“Except for that.” Jack’s face was grim as the heavy red velvet curtain parted for Act I.
And yet, as he watched the expression on Beth’s face, he knew the risk they were taking was worth it. The girl was enthralled. Eyes shining, lips ever so slightly parted, she was borne away on the music, lost in a world of fantasy where Jack was unable to follow. So let Terence kill him, he would never regret this night. Though the men around them were still casting remarks, wondering which dancer Jack thought suitable for the boy. Or had he changed course, developing a taste for boys?
By the time the evening was over, Jack could only congratulate himself on refraining from knocking a few heads together. Beth truly didn’t seem to notice, for which he was infinitely grateful. Obviously, the child had selective hearing.
“May we go backstage? Dear, dear Jack, may we, please?”
Jack groaned, closed his eyes. He wanted out, away from this place. Suddenly, he had gone from uneasy to being assailed by the warning prickles he experienced just before a fight. There was danger here, something more than Terence’s wrath, but for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what it could be. “I’m sorry, child, we’re going home.”
Jack, her smiling, happy-go-lucky Jack, was so serious Beth closed her mouth over an automatic protest. Surely during her coming Season there would be another evening at the opera. Or perhaps Madame Rolande would perform at one of the ton events. London’s foremost prima donna was unlikely to abandon her devotees until the end of the Season.
When the footman opened the door on the closed carriage Jack had deemed appropriate for the occasion, a pair of flashing blue eyes lit up the night. “You may walk,” Terence O’Rourke said to Jack, “or take a hackney. Or jump into the Thames. I’ll speak with you later. Get in, Beth,” he ordered. “I’ll take you home.”
Beth squeezed Jack’s hand, kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It was a wonderful evening! Now go. I’ve been dealing with His Highness since I was born.”
Jack handed her in, shut the door with care, stepped back onto the curb, watching through narrowed eyes as the carriage pulled into the heavy bustle of traffic in front of the Opera House. Lord, but the fat was in the fire! There was something he was missing here. Something to do with why Terence and Tobias refused to take Beth to the opera . . . Still frowning, Jack straightened his top hat and set out in search of a hackney.
Beth had stopped making excuses for Jack, her words falling on deaf ears. The only sound from Terence had been a sharp hiss of breath when she’d admitted pestering Jack to take her backstage to the Green Room. From Terence’s expression, Beth was rather glad Jack had said no. As the carriage slowed to a stop, she peeked out the curtained window, expecting to see the familiar stone front of Brockman House. Instead . . . “Terence, where are we?” Beth demanded.
He got out and, waving away the footman, handed her down himself. Still silent, Terence offered his arm, led her up broad front steps into a foyer lit by a chandelier with hundreds of candles, each tiny fire sparking rainbows in a thousand crystals. Through one open door Beth saw finely dressed people indulging in games of chance. Through another, she saw a supper room, its long tables laden with food which probably tasted as fine as the artistry with which they were displayed. A third door revealed a crowd talking, laughing, drinking, the women—Beth’s eyes widened—the women far too close to the men, too clinging, too . . . In that moment Beth knew she was some place she should never be.
Terence nodded to the man Beth presumed was the majordomo. “We’ll go upstairs, Phipps. I trust there’s space available?”
“Of course, sir,” the man murmured. They followed his measured footsteps up the broad sweeping staircase and along a gallery until Phipps ushered them into a small private alcove. As he left them, the majordomo swept a fall of gold velvet curtains across the entrance to the room, shutting them into a private world of their own.
Beth eyed the intimate dining table, the delicate gold chairs, the cut velvet upholstery on the lounging sofa which took up the rear wall of the small room. In the space of a heartbeat she grew up by five years. “What is this place?” she demanded as Terence pulled out one of the gilt chairs.
“Sit and I’ll tell you.” Beth sat, her knees so weak she had no choice. Her courage, however, was still with her. Only her body had failed in her hour of need. Eyeing her best friend, the keeper of her heart, with a gaze nearly as sharp as his own, she challenged him once again. “Well?”
