She was supposed to feel relieved. “Then you won’t have any objection to my visiting Madame Gravelle’s with His Grace.”
“Not at all,” Nicholas said evenly.
The duke made a noise and rubbed his hand over his jaw, and a quick cut of dimple gave away that he was only hiding his laughter. “As a compromise,” he said to her, sobering, “perhaps Taggart will join me there in your stead—say, tonight?—and he can pass along the essentials.”
“I feel certain that solution would never suffice for Lady India,” Nicholas said.
“Certainly not,” she agreed. “I suggest we make it a threesome.”
“Good God,” the duke said, looking at Nicholas, who only smiled pleasantly.
“We can hardly refuse a lady’s wishes.”
The duke shook his head, laughing, and bowed quickly. “Until tonight, then. This has been most entertaining.”
“What an excellent plan,” India said the moment he was gone, hoping to cut off any more talk of marriage. Pretending, which was so much better than...
I want you to know that, as your husband—
“I simply cannot wait,” she added. “What fun we shall all have.”
“I’m sure the visit will be most enlightening for you.” India stared at him. He was going to allow this?
“And diverting,” she agreed. “Perhaps the very kind of diversions a married lady might take advantage of.”
There was a moment of something in Nicholas’s eyes—a weariness that said he’d grown tired of their game. And yet, “The company at Madame Gravelle’s will certainly put your ‘the more the merrier’ maxim to the test,” he told her.
A nerve pulsed at the base of her throat. She raised her chin. “Excellent. I hope there are dozens of people there. Hundreds.”
“No doubt there will be plenty—” he stepped closer, so they stood face-to-face with barely a hairbreadth between them “—all expecting to see a good deal more than the outline of your breasts through a swathe of blue fabric.”
“I shall look forward to it.” Her breath turned shallow. If he hadn’t been concerned enough to stop the portrait painting, what else might he stand by and allow?
“You’ll need an excuse to escape the Comte d’Anterry’s ball, of course,” he pointed out reasonably.
“I shall sneak away and hire a chair. Balls last for hours—I can return before I’m missed.”
“No need for that.” Now his eyes roamed over her, dark with a hunger she recognized too well. “We can escape the ball together, and I will take you to Madame Gravelle’s myself.”
“Indeed? Or will you escort me back to my aunt’s?” Tell me again, she thought. Tell me again how we might be married and you’ll never hurt me.
Instead, he turned finally and offered her his arm once more. “Lady India,” he said, starting back toward Auntie Phil and her admirers, “you have my word I will do no such thing.”
* * *
THE MOMENT HE got India into the carriage tonight, Nick would instruct the driver to take a long and winding route through the city, and he would seduce her.
Right there, in the carriage. Never mind that despite everything she was a lady, and a virgin, and she would be his wife, and that plundering beneath her skirts in a moving carriage was not the way a woman fitting any of those descriptions should be treated.
She’d been so bloody close to acquiescence. He’d seen the way she’d been looking at him—the desire in her eyes, the softening of her face.
She was nearer to being a willing bride than she’d ever been. If Winston hadn’t come along when he had...
There was no certainty Nick would have convinced India of anything. He hadn’t even planned exactly what to say. The words about not hurting her—they had risen up from somewhere deep inside him.
And the next thing he’d known, she’d been proposing a debauch with Winston.
He escorted her back to her aunt, made his excuses and left the gardens, imagining India at Madame Gravelle’s amid all that raw sensualism, and—
God.
As he walked back to his hotel, his mind took him to that dangerous place where India was beneath him, wide-eyed and gasping as he stoked her desire, readying her, introducing her to all the things she claimed she wanted to know, sinking into her and hearing her cry out as he took that damnable virtue she spoke so carelessly of tossing away.
God.
He inhaled deeply and turned the last corner before he reached his hotel.
