Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  “What?” Ned demanded. “What are you two staring at?”

  “I,” said Lord Blakely, “am dependable. She is—”

  “You,” retorted Ned, “are cold and calculating. I’ve known Madame Esmerelda for two full years. And in that time, she’s become more like family than anyone else. So don’t you dare talk about her in that tone of voice.”

  Jenny’s vision blurred and her head swam. She had no experience with family; all she remembered was the unforgiving school where an unknown benefactor had paid her tuition. She’d known since she was a very small child that she stood alone against the world. That had brought her to this career—the sure knowledge that nobody would help her, and everyone would lie to her. Lying to them instead had only seemed fair play.

  But with Ned’s words, a quiet wistfulness filled her. Family seemed the opposite of this lonely life, where even her friends had been won by falsehoods.

  Ned wasn’t finished with his cousin. “You see me as some kind of tool, to be used when convenient. Well, I’m tired of it. Find your own wife. Get your own heirs. I’m not doing anything for you any longer.”

  Jenny blinked back tears and looked at Ned again. His familiar, youthful features were granite. Beneath his bravado, she knew he feared his elder cousin. And yet he’d stood up to the man just now. For her.

  She wasn’t Ned’s family. She wasn’t really his friend. And no matter what had transpired between them, she was still the fraud who bilked him of a few pounds in exchange for false platitudes. Now he was asking her to repay him with more lies.

  Well. Jenny swallowed the lump of regret in her throat. If deceit was all she had, she would use it. But she hadn’t saved Ned’s life for his cousin’s convenience.

  Lord Blakely straightened. His outraged glower—that cold and stubborn set of his lip—indicated he thought Ned was a mere utensil. That Lord Blakely was superior in intelligence and birth to everyone else in the room, and he would force their dim intellects to comprehend the fact.

  He thought he was superior to his cousin? Well. She was going to make the marquess regret he’d ever asked for specifics.

  “Ned, you recently received an invitation to a ball, did you not?”

  He puckered his brow. “I did.”

  “What sort of a ball?”

  “Some damned fool crush of a coming-out, I think. No intention of going.”

  The event sounded promising. There were sure to be many young women in attendance. Jenny could already taste her revenge on the tip of her tongue.

  “You will go to this ball,” she pronounced. And then she swept her arms wide, encompassing the two men. “You will both go to this ball.”

  Lord Blakely looked taken aback.

  “I can see nothing of Ned’s wife in the orange. But at precisely ten o’clock and thirty-nine minutes, Lord Blakely, you will see the woman you will marry. And you will marry her, if you approach her in the manner I prescribe.”

  The scrape of Lord Blakely’s pencil echoed loudly in the reigning silence. When he finished, he set the utensil down carefully.

  “You wanted a scientific test, my lord.” Jenny placed her hands flat on the table in satisfaction. “You have one.”

  And if the ball was as crowded as such things usually were, he would see dozens of women in every glance. He’d never be able to track them all. She imagined him trying to scribble all the names in his notebook, being forced by his own scientific methods to visit every lady, in order to fairly eliminate each one. He would be incredibly annoyed. And he’d never be able to prove her wrong, because who could say he had recorded every woman?

  Ned’s mouth had fallen open. His hand slowly came up to hide a pleased smile. “There,” he said. “Is that specific enough for you?”

  The marquess pursed his lips. “By whose clock?”

  One potential excuse slipped from Jenny’s grasp. Not to worry; she had others.

  “Your fob watch should do.”

  “I have two that I wear from time to time.”

  Jenny frowned. “But you inherited one from your father,” she guessed.

  Lord Blakely nodded. “I must say, that is incredibly specific. For scientific purposes, can you explain how you got all of this from an elephant?”

  Jenny widened her eyes in false innocence. “Why, Lord Blakely. The same way I got an elephant from an orange. The spirits delivered the scene as an image into my mind.”

  He grimaced. She could not let her triumph show, and so she kept her expression as unchanging and mysterious as ever.

  “So,” Ned said, turning to his cousin, “you agree, then?”

