The Miss Mirren Mission (Regency Reformers Book 1)

by Jenny Holiday

  The worst were in Portugal, in tents—if they were lucky—awaiting the carnage that would descend as whatever battle they faced unfolded. In those miserable days, cold and wetness were the last thing the men needed on top of the ever-present hunger, depravation and, he would freely admit, fear. England’s cause against Napoleon had been just, but one couldn’t help but wonder during some of those sodden nights whether God was.

  The storms of his childhood had been annoyances more than anything, necessitating pauses in whatever grift he had going at the moment, but he had endured most of them hungry, just like in Portugal.

  Recent years had passed high and dry, for the most part. His rooms in Bartlett’s Buildings, home until a month ago, had been comfortable, luxurious even, as his fortunes rose steadily. But there was nothing like owning the walls that kept one safe from a storm, nothing like being sheltered by a structure that had been built to one’s exact specifications. A home, at last. And, nestled atop London’s most spectacular new building, what a home it would be.

  He sipped his brandy and tucked the edges of a blanket around his feet. The dozens of candles he’d lit—another rewarding consequence of financial success—cast a warm glow on the shelves that lined two walls. Soon, they would be filled with books. He couldn’t contain a sigh of satisfaction. Yes, of all his ventures—shipping, mining, investing—the hotel that would also be his home was going to be the best. The best meaning not just the most lucrative—though he hoped it would be that, too—but the most fulfilling. He raised his glass, even as he recognized the absurdity of making a toast in an empty room.

  He laughed a little as he tried to summon the appropriate words. “To the hotel,” he finally said, favoring, as usual, a brief but accurate summation of the circumstance. “To the Jade.”

  As the balance of the brandy in the glass slid down his throat, the hairs on the back of his neck rose. He was up in an instant. Four years with the Earl of Blackstone—both on the battlefield, where they’d become bosom friends despite their class differences, and in their post-war intelligence careers—had honed his senses. He’d learned to trust those back-of-the-neck hairs. They were the reason he was still alive.

  Picking up a branch of candles, he made his way out into the main corridor. He was five flights up, but as he started down, he could begin to make out a thudding, distinct from the wind and the rain, coming from somewhere below him.

  As he descended, the noise resolved itself into a rhythmic pounding he followed to the empty kitchen at the back of the hotel. On the other side of the heavy oak door was a small, presently empty courtyard he intended to convert to a kitchen garden next spring. Someone clearly wanted in—someone who would have known there was a back entrance through the courtyard, or had nosed around enough to discover it.

  He devoted a fleeting thought to whether he ought to have armed himself, but he and Blackstone weren’t working on a mission now, so his pistols were upstairs locked in a case in an armoire. Rummaging through one of the boxes he had yet to unpack, he searched for a knife. Blackstone the spymaster would not be impressed. Just because they didn’t have an active mission—Waterloo had finally ended the wars against Napoleon—was no reason not to keep his guard up.

  The wind screeched—even after a week, the storm raged on—and the pounding continued. Whoever it was, friend or foe, the poor bastard must be soaked to the bone.

  Trevor palmed a paring knife, threw back the bolt, and swung open the weighty door.

  He heard his own sharp intake of breath as the knife clattered to the floor.

  She looked exactly the same as she had all those years ago when they’d run wild on the notorious streets of Seven Dials. Mahogany hair a tangled mess, clothes dirty and torn.

  No, that wasn’t entirely correct. There was one significant difference. Back in the rookery of their childhood, there would have been a hint of mischief in those light brown eyes. It had never made sense, given the circumstances, but it had been there all the same, telling him that she was well, that the impossible, hardscrabble life they led hadn’t defeated her yet.

  For it to be gone…maybe he had made a mistake that day. Because preserving her spirit had been the whole bloody point of sending her away.

  “I need help,” she whispered.

  The years fell away, all at once, like a great, heavy coat falling to the floor.

  “Lucy,” he said, his voice catching. “Lucy.”

