The Edge of Desire

by Stephanie Laurens

  She took it, read it. Her brows rose. She looked at him. “Grosvenor Square?”

  He met her gaze. “I act for Lady Randall.” He glanced at Letitia.

  She caught his gaze, then looked at Mrs. Rigby and nodded. “Indeed. Please send word if you hear anything at all. We’re in the process of sorting out Mr. Randall’s affairs, and need to know anything pertinent—including if there’s any interest in the business from others.”

  Consciousness passed behind Mrs. Rigby’s eyes. Christian noted it. “Have you heard anything?”

  Startled, Mrs. Rigby looked at him, then she grimaced. “Not so much heard as…there’s been a rumor, the veriest whisper, going around that Randall was thinking of selling. Not just this place but his whole operation. Who to, I—and the other owners I know—never heard, but you may be sure there’d be a lot of interest in the businesses, at least all those I know of.”

  Given the sums regularly pouring into the company’s accounts, Christian could well believe that. He nodded to Mrs. Rigby. “Thank you.” He caught Letitia’s eye. “We won’t take up any more of your time.”

  Letitia rose. “Indeed.” There was an almost feverish light in her eyes as she pulled on her gloves. “We have rather a lot to deal with.” She swung around and headed for the door. “Do remember, Mrs. Rigby, to send word if there’s any query about the business.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Rigby fell in at Letitia’s heels. “I’ll send Tiny with a note. That way I’ll know it gets to the right place—no one gets in his way.”

  Letitia glanced back at the giant, and nodded. “Yes—I can see how that might be.” She continued her march toward the door.

  The butler whisked about and preceded her down the corridor to the front door, there to bow her out with all due deference. Mrs. Rigby came, too, to stand at attention and nod a careful farewell.

  Christian followed Letitia down the front steps. When the door shut behind them, she halted on the pavement.

  He joined her. She was still rather viciously tugging at her gloves.

  Her eyes were narrow slits of fury. “You know, I lied.”

  “Oh?” He kept his tone mild. “How so?”

  “I swore I would never have killed Randall. But if someone hadn’t already done the deed, if—when—I found out about this—his secret business—I would definitely have murdered him myself!”

  Suppressed rage fell from her in waves. She swung around and stormed off, back toward Shaftesbury Avenue. “Let’s find a hackney and get back to the club.”

  Abruptly she halted. Christian nearly ran into her.

  He steadied her, his hands on her shoulders.

  She stared straight ahead, as if she’d seen an apparition.

  “I just realized…” Her voice was too calm. Terribly calm. “…if on this account alone I’m the part owner of four hells, and each regular deposit is a different hell, including for those other two accounts, then…”

  Her voice faded away.

  Fourteen hells, Christian thought. Soothingly, he said, “We don’t know that yet.” His hand at her back, he urged her on. “Let’s get back to the club and see what the others have learned.”

  “You, it appears, are the part owner of a company running an extensive string of high-class gambling hells throughout London.” Dalziel considered Letitia. They’d all returned to the club and gathered in the library to report on what they’d found. Along with Christian and Letitia, Dalziel, Tristan, Tony, and Jack Hendon were all seated in armchairs forming a circle before the empty hearth.

  Letitia didn’t respond to the startling summation; she appeared to be mentally elsewhere.

  “They certainly went to considerable effort to minimize any chance of outsiders learning of their involvement.” Tony Blake spoke to the room at large. “Each hell manager knew only one of the partners, and had no idea any other partners existed.”

  Christian nodded. “The payers into each bank account are answerable to a different partner—Randall handled all the hells paying in at Rothchild’s, Trowbridge handles those depositing at Child’s, while Swithin oversees those paying in via Barkers.”

  Dalziel and Tristan had found themselves visiting a hell in Newport Place, not all that far from Rigby’s in Wardour Street, while Tony and Jack had been led to an establishment in King Street, not far from Covent Garden.

  “If the three hells we’ve visited are anything to judge by,” Christian said, “then it seems the company targeted the very crème de la crème in terms of young gentlemen with money to lose.”

  Dalziel shifted. “I asked around after we left—the hell in Newport Place is known as an establishment that rash young men with more money than wits simply have to patronize.”

  “You know,” Tristan said, “in terms of making money from the ton, Randall, Trowbridge, and Swithin have demonstrated a fine appreciation of what will work in attracting young gentlemen.”

  “That’s what they learned at Hexham Grammar School,” Christian dryly remarked.

  “Which is all very well,” Letitia suddenly said, “but says nothing to my purpose. I don’t give a fig for whatever ingenuity my late and unlamented husband and his cronies demonstrated in setting up this enterprise—all I want is to be rid of it!”

  She glanced pointedly around the circle, reserving her final near-glare for Dalziel and Christian. “A Vaux,” she declared, “cannot be the owner of a string of gambling hells. My father would quite literally have a seizure—and who could blame him?—and I don’t even want to think of how my aunts would react if ever they heard of it, which I fervently pray they never will.”

  Her tone made it clear she was not merely troubled by what they’d discovered—she was horrified, aghast, tending toward overset. She was seriously upset, well beyond agitated; they all understood that. They exchanged wary glances, keeping very still.

