by Darcy Burke
She turned to Con, who had yet to rise. He still appeared deep in thought. “My lord, our dinner awaits us.” She held her hand palm up to him, her fingers stretched toward him. He rose with reluctance. She felt another brick in her defense fall. No one had ever cared what became of her. Especially not with the same fervor he showed for his brother.
She had no doubt in her ability to seduce him. What must she do to bring him to care for her? Was such a feat even possible?
And if it were… Did she truly want to risk her heart that way?
Chapter Nine
HE HAD NO NOTION how she did it. One minute she was sex. The next, she had him verbalizing thoughts he shouldn’t even think. Now she was entertaining him with idle chatter about his friends; no more of the stoic navel-gazing they’d suffered earlier.
In the light of the many candles placed strategically about her dining room, she shined. He wasn’t taken with her, of course. She’d put him off with her bold attempt to take him to her bed. But he could admit her appeal, beyond the obvious. With her many faces and ability to change fluidly between them, she was rather fascinating.
He supposed if he must pay her visits for the next few nights, or however many it took to convince the ton that they were involved, he would at least be amused.
“Lord Hennig was beside himself, you see,” she was saying, her melodious voice an entrancing combination of laughter and promise. “He’d been convinced to that point that Kinsey was going to call their wager off. ‘I’ll not have such a scandal on my head!’ he declared, but of course, no one was listening. He’s something of a windbag.” The soft sound of her chuckle tickled Con’s spine. “Pompous man. But I never thought Kinsey would go through with it, so I paid him little mind, myself.”
Con couldn’t keep himself from leaning forward, though he’d only been listening with half an ear. “If Kinsey meant to climb up to Lady Violet’s window and serenade her with a love song, what possible outcome could there have been but humiliation?” He paused. “The altar, I suppose.”
Candlelight highlighted her aristocratic cheekbones. Her disenchantment with Lord Kinsey was obvious, but her wry smile took the bite out of her words. “And all for a hundred guineas. Who would risk her father’s wrath—the Duke of Avondale, if I must remind you—for pocket change? Men make the most absurd wagers in their cups.”
He liked that she didn’t shy from the topic of gambling, despite his outburst earlier. It was as though she refused to be afraid of offending him.
It wasn’t polite in the least to make light of the issue, but then, she was hardly a lady.
He did find it disconcerting to hear a hundred guineas referred to as pocket change. A hundred guineas would see his mother in a new gown and the servants with extra coin to spend. Or one of his older brothers would think up a more practical use for it. Bart had been going on about a new thresher, and Antony would likely put such a sum toward their stables.
In any event, had Con been given the opportunity to embarrass himself with Lady Violet’s papa for a hundred guineas, he would certainly have jumped at the opportunity, marriage to a duke’s daughter notwithstanding. “How did I never hear of this?” he asked Elizabeth.
She’d been about to pop a piece of carrot in her mouth. She set her fork down and turned to answer him instead, but the damage was already done. He’d seen her. In just that moment when her lips were poised to take the morsel into her mouth, her pink tongue curved slightly to receive it—
Oh, God. He was never going to stop thinking about her and her bed, together. With him in it.
“There was no marriage, as you can have guessed. It was all kept very hushed. I suppose if Viscount Kinsey had been a man of more importance—”
“You imply means,” Con supplied with just a bit of an edge, not amused to hear a destitute comrade denigrated. “He’s dead broke and everyone knows it.”
She smiled as if he’d said something patently ridiculous. “Lady Violet is a duke’s daughter. Her father wouldn’t have wanted it known that she’d been compromised, especially on a wager.”
He knew that. It just made him feel lesser, and he didn’t like the feeling. “Please, go on. I shouldn’t have been rude.”
