by Mia Marlowe
“That was just the trouble.” Color slowly returned to her lips. “I wasn’t in London, you see. I was in Wiltshire. Lord Albemarle is headed for his country estate, Albion Abbey.”
“Is Lady Nora with him?” The words tumbled from Westfall’s mouth before he could get a net around them to keep them in.
Meg Anthony nodded.
“Well, that settles it,” Camden said. “Someone has to go to Wiltshire and retrieve the snuffbox filled with Fides Pulvis.”
“I’ll go if I must, but you know how I loathe the countryside,” Vesta said. “All that fresh air and early rising—it’s enough to drive one quite dotty. Oh! Westfall, I do beg your pardon.”
He waved away her apology. He was so used to being thought mad, it no longer raised his hackles when someone assumed he was one brick short of a load.
“I’ll go,” Stanstead offered. His wife skewered him in the ribs with her elbow. “Oh, perhaps not. Since my countess cannot accompany me, she being great with child and— Ow!” There was the elbow again. “What? A biblical reference to your condition isn’t good enough?”
“It would be if only the one you chose didn’t make me sound as big as an elephant,” Lady Stanstead said with meekness in her tone that belied the flame flashing behind her eyes. “You don’t truly think I’ve reached pachyderm proportions, do you, dear?”
“Never, my darling.” Stanstead raised his lady’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “Your Grace, I must respectfully decline to participate at this time.”
“If you please,” Meg Anthony began, “I will—”
“Miss Anthony, I determine when my operatives are ready for the field. Since I have only just discovered this disturbing new information about your psychic gift, and I must say, it troubles me that you were not forthcoming about the risks you take, I cannot allow you to take part in this enterprise until we’ve discovered a way to lessen the hazard to you.”
For the first time, Westfall saw a glint of mutiny in the Finder’s mild eyes, but she folded her hands in her lap and studied her knuckles before anyone else could see it.
“So Westfall,” His Grace said, “that leaves you.”
There were a number of things wrong with that plan, not the least of which was that he was certain Honora didn’t want to see him again—either in London or Wiltshire. “I’ve not been invited to Lord Albemarle’s countryseat. I cannot simply present myself at Albion Abbey’s doorstep.”
“Of course not.” The duke waved his hand as if he could swipe away all difficulties as easily as swatting a gnat. “That’s why you’ll be heading for my hunting lodge. It abuts the Albemarle property on the eastern side. I’m sure you can arrange a chance meeting once you’re that close. Country society is somewhat sparse by comparison to London. You’ll be invited to the Abbey soon enough.”
“But how am I to retrieve”—he wouldn’t let himself even think “steal”—“the baron’s snuffbox? I’m not an accomplished pickpocket.”
Given Miss Anthony’s skills in that regard, he thought the duke wrong to dismiss her out of hand.
“You shouldn’t attempt it. You have too honest a face and a good pull requires a bit of acting. Besides, you’d never get close enough to Albemarle,” Vesta said. Meg nodded her agreement. “But you know someone who can.”
“Lady Nora?” Pierce guessed.
Vesta smiled and tapped the tip of her pretty nose.
Pierce shook his head. “She won’t betray her protector.”
“Perhaps you can persuade her that she’d be protecting him. After all, he is contemplating treason,” Vesta said. “If she were to substitute the Fides Pulvis for some ordinary snuff, Lord Albemarle wouldn’t be any the wiser. Without the power of the Trust Powder behind him, he’d just be another courtier trying to turn the opinion of the Prince Regent and frankly, Prinny’s too lazy to change his own cravat, much less his mind.”
“Thank you for that nearly treasonous assessment of our future sovereign, Vesta. But we ought to have a backup plan in place, in case Lady Nora proves…stubborn.” Camden shot a glare at the courtesan. “Women generally are.”
Then the duke eyed LeGrand.
