Flawless

by Carrie Lofty

  “May I see one?”

  Smets unlocked a four-inch-tall drawer and removed a metal box. Lined with a scrap of dark blue velvet, it contained a diamond the size of an eye. Still rough, its beauty was not in its cut or setting, as with the stones in Viv’s wedding band.

  No, its beauty was in its potential.

  “It’s flawless,” said Smets, his voice reverent. “When cut . . . I cannot even imagine its worth.”

  Viv took the diamond between two fingers and stared. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and naturally sensual, but the brain ticking away behind them was sharp, noticing everything. Apparently she was no longer so awed by the dazzling shock of their trade. Miles shifted his weight, knowing that shrewd look all too well—for she’d turned it on him countless times.

  “And what’s our percentage for brokering a deal between the mines and buyers?” she asked.

  Smets faltered for the first time. His gaze sought guidance from Miles, who conveniently turned his attention to dumping the god-awful carbons back into their ignoble bucket. No velvet for them.

  Viv carefully placed the diamond back in its metal box and snapped shut the lid. “Mr. Smets, my father’s name adorns this building and I am your employer. Now, if you please?”

  Smets’s manner had decidedly cooled. “We earn ten percent, my lady.”

  “And the other brokerage houses?”

  “The same,” he said, his tone as flat as a boy reciting his times tables. “Mines stay with mines, brokerages with brokerages, diggers with their kind, Africans with theirs. No one breaks rank here, my lady.”

  She made a little sound that would have signaled an outright rebellion of opinion had she done so at a London tea. Smets hardly noticed it, while Miles only grinned. His beautiful, determined wife was having ideas. So was he, suddenly aware of his hand’s proximity to her thigh.

  God, if he could turn that deft mind to matters of sexual gratification . . .

  “Don’t you think, my lord?”

  “Hmm?”

  The corners of her mouth tightened, the only hint of her displeasure. “I said, don’t you think we should examine the ledgers? And I would very much like to learn more regarding the difference between these stones and the ones stored in buckets.”

  “Certainly,” said Miles. “Assess to your heart’s content.”

  Smets smiled, seemingly accepting the comment as Viv had: a husband condescending his overly interested wife. Her eyes’ delicious mix of green and gold—that beautiful hazel—darkened with stormy malice intended only for him. But he had meant it as truth, and Mr. Smets needed to be dealt with.

  “I appreciate your taking the time to explain all of this to us,” he said. “We’ll provide as much assistance as we’re able, without getting in the way unnecessarily.”

  The man flicked a glance toward Viv. “Thank you, my lord.”

  And now for the challenging bit.

  Miles drew from deep within his ancestral heritage and affected his most aristocratic conceit. “My lady, would you wait for us in the lobby?”

  He bowed slightly, a polite yet glaring dismissal. But with his eyes, with the whole of his being, he urged her to trust, to remember what they’d discussed.

  Her jaw held all the softness and warmth of a block of ice. Her gaze fired cannonballs. But she nodded. With her back straight and chin high, she glided out of the sorting room. Poise and unflappable grace seemed as innate to her as the delectable curve of her lush lower lip.

  Relieved that Viv had consented, he faced off against Smets. “As for my darling wife, I would ask that you humor her interests.”

  “Humor?”

  “She fancies herself a protégé of her late father and at times harbors . . . well . . . untoward interests.” Miles stripped his words to a whisper. “But I think it’s a bit of a ruse, you see. Girls and pretty stones and all that.”

  “Ah.” The tension that had misshapen the man’s shoulders suddenly eased. “I understand, my lord. She will be welcomed here.”

  “My thanks, Mr. Smets.” He offered his hand, which Smets shook vigorously.

  They returned to the lobby where Viv stared into an unknown middle distance. He needed to get her somewhere private. She would not explode. Vivienne Bancroft never exploded. But she wouldn’t forgive him until she understood his motives.

  “One last question, if you please,” she said.

  Carefully neutral, her expression revealed no hint of intrigue. Instead she appeared as vacant as a wine bottle at midnight. Miles could’ve sang for how happy he was.

