Love in Disguise (The Love Trilogy, #1)

by Edith Layton

  The Lion’s voice became sober as he said very seriously, “You shamed him in the world’s eyes, Mr. Jones—even in my quarter the tale of his thrashing at Gentleman Jackson’s is famous. You continue to court his sister, Viscount Hazelton, despite all his threats. Oh yes, we on the dark side of town know exactly what’s happening in the light. Footmen have eyes, and scullery maids have ears. So the gentleman is understandably frustrated. And the gentleman, I believe, though I’m no physician, is more than a little mad, and not just in an eccentric fashion. I saw his eyes that night he hired my lads and then attempted to remodel your face himself, Viscount, and though living where I do I’m well used to rats and mad dogs, they were not something I’d choose to see again.”

  “You!” Susannah breathed in shock. She was amazed. Because almost all else he’d said, he’d told her before the other two had returned home, but this news—the incredible fact that he’d been responsible for, as well as present at the attack on Julian—she’d not known, or guessed.

  “Yes,” Julian said slowly. “That voice, I knew it, but not from where, but now I remember. No, Susannah,” he cried, half-laughing, half-horrified as he jumped to his feet to wrap his arms around the girl, who’d risen to her feet, visibly trembling, to stand looming threateningly over the man called Lion’s chair. He drew her close, and held her so close he could feel her slender body vibrating against his from the force of her suppressed tension. Then, holding her securely, his own frame a buffer between her and the Lion, he said slowly and clearly, “Whatever you’re thinking, Susannah, unthink it. He helped me. He actually did, whatever he originally contracted to do. It was Moredon who was set on killing me once I was down, and as I remember it now, it was this gentleman who prevented him. A belated thanks,” he said to the Lion, now speaking over Susannah’s bent head as he continued to hold her close, and she at last rested limply against his chest, worn out by the sudden cessation of her unspent rage.

  The Lion nodded as he watched the blond young woman breathe an almost imperceptible sigh as she settled into the blond young gentleman’s embrace, he noted the brotherly pats the fair young nobleman gave to her quivering shoulder, and then, glancing to where Mr. Jones sat on the edge of his chair, saw the sudden look flash in those pained dark blue eyes before they were promptly shuttered by their heavy lids again. Then the large man nodded once again as though to himself, before he said casually, “No thanks are necessary, it was my own good, or bad, name I was saving as well as your remarkable face, my lord. At any rate, you’ve just repaid me. Because I begin to see it wasn’t Miss Logan who was in any danger before you two arrived, it was me. Luckily, you were both here when she discovered I’d been in on the attack on her…friend.”

  “Indeed, fiercely loyal is our Miss Logan,” Warwick drawled.

  “Indeed I am, and what of it?” Susannah exclaimed in a tremulous voice, emerging at once from Julian’s embrace, finding it too pleasurable, too public, and too casual all at once, to bear another second. However difficult it might be for her, she quickly decided it was better to talk to them now and try to make sense, and hope that they’d all take her trembling limbs and voice and heightened color for the rage which had already been replaced by her own secret confusion.

  “I cannot understand how you can all sit and speak as friends when one of you was paid to injure the other. I cannot,” she complained distractedly.

  “It was only a matter of business,” the Lion began to explain patiently, but the fierce look she gave him silenced him temporarily. Warwick spoke up at once and she listened gravely to him, while the Lion listened as well, watching her incredulous face bemusedly.

  “It was business, Susannah, that’s the point. Our visitor is in trade, but of a different sort than you’re accustomed to. He provides that which his customers can find nowhere else. He deals in pain, pleasure, and commodities that are not usually available. But whether it is to be pleasure or pain, it’s not a question of any sort of passion, anger, cruelty, or revenge with him. It’s a matter of business, solely of money paid for service rendered.”