  An excerpt from Famous

  Enjoy this excerpt for Jenny’s RITA-nominated contemporary romance about a pop star on the run from the spotlight.

  Seven years ago

  Sometimes a wedding was not just a wedding.

  This one, in which Evan Winslow’s friend Tyrone pledged his eternal devotion to his girlfriend Vicky, was, in fact, a test. It looked like a normal wedding, with white funereal-looking flowers and ill-fitting tuxedos, but it was also Evan’s Hail Mary pass: one last attempt to hold on to his life in Miami, to his nascent career, to his entire freaking life.

  His final experiment to measure how extensive—how permanent—the damage inflicted by his father on the Winslow family’s reputation was going to be.

  Evan had laid low for the past two weeks, hoping the whole “out of sight/out of mind” adage would prove true, and now it was final exam time.

  This test had one question: Could Evan attend his friend Tyrone’s wedding and not be recognized, not upstage the proceedings with his mere presence?

  The answer was no. Fail. Flunk.

  Which meant this was it. Today was the end of life as he knew it, which sounded melodramatic but was no less true for it. Because if Evan knew one thing with certainty, down to the dusty corners of his soul, it was that he could not live with the fame—the infamy—his father’s crimes had brought down on his head. He had already been coming around to accepting the idea that his painting career was done before it had even really started—thanks to the crimes of Evan Winslow Sr., Evan Winslow Jr. was destined to be persona non grata in the art world—but now he’d brought the goddamned paparazzi to his best friend’s wedding.

  He’d tried to hedge against that prospect, and he initially thought he’d succeeded. He’d spent the night at his brother’s place. Evan’s brother wasn’t in the art world—the family business—having opted instead for life as an overgrown trust-fund baby. So he wasn’t getting as much media attention as Evan. Evan had called a cab to his brother’s house, timing things so as to arrive at the church just before the ceremony started.

  But he’d miscalculated, emerging from the taxi as a limo pulled up and disgorged the bride and her attendants.

  He’d held out a shred of hope that the flashbulbs that started going off were actually for the bride. But how many brides hired half a dozen photographers with zoom lenses to photograph their nuptials?

  How many wedding photographers yelled things like “Were you in on it too?” and “Will you attend the sentencing hearing?”

  So he’d hustled inside ahead of the bridal party and tried to make himself inconspicuous.

  Which, of course, had set off a series of whispers among the guests. People talking behind wedding programs, some openly pointing at him. The bride’s mother glaring, no doubt because he had upstaged her daughter before she’d even made an appearance.

  It didn’t even matter that everyone recognized him, really. The fact that he had failed his test was regrettable but not elementally important. Because even if the infamy died down, could he live with the lie? With the notion that everything he had—his luxe condo; his painting ability, honed over years of lessons from the world’s greatest artists; his expensive grad school—was all built on lies and paid for with stolen money?

  The answer to that question was also no.

  So it was time to go. To start over somewhere else. Pack his shit up, transfer to another college to finish his degree—say goodbye to his entire life.

  He had no earthly idea how to do that, but that was a problem to be solved tomor
row, on day one of his new life. Right now, the last day in his old life, he had a wedding to attend.

  Thankfully, the music changed at that moment, signaling the start of the ceremony. Everyone turned, and he breathed a sigh of relief. For a few moments anyway, there were people in the room who would attract more attention than he would.

  He almost laughed as the first bridesmaid appeared. The dress was ridiculous. She looked like a short, puffy, pink mummy. Evan didn’t know fabrics, but he suspected that the multi-layered, shiny dress she was wearing had not been constructed from any fiber or dye that occurred naturally in this world.

  And there was another one, and another. They kept coming, parading down the aisle in ascending order of height, like caricatures of bridesmaids rather than actual bridesmaids, with their identical upswept hairdos and identical pink heels.

  His wrist twitched. They would make a great painting, all of them lined up like nesting dolls.