  She wasn’t furious. She was playing along.

  “Of course, my lady,” Smets replied, his attitude now like that of a doting parent. He should’ve known Old Man Christie had been a taskmaster, expecting only the best.

  “You mentioned many of the security features here in the office, the metal and the signing in.” She waved her hand as if the details escaped her. “But what’s to prevent men such as yourself and these fine card-playing gentlemen from, well, misbehaving?”

  Smets paled.

  “There seem to be so many arenas for graft, undervalued gems, et cetera,” she continued, all things empty-headed and lovely. “Oh, but don’t believe I ever thought such a horrible thing about you.”

  “Of course not,” Smets said with an uncomfortable little laugh.

  Viv offered a dainty shrug. “I was simply curious.”

  The Belgian stood before them on two legs, but he seemed to have shrunk by a good three inches. His fingers petted each other in an agitated fist. “Well, my lady, the last man in my position was sent to prison for eight years after he was convicted of just such . . . activities.”

  “Prison,” Viv said. “Well, my lord, that does explain a great deal, doesn’t it?”

  “Indeed.”

  Smets relaxed somewhat. “And the last bodyguards to cross your father, my lady . . . they were hanged.”

  Once they’d emerged onto the street, Viv could breathe again. She had much to work through—diamonds and violence and her maddening husband.

  “You did that on purpose.”

  They resumed a walk that was, to all outward appearances, perfectly artless. “Yes, I did. But I would count the encounter as a win, wouldn’t you?”

  “Divide and conquer.”

  “Naturally,” he said with a glib smile.

  Initially she had been upset at his condescension, with the decision to trust him coming after a silently fought battle. But no matter what he had been before, Miles would not jeopardize their chances.

  “Good. Then what concessions did you wrest from Mr. Smets?”

  His shrug was that of a bored gentleman. Strange how she kept forgetting that he was one. “You’ll have the run of the place. Learn what you can. Just refrain from appearing too competent. I can only throw him off the trail so long. Show off that capitalist intellect of yours too frequently and you’ll need more than simpering smiles to misdirect him again.”

  “He wasn’t taking me seriously.” She stopped. Rather than stall foot traffic along the sidewalk, she approached a dressmaker’s window and affected perusing its frilly wares. “But why do you? Take me seriously, that is?”

  Miles stood at her side, merely a man with his wife as they took in the selection. “You threatened to leave me once,” he said, his voice oddly airy. “Do you remember that time?”

  Memories rose up to flutter like caged birds attempting flight. “Yes, I do. The night you were so intoxicated that you slept in the gutter outside our town house.”

  “And I was there to greet your friends when they called in the morning.” He sounded amused, but a quick glance revealed that the tendons along his jaw had tightened. Rather than conceal, the bristles of his stubble accentuated that small tick. “I imagine my behavior must have mortified you.”

  Was that an apology? The shivering relief in her stomach whispered that it might have been. “It did. And I said I would leave you if it happened again.”

 
; “It never happened again, but you left anyway.”

  “For other reasons. Learning where you’d slept after the Saunders’ ball, for example.”

  “It wasn’t what you think.”

  “A pity you were too intoxicated to explain.”

  “Granted.” He cracked his thumb knuckle against his palm. “But the point remains, Vivie. I take you very seriously.”

  “I asked that you refrain from calling me that.”

  “You asked, yes.”

  “Miles.” She stared through the window, her gaze fixed on a hem of Swiss lace. But her neck was flushed and her heart raced. “Why are you doing this? Truly? You know how it will be when we’ve accomplished our goal.”

  “You looked at that diamond—the obscene, monstrous one—and I saw your brain working. All of those calculations and possibilities. That’s the enthusiasm I was talking about.”

  Her enthusiasm. Only Miles could set her alight with dread and shame and anticipation by using a single word. He had never been so two-fisted with her before: one hand stroking her pride with his confidences and esteem, the other hand reaching beneath her skirts. He was a much crueler version of the man he’d been in London.

  She would do well to remember that, no matter their shared purpose.