  “Just so,” the man called Lion commented generously, “and very well said. I believe I should hire you to advertise for me, Mr. Jones. In fact, I wasn’t even the one who contracted for the lesson to be given to the viscount, it was a job of work taken on by two associates of mine. Not that I would have refused it, mind. It was a straightforward-enough task. He was simply to have been given a bit of discomfort, never enough to inconvenience him for more than a few days, enough time to think over the message they were paid to deliver. It was Lord Moredon who took things too far—”

  “Yes,” Julian agreed, “and it was, as I said, the Lion who stopped that. So I don’t harbor a grudge, although I’ll admit,” he said, grinning at the larger man, “that I wouldn’t mind having a few names from you, my friend, so that when I’m able, I can arrange to have a few words with the two fellows who waylaid me, one at a time this time, that is.”

  “Terribly sorry to disoblige you, my lord,” the Lion said loftily, “but that’s quite against company rules.”

  At that, all the men began laughing, as Susannah stood and stared at them with such apparent dismay and growing annoyance that they laughed the louder when they noted it.

  “I’m afraid a lady such as Miss Logan can’t understand such commerce,” the Lion said then, wiping his eyes, and sighing. “Females, ladies or not, I have found, do not usually understand such cold-blooded dealings. Oh, they’ll do mayhem and murder with the best of men, but they tend to do it through passion, and personally. They take a much more personal view of life entirely in all things,” he mused, “for if you’ve noticed, they don’t seem able to take their pleasures as casually as we do either, there’s never really been a booming market in males for sale for the night or by the hour such as there is… Oh, I beg pardon, I do, Miss Logan,” he interrupted himself before anyone else could, to go on in the most patently artificial manner Susannah had ever heard. “Forgive me, my tongue ran away with me, I forgot myself entirely. My dear mother would be appalled at me, a thousand pardons. You gentlemen aren’t going to call me out for my lapse, are you?”

  But as this was said with great amusement and no little eagerness, Susannah realized that their visitor was, for all his joviality, a man who never allowed anyone to forget the potential menace he represented. She moved to lighten the moment, for in one nervous glance she’d noted that Warwick had narrowed his eyes, and Julian’s face and entire body had stiffened.

  “Mr. Ryan,” she said coolly, “I make no doubt that you gentlemen thrive on such meetings and are positively enraptured by the thought of letting blood again, but I remind you that it is the ladies who have to do the nursing and the mopping up after you. If you don’t mind, I’ve had quite enough of that, even if they have not. So I’d ask you, as a favor to me, not to invite these two gentlemen to any more such sport, at least not while I’m staying on with them. And as for insult to me, why, I didn’t mind what you said in the least, sir, though I didn’t find it edifying, it being far too obvious.”

  The large gentleman checked, and after an appreciative smile and nod, commented only, “Indeed, it’s as my dear mother herself used to say: if women had the running of the world, what a better place it would be.”

  “What a lot she had to say,” Warwick said reflectively. “The good fathers that raised you must have let her have a room nearby.”

  “Just so,” the large gentleman agreed, and then, rising, he went on, “But now I have to go, however pleasant this visit has been, since I find myself in great official demand, and have considerable interest in keeping that demand unmet. So although it won’t be impossible, I fear it will be a bit difficult for you to contact me again—for a short while only, I hope. I’ll leave you with a bit of advice, my friends. Lord Moredon is a very bitter man. He’s revenging himself on various people, various ways. He’s made it difficult for me, for instance, since he has access to high places. But even without me�
�I might say, especially without me on the scene—he has access to low places too. So I’d suggest, since Miss Logan deplores bloodshed no matter how we enjoy it, that you leave town for a while.

  “Until, at least,” he added, “things sort themselves out to our satisfaction. As he’s a lord, it’s not easy for me to pay him back. I’m not mad enough to forget that a lord of the realm has certain powers that even I don’t. But there are always ways…” He paused, and the brief silence in which he meditated was a chilling one. Then he smiled charmingly again and shrugged and said, “Ah well, later days. For now, I wouldn’t think it cowardly to leave the scene. I am doing so, in my own way, as well. I wouldn’t think of it as exile if I were you, neither, for I hear,” he said lightly, looking at Julian, “that Lord Moredon himself is sending his own lovely sister out of town for a spell. To cooler climes. To Brighton, in fact. There’s quite a social whirl there too now that the Regent’s there, I hear.”

