She hesitated. Interesting that she was taking care with the words she chose.
“Oh, one day, perhaps, you will meet this guest, depending upon how long you stay, Captain Hardy. Until then we keep the room tidy and comfortable, the same way we keep yours tidy and comfortable.”
He wasn’t certain she was being unreasonably discreet, but it did sound rather like circumspection.
He would find out, one way or the other, because he always did.
And if he found out while he was lying in bed next to her, naked, so much the better. Whatever sacrifice had to be made.
He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Do you know, on my way up to my rooms late last night I saw Miss Gardner coming down this very hall. Away from the room.”
“Miss Gardner?” She was confused. “But she’s . . . but they’re . . . which Miss Gardner?”
“The . . . big one.” He felt a right fool for saying that.
“You don’t think . . . Mr. Delacorte . . . and Miss Gardner . . . were . . .” She was pink again, and her hands went up to her face then came down.
She was picturing it, and no one ought to do that for sanity-preserving reasons.
“But there are rules here at The Grand Palace on the Thames about entertaining strange women in one’s room!”
He gave a short laugh. “If rules alone would keep people in line, the way a harness keeps a team of horses neatly trotting along, England would have no need for a navy, Lady Derring.”
Her face was a picture. “I think life has been unkind to Miss Jane and Miss Margaret,” she said, hesitantly. “I’m glad they are here so we can treat them gently and kindly and make them feel safe.”
He felt he was hearing a list of things that Lady Derring wanted from life.
Why did it feel like he was hearing his own true purpose delineated for the first time ever?
“I’m certain Miss Gardner simply took a wrong turn,” he said gently. But he wanted to take the worried, conflicted expression from her face.
He wasn’t at all certain this was the case, but he’d find out.
She looked relieved, and as though, suddenly, his emotions were a mirror of hers, he was relieved, too.
Which troubled him. He frowned faintly, as if desiring her was something uncomfortable she’d compelled him to against his wishes, like sitting in their drawing room at night.
He ought to go. Massey would be awaiting orders.
She noticed his silence and his frown. “Is there anything I can help you with, Captain Hardy?”
“Perhaps,” he said tersely. “Delacorte offered me the most vile yet interesting cigar. You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find such a thing?”
She sighed. “Did it smell like . . . something that had perhaps died inside the walls of a house, then was buried in a variety of herbs and spices in a kitchen garden watered by the contents of a slops jar?”
He struggled not to smile. “It wasn’t quite how Delacorte put it. But your description is equally apt.”
“Derring used to be fond of cigars that were precisely . . . that unusual. I don’t know where he purchased them, however. I never did see a bill or receipt for them.”
“Did you often see his bills and receipts?” He said it lightly, and with some surprise, as though receipts were a comical thing to inflict upon a countess.
She hesitated. “For the running of the household, of course. Not for Derring’s purchases.” She searched his face curiously, as something was clearly troubling her about the question. “If you’re wondering how it is I came to acquire the expertise to run a grand boarding establishment, Captain, I tracked those expenses very carefully, and I am very good at budgeting and managing a staff,” she said proudly. “Derring wasn’t, of course,” she added shortly, dryly.
He believed her. Surely someone who was intelligent, and blushed so very easily, wouldn’t lie as smoothly as that, or volunteer that sort of information.
Then again: one never knew anything about anyone, as he’d told the drunk man lying in front of The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Your spotless facilities and my comfortable room are a testament to your household management skills, Lady Derring.”
Her crooked smile once again indicated she was skeptical of flattery, particularly from him, but nevertheless, he could see she was leaning into it the way a flower leans into a cool spring rain.
Which was precisely how he was leaning into that smile.
The realization made him frown again. “I expect you should want to get on with your duties. Am I keeping you from them?”
“I was just about to trim the candles in the sconces.”
She looked up at them somewhat ruefully.
He recalled her body stretched to reach the top of the window. The compulsion to help her with something was like an itch needing scratching.
“Why don’t I do . . .” He gestured to the sconces. “It’s easier for me to reach.”
She looked up at him, dark eyes thoughtful, a little reluctant.
“That’s very kind of you.” She said it somewhat stiffly, a little shyly. As if it were a sort of surrender.
She handed him a candle.
He effortlessly reached up.
First one sconce.
And then the next.
Conversation had been safer than this silence, or as safe as anything could feel in Captain Hardy’s presence; he was, she realized, precisely as Dot had described him: part Lucifer, part Atlas. Trouble. And, quite frankly, Desire on Legs.
The silence made her both acutely aware that they were alone, and that as she handed up the candles, she was so close that her next breath took in a tantalizing hint of smoke and soap and musk, clean but heady. Immediately she understood how Derring had felt about those cigars. She wished for a blanket that smelled just like this. She would wrap herself in it every night. She would never sleep again.
She handed him another candle.
And when he reached up, she leaned forward a little more and inhaled, quite sneakily, near his elbow.
