Tempted By Fire

by Thea Devine

  She shuddered at the harshness of his words and at the space-hurling thought that there was no turning back, not now. But she would die before she would let him see her hesitate one moment, or back down one inch from the course she had chosen.

  The light of battle kindled in her bold blue eyes as she stared defiantly into his shuttered black gaze.

  "I understand, my lord," she said finally, lifting her chin into that arrogant, opponent-be-damned tilt.

  There would be no submission here, he thought, refusing to acknowledge the disdainful set of her mouth as she uttered these words.

  He grasped a coil of her lustrous black hair and tugged at it so that she was forced to look up at him by his direction and not in that once-removed insolent way she had. This was better.

  The light in her bolting blue eyes flared into pure flaming

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  anger as he forced her mouth open and mastered her tongue once again.

  There was no help this time; he was bent on subjugating her and nothing less. Her helpless hands, encased in slave bracelets, beat at the enslaver to no avail. He bent her backwards, and backwards again as he conquered her lips, her tongue, the whole precious luscious recesses of her mouth and made her do his will.

  And then, as tightly and intensely as he had crushed her against his thick hard length and demanded that she bow to its potent power, he pushed her suddenly and violently away from him so that she stumbled backward and reached convulsively for a chair before she fell to the ground.

  "Now you understand," he said grittily. "That is the bargain."

  She reached deep into herself to pull her shattered composure into play. He would not win. The deed was done, the arrangement was set and bound in contract by all that had just transpired. She was a conspirator now, in willful bondage to a hedonistic libertine.

  She shrugged negligently as if the movement relieved the onus of her burden. "I am yours, my lord," she said succinctly and deliberately. And then she looked at him with that combative light in her eyes and he knew he read the message clearly and plainly: / am yours—but you will never have me.

  Chapter Five

  "I swear, Nicholas, ever since you began playing at the Alices, you've absolutely gone round the bend."

  "I am not crazy, Jeremy; I know exactly what I am about, and I await Lucretia's answer with bated breath."

  "I think you must have a screw loose," Lucretia said pungently. "You want me to take in some Aphrodite from the gaming house, set her up as my ward and sponsor her this season? My dear, you are short a sheet on your bed if you think I would even consider such a ramshackle scheme."

  Nicholas smiled warmly. "Thank you, Lucretia. I knew you would understand that if I requested it, I had a reason for wanting it done."

  “As ever, Nick," she grumbled. "How you do work your way around me. I had accounted myself a woman of great practicality and common sense and yet every time you require it, I toss my sensibilities out the window for you. I still cannot understand it. A trollop from the gaming house—"

  "She is Diana," Nicholas told her, "Diana of the Alices, and she is most desirous of going to London and I am equally desirous of helping her."

  Jeremy stared at him. "The goddess, Nicholas? The goddess? Oh, well—that explains the whole." He turned to Lucretia who was settled quite cozily next to a roaring fire in the parlor of their rented house, with a robe tucked round her lap. "He handed her ten thousand pounds over the Faro

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  table several nights previously and she handed it right back to him two nights ago."

  "It was never so simple," Nicholas interposed, as he seated himself opposite Lucretia and reached for the chocolate pot on the table between them. "She lost it at Quinze, which is a damned hard game to cheat at, and wagered the whole on a turn at Blind Hookey. I fail to see what is so amusing, Jeremy."

  "Only that she deliberately defaulted, because everyone in this town knows that no one is plumper in the pocket than you. Clever girl, I must say, and somehow she racked up a promise that you would sponsor her as well. Take her to London and she'll set the Thames on fire."

  Lucretia watched him as he poured the chocolate into a fair sized cup and wrapped his hands around it. "You ain't a man to be gulled, Nick."

  "There isn't a man alive who cannot be seduced by a beautiful face, Lucretia."