  This time when the large gentleman extended his hand, he found it taken, eagerly, and then shaken by Julian. And Warwick gave him his hand too, as he went with him to the door.

  “Yes, Brighton’s a lovely place this time of year,” the Lion said reflectively, “far from the turf of evil men such as myself, even further from the danger of the sort of easily hired violence town offers. And I understand, Mr. Jones, that you have a country home close to the Devil’s Dyke, near there too. How convenient for you.”

  “Is there nothing you do not understand?” Warwick asked curiously.

  “No, nothing. Am I any less than you?” the other man asked as he prepared to leave. But then in a lower voice he added, “It would be for the best, you know, for all of you. For the pretty fellow so he can have another try at the lady he adores, without her brother to interfere; for Miss Logan, so she can be safer; for you, sir, so you can have time and opportunity to show her what she’s missed seeing as she’s been so busy looking elsewhere.”

  Warwick paused. It seemed he grew a bit white about the mouth. Then he said, with great casualness, “Ah yes, I don’t believe she’s ever seen Brighton, or the seaside there.”

  “Just so,” the large gentleman agreed, considerably amused, before he glanced down the street both ways and then quickly left.

  *

  It wasn’t until he felt the sun upon his upturned face and the wind blowing his hair back that he fully realized how much he’d missed the life he’d thought he was so eager to give up. But the speed, the motion, the sound of the horses’ exhalations and their steady hoofbeats, the sway of the coach, the scent of newly blooming things in all the hedgerows that lined the road he drove down were like balm to Julian, better for him, just as he’d sworn they would be when he’d begged Warwick to let him have the reins again, than all the potions, than all the beds and rest and doctors in creation.

  He’d stooped to begging, and he hadn’t cared. For it was just as he’d told Warwick. He was feeling sounder, the horses were well-bred, amiable fellows, not like some of the mad, desperate things he’d harnessed and driven for the company, and the coach was so well-oiled and maintained that he could drive them all the way down to Brighton without pain even if he’d a rib wedged in each lung and one through his heart. That heart had been pierced, but it had only been by love, and since he was coming closer to Brighton every moment, even that wounded organ felt lighter by the moment.

  It was a rare, warm sunny spring day, Julian had the reins in his hand and hope in his heart, and he vowed he’d never felt better. But even as this was England, and so he knew rain clouds always gathered even as the sun shone, he knew that no joy was unalloyed. Warwick had spoken of new investments, annuities and returns he’d made for him, but still he hadn’t enough money in hand to take his future firmly in hand, or to take his lady’s hand in lawful matrimony. He supposed he might soon have to go back to the Thunder after all, back to a life on the road, back to bone-shaking, bone-breaking journeys through heat and rain, back to shambling for tips like a performing bear and swallowing down the indignity of it even as his fist swallowed up the coins. But on such a bright and hopeful day, when he thought of that life on the road, he remembered its advantages the most: the savor of beautiful days…and then he recalled the better nights, enhanced by the likes of Nan at the Silver Swan, and Mary at the Crown, and Mrs. Bower in Cucksfield…and then he found that he was grinning widely to himself.

  He enjoyed them all very well, as he’d always enjoyed women, and as they’d all always insisted they enjoyed him. Physical pleasure was an uncomplicated thing, not like love. What transpired between himself and all those willing females had to do with pleasure, nothing to do with love or what he felt for Marianna. He never felt as though he were betraying her when he sampled other females, simply because he never thought of her in such terms. She would one day, he hoped, be mother to his children, she would one day, he prayed, find joy in his arms, but if he thought about it deeply, and he seldom did, he believed she’d never find quite the sort of pleasure there the others did. Nor would she expect to. She was, after all, a lady, and one of the highest kind, so her love had little to do with the sort of writhings and releases gentlemen found in such sport. If he were wrong, he’d be delighted, but when he pictured her in his mind’s eye, it was in his home as hostess, wife, and mother, and never in his bed as temptress and lover.

