by The Charmer
The carpets were a bit too bright, the portraits all in the style of the last decade, the fireplaces a tad too obvious in scale.
“Almost, but not quite, Louis.” Collis grinned. Moving quickly through the house, he found a little-used room with a back garden window view. He unlatched the window with a quick motion. The likelihood that this latch would be checked before he came back was quite slim. He looked down into the garden. Lovely. There was even a trellis near the window.
He returned to the room he’d been assigned. While waiting for his host, Collis took a halfhearted look about the parlor. It was a very standard sort of chamber, perhaps a bit less tasteful than most. It seemed Mrs. Wadsworth had a taste for the baroque.
A maidservant bustled in, her cap-covered head bent over her burden of loaded tea tray. Collis scarcely registered her at first, until she glanced up at him past the lace edge of her mobcap. Hazel eyes widened in evident surprise.
In a few brisk strides, Rose had one hand wrapped about his arm and the other pushing shut the open door. She towed him to the opposite end of the room and to the hearth. Only then did she speak. “What the bloomin’ hell are you doing?”
“Having tea,” he said. His first surprise had worn off. He grinned. “And yourself?”
“Damn it, Collis!”
Her eyes flashed green fire. He badly, abruptly wanted to kiss her, but her stubborn chin was raised high. She’d likely smack him right back, and this was neither the time nor the place for him to get into a wrestling match with his tempting nemesis.
Then he froze, realization striking hard. She was in the house. First.
Damn.
She didn’t smile, but the tiny quirk of the corner of her mouth was all the more riveting for it. “I’ve been here since before dawn,” she said. “You’ve been here for perhaps…two minutes?”
He couldn’t answer her. His jaw seemed cemented with dismay, which only grew worse when her gaze softened.
“Collis, don’t take it hard.” She leaned forward in sudden eagerness, which eased her grasp on his arm somewhat. “Oy, that means I’ve won and you must obey!”
Rose’s breath caught as Collis stepped closer, using his height to loom over her. He had the additional advantage of being deadly attractive. It truly wasn’t fair.
Nothing new there. Besides, this round she had the upper hand. So she merely cocked her head at him and waited for him to back away once more. To her surprise, the irritated flair in his gray eyes suddenly shifted to something equally hot and far more threatening.
Collis was having a bit of trouble remembering why he was riled when all he could think of was the scent of her hair. His body remembered the feel of her beneath him all too well, having been reminded in his dreams last night. Supple, energetic bundle that she was…would she be a lively partner? Would they pass hours away in happy animal coupling? Or would she be chill and slow to warm, only to explode at his hands at last?
He stepped closer, then again. His fingers came up to trace the neckline of her maid’s livery, only allowing the tips to touch the silken skin just below. Her eyes flickered away from his, then back. Her hand came up to cover his, but instead of pushing it away, she slid it a few inches down and pressed his palm over the mound of her small, full breast.
The shock of her beneath his hand sent Collis into a full second of immobility. She filled his palm with yielding, satisfying woman. God, he wanted her so much—
“No, sor, playse!” she cried out abruptly, her common accent shrill and panicked. “Oi’m a good girl, Oi am!”
Collis snatched his hand back and stepped away from her in shock. She ducked under his arm and recoiled a few steps, holding the empty tea tray protectively before her face and emitting small terrified sobs.
A light laugh came from behind Collis. He turned to see Louis Wadsworth in the doorway with a tolerant grin on his face. “Well, Tremayne, one can’t fault you for speed from the gate! I can see I won’t be able to let you alone for a minute.”
Collis forced a lazy smile to his face. “Sorry, Wadsworth. Forgot myself.”
Louis shrugged. “No matter. Will you be long then?”
Collis managed not to snarl at the man’s careless attitude toward his dependent. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be all done in a moment.” Louis grinned again and left, pointedly closing the door behind him.
Collis turned to Rose. “What kind of master knowingly leaves a young woman alone with a man with evil on his mind?”
