintly nauseated.

  She could not stop herself from edging nearer to Ainswood. She would have burrowed under his big body if she could, but the tight vertical fit prevented her from carrying out that inexplicable act of cowardice. Even flat on her stomach, she occasionally felt the mattress sag onto her head. She prayed it wouldn’t collapse. She prayed that neither of the acrobatic lovebirds would tumble off and happen to look under the bed.

  It wasn’t the easiest corner to fight one’s way out of, and she would not be able to fight very effectively while keeping a firm grip on the precious bundle.