  Lord Blakely blinked. “Agree to what?”

  “When you find the girl in question and fall in love, you’ll agree Madame Esmerelda is not a charlatan.”

  The marquess blinked again. “I’m not going to fall in love.” He spoke of that emotion in tones as wooden and unmoving as a dried-out horse trough.

  “But if you did,” Ned insisted.

  “If I did,” Lord Blakely said slowly, “I’d admit the question of her duplicity had not been scientifically proven.”

  Ned cackled. “For you, that’s as good as an endorsement. That means, you’ll consult Madame Esmerelda yourself and leave me be.”

  A longer pause. “Those are high stakes indeed. If this is to be a wager, what do you put up?”

  “A thousand guineas,” Ned said immediately.

  Jenny nearly choked. She’d thought herself unspeakably wealthy for the four hundred pounds she’d managed to scrimp and save and stash away. A thousand pounds was more money than she could imagine, and Ned tossed it about as if it were an apple core.

  Lord Blakely waved an annoyed hand. “Money,” he said with a grimace. “What would either of us do with that paltry amount? No. You must risk something of real value. If you lose, you’ll not consult Madame Esmerelda or any other fortune-teller again.”

  “Done,” said Ned with a grin. “She’s always right. I can’t possibly lose.”

  Jenny couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Because Ned could do nothing but lose. What if he began to doubt Jenny’s long-ago assurances? What if he discovered that he owed his current happiness to the scant comfort of Jenny’s invention? And Jenny could not help but add one last, desperately selfish caveat: What if Ned learned the truth and disavowed this curious relationship between them? He would leave her, and Jenny would be alone.

  Again.

  She inhaled slowly, hoping the cool air would help her calm down. The two men would go to the ball. Lord Blakely would look around. For all she knew, he might even decide to marry a girl he saw. And once he rejected all the women whose names he’d recorded, she’d tell him he’d seen a different woman at the appointed time out of the corner of his eye.

  The wager would become a nullity, and she wouldn’t have to see the fierce loyalty in Ned’s eyes turn to contempt. Jenny’s pulse slowed and her breath fell into an even rhythm.

  Lord Blakely lounged back in his chair. “Something has just occurred to me.”

  The devilish gleam in his eye froze Jenny’s blood. Whatever it was the dreadful man was about to say, she doubted he’d thought of it at that minute.

  “What will stop her from claiming it was some other chit I was meant for? That I saw two girls at the designated time, and chose the wrong one?”

  He’d seen through her. A chill prickled the ends of Jenny’s fingers.

  Ned frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose if that happens, we’ll have to call the bet off.”

  The marquess shook his head. “I have a better idea. Since Madame Esmerelda’s seen everything in the orange, she’ll be able to verify the girl’s identity immediately.”

  He met her eyes and all Jenny’s thoughts—her worries for Ned, the loneliness that clutched her gut—were laid bare in the intensity of his gaze.

  His lip quirked sardonically. “We’ll take her with us.”

  Chapter Two

  GARETH CARHART, THE MARQUESS
OF BLAKELY, had allocated one hour to this endeavor. Fifteen minutes to travel to the fortune-teller’s lair, fifteen minutes to return home. Half an hour, he had supposed, would suffice to shred her lies like the insubstantial foolscap that they were.

  “I can’t go.” Madame Esmerelda’s voice was soft and uncertain.

  “Why ever not?” Ned turned to her, a look of genuine befuddlement spreading across his face. Gareth’s young cousin sat with his hands on his knees, his whole body canting toward the woman. And therein lay Gareth’s problem.

  When Gareth had left England years before, Ned had been a child, whining and hanging on at every opportunity. Now, he was barely twenty-one—but still damnably vulnerable. And Ned believed every word that this woman spoke.

  With Ned’s father dead, Gareth was the closest thing Ned had to a patriarch. Ned was his responsibility—and responsible marquesses did not let their young cousins fall into the clutches of fortune-tellers.

  “I’m sure Madame Esmerelda had a perfectly legitimate reason not to come.” Gareth raised an eyebrow at the woman and dangled his bait. “I suspect she had another appointment at the same time.”

