The alley was dark and filled with garbage. A foul smell thickened the air. An ancient drunk slept inside a doorway a little way along the street. Isabella flew past him, trying not to trip on the icy, uneven cobblestones.
“Isabella!”
She had known that his arrival in that particular street was not a coincidence. Now here he was, coming after her, his booted feet thudding loudly against the pavement as he ran.
He had caught her once before. She did not mean to let him do so again.
Picking up her skirts, she fled as if the hounds of hell were on her heels.
XXVII
“Damn it, Isabella!”
His hand closed on the folds of her cloak billowing out behind her, jerking her to a halt. Isabella whirled, snatching her cloak from his grip. Panting, she glared at him. Alec was scowling at her from less than an arm’s length away. Even in the murkiness of the alley, he looked very big, very tough, and very handsome, and she had to squash a wayward flicker of pleasure and relief at his presence.
“Let me go!”
“Let you go? You’re damned lucky I found you! I’ve had the word out on the streets all day. Do you have any idea what could have happened to you …? No, of course you don’t!” He was nearly as out of breath as she. “Just what the bloody hell did you think you were about, anyway? Where did you think you were going?”
“Home!”
They were practically shouting at each other. Alec took a deep breath, and when he spoke again his voice had moderated somewhat.
“You can’t go home, and you know it.”
“I’m not staying at the Carousel any longer! You can’t make me! I will go home, I will!”
“Stop being such a spoiled little miss, and think what you’re doing for a minute!”
“I will go home! I will!”
“Someone—very likely your husband—wants you dead, Isabella. Until we find out who it is, you cannot go home.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“You don’t believe me?” His eyes narrowed.
“No, I don’t!”
“Why would I lie?”
“To get me to … to keep me as … to … to … you know!”
Alec studied her for a moment, and Isabella felt her face pinken as she realized just what memories her words had stirred up in him.
“From that nearly indecipherable speech, I gather that you’re asking yourself if my lust for you is such that I would keep you from kith and kin until it is slaked.”
Uttered in such a satirical voice, the notion sounded absurd, Isabella had to admit. Still, she stubbornly lifted her chin.
“Yes!”
Alec laughed, but his eyes glittered at her almost as if he were angry. “No. The answer is no! You’re a fine piece in bed, Countess, but I would not go to such lengths as that to keep you in mine.”
Isabella felt her cheeks glow positively red. She glared at him. “You’re vile!”
“And you’re a bloody little fool, so I’d say we’re well matched!”
“Stop swearing at me!”
“I’ll bloody well swear if I feel like it!”
“You may certainly swear, but I don’t have to listen to it!”
With that, Isabella turned on her heel, the cloak swirling about her, and marched off.
“Stop right there!” His voice was tight with suppressed anger. Isabella ignored him, and kept walking.
“ ’Twould serve you bloody right if I left you ’ere,” he called after her. She knew from his slipping accent that he was on the verge of losing his temper. Still she kept going, stalking down that cesspool of an alley with her back ramrod straight and her head high, not caring that the drunk in the doorway had awakened to blink at her with befuddled eyes, or that a small crowd had spilled out of the back of the Nag’s Head to watch.
“Isabella! I’m giving you one last bloody chance to turn around and come back ’ere!”
She said not a word, but continued to walk. With a sound midway between a roar and a growl, he came after her. Isabella heard him behind her and, abandoning her dignity, started to run. He scooped her up in midstride, and slung her up and over his shoulder like a sack of grain before she could even regain enough presence of mind to struggle.
“Put me down! How dare you! What do you think you’re doing?”
She kicked furiously as he carried her back toward where the crowd guffawed outside the Nag’s Head.
“You mean you don’t recognize the feeling?” He clamped her legs to his chest with one arm to still her kicking. “I’m kidnapping you, Countess!”
XXVIII
“Put me down!”
“Presently.”
“Now!”
He ignored that as he carried her through the coffee shop and out into the street. The crowd of onlookers had fallen respectfully silent as he had raked them with his eyes, and now they trailed behind him, whispering amongst themselves with great care and even greater amusement.
Isabella was not amused. Alec had tossed a coin to the stout barmaid, thanking her for sending him word and telling her that if she ever needed a favor, she had only to ask for him. The woman had practically licked his boots in response, while Isabella, in her humiliating position, had seethed.
The Tiger was a force to be reckoned with in the slums of London, it seemed.
Alec gave another coin to the grubby urchin who was holding his horses—the Tiger didn’t have to worry about harm coming to his equipage even in such a run-down section of the city; who would dare?—and deposited Isabella on the seat.
She immediately scrambled for the other side of the carriage, determined to take advantage of his momentary distraction with the horses to get away. For her pride’s sake if nothing else, she could not let him treat her so highhandedly.
He caught her skirt with one hand, and yanked her unceremoniously back into a sitting position.
“Try that again, and I’ll tie you hand and foot. See if I don’t,” he promised through his teeth.
Isabella did not doubt him. She had seen that look on his face before. She sank back in the seat, pulled the hood of her cloak over her head, and scowled at the pair of horses now carrying them briskly along the street.
“What would you say if I told you I had proof that St. Just paid Parren to murder you?”
