The Rogue's Conquest (Townsend series)

by Maxton, Lily

  He couldn’t believe he’d nearly kissed Eleanor. With the door open. And Georgina and Robert and servants in the house. Everything he’d wanted, everything he’d worked so hard for, could have been gone in an instant. He had never lost control like that before.

  He had never placed desire over his ambitions.

  He’d never even warred with the choice.

  And the worst part was, he wasn’t positive he could keep it from happening again, not when Eleanor faced him, open and unguarded, and said she couldn’t look away from him. As far as declarations went, it was fairly innocent, and still, it had set his blood on fire.

  And if it had only been lust, maybe he could have overlooked it, but then there’d been that moment by the door when his chest had felt tight and strangely tender, when Eleanor had been looking up at him, smiling slightly, and he’d reached out to brush her hair back from her face.

  That had not felt anything like lust.

  Which meant James was in far too deep. He needed to stay away from Eleanor for the foreseeable future, or risk losing everything he’d fought for.

  The decision itself was easy.

  The way he felt after he made it was not.

  He threw himself into practice the next day. Closed off his mind and pushed his body. This was what he understood—physical things—the burn of muscle and heavy pulse of blood, the bite of knuckles against skin. He liked what he could touch—gilt-framed paintings and silk waistcoats and well-made furniture—physical markers that clearly said what one had achieved.

  He had no use for something that he couldn’t see or touch or assess.

  Or so he told himself.

  When practice was over, he was left alone, picking up, when a sharp rap sounded at his door.

  He remembered Eleanor arriving here, uninvited, remembered what had happened that night, and his legs moved him toward the door. His mind, about ten seconds too late, warned him that nothing good would come of opening the door if it was, in fact, Eleanor.

  Or, more precisely, it might be good temporarily and then proceed to ruin everything.

  But he opened the door anyway.

  And stared dumbly at a broad-shouldered, blunt-featured man he didn’t recognize. No Cecil.

  “What do you want?” he said. Not very politely, but then, he wasn’t very polite naturally.

  “Just to introduce myself,” the other man said. He handed James a card.

  James stared at the embossed lettering blindly for a few seconds. “Thomas Clark?”

  He nodded.

  “The Thomas Clark?” What James meant by that was the pugilist Thomas Clark? The proclaimed best prizefighter in all of England?

  “One and the same,” he said with a grin. “Edinburgh is a nice place, ain’t it? Thought I’d set myself up an operation.”

  “Operation?” James repeated. He was making himself sound intellectually deficient but he couldn’t help it. Dread was pooling in his stomach.

  “A boxing saloon.”

  “Where?”

  “This exact street. I’m taken with it.”

  James scowled at him. He could feel his future unravelling, pulled like a loose thread in a worn rug.

  The truth was, financially, James couldn’t continue courting Lady Sarah much longer.

  He hadn’t expected this to be a problem. Courtships were only temporary, after all. Once he had her dowry and her connections, it wouldn’t matter that he wasn’t rich.

  But if Thomas Clark opened a saloon right by his, he’d draw away all his business. He wouldn’t even be able to afford the pretense of wealth anymore. And Lady Sarah had too many suitors to choose from to make James feel certain she’d pick one who wasn’t wellborn or wealthy. Impeccable manners were something, but were they enough?

  He doubted it.

  It didn’t make any sense for England’s best boxer to open a saloon here. Someone had told him to do it, or paid him to do it. That someone must have been watching James very closely if they guessed his situation. They must have been watching him for some time, if Thomas Clark’s abrupt arrival was any indication. And there was only one reason why anyone would go through the time and the trouble—they wanted him to fail.

  James could only think of one person who wanted him to fail.

  “Why here?” he asked, voice strangled. “You could go anywhere you wanted. Why here?”

  Thomas Clark tipped his hat and stepped back with a grin. “The Duke of Sheffield sends his regards.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Eleanor found Georgina sipping tea in the library while she perused a book. Georgina was always drinking something or nibbling on something when she read books—if Eleanor came across one with stains and crumbs, she knew Georgina had had it first.

  Luckily, Georgina gravitated more toward fiction while Eleanor preferred natural history, so their tastes didn’t often intersect.

  Georgina looked up and paused in the act of lifting her tea cup to her mouth. “What is it?”

  Eleanor sighed. “Why do you assume something is wrong?”

  “Your face looks crumpled.”

  Eleanor felt insulted.

  “I know how you look when you’re worried, Elle.”

  Eleanor sat down at the table next to her sister. “I told Lady Sarah.”

  Georgina’s utter lack of reaction was a bit of a disappointment. Finally, she said, “Do you think Mr. MacGregor will expose you?”

  “I doubt it. I’ve come to expect more of him. But lately…” She lowered her voice, even though there was no one else in the room. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about telling the society myself, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Mr. MacGregor.”

  That wasn’t entirely the truth. It had a bit to do with him. She saw how he was trying to fold himself to fit in a neat little box, when she knew he was so much more than that box could contain. And she saw that she was doing the exact same thing. She didn’t want to be in that box any longer.

  Georgina nodded again. “I think you should.”