She shrugged. The light shawl around her shoulders slipped, revealing one palm-sized swath of creamy flesh. “I only know of it because Hennig thought nothing of spreading it among the demimondaines. We shared a good laugh at Kinsey’s expense, imagining him running away from Avondale in the dark, his breeches ripped from his arse to his knees from the fall through the trees.” She laughed at the image. He could swear her eyes reflected the candlelight like sapphires… except that was possibly the stupidest thought he’d ever had.
Viscount Kinsey’s predicament, on the other hand, was an amusing image, even if Con wished it had turned out better for the pup. “I would have done it,” he said. “I would have done a much better job of it, too.”
Elizabeth’s chestnut brows arched in a perfect, narrow arc. She sipped her wine and contemplated him. “I think Lady Violet would have preferred you.”
His neckcloth chafed against his neck. Either his clothes had become too tight or his head was swelling to an alarming proportion. “I would have done it for half.” Somehow it sounded like a boast. “The absolute worst I can imagine is Avondale holding a fowling piece to the back of my head as I took a trip down the aisle with his daughter. I’d have been better off than just fifty guineas, mark my word.”
Her arched eyebrows became alarmingly peaked. “I thought my lord deplored the idea of being a bauble on a woman’s arm.”
She had him there. He leaned back in his chair, amused by her quick rejoinder. “That’s not the same.”
She motioned for one of the footmen to refill her wineglass. “Because you are doing the choosing, in this case.” She swirled the liquid so that it coated the crystal vessel like her voice coated his insides. “It would have been your idea to compromise her. But what about her? I said she might have preferred you to serenade her, not that you would be her choice of husband. A lifetime with the wrong man is…” She laughed darkly. “Forever.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of her feelings,” he admitted. “Aside from my mother, I rarely sit and talk with a woman as if she were a friend.” Looking back now, the day Elizabeth had leaned over his shoulder and inquired as to whether he could use a few quid had been the most bizarre moment of his life. What had he been thinking?
He’d made Kinsey look like a measured, logical fellow.
Yet he couldn’t regret that he’d done it. In the last few days, he’d begun to feel worldlier than in all his twenty-nine years put together. If his only penance was the occasional dinner with a beautiful, charming and interesting woman, then he ought to be able to tough out his sentence.
She was looking at him placidly, as if waiting for him to continue. What had he been saying? It was hard to keep his thoughts in order when she hung on his words like that.
“You were admitting we’re friends,” she said, gently prodding him.
“I wasn’t,” he said before he realized he had been. He liked her. At least, he liked her when she wasn’t making him rock-hard and confusing things with lust.
Her wine swirled hypnotically in her glass, but she didn’t drink. She looked in no hurry to move on to dessert. “What of your investments? What have you learned about them since returning to London?”
Even in his mellowed state, he recognized the subject had been changed deftly. But they were friends, were they not? She already knew his embarrassing shortcomings. “More delays. More unrest in the factories. Maybe I wouldn’t actually have taken Hennig’s wager a month ago. Today?” He shook his head. “I have news that makes me desperate.”
“Oh? What happened?” She didn’t seem disappointed to hear he’d encountered yet another problem, merely curious. He was glad for it. She was a right sort, she was.
A footman slipped a slice of cake beside his elbow and whisked away his di
nner plate, but he barely noticed. For some reason, he wanted to tell Elizabeth something he’d never told anyone else. “My brother bet five hundred on Lucky Strike two weeks ago. The horse went lame and was shot before the race. Tony—Lord Antony, I mean—would say to let him stew in his own misery in King’s Bench. Bart and Montborne would agree. I would, too, but I can’t, by God. It could kill him.”
And the smell. God, just remembering the smell was enough to make his dinner churn in his gut.
She nodded as though she understood, but she couldn’t.
The fetid stench of desperate men started to suffocate him. He inhaled sharply. “I haven’t got it. Darius is going back to gaol…and I’m a hairbreadth away from joining him.”
“Why?” She looked perplexed. “What do you have to do with his losses?”