She dropped her fearful pose and sighed. “You really are naïve, Collis. Why should he object, when he has a long history of accosting his own dependents?”
“What?”
“Hush. He’ll hear you. Now, hold this.” She plunked the tray into his hands. Then she pulled her cap askew, tugged several strands of hair down over her face, unbuttoned the top three buttons of her dress behind her neck, and pulled the neckline of her uniform to twist slightly over her breasts. Collis pulled his attention away from those breasts with difficulty. He knew why she’d done what she had.
It didn’t change the fact that one brief touch had ignited his desire like a torch to paper. He gave his head a slight shake. It had been far, far too long.
After briskly damaging her respectability, Rose took the tea tray back from him and turned toward the door. “That ought to be long enough, don’t you think?”
Collis ignored the slur on his masculinity for the moment. “Rose, we need to talk about this.”
“I agree. Make your farewell as soon as you can. Meet me behind the mews at dusk. We can talk then.” She gave an extra tug to her bodice. Creamy flesh welled. “I’ll just rush out crying, shall I? He’ll be directly across the hall. I wouldn’t want him to miss anything,” she said with sour satisfaction.
Distracted by her casual exposure, Collis merely turned to watch her go. Just before she touched the latch, she looked back over her shoulder with a frown. “That was your injured hand that you—that I used, wasn’t it? The one that cannot feel?”
Though his entirely healthy and sensitive palm still burned from the softness of her breast, Collis nodded soberly. “Absolutely.”
With a quick nod of relief, she was gone, running sobbing from the room and down the hall. Collis took a tip from her and twisted his waistcoat a bit, then ran a hand through his hair to disarrange it. It wasn’t until he was across the hall, greeting Louis Wadsworth with a satisfied smile, that he realized he was now following orders. Her orders.
Damn, but she was good.
Chapter Nine
Collis was waiting behind the mews well before dusk. He’d spent a half hour too long in Louis Wadsworth’s company, dawdling over sherry and talk, before he finally declared another engagement for the evening.
At first it hadn’t been too bad, as conversations go. Louis was an intelligent fellow, if given to waiting for his guest to express an opinion before actually daring one of his own.
Not that Collis had done anything but toe the conservative party line. Hell, even Dalton would have choked at hearing some of the stuffy declarations he’d made tonight in the interests of drawing Louis out.
Then he’d abruptly realized that Louis was very subtly and skillfully questioning him. That had been disconcerting, to say the least. Why would the head of a family “friendly to the Liars” be so interested in the doings of the Prince Regent and the Prime Minister?
Especially when Louis claimed to know Liverpool so well himself. He’d even proudly shown off his father’s posthumous award for allegiance, received by Louis directly from His Royal Highness George IV. It didn’t seem to Collis as if Louis needed any help at all moving upward socially. He was already very nearly atmospheric.
Yet, for all his high connections, there was something about Louis that left Collis ill at ease. Perhaps it was simply his disregard for his dependents. To allow a guest to molest a housemaid was contrary to everything Collis believed in. To encourage it, yet?
Simon must not know this about
Louis Wadsworth, Collis decided. Simon was well known for his stance on taking advantage of women. But Louis Wadsworth might very likely know something about him. It hadn’t occurred to Collis that Louis might know of the connection between Simon and Dalton—and therefore to him….
No. It really wasn’t likely. Simon had nothing to do with Dalton in public, and Clara and Agatha did all their socializing in the secret rooms of the club.
All in all, not what he’d expected from a candy-coated test assignment. Simon was up to something here. Collis leaned against the stone wall surrounding the back garden of the Wadsworth house, studying the problem.
The garden gate next to him opened without the merest squeak. A dark shape, barely discernible in the growing dusk, stepped through, carefully and soundlessly closing the gate behind.
Collis couldn’t resist. He clapped a heavy hand on her shoulder, intoning, “You there!” in a rough accent.