“This,” said Terence O’Rourke, “is the place headstrong little girls end up when they don’t pay attention to their elders. This, as you’ve so obviously guessed, is where bad men seduce innocent maidens. And some not so innocent,” he added in all fairness. “And, no, it’s not quite a brothel, but close enough for our purposes.”
“And what are our purposes, dear brother?” Beth taunted. There would never come a day when she was afraid of Terence O’Rourke. There’d been that one moment when she’d seen the lounging couch, but reason prevailed. This was Terence, and he was hers. Never would he hurt her.
But what she was hearing was far from reassuring.
“We’re going to talk . . . and drink, dear sister,” Terence informed her, deadly calm. “And I am going to show you how a man seduces a foolish girl of good family. How he smiles while refilling her glass, gazes into her eyes while he adds a drop or two of laudanum. How he tells her she’s beautiful, enchanting, quite the loveliest creature he’s ever known while his hand slides down her back, around her waist, moves up to plunder her breasts, then down to parts you’ve never thought about before.”
Chapter Four
Terence was wrong about the private parts, Beth thought, though she could never tell him so. Every sensitive inch of flesh, each hidden recess tingled when he was near. Her heart leapt into her throat, her stomach went hollow, and her brain turned to porridge. Seduce her with wine and wandering hands? All he had to do was lift an eyebrow, and she was his.
Phipps broke the spell, returning with a bottle of wine, goblets, cheese and thin wafers on a silver platter. Terence approved the wine, stared unwaveringly at Beth while the majordomo filled the glasses. Phipps bowed himself out, once again sliding the velvet curtains in place.
Beth sipped her wine, stared back at Terence over the top of her glass. “Why?” she challenged.
“I thought I had made myself clear. Foolish virgins need to be taught a lesson.”
Defiantly, Beth took a long swallow, licked errant drops from her lips. Terence blinked. Lord, he hadn’t known she had it in her!
“You were quite clear,” she replied coldly, setting down her wine glass with careful control. “Your present intentions were not the object of my question. I wish to know why you and Papa are so determined to snare a title? Why you are the fishermen, I the bait?”
All her life Beth had wanted to see Terence speechless. Reduced to incoherence. Previously, she had come closest the time she had asked him to tell her about men and woman and babies. When he’d curtly told her to seek out Miss Spencer, Beth had informed him she was quite sure Miss Tildy didn’t know, and would be mortified if asked. Terence had groaned, run his hands through his thick black hair, and stammered his way through the mysteries of life. Complete with grimly sketched diagrams which he had torn into tiny bits as soon as he saw by Beth’s shocked face that she had grasped the right of it. But somehow, tonight, when it seemed he was ready to finish her instruction, Beth felt no triumph in discovering she had shocked him to the core.
“I . . . I? What do you mean, I?” Terence snarled. “Are you daft, girl? It’s Tobias who wants a title. The ton can go hang for all I care.”
“Then why are you helping him?” Beth cried. Letting me go? Throwing me away? Was it presumptuous to think he cared? That the light of love she’d once seen in his eyes was mere brotherly affection, as Tildy so often tried to tell her?
Terence—playing for time, fighting to get back the control he’d lost—poured
himself a refill, topped up Beth’s glass. He drummed his long slender fingers on the small square table. “It would seem you need no lessons,” he said at last. “You’re already adept at deflating a man’s desires.”
“Do you have desires, Terence? I’ve never seen a sign of it.”
“And so you shouldn’t. You a fine virgin of seventeen and me a bastard Irishman ten years your senior. And a brother as well.”
“You’re not—”
“As far as the world’s concerned, I am. And there’s an end on it. You’re destined for great things, and I’ll not be the one to tell Tobias his grand schemes are not the same as mine. I owe him too much, and well you know it.”
“Coward!”
“Aye, that I am. And so are you, for he’d never force you. You made up your mind to go along with him, figuring you owe him. Come, girl, you know it’s true.”
She had agreed to her father’s schemes because Terence had rejected her, walked away as if he had not been her bright star since the day she was born. Even now, in this intimate setting when he was threatening to have her on that burgundy cut-velvet couch in seconds, she couldn’t tell if he truly cared or if he was merely performing his duty as chief bodyguard. Or was the love she suspected there, just waiting to be ignited?