Her head went light. Her eyes closed.
When she opened them, he was staring down at her. His face was absolutely motionless. His face a study in amazement.
“Did you just . . . sniff . . . me, Lady Derring?”
His voice was amused. And very, very soft. Like a voice from the pillow next to hers.
After a long and shameful delay, during which he did not blink once, and during which her face rose several degrees in temperature, she finally whispered, “Perhaps inadvertently?”
The trouble was, he was still very close, and she could still smell him. She knew a terrible, frightening urge to rest her head against his arm.
And all at once something he saw in her face made his go closed and unreadable.
He silently turned, leaving her simmering in mortification.
He moved on to the next sconce.
She handed him the candle, and he reached up. “Lavender,” he said. His voice was gruff.
“I beg your pardon?”
He turned and met her eyes and said, very clearly, very steadily, his voice confiding and quiet, “Last night, when you leaned forward to tell me I was gauche, you smelled of lavender and spice. Like fine-milled soap.”
His silvery eyes were suddenly pins, and she was a butterfly.
She could not possibly have spoken if she tried. She merely stared. Her breath lost.
He did not release her gaze. “I thought about it a good deal last night, when I was stretched out on my comfortable blue counterpane.” He delivered that like a spy offering a password to a sentry.
She said nothing.
He turned away.
She watched the slow insertion of the last candle.
And when he was done he went still and turned to her.
The silence now was as alive as the night and hummed a good deal of unspoken things. Are you flirting with me, Lady Derring?
“Do you snore, Captain Hardy?” she sai
d softly.
She saw the breath leave him. His gray eyes flared to black.
It was the most thrilling, vixenish thing she’d ever done, that subtle question, which was born of real curiosity. But she knew immediately that she was quite in over her head.
She pivoted to leave, and swiftly.
She’d taken two steps when he said, his voice raised only a little, “Lady Derring . . . something puzzles me.”
She halted.
Closed her eyes.
Took a shuddering breath for courage.
Turned back to him. From the relatively safe distance of three feet, she said, “Surely not. We’ve established you know everything.”
His smile was small and patient. “You seem to excel at so very much here at The Grand Palace on the Thames. Yet you can’t seem to disguise how much you want me.”
One of the things Tristan excelled at was ambush.
Her eyes grew enormous as his words sank in.
She looked both stricken and resigned, like a thief nabbed in the act.
Finally she drew in a breath and resettled her shoulders, as though she’d been ruffled by a stiff wind.
“Well, Captain Hardy, I must take issue with your assessment, on the grounds that I’m not trying to disguise it at all.”
Holy—!
His breath left him in a gust.
And as she turned again to walk away his hand shot out.
It was a primal reflex, but not the about-to-fall-off-a-cliff sort. It was somewhere in between a cat with prey or a miser with gold.
He got hold of her forearm.
He held her like that long enough to feel brutish. Three seconds all told, though something had gone wrong with time—it seemed to have stopped—so it was difficult to know.
She ought to slap him.
He ought to let go.
Unless one counted lungs moving in and out, color flooding into cheeks, pupils flaring to shilling size, neither of them moved.
And then he slid his hand down, down, down along her arm to bracelet her wrist.
He felt her heart drumming against his fingertips. At least as hard as his was beating.
It was what he needed to know.
He tugged her up against his body.
It was nearly as much a collision as a kiss, at first, fierce and hard, as if they were both intent on punishing themselves and each other for wanting this.
This was a mistake. He’d known it was, and he could not stop himself from making it.
He fanned one hand against the small of her back; with the other he cradled her head, threaded his fingers up through her hair. And tugged her head back to take that kiss mercilessly, greedily, carnally, deeper.
She moaned softly. And opened to him with a sweetness and hunger that stunned him, then made him nearly savage. Her hands rose to grip his shirt and she pulled him hard up against her. He slid his hands down beneath the curve of her arse and scooped her up hard against the swell of his cock and he felt her ribcage jump against him as her breath snagged.
And then she shifted to fit him more snugly between her legs and pulled him closer and lust threatened to tear the top from his head.
It was already out of hand.
The hallway spun, as if he’d staggered from an opium den.
Her finger remained curled into his shirt. Her body was still crushed to his, and he could feel her heart beating against his body, in counterpoint to his.
He could rest his cheek on the top of her head if he wanted to. It was as seductive as those pillows in his room, a moment of infinite weakness.
God, how he wanted to.
Which was why he didn’t.
“I’m not a gentleman,” he said gruffly. Finally.
He didn’t know why these should be the first words he said after he surfaced from the kiss. A warning, perhaps. Or an explanation. Not an apology.
He would never apologize for something that could not be helped.
She finally stepped back from him and drew in a breath that shuddered.
Her hands rose, and he thought for a moment she meant to cover her face. But she dropped them again. And she stared at him. Not censorious. Assessing, perhaps. Amazed, certainly. Her eyes were hazy and soft.