A moment later, he was lying breathless on the grimy cobbles of the alley, looking up at the pale oval of Rose’s face peering at him from the depths of her shawl. She straightened, then kicked him lightly in the ribs with the toe of her shoe. “Don’t do that!”
She held out her hand. Collis took her offer, for his breath hadn’t entirely returned to his lungs. “One day, I’ll learn,” he gasped. He stood, grinning down at her. “Unless you want to keep tossing me on my back?” He leered playfully. “Or I could practice on you.”
She didn’t retort sharply, as she usually did when he teased her so presumptuously. Instead, she took his hand and dragged him farther behind the odd stacked crates and barrels that always seemed to end up lining the alleys of London. “I only have a moment before the cook will miss me,” she hissed at him.
Unseated by her refusal to engage, Collis groped for a way to deal with this new, brisk Rose. “Aren’t you taking this all a bit seriously? It’s not as if you truly work here.”
“I don’t know about you, Collis, but I am indeed working at the moment.” She regarded him closely. “What are you wearing?”
Collis spread his hands so she could see his version of the common man’s tailoring. “Something more appropriate for lurking in an alleyway. Do you like it? I nicked it from one of the grooms at Etheridge House.”
“You look…” Rose hesitated. He looked wonderful, actually. His broad shoulders filled out the rough jacket tightly, and the breeches weren’t nearly as baggy on him as they ought to be. Aristocrat he might be, but no one could accuse Collis Tremayne of being a pasty weakling. In the workingman’s kit he looked manly and slightly dangerous and—this was not a welcome thought—entirely attainable.
For one eternal fraction of an instant, her heart brought forth a full-blown fantasy of a world where this man before her was an ordinary man. In the blink of an eye, she saw them happy and poor and mad for each other, with fat laughing babies crawling underfoot in their humble, cramped, blissful abode.
Then reality snapped back into place with a sickening jolt and she promptly buried that fantasy in a plot marked “Things That Will Never Be.”
“You lost,” she said slowly. He wasn’t going to like this. “You lost the wager, Collis. Go home.” She only had to get rid of him for the night. So far, the cook was working her like a drudge and watching her every move. She still had not had the chance to do more than learn the lay of the house. Yet soon the staff would go to sleep, readying themselves for another early day. Then she could begin her search. Just a few midnight hours—that’s all she would need.
Then, tomorrow she would confess everything, to Collis and to the Liars. After she had her evidence.
He grinned. She could see the flash of his smile in the dimness. “What, and let you have all the fun?”
“I’m quite serious. You shook on the wager. I won fair and square. My orders are for you to give me one day’s head start. Go home. Go drink with your highborn friends. But tonight is mine.”
He straightened to his full height. She couldn’t see him well, but she could imagine his face. “We are supposed to work together, remember?”
Rose folded her arms. She had to get rid of him. “What is the difficulty with giving me one night? It isn’t as though you could get back in tonight. You’ve already been a guest, so you can’t very well pose as a servant now.”
He only looked intrigued. “Well, actually, I think that could be done—”
Rose could faintly hear the cook’s voice shouting for her through the window of the kitchen. Her urgency surfaced as annoyance. “Collis, no. Now keep to your word! Are you a gentleman or are you just a rakehell?”
She felt the shot go deep, felt it in her own belly as he flinched at her words. Drat. She hadn’t meant to wound him.
Vengeance tonight. Apologies tomorrow. She tightened her shawl over her shoulders. “Now go home,” she ordered coolly, “and let me work.”
With that, she turned back to Louis’s house, leaving Collis standing in the grimy, darkened alley.
The royal private quarters of Carlton House, situated beautifully on Pall Mall in the heart of all that was fine and aristocratic in London, were something to behold. When Prince George had designed the rooms, he’d given free reign to his trained eye and profound love of beauty and fine architecture.
