“Damn it,” she muttered.
Had she truly ruminated over the Duke of Arden for a full three minutes? Her vulnerability for the man—produced, no doubt, by a natural reaction to his handsome face and nothing more—had to be mown down like a field overrun by weeds. Mow it down, she would.
Beginning now.
With a final nod at her reflection in the glass and a straightening of her jacket, she set off in the direction of Arden’s study.
Sweet God.
Lucien could do nothing but stare, transfixed, at Miss Montgomery as she strode across the expanse of his study wearing the most bewildering—and mouthwatering—costume he had ever seen upon a woman.
Her legs were encased in billowing trousers rather than skirts, coupled with a fitted bodice that, had he been viewing it alone, would have looked indistinguishable from the upper portion of any gown. It was fashioned of blue silk, with lace at the top that almost resembled a cravat in its frothy waterfall over her décolletage. Atop the bodice, she wore a cutaway jacket, which flapped in the breeze as she approached his desk with her unique sense of determination.
He stood, belatedly, offering her a formal bow. His tongue felt as if it were stuck to the roof of his mouth. Any hope he possessed that a subsequent look at her outlandish attire would render him horrified died a quick, merciless death when he straightened to his full height and settled his gaze upon her once more.
She was astounding.
Mesmerizing.
Damnation, her hips. Full and round, just as he had imagined they would be. Her legs, so long. Legs a man could well imagine wrapped around his waist. He wondered if her bodice was attached to her trousers. The whole effort appeared seamless, but surely it could not be so. And that thought inevitably led to him disrobing her in his mind. Surely she wore no corset beneath that bodice. He wondered if her nipples were hard once more, hiding beneath the safety of her jacket.
Christ, this was going to be torture. The Home Office had not just foisted a partner upon him. No, indeed. They had forced him to accept a determined, intelligent, fiercely independent, rebellious, beautiful female, whose body was a courtesan’s dream, as his partner. And an American one, at that.
She bowed right back at him, startling him from his unacceptable ruminations concerning a woman he could not afford to want. Hers was not a full gentleman’s bow, but rather a cursory, abbreviated thing. Halfway between a curtsy and a bow. Odd, to be sure. He hoped to God she never made such an awkward gesture should she find herself at a social gathering during her short stay in London.
Her incredibly short stay, he reminded himself bitterly. The woman before him—eccentric, endearing, and enticing though she may be—was his nemesis. He could not forget that bitter truth.
“Good morning, Arden,” she said.
Ah, an overture on her part. She had not referred to him as Mr. Arden. He would have smiled had not the situation been so dire. It would seem all that was required to pierce Miss Montgomery’s armor was cherry tartlets and a good night’s sleep. He could manage that. Far less guilt-inducing than drowning her in port, after all.
“Good morning, Miss Montgomery,” he returned, forcing himself to keep all hints of emotion and all traces of his reaction to her from his voice.
Doing so required every last speck of his self-restraint. Because those bloody trousers. And her legs. Lord in heaven, the woman’s legs. He had known she was taller than most ladies, but the way those trousers clung to her curves and emphasized how long her legs were…
His cock was hard.
He had to sit.
Almost in unison, he and Miss Montgomery sank loudly and gracelessly into their respective seats. He stifled a groan. It was as if the dratted female had him so bollixed up, he had somehow begun taking on her alarming lack of polish and grace. What more havoc could the woman wreak upon him? What was next? Would he too be attacking his dinner as if it were about to flee his plate?
She stared at him, her back straight as a ramrod, unblinking. “Have you had the opportunity to review my notes?”
Bloody hell. Again with the journal. He had skimmed it once more following his hasty retreat from the salon the day before, but in truth, his blood had been pulsing in his veins, and desire had simmered through him with such insistence, he had been forced to take matters into his own hands in his chamber.
Shameful. Disgraceful even, but true. He had gripped his own cock to the thought of Miss Montgomery taking him into her mouth. He was not proud of himself. Not at all. What was wrong with him?
He forced the unwanted thoughts away, where they belonged. “I have perused them, yes.”
She quirked a brow, looking distinctly unimpressed. “And what do you make of the threats against the railway system?”
Her question stole his breath, but this time, it had nothing to do with him mooning over her beauty, and everything to do with what she had just asked.
“Against the railway?”
Her brow hiked an inch upward. “Yes, precisely as I said, Arden.”
Still not a mister. Simply Arden. And damned if he didn’t enjoy the sound of his name in her sweet, syrupy drawl. Apparently, he had earned himself enough redemption to carry him over for now.
“I failed to read that portion,” he told her honestly.
“Perhaps we ought to begin at the beginning.” Her tone was steeped in disapproval.
Was she already attempting to wrest the reins from his more-than-capable hands? Surely not. He would remind her which of them was the leader of the League, and which of them was the new partner dredged up from the bowels of New York.
Lucien pinned her with a glare. “Perhaps you ought to allow me to decide where and how we begin, Miss Montgomery.”
“This is not a matter of which of us possesses more power than the other, Arden,” she said coolly. “This is a matter of your country’s safety. You do realize that, do you not?”
