Nicola Cornick - [Bluestocking Brides 04]

by The Secrets of a Courtesan

  “So,” she said, a little ungraciously, “I can give you two minutes, Rowarth, no more. Whatever your business is with me, I do not want to discuss it.”

  His gaze came back to rest on her, dark, brooding, and she repressed a little shiver.

  “You will give me as long as I require,” he said. He straightened. “My business with you is this. I am here on behalf of the Home Secretary. You are under suspicion of criminal activity. If you do not help us we will ruin you. We will expose your true identity and we will take from you everything that you possess.” He smiled at her. “Now,” he said gently, “will you talk to me?”

  Chapter 2

  She looked the same as she had done five years before. Alasdair Rowarth looked at his former mistress and amended his view slightly; she looked almost exactly the same except that there were shadows haunting those glorious lavender blue eyes now, suggesting a sadness that went soul deep. He did not feel any pity to see them; she had left him, walked out on him for another man, so whatever sorrow she had brought on herself was surely richly deserved.

  The bitterness and resentment twisted within him and he ruthlessly subdued it. She was nothing to him now. He was here to prove it. But he remembered that it was Eve’s clear and candid gaze that had first enslaved him from the moment he had stepped into the ballroom at Albermarle Street, persuaded against his better judgment by his friend Miles Vickery to attend the Cyprian’s Ball. He had been bored and restless that evening, he remembered, searching as he always was for something elusive, something he could not even name, grasping after that mysterious entity that would fulfill him and provide a desperately needed balance to the lonely duty that was his life. Rowarth had come into his dukedom young; so many people depended upon him, it seemed that his days were never any more than a round of obligation and responsibility. He had searched for someone to share that weight of duty with him, looked for a wife at Almacks and in the long round of the London Season, and had been bored rigid by the witless pattern card debutantes he had met.

  And then he had attended the Cyprian’s Ball and there she had been, Eva Night, bright, dazzling, so very alive, and in some way strangely untouchable even as she was effectively selling her virginity to the highest bidder. He had been entranced. He was rich enough—so he had bought her. And yet from the first he had thought that there was more to the transaction than that. It had not been solely his money for her body. She had given him life and light and warmth, wrapping him around with her generosity of spirit, her very presence lightening the load of the responsibilities he carried. In return he had shared everything with her. Not simply his money but his concerns and his cares, his deepest, darkest fears and his hopes for the future. Even though he was a mature man of one and thirty he had fallen for her like a love-struck youth. He had wanted to marry her. It had been perfect. Or so he had thought until she had left him, run away, denting his pride, making him an utter laughingstock—the foolish duke who had wanted to marry his venal mistress—and breaking a heart that until he had met her he had cynically believed could never be touched.

  He had been a fool. That much was clear. The thing that angered him most was that he had loved her and believed his feelings were returned when in fact she had merely been using him for money and advancement. He had been wealthy enough but nowhere near as rich as some of the peers who sought Eve’s favor now that she was the toast of the demimonde. It had been madness to think that he could hold her if another man offered more. When he had been a mere ten years old he had seen his mother do precisely the same thing, betray his father, running off abroad to be with her wealthy lover. There had been the most appalling crim con divorce case that had dragged through the House of Lords and made his father look like a naive, impotent fool. And Rowarth, who savagely told himself that he should have known better, had almost made the same mistake as his luckless father. He knew he should be grateful that he had not committed the ultimate folly of marrying Eve as he had wanted to.

  After Eve’s defection he had gone abroad for several years—he had business concerns in India that had occupied him most successfully until the pleas of his estate managers had brought him back to England to face those responsibilities he had neglected. He had believed that he had put aside thoughts of Eva Night until he had come back to London and found himself searching for her face in a crowd or listening for news of her. He had learned that no one had heard of her since she had run away from him. It had been the on dit at the time but Eve was now long gone, her star extinguished, the brief time when they had been the glittering couple of the demimonde all but forgotten. Rowarth had tried to forget it, too, but every so often the memory of Eve would stab him like a wound that had not completely healed.

