Gambled Away: A Historical Romance Anthology

by Rose Lerner

  His gentle, fluttery, shy Daphne was trapped by a monster. She’d been waiting four weeks for her brother to come rescue her. She’d held out. That was courage he hadn’t known she possessed.

  “Daphne hasn’t asked, has she? No partridges and sugar cakes for her.” He controlled the berserker madness thundering in his brain. Made himself sit like a rock while his heart pounded and his mouth went dry.

  “Not yet.” Lazarus was amused. Maybe he always played with his victims’ family as much as with the women. “She’s not starving, you know. There’s plenty of food if she wants to eat. It’s a free choice. What would be the point of it otherwise?”

  “She’s done nothing to deserve this.”

  “You think she hasn’t?” Lazarus cocked his head lazily. “Maybe you don’t know your sister as well as you think.”

  “I know my sister.” Carefully, he unclenched his fists. “What do you want for her ransom?”

  “Two hundred pounds.” Lazarus smiled at his reaction. “Are we bargaining? Then make it two hundred guineas. This is the quality market. We speak in guineas here.”

  “That’s a lot of money.” He kept his voice neutral. The space that separated him from Lazarus was just a distance, not an invitation to pull a knife and leap forward.

  “You can afford it,” Lazarus said.

  His men were already gathering in London. Ahmed, Mahboob Ali, Jamshid, Salah. Tomorrow or the next day he could come back and take this shabby mansion apart, brick by brick. Tonight, he had to find out where Daphne was kept, where the guards patrolled, where all these doors and corridors led. He’d need to draw a map for his men.

  Or with luck, he wouldn’t fight at all. He’d seen too many vicious little skirmishes in the dry hills of the East. Fragile, valuable things got broken when men fought.

  A faint rattling meant the Frenchwoman was back. She carried a wide, well-polished silver tray with all the accouterments for making tea. One of the swarm of feral children followed her, holding a hot kettle well away from his body, watching it carefully.

  Lazarus made a lazy indication. The tray should go beside him on the table, next to the brandy.

  Hawker said, “Tea. As you love me, Aimée, pour me tea. I’m perishing from the lack of it.”

  “You don’t deserve any.” She set the heavy tray in place, her shoulders and arms full of matter-of-fact strength. “You didn’t have to bring a man like this inside. You could have sent him away and saved us all considerable trouble.”

  She measured tea from a caddy into the pot and closed the case. She poured water, gravely intent, graceful, her ritual as perfect as the ceremony performed in any parlor in this city.

  The tea service was Sèvres. His aunt kept one much like it displayed behind glass. Like the china, Aimée was impeccably genuine. She’d been raised in luxury, whatever she’d come to now.

  Are you my pathway into this house? Can I bribe or blackmail you? What can I offer you to help me rescue my sister?

  Lazarus watched her also. He said softly, “Aimée, tell him his sister’s not being raped.”

  She said, “Your sister’s not being raped. Not by any of the men in this house. Not by Lazarus. If she was kidnapped a virgin, she’s still a virgin.”

  Strange to hear words like rape and virgin from a woman whose English held the accent of an aristocrat of the ton.

  He said, “You could be lying.”

  “I could be lying,” she agreed. She set the lid back on the teapot.

  “Would you? Lie?”

  “If Lazarus told me to, I would. I just wouldn’t do it very well. If he wants lies told he gives the job to Hawker.”

  “I ’ave me unique areas of expertise,” Hawker said without resentment.

  Four cups had come into the room on the tray, one facing up, three turned down. She arranged them in a curving row, left to right, set the strainer, and poured into the first cup.

  She took no joy in her perfect performance. Her lips were set hard. One intense, sharp glance escaped in his direction. Then she looked resolutely down to the business at hand.

  He could guess what was going on. As a young, very stupid lieutenant he’d visited whorehouses with groups of his rowdy friends, getting robbed with some regularity and narrowly escaping worse consequences. He knew the tricks of brothels. This was one of the classics.