  “Bad enough,” she concluded, her voice very nearly wavering, “to discover that Randall was a farmer’s son, but now I find he wasn’t even an honest one!”

  Christian opted for silence.

  Dalziel, brave man, tried for rationality. “There’s nothing illegal about running a gaming hell, in and of itself. The company isn’t breaking any laws per se.”

  “That may be so”—Letitia’s tones were clipped; she clearly wasn’t mollified in the least—“but owning a string of gaming hells, no matter how exclusive, is breaking every ton law ever created.” She narrowed her eyes on Dalziel. “You, of all people, know what that means.”

  Dalziel held her gaze, then, to the utter fascination of his ex-subordinates, inclined his head and retreated.

  Letitia looked down at her fingers, clenched in her lap. “The only bright light in all we’ve uncovered today is that according to Mrs. Rigby, there was talk of someone wanting to buy the hells. If that’s so—”

  “If that’s so,” Christian cut in, “you’ll need to wait and see who approaches you. Or me as your agent—you should take care not to be involved.”

  “I have no interest in being involved.” She frowned at him. “That’s my point—if they wish to buy, then I’ll happily sell my share of the company. I want all ties with its enterprises severed and no more, as soon as humanly possible.”

  “That’s understandable,” Christian allowed, “but you might want to consider not being quite so open about it.”

  She frowned harder. “Great heavens, why?”

  “Because,” he replied, jaw firming, “it’s entirely possible that the putative sale was in some way behind Randall’s murder.”

  That gave her pause. “How so?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but until we know more, we need to play our cards very close to our collective chest.”

  She consider that, then pulled a disgusted face and stopped arguing.

  “We should,” Dalziel said, breaking into the ensuing silence, “put together all we’ve learned thus far about Randall, Trowbridge, and Swithin. We need to see how the picture fits together, an
d what pieces of the puzzle we’re still missing. We know all three were governors’ scholars, in the same year, at a school with a sizable percentage of boys from ton families and an otherwise solid base of the gentry-born. The three would have been entirely out of their social depth—certainly they wouldn’t have been readily welcomed among the other boys—so them banding together makes excellent sense.”

  “It’s also,” Christian put in, “not hard to see what might have fired their ambition to become a part of the ton.”

  “True,” Dalziel continued. “But from the time they left school to the time Randall appeared in London—which seems to be much the same time as Trowbridge and Swithin also relocated to the capital and the company was established—we know nothing of their lives. Whatever happened during that interval might be crucial, especially with regard to the motive for Randall’s murder.”

  Tristan was nodding. “However, when they came to town twelve years ago, they immediately set about establishing a string of exclusive gaming hells exquisitely tailored to appeal to the dissolute young gentlemen of the upper echelons of the ton.”

  Tony snorted. “Well, you can see it, can’t you.” He glanced around the circle. “They’re preying on the very group who, at Hexham Grammar School, would have made their lives hell.”

  “There is,” Christian said, “a certain thread of irony running through all this.”

  Jack stretched his long legs before him. “Extrapolating from Hexham to how they behaved when they arrived in London, I’d suggest that to fill in those intervening years we look for word of them at Oxford or Cambridge. Who knows? We might find gaming hells—the first they set up—operating there.”

  Letitia glanced at Dalziel. “Much as I do not want to know the answer, I suggest you ask Justin. He would know—at least about Oxford.”

  Dalziel nodded. “I’ll ask him, and send up and ask another who might know if Randall, Trowbridge, and Swithin actually owned a hell or hells in Cambridge.” He nodded to Jack. “I agree it seems likely they learned their trade there.”

  Tristan grimaced wryly. “That would certainly explain their excellent understanding of how to attract their chosen prey—the fattest and easiest of all to pluck—into their establishments.”

  Looking up to see nods all around, he continued, “While you’re pursuing that, I’ll see what I can learn about this rumor of Randall selling. The Newport Place manager seemed to think a deal was in progress.”

  “I can help with that,” Tony said.

  “And me,” Jack chimed in.

  “Meanwhile”—Dalziel looked at Letitia and Christian—“I think we now have sufficient information to make another interview with Trowbridge worthwhile.”

  “Indeed.” Christian rose. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

  He offered Letitia his hand. She took it and rose, too.

  All the others came to their feet. Dalziel continued, “Trowbridge’s house is in Chelsea.” He caught Christian’s eye. “You might well find Rupert Honeywell in residence.”

  Reading the message in Dalziel’s dark eyes, Christian raised his brows. “I see.”

  Letitia, following the exchange, didn’t, but before she could ask for clarification, Christian appropriated her hand and anchored it on his sleeve “We’ll reconvene here, I presume?” he said.

  “We’d better, I think.” Dalziel exchanged a glance with the others. “We’ll all need to hear what Trowbridge has to say. If we can learn anything else, especially about any suggestion of a sale, then by tomorrow we might have quite a few potential murderers to pursue.”

  Dalziel’s last words set hares racing and chasing through Letitia’s mind. That evening, as she stood in Lady Henderson’s drawing room and pretended to attend to the conversations around her, all she could think about was what she’d subsequently badgered out of Christian.