  Then Lord Hawkesbury’s letter had arrived out of the blue, asking for his help. Yes, he would go to Yorkshire and confront his beautiful, treacherous former mistress. Yes, he would ascertain if she were a member of a dangerous criminal fraternity, as Hawkesbury’s intelligence suggested. And in doing so he would prove once and for all that he was free of the hold she had once exerted over him.

  Criminal she might be. Beautifully, wantonly seductive she most certainly was. Eve’s face still had the vivid animation that Rowarth remembered: her creamy complexion was still dusted with amber freckles, her hair was still a fiery red, and the quick, expressive movements of her body were as ridiculously, dangerously appealing to him as ever. Not even her fearsomely respectable worsted gown and dark blue spencer could hide the lush curves of a figure he had known intimately and already ached to explore again in exquisite detail, unable to subdue the desires of his body even while he deplored her and the hold she still had over him.

  He had not expected to want her.

  He had thought those feelings dead and gone. They should have been—they should have been annihilated, destroyed by her betrayal. He was furious that they were not. Yet he was forced to acknowledge that when he had first seen Eve in the Market Square he had felt all the old emotions of desire and lust and longing as strong as they had ever been and searing in their intensity. He had been told himself then that the memories, the hold she had had over his senses, would never be permitted to cloud his judgment. That resolution had lasted all of five seconds. He had seen her and he had wanted her with a hunger all the more acute for the years of denial.

  But his business with Eve was precisely that—business. He was here on Hawkesbury’s behalf to ascertain her connection to Warren Sampson and to use her, coldly, ruthlessly, to get to Sampson so that the man could finally be arrested. That was his goal, no more, no less.

  “I strongly suggest,” he said, “that you do as I ask.”

  For a moment Eve stared at him, those glorious lavender eyes wide and blank and he wondered if she had even heard him. Then an expression of fury came across her face.

  “You bastard!” she said, picking up a very fine silver hairbrush from the desk in front of her and throwing it at his head. “How dare you come here and threaten to take away from me everything that I have worked so hard for?”

  Rowarth caught the hairbrush absentmindedly in one hand before it made contact. He had always been good at cricket. Eve was looking absolutely furious, her piquant face flushed and her breathing quick and light. But it was more than anger he could see in her face. It was desperation. There was so much passion and rage in her voice that for a moment the principal emotion he felt was admiration that she was as strong as a tigress in defending the things that mattered to her. Memory stirred again; when she had been his mistress he had given her money and had been puzzled when she appeared to have spent it all on nothing. When pressed it had turned out that she had given it all away to feed and clothe urchins living on the streets. Rowarth had protested at her generosity and Eve had turned on him, saying that he was spoiled and privileged and could not understand—all true, of course, for how could an Eton- and Oxford-educated duke ever understand what it was like to struggle to survive? Most dukes would not even care. They had argued p
assionately and then made love even more passionately and she had lain in his arms and at last confided the truth in him.

  “I did not know my parents,” she had said, her head against his shoulder, her hand resting over his heart, “and I was cold and hungry and afraid more times than I care to remember.” There had been a faraway look in her eyes, as though she were seeing far beyond the walls of her bedchamber. “If I can spare even one child from suffering as I did then that has to be for the good.”

  Rowarth had felt humbled, made to look beyond the comfort that had shielded him since his youth to another more painful existence. He knew that Eve had chosen to become a courtesan only because she had seen it as a way out of such stark poverty.

  “I was pretty,” she had once said lightly, “so I used it to escape.” But he knew those words hid a wealth of bitterness.

  “It is only the rich who can afford moral scruples,” she had once flashed at him when he had commented on the hanging of a youth for the theft of a loaf of bread and he knew that she had felt the same way about the choice she had made in selling herself.

  Or he had thought he had known her until she had betrayed him.