He bristled at her implication he did not take this assignment seriously. The safety of England’s men, women, and children had been his sole concern for years. Plucking the evil roots of the Fenian desire for destruction was his daily goal.
“Of course I realize how grave the danger is,” he snapped. “Already, there have been innocent lives lost, among them a child and a leading political figure. I am doing my damnedest to make certain not one more drop of blood is shed, that there is not one more death.”
“If you were doing your damnedest, then you would have read my notes,” she returned, with equal vigor.
So much for the bloody cherry tartlets. Their sweetness had not lasted long.
“When was I to have possessed the time to read your voluminous scribble, Miss Montgomery?” he demanded, not caring if his voice dripped with acid. “I only received word I was being suddenly forced to accept a partner in leading the League a few days prior to your arrival.”
She frowned at that. “Do you mean to suggest you did not know about my arrival until recently?”
He inclined his head, a rush of outrage bubbling to the surface with him at the reminder. “Yes.”
“I see.” She paused, seeming to contemplate his revelation, as if it had somehow given her a setback. “How much notice did you have when you received your previous partner, Arden?”
Here, too, was another source of indignation. “I had no partner.”
Her full lips parted in surprise. “I am the first?”
“The first,” he confirmed bitterly. But rest assured, you will not last long, if I have anything to say about it.
“Is that why your dislike for me is so strong?” she asked. “You resent me for the Home Office’s decision to make you share your power with me?”
“I do not dislike you, and nor do I resent you.” That was a half-truth. Part of him disliked and resented her very much. The other part of him wanted to peel her out of those indecent trousers, settle her before him on the desk, and feast upon her.
But most importantly, he would never share
his power with her. Not ever.
“You do not fool me, Arden.” She gave him a look laden with meaning. “Not when there is no port about for you to drown me in, anyway. You have a way of looking at me as if I am a fly you’ve found in your soup.”
He almost laughed at her unexpected analogy. Almost. By God, the woman was strange. “You are a great deal larger than a fly, Miss Montgomery, and I should never wish to find you in my soup.”
Her lips pursed in displeasure, her eyes narrowing upon him. “You misunderstand me deliberately, but I will not be swayed from my course. I want answers from you, Arden, and I want them now. If this partnership is to be successful, and I do not see any reason why it cannot—aside from your arrogant, condescending, obdurate nature—we must be honest with each other.”
There was honesty. Ugly and altogether unwanted. Drat the female.
“You think me arrogant, condescending and obdurate, madam?” he asked tightly, offended in spite of himself.
“I know you are,” she countered. “Fear not. I have worked with a great deal of men such as yourself over the course of my career as a Pinkerton. I am entirely prepared to deal with you.”
“To deal with me,” he repeated, thinking surely, surely, he could not have heard the woman before him correctly.
“You are having difficulty accepting the fact that you are being forced to accept a partner,” she added. “To make matters worse, I am a woman. An American woman, at that. You consider me an interloper, and you think me intellectually and physically incapable of performing the same tasks as you, a man.”
She spoke with such certainty, as if she already knew every word she spoke was irrefutable fact. But to his utter shame, he realized she was not entirely wrong. She had read him as if he were a book laid open before her.
“I am not pleased about being forced to accept a partner,” he allowed, “as it casts a shadow over my abilities. Furthermore, forgive me, but I cannot help but to feel, down to my marrow, that a native Englishman will have a much better understanding of the current wave of Fenianism than an American.”
If possible, she sat even straighter, and as well as she could read him, he could read her. She was infuriated. Arguing with her had not been his intention for this meeting, but it would seem they found themselves in dubious footing upon a slippery slope.
“Most of the men who have already been arrested, or who are actively plotting now, are Americans with roots in Ireland,” she countered, her voice firm.
He admired her tenacity. Her ability to find success in a predominantly male profession did not surprise him in the least, now he’d seen it in action. And he had to admit, she was correct about her assertion concerning the American ties to many of the Fenians who had been caught thus far. However, he still disagreed with part of her argument. Quite vehemently, in fact.
“That is an incontrovertible fact. However, running covert operations in a city you are familiar with is decidedly different from running them here in London.” He tapped his fingers against the surface of his desk to drum away some of his vexation. “Surely you must admit the difference, Miss Montgomery.”
“You fancy me from New York?” She laughed then, and the sound was rich and true and sultry.
Damn him if her laughter did not send a trill straight down his spine.
“Is that not where you hail from, Miss Montgomery?” he asked coldly, nettled by his reaction to her—all over again—and her amusement. No one laughed at him. He was the Duke of Arden, by God. Leader of the Special League.
“No,” she said, the remnants of her luscious laugh lingering in an equally tempting smile. “I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Or, at least, that is where my recollections begin. I am an orphan, you see, no memories of my mother or father, and I am sure that is just as well. Atlanta is where I remained until the city was burned in the war. After that, I moved whenever and wherever I had to, a child of misfortune, as it were. I have found my home in a dozen states. I am not bound by geographical location, Mr. Arden.”