It was time. She wasn’t going to Madame Bloody Gravelle’s, and they weren’t playing this game anymore. It was clear enough that given the opportunity, he could stoke India’s desire until she was begging him to take her, just as she’d begged that night in the hayloft.
Letting her glimpse his feelings just now had been a mistake. He already knew that touching her would not be. She would respond—there was no doubt about that—and soon she would be standing in front of Père Valentine, saying the necessary vows without any coercion except the promise of more pleasure to come.
He opened the door to the hotel, nodded to the hotelier, started up the stairs.
India wanted him to admit he hadn’t changed his plan to marry her? Very well.
He would show her tonight—very, very thoroughly—exactly what he intended their relationship to be.
* * *
FROM THE SHADOW of an alley, Millie watched Nicholas Warre disappear through a pair of doors with peeling blue paint and almost—almost—felt sorry for him. Hôtel Bernard looked like a medieval seedbed for the plague.
But his own desperation didn’t change the facts. He’d made her an offer, and she’d fulfilled her end of the bargain. She picked up her skirts and hurried across the street, feeling comfortingly nondescript in the old brown cloak she’d bought from a woman selling secondhand clothes at the market.
The door stuck a little, but she let herself into a worn reception that smelled of tallow and whale oil smoke. The hotelier eyed her from behind the desk.
“The man who just came in,” she said, producing a key she’d taken from Philomena’s maid. “I saw him drop this in the street.”
The hotelier grunted his disbelief and jerked his head toward the stairwell. “Numéro 34, au troisième.”
He assumed she was a prostitute. It made her feel sick as she climbed the stairs, but it was a small price to pay. She could not let Nicholas Warre off the hook now.
She had to knock twice, but suddenly the door flew open. He stood there half-dressed, shirttails hanging out of his breeches and his waistcoat draped across a wooden chair behind him. The room was barely big enough for the bed and his trunk.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
She made herself look him in the eye. “We need to discuss our arrangement. I’ve done everything you asked.”
“Have you?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes.”
“Aside from a few halfhearted attempts, I’m not sure you’ve been of much use to me at all.”
“You owe me a hundred pounds, Lord Taggart—”
“Do not speak of such sums here.” He pulled her into the tiny room and shut the door. “It seems to me, Miss Germain, that my success has been largely my own doing. Yet I’m to understand that you still expect full payment?”
She needed full payment. “Yes. And the letter.”
“Ah, the letter.”
Yes. The letter. God help her—he could not renege on that now. She would not allow it. “The money and the letter, Mr. Warre. And I’ll not leave here until I receive it.”
“Lady India and I are not yet married.”
“Through no fault of mine—and waiting until the wedding was not our arrangement!”
“Perhaps it should be.”
“You and Lady India won’t ever be married if your true paternity comes to light—which it will if you do not fulfill your end of our agreement this instant.”
His eyes turned cold, and his face turne
d to stone, and Millie wished the threat back but it was too late. And now he was turning to his valise, digging, coming up with a small piece of paper.
“Payment,” he said flatly. “For services rendered.”
One hundred. She stared at the bank note in her hands, giddy and sick all at the same time. She wanted to ask about the letter—she needed that letter—but after what she’d just threatened, she couldn’t imagine him still vouching for her character.
Better to leave, quickly, before he changed his mind about what he’d already given. “Good day, Lord Taggart.”
She took the bank note and fled. Down the stairs, past the hotelier—
“Attendez!”
She stopped. He came out and blocked her way to the door, holding out his hand and wiggling his fingers. “Donnez-moi. Donnez.”
He wanted her to give him money? Because he thought—
“Non—that isn’t what I—”
“Donnez!” He reached for her arm, and she had fled so quickly she had barely stuffed the bank note in the pocket of her cloak and he reached inside, pulling it out.
“Non!”
The hotelier laughed.
“Donnez-le-moi!” Millie cried, lunging toward him, but the hotelier pushed her away. And now he was looking at her as though he might take something else, as well—something she would rather die than give him.