  "Except you, Nick, else why would you have worked so hard to make Charlotte Emerlin so disgusted with you, she was forced to break your engagement? You don't fall easily, my boy, and I know you well. You are cold and rock steady about this and what you want from me. But if you think you are going to give her carte blanche, and under my roof, you are crazy."

  Nicholas lifted his head and his glittery black gaze bored into her. "That, my darling Lucretia, is none of your business. In any event, you should know I would never disgrace you. Whatever you decide, the goddess will come with me to London, and if she must stay with me at the townhouse, so be it. But," and here he took a sip of the chocolate to hide the small smile on his lips, "I daresay you would be loath to ruin the first season of a child of a dear friend of yours, someone your husband met in India? Very outspoken, Lucretia, because those ayahs don't know how to raise a girl to be polite. That is why they need a season in

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  London—albeit a late season. She dearly wants to get married, Lucretia, and her father could settle a nice dowry on her were the right man to come along. You might dispense with Aimack's unless she really desires it. She can," he added, still enchanted by his little fiction, "be fairly amusing at cards."

  Jeremy choked. "It is time for someone to play the grown-up here," he said stringently, seating himself next to Lucretia and taking her hand. "The woman's name is Jainee Bowman, and she has been at the Alices a little over a year..."

  "Jeremy. . ." Nicholas said warningly.

  ". . . and she's been a hostess and been at the tables for about six months. No, Nick —I haven't heard anything negative about her at all. She works hard, she's damned beautiful and no one knows if she has made any liaisons since she has been there, or where she is from or even where she is going."

  "I do," Nicholas said, forestalling anything else Jeremy had to say. "She is coming to London with me and the rest," he bowed to Lucretia, "is at your discretion, my dear friend."

  Lucretia looked up at him. His expression had turned stony, obdurate. This was very unlike him, although he was pig-headed to a fault. But never did he deliberately mix himself up with a woman. The Emerlin was the sole exception and she still had not been able to figure out the attraction between them. Nor was it water under the bridge. By all accounts, Charlotte Emerlin had not reconciled herself to losing him, and was sharpening her image to have one last attempt at him this season.

  The thought of it set all her well honed instincts to a razor's edge. Whatever Nicholas was about, she would, even with her reservations, be a part of it. The boy needed her, and she needed to rein in his baser nature; and he knew it, or he would not have involved her.

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  "I think," she said consideringly, "it was a deathbed promise I made to her mother back in ‘02—that was the last time they were able to make it back to England, wasnt it? —Well, poor Marguerite was ill with—what is it they get ill with in India, Nicholas?—and Diana ... no, Jainee, correct?—was still being schooled back in Delhi—" She paused and looked up at Nicholas with a mischievous smile.

  "Yes, I think we can contrive a very nice story to cover the essentials, my dear. The rest," she added confidently, as Jeremy snorted in disgust in the background, "I will leave up to you."

  ******************

  When one made a bargain with the devil, one should expect to be consigned to hell, Jainee thought mordantly as she took her place at the tables the following night. Southam was nothing if not thorough, and thoroughly despicable into the bargain.

  Well, it was all of a piece; she should have expected the worst when she gave herself into his power. There was no
use repining now. Her mouth was forever branded with his kisses and her direction inevitably set. Somehow she would deal with this sense of losing control, and in time, she would gain back the advantage, she just knew she would.

  Nor could she express any of this to Edythe Winslowe when she appeared that night. Edythe would hardly understand, but then Edythe was crowing with triumph that her protege had bested Southam, and obtained his support all in one cleverly played night.

  "Oh, I vow—there will never be such a hot story as this when he finally takes you up to London," Edythe said delightedly. "No one has been able to move that man. You must be magical."

  "Or a goddess," Jainee murmured, ignoring the effusions. "He is a hard man, madame, just as you have said, and I cannot imagine how we will deal together. He 74

  takes what he wants, and damns the consequences."