  No, correction: as the final bridesmaid appeared at the top of the aisle, Evan had to revise his previous thought. They would make a great painting, but she would make a spectacular painting. He would title it Bridesmaid Number Seven.

  Tall and thin with long limbs, she was the sort of person people might describe as gangly. It was like someone had taken a regular, average woman and stretched her out like taffy. But she was too graceful to be rightfully called gangly. She had an ease about her, which was rather remarkable, given the packaging and spackling she’d been subjected to.

  Evan noticed those sorts of details when a painting was emerging. It was like his brain clicked into some other mode as it swept over a scene, processing, neutrally assessing everything with equal attention, waiting for the jolting spike of feeling that signified the correct take on a subject.

  He was a beat behind everyone else standing for the bride because he was still looking at the last bridesmaid. She and her colleagues arrayed themselves at the front of the church and turned to watch the bride process. Her face had interesting angles: sharp cheekbones and slightly unruly brows arching high over eyes that should have been too close-set to be called pretty.

  Where would he put her? In a forest, maybe? In her ridiculous pink dress in a forest, Titania styled by Barbie? No. That wasn’t quite right.

  As the bride passed his pew, he forced his gaze from her tallest attendant and considered his friend Tyrone’s soon-to-be-wife with more attention than he had ever found it necessary to bestow on her before. Vicky had the same facial structure as the bridesmaid, but less of it. The cheekbones were there, just not as prominent. The two women had to be related. Sisters, maybe?

  As Vicky’s father kissed her and sat down, the bridesmaids turned their backs to the congregation, presenting the assembly with a row of identical bows on their backsides, each one a little higher than the one next to it thanks to the arrangement of attendants from shortest to tallest.

  He was still thinking about her face, though.

  He would start with Yellow Ochre and add tiny amounts of Cadmium Red Light to start with, and then he’d layer in the planes of those gorgeous cheekbones.

  It was with a jolt, a great wrenching, invisible blow, that he realized: no.

  Not that those were the wrong colors, but that he wasn’t going to paint her.

  He wasn’t going to paint anything.

  After today, he didn’t paint anymore.

  “Is that cute guy in the corner the son of the infamous art criminal?” Emmy whispered to her cousin Vicky. Now that dinner and the first dance were over, she’d finally gotten a minute alone with the bride so she could ask about the handsome man sitting alone at a table in the back of the ballroom. She figured he must be “the one” since she’d seen him intently speed walking past a clump of photographers on his way into the church.

  He’d been staring at her much of the evening.

  It started when she was walking back up the aisle after the ceremony on the arm of her assigned groomsman. The intensity of his gaze had drawn her attention, but he’d looked away when she caught him staring.

  And she’d kept catching him. His appraisal had continued throughout the toasts and as she’d tried to make conversation with the rest of the wedding party over dinner. She’d glance over at him only to find him already looking at her—enough times that he’d started grinning sheepishly, like he knew he’d been busted.

  But of course if she kept catching him, it meant she was staring at him as much as he was staring at her.

  It was just so hard not to look at him. He was tall and broad-shouldered under his impeccably tailored suit, and when he smiled as she’d catch him looking, he did it with his whole face.

  “Don’t look!” Emmy shriek-whispered as Vicky turned to peek over her shoulder.

  “I can’t tell you who he is if I can’t see him,” Vicky declared, not even trying to make her surveillance subtle. “Oh! Yep, that’s Evan Winslow!”

  “His dad even made the papers in Minnesota,” Emmy said. The story of the jet-setting art dealer’s fall from grace had all the makings of a Greek tragedy, and it was playing out in the tabloids. It was a true-crime story that had the nation fascinated, except instead of dead bodies there were Ponzi schemes and counterfeit art.

  “Yep,” said Vicky. “The trial was huge. They were one of the richest families in Miami. It’s been all over the place. Poor guy. Ty says he’s taken it all super hard.” She cocked her head. “So you think he’s cute, huh? A little nerdy for my tastes, but I dare you to go over there and talk to him.”

