She spun around with a whispered, “Richard . . .” And looked up into the face of the Earl of Downe, the man she had loved as long as she could remember.
He stood under the candlelight, his dark blond hair damp with raindrops that shimmered and sparkled and made it seem as if he had been delivered to her in a cloud of stars. He picked up a cup of lemonade and held it out to her. She stood there frozen, unaware that her heart was in her eyes.
“Are you going to take this or make me stand here all night?” He raised the cup until it was eye level and looked down at her, amused.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said in a half croak, then took the cup and raised it to her lips and drank the whole thing in two giant gulps. She stared into the empty cup, searching for something brilliant and witty to say.
But before she could open her mouth he had reached out and tilted up her dance card. It was all she could do not to jerk her hand away before he saw the humiliating fact that her card was empty.
His face was unreadable, but he seemed to watch her for the longest time. Then, just as he had done in a thousand of her dreams, he wrote his name in a large, masculine scrawl across the card. He dropped the card and held out his hand.
She just stared at it.
“I believe this dance is mine.”
She met his look. It was all she could do not to throw herself into his arms and sob her gratitude. For once in her life, for once in the company of Richard Lennox, she did the proper thing. She placed her hand in his, and felt a small flutter deep inside her. After a half curtsy, she let him lead her to the dance floor, praying to God that she wouldn’t fall flat on her face and ruin everything.
The music filled her ears with notes more lovely than Mozart ever wrote. She moved slowly, feeling as if she were in one of her most enchanting dreams.
He touched her other hand and she almost cried out, so sharp was her reaction to him. Like one whose heart had just taken wing, every sensation in her young body came instantly alive. The air became tactile, the candlelight as warm as an embrace. Each breath she drew was honey, each note of music the sweetest of sounds.
In less time than it took a tear to fall, she was dancing. With Richard. She couldn’t will her eyes to look up at him, and she was so nervous she had to concentrate on her steps.
“You miscounted, hellion.”
She stumbled, but he pulled her into a turn, one strong arm keeping her steady. She looked up at him, then—half-embarrassed, half-thankful, completely besotted—and she whispered, “How did you know?”
He leaned down slightly and whispered into her ear, “Your lips are moving.”
She flushed, red and hot, so flustered that she went in the wrong direction, throwing the entire line of dancers off. By the time she’d found her way back to him, he was making a serious effort to hide his amusement.
No one else was. She dipped her head to keep from seeing their smirking faces, and on the next turn her fan caught on the hem of his velvet coat. Shackled to his coattail, she was forced to follow him down the gentlemen’s line of the dance as she tried to loosen her fan.
She stepped on his foot three times during the remainder of the dance. But at least she didn’t fall. Next time she prayed for something, she’d have to remember to be more specific.
Ten minutes after they had started, the music, sadly, stopped. Eyes closed, heart pounding, she finished in a deep curtsy. Too soon, way too soon. She didn’t even realize she had been holding her breath until she released it.
In utter silence, he led her from the floor over to Cupid’s alcove. She turned, thanked him, then added quietly, “I’m sorry about your foot, my lord.”
He said nothing. His face carried that same look of casual indifference it always wore of late, and she wondered what he was thinking when he wore it. Vaguely she heard him voice his pleasure before he made a quick bow and walked away.
Her gaze locked on his broad back, clad in a dark green velvet coat that matched the deep color of his eyes. Even when he had joined a group of men on the opposite side of the room, she could not will herself to look away. His friends clapped him on the back and stood there talking and laughing. Never once did he give her another glance, but she didn’t care because he had danced with her.
Her mind in cloud castles, she sagged back against the wall and stared at nothing. If, for the remainder of the season, she never danced again, it wouldn’t matter, because Richard Lennox, recently the Earl of Downe, the center of her dreams and the object of her affections for six long years, had actually danced with her. At a ball. In front of everyone!
