“And is that all there is to the connection?” Sir Edmund asked, lowering his voice.
Jack clasped his hands behind his back, squaring his shoulders and thinking hard about his answer. He hadn’t risen to the heights he had by being stupid. “What do you want me to say, sir?” he asked. “Lady Bianca and I share the same opinion, want the same thing. I am working tirelessly to reach a point where we will be able to enter into the arrangement we desire.”
“It will not happen,” Sir Edmund said in no uncertain terms. “She is high-born and you are not. Class lines cannot be crossed. Everybody knows that, man.” His last statement was made more with a sense of sympathy than command. Sir Edmund’s posture softened. “Come on, Craig. Find a girl of your own class. Lady Bianca is miles out of your reach.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Jack said, fighting not to boil over with rage, “times are changing. My record at Scotland Yard has been exemplary. I may not have birth in my favor, but, God help me, if reputation and recognition can raise my stock in the eyes of those that matter, then I will move heaven and earth to earn Lady Bianca’s hand in marriage.”
Sir Edmund sighed and shook his head, but he wore a smile as he did. He thumped Jack’s arm. “You’re a good man, Craig, but this will ruin you. Take my advice and cut ties with Lady Bianca. This will ruin her too. You don’t want that, do you? Not if you truly care for her,” he answered his own question.
Jack clenched his jaw so tightly that pain shot to his temples. It would do him no good to argue with his superior, a man with a sterling military career and exemplary service in the Metropolitan Police behind him. But Sir Edmund was old and from a different time, and Jack seriously wondered if he understood love at all.
“If you will excuse me, sir,” he said, managing not to sound too belligerent. “I’ve just been given an important lead in the O’Shea investigation and I need to follow up on it before it turns cold.”
“By all means, Craig.” Sir Edmund stepped back to the door and opened it. “Far be it from me to stand in the way of an investigation. You are the future of this police force,” he added as Jack strode toward the door. “If you play your cards right.”
Those final words stuck with Jack like a bullet in his back as he headed out of his office, through the halls and downstairs to the bustling street. He was tired of feeling like a romantic hero, fighting against the odds for love. Romance was a far cry from reality and he’d never been one to indulge in it. He wanted Bianca, wanted her in his bed and in his life. He wanted to take care of her and have a family with her—a normal, happy family without scandal or hardship. He’d fallen so hard for Bianca because she wasn’t the posing, preening sort of woman most fine ladies were. Neither was she the defeated, hopeless sort of woman who had already given up that he’d been surrounded with in his early life. She spoke her mind, and quite a mind it was too. She laughed at jokes, she ate when she was hungry, and she wasn’t afraid to handle his cock. He didn’t think she’d be afraid to take his full length in her sweet cunny, or her mouth, for that matter. And she’d look beautiful while doing it.
But those kinds of thoughts did him no good at all. In fact, they made things worse. As he rounded the corner to the mews, where his horse was stabled, he punched the doorframe of his horse’s stall. Wanting a woman he couldn’t have was torture when he’d spent his entire life until he met her surrounded by women who vied with each other to show him a good time, on the house. And there he was, mounting and riding off toward the seedy section of London, his home, worked up, but knowing he wouldn’t find relief anytime soon.
Aphrodite’s Den was one of the larger brothels in his neck of the woods, but in the light of day, it had more of an air of a mischievous girls’ school than a whorehouse. It catered to a lower clientele than Mrs. Farringdon’s, but it was leaps above the back-alley rooms and crumbling pubs that gave the entire business a dirty feeling. The Aphrodite girls kept themselves clean, and though the clap was impossible to avoid in their profession, Mrs. Wimpole made sure her girls got the medical attention they needed. She ruled over the place like a sergeant-major, which was why Jack was surprised someone like Brickman would be allowed in.
“Why, if it isn’t Chief Inspector Jack Craig,” one of the girls, Ruby, called out as soon as he stepped through the front door into the house’s lurid foyer.
“Jack!” The answering cry came from parlors on both sides of the front hall.