  “No way! I can’t just—” Emmy’s objection was cut off when the DJ cued up a horrid song that made Vicky’s sorority sisters scream and rise as one.

  As they swept Vicky away in a tornado of pink tulle, she called, “Go over there. What have you got to lose? You’ll never see him again anyway.”

  There was so much more she wanted to ask Vicky. How old was Evan Winslow? What was he studying? Vicky’s new husband knew him from the University of Miami, where they were both grad students. Tyrone was doing his MBA, but she had a hard time imagining this guy in a business school. He seemed like more of an intellectual—a humanities type maybe. His hair, though currently slicked back, seemed like it was a little too long for him to fit in with the would-be capitalists, and his nerd-chic horn-rimmed glasses seemed more Buddy Holly than business. She started to make up a story. Something from the point of view of a sensitive guy forced into business school by his conniving, greedy father. The chorus could be the dad talking, but by the end of the song, the lyrics would be turned around, the guy defiantly using the father’s words against him.

  Well, hell. Emmy wasn’t generally an assertive sort of person. She tended to hang around on the sidelines and make up little snippets of songs about what she saw unfolding around her. But Vicky was right. She was flying back to Minneapolis tomorrow, and she’d never see this guy again. In twenty-four hours, she’d be back doing battle with her parents, facing their perpetual and poorly disguised disappointment over her barista job and her “childish dreams.” So why not put an end to their little mutual staring society and go say hi to the infamous Evan Winslow?

  Gathering about a thousand yards of pink polyester in her arms, she hiked up her skirts and set off. He must have felt her approach, because he looked up from his cake while she was still a good twenty feet away, an expression of surprise seguing into another of those magnetic, self-deprecating grins as she got closer.

  “Hey,” she said, trying to make the greeting seem casual.

  “Hey,” he echoed. Then he added, “You’re here,” as if all this time he’d merely been waiting for her arrival, as if she had been the point of his attending the wedding.

  He picked up a wedding program and slid it across the table to her.

  “Ha!” She laughed in delight. If she’d been making up a story about him, it seemed he had done the same thing, in a way. Except where hers was coming together from turns of phrase and snippets of melody, his was composed of ink—gar
den-variety ballpoint from the look of it. He had drawn her on the back of the program, right on top of the Shakespeare sonnet that Vicky, who Emmy was pretty sure wouldn’t know a sonnet if it bit her in the ass outside the context of wedding planning websites, had artfully placed on the otherwise-blank heavy-gauge paper. The funny thing was that Emmy wasn’t wearing the god-awful dress in his portrait. He’d put her in shorts and a tank top, which was pretty much her uniform when she wasn’t performing bridesmaid duties.

  “You drew me! You’re an artist?” She’d known his dad was an art dealer, but she didn’t know that much about the rest of the Winslow family—she’d read the headlines but hadn’t really followed the details of the trial.

  He paused for long enough before answering that she started to fear she’d offended him somehow. “I used to be a painter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I used to paint, but now I don’t.”

  Okay then, that was clearly not a topic he was keen to discuss, so she tried another question. “Vicky said you’re in grad school with Tyrone?”

  “We’re both at the University of Miami, but I’m doing a PhD in art history. Ty and I met in a campus running club.”

  Yes. The satisfying ping of having uncovered the truth in her proto-song echoed in her chest. An artist and an intellectual. She’d been spot-on.

  “Are you from Minnesota?” he asked. “You look like you’re related to Vicky.”

  “Yeah. She’s my cousin. I’m Emmy.”

  He stood and stuck out his hand. “Hi, Emmy. I’m Evan.”

  She was on the other side of the table—too far away to reach his hand—so she walked around. Wanting to pretend that she was in control, she slowed her steps. But that was only because she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the truth of the matter, which was that in her haste to reach him she’d had to slow her steps. She was a stupid, powerless fish he was reeling in.