He was hardly better than his brother when it came to making impossible wagers. He laughed darkly. “We dance, he and I, taking turns taunting the clink. I put up; he wins back enough to cover it. He loses a small fortune; I scrape together a payment or two. You asked why I’m so far gone, and I only told you the half of it. Every time Dare finds himself with one foot in prison, I sign an IOU to cover what he owes. Now you know what a rotter I am. The moneylenders are out for my blood almost as much as Darius’.” Or, they had been. He’d been doing well since striking his deal with her. He’d been almost entirely free, until Darius had broken down yesterday and revealed his situation with Lucky Strike.
“Nonsense,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have me. What are friends for, if not for bailing siblings out of King’s Bench?”
What little good feeling was left inside him withered at her words. “That’s hardly why I told you something so personal.”
“It isn’t?” She looked completely taken aback.
“I’m not asking for help.” He grimaced. He didn’t want her pity. He’d just wanted… What? To unburden himself to someone. His brothers thought he was just as worthless as Darius when it came to managing cash, and in a sense he was. He’d never told them how many times he’d kept Darius out of prison. He couldn’t bear for them to know how deep in his twin was, or how close on Dare’s heels he followed.
He reached for the plate of cake and pulled it around so he could jab at it with his fork. Dinner wouldn’t end until he was finished, unless he wanted to be unpardonably rude and leave early. Which he just might.
“My apologies,” she murmured. She reached for her own dessert. “I’m so used to being propositioned, I didn’t think you might simply be confiding in me.”
She sounded so genuinely sorry, he paused in his attack of the cake. “I’m not used to confiding in people who have so much money they can toss it at any fellow who happens by with a sad story,” he said, a bit too sharply.
Her knuckles whitened against the table covering. “You’re not just ‘any fellow’ I’m entertaining for a night.”
The cake, so good a moment ago, turned to chalk in his mouth. He didn’t want her pity, or any more of her money. And he certainly didn’t want her fixing problems that had nothing to do with her.
But he didn’t want to be ill-humored with her, either. He forked up the cake until it was gone and there could be no more delay to his leaving. “It’s my turn to apologize. I’m not used to this.” It was the best he could do under the circumstances.
“Having a friend?” she asked.
When he looked up, she was smirking at him. The same expression on a man would have set his back up, but with her it was an insight into her world. She’d changed masks again. She wanted him to think she didn’t care. She wanted to hear him say it. They were friends.
He wasn’t falling for it this time. He could give her that much. He reached for his wineglass, but his eyes never strayed from the woman across from him. He’d known right from the start that she was different. Given her career, that hadn’t been a giant leap, but there was more to her uniqueness than her past. She teased him and she made him desire her, but she also made him think. Their lives were entangled now, whether he wanted them to be or not.
Oddly enough, he did want them to be. She made him feel significant. He gave her a slow smile. “I’m not used to having rich friends in interesting places.”
He was rewarded by her beaming smile. Then he got the hell out.
***
Con didn’t come again that week. She didn’t mind. There was so much to be done to care for Oliver, and then, she didn’t have any expectation that he would return so soon. She went about her days as if he hadn’t looked very much like a man torn when he’d left her dining room…precisely as she wanted him to look.
On Saturday she took her son to the park, for it was a fine morning, perfectly suited for a stroll, and she wished to stretch her legs. Other young mothers and nannies minded their little lordlings and barking spaniels as they chased each other across the rectangular patches of grass, making Elizabeth feel like part of a secret society. She didn’t require a man to walk through this section of the park filled with children. Most of the women were too occupied reprimanding precocious lads and lasses to notice her presence. Here she might be perfectly normal, any doting mother on a walk with her son.
Mrs. Dalton had stayed behind to spend an hour with her nose tucked into a book, leaving Elizabeth free to take in the air and think about Con—though only the barest amount, really. Their first night had gone far more marvelously than she’d ever dreamed. He hadn’t bedded her, but it was too early for that. All she’d needed to do was to plant the seed, then give him time to nurture it. She’d done that part well. Her initial error had been quickly corrected; so quickly, he hadn’t let her mistake ruin the night.