Half a dozen women in varying states of dress poured into the hall to greet him. They did so with what the outside world would see as astounding boldness, rushing to hug him and kiss his cheeks, or mouth, in some cases. His backside was pinched at least four times as well, and one of the girls, Claire, went so far as to cup her hand over the front of his trousers.
“You need a tumble, guv’nor?” Claire asked, working him expertly.
Jack laughed, his body responding as bodies did. “Not today, sweetheart,” he said, planting a dismissive kiss on Claire’s cheek. “I’m here on business.”
“Ooh, you can give me the business any day, love,” another of his old friends, Iris, said, biting her lip.
“Yeah,” Ruby agreed. “How long has it been since you spent quality time with us?” She slipped an arm around his waist, pressing her ample breasts against his arm as he attempted to move forward into the main parlor, where he could see Mrs. Wimpole sitting. She was busy winding a ball of yarn while one of her younger girls held the bulk of the yarn in her hands.
“He don’t like us anymore,” Claire said with a fake pout, taking Jack’s other arm to escort him into the parlor. “He’s got that hoity-toity lady now.”
“Her name is Bianca,” Jack laughed, not bothering to shake Ruby or Claire off. “Morning, Mrs. Wimpole,” he greeted the madam as he and his group of admirers stepped into the parlor.
“Jack, what are you doing here?” The woman who asked the question as she hopped up from the sofa where she’d been playing some sort of card game with another of Mrs. Wimpole’s girls brought a wide smile to Jack’s face.
“Nanette.” He broke away from his welcoming committee to cross the room and sweep Nanette into his arms, planting a quick kiss on her lips. “I could ask you the same question.”
Nanette brushed his question away with a gesture as she pivoted to lean against his side, her arm around his back. “Thought I’d come up here for a visit, since Mama is busy with inspections today.”
Jack stared pointedly at her. “If Mama is inspecting, shouldn’t you be there in case she finds something she shouldn’t in your room?”
Nanette shrugged. “What’s she gonna find that she don’t already know about?”
It was a fair enough answer. He’d known Nanette since she was born. When he was a boy, he’d kept her fed and changed her nappies when the women were with customers. Mama, as Mrs. Tyler, the madam who currently owned the brothel they’d been raised in was called, wouldn’t have let Nanette go if she suspected the woman had anything she shouldn’t in her room.
“I’m here to ask a few questions about a certain Dick Brickman,” Jack said, turning to Mrs. Wimpole.
“I know all about Dick Brickman,” Claire said, clinging to Jack’s side once more.
“You do?” Jack’s brow lifted in hope.
“He’s right here,” Claire said, sliding her hand into his trousers to tease him.
Flashes of Bianca doing the same thing the other evening had him instantly hot and hard, much to Claire’s delight, if her squeal of glee was any indication. Jack cleared his throat and gently closed a hand around her wrist, pulling her hand away and sending her a stern but good-humored look.
He turned back to Mrs. Wimpole, who seemed thoroughly amused by the whole thing. His trousers were hopelessly tented now, but that was simply what cocks did when surrounded by willing women with wandering hands. He wasn’t going to let nature stop him from getting his work done.
“Do you know anything about the man, ma’am?” he asked Mrs. Wimpole.
&nbs
p; Mrs. Wimpole set her ball of yarn aside and stood with a laugh and a shrug. “He’s not as fetching as you are, my boy, that’s for sure.”
“Few men are,” Iris added from behind Jack’s shoulder.
The rest of the coterie of whores giggled. Jack grinned and blushed. God, but it would be so easy to slip upstairs with one or more of them when his business was concluded to release some of the unbearable tension that not being able to be with Bianca caused. But if he couldn’t offer Bianca his hand yet, the least he could do was keep his cock clean until they could be together.
He cleared his throat again, focusing on Mrs. Wimpole. That seemed to send the signal that he really was there for business. “Dick Brickman might be the key man in an ongoing investigation I’ve been working on,” he said.
“I know the man well,” Mrs. Wimpole said. “He started coming around here more frequently since this summer. Rumor has it that he’s found steady employment, though I wouldn’t call it gainful employment.”