  A fellow had to be careful to differentiate, he thought, frowning so now that Warwick’s regular coachman, riding alongside him on the high hard driver’s seat, looked at him with some distress, wondering if the young gentleman hadn’t some pains in his ribs after all. The other day, Julian thought, with some unhappiness clouding his otherwise shining day, when he’d taken Susannah into his arms to comfort her and prevent her from attempting to slay the Lion, between his laughter and his dismay, he’d also become aware of two things. Well, more than just those two, he thought to himself, his irrepressible spirits rising momentarily. But that was just the point, he thought more soberly.

  He’d become aware that she was a delicious armful, fragrant and curving, and whether she fully knew it or not, willing. He was appreciative enough of her sex to judge her eminently desirable, and enough of an expert on it to realize that she had a real response to him as a man. He couldn’t think to do anything but release her at once. Because she was a friend, and even if, strictly speaking, she wasn’t a lady, she’d been raised as one. Even so, with her glorious shining hair and lovely face and yielding, excitingly, unexpectedly lush body, he might just have decided to oblige her anyway. She was young and inexperienced; but it would have been pleasant to instruct her, she was a friend; but pleasure between friends was even more pleasurable; she was trusting; but then, he thought, he’d never hurt her, only enjoy her and teach her enjoyment. But, overriding all else, he knew she was, however, wealthy and wise, sprung from a family of newly arrived, prosperous cits. She was a bourgeoise. As Warwick had once jested, a female of that sober middling class, unlike a fashionable lady who stoops to sport, or a common girl who sports for the sheer joy of it—was untouchable, except in marriage. And though he could give her a great many other things and would very much like to, that, he could and would never offer her.

  But it was a shining day, an easy day, a day for simple solutions, easily implemented. He would remain friends with Susannah, indeed, he liked her very well, more each day, in fact. She was very bright, and amusing, and as goodhearted as any man he’d ever known. But she was undeniably beautiful, so he’d stay away from her physically, for what a man could touch, he thought with a rueful grin, often changed what a man thought to do.

  All his problems settled by the rushing wind, the sun, and the fresh spring air, Julian lifted his head and gazed out at the scenery about him. Then he bit his lip, frowned, and raising up the whip he held in his right hand, gave the reins a sharp crack with his left and sprang his cattle until they began to race down the road. But they didn’t travel fast enough to carry away the cry that arose from within the coach.


  “Here, Julian,” Warwick shouted from his open window, “slow them, stop them, no more of this. Julian! At once! The charming idiot,” Warwick explained as the coach slowed to a stop on the country road, “was trying to spare my feelings, I think.”

  The contessa looked up at him, as Susannah grinned. She didn’t know what sort of jest he was about to make, but he’d been amusing her so effectively, they’d laughed so much together since they’d gotten into the coach this morning, that her lips had been curved in a constant smile and his smallest statement brought anticipation of more merriment.

  When they’d pulled away from the town house with the lumbering luggage-laden coach behind them filled with those servants who were making the remove to his country home, she’d become unexpectedly anxious. She’d written to Charles to tell him where she was bound, but she’d never been at a gentleman’s country estate before, and though she knew the change was for the best, she couldn’t help thinking that if she’d been shunned and ignored in London, which teemed with fashionable persons, why then, she’d be completely a hermit when they were at Greenwood Hall, Warwick’s home. Of course, she could easily leave then, she’d have the excuse of being out of London to make Charlie swallow it, but then, she’d be leaving everything that she’d gained in the past weeks: her friendship with Julian and Warwick, and the small matter of all her hopes for the future. For withal that she’d become such fast friends with both of them, it was an odd sort of alliance, founded by her being landed on Warwick and cemented by the troubles that had beset them all. Whatever it was, however, she wasn’t foolish enough to expect that they’d either of them ever contact her again if she left. So she couldn’t leave, she thought, not if it transpired that no one in Brighton spoke to her or uttered her name, except for calling birds.