“Monsieur LeGrand will go with you, Westfall,” His Grace said. “He’ll pose as your valet. Then once he’s belowstairs at Albion Abbey, he can befriend Albemarle’s valet. Servants can sometimes be tempted to petty thievery if they are assured of not being caught.”
“It wouldn’t hurt for Miss Anthony to come, too. As another option for retrieving the Fides Pulvis.” The words were out of Pierce’s mouth before he could stop them. Meg Anthony had looked so crestfallen at being passed over in favor of the newcomer that he had to come to her defense. Her quick smile told him he’d won forgiveness for telling her secret with that suggestion. “Country society is different than in the city. You said so yourself. It should be easier for Miss Anthony to slip into that setting so she can practice passing as a lady.”
“He’s right, Camden,” Vesta said with a sigh.
“A journey to Wiltshire.” Lady Easton, the duke’s sister, had been quietly embroidering in the corner. When she spoke up, there was wistfulness in her tone. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen the Chalk Horse country. I’d be happy to accompany Miss Anthony as her chaperone.”
“Oh, why don’t we all go?” Vesta said sharply. “If I can bear a little fresh air, you can too, Camden. You could do with a bit of rusticating. Far too much of your time is wasted on chasing mediums and riddling with the past and not enough on the problems at hand.”
The duke tugged at his waistcoat, though it hung on his frame with an impeccable fit. “How I spend my time is none of your concern.”
“It is when it affects the operation of the Order,” Vesta said. “You know full well that things will progress more quickly if you’re in Wiltshire too. Albemarle won’t be able to resist inviting you and your party to dine once he knows you’re in the vicinity.”
“But it isn’t hunting season,” the duke protested.
“Which didn’t matter a flibbet to you when you decided to send dear Pierce off to your precious hunting lodge.” Then Vesta’s voice dropped into seductress range, and she sent a sizzling look across the room to the duke. “Besides, you know full well that for some of us, it’s always hunting season.”
His Grace expects me to use Honora in the furtherance of the Order’s goals. I can think of nothing more repugnant. If by some miracle I have not already destroyed whatever we might become to each other, I cannot risk losing her. Not even for King and country.
I’d rather return to Bedlam and the water chair.
~from the secret journal of Pierce Langdon, Viscount Westfall
Chapter Twelve
Camden dismissed the others with instructions to pack for an extended trip to the country. Only Lord and Lady Stanstead would stay behind in London. In Camden’s absence, Bernard had instructions to relay any incoming intelligence from other cells of the Order to them. Garret and Cassandra could be trusted to act independently, if the occasion warranted.
Vesta, on the other hand, couldn’t be trusted at all.
As the last of his Extraordinaires filed out the door, only she remained. The woman lounged in his leather wing chair as if she were doing the piece of furniture a favor by allowing it to support her tight little bum. She cast a feline smile at Camden.
“I hope you have an explanation for the way you tried to undermine my authority in the meeting,” he said testily.
“Your authority? Why should you lord it over the rest of us in the Order? Aren’t you the one who’s always expounding on how extraordinary we all are? Why should it surprise you when we act like it?”
She rose in a single, graceful motion and swanned across the room to stand before him. The way the daring bodice on her gown was cut, if he looked down, he knew he’d be able to see the sweet hollow between her breasts, perhaps even a rouged nipple peeping from the froth of lace. He fought to keep his gaze locked on hers.
“If we’re that bloody exceptional, we don’t need a keeper, Edward.”
The sound of his name on her tongue zinged straight to his groin. “There’s no need for profanity,” he growled, irritated that she could rouse him so thoroughly when he was so thoroughly angry with her. “And I am not your keeper.”
“Obviously.” She slid a cool hand around the back of his neck, pulling his head down so the warmth of her breath feathered over his lips. “If you were my keeper, I’d be bound to acquiesce to your every demand. Satisfy your every wish…”
Vesta LaMotte might be one of the most powerful fire mages ever born, but her real gift was bringing a man to his knees.