But by what? If only she were older, more experienced . . .
If only her damnable pride didn’t keep her frozen to her chair, willing Terence to do something, fulfill his threats . . . love her as she had always dreamed love might be.
Deliberately, Beth raised her glass and drank. As she downed her third swallow in a row, the wine turned bitter. She kept on going. Terence’s fingers clamped over her wrist, forcing her hand down. The glass clattered onto the table, tilted. Deftly, Terence caught it with his free hand, ignoring the spill of wine which streamed across the table, dripping onto the thick carpeting beneath. Still clasping her wrist, he leaned toward her, carefully enunciating each word. “This is goodbye, Elizabeth Brockman. It’s unlikely Jack and I will be invited to the fine parties you’ll be attending. It’s not that we won’t be around, cheering you on, so to speak. And we’ll gladly take on anyone who doesn’t treat you as he ought. But it’s time for you to go into the world, find a destiny beyond what Tobias and I can give you. You’ll make him proud, girl. Nothing’s ever meant so much to him as this. So you’ll do it . . . and I’ll make the way as smooth as I can because that’s how it must be.”
Beth looked down at the fingers which bound her. Abruptly, Terence let go. Her breath caught on love as sharp as a dagger. “Did you ever love me, Terence?” she whispered. “Once upon a time, long ago?”
How he’d love to slip the leash, tell her about a love so strong he would give his soul for her. Sacrifice his long-held dreams, deny what every fiber of his being told him was right because he had to do what was best for his darling girl, his Beth. His love.
“Once upon a time I thought to enter the ton myself,” he admitted with cool finality, “but I grew up and now see the world as it truly is. As long as I handle the ton’s money, I am an employee, an upper servant, if you will. As Jack was, as his father’s estate manager.”
Beth drowned in the depths of those Irish blue eyes, now ice cold, unwavering, ruthless. “I understand you better when your temper is hot,” she breathed. “But when you are like this, I do not know you at all.”
His Irish soul cried for him to grab her up, kiss her, make it all better as he’d done so often through the years. Yet the rational mind that had led him to Trinity College library as a boy of nine would not allow it. He’d sold himself to the bloody Brits and knew where his honor, such as it was, lay.
Try telling that to his bloody body, whose cock was so hard he’d be up the whole night, haunted by what he hadn’t said or done. By what might have been. By the travesty that was going to be. No one would ever love her as he did. No one. Not even some bloody nobleman as strong and daring as the great Wellington himself.
There she sat, dressed like some scion of a noble house not yet old enough to shave, blonde curls slicked into an old-fashioned queue and pinned up in back in the mistaken belief she might actually look like a boy when she removed her hat. It was a miracle Phipps had maintained his aplomb when he’d brought their wine. Then again, in this establishment, the man must have conquered shock many years since.
It was best she looked like a boy, Terence thought. If Beth appeared as she usually did, so delicately feminine, a fragile beauty who seemed scarcely larger than the baby who’d once tugged at his dark curls . . . No! She was nearly eighteen, a woman grown. Pert, headstrong, with a mind like quicksilver. If she didn’t take great care, the young ladies of the ton would hate her, be on her like a pack of wolves. But how could he teach her to be humble at this late date? Particularly when he loved her exactly as she was.
Those damnable amber eyes were looking at him very strangely.
She smiled. For a chit of seventeen the seductiveness of it was remarkably effective. “Kiss me, Terence,” she said. “I wish to prove a point.”
Terence leaned back, stretched out his legs, crossed his ankles. “I’ve no taste for boys,” he returned. Ah, no. He had a taste for petite blondes with saucy amber eyes and a mind that matched his own. If only she would exercise it more frequently. If he so much as touched her, he was doomed.
Her gaze never leaving his, Beth pulled out the pins holding her queue to her head, slid off the velvet ribbon, shook her blonde curls until they framed her face in a cascade of gold. Her amber eyes lit in triumph as the sharp movement of Terence’s Adam’s apple betrayed him. His feet hit the floor. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, his face only inches away from hers. “Hear me well, child. You’re playing games far beyond your understanding. If I kiss you, you’ll likely find yourself flat on your back on that soft red couch, with your fine boy’s breeches down around your ankles. You’re a fool if you trust me any more than you would any other man.”