She looked up at Cupid, balanced on a pedestal, his arrow drawn. Then she stared down at her dance card for the longest time, watching Richard’s signature as if she expected it to just disappear, to fade as so many of her dreams had in the cruel light of morning. She ran her fingers over the handwriting. But it didn’t fade.
His name, bold and dark, stared back at her. She knew then that it hadn’t been a dream. It had been real.
She took a deep breath. His scent lingered around her. She could still feel the warmth of his hand touching her, still see his face looking into hers, still hear that chocolate voice.
She could still feel the tingle of his grip on her waist as if he had marked her. She looked at her hand, the one his had touched, and wondered if she could ever bear to wash it. Her mind flashed with the impulsive youthful thought that nothing but lemonade would ever touch her lips again.
Ever so slowly, she untied the pink ribbon around her wrist. With a huge sigh, she clasped the dance card to her heart. And out of the corner of her eye, she could have sworn she saw Cupid wink.
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About the Author
JILL BARNETT enchants readers with her signature blend of love and laughter. Publishers Weekly gave her book, Dreaming, a starred review, calling it "hilarious… Her characters are joyously fresh and her style is a delight to read—a ray of summer sun." The Detroit Free Press named Bewitching one of the Best Books of the Year, cheering, "Barnett has a wicked way with a one-liner and she makes the romance sizzle."
Her other books have all won critical acclaim and have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks, who presented Jill with a National Waldenbooks Award. She has over 8 million books in print and her work has been published in 23 languages. Jill lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.
To learn more about Jill Barnett’s latest books please visit these sites:
www.jillbarnettbooks.com
Seducing a Stranger
Kerrigan Byrne
Prologue
London, Autumn 1855
The devil’s breath was a persistent cold prickle on Cutter Morley’s neck. He’d awoken with a start in the wee hours of the morning, propped up against the doorway to St. Dismas where he’d taken refuge. Vicar Applewhite had fallen ill, and so the rectory was locked against vagrants today. More’s the pity. He’d not been able to scrape together enough money to afford a flea-bitten room for the night, but the fact that his twin, Caroline, hadn’t met him in the abbey courtyard meant she’d found a roof to sleep beneath.
Or a protector willing to allow her into the warmth of his bed for a pound of flesh.
She wasn’t a prostitute. Never that. She was just… desperate. They both were.
But not for long. He’d a plan—one he’d implement just as soon as he was old enough, or rather, as soon as he looked old enough.
He was so close. Just one or two more winters. One or two more inches. No one was right sure of their ages… maybe thirteen or fifteen. Probably not older, but his recollection of the first handful of years was cagey so he couldn’t be sure.
They’d no papers.
The slick of oily disquiet Caroline’s new sometimes profession wrought within him was a mild hum compared to the symphony of peril and impending doom sawing at his nerves.
It haunted him as he set off fr
om Spitalfields to Shoreditch, increasing with every step until he lifted his grimy hand to swat at the itch and smooth the hair at his hackles back against his neck. He had a hard-enough time staying warm with only the moth-eaten jacket he’d filched from a rubbish heap, but something about this day frosted the marrow in his bones.
He thought to lose the disquieting demon in the Chinese tent city, hoping it could be distracted by inhabitants of the cloyingly fragrant opium dens just as easily as he was drawn by the sizzles and aromas of food cooked in the out-of-doors. His gut twisted with longing, but he found no opportunity to filch a breakfast. People were extra wary today. Perhaps they, too, felt whatever portent hung in the air.
He wandered through throngs of peculiar and elegant Jews, his ear cocked to the lyrical Crimean accents of those escaping the violence in Russia, Prussia or the Ukraine. He thought their industrious bustle would perhaps chase away this unfathomable sense of bereavement. But alas, he made it all the way down Leman Street with the healthy sense that calamity watched him from the shadows of the palsied, rotten buildings, waiting to strike.
It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. Or… no… perhaps it had already happened. The thing. The terrible thing. And the world held its breath waiting to suffer some awful consequence.