He was still annoyed with her, but he ached to kiss her. He wanted to flip up the woman’s skirt and take her right there on his Aubusson carpet. He needed to pound her into such a shattering climax, she’d never try to subvert him again.
“I could be yours, you know.” Vesta nearly purred as she smoothed her cheek against his. Then she ran her open mouth along his jaw.
He couldn’t hold back. He clasped her roughly to him and claimed her lips. She didn’t seem to expect gentleness, and he gave her none. They devoured each other, tongues thrusting, lips bruising.
Her hands were everywhere, her clever fingers stoking him to white-hot fury. She reached around him and drew a thumbnail along the seam in his trousers that divided his bum cheeks. He nearly spent into his smallclothes.
It had been so long since the last time she’d tempted him beyond what he was able to resist.
Vesta was a sickness. A recurring fever that left him weaker and more prone to succumb to her wiles with each indulgence. When she knelt before him and worked the buttons over his hips, he abandoned all hope of restraint.
As his trousers slid down his thighs he collapsed into the wing chair. She settled between his knees and went to work.
The heaven of her tongue on him. The warmth of her mouth as she took him in. The scrape of her teeth over his most sensitive spot. He dug his fingernails into the arms of the chair hard enough to leave marks in the leather.
“Succubus,” he murmured as the pressure built in his shaft.
“No, I’m definitely flesh and blood,” she corrected between long licks of his entire length. “But I suppose I do fall on the dark side of the scale. Your Mercedes was the angel of light.”
It was the only thing Vesta could have said that would deflate him completely. His gaze jerked up to the portrait of his dead wife above the mantel. Mercedes was smiling down at him with that enigmatic glow of hers, her lips softly parted as if she was about to share the most delicious of secrets.
And there he was with his trousers around his ankles and his cock in another woman’s mouth.
Camden pushed Vesta away so forcibly that she rocked back off her knees and landed with a thump on her bum. He wished he’d been less brutish, but if he hadn’t thrust her away that very second, he wouldn’t have had the will to do it. He rose, yanking up his trousers and stuffing his shirttail back into them.
“Damnation,” he muttered.
“My thoughts exactly,” Vesta said without bothering to get up. Instead, she splayed her legs before her and leaned back on her palms. “We were having a delicious time. Do you mind telling me why you felt compelled to kill the joy?”
“What do you think? I can’t do this. Not with you. Not…” He waved a hand toward the portrait. “Not here.”
Vesta’s gaze flicked upward and her wicked mouth formed a perfect “Oh.” “It seems my words were poorly timed—”
“You think so?”
“But Camden, when will you realize that Mercedes loved you? Wherever she is, if she is able to see you, she would want you to be happy.”
He leaned on the mantel and pressed his forehead against the cool stone of the fireplace. It steadied him, made it easier to think clearly. He wished he could put out the fire that still raged in the rest of him as easily. “If she wanted me to be happy, she’d still be here.”
“It’s not as if she chose to leave you.”
“Isn’t it? She should have stayed home.”
It had only been a few days after she had given birth to their little boy. The child hadn’t even been christened yet. Mercedes hadn’t been churched—usually the first outing for a new mother, but instead, she’d ignored Camden’s wishes and set off for an unsafe part of the city on an unknown errand.
Days later, after the funerals were over and all the mourners had left, Camden had realized that Mercedes had tried to talk to him about something, but he’d put her off. He had been too busy with plans for his Order of the M.U.S.E., too puffed up over producing an heir for the estate, and too engrossed in the running of said estate to believe his beautiful wife had anything of consequence bothering her.
Certainly, nothing so pressing that she’d bundle up herself and their newborn and go to Whitechapel in the dead of winter.
Camden wandered over to the window and stared out at London. His home was on a small rise so that, from his study, he could see over the rooftops across the street. The city was settling into evening, myriad chimneys belching smoke into the sky. Lit by flames extended on long poles, gas lamps winked on in the better neighborhoods. So many lives intersecting, so many souls living cheek by jowl, and none of them the one he most wanted to speak to.