  Edythe smiled in complete understanding. "Of course he does. And you be sure to anticipate what he wants, my girl. Get the most of it. Men are all the same. They want no criticism, just compliant slaves, and that is easy enough to do. You have already vanquished him once, twice, perhaps times three. Now he is intrigued. Nothing could be better. But now you must let him have his way a little. It is the secret knowledge among women that sometimes they must play this little trick. You understand?"

  Did she? There was nothing to read between the lines with Edythe: everything was laid out bluntly before her, the rules of life among the gentry the same as those among the sharps: you win, you lose and you keep your opponent guessing.

  "I understand," she said, not liking to have to admit it. In a snap, the whole would be nothing if she did not gird herself to comply with the more erotic elements of it. But that she could cope with later as well. "Shall I see you in London?"

  Edythe wagged a disparaging finger. "My dear, Southam's set does not follow me. Take your lead from that. They will be well nigh bowled over to even see him attached, but you cannot count on him squiring you about in the manner of an eligible parti. Perhaps . . . perhaps we might see each other in passing, and if we should, I promise you I will indicate how or if we should acknowledge each other. Agreed? For after all, too many tattle-mongers have seen us together here, and one never knows in what form the gossip will follow the bearer to town. Take care, my dear. Win well."

  She was gone in a swirl of her elegant cloak and a cloud of scent and Jainee felt for a long volatile instant bereft of all friends, all conscience.

  But that was to end within the week, for several days later an odd, endearing and quite diminutive whirlwind

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  showed up at her door, bullied her way in, introduced herself as Jainee's chaperone and proceeded to discuss with her at length and in public everything she was supposed to do, and in accordance with the instructions of her dear mother.

  "My dear, I had no idea you had been reduced to this," the whirlwind clucked sympathetically as she eyed the customers streaming into the Alices of an early Saturday evening. "I am horrified. But I collect your father has passed on as well and there was no way to ... an uprising or something of the sort, wasn't it? My dear, you are not used to the cold, I can see that. Do take my shawl. No one understands about being raised in such warm climes as India . . . there ..."

  The woman's name was Lucretia Waynflete, Duchess of something, and she was a friend of Southam's it seemed, sent to arrange things with her and to make sure she understood the "story" so that everlasting appearances could continue to be observed.

  And Lady Waynflete was quite clever about it. She paraded through the whole of the Alices, exclaiming to everyone she met (except that she knew everyone) how extraordinary it was that her dear friend's daughter was working the gaming tables at the Alices, and that while she was certain that no disgrace attached to any honorable work, she could not possibly allow Jainee to continue on as she had because she, Lady Waynflete, who had made a deathbed promise to Jainee's mother, was now here to put things in proper order.

  "Well of course you knew nothing about the promise," Lady Waynflete said to her almost indignantly. "Your mother passed before you were told. And then your dear father lost his life in that dreadful . . . truly," she grasped Jainee's hands, "there are no words to express ... it is a wonder and a miracle that you survived and that you have been discovered."

  And that indeed was the word for it. Jainee felt like a

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  continent upon which Lady Waynflete had launched herself in an orgy of exploration.

  "No one is going to believe a word of this Banbury tale," she told Lady Waynflete plainly at one point. "Everyone has seen me at the tables this se'enmonth, and indeed there are witnesses to the skies that I made a rash wager with Southam and came off the worst."

  "Relieve your mind," Lady Waynflete said confidently. "There will indeed be those who do not believe it, but our method is to usurp those who would bring up your past to besmirch your name. You must understand, there is nothing a lady cannot do in the name of saving herself and so, if the story of your past accounts for your present, why—you become a romantic heroine instead of a doxy."

  "Nonetheless, I am down ten thousand pounds to Southam and I have suddenly been taken up by the mother of his friend. What accounts for that, ma'am?" Jainee said stubbornly.