  “Do you take sugar?” She addressed the sugar bowl, but the question was directed toward him.

  “Milk,” he said. “Two lumps of sugar.”

  “I can give you sugar. I was hoping you wouldn’t ask for milk.”

  “He ain’t fussy,” Hawker said. “One clue is the ungodly reek coming off ’is togs.”

  “Only the overcoat, I think.” Aimée dropped sugar lumps into the cup and watched them melt. She stirred, taking her time about it. When she brought the tea to him she carried it like a volatile explosive and she handed it over without the slightest touch from hand to hand, without meeting his eyes, without one sliver of a smile.

  The tea was black as ink, the better to hide any suspicious residue in the bottom. Whatever had been added was probably a liquid anyway. Probably put in the cup before it was brought into the room.

  How many whores in how many whorehouses had tried to drug him? There was an almost comforting familiarity about this.

  He pretended to sip while Aimée prepared tea for Lazarus—four lumps of sugar. Hawker—one lump. Then herself. No sugar in her own cup. She didn’t drink though. She stood with her hands around the teapot, looking down at it as if it had said something interesting. She was a woman of elegant and precise stillnesses.

  Hawker held his cup between his hands. Lazarus had given his back to Aimée almost at once and she’d put it back on the tray. The bodyguard didn’t get offered tea, and didn’t seem to expect it.

  None of them looked in his direction.

  The tiny taste he allowed himself was ever so slightly bitter with something besides tea. No telling what exotic drugs a man like Lazarus had access to.

  It was time to dispose of the tea before they noticed he wasn’t drinking it. He set his cup and saucer on the arm of his chair and stood to remove his ragged beggar’s coat. Any sensible man would want to get out of it. It wasn’t just soaked with rain. It stank.

  He lifted the cup inside the shelter of the overcoat. Poured the tea inside, against the lining. Put the cup back in its saucer.

  Then he folded the coat and let it fall to the floor beside his chair. It was done.

  He sat down, loose and comfortable, and pretended to be drinking tea. How soon before they’d expect him to get drowsy? Why did Lazarus want to drug him? What did they plan for him?

  He’d find out, wouldn’t he? He said, “Let’s talk.”

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Black John, who was strong enough to carry two men up the stairs, had no problem with this large captain. She opened the door with the key and John rolled him out across the bed as if he were a bolt of fabric.

  Gideon Gage was thoroughly insensible. His eyes were open a slit with only the whites visible behind the lids. She set the candle on the stand beside the bed and lifted the man’s legs further up onto the coverlet so he wouldn’t hang over the side of the bed. She was glad to discover the smell of beggar had come away along with his coat. His natural smell was the familiar one of leather and wet wool and soap.

  “I’ll get back to Lazarus,” John said. “It’s not safe to leave him on his own.” He stayed another minute looking down at their captive. “Took a while for the drug to hit.”

  “He’s a big man.”

  “And heavier than he looks.” Here, between the two of them, John let himself look worried. “What the devil game is Lazarus playing?”

  “God knows.” She wiped her palms on the skirt of her dress. “Life is never dull. I’d better strip the fellow of knives and guns and cudgels and battleaxes and so on. Are you going to get any sleep?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Come downstair
s when you’ve finished here. We aren’t through the night yet.” John closed the door firmly behind him as he left.

  Gideon Gage lay across the coverlet, arms outstretched. His face was free of anger but he looked just as dangerous as ever. A testament to a truly ruthless character, she supposed.

  She’d never searched a man to the skin before. There was always a new experience waiting round the corner.

  She sat on the bed beside him and laid her hand on his chest. It was a way to make certain he was breathing deeply and evenly under the drug, of course. That was her excuse. In truth, she wanted to touch him. Gideon Gage was different from the men she lived among. She had never wanted to touch any of them.