  But that was in the past and nothing to the purpose now.

  He put the silver hairbrush on the desk. He suspected it was part of a quantity of stolen goods that Hawkesbury had said Warren Sampson was almost certainly laundering via Eve’s pawnbroking business. Which brought him back to the matter in hand.

  “You are working with Warren Sampson to pass on stolen goods,” he said. “He runs a housebreaking gang that robs property across the county and then his accomplices bring the items here and you sell them, making him a double profit.”

  She stared at him contemptuously. “That is utter rubbish.” She turned away from him with an angry swish of skirts and took a couple of paces away across the room. She could not get any farther away from him because the office was so small and he could sense the anger in her, still simmering like a pot coming back to the boil.

  “I barely know the man,” she snapped. “And what I do know I dislike intensely. It is both insulting and plain wrong to suggest some criminal conspiracy between us.”

  Hawkesbury had suggested that Eve might be Warren Sampson’s mistress, a cozy arrangement if they were in bed and business together. And Rowarth was not simply going to accept her word that it was not so. Just the thought of her tumbling between the sheets with Sampson made him hot with rage and thwarted desire. Madness, when he had sworn he did not care and did not want to want her.

  “Shall we sit,” he suggested evenly, “and discuss this calmly?”

  She gave him another look of searing disdain. “If we must. If it will hasten your departure.”

  He bit back a reluctant smile. Never had a woman seemed so anxious to be rid of him. But then, Eve had always been different.

  “I shall want to see your accounts in due course,” he said. “I need to trace every one of your transactions.”

  “How tedious for you,” Eve murmured.

  “I suppose that they are in order?”

  “Of course not.” Eve glanced at the tottering plies of paper on the desk and the floor. “You may have taught me to read and to compute mathematical sums, Rowarth, but you could not make me like it.”

  The memory touched him on the raw. It was true that she had been illiterate before he had taught her. There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he thought of the sweetness of those lessons and the gifts he had brought her, the books she had painstakingly learned to read, the columns of figures she had haltingly added up while he had joked that at least that way she would know how much money she was giving away to the poor. He slammed the door on such memories. Evidently she had moved on and was able to calculate Sampson’s wealth very accurately and certainly well enough to profit by it.

  “It was not the only thing that I taught you,” he said harshly. “You may have been a courtesan but you were not a tutored one.”

  Color lit her cheeks at his reference to the fact that she had been a virgin when he had taken her to his bed.

  “I do not recall you having any complaints,” she snapped.

  He had not. It had been blissful. He recalled the sweetness of Eve’s lissome body stretched beneath his hands and the pure physical compatibility that they had achieved. And then he thought of her running from him.

  “Such debate gets us nowhere,” he said harshly. “Now, tell me the truth about Warren Sampson this time.” He met her eyes directly. “Was he the man you left me for? Are you his mistress?”

  “I do not believe that you have been hearing me,” Eve said wearily. She felt sick to her soul that Rowarth, who had once loved her, should now hold her in nothing but contempt. “For the last time, Rowarth,” she said, “I barely know Warren Sampson. I am neither his mistress nor his business partner, nor,” she added with emphasis, “his associate in any way.”

  Disquiet stirred in her. It was true that for the past couple of months she had been aware of some very valuable goods passing through the pawnshop. The silver hairbrush was one such item and there had also been some silver plates and a couple of gold snuffboxes. A rather dissolute young man whom Eve had recognized as Tom Fortune, younger brother to the squire, had brought the pieces in. The workmanship on them had been superb and Eve had given him a good price for them. She had asked no questions at the time for she was well aware that people were very sensitive about bringing in property to pawn for money and one of the reasons her clientele liked her was because she was so discreet and kept their secrets. And yet she had not been comfortable about the transaction. A sixth sense had told her that something was wrong even as she had tried to persuade herself that Tom Fortune was probably only selling off the family silver to pay his gambling debts.

