Mistress by Midnight

by Nicola Cornick

  “You are meeting the wrong men, then,” Garrick said.

  She laughed. “Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, if I frequent the bedchambers of men like you.” She gave him a very direct look. “And you, your grace? Do you seek to remarry?” She paused. “I suppose not. It is not exactly your forte, is it?”

  Ouch. Two points.

  “I wondered whether you wished me to return your possessions to you,” Garrick said, upping the stakes. “Return the evidence of your midnight wanderings, if you like? Your book, your spectacles… Can you see without them?”

  “Perfectly, I thank you,” Merryn said.

  “Then they are for disguise only?”

  She gave him another pitying stare. “You have too vivid an imagination, your grace. My glasses are for reading, not for disguise. Fortunately I have two pairs.”

  “There is also your underwear,” Garrick said.

  She stiffened. “You have been rifling through my underwear?”

  “You left it in my drawers.”

  “Then I think perhaps you had better keep it,” Merryn said icily “I don’t really want it returned secondhand.”

  “I haven’t been wearing it,” Garrick pointed out mildly. “Merely looking at it.”

  “How singular of you.”

  “Not really,” Garrick said. “If you know anything of men, Lady Merryn—”

  “I don’t.” She cut him off. There was something defensive in the way that she withdrew from him as though he trespassed on forbidden ground. Her voice was soft but her fingers, rubbing ceaselessly over the embroidery of the window cushions, betrayed her agitation. Merryn Fenner, he suspected, was not accustomed to people getting close to her and stripping away her defenses.

  “I know nothing of men,” she said, “nor do I wish to know.” Her tone eased a little. “My sisters… They are the ones to whom you should address your gallantries, your grace. They are wasted on me.”

  Garrick wondered if she resented being in the shadow of Joanna Grant and Tess Darent, both such beautiful, charming women. Had she deliberately taken this step back, refused all competition, made her world in books and libraries, lectures and scholarly research where they could not and did not want to follow? And could she not see that she, too, was beautiful and oh so desirable, like a tiny pocket goddess with her tumble of silver gilt hair and those wide blue eyes? It seemed not. Or perhaps she simply did not value good looks. Perhaps she did not even want to be beautiful.

  He shifted in the armchair, studying her thoughtfully.

  “What do you really do when you are pretending to attend your bluestocking soirees?” he asked. “And when you are not stalking me?”

  She considered him for a moment. Her eyes were a smoky-violet in the shadowed room. “I lead a blameless life, your grace,” she said. “I really do attend bluestocking soirees. I read and I study. I go to Professor Brande’s lectures at the Royal Institution and to poetry readings and concerts.” She took another sip of champagne. She sounded cool and amused.

  Garrick smiled slowly. “You also work for Tom Bradshaw,” he said.

  Merryn jumped. A drop of champagne fell on the rose gown, staining the material to a deeper pink. They had been fencing before, testing each other’s defenses. Now the nature of their exchange had altered. Garrick sensed this was really important to her.

  “How did you know that?” She spoke abruptly. Garrick was interested that she did not try to deny it, even for a second.

  He shrugged. “I have been asking questions about you, of course.” He tilted his head and studied her, watching her closely. “You know how the system operates, Lady Merryn. I pay someone to find out about you.”

  He saw her fingers tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. “You paid someone to do your dirty work for you,” she said. Scorn tipped her words. “Yes, that fits.”

  “It’s quicker,” Garrick said. “Bradshaw is corrupt,” he added. “But surely you know that?”

  Her gaze flashed to his face. “He is not!” She sounded outraged at the slur. “Tom works for justice! He helps people—” She broke off, as though she realized too late that she had revealed too much.

  “No,” Garrick said gently. “That is why you work for Bradshaw.” He paused. He could see it all, her blind quest for justice and the determination that drove her. She felt a burning need to set right perceived wrongs and he would wager his entire fortune that it had been initiated by her brother’s death at his hands.

  “It is, isn’t it?” he persisted. “You do it because you believe in justice and fighting for what is right, and to help the underdog?”

  “I do it for the money,” Merryn said defiantly. She tilted her chin up, her look defying him to contradict her. He had trespassed, Garrick thought. Merryn Fenner’s world had hitherto been a secret from all those she knew, even those closest to her. He had not only blown that wide apart, he had seen straight through her motives to the painful truth below. For a moment she looked small and defenseless and Garrick felt the most enormous compassion for her. He was a cad to do this to her, to force her to confront those truths, to strip away her defenses, and his only justification was that there were those even more defenseless who needed his protection. Twelve years before he had sworn to defend them. He had never imagined that the price would be so high.

  “My reasons are not what matter here,” Merryn said, after a moment, rallying. Garrick could see that her eyes were suspiciously bright but she faced him down. She was not, he thought, a woman who would resort to tears or to the vapors to get her own way. “What matters,” she said, “is that you have chosen to challenge what I am doing. And you are doing this because…”

  “Because you threatened me,” Garrick said. “When someone indicates that they would like to see me ruined it concentrates my mind.”

  “Has that happened to you often?” Merryn inquired politely.