  Let her agree. When she did, he would ask her to name the date of the ball. She wouldn’t be able to, despite her vaunted powers and he would end this foolish charade before it even began.

  But she did not take the easy way he offered. Her nostrils flared, and she pressed her lips together. “You’re attempting to trick me, my lord.”

  Gareth barely transformed his jerk of surprise into an arrogant chin-lift. “I assure you,” he said in his coldest tone, “I had no such intention.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You want this to be a scientific test? Let it be a scientific test. But don’t set little verbal traps for me. And don’t ever lie to me. You intended precisely such a thing.”

  Electricity prickled the hairs on his arms, and Gareth sat back, the silence pressing uncomfortably against his skin. Madame Esmerelda leaned toward him, her hands gripping her skirts. It had been a long while since anyone had spoken to him in that manner. He had lied to her. He had intended to trick her into playing her hand too soon. He just hadn’t expected her to notice.

  “You’re trying to change the subject,” he accused her. “Why can you not go to the ball?”

  “Because I wasn’t invited,” she snapped. And then she looked down. “And besides, I have nothing to wear.”

  Ned gave a high crack of laughter.

  And no wonder. It was such an absurdly ladylike thing to say. He glanced at her again. In that moment—a trick of the light, perhaps, or the way her lashes obscured her eyes—Gareth felt a jolt. Madame Esmerelda was not a lady, but she was most definitely a woman. A pretty one at that. She’d hidden her femininity beneath those unflattering layers of dark paint and the kerchief. Lies, those; just ones composed of fabric and powder instead of words. He wondered idly how far down her back that mass of hair would reach if it were not bound up. She lifted her chin and met his eyes.

  Gareth didn’t believe in fortune-telling. He was a scientist; he’d devoted years to a naturalist’s expedition in Brazil. He’d only returned to England when his grandfather died, and responsibility required he take on the demands of the title. He had come here because responsibility also demanded that he free his cousin from Madame Esmerelda’s grasp. But he would take it as a matter of personal pride to strike a blow against the illogical superstition that this woman represented.

  Her particular choice of lies, however, would take far longer than his allocated hour to disprove. He should have been annoyed. And yet he couldn’t intimidate Madame Esmerelda.

  In the year since he’d been back in England, he hadn’t faced anything like a real challenge. Now he did. It was going to be extremely satisfying when he exposed her as the fraud that she was.

  He relished the prospect of matching wits with her, of pulling the truth from her.

  Gareth snapped his fingers. “The invitation,” he said, “I can fix. The clothing I can fix. I’m willing to do much in the name of science.”

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t.” She looked away again. “Besides, I can’t accept—”

  Disparate details collided in Gareth’s mind. The proper curtsy she had dropped. The educated precision of her intonation. Her reluctance to accept a gift of clothing from a man. These facts all added to one overwhelming conclusion: Madame Esmerelda had been educated as a gentlewoman. What on earth could have driven her to tell fortunes?

  “Of course you can,” he insisted. “Madame Esmerelda, if this is to be a scientific test, I don’t believe you should lie to me, either.”

  Some emotion flickered in her eyes. She shook her head—not a denial, but a swift, short shake, as if she were putting everything to rights. And when she met his gaze again, her face was smooth.

  She had thought of something, Gareth realized. She saw a way out of the mess he had created for her.

  He should have been disappointed.

  Instead, he couldn’t wait to foil her plan.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Gareth to regret his eagerness. He hadn’t realized finding Madame Esmerelda appropriate attire would turn into an ordeal. But Ned had thought it necessary to take the woman to the modiste himself. And Gareth knew if Ned had a moment alone with the charlatan, she would find a way to turn his head inside out. Again.

  Which is how Gareth found himself in his closed carriage the next afternoon, accompanied by his chattering cousin, a fraud and a growing headache.

  “So,” Ned babbled, “we’re going to the ball next Thursday, and then we’ll meet Blakely’s wife. I should like to see him fall in love. I’m rather looking forward to it.”

