David

by Grace Burrowes

  Letty saw an image of David’s hand, covered with Portia’s blood.

  “He isn’t my viscount, Fanny, but you’re right: he enforces order by lifting an eyebrow or making a joke.”

  Fanny peered at her over the menu. “Do I detect a note of admiration in your voice?”

  And was that a new bonnet to go with the new dress and new gloves? Amery must believe in paying his help well, which notion pleased Letty. “I admire whoever is paying my salary, Fanny, particularly when I’m allowed to keep my clothes on into the bargain.”

  “Hush, my dear. You may be beyond shame, but I am not.”

  “My apologies,” Letty replied in a sheepish whisper. As they placed and then received their orders, the topic shifted to pleasantries, the weather, and the magnificence of London’s parks in the spring. Not for the first time, Letty wondered why she continued to keep these weekly appointments with somebody whom she no longer had anything in common with.

  What would the Viscountess Amery say about her housekeeper taking tea with a madam? Did Fanny care so little for the goodwill of her employer?

  “How much longer do you think you will hold your current position?” Fanny asked, swishing the dregs about in her cup.

  And just like that, Letty was grateful for a sympathetic ear. “I don’t know. I enjoy much about the position—including the generous wages—but it is not decent employment, and I can’t get my mind past that fact.” Then too, his lordship was looking to sell the place, and like livestock conveyed with a rural property, the ladies—and Letty—would likely be considered part of that transaction.

  “You should get the viscount into your bed,” Fanny suggested quietly. “He has the coin, and he’s clean. He fancies you, Letty.”

  Letty stared at her empty cup and wished she’d stayed home. Fanny might be beyond shame, but she wasn’t above handing out shameful advice.

  “He’s a good man, Fanny. A better man than I deserve.”

  “So don’t deserve him,” Fanny rejoined, patting Letty’s knuckles. “Take his money and lead him a dance or two.”

  “I’m doing well enough for now, better than I was last year at this time, and without leading anybody any dances. I must be getting back, so I’ll leave you until next week.”

  Fanny slipped on her new gloves and bonnet, said nothing while Letty paid the bill, and parted from her at the corner.

  Fanny had been housekeeper at the vicarage for a few years as Letty had grown up. She was a link with home and a familiar face, but Letty couldn’t help but feel ashamed when Fanny alluded to leading the viscount in a dance or two. And those remarks, encouraging Letty to find a new protector, to prostitute herself again, always made their way into the conversation, even as Fanny chided Letty on small lapses in propriety.

  Next Wednesday, I am going to develop a megrim, and this time I mean it.

  Ten

  Letty returned to her office through the side entrance off the kitchens, and indeed, pandemonium reigned. Etienne accused Pietro of using his knives, and Manuel insisted that Etienne was poaching on his recipes—as best Letty could tell from the polyglot shouting match that included sufficient quantities of English cursing. Musette’s name popped up a time or two—Etienne’s “angry little Frenchwoman”—as did the names of several other ladies.

  Letty wasted the better part of an hour sorting through the details, smoothing ruffled feathers, and ensuring preparations for the evening were under way. Dealing with kitchen politics in a brothel bore a startling resemblance to parish politics in Oxfordshire.

  The evening passed easily enough, the moderating weather ensuring that the parlors were more often full and the ladies kept busy. Letty had become so used to mingling with the patrons that she did so by second nature—also like a parish assembly—even as she kept her eye on the ashtrays in the smoking parlor, the clutter of dirty glasses to be cleared, and the dishes on the buffet to be replenished.

  “That,” Lord Valentine Windham said, taking a place beside her in the main parlor, “is not an expression of pleasure. My dear, you look positively woebegone.”

  His green eyes missed little. Letty tried for a smile anyway. “Hello, your lordship. I am lost in thought, and because the hour grows late, a bit tired.”

  Lost in thoughts of David. Again.

  Windham fussed the lace at his cuffs. “The hour is not late for you, Letty Banks. And you’ve been looking peaked for the past two weeks, if you ask me. Of course, I am not a physician, am I?” The last question was offered in such bland, conversational tones, that Letty abruptly felt very tired, indeed.

  “Was there some significance to that remark?”

  “You’re missing your Lord Fairly,” Windham said. “I don’t suppose you’d consider finding solace in my arms, would you?”

  His grin said he was teasing, though Letty had the uncomfortable sense that perhaps he wasn’t merely teasing.

  “Things run more smoothly when he’s here.” She ran more smoothly. “I spent much of my afternoon listening to three grown men argue—in several languages—over recipes for hollandaise and the sharpness of their knives. They need to know someone takes them seriously, and they would rather that someone be Lord Fairly.”

  “As would you, I gather?”

  Valentine Windham was the Duke of Moreland’s son, which might explain why Letty didn’t tell him to take his too insightful questions and go make music with them.

  “I manage the patrons well enough, and the ladies are comfortable with me. The account books are gradually getting straightened out, and the various merchants accept me adequately.”

  “But?”

  “But we all know I’m not Fairly. And he is the owner.” Though David was no more suited to owning a brothel than Letty was to running one.