  Her sister’s ready acceptance startled her. For an instant. And then she realized that Georgina never tried to talk her out of anything. Maybe she was the person Eleanor went to when she already knew what she wanted to do, but needed the courage to do it.

  “But…I could be ruined,” she tried. “You could be ruined.”

  “They are your articles. Your words. It’s not fair that you have to put someone else’s name on them.”

  “What about marriage, George? Don’t you want to make a good match? You know the scandal will fall on us. Robert will be touched by it, but not ruined.”

  “I want you to respect yourself. And it’s not as though we’re in dire straits…we don’t have to make good matches. That is simply what Theo wants for us.” At Eleanor’s look, Georgina continued. “He’ll accept it. Annabel will help him accept it.”

  “You might change your mind. You might feel this way now, but in a few years…”

  “In a few years, I will remember that my sister did something very brave, and I’ll be glad that I was strong enough to encourage her to do it.”

  Eleanor found herself blinking against a suspicious pressure.

  “Anyway,” Georgina said flippantly, “It’s gotten quite boring around here, as of late. I miss our Highland adventures. You know I’m not good with dull. I’m counting on you to liven things up for me.”

  Eleanor caught Georgina’s sparkling gaze and sighed. “You’re a strange girl. Most people like dull.”

  Georgina shook her head. “Give me strife any day.”

  Eleanor sighed again, but she was smiling, too. She left her sister to her book and tea and went back up to her bedchamber. She leaned over her writing desk. With a trembling hand, with both fear and exhilaration tangling in her chest, she crossed out Cecil and wrote Eleanor.

  …

  Eleanor rapped on the door of the Natural History Society, parchment clasped tightly in her hand. So tightly, she was probably wrinklin
g it, but she was having trouble easing her grip.

  She was excited, but she was equal parts terrified. She swallowed past a sudden thickness in her throat.

  The door opened, and a footman peered out, frowning. “Are you lost?”

  She paused. “No, I am not lost.”

  “You must be,” he said, as though she were simpleminded. “This is the Natural History Society.”

  Now, the terror was threatening to swamp any excitement she might have imagined. “I’m aware of that.”

  He stared at her blankly. “So what are you doing here?”

  “I have a paper…” She began to hold it out and then snatched it back when he shut the door in her face.

  She stared, eye to eye, with the lion’s head knocker, dismay creeping into her chest. She’d expected this would be difficult; she hadn’t expected they wouldn’t even let her inside.

  They’d let Cecil in with open arms.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply to ease her tight throat.

  She was Cecil. Cecil was her.

  She knocked on the door, and this time, when it opened, she made a mad dash inside.

  “You, stop!” The servant cried.

  But it was too late, she was already pushing into the assembly room, interrupting someone else’s lecture. Twenty male gazes turned and stared at her, some puzzled, some blank.

  Lady Sarah’s father stood first. “Miss?” He looked at her more closely. “Miss Townsend?”

  “Yes,” she said, striding toward him quickly. She pushed the paper into his hands. Mr. Smith came up beside them, glancing over the earl’s shoulder to read.

  She would have rather waited until the very end to do this, so she didn’t have a large, disapproving audience, but the doorman hadn’t left her much choice.

  “What is this?” the earl asked. “Did Mr. Townsend ask you to deliver his paper?”

  “No,” she pointed out the name. She pushed down her terror. “I am Cecil Townsend.”

  The silence was complete.

  Finally, the earl laughed. “You cannot just cross out someone’s name and…”

  She sighed, then removed a pair of spectacles from her reticule and perched them on her nose while she pulled her hair away from her face. The earl looked at the paper, and then at her, and then at the paper again.

  “Good God,” he said.

  He didn’t appear capable of anything else, so she said, her voice more tentative than she’d hoped, “I would like to publish under my real name. I would like to be part of the society.”

  “This is…beyond the pale. You have deceived us.” He was starting to sound angry.

  “Not…not because I wanted to,” she said. “I couldn’t publish any other way.”

  “Because the society does not allow women!” he exclaimed. “This is fraud. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  She hadn’t done anything, she thought, other than use a pen name to publish her paper.

  “You wretch of a girl. If this gets out, we’ll be a laughingstock.”

  “But that wasn’t my intent.”

  “Just like a woman,” he said, “to rush in without thinking through the consequences of her actions.”

  Mr. Smith set his hand on the earl’s shoulder. “Do you think perhaps you are being a little harsh?”

  “I don’t think I’m being harsh enough, Mr. Smith. If this girl had had a father to discipline her, she would never think to try something so unnatural.”

  Anger swelled inside her. “I disagree. My father was quite aware of my love of science, and in fact, encouraged it.”

  “Your father was a bloody fool.”

  “My lord!” Mr. Smith exclaimed. “Let us think this out rationally.”

  “What is there to be rational about? She deceived us, and now she wants us to let her into the society? She is the opposite of rational.” He glanced at the men around him. “Does anyone here want to ignore years of tradition and allow her in after she’s stomped all over everything this society represents?”

  A few men were silent, most of them shook their heads, a few shouted hearty nays. Eleanor’s heart, which had been in her stomach, dropped down to her toes. Maybe, if she’d written out her arguments beforehand, she could think of something to say now. But she’d never been very good at speaking in front of people, unless the subject was entomology, and fury was making her mute.