  “So you will have your way while it’s still yours to have?”

  “I’ve always enjoyed when we’re in agreement,” he said. “I hear tell that helps make a marriage happy.” He caught her chin and tilted her face away from the store display. “I haven’t had a drink since leaving New York. I miss my cigars like I miss rain. And soon I’ll enter the Kimberley Club and refuse both vices—repeatedly, I’d wager, and to the detriment of my perceived manhood.” His nostrils flared around each measured inhale. “And you insist on appreciating my reasons? It’s all very simple, really. Shall I remind you?”

  Viv nodded as an excuse to wrench away her chin. But he’d stolen her words, numbed her tongue, shattered her capacity for argument. She could only stare into his earthen eyes, where fury and lust roiled together in a primitive dance.

  He was going to kiss her. Middle of the afternoon. A public thoroughfare. Her back against a dressmaker’s storefront. And she didn’t care.

  Head angled, he blocked out the sun and shadowed her gaze. For the briefest moment she could see into him, through him, as if all his secrets were hers to read. All she found there was desire. For her. A giddy rush shot up from her toes. She felt charged with electricity when their lips finally met.

  Viv’s moan was instantaneous. Wanting turned to having in just that short span. Firm and patient, he was a dream lover made real. His tongue slipped along the line of her bottom lip and urged her to part for him. Open to him. She did, welcoming that gratifying invasion and the sudden shock of his taste. Hot, masculine—he breathed and pulsed and feasted, just as she did.

  Strong fingers enveloped her wrists and held them fast at her sides. How had he known? How had he suspected that her next impulse was to dig her fingers into his sun-touched hair and drag him closer? She wanted his chest crushed to hers, their bodies acting out every depraved whim. Yet he kept her hands immobile. Only mouths in this kiss, this silent war.

  So she gave it all she had. Diving more deeply, Viv luxuriated in the banquet of textures—the slick inside of his lower lip, the rough surface of his tongue, the hard scrape of his teeth.

  But then he was gone.

  Back straight and tall, he held his jaw at such a disdainful angle. Lust still sparked in his dark eyes, as did an animosity that she would’ve expected to see reflected in her own. His deep, shuddering exhale did as much to stoke her feminine fires as had his kiss. He was raging inside. Just who was the winner of this particular encounter? Viv could no longer tell. All she knew was that the hollow between her legs ached to be filled, yearning for the satisfaction Miles had always been able to provide.

  But the hollow in her heart knew any such relief would only be temporary.

  “Vivie, my darling,” he said, his voice low and jagged, “you have twenty-nine days.”

  Ten

  After his first formal supper with Viv, Miles decided to forestall dining together. He wanted no more part of forced conversations and averted eyes. Kissing her had been just as astonishing as he remembered. No, more so. He couldn’t recall many times they had kissed without alcohol staining his tongue.

  Now he had twenty-six days to earn her trust. And at that moment, he didn’t trust himself to keep his hands where they needed to be. What a torture, this task of not touching. If that was what dining together meant, then he would kindly decline. Permanently. He’d rather skin himself with a butter knife and make Viv watch.

  That evening he intended to take supper at the Kimberley Club. He and Adam strode along the plank wood walkway.

  “There is a logic to it, isn’t there, my lord?”

  The setting sun took the day’s warmth with it, as autumn overtook summer. “What’s that?”

  Adam grinned. “The walking.”

  “What was it Wordsworth said? ‘A respite to this passion, I paced on with brisk and eager steps.’ “

  “Wordsworth never walked in Cape Colony after dark.”

  Adam eyed the city’s secretive corners, where bold, wild dogs slunk in from the desert to forage along the outskirts of town. Birds added their melodies to the air, and in the far distance, the grunting call of a large animal sent a strange shiver up Miles’s forearms.

  “A rhinoceros?” he asked. “Or perhaps it’s one of those massive wildebeests that put Spanish bulls to shame.”

  “Or a lion.”

  “Nonsense. Although, there is a certain thrill to living in a place where being eaten is an actual possibility.”