Turning down Common Doss Street, he loped up to number three, a ramshackle place mortared with more mold than grout.
Mrs. Jane Blackwell land-lorded over the only seven rooms free from vermin. At least, vermin other than that of the human variety. In Whitechapel, vermin were as inescapable as the toxic yellow fogs belched up by the Thames and thickened with soot from the refineries.
Cutter didn’t need an invitation to shoulder into the doorway of the Blackwell common house, he’d been doing it since he was a lad.
The sharp smell of lye cut through the noise and stench wafting from men and women of dubious nocturnal vocations who had already begun drinking beer for the day at half noon. It drew him to the back of the house where a square of garden was connected by several alleys cobbled with grime. Clad in a dark frock and a soiled apron, Mrs. Blackwell stirred laundry over a boiling pot.
“More discarded bastards in these sheets than in all of Notting Hill,” she muttered with a grimace. “I’m charging Forest extra if he’s going to wank all over me linens, bloody pervert.”
She glanced up when Cutter ambled over, her marble-black eyes crinkling with a good-humor quite lacking round these parts. In a place where most humans were anything but humane, where corruption was the only legitimate business and vice the only escape, Jane Blackwell was a warm, if rough-handed oasis of compassion.
Cutter would have given his right eye for a mum like her, or any mother really. She was a crass and vulgar woman, but he knew nothing else. She’d inherited these rooms from her father back before the pernicious poverty had taken over Whitechapel so completely, and an addiction to gin rounded out her inheritance. Or rather, drained it.
On top of her rents, she could charge tuppence a week more for her laundry services, and when she was of a mind to be dry, the money kept her and her son, Dorian, in luxuries like meat, cheese, and sometimes milk.
No wonder the lucky bugger was so tall and broad when they’d only dipped their toes into their teen years.
So long as Mrs. Blackwell kept her broken teeth—courtesy of Dorian’s missing father— behind her lips, she was still a handsome woman. Her night-hued hair remained free of grey, and curled from beneath her cap in the steam of her laundry. She’d clutched Cutter to her breasts from time to time in a fit of sodden sadness or effervescent good spirits, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy it. He enjoyed it twice when he got to rib Dorian about it until his best mate blushed and boxed him one.
“I’m going to marry your mum,” he’d taunt before dancing away. “Then I’ll raise ya proper.”
“Sod off,” Dorian would reply irritably.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make you call me Da.”
“I’ll call you worse than that, you poxy cock.”
At the thought of future scuffs, Cutter directed a half-grin at her, the one he knew made his cheek dimple, and he hefted what little sparkle he had left into his eyes. It was the first time he’d felt close to warm all day.
“Hullo,” he greeted. “Did Caroline breakfast here?”
“I ain’t seen her, Cutter,” Jane greeted with a noticeable slur and a lack of any T’s whatsoever.
He reached for the back of his neck and rubbed once again, even though little needles of gooseflesh stabbed at every inch of his skin by now.
“Dorian about?” he asked.
“In the kitchen fleecing doxies out of their hard-won earnings wif his dice last I checked.” She swiped at her forehead with the back of her wrist and wrinkled her nose at him. “I’ve a mind to boil your wee arse in my pot next, ya noxious goblin. I can smell you from here.”
Cutter’s testing sniff of his own person was interrupted by a strong arm around his neck as he was pulled in for a grapple choke that might have resembled a boisterous hug if one was feeling generous.
“Oi! I think you smell awright.” Dorian’s voice seemed to deepen by the day, though Cutter’s had changed over a year ago, much to Blackwell’s competitive consternation. “I’ve heard there’s a dead body or some such washed up at Hangman’s Dock.” His mate’s dark eyes gleamed with a greedy sort of mischief. “Wot say we go and work the crowd?”
Working the crowd was their language for relieving the distracted onlookers of their watches, coin, and pocketbooks.