“Do you know if he’s connected to a Lord Denbigh?” Jack’s pulse sped up. He was so close to cracking the case that he could taste it.
But Mrs. Wimpole answered, “That I don’t know, my boy. Only that he’s been flush with cash of late.”
Jack deflated a bit, in more ways than one. “Anything you can find out for me, anything at all, will go a long way to finding justice for a good man.”
“Is this about Lord O’Shea?” Nanette asked. She still clung to his side, radiating affection.
“It is,” Jack said with a lop-sided smile. “Do you know anything about it?”
Nanette shrugged, standing straighter. “I could find out for you. What’s this Dick Brickman look like? I’ll see if I can spy him out and lure him into my web.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “I’ve got ways to make men talk.”
Jack laughed outright. “I’m sure you do.” He wasn’t exactly pleased at the thought of Nanette entertaining a violent criminal, but chances were she’d bedded more than a few already without him knowing about it. “I don’t know what he looks like, but I wouldn’t say no to a little extra help bringing the man to justice.”
“Consider it my mission to bring the blackguard to his knees,” she grinned. “In more ways than one.”
Jack shook his head. “Safely,” he cautioned her.
The ladies around him all scoffed and snorted, shaking their heads. One of them slapped his back. Another pinched his behind.
“Little Jack Craig,” Mrs. Wimpole laughed. “Our own vigilante, out for justice for us all.”
“That’s right,” Jack told her, sharply at first, then breaking into a smile and stepping away from Nanette and the others to kiss the aging madam on her wrinkled cheek. “You’re family, you are,” he said, slipping into his cockney accent. “And don’t you forget it.”
“Never.”
“We won’t.”
“You’re our family too.”
The chorus of women around him burst with loyalty and affection.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies.” Jack turned and started out of the room. Half of his entourage wandered away to continue with their work and play. Nanette and a few of the others escorted him back to the foyer.
“How is Lord O’Shea?” Nanette asked, genuine concern in her eyes.
“I’m on my way to find out right now,” he said, giving Nanette a final kiss goodbye.
Of course, she wasn’t the only one who wanted a kiss. Jack could only imagine how Bianca would rail at him if she could see him kissing a bunch of overeager prostitutes goodbye. In his mind, each kiss he doled out was as chaste as church. He meant it when he said the women around him were like family. Few people would see it that way, but few people had grown up in the world he had. There was a world of difference between bodies doing what they did and giving your heart away to a woman.
As he stepped out onto the street and headed back to the mews to fetch his horse, the uncomfortable paradox of his life hit him. Sir Edmund was right when he, and everyone else, railed about him and Bianca coming from different worlds. Class was only part of it, though. Caring was the true difference. People mattered to him, which was what had driven him into law enforcement to begin with. Whether they were whores or gutter trash or noblemen who had been unjustly attacked, they mattered. Bianca mattered more than any of them because, right from the start, Jack had sensed people mattered to her too. But that didn’t mean he was looking forward to the day when their worlds well and truly collided.
Chapter 3
Campbell House was situated deep in the heart of Mayfair, which Jack considered the heart of aristocratic snobbery. He knew the moment he crossed from the working-class section of the city into the posh and polished neighborhoods where the high and mighty lived. He sat a little straighter as he rode, held his head higher, and nodded to the men he passed as though he belonged with them.
He absolutely didn’t, of course, but he’d learned ages ago, at the beginning of his career as a police investigator, that men with titles gave information more freely when they believed they were speaking to one of their own. That was why he worked tirelessly to speak like the nobs, why he spent a ludicrous amount of his salary to dress like them, and why the first luxury item he purchased after earning a bonus for solving a particularly tangled crime years ago was Tiger, the sleek, pedigreed gelding he rode through Mayfair’s pristine streets. Nothing made the nobs sit up and take notice like good horseflesh. As far as Jack was concerned, he and Tiger always had the last laugh, though. Barons and earls had doffed their hats to him without knowing who they were saluting. Once, a duke had greeted him with a handshake and asked about Tiger’s sire and lineage.