Isabella cast a quick glance up at him. He was driving easily, competently, but he seemed to favor his right hand. She remembered that it was his left shoulder that had been wounded only that morning, and felt a slight pang of concern for him. But only a slight one.
“I would say, show me.” Her voice was very cold.
“All right, I will.” His mouth was set in a hard, straight line, and his eyes were suddenly very grim.
Neither of them said another word until he pulled the tilbury to a halt and threw the reins to another urchin who almost magically materialized from the ragged throng crowding the street.
“Watch ’em,” Alec said briefly to the lad as he stepped down and turned to help Isabella down.
“Aye, Tiger, sir. Nobut will touch ’em with ’Ank Soames a-guardin’ ’em for ye!”
Alec said nothing in reply to this fervent speech, but held out his hand for Isabella. When she sat there for a moment, just staring at his outstretched hand, he said impatiently, “Well, do you want to know or don’t you?”
Isabella put her hand in his.
The street that was home to the Nag’s Head looked like the epitome of fashionable London compared to this one. What seemed to be crowds of raggedly dressed, filthy people swarmed around a makeshift market of handcarts in its center, babbling in a nearly incomprehensible slaughtering of the King’s English as they fought over prices. Isabella goggled at the sights and sounds, and tried to ignore the smell, which seemed to be coming from the overflowing gutters that ran along both sides of the street.
“This is where I grew up,” Alec told her with what seemed to be grim pleasure as he took in her wide eyes and wrinkled no
se. “But it’s much nicer now, of course.”
Isabella turned to gape at him, and thus missed noticing much about the entrance to the dark hole of an establishment where Alec led her. Impossible to imagine Alec as one of the filthy, rag-tag urchins darting about that unruly throng.
“This is what’s called a flash-house,” Alec said. Isabella blinked at her surroundings, not knowing whether to be frightened or appalled at what she saw. Men and women who looked like nothing so much as human refuse scrounged about in the cavelike gloom which was barely pierced by a few guttering, smelly candles. The odor of stale ale and, yes, vomit and possibly even excrement joined the awful aroma of the candles for a stink that was indescribable. As they entered, a man near the door stood up, took one look at Alec, and sank back down abruptly. Isabella instinctively clutched Alec’s arm.
“Do you recognize that woman?” His voice was quiet. Isabella followed the direction of his eyes.
A short, stout woman in a patched-together, too tight blue wool dress huddled in a chair in the corner, cackling as she laughed at something a hulking man beside her said. Isabella stared at her, but shook her head.
“I’m sure I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Alec’s mouth tightened.
“Look again.”
Isabella did. There was something about the way the woman laughed.…
“Molly!” she gasped, and felt as if a fist had suddenly slammed into her stomach.
XXIX
Molly was clearly terrified to see Alec, and spilled her guts at his first quiet suggestion that she do so. Although she had never been told the identity of the man who had hired Parren, she did know that he was a “fancy lordship” who had wanted the lady killed after the ransom was paid. There was quite a wealth of detail, which Isabella couldn’t think about without feeling sick, and all of it pointed to Bernard. Molly’s whining insistence that she personally had never intended any harm to Isabella was treated with the contempt it deserved.
“Did I know she was your wench, Tiger, I’d a treated her like spun gold, I would!” Molly wailed, her voice shrill with fright as Alec listened to her story with eyes that grew steadily more arctic. Alec fixed her with a frightening look in his eyes, and Molly fell to her knees right there, babbling for mercy.
In the end, to Isabella’s relief, he left the woman groveling on the floor. Even to such a one as Molly, Isabella would not like to see harm done.
“Damn it, Isabella, will you speak? Do you still want to go home?”
They were outside now, bowling through a maze of cobbled streets as Alec drove away from the worst of the slums. It was growing dark, and the wind was icy cold. Alec’s perfectly sculpted face looked austere and a little bleak as the biting wind brought color to his cheeks and ruffled his tawny hair. Isabella’s own hair had long since lost its battle with the pins that confined it, allowing wispy tendrils to straggle around her face. She brushed them aside, and glanced distractedly at Alec.
Alec met her eyes, his own hard and cold. “Isabella?”
“I can’t go home, can I?”
“Stop looking so damned forlorn. You know I’ll see you safe.” His voice was rough.
“I can’t stay with you.”
“I don’t see that you have a great deal of choice.”
That was so true that she was left without a ready answer. Still, she tried.
“I must find employment. Surely there is something I can do to support myself.”
“Don’t be a fool, Isabella.” He was glaring at her. She looked back at him calmly. All the emotions had been drained from her by Molly’s bloodcurdling recital.
“I cannot let you support me. It’s not proper.”
“I think we’ve gone rather beyond the line of what is proper, don’t you?”
Again Isabella was left without a ready answer.
“I won’t let you keep me, Alec. Nor will I be your mistress.”
His face tightened, and his eyes flashed as they moved over her face. “I’d wait till I was asked, were I you, Countess. I meant to offer you a job, nothing more.”
“A job? What kind of job?”
Despite herself, Isabella was morbidly interested. No doubt he saw her as a bawd at the Carousel, or some such. Such an offer would be the final humiliation. Nothing would hurt as much.