“Putain.” The hotelier laughed. Whore. “You will get more where this came from, eh?” he said, pocketing her bank note.
Millie didn’t wait. She ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HE WAS DOWN to half the money he’d had when the day began.
Which made it even more nonsensical that now, three hours after he’d parted with what some might consider a fortune—despite the fact that she’d threatened him with a secret she could only have learned from India, which proved that India had heard exactly what he’d imagined—he stood near the river, half-hidden behind a hay cart, and watched the women and girls washing clothes aboard the laundry boats moored haphazardly along the banks.
This was folly. Utter, complete folly.
He’d planned to leave Paris without doing this.
And now the sun was sinking below the horizon, and nearly two hours of searching and asking had turned up nothing. How he thought he would ever find one girl among so many boats and laundresses, he had no idea. He didn’t even know what she looked like.
It was past time to give up. It would be dark soon.
But he couldn’t walk away.
Two boys ran by, laughing and shouting, chasing each other with sticks. Nick surveyed the women, looking for glimpses of dark hair beneath the rags and kerchiefs tied around their heads.
This was going to drive him mad. He was exhausted. He should leave now, go find something to eat. His stomach had been rumbling for two hours.
Just one more. The words that had driven him for hours drove him toward the water’s edge once again. He spotted a woman in a boat—stout and industrious, with strands of dark hair falling from beneath a dirty white mobcap. She was almost within speaking distance, so he moved a little closer. Children carried armloads of clothing hither and yon, followed by shouts from their mothers.
He was just about to call out to the woman when a sharp reprimand from somewhere to his left froze him in his tracks.
“Emilie!”
His attention snapped to the side, searching.
“Emilie, non!”
He found the speaker, a gaunt woman with thin, angry lips teetering purposefully toward a girl in a boat—a small girl of perhaps ten or eleven, who had paused her washing to reach out toward a mallard paddling closer to investigate the activity. The girl ducked her head and instantly resumed her washing, but it wasn’t enough. The woman yanked her by the arm, smacked her across the face. The girl barely flinched.
“Lazy, useless girl,” the woman spat. “You think the ducks are going to do the washing for you? Eh?”
“Non, Tante Marie—”
“Ne dit rien!” The woman gave the girl a shake. “Always excuses from you. Toujours les excuses. J’en ai assez!”
Nick hardly realized he’d moved until he was standing there, shoes sinking into mud at the river’s edge. “Pardonnez moi,” he called sharply. “Is there a problem?”
The woman’s gray eyes snapped in his direction, narrowing. “Not that concerns you.”
But already he was looking at the girl in the woman’s grip, who was staring at him through wide brown eyes that were...too familiar. His gut clenched.
“Emilie?” he asked.
The girl’s nod was barely a movement.
“What do you want with Emilie?” the woman demanded, releasing her now to face him.
He looked at her sharply. “Is there another Emilie here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Do you know another Emilie?” He barked it this time.
His tone had its effect, and he could see the woman calculating. “Non.” And then, with a contemptuous glance at the girl, “Merci, Dieu.”
Tante Marie, the girl had said. This woman was the girl’s aunt. “Where is her mother?” Nick demanded.
The woman grunted. “Dead. Of course. And leaving me with Emilie, as if I don’t have enough children of my own.” Her eyes shot daggers at the girl.
At Emilie.
Nick looked at her, too. She stood in the boat, dirty skirts drenched, hands red and chafed. Thin, much too thin. Ruddy cheeks. Hollow brown eyes a little sunken in her face. Everything about her screamed laborer. Commoner. Urchin.
And everything about her screamed Yves Dechelle. He didn’t need to meet the man twice to see the resemblance to their father. To Nick himself. The set of her brows, the shape of her chin, the tilt of her nose.
His chest filled, squeezed, so full it made his throat tight.
“How old are you, Emilie?”
“Eleven,” she said in a small voice.