“Games, Terence? And who was it taught me what happens next?” Blue lightning flashed. Beth felt his fury all the way down to her toes.
“Words are one thing, me darlin’, but personal demonstration is not part of the curriculum. Fasten up your hair, put on your hat. You’re going home.”
She didn’t move. “If you take me home, there’s no hope for us. You know that.”
“Aye,” Terence agreed, unblinking. “I told you this was goodbye.”
Silence lengthened. Terence sat back, once again crossing his ankles, and waited. The candles dripped, flickered, threatened to go out. Finally, Beth’s fingers moved, refastening the ribbon around her curls, pinning the telltale strands in place. By the time she clapped on her top hat and stood, her face was fixed in haughty indifference. Finally, she had accepted the truth. She had lost the one true love of her life.
In the fall of 1814 Terence O’Rourke had received a shock second only to the day he learned he would never be considered a candidate for the hand of his employer’s daughter. Armed with the calling card his secretary had just handed him, he rose to his feet behind his desk in preparation for his illustrious visitor, the Marquess of Harborough. Although he had never met the young man destined to become the Duke of Marchmont, there was scarcely a person in London who had not heard of the miraculous return of the supposedly deceased—some said mad—young nobleman who had spent seven years of his life as a spy for His Majesty’s government.
What Terence had not expected was two young noblemen, as alike as it was possible for two men to be. Each with waving hair as black as his own and amber eyes which looked as if they should be related to Beth. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known there were two of them. That, too, was the talk of the town, but actually seeing them together took his breath away. Everything about the two men, from their height and broad shoulders to an attitude of daring, even the pugnacious, left no doubt they stood out in the ton like two tigers in a pen of sheep.
With no sign of condescension, each shook Terence’s hand bef
ore sitting in the comfortable black leather wing chairs always ready in front of his desk. “I’m Harborough,” said one of the twins. “Alexander. This other pea in the pod is Anthony.” The Marquess raised one shaggy brow. “You may have heard of us?”
“Most certainly,” Terence murmured, making a severe effort not to show how delighted he was. How delighted Tobias Brockman and Company was by this unexpected visit.
Harborough nodded. Terence detected a gleam far back in the young nobleman’s eyes. He was enjoying this, whatever this was. “It seems,” said the man once known as Blas the Bastard, “that while my brother and I were otherwise engaged, few demands were made on our estates—”
“You bought a manor house,” his brother reminded him.
“A modest one,” Alex drawled, “a mere two hundred acres in Sussex. And most of the land growing vegetables for the city.” The Marquess sighed. “Alas, even that made money.”
“And there were no London Seasons—”
“No boxes at the opera—”
“No gaming—”
“At least not in London,” Alex corrected carefully. “And none that was a drain on the estate.”
“No wine, women or song.” Tony sighed.
“Again, not in London,” his older brother amended.
“The long and short of it—” said Tony
“—is that we have more money than we know what to do with,” Alex finished. His lips twitched as he studied the bastard Irishman behind the desk. “We have been informed that the firm of Tobias Brockman and Company might be able to suggest some ventures in which we might invest this embarrassing amount of wealth. And that Terence O’Rourke was the man to see. I wonder . . . would this be true?”
Even though Terence could only begin to guess at the sums the Trowbridge twins were hinting at, his mind soared. Not to mention that the two young men were the most likable members of the ton he had ever met. He signaled his secretary to arrange for wine and any other refreshments his guests might wish, then brought out the heavy leather tome in which were recorded the almost infinite investment possibilities offered by Tobias Brockman and Company. In the end, it had taken nearly a week to place the funds of Alexander, Marquess of Harborough, and his twin, Lord Anthony Trowbridge. By the time the process was finished, Terence had acquired two surprising new friends. And young Beth was about to receive an invitation to tea from the twins’ wives.
O'Rourke's Heiress Page 5