  "Nothing simpler," Lady Waynflete said airily, waving off her objections. "Your father left—banked in England—or didn't you know? I thought not. My dear, when a man hauls his family off to India, he has to prepare for every contingency. You have no worries. Southam is one of the trustees. It explains everything. He didn't know you, he came upon you, he felt it incumbent to discreetly provide for you . . . and when you so fortuitously lost to him, why—his only recourse was to dispatch me to your aid. And the wisdom of your dear father, entrusting everything to Southam. The very best man, honorable in every way."

  She smiled benignly at Jainee. "Do you see? Everything is covered. And when Southam told me, I came right to your assistance. We have only to inform Lady Truscott. She will be the soul of understanding—" to the tune of a voucher for five hundred pounds, she thought dourly, but it was Nicholas' money and she had no say in that matter, " — I assure you."

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  "I appreciate your plain-speaking, ma'am," Jainee said, instantly awed by Lady Waynflete's breezy maneuvering through the treacherous waters of ton acceptance.

  "Excellent, and now we have only to discuss the details of removing you to my townhouse and when we will travel up to London."

  Jainee spent two days packing, all the while with Marie's tearful protests ringing in her ears.

  "Oh, you cannot go, Mademoiselle. You cannot leave me. Can I not come with you? It is my dearest wish . . ."

  Poor Marie. How could she leave her when Marie herself had been treated by Caroline Murat like some inanimate object to be attached to Jainee solely on the whim of her employer?

  "Ask the lady," Marie begged her. "Tell her how loyal I am to you, how prettily I sew. I can learn everything else. I am able. Please take me with you."

  But Lady Waynflete saved her the trouble of broaching the subject. Several days later, as she was critically assessing the components of Jainee's gaming house wardrobe, she said, "This is excellent—a bit flashy for my taste but . . . you have the most extraordinary eyes, unusual height, a lovely figure—I don’t believe we will change a thing. We'll just add some ornaments and accents—hats and shawls and that sort of thing . . ."

  "I do not wear hats," Jainee said emphatically.

  Lady Waynflete looked at her consideringly. "Well—perhaps not. We'll see. And then of course, we need to find you a maid—"

  Jainee hesitated, but the thought of Marie spending years sitting in a back room at the Alices mending piles of tablecloths and ripped hems prodded her conscience and she said, "I know a woman. She came with me from Italy, and she is not being well used by Lady Truscott—" And then she stopped, wondering at the wisdom of recommending someone who knew all about her past.

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  But Lady Waynflete immediately agreed to it. "Yes, I think you are right; it would be wise to have her with you. If she can sew as well as you say, so much the better. The rest can be taught. And a handsome wage will ensure her . . . conscientiousness. In any event, Lady Truscott is not known for her generosity. A wonderful stroke of luck to have someone who is not a stranger. I will make the arrangements, my dear. Leave everything to me."

  How often had Lady Waynflete said that, and how easy it was to do. She had the energy of ten women and the know-how and wherewithal to conjure up little miracles. Everything was obvious to her: she saw all sides of a situation and could sum up to a nicety exactly what needed to be done in order to pass muster.

  Jainee wondered what she thought of her bargain with Southam, but she had an idea that Lady Waynflete had some inkling of what had gone on between them and that nothing shocked her. Just nothing.

  She supposed that at this point nothing should shock her either, but she could not quell her turbulent feelings about Southam's domineering possession of her, and her rage to take revenge for his high-handedness.

  Oh maman, she thought, speaking to Therese in her mind as she often did, certain that Therese in spirit could somehow assimilate these ruminations, you would be so proud of the bargain I have made on the fantastical notion that some phantom would want to kill your long gone son, and the deathbed promise that I made. . .

  And in her more retrospective moments, even she had to acknowledge that those two reasons were too flimsy a justification on which to hinge her monstrous contract with Southam.

  But the thing was done and in a day she would be on her way. All for a dying woman's delusion. She had not yet gotten over the tormenting feeling she had abandoned Therese, even as she strove to keep her promise to her.

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