Not to mention comfort. Collis lounged deeper into what had to be the single best drinking chair in all of Christendom. Apparently nothing was too good for the royal arse. Collis’s bones sighed in pleasure at the deep cushions meant for the gradually sinking posture imposed by the serious partaking of far, far too much superior wine.
At his feet was poised a small hassock, primed and ready for the moment when he was as nearly horizontal as a man could be without a girl and a bed.
Thinking of girls led one to think of breasts. That was fine. Collis had spent many happy hours of his life contemplating the divine miracle of breasts. Now of course, the thought of breasts led him to remember one certain breast in particular. One sweet, round, high breast that should have been altogether too small to be tempting. How could it be that it had felt so perfectly enticing in his hand?
And then of course, thoughts of that breast led one to wonder about the other half of the pair and what it would be like to see them, together, naked—to touch them both, together, naked—
Collis snorted into his wine, which really was too fine a vintage to deserve such treatment. Two breasts require two hands, don’t they?
“And then what did you do?”
Collis raised his glass to peer through the wine to see the fire flickering in its ruby depths. “I left. What else should I have done? She’d won by getting into the house first.”
His companion shook his head in amusement. “Giving up so easily? Pity. Seems a waste. What I would give for a chance to live so adventurously!”
Collis snorted. “Yes, I cannot imagine why everyone isn’t doing it.”
“I am referring to the excitement and danger of being a Crown spy. Beats the bloody hell out of my life, I’m sure.”
Collis slid his eyes sideways, too drunk and too lethargic to move his head. Time to check his companion’s mood. They were alone in the Prince’s private sitting room. The considerable cadre of menservants and royal attendants, some more highborn than Collis himself, had been summarily dismissed after supplying them with more wine than any two men should sanely drink.
Still, such intimacy with royalty came with problems of its own. It didn’t do to misinterpret the humor of George IV, Prince Regent and ruler of England.
Although Collis counted the Prince among his friends, George could be unpredictable. Half-filled with drunken ramblings, half with piercing insight, time spent with the Prince was rarely comfortable but always stimulating. Once very handsome, he had not aged well due to dissipation and overindulgence.
George was thought by most to be so vulgar as to be stupid, but Collis knew his friend to be a sensitive and intelligent man who had no compunction putting on his worst face when met with prudery a
nd prejudice. The fact that the prejudice was highly merited never seemed to bother the Prince one jot. He liked sleeping with women, he liked eating and drinking and gambling, and he saw no reason to not do all with enormous energy.
Perhaps Collis understood the Prince’s rebellion better than most, for he faced a very similar lot in life. Dalton Montmorency, the great Grand Oompah of Etheridge, might not cast a shadow as deep as a king’s, but Collis knew well the burden of being heir.
George would have been happiest working as an artist or architect, married to his dear Maria Fitzherbert, an ordinary man with extraordinary talents.
The Prince emitted an enormous belch. Yes, George was drunk, although not as drunk as Collis. George was eye-bright-and-restless drunk. Damn. Collis was sure the Prince had matched him swallow for swallow. He sat up and set aside his glass. Rubbing both hands over his face to hopefully rouse himself to matching alertness, he sighed. “I’m not the man I once was.”
George waved his glass airily. “Who said you ought to be? You were a poisonous little snot until you turned twenty-five. Vain and self-important. Now, you’re much more amusing. Life and humbling disfigurement have given a nicely dry twist to your personality, rather like a hint of sour lime. I much prefer it.”
“So happy to oblige.” The Prince’s offensive statement slid over Collis’s wine-soaked mind, leaving only the truth behind. But what of it? He’d once had every right to be proud and every reason to be vain, hadn’t he? Then he frowned. “You hardly spoke to me when I was twenty-five.”
The Prince shrugged. “Ergo the poisonous-snot comment.” He rested one gloriously clad leg on a hassock and propped his other across that knee to rub one stocking-clad foot. “I love those shoes, but they are bloody tight.”