  She slid fingers across the textures of his face. He was smooth on his forehead and warm to the touch, like cloth that has been lying in the sun. His cheek was gritty where the beard was coming out in prickles. The prominent ridge of his nose was a slope with a bump in the middle, all at odds with the seriousness of every other feature. His eyebrows were bushy to look at, but soft to the touch.

  He looked exactly like somebody who’d stride in from the night to confront Lazarus alone.

  “You are a hero, even if a foolish one.” She had been smoothing his eyebrows from center out to the edge because she was free to do so. He would never know. She drew her hand back and said, very softly, “I wish someone like you had come to rescue me from Lazarus, back at the beginning.“

  He was also a man who’d go armed when he embarked on an adventure of that sort. She had her work cut out for her.

  “We will start with your boots, being methodical about this.” She turned on the bed and knelt beside him. “This is not the footwear of the rich,” she told him. His boots had walked miles, hard miles, before they strolled their way into Lazarus’s house. “But they are not what a beggar would wear either. You would have been exposed as a fraud in one minute if it hadn’t been so dark on the streets.”

  She ran her fingers around the top of the closest boot and found a slender little throwing knife tucked inside. “These are heavily armed boots. Did you plan to stab Lazarus? I do not think so. That would be stupid and you are not a stupid man.”

  She received no answer, yea or nay. “I have a friend who tells me one cannot carry too many knives. That is Hawker, whom you have met. He is a boy of many aphorisms, most of them menacing, though some are merely improper.”

  Gideon—she had firmly decided to think of him as Gideon while she was undressing him—made a snort in his sleep. A sort of emphatic snore, like the sound a mastiff dog might make.

  She tugged at his boot and it did not budge. Braced her foot against the frame of the bed and pulled. “This is not easy. I wish Lazarus would just give you Daffy and send you on your way.”

  There was no answer. She would have to carry both the warp and weft of this conversation.

  She squirmed around to straddle him across his thigh, taking care where she put her knees. Men were foolishly sensitive in some parts. She knew all about men. Not from her barely remembered, brief, horrible encounter with the smugglers, but from her friends among the whores. They were informative in so many ways. No girlish ignorance survived life in a flash ken.

  “We will assume a position of mutual indelicacy, you and I,” she said. “Excuse me.”

  When she stretched upon him to take the heel of his boot in her hands, her skirt and shift rucked up her legs. His thigh emerged into her consciousness as wide, hard muscle with long bone underlying. “This is not… unpleasant.” She took a slow, considering breath. “Wrong in every way, but not unpleasant.”

  Gideon breathed deep and evenly under her. She felt this as a small boat feels the waves of the sea, if a small boat were aroused by the sea and worried about that.

  “In another place and time, in another bed, I would enjoy this,” she said. “Not with you, though.” The skin of her inner thighs slid against the fine wool of his breeches. She felt the tug of buttons and seams at his knee. “I should be with a Frenchman of Paris, a merchant, a skilled craftsman. Someone gentler and more reasonable.”

  She was aware of his body, emphatic and determined, filled with a masculine tension. Even like this, even flung flat and unknowing with the drug, he was wholly male.

  “It should not be you,” she repeated.

  But she did not leave him or go away from this sensation or become sensible. Fire and sugar sweetness built inside her and she did nothing to stop this.

  Enticement spread through her, raced along her nerves, plucked at all the intimate, secret places of pleasure. She was overwhelmed by the impulse to press close and closer to him. To rub her skin against him. She was becoming nothing but her own awareness of the uncoiling warmth inside.

  I should not want him.

  She whispered, “You are here and the man I would have loved is not. He will never come for me. Never at all.” She took a breath. “It is just as well. I have no shy, innocent secrets to share with him.”

  She set her hands to the coverlet and pushed herself away from him. “You are, in fact, exceptionally unsuitable, though I admit you are quite nice to share a bed with and I am sure many women have told you this.”