“No. You certainly aren’t,” she said finally.
He said nothing.
She adjusted her shoulders, as though realigning herself with propriety.
And then she turned and went down the stairs without another word.
Albeit carefully, and a little more slowly, as though she were finding her footing in a world that was still shifting beneath her feet.
Chapter Fifteen
“I’ve missed you, sir,” Massey said. “Your snorts, your grunts, your frowns, your growling commands.”
Tristan obliged Massey by scowling. He carved his sausage. Stabbed a segment and lifted it toward his mouth.
It had been two days since they’d convened.
They were in a pub opposite the livery stables that angled The Grand Palace on the Thames. Tristan told Massey what he’d discovered, which was nothing, essentially, though he supposed it was a discovery after a fashion.
It was noisy with an equal balance of honest workmen and ne’er-do-wells in varying stages of inebriation, and he and Massey had thrown back ales—or pretended to throw them back—and bought ales for other men while they casually slipped questions about The Grand Palace on the Thames into conversation.
“Oh, you don’t want to go there, guv,” several men told him.
Yet no one seemed able to tell them why.
“Everybody knows it,” he was told. This was accompanied by shrugs.
He had the increasing suspicion that someone had, in fact, put the word out that people were not to go there. But why?
He’d sent word for his men to watch the building, and to follow everyone who entered and left The Grand Palace on the Thames.
He’d assigned four others to questioning, as casually and surreptitiously as possible, the locals about the building. Did they know Derring? Had they seen him about? Did they know where they could buy a particularly foul cigar?
He glanced out the window. Carts and carriages and fine glossy horses moved in and out of the livery stable in a satisfying, steady stream. The streets were teeming and busy and loud.
“Are you taking the waters at that boardinghouse, sir? Are they perhaps feeding you a tonic?” Massey asked suddenly.
“Of course not.”
“You look . . . better.”
Tristan stared at him. “I always look well.”
“No, you have a sort of . . . glow.”
“I always glow with health.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. What was I thinking, sir.”
What did Massey see? Tristan knew how he felt. There was something about his nerves of a dropped brass bowl. Ever since that kiss, they continued to jangle and hum. Sounds and sensations landed on him a little too hard. He ought not to have kissed her; he had not planned to kiss her; he could not have stopped himself; it had happened almost without his realizing it. These four utterly disparate facts disturbed him, along with the notion that he wanted, very much, to do much, much more than kiss her.
He suspected she wanted it, too.
Though he had no true idea what Lady Derring was thinking.
And perhaps he could justify it, in the name of duty. Rather than in the name of desperation. He’d thought he’d transmuted desperation into cold determination long ago. But it wasn’t cold determination causing him to stare at his ceiling nights, listening to Delacorte snore.
For the past two nights he’d sat at his table with his book and his brandy in the drawing room while the women did things to fabric with needles and whatnot and murmured pleasantly amongst themselves. He hadn’t been shunned. No one so much as looked at him askance. He suspected Lady Derring had been discreet; she hadn’t told a soul.
So he’d read to page eight of his book until the suspense, such as it was, re
garding whether his belongings would show up packed next to the front door was enough to drive him to stand with Farraday and Delacorte in the smoking room.
Whereupon he seized the opportunity to find out how Farraday had come to be at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
He heard the entire sorry version, including the part about the Vicar’s Hobby.
“A bit craven to run off like that, wouldn’t you say, Farraday?” he’d said.
Not without sympathy, however. Still, he wanted scolding.
“Yes,” Farraday said glumly. “That’s the word. I had to, you see. Not sure how I’m going to fix it now, but I’m glad to be going to a boxing match tomorrow with Delacorte,” he said, brightening.
“Delacorte is a good influence,” he’d said quite dryly.
Delacorte and Farraday both beamed at him, pleased with the compliment.
He asked the room at large a question that had been troubling him. He could not quite say why yet.
“What do you think of the Gardner sisters?”
Both Delacorte and Farraday were silent. They were decent sorts at heart, clearly, because the first things that came to mind were ungentlemanly and obviously could not be said.
“I’ve an herbal concoction in my case of medicines,” Delacorte began thoughtfully. “From the deepest heart of China. One makes an infusion of it to cure a variety of ailments. And if you take too much of it, inadvertently, you’ll have fascinating hallucinations. I once took too much of it. The Gardner sisters could have stepped out of one of those hallucinations.”
It was so eloquent both he and Farraday gave him their tribute of awed silence.
“Quite like it here,” Farraday had said finally, with great cheerful satisfaction, downing the rest of his brandy. “Good company.”
Oddly, Tristan found that he did not precisely disagree.
“Learn anything else while you were milling about the pub?” he asked Massey, who was silently watching him brood.
“Nay. Either they know nothing at all about the place, or they know to stay away, but no one can say why.”
“It occurs to me, Massey, that someone might have a reason for attempting to ward people away from The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
Lady Derring Takes a Lover Page 15