  And she didn’t think the earl would care what she had to say, anyway.

  “But her work is quite good,” Smith said.

  The earl stared at him. “Mr. Smith.” A world was contained in those words. He might as well have said, “Mr. Smith, you are a bloody fool, just like this girl’s father.”

  Smith sighed. “I’m sorry, Miss Townsend, the society has spoken.”

  The earl glared at the men around them. “Cecil Townsend’s identity will stay within these walls. Unless you want the London Society to laugh at us for years to come.”

  “But she knows things,” someone called out. “She went to a gentleman’s club with us! We talked to her like she was one of us.”

  An angry roar started up among the crowd. For the first time, Eleanor felt fearful for her safety.

  Mr. Smith lifted his hands to quiet them. “That won’t be a problem, will it, Miss Townsend? I assume you’d rather not let everyone know you masqueraded as a man.”

  She shook her head numbly.

  “It’s settled, then,” Mr. Smith said. “Miss Townsend’s silence for our silence. Everything will be as it should.”

  But nothing was as it should be. She was thankful she wouldn’t be ruined, of course, but that relief was eclipsed by the fact that she’d accomplished nothing by coming here tonight. She felt defeated to her very soul.

  The men filed out of the assembly room, giving her a wide berth, as though she might carry some noxious, hidden disease. The earl shoved her paper toward her with a look of disgust.

  “I thought this society represented science,” she said quietly, fingers clenching around the parchment.

  The earl ignored her. Mr. Smith gave her an apologetic smile.

  “Shall I escort you home?” he asked.

  “No,” Eleanor said. She couldn’t face his compassion—she felt tethered by only a very thin string. She glanced around at the nearly empty room and blinked back tears. “I should like to sit here for a while.”

  He nodded and shut the doors softly behind him.

  And Eleanor sank down into the nearest chair, alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “James MacGregor is here,” Georgina said, stepping into the bedroom as Eleanor tamed a last wayward tendril of hair.

  Eleanor paused, and Georgina stared at her with sympathy. She hadn’t told Georgina exactly what had happened yet, but she assumed her sister had guessed, given Eleanor’s sudden, stoic arrival.

  After the other society members had left, Eleanor had sat in the lecture hall for a very long time, too numb to move, too numb to think. But she knew she couldn’t sit there forever. Eventually, she’d forced herself to her feet and begun the weary journey home.

  “Should I have Jeffries tell him you’re not here?”

  “No, I will—” Her throat caught and she had to clear it. “I will see him.”

  She was looking forward to seeing him. If she told James what had happened with the Natural History Society, if she told him how hurt she was, even when she wanted to dismiss them all as fools, she thought he would understand. He knew what it was to both hate something and admire it, to want it, beyond all good sense.

  She needed him, in that moment, more than she had ever needed anyone before. Needed the strength of his presence and the warmth of his teasing.

  James was waiting in the drawing room, leaning with one arm on the marble mantel, staring into the fire as though mesmerized. His head shot up when he heard the floorboards creak under her feet.

  “You look horrid,” she said.

  He did. His hair was mussed, his eye
s were red and a little wild. And her heart—her foolish, foolish heart—leaped with yearning. He was here. And he looked dreadful. And she wanted to stare at him forever.

  “Cecil,” he said warmly. “What a greeting.”

  She pushed down all of her tumultuous emotions and stayed hovering by the doorway. She strove for calm and collected, not heartbroken and wanting and desperate.

  He sighed. “I know I look horrid. The duke has made things…difficult.”

  “What has he done?”

  “Have you heard of Thomas Clark?”

  She shook her head.

  “They call him the best prizefighter in England. He opened a boxing saloon, not three doors down from mine. He’s taken all of my business. The duke sent him. He wants to drag me back down.”

  “That’s dreadful,” she said.

  “Quite. But the Duke of Sheffield is a dreadful man, I already knew that. I’m going to have to sell my horses—they cost too much to keep up without an income. Tell me, Eleanor, would you let a man court you if he didn’t keep a nice carriage?”

  She thought there were probably more important things to consider in a courtship. “If I cared for him, yes.”

  James looked unconvinced.

  “What will you do?”

  He stared at a point on the wall before he spoke. “I’ve worked too hard for this to simply let him win. I know what he wants—he’s hoping I’ll fight Thomas Clark.”

  “Is he hoping you’ll lose?”

  He laughed wryly. “He’d rather I lose, I’m sure, but that’s not his end goal. That’s not how he works. He wants to remind me of what I am. He wants to remind everyone else in the process.”

  “Is it so bad?” she asked.

  “It’s violent. Brutish. There’s nothing very noble about men pummeling each other bloody with their bare hands while rich swells place bets on them.”

  That wasn’t what she’d meant, at all. She rephrased the question. “Would it be so bad for people to see who you are?”

  He stared at her as though he barely even understood what she was asking. And for the first time since he’d arrived, she felt a prickle of unease.

  She smoothed down the front of her dress and decided on a different approach. “I’ve never seen a fight.”