  She wriggled into a better angle of attack and encountered—

  He was aroused. Unmistakably. She brushed against him and he stirred there, shockingly. Suddenly his hand was on her buttock.

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  Gideon had been appreciating the woman’s arse for a while, watching under half-closed lids. Sooner or later she’d twist up against the cockstand he’d swelled up for her and that would be the end of this interlude.

  She was holding an interesting conversation with herself when she stopped suddenly and froze still. He surrendered to impulse and stroked the pretty roundness he’d been admiring.

  She gave a strangled yelp, spilled away from him, tumbled off the bed, and hit the floor with a thud.

  He landed on top of her instantly. That was another thump they’d hear downstairs. He flipped her over on her back and held her under him, pinned down, with his hand hard across her mouth.

  They stayed like that. Him, using his weight to hold her down. Her, stiff as a board, quivering beneath him. She didn’t fight. Her breath was hot and rapid against his hand where he held her voice in, but she wasn’t trying to scream.

  She’d gone stark white. Her eyes were filled with a mad commotion of thought, the pupils expanded to the outermost limit. She had so much going on inside her head she probably wasn’t seeing him at all.

  Thirty or forty men in this house would come if she called, yet she kept silent, panting against his fingers.

  That was a puzzle. Definitely a puzzle.

  He said, “I won’t have to terrify you into silence, will I?” He uncovered her mouth. “Why not?”

  “Why not what?” She ran her tongue over her lips. “Get off me.”

  “Not yet. Why aren’t you yelling your head off?”

  She closed her eyes and didn’t move. She might have been listening for an alarm raised somewhere in the house. For pounding feet headed in this direction. For shouted questions. But there was no sign anyone had heard their scuffle.

  Without opening her eyes, she said, “Let me sit up.”

  “I think not.”

  “I’m not going to run off. You’re heavy and my hands are cramping.”

  That was reasonable. He didn’t trust reasonable from her at this moment, but it was all he had to work with.

  He set his arms on the floor on either side of her and hoisted up a little on his elbows to take the weight off her. He was struck with a hundred memories of lifting himself up this way so he wouldn’t crush the woman he was making love to. He liked looking down into the face of someone he was pleasing.

  He wasn’t pleasing Aimée. He wasn’t frightening her either. She was all narrowed, considering, angry attention, deciding what to do about the situation.

  That made two of them, wondering what to
do next.

  The whole of her, tense as steel, supple as a cat, pulsed under him. Through several layers of clothing, his and hers, he was aware of breasts and legs, a flat belly, the upcurve of her hip. The possibilities of this position were myriad and interesting. He wasn’t going to take advantage of any of them.

  Taking an enemy outpost, sometimes you break in the front with guns firing. Sometimes you sneak in the back gate, carrying knives. Sometimes you parley.

  He said, “Can we talk? Just talk?”

  She said, “No,” and after a minute, “Yes.”

  “A woman of decision.” He released her and sat up. On the floor of this shabby bedroom, they considered one another with wary interest.

  “You drugged my tea,” he said. “Why?”

  “Lazarus ordered it.”

  “You do whatever he tells you?”

  A look of scornful impatience was the answer to that.

  “Why did he want me drugged?”

  She shrugged. “It is difficult to exaggerate how little I know of what goes on in Lazarus’s mind. One grain of wheat in a field. One fish in a school of herring. One—”

  “I get the point.”

  “Life would be considerably simpler if you’d drunk that tea.” She frowned, making a little fine-grained crease between her eyes.

  He could have set his lips there, on her forehead. She was that close. Her skin would taste like worry and plotting. “Simpler for you,” he said. “Tell me why you’re not yelling for help.”

  “My reasons. Nothing to do with you.” She chewed her lip, sorting through various schemes, obviously. She came to some decision. “I am the answer to all your problems, Monsieur Gideon.”

  “Are you?” He didn’t trust that friendly voice.

  “We are in agreement. You want to get out of here. I want you to leave.”

  “Not without my sister.”