None of that completely overrode the restlessness of knocking on Campbell House’s front door and walking into a grand home where the inhabitants knew exactly who he was—Jack Craig, son of a whore.
“Lord Stanhope and Lord O’Shea are in the white parlor with Dr. Townsend, sir,” Galston, Lord Stanhope’s butler, said, gesturing for Jack to follow him down the long hall toward the back of the grand home.
“Thanks,” Jack said as he followed, acting every bit the noble. If the nobs themselves were sticklers for rank and class, their servants were even more so.
The white parlor was everything its name implied. The furnishings were light in color and appeared newer than most bits and pieces in old homes. The walls sported cream-colored paper, which an army of maids must have had to work around the clock to keep from being smudged with soot from the lamps around the room, and the curtains that framed tall windows were a light blue. The effect was to make the room feel bright, cheerful, and as far from the dirt and grime of Jack’s working-class world as was possible.
But it was the cheering effect Rupert Marlowe, the Earl of Stanhope, must have had in mind when choosing the room to use for Lord O’Shea’s recovery activities.
“One step, my lord,” Dr. Townsend said in a falsely cheerful voice as he stood by Fergus’s side. “Just one small step will do.”
Fergus stood, red-faced and tight-jawed, between two tables that had been moved into the center of the room. He balanced between them, his arms braced, unmoving. The patch that covered his missing eye made him look like a furious, flame-haired pirate. The wheelchair he’d been trapped in since Denbigh’s men attacked him sat a few feet behind him. Rupert stood in front of Fergus between the tables, holding his arms out as if to either encourage Fergus or catch him if he fell.
“Try lifting your right leg,” Dr. Townsend said, leaning back to look at Fergus’s legs under the table. “Really concentrate.”
“I am concentrating,” Fergus growled through gritted teeth. “I’m trying bloody hard.”
Jack could see the effort on his face and in the tension that stiffened his body. He checked under the table too, only to see Fergus’s legs hanging uselessly beneath him. It was clear he couldn’t put any weight on them, in spite of the fact that his bones had healed weeks ago. They’d healed awkwardly, leaving
his legs slightly different lengths, but as Jack understood from past conversations with Dr. Townsend, it was the blows to Fergus’s spine that were making his recovery so difficult.
Fergus growled, effort pinching his face, and managed to make his right leg twitch forward, but that was it. He spotted Jack standing in the doorway and let out an exhausted breath, slumping, though he managed to hold himself up on his arms.
“Craig,” Fergus panted, inching himself backward with his arms until he was close enough to his wheelchair to flop into it. “Nice to see you.”
Rupert and Dr. Townsend pivoted to face Jack, who strode deeper into the room. Walking so easily while all Fergus could do was sit in his chair seemed wickedly unfair. What did it matter that Fergus was an earl and Jack was a son of Clerkenwell when Jack could run and jump while Fergus had to ask for help getting to the toilet to take a shit?
“Craig.” Rupert echoed Fergus’s greeting, walking out from between the tables and coming around to shake Jack’s hand. “What brings you here on this fine morning?”
Jack could see the strain in Rupert’s eyes, feel the tension in his handshake. It was a credit to the man that he cared so much for his friend and that he continued to let Fergus live at Campbell House, even though doing so had meant making any number of inconvenient changes to the house itself to accommodate Fergus’s injuries.
“No doubt he’s here to visit your sister,” Fergus teased him, wheeling his chair away from the table and over to the conversation. He was becoming quite proficient at maneuvering in the chair. Dr. Townsend followed behind, ready to help without being needed.
Rupert’s face darkened. “I believe Bianca and Cece are messing about with catalogs of baby clothes at the moment.”
Jack’s heart missed a beat and he fought to keep his expression neutral. He hadn’t expected Bianca to be at Campbell House that morning.
“I’ve come with news about the investigation,” he said, sidestepping the topic of Bianca entirely.
It’s Only a Scandal if You’re Caught Page 3