Eleven. He turned to the aunt. “Who is the girl’s father?”
“What business is that of yours?” the woman snapped. “Who are you?” Already now she was looking him up and down, assessing the value of his clothes. And then, at Emilie, “Stop staring and return to your washing, you lazy little—”
“No.” Nick waded into the water and grabbed the edge of their boat, reaching out and curling a hand around Emilie’s arm, as gently as he could, to stop her turning away. “I am your brother,” he told her in a voice he had to work hard to keep calm. Nonthreatening, when he wanted to yank her aunt out of the boat and show her what it felt like to be slapped. “Je m’appelle Nicholas. I won’t hurt you.” It was the second time today he’d said those words.
A little cry escaped Emilie’s lips, and her aunt’s face twisted contemptuously. “Son frère.” She laughed, clearly believing that, more likely, he was trolling the river for a virginal plaything. The very idea enraged him.
“And I am taking her with me,” he said flatly.
“You’ll not take Emilie anywhere without paying.” She held out her hand. “Deux écus.”
“Tante Marie, non!” A terrified Emilie cowered in his grasp. Two écus...for less than a pound, the woman would simply let him—let anyone—take Emilie away?
“Don’t be afraid,” he told Emilie again. “I will make sure nobody ever strikes you again.”
A spark of hope in Emilie’s eyes faded as quickly as it appeared.
Nick turned to her aunt. “I am her brother, and I owe you nothing.”
She grabbed Emilie’s other arm. “Deux écus, or I shall make such a scene you’ll not have her at all.”
Already they had attracted attention, or he had, and more than a few of the washerwomen were looking their way. Listening. Thinking, most likely, exactly what Emilie’s aunt thought. He could feel Emilie trembling in his grip.
He told himself to let her go. Walk away. Nobody would ever think he was more than a man with a taste for young girls but not enough money to pay the price.
Instead, he reached into his pocket. Withdrew a coin. Let them think what they would. “One and no more.”
The woman’s eyes turned hungry as she snatched the silver coin from his fingers. “Good riddance,” she said, and turned back to her washing.
Nick lifted Emilie out of the boat. “Tante Marie!”
* * *
NOT A SOUL interfered.
Nick spoke reassuring words until he’d said I won’t hurt you every way he could think of, but still Emilie’s hand trembled in his as they hurried toward the street, and tears streamed down her cheeks. He reminded himself—again—to slow his pace so she could keep up.
She was small—too small for a girl of eleven? He didn’t know.
A girl of eleven.
Panic welled up inside him. He bundled her into a chair, barked the address at the driver. Ushered her past the hotelier, silently daring the man to object.
His rented room seemed half the size with Emilie in it. She stood in the only free space—at the foot of the narrow, sunken bed—in her soggy clothes, with her arms hanging at her sides, watching him through terrified brown eyes that could eat a man’s soul.
The gravity of the situation closed around him like a hand around his throat. Good God. What had he done?
“Tu as faim?” he asked. She only stared at him, but then he heard her stomach rumble and knew the answer.
He took her to a bakery on the corner, the charcuterie across the street, purchased a bit of cheese to go with the bread and meat. Back in the room, he fashioned a simple meal. Emilie sat in the single, crooked chair and ate tentatively at first, then ravenously. He considered offering her more, but worried it might make her ill.
The slow rage that had already lit inside him burned hotter. Had she gone her entire life without enough to eat?
The window was completely black. Night had fallen, and what the devil was he supposed to do now? He surveyed the tiny room, hating that he had to think twice about moving them somewhere better. He simply couldn’t afford to lodge them both properly in Paris for...
How long? Days? Another week?
Already time was closing in on him, while Holliswell rubbed his hands together in England, salivating over Taggart. At this very moment, India would be at d’Anterry’s ball, waiting for Nick to show up so they could continue their ridiculous pretense about Madame Gravelle’s.
A Wedding by Dawn Page 20