  Garrick laughed. “More than once.”

  She flicked him a look. “I might have imagined so. A pity no one has as yet followed up on their threat.”

  “There’s always a first time,” Garrick said. The last time a man had threatened to take his life it had been in the Peninsular and it had ended very badly for his assailant. No need to tell Merryn that, though. She would probably pick up that cause as well and declare open season on him.

  “You have been gathering evidence,” he said. “That newspaper entry you found at the Octagon Library—”

  He saw her eyes flash. “The one you stole from me? That was underhanded.”

  Garrick laughed. “I did not hear you protesting at the time.”

  The color fluctuated deliciously in her face. She looked infuriated, pink, cross, unwillingly aroused. “I should have guessed you would stoop as low as kissing me to achieve your aim,” she said.

  “It was no hardship,” Garrick agreed.

  She glared. “You are a rake.”

  “I was a rake,” Garrick corrected.

  “You are confusing your tenses.” Merryn looked down her nose at him. “I do not believe that a man ever stops being a libertine.”

  Looking at her, with her shining fair hair as rich as silk and her cheeks stung pink with righteous anger and her bow of a mouth pursed with disapproval Garrick was tempted to prove that she was exactly right by grabbing her and kissing her to within an inch of her life.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but you base your remarks on…what, precisely?”

  She turned away. “Literature,” she said. “Observation.”

  “Let me know if you would prefer to replace that with experience,” Garrick said, and received another glare for his pains.

  “We drift from the subject,” Merryn said tightly.

  “We do indeed.” Garrick shifted. “From the piece of paper that I extracted from your pocket I surmise that you have found other items, little details that you think contradict the official record of your brother’s death—”

  She reacted to that, as he had known she would.
“I don’t think they contradict it,” she said hotly. “They do contradict it.”

  “Guest lists can be notoriously unreliable,” Garrick said. “Names confused, numbers miscounted—”

  “Like the number of shots heard?” Merryn said sweetly. “The number of bullets in a body?”

  Hell. She had discovered a great deal. Garrick felt the sweat break out over his body. A few more steps, a little more digging, and Lady Merryn Fenner would be perilously close to the truth. She would learn what an out-and-out rogue her brother had truly been, she would learn the appalling things Stephen Fenner had done, she would be heartbroken.

  Not that he was blameless. Garrick rubbed his forehead. He should have dealt with matters differently, he should have kept his head, instead of sacrificing everything—life, honor, the future—in that one desperate moment that he had killed his friend. Yes, Stephen Fenner had been a scoundrel but a day did not go past when Garrick did not regret his death.

  Merryn was watching him. She had, not surprisingly, misread his expression. Garrick knew that he had looked guilty as all hell because in many ways, in the matter of Stephen’s death, he was.

  “Can I appeal to you to let matters rest?” he asked. “I can look after myself but if you pursue this matter there are others who might be hurt—” He broke off, seeing again in her eyes that vivid flash of pain he had witnessed when they had spoken at the Octagon Library.

  “Others often are,” she said in a hard voice, and Garrick knew she was speaking of herself, of the thirteen-year-old girl who had had home and family and fortune ripped away from her.

  “If you refuse to stop I will expose your work for Tom Bradshaw,” Garrick said. “Taken together with the information that you habitually visit the bedrooms of noblemen, I think you will find that scandal more difficult to quell than a simple slur on your reputation.”

  There was a frozen silence. Merryn sat quite still, almost as though she had not heard him.

  “You’re trying to blackmail me,” she said. “How immoral of you.”

  “I would do nothing so vulgar as stoop to blackmail,” Garrick said, and saw her smile as she recognized her words to him at the library two days before. “I am merely pointing out to you the dangers of your situation.”

  “I am obliged to you,” Merryn said ironically. She sighed. “The same argument applies as before, however. The worst you can do is ruin my reputation—” there was the shimmer of triumph in her eyes “—and that only matters if I care about it.” She rubbed her fingers thoughtfully over the rim of her empty glass. “It would be a nuisance,” she conceded, “to be the subject of scandal and gossip, but I am sure I would survive it.”

  “You would not survive with any of the things that you value left to you,” Garrick said, and saw her gaze jerk up to his.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  Garrick shrugged. “The other reason I think you work for Bradshaw is that you are bored,” he said. “You are clever, and society has no use for clever women.”

  She was betrayed into a rueful smile. “Other than to laugh at them,” she said dryly. “Or to make them conform.”

  “Exactly,” Garrick said. “So with no work and a reputation destroyed, no freedom to attend all the academic events that you currently take for granted, nothing to do with your time…” He let the sentence hang. Her life, he knew, would be an utter desert. She was too unconventional to conform and it made her vulnerable.

  He waited while she thought about it and saw in the widening of her eyes that she had reached the same conclusions.

  “You would take away all the things I value.” She looked stricken. “My work, my interests—” She broke off. “Damn you,” she said with feeling. “As if it was not sufficient to rob me of everything once.”

  Garrick hardened his heart against the pain and disbelief he could see in her eyes. “It is your choice, Lady Merryn.”