  The soiree was not one she would have chosen to attend, but there were some invitations that, mourning or not, one did not decline. A summons from Lady Henderson was one such; the old lady was getting on in years, yet remained an institution within the ton. As Letitia was widely viewed as the most senior Vaux lady—with Randall so undistinguished, society had continued to regard her as a Vaux, and as Justin had yet to marry, she was the only female representative of the principal line of age—it fell to her to carry the family flag. The matrons around her would have been thoroughly shocked had she failed to appear.

  Not that anyone could conceivably view standing in an ill-lit salon sipping weak orgeat and listening to others, most of whom were twice her age, dwell on the shortcomings of their adult children as at all entertaining.

  Which was no doubt why her mind found it much easier to dwell on what Christian had revealed. He’d explained that in the murky world of which gaming hells formed a part, the sale of a valuable set of properties like the company’s had the potential to stir all sorts of reactions, any of which might turn violent. Bidders who sensed they might not win and owners of similar establishments were only some of the possible reactees; Christian had hinted that there were other even more shadowy souls within London’s underworld who might be moved to take an interest.

  The notion of being involved with such persons held absolutely no allure. She was nearly twenty-nine; she’d left unthinking wildness behind her long ago.

  Smiling as Lady Washthorne concluded a story about her niece, she wondered how soon she could leave.

  “Letitia.”

  Just the sound of Christian’s deep voice sent relief washing through her. She turned to face him and gave him her hand. “My lord. What brings you here?”

  He raised her hand; eyes locked with hers, he brushed his lips across the backs of her fingers. “You.” He smiled. Instead of releasing her hand, he set it on his sleeve.

  The others in the group were delighted to welcome him. He shook hands, exchanged greetings, then, after a few minutes had elapsed, excused them both and drew her out of the circle.

  He glanced down at her. “How’s your temper?”

  “Holding up. Just.” She looked around the room. “You know everyone here, do you not?”

  “All by name, most by sight, but a potted recent history of the more notable wouldn’t go astray.”

  “I see. In that case, you’ll want to know that Lady Framlingham…”

  Christian steered her around the room in a slow, ambling circuit. A few reckless souls were brave enough to stop them to exchange greetings, but as it was plain they were deep in converse, most simply smiled, nodded, and let them pass by.

  Letitia frowned at a gentleman—an aging dandy—across the room. “Did you hear about Findlay-Robinson?”

  “What about him?” Christian inwardly smiled as she told him the tale of the faded beau’s obsession with one of the more flighty young ladies recently out.

  “It will never do, of course, but no one has the heart to tell him.”

  As they promenaded, she filled his ears with a detailed, colorful, accurate, and often acerbic account of the company and their private lives, their personal foibles. She entertained him while imparting information that, now he was appearing in society again, he needed. While she was frequently cynical, she was never malicious, instead exhibiting an understanding of their world that was both remarkably mature and remarkably well-grounded.

  Demonstrating on yet another level why she was the perfect wife for him, and always had been.

  Not that he needed reminding, let alone convincing.

  Deciding they’d both been present long enough to be deemed as having done their respective duties, he turned her toward their hostess. “Come—I’ll take you home.”

  Letitia inclined her head and let him.

  Let him take her back to South Audley Street, let him take her upstairs, let him take her to her bed.

  Let him take her.

  Or, as the case proved, let him let her take him.

  It was a distinction she appreciated, yet it was only much later, when she lay in his arms in the rumpled jumb
le of her bed and listened to his breathing deepen, listened to his heart slow as he slipped into slumber, that she realized.

  She didn’t need to wake him to ask if he’d done it on purpose; she knew him—of course he had. He’d set the stage, played the part, and she—without thinking, without the slightest warning flicker in her mind—had slipped into the opposing role.

  That of his wife.

  If her unthinking acceptance hadn’t rattled her so much, she would have woken him just to upbraid him.

  Damn man! She hadn’t seen that coming, not at all.

  There was nothing to be done, not now she lay wrapped in his arms, her head pillowed on his chest, still far too physically wrung out to even contemplate moving.

  No point in trying to move, either; even in sleep he’d hold her where she was. Over his heart.

  All of which led her to contemplate instead the unexpected turn her life had taken. Randall was gone—as Christian had said, removed by fate from her side. And he was there instead, holding her through the night as Randall never had—as she’d never allowed Randall to do, which in itself told the story.

  She was besotted with Christian, always had been, and nothing on that front had changed.

  And now he wanted to marry her.

  She knew he meant it, that this time he intended to stubbornly press his suit until she agreed, but the more cautious and wary, afraid-of-being-hurt-again side of her insisted she had to know why.

  Had to know what was truly in his heart before she could decide whether marrying him now, after their years of separation, was the right, safe, and sensible thing to do.

  It wasn’t being his wife she questioned; she’d always wanted the position, knew it fitted her like a glove and that everyone—simply everyone—agreed. That was not the issue. What she wasn’t sure of, what was holding her back, was a sense of not having looked hard enough. Of not yet having gained sufficient assurances to justify taking the risk of loving him again.