  “Have you considered buying him out?” Lord Valentine asked, casually sipping his drink. “He’s grumbled about this place endlessly, and because he must eventually take a wife, he’ll someday need to get rid of it.”

  The observation wasn’t unkind, though it was bracingly, painfully honest. “How could I afford to buy him out? I am paid well, but I have obligations. I can put some by, though nowhere near enough to purchase a business as profitable as this.”

  Windham raised a dark eyebrow, looking very much a duke’s son and more like Westhaven’s sibling.

  “What obligations could you possibly have? Aging parents living in a cave by Hampstead Heath? A crippled, blind sister begging with a tin cup in Greater Mud Puddle? A brother who gambled away the family farm near Cow Crossing Wells?”

  Letty gave up on smiling altogether, resenting the mockery a titled man could make of what was reality for too many people. “It’s Little Weldon, Oxfordshire, and nothing so dramatic as that. I need my gowns to wear, don’t I?”

  He leaned two inches closer. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  Sometimes, Letty missed the vicarage. Perhaps that was why she’d ended up in a brothel, because she’d been ungrateful for her upbringing. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what? Flirt with you? I should think it simply another meaningless exchange in an evening that is filled with them, for you at least.”

  Letty closed her eyes, fatigue and a howlingly inconvenient case of the weeps dragging at her. A real madam would have known what to say to such comments—or she might have slapped his lordship soundly.

  A real madam might, in the alternative, have taken his handsome young lordship to bed and swived the smirk right off his face.

  “In the first place,” she began, “while the flirtation may be meaningless, you are not meaningless. In the second, I am not comfortable flirting in a venue where it is expected that flirting with me could lead to something… more.”

  “You see my flirting as a renewed attempt to gain your favors?”

  “I fear that’s what you’re
about.” Or did she hope he was, because then the puzzle of what to do when David lost interest in her would be solved.

  “Put your fears to rest,” Lord Valentine said, offering her a genuine, if wistful, smile. “I merely want you to know, Letty Banks, that even though Fairly can’t seem to pay you sufficient attention, I do enjoy your company.”

  He laced their fingers, making the gesture more than a drawing-room gallantry. “You have been a friend to me, my dear, and there are few others about whom I could say the same. Please remember that you have a friend, too. Short of calling Fairly out, there’s little I wouldn’t do, should you ask it. And that includes making you a loan sufficient to buy this place, if that’s what you decide you want.”

  What on earth should she say to that? Fanny Newcomb, who’d known her since birth, encouraged her to further vice, while this lordling offered her a casual fortune out of simple… decency.

  “Try not to look surprised.” Windham kissed her knuckles. “Much to my father’s consternation, I own companies that specialize in the importation of fine musical instruments from the Continent, and manufactories that build pianofortes here in England. Though my social life is sadly impoverished, my personal coffers are not.”

  “Your offer is generous, also surprising, my lord.”

  “Think about it,” he said, patting her hand and returning it to her. “And now I will take my leave of you, to put yonder fine instrument through its paces once again. Would you like to hear anything particular?”

  She would like to hear again that she had a well-placed, wealthy friend—except all of Lord Valentine’s wealth and charm might simply be a patient version of pursuit.

  “What I like most is when you play without written music, your own compositions that you make up as you go. Such a talent leaves me in awe, your lordship. The beauty you create with your hands is almost too much to bear.”

  Windham bowed as properly as if he’d met her at a village assembly. “For flattery such as that, I will play for hours.”

  He would play until he’d exorcised whatever demons were tormenting him, and sometimes he did play for hours. Lord Valentine had an uncanny knack for making the music that suited the hour and the mood of the evening, too. Tonight, he spun a slow, lyrical melody, one that drifted from the treble, to the tenor, accompaniment flowing under, over, and around it as he crossed hands to follow his muse.

  Perfect music for putting her in the mood for bed.

  A bed she’d rather be sharing, but only with David Worthington.

  ***

  “I didn’t know you’d come in.” Letty stood by the door, her smile friendly without being personal. “Have you had supper?”

  “I have,” David said, rising from the fainting couch in her office and wrapping his arms around her. Letty hadn’t flown across the room to embrace him; she’d hovered by the door, a pleasant, noncommittal greeting in place of the leap of enthusiasm she might have shown him.

  He had done this to her, put her on her guard, wary and mistrustful.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, leaning into him and resting her forehead on his shoulder. “So glad.”

  Something inside David eased. “How was the evening? I confess I’m hiding back here, and I have no intention of leaving the private quarters, Letty.”

  “You’ve been hiding a lot lately,” Letty said, straightening the folds of his cravat. The gesture was wifely; the observation was pure Letty. “I mean, you haven’t been much in evidence here, and your staff is remarking your absence.”

  His staff was indeed remarking something. He dropped his arms, the better to see her eyes when she flayed him with guilt. “Who is giving you trouble?”

  Besides her employer.

  “Etienne, Manuel, and Pietro went at it in high dudgeon this afternoon and Musette chimed in with various threats of violence.” Letty knelt to poke at a perfectly cheery blaze. “There’s jealousy afoot, both personal and professional. The ladies could hear them on the third floor, and the footmen were placing bets regarding the likelihood of bloodshed. Somebody in that kitchen is stealing from you, possibly several someones. It grows… tiresome.”