  Her disquiet turned to foreboding. Could Hawkesbury be correct, not in his suspicions of her, but in the fact that Warren Sampson might be using her shop to launder stolen goods? Sampson was a deeply unpleasant man, grotesquely, ridiculously wealthy with a fortune that had been made in the mills of Leeds and Bradford. On more than one occasion Eve had caught him looking at her with speculation and lust in his eyes and she had shuddered to imagine that he might know her secrets, her background, her past. What Warren Sampson might do with such knowledge was terrifying. But he had said nothing and had always treated her with outward respect, and Eve had told herself that she was imagining things. Nevertheless, he always made her skin crawl.

  Rumor, which swirled around Fortune’s Folly like the current of the River Tune, said that Sampson had added to his money through various criminal activities but nothing had ever been proven. Now it seemed that Hawkesbury was set on finding that proof and that Rowarth would use her in any way possible to bring Sampson down.

  Eve shuddered. She knew that if Rowarth had Hawkesbury’s authority he could enforce whatever he wished and if Hawkesbury believed her guilty of criminal activity then she had no hope. Suddenly she felt so tired, so vulnerable to this man and to the insidious appeal that he still had for her and so miserable that he had nothing but disdain for her now. It appalled and distressed her that he had accepted Lord Hawkesbury’s commission to bring her down.

  But such regrets would not save her. With a sigh, she gestured Rowarth to a seat on one of the rather rickety wooden chairs at the side of her desk. Accounts and correspondence spilled from the table onto the floor. She gave vent to her feelings by giving the papers a violent shove so that the ones still on the desk cascaded onto the floor.

  Realizing that Rowarth was waiting, with impeccable manners, for her to sit first, she pushed some books aside and took a chair. He immediately sat down opposite her. His presence seemed to fill the space between them, powerful, authoritative. The room suddenly seemed too small, cramped and close, and it was nothing to do with the piles of goods that were stored in there. It was simply that Alasdair Rowarth had always been the most overwhelming man that Eve had ever met and she felt angry that he could still affect he
r in such a profound way.

  To cover her nervousness she tilted up her chin and subjected him to a stern appraisal.

  “You cannot have any evidence at all to back up these ridiculous accusations,” she said. “They are absolutely untrue.”

  Rowarth inclined his head. His hair, glossy and thick, shone in a ray of sunlight that penetrated the dusty window. He looked self-assured, Eve thought, with all the confidence that privilege and position could bring. It only served to make her feel all the more vulnerable.

  “The Home Secretary’s agents have had your shop under observation for several months,” he said. “They know that you are fencing stolen goods.” He picked up the silver hairbrush again and looked thoughtfully at it. “I am sure you are aware there have been a number of robberies locally.”

  “No,” Eve said. Her immediate instinct was to protect herself and Joan and all she had worked to build up. But she could see as soon as the words left her mouth that Rowarth did not believe her. His gaze rested on her face with the perceptive intensity that she remembered. She blushed and saw the corner of his mouth lift in a smile, as though she had just confirmed her guilt. She could have kicked herself.

  “If stolen goods are being passed through this shop it is entirely without my knowledge,” she temporized.

  Rowarth held her gaze, his own implacable. Eve shivered to see the coldness there where once there had been nothing but heat and sweetness for her.

  “That does not make you innocent,” Rowarth said.

  “It makes me a victim of Sampson’s criminality,” Eve said sharply, “not an accomplice.”

  Rowarth raised his brows in blatant disbelief but he did not challenge her immediately. Instead he picked up a monograph of some very naughty erotic drawings that Eve had failed to notice was lying on the desk. As he flicked through the pictures Eve started to feel unconscionably heated, her mind conjuring up visions of the past, of her body locked with Rowarth’s in the most intimate and sensual of embraces, his mouth hot against the bare skin of her inner thigh, her cries of need as his tongue flicked her tender core, the bliss as he took her, pushing her to the extremes of pleasure…