  Adam grimaced. “Thrill isn’t the word I’d use.”

  Young shadows stretched sideways across the road. Soon the changing shift at the Hole would provide an exchange of men—diggers going home, guards heading down to work—but few other people walked after dark.

  “Let’s call my impulse toward exercise a fair alternative to pugilism.”

  His quirking grin was all too predictable, but Miles never held that against his manservant. From Adam, predictability was like having a firm, steady wall at his back. Dependable and unflinching. “Feeling the urge to punch something, my lord?”

  “Kicking would be fine, too.”

  The urge had raged within him for weeks, like a lad throwing a wild tantrum. And why not? After all, he could do just short of murder and still retain his title. Kimberley could take nothing from him, while providing the unpredictable vigor England never had.

  His rebellion of choice was to flaunt what so many others yearned to acquire. In London, that commodity had been respectability. Here, where fortunes could literally be picked up off the ground, he possessed what so many rich entrepreneurs envied: heritage. A noble bloodline. And connections as thick as a wall of ivy. So he paid little heed to neatness, and he walked—but not to become the talk of Kimberley. Let them try to negotiate with a man who seemed capable of wasting so much. Then they would never grasp what he truly valued.

  “And my role tonight, my lord?”

  “Eyes and ears, as always. If the disparity between my appearance and my status is any indication, I assume that the major players will not be readily apparent. Which of these fat cats has a wallet to match his talk and reputation? And which sly snakes are waiting to strike? That’s what we must learn, and quickly.”

  A faint trace of sweat lined his collar when he arrived, the only proof of his ungentlemanly mode of transport. The large, rather exotic club, with its high gates and wraparound verandah glowing with a dozen gas lamps, looked particularly ostentatious. Most buildings in Kimberley admitted that the plateau’s harsh conditions would be their eventual ruin. Not this one. Its girth alone proclaimed that it was a thing of wealth, grandeur, and permanence.

  “Adam, do you have any idea how much money is at stake in this venture?”

&nb
sp; “No, my lord.”

  “Just over two hundred thousand pounds sterling.”

  Adam’s pale blue eyes widened, then he whistled low and long. “And here I thought you were just in it for her.”

  Cutting his manservant a sharp look, Miles fought a grimace. “No need to be that bold with your counsel. But yes, Vivienne figures into my intentions, just as her maid figures into yours.” A grin was easy to indulge upon seeing Adam’s amazement. Rarely had Miles been in a position to take the patient man by surprise. “You’ll earn five percent of whatever I do, which means you can marry young Chloe in high style, if that’s what you want.”

  “Your word, my lord?”

  “My word,” he said, offering his hand. “Now go find what dirt lurks beneath all this frippery.”

  With two fingers to his brow in a mock salute, Adam strode on ahead where he would join the other valets for gossip, gambling, and cheap gin. The perfect place to learn what even Miles could not.

  Carriages came and went outside the entrance gate, disgorging men in all their evening glory. Miles observed their arrivals from his place across the street, momentarily donning the cloak of anonymity he’d worn at the way station. As on that day, he prepared to do battle.

  In the coolness of the fading day, Viv stood in her so-called garden and surveyed the work that needed to be done. Must everything in Kimberley be such a tremendous challenge? But after the many shocks and surprises she had endured since disembarking at Cape Town, she was happy to be back among familiar tasks.

  This certainly wasn’t her garden in New York. Would wisteria grow here? Or lilac? She wanted blooming flowers and fragrant scents, but she hardly knew where to begin. What would grow in this climate? Perhaps the town’s only bookshop, which she had visited to purchase industry trades and newspapers from New York and London, would have a guide to local flora and fauna. From what she’d observed, however, activities that didn’t pertain to mining held little interest for the citizens of Kimberley. The entire population was obsessed.

  She felt on the verge of joining them. Learning about the native environment might take the edge off her rabid thirst for answers. She had seen a small antelope-like creature only a few minutes before, and bugs of all kinds roamed the soil. Especially spiders. Which were useful? Harmless? Poisonous?