“Why?” he whispered.
It was a measure of how finely attuned Vesta was to him that she seemed to sense the direction of his thoughts. “I know you spent a small fortune on Bow Street Runners trying to answer that question.”
He heard a rustle of silk. Vesta came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. She laid her head against his spine between his shoulder blades.
His feelings for the courtesan were a tangled mess. She was blindingly attractive and she knew it. She could make him her slave, if he didn’t take care. He alternated between lusting after her and being repulsed by his need for her. Either way, she was the most exasperating woman he’d ever known.
Now, however, he covered her hands with one of his, grateful beyond words.
Sometimes, she was too good to him. Mercedes had been, too.
He didn’t deserve any of the women who’d come into his life.
“There are some questions that have no answers,” Vesta said.
“That’s not true of this one. Mercedes went to Whitechapel for a purpose and I need to know what it was.” The Runners had discovered no reason for her visit to the sketchy district or even who she had been meeting there, so Camden had turned to seeking a way to contact his wife directly. If he could locate a medium worthy of the name, he’d be able to speak with Mercedes. But so far, all the mediums he’d discovered were charlatans preying on the bereaved. None of them could really communicate with the dead.
At least, not his dead.
Vesta tugged her hand free. “Good night, Edward.”
“Wait a moment.” He turned and caught her wrist. Her lovely eyes were hooded, but he could still read hurt in them. “My behavior toward you has been abominable of late.”
She merely looked up at him. After a long pause she said, “Oh!” Then she gave herself a slight shake and batted her long lashes at him, her professional courtesan’s smile firmly in place. “Were you expecting me to disagree?”
“Always, but perhaps not on this point,” he said with a chuckle. “Vesta, for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”
“So am I.” Her smile drooped. “I’d hoped to give you ease. And take a bit for myself as well.”
She was between patrons, he knew, and the fire mage’s gift was always accompanied by a voracious sexual appetite. The least he could have done was sate that hunger for her a little.
“I should have—”
“Yes, you should have,” she said with a genuine smile this time. “But that ship has sailed, for this evening, at least. And now I must be off.”
He cocked his head at her.
“Someone we know and have little r
eason to love at the moment has commanded me to take a journey to the country.” She dipped in a low curtsy. “So that means I must pack.”
She turned and sashayed toward the door, her luscious hips swaying. He damned himself for a fool. She was right. Mercedes was gone. He’d mourned her for far more years than most husbands. He would always love her, and the mystery of why she was taken from him would always haunt him, but his wife wouldn’t begrudge him the comfort of a mistress now.
Vesta stopped at the threshold. “Even though you don’t deserve it, sleep well, Edward. Heaven knows, I shan’t.”
Then she slipped out the door before he could call her back. Even if he had, she was contrary enough not to have come.
“Neither will I, Vesta,” he said with regret. When it came to women, even being a duke was no guarantee of unquestioned obedience. Or a restful night’s sleep. “Neither will I.”
…
Nora didn’t know why she’d ridden this way. It wasn’t her usual route through the woods surrounding Albion Abbey. But when she’d learned that the Duke of Camden had a hunting lodge nearby, she was drawn to see it, as surely as a lodestone to true north. There was no logic to it. She was compelled to view the lodge for no other reason than her strange sense that seeing it would ease the disquiet in her breast.
Which was how she’d come to be leading her mare along the rutted road instead of riding. The beast had thrown a shoe, and Nora couldn’t bear to see her lamed. She was closer to the Camden property than Albion Abbey, so she trudged on in hope of finding a hostler on site who could help her.
When she crested a small rise, the hunting lodge and its accompanying outbuildings spread out before her. It was ringed by an ancient grove of beeches. Clematis and wisteria clung to the limestone walls, bright spots of color against weathered gray. It seemed far too grand to be a hunting lodge. While undeniably rustic, Camden End was more of a manor house than most estates could boast. The three-story stone structure was shaped like a stone butterfly, wings extended on either side of a central tower.