  Madame Esmerelda adjusted the kerchief on her head—red, this time—and slanted a careful look at Gareth. “Identify.”

  “Identify?” Ned repeated. “What do you mean, identify?”

  “We are going to identify the woman in question. I never said your cousin would meet her that day. In fact, the time for their meeting is not yet here.”

  Gareth inhaled in trepidation. “Not yet here? How long will this take?”

  The smile touched her eyes, if not her lips. “Oh, I couldn’t say. The time is not measured by years, but by tasks. Three of them.”

  “Tasks?” repeated Ned, incredulously.

  “Tasks?” Gareth said sharply. “You said nothing of tasks.”

  “Oh? What did I say, I wonder?” She looked up at the roof of the carriage, innocently.

  Gareth drew out his notebook and fumbled for the page. “At precisely ten o’clock and thirty-nine minutes, you will see the woman you are to marry if only you approach her in…” He faltered, and looked up.

  That innocence had faded from her eyes. She’d known what she’d said. Baited him into this, no doubt, to make him look foolish.

  “If only I approach her in the manner you prescribe,” he finished dully.

  “Ah, yes. The manner I prescribe.” She smiled. “And I prescribe tasks.”

  He’d thought himself so clever, trapping her into making an easily disprovable statement. All he had to do, he’d thought, was not marry a girl. He’d succeeded at not marrying women all his life. He’d been too confident, too sure he’d backed her into a corner.

  He’d underestimated her. He’d been so intent on winning, on disproving her statement, that he’d not seen the exit she planned for herself.

  He could walk away at any moment. But if he did, he’d leave her influence over Ned unabated.

  “I never got tasks,” mumbled an aggrieved Ned.

  “Of course not,” Madame Esmerelda soothed. “But you must think how monumental an undertaking it will be for your cousin to convince a woman to care for him. If I didn’t set him tasks, he’d use logic instead, and just think how that would work out. You don’t need tasks. Everyone likes you already.”

  Gareth clenched his hand in suppressed fury and pushed his knuckles into the leather squabs. “And what,” he snapped, “is the first ta
sk? Mucking out stables? Killing lions? Or must I chop down an entire orchard of citrus trees?”

  She tapped a finger against her lips. “It is a trifle premature to tell you. But I suppose it can’t hurt. You must carve an elephant out of a piece of ebony.”

  “An elephant?” Gareth looked up at the roof. “Why is it always elephants?”

  The coach slowed to a halt. The footman opened the door, and dust motes danced in the rays of sunshine in front of Madame Esmerelda. They made her look…well, mystical. Drat her.

  “I am,” Madame Esmerelda said, “just a poor conduit for the spirits. As you will be a mere conduit for the elephant. You will give your future wife the elephant when first you meet.”

  Her eyes danced, and she exited the conveyance. Gareth bit back a pained yelp.

  No doubt he could find a way to present such a gift in a dignified manner. If she thought to make a fool of Lord Blakely, she was vastly mistaken. But maybe she intended to fight him to an impasse. If she made those tasks onerous enough, she doubtless thought he would walk away. And with her conditions unfulfilled, he would have no proof she was a fraud—and that meant his cousin would continue to see her. Unacceptable.

  By the triumphant spring in her steps as she approached the shop, she thought so, too.

  Gareth’s thoughts boiled as he entered the little shop. He paid little mind to Ned bothering Madame Esmerelda, whining about some irrelevant trifle. Bolts of colorful fabric decorated the front waiting room; they faded to dim gray in his mind. He didn’t even notice he was pacing the floor, scarcely saw when Madame Esmerelda was whisked away to the back room. He wanted to rip the fashion plates off the walls and shred the sample cards laid demurely out on the tables.

  Gareth did not like losing. He would not be outdone by some fraud. He’d looked forward to the challenge when he thought he would vanquish her. The situation became far less entrancing when her victory was possible.

  Tasks. He couldn’t let this continue.

  He turned to Ned, who was fidgeting on the edge of his seat. “Ned,” he said.