But she hadn’t dwelt on him long after that. The few hours she planned for the seduction of Lord Constantine were too many away from her son. Oliver wouldn’t be a roly-poly baby forever. She delighted in witnessing his new tricks, and resented any obligation that kept her away.
She nuzzled his head. His answering smile pierced her straight through. She glanced around the park, but of course no one else noticed his adorableness. She, on the other hand, couldn’t be prouder. His fits when he struggled to lift himself from the carpets made her sure he’d grow to be an athletic young man. He liked to be given objects to shake and suckle on, and brandished them toward her as if he were destined to have a generous heart. If she supported his dense little body, he could bounce on her knees.
He was becoming more aware of his surroundings, too. She’d chanced the park alone, without Mrs. Dalton or even so much as a footman. This was her special time with her son, and she didn’t want to interrupt it.
He looked about the park in little jerking motions and made nonsense sounds. She pulled his bonnet down lower over his brow and shifted him to her right arm. “Do you see the dog?” she asked, pointing to a mutt performing an impressive leap as he caught a red ball.
Oliver turned toward the sound of her voice. The angling of his small, round head as he sought to understand her made her heart feel so full, she felt a tear come into her eye.
She adored him. When he’d been inside her belly, she’d been terrified of the day he’d arrive and turn her world upside down. Now she could hardly remember her life before he was in it. Nor did she want to. The Elizabeth who’d never held her child at her breast was a different Elizabeth, a woman who’d thought only of herself.
Locked inside her own thoughts and distracted by her son as he reached his chubby arm toward the dog half a block distant, she didn’t notice a man drawing abreast on her right until his voice brought her crashing back to the present. “I’ve been thinking,” Nicholas said without preamble, “and much more.”
She tightened her grip on Oliver, tangling her fingers in his long gown lest Nicholas try to wrest him from her. Her steps quickened, but Nicholas’s long legs easily kept pace. “I don’t have time for your accusations,” she bit out. She elbowed past him. She searched for any person nearby who might help her if he threatened her.
&
nbsp; She recognized no one who could come to her aid. What was he doing here?
“He looks uncomfortable. Let me have him.” Nicholas reached for Oliver.
“No.” She looked daggers at him. Her elbow jutted out, her only barrier between them.
Nicholas stopped suddenly. His arms went limp at his sides. He looked like a man headed to the gallows. She paused, momentarily conflicted, but quickly regained her senses. She couldn’t let him hold his son. She didn’t trust him not to run.
Her quick steps crunched along the gravel path, broken only by the occasional happy cry from her son. His small hands shoved against her and his feet kicked at her waist, but she relished the squirming weight of him in her arms. She went perhaps twenty feet before the sound of boots digging into the rocks sent alarm through her again. Nicholas didn’t catch up to her this time, though she didn’t doubt he could. Instead, he dogged her heels.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. His unseen presence behind her set her on edge. She wanted to have him in her sight. Oh, how she wished she’d brought Mrs. Dalton, or even better, a footman, as she ought to have done. She looked again for a nearby man or group of women who might help her. If Nicholas tried to snatch Oliver, she’d scream. Surely someone would help her.
“He wants to see me.” Nicholas didn’t sound high-handed so much as anguished. “I knew you’d come eventually. You always liked to bring him here, back when…” He didn’t finish his sentence, but she thought he’d been about to say, back when we were together.
She angled her chin toward Oliver’s dark head and hurried on, ignoring the guilt building in her breast. She wasn’t the one who’d ended their liaison. If he had some idyllic memory of their past, it was only what he’d created out of the sordid truth.
“That Corinthian isn’t his father,” Nicholas sneered, changing tack. “I’ve made enough inquiries to know he wasn’t even here when Jonat—Oliver,” he quickly corrected, “would have been conceived.”