“Maybe later.” Cutter rubbed at his chest as the dread that had dogged at him now bared its teeth and struck, wrenching at his heart with an icy pain.
Pain meant weakness. And one never showed weakness here, not even in the presence of those he knew the best. He always covered his pain with humor if not indifference.
“Your mum just offered to bathe me.” Cutter waggled suggestive brows and summoned a cheeky smile from lord-knew-where. “Now toddle off, son.”
A hot rag hit him square in the face, eliciting a very unmanly squeak of surprise.
“Wash your face, you little deviant, and then both of you make yourselves scarce, I’ve work to do!” Jane’s bellow was softened with a wink, and Cutter gave himself a half-hearted scrub before he tossed the soiled rag back to the laundry pile and threw Jane another smile.
This she returned with a curse and a shake of her head.
He’d felt this strange sort of veneration for her since the first time Dorian had brought him and Caroline around. She’d allowed them to curl up in the kitchens and sleep like dogs by the stove in the winter and eat whatever crusts they’d helped clean from the tables. The next morning she’d sent them to Wapping High Street with strong warm tea in their bellies and a few pointers on how to beg.
“You’re two golden-haired angels, inn’t ya?” She’d tugged their noses fondly. “You’ll empty more pockets than a naughty peep show, eyes that big and blue. ’Specially you, darlin’.” She’d pinched at shy Caroline’s pale cheeks and tugged at her golden ringlets.
And so they had. For years, Cutter and Caroline worked the streets of London, his sister drawing upon the kindness of those who would stop to offer a coin, while he learned to divest them of the rest with a pick of the pocket and a nimble getaway.
Sometimes they’d be caught, and Cutter would take the beating meant for them both. Those were often their most profitable weeks, as he could use the pitiable bruises and abrasions to solicit more charity.
This kept them fed until they’d passed their first decade and were no longer young and wretched enough to pity. People began to solicit them rather than offer them kindness, and eventually Cutter learned to answer the beatings he received with violence of his own.
Because he lacked the brawn of other boys, he relied on reflexes more advanced than most, and he’d mastered a slingshot as well as his sleight of hand, earning him the moniker, “Deadeye.”
I
t was that name the streetwalkers of Whitechapel squawked as he tumbled into the common room with Dorian, loping toward the front entrance.
“Bugger me at both ends, you ladies ever seen an angel and a devil so ‘andsome?” A girl they ironically called “Dark Sally,” jabbed at one of her friends, who gathered at the long-planked table nursing sharp beer and waiting for darkness so they might ply their trade.
Cutter knew instantly he was the angel, as Dorian’s wealth of shiny, black hair and sharp, satirical features made the comparison bloody obvious.
“I don’t see no ladies here.” The older plump prostitute named Bess gave an overloud bark of laughter before peering over at the boys. “I’ve swived plenty of devils in my day, but I’d bonk an angel with pretty eyes like that for free.” She reached out an almost masculine hand to Cutter. “Come over here, darling, and let’s see what you’re packing.”
Cutter didn’t raise his eyes from the floorboards as his cheeks burned. “Any you seen Caro?”
“Look! Someone who still blushes in this shitehole,” crowed yet another woman. “I’ll bet you a pence he’s a virgin.”
“Caroline, you seen her or not?” he asked again.
Bosoms bounced as shrugs passed around the table, though it was Dark Sally who spoke. “She took up with an old watchmaker last I heard.” She turned to Bess. “Remember the one, had an orange to share and it weren’t even Christmas.”
“I’d do right sick things for an orange,” muttered a girl he didn’t recognize. “Little bitch swiped him up before anyone got the chance at him.”
“Careful, you,” Bess threw a soiled handkerchief across the table. “That little bitch is his sister.”
“I like virgins,” sighed a thin, waspish woman around her sip of beer. “They ‘aven’t learnt to be cruel yet, and it’s over quick enough. Right grateful they are.” She sized Cutter up with a look that made him squirm.
With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection Page 43