“As a tutor.”
His words were so unexpected that she blinked at him stupidly.
“A tutor?” Her voice was incredulous. “For whom?” If it was possible, she would have sworn he looked slightly embarrassed.
“Me.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. You’re an educated woman, and I’ve decided I’m in need of … educating.”
“You must be joking,” she said at last, staring at him.
“Devil a bit.”
Isabella frowned. “Are you really serious?”
“As serious as a grave. I bought a property in Horsham some time back, and I propose to rusticate there awhile as my presence at the Carousel is apparently an open secret. You can come down with me, and … uh … teach me whatever it is a gentleman should know, and I don’t.”
Isabella looked at him warily. “You have to understand that I have no intention of … that I won’t …”
Alec smiled wryly. “That you won’t repeat that delightful experience we so lately shared? Very well, Countess. Will you accept my offer if I give you my word that the arrangement between us is strictly business?”
Isabella looked at him a moment longer. Then she took a deep breath of the cold, crisp air.
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
XXX
The day already being far advanced, the journey to Horsham was put off until the following morning. Upon their return to the Carousel, Pearl was conspicuous by her nonappearance, but since Alec’s presence in the brothel was an open secret after the events of the previous night, there were servants aplenty to see to their needs. Isabella was given a room on a lower floor, and a maid to wait on her. Where Alec slept, she preferred not to speculate. Surely not with Pearl … But whether he did or not was none of her concern. Their relationship henceforth would be strictly business.
Isabella spent most of the evening trying to put together some reasonable facsimile of a wardrobe. With the maid’s assistance, clothes were not hard to come by, but such clothes! Few were suitable for wearing by a female not intent on the seduction of the entire male gender.
When, not long after first light, Isabella descended the stairs into the Carousel’s deserted front parlor, she was clad in a fur-trimmed bottle green pelisse that she wore buttoned to the throat to conceal the décolletage of the gown beneath. Of the same green wool as the pelisse, the garment was obviously intended for day wear—but not by a lady. It was long-sleeved, high-necked—and graced with a braid-trimmed cutout that bared her chest from her collarbone to halfway down her small breasts. With the pelisse, the outfit was unexceptional and could have been designed specifically for travel. Without the pelisse, the gown was indecent, as were most of the half dozen others she had selected as the best of a hopeless array. Certainly she could wear none of them with ease in a public place—or for viewing by Alec.
Isabella clutched the carpetbag containing the rest of her borrowed finery as she made her way down the stairs. On the last landing, she paused uncertainly. Pearl was crossing the hall on the floor below, and Isabella was not sure of what her reception might be. Pearl looked up then, saw Isabella and stopped. Then she walked purposefully to the foot of the stairs, where she stood with her hand resting on the well-polished newel post. For a moment she merely stared at Isabella, unspeaking, her beautiful eyes slightly narrowed. Then she smiled, and shook her head regretfully.
“So you didn’t get away after all, angel.”
Isabella, relieved at this mild greeting, smiled too, and continued down the stairs. There was nothing in Pearl’s manner that was less than friendly, although for a minute there, anger seemed to have flashed i
n her eyes. Or maybe not. Although it was full daylight now, the hall had no windows, and the heavy curtains were pulled shut in the rooms on either side. In the resulting gloom, it was hard to be certain of anything, much less a fleeting look in someone’s eyes.
“No. Bernard was from home. The knocker was off the door.”
Pearl grimaced. “Alec was wild when ’e ’eard you’d gone. ’E gave me a tongue-lashing I won’t soon forget, let me tell you.”
“I … I’m sorry.”
“No need for you to be. Alec and I’ve quarreled before, and we’ll doubtless quarrel many more times afore we’re through. Both ’ot-’eaded, we are.”
Isabella could find nothing to say to that, so she smiled again, nervously fingering the soft brown fur framing her throat. The idea of Alec and Pearl quarreling repeatedly over many years to come bothered her in some odd way that she refused to even allow herself to consider. She could not be jealous of a street thug and his bawd. She would not even consider the possibility.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve borrowed a few things to wear. Alec said it would be all right.”
“Did ’e?” Again Isabella had the impression that something ugly flashed in Pearl’s midnight blue eyes. Then the other woman shrugged. “You’re welcome to anything you like, o’ course. I only ’ope you know what you’re gettin’ into, is all.”
“What do you mean?” Isabella’s hand tightened over the fur.
Pearl pursed her lips. Compressed, they formed a perfect carmine red rosebud in the white oval of her face. The only flaw in her loveliness was the wrinkle on either side of her mouth, created momentarily by her expression and accentuated horribly by the cracking of the exquisite maquillage. “A gent dearly loves a bit of novelty, you know, in food or females. Still, I wouldn’t ’ave thought a lady like you’d go along with ’aving Alec set you up as ’is mistress. But then, ladies ain’t no different from the rest of us females when it comes to a ’andsome gent, I guess.”
Isabella caught her breath. “Alec is not—I am not to be his mistress. You are quite mistaken, Pearl, believe me.” She blushed horribly, and hated herself for doing so.
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