  She stood up so abruptly that the table rocked and the champagne glass almost toppled to the floor. “I think it is time that you left, your grace.” She waited, drawn up as tall as her diminutive stature allowed. “I should have guessed that you would sink lower than I had could ever have imagined,” she added.

  “I’ve only just started,” Garrick said. “You will have to broaden your imagination to keep up.”

  “Oh?” She raised her brows. “If I refuse to concede, what then? Kidnap? Abduction? Marriage?” She smiled faintly. “I doubt you could get away with murdering two members of this family.”

  “The marriage option interests me more than the murder one,” Garrick said.

  She laughed. “So that you could bar me from testifying against you?”

  “No,” Garrick said. “So that I could make love to you.”

  The air in the room seemed to heat and catch fire. Merryn’s eyes dilated in shock. She gave a gasp. A pink flush mantled her cheeks and she turned her back on him, hunting feverishly now for her slippers, the need to escape him evident in the tension enveloping her slim figure.

  “You have outstayed your rather tenuous welcome, your grace,” she said. “If you will not leave, I will. I should return to the ball anyway. My sister will be wondering where I am.”

  “A conventional excuse to escape,” Garrick said. “I would have expected something more imaginative from you. Besides—” he took a breath, looked her over from shining fair hair to bare toes “—you cannot go back to the ballroom looking like that.” His voice dropped. “You look far too disheveled. People would talk. You look as though we have already been making love.”

  Something flared in her eyes. Her lips parted. She looked innocent, frightened but also bewitched.

  Garrick knew that he should not touch her. It was one thing to use whatever advantage he could to persuade her to give up on her quest. It was quite another to take the step of seducing her. Her innocence and her openness fascinated him, she called to every one of his long-buried rakehell propensities, but even he was not such an unscrupulous bastard that he would deliberately ruin her. Merryn Fenner was the last woman he could ever have. Twelve years ago, after he had taken her brother’s life and destroyed so many other lives as a consequence he had sworn that the only way to redeem himself was through duty. He had given up his hard living. He had turned his back on those who had predicted that with his wife dead and so spectacular a scandal attached to his name he would go back to his debauched ways with a vengeance. He had proved them wrong because after Stephen’s murder and Kitty’s death, strength of character was the only thing he had left, the only thing that could save him. He had served his country and he had tried to atone for his past failings. And now what tarnished honor he had left did not permit him to pursue Merryn Fenner, innocent, untouched, a woman who had already been cruelly hurt. He could not be such an unmitigated scoundrel. Even so the temptation grabbed him by the throat.

  Just this once…

  He knew he was lying to himself even as he kissed her. If he tasted her response just one more time he would not be able to let her go.

  He bent his head and his lips met hers.

  That night in his bedroom it had been no more than a brief caress. At the library he had kissed her with ruthless intent. This time he did not hurry to force a reaction. This time he courted a response from her, teasing her lips until they parted to allow his tongue to slip into her mouth, tasting her, drawing out the pleasure. He felt her tremble and slid his arms about her to hold her still.

  It was a thousand times more potent than Garrick had ever imagined. Her lips were soft and yielding beneath his, offering the sweetest of surrenders. Her tentative response, the hesitant way she touched her tongue to his, tempted him to deeper intimacies. Suddenly Garrick wanted to make love to her here and now, throw her down on the bed or take her on the rug before the fire, he who had not behaved like that with a woman in twelve years and had thought he never would again, the Duke whose emotions were ice-cold and whose only passion was for books and dry documents.

>   He deepened the kiss, plundering her mouth now, desire leaping to wild desire, passion laced with tenderness. He slid a hand into the bodice of the rose-pink gown and felt the curve of her breast against his palm, small and soft, the nipple tightening against his fingers. It was shattering, hardening his arousal to painful proportions. She made a sound deep in her throat, and her body seemed to quiver beneath his caress. Feral possession ripped at Garrick and set him gasping. He was within an inch of losing control and ravishing her body as fiercely as he took her mouth.

  He fought a brief, violent struggle for self-control and let her go, stepping back.

  And then he saw her face and almost dragged her back into his arms. There was a dreaming unawakened expression in her eyes and a little smile on her lips as though she had just discovered something new and so fascinating that she was enchanted by it.

  It was there for a second and then reality smashed through her pleasure banishing the look of a princess in a fairy tale. Horror was etched on her face and she pressed her fingers to her lips as though to scrub the kiss away.

  “No,” she said. “Oh, no, not you!” And she turned and hurried away from him, her stockinged feet making a soft slapping on the floor that seemed to emphasize her agitation.

  Garrick understood what she meant. If he had had a choice she would have been the last woman in the world he would have wished to be so attracted to. It was impossible. It was madness. And yet it seemed he had no choice.

  MERRYN DID NOT STOP running until she had reached the sanctuary of the library. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she was running toward people, not away from them, but with Garrick in her room there was only one other place to go that could give her solace.

  There were plenty of guests in the hall. She fled past them, seeing their faces, curious and speculative, hearing the titters of laughter.

  “Lady Merryn is such an original… Running into the library with her hair down and no slippers…”