He had returned to mister status once more. Somehow, that concerned him far less than the notion of a young Miss Montgomery, in an orphanage within a burning city, in the midst of the chaos of war. Something inside him shifted.
Softened.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“When?” she asked, seemingly unaffected by the harrowing childhood she had just described.
“When your city burned,” he clarified.
He knew he should not care. That he ought not waste his precious time on inquiring after personal details about her, which would never matter when she had been dismissed from her position and sailed back to America. And yet, unable to help himself all the same. He wanted to know more about this irksome, intriguing woman.
“Nine years old, or thereabouts,” she said. “No one can be certain, since I was abandoned as a small child. No birth date on record for me, I am afraid.”
“A girl,” he concluded, thinking of how Miss Montgomery may have looked, bright-eyed, with a halo of dark ringlets around her heart-shaped face.
And despite his every instinct to the contrary, he allowed himself to entertain, just for a moment, a sense of kinship with her. Hidden deep within him was an orphan as well. His mother had died in his youth by her own hand, drowning herself in the North Sea. His father had died not many years later, leaving Lucien and Violet with no one in the world but each other.
And Aunt Hortense, of course, who was not to be forgotten.
But he related to Miss Montgomery, for he too knew what it was like to be motherless and fatherless. To be adrift in the world, without the guidance of those who should have loved him best.
“I was old enough to find my way when the time came,” she said then, her gentle drawl dispersing his heavy thoughts. “I tell you this, not so you pity me, but so you see I have never called any place home. I find my home wherever I am, and I am not daunted by the prospect of conducting an investigation in a country I have only just recently arrived in. If anything, I am eager.”
He believed her when she said those words. He did not discredit the vehemence in her voice, or the strength of her convictions. “My mother drowned herself in the sea when I was a lad,” he found himself revealing to her.
Why, he had no idea. Merely that she was there, and for this brief moment, the connection between them seemed a bridge, and he was blindly crossing it. Reaching out, not an olive branch, but a hand, from one orphan to another.
But she did not wilt as most ladies would. Her eyes filled, not with sympathy, but with something far more valuable: understanding. “Perhaps you have more in common with this American interloper than you initially suspected, Arden.”
He swallowed against the rush of bile which inevitably rose in his throat whenever he thought of his mother. How beautiful and pale she had been in death, how unlike herself. She had finally been at peace, but she had left him behind in torment.
“Perhaps,” he allowed at last, gaining control over his emotions.
“Read my notes,” she said. “Begin on page twenty-three. There is a man here in London going by the name of The Nightingale, who has been accepting funds and shipments of Atlas powder from the Emerald Club. The club is organizing an attempt to cause destruction on your railways using bombs hidden inside portmanteaus. I do not have more than that, other than the knowledge The Nightingale is not alone. My investigations suggest there are others, working in concert, all with strong connections to the Emerald Club.”
Her words sent a different trill altogether down his spine. He recognized the icy claws of dread all too well. Either the woman before him was a fraudster, flush with false information, which would prove unreliable, or…
Or she was exactly who she seemed to be: an intelligent, resourceful creature, who had somehow infiltrated the ranks of one of the most secretive and dangerous Fenian organizations in America and mined crucial information, which could be used against the Fenians before it was too late.
He extracted her journal from where he had stored it, locked in one of his desk drawers. “I will read the bloody notes.”
“Page twenty-three,” she prodded.
“Page twenty-three,” he agreed. Of course the woman knew by memory what information was contained on which page. He should not be surprised, and yet he was. Somehow, Miss H.E. Montgomery continually surprised, impressed, vexed, and confounded him.
“Excellent.” She flashed him a beaming smile and stood, thrusting her hand out over his desk.
He was forced to stand as well, and to accept her handshake, even if it felt deuced odd, which it did. Her hand was bare in his, and he could not deny the spark which shot past his wrist and up his arm. Or the heat settling somewhere in the vicinity of his trousers.
“This is not a surrender, Miss Montgomery,” he warned her, lest she think he was falling into her battle formation.
“I would never dream of such a hasty capitulation, Mr. Arden,” she assured him, grinning as she pumped his hand with more vigor than a lady ought to possess, before releasing him. “I will leave you to your reading. I have some inquiries to make about town.”
Jesus, the thought of her gadding about in those trousers… No.
“I shall accompany you,” he decided grimly. “I will read the notes upon our return.”
Her smile deepened. “I do not require your assistance, sir. I assure you.”
Oh yes, yes she did. He’d be damned before he allowed her to go traipsing about London, alone, wearing those misbegotten trousers.
“Nevertheless,” he said, trying to keep his voice even and smooth, “I am your partner, Miss Montgomery. My place is at your side.”
She frowned at him, looking distinctly unimpressed. “Very well. If you must.”
He placed her journal back within its locked drawer for safekeeping. “I must.”
It was either that, or spend the rest of the afternoon pacing his study, worrying about what would become of her in those blasted trousers. He had no choice really. Not any more of a choice than he had in accepting her as his partner.
Shameless Duke Page 7