  “I can believe that,” David said, wondering if—should he crouch down beside her—she’d let him tumble her on the hearthrug, and then disapproving of himself heartily for the notion. “You’ve spared me and Thomas Jennings both the pleasure of attempting to intercede, though I understand it’s hardly a chore you enjoy.”

  “They’re fretful, David,” Letty said, shifting to sit on the fainting couch, the poker across her knees. “They need to know you appreciate their efforts. And the ladies miss you as well.”

  He sat beside her, hip to hip, set the poker on the hearth stand, and brought a hand up to gently massage the nape of her neck.

  Not because she enjoyed it—though she clearly did—but because the pad of his thumb ached to stroke that soft flesh and to tease the downy hair that escaped her tidy coiffure.

  “And what about you, Letty Banks? Do you miss me, too? Or do you more often wish me to perdition these days?”

  “I wish you with me,” Letty said softly, “and I wish this house full of flirting, drinking, swiving fellows somewhere else.”

  The good news, and the bad. She wished herself elsewhere.

  “They are paying your salary, those flirting, drinking, and particularly those swiving fellows.” He was paying her salary, but the swiving fellows allowed him pretenses to the contrary.

  She curled over to lean against his shoulder. “Do you ever think of closing this place?”

  No, he did not. Not any longer, because this place of immoral commerce meant he had some connection to her beyond what she allowed him in bed.

  “And doing what with the property?” he asked, taking pins from her hair. “The building is almost too big to be a town house, unless, like Devonshire, you have various children, a wife, a mistress, and the ability to manage them all under one roof.”

  “You could do anything you pleased with the property: sell it, turn it into gentlemen’s rooms to let, use it to house some of your businesses. The house is pleasant and pretty enough.”

  And gentlemen’s rooms in a former brothel would have a wonderful cachet. Jennings had made the very same point, damn him. David undid the single thick braid Letty had wound into a coronet, then spread her hair in long, loose skeins down her back.

  “I’ve thought about closing the business, Letty,” he said, trailing his fingers down the silky length of her mahogany tresses. “And then where would the ladies be? I’ve considered selling the place as well, and the same concern makes me hesitate.”

  Lately, it made him hesitate. Three months ago, he’d been ready to give the place away.

  “You would have to sell it to someone you trusted. Do you suppose Valentine Windham might buy it?”

  She had an answer for everything, also beautiful hair, and the most beguiling rosy scent.

  “I doubt he has the means, and neither Westhaven nor His Grace would approve.” And for the first time, David honestly appreciated old Moreland’s propensity for meddling in his children’s lives.

  “Lord Valentine has the means. Tonight, he offered to lend me the money to buy it from you.”

  Utter glee at the prospect of shedding the property warred with… terror at the idea that Letty might buy him out. “Are you considering it?”

  “I am not.”

  Relief burned through him at her words, though for the life of him, he ought to sell her the place. Selling the brothel to Letty would accomplish three dearly sought outcomes: First, it would relieve David of the enterprise entirely. Second, it would ensure Letty had financial security for the rest of her life. Third, it would ensure the ladies were well taken care of.

  “So you don’t want to own this establishment?” Something they had in common. “Why not?”


  Letty kissed his jaw. “I never aspired to be a madam.”

  Oh, that.

  David shifted so he could undo the hooks on the back of her dress. “You aspired to eat, to have a roof over your head, to put a little bit by.” He swept her hair aside in a slow caress and kissed her nape, and even there, she bore the scent of roses. “I can’t say the prospect of years of squabbling chefs, violent altercations among the employees, lecherous young lords, and the rest has great appeal as a steady diet.”

  He fell silent for a few moments, content to kiss the juncture of her shoulder and neck, and the soft, soft skin between her shoulder blades. Next, he peeled back her dress and rested his forehead on her nape, a man condemned to protect her best interests, such as those might survive in her present situation.

  “Letty, you could make enough in five years here to retire outright, if you lived frugally off in the shires. You could be the one selling this business at an enormous profit, and spending the rest of your life in relative peace.”

  Without him. He wanted to bite her, to hold her in place the way a stallion pinned a mare in season with his teeth.

  “Do you want me to buy it?”

  She sounded breathless, and that was wonderful, because it meant this awful conversation would soon be over. David pushed her gown from her shoulders and went to work on her chemise and stays.

  “What I want,” he said, “is not under discussion. If you want this business, I am sure we could come to terms. Why do you wear so many clothes, my love? The hour grows late, and I am on fire for you.”

  “I wear so many clothes because my employer insists that I be properly attired from the skin out.”

  She was taunting him with reason, which was most unfair. David pulled her to him, her back to his chest. “I could bend you over this chaise, hoist your skirts, and pleasure you witless with you half undressed. Nobody need shed a single additional piece of clothing.”

  Though they would, at least temporarily, let this vexing topic drop.

  “You could, or you could let me relieve you of every stitch of your fine evening attire, lie naked with me on the big, soft bed in the next room, and spend hours castaway with pleasure.”