Wicked Temptation (Nemesis Unlimited)

by Zoë Archer

He appeared entirely unperturbed as he gazed with perceptive eyes around Devere’s rooms. Bronwyn tried to see what he saw. There was a front parlor with a small stove in one corner, and beyond that, a bedroom. The furnishings were of decent but not extravagant quality. Though the curtains were open, a heaviness lingered in the air.

  “No one’s been here for some time.” She wrinkled her nose at the musty atmosphere.

  “A month at least,” Marco said. “Maybe more.” He moved through the rooms, quietly opening cupboards and poking behind furniture.

  Trying to make herself useful, she did the same. “Tell me what we’re looking for.”

  “Documents, notebooks.” He pulled open the top drawer of a writing desk, removing a sheaf of paper. This he set on the parlor table, and continued to prowl through the room.

  Bronwyn moved past him and into the bedroom. Her skin tightened to be in a stranger’s bedchamber, and a man’s, at that. But there was more at stake than propriety. The bed itself was unmade, and when Bronwyn opened a chest of drawers, she found only a few shirtfronts. Everything else had been cleared out.

  “Moldy cheese and spoiled milk in the pantry,” Marco said, just loud enough for her to hear from the other room. “He left in a hurry.”

  “What if he took what we’re looking for with him?”

  “He’s sloppy enough to owe money to the most dangerous people in London,” Marco answered. “If he bolted, he’d do it without thinking clearly. Whatever we need is still here.”

  He spoke with such assurance, she couldn’t doubt him.

  There was another, smaller desk in the bedroom. She discovered a notepad, but the paper inside was blank. Still, she tucked it into a pocket in her cloak. It might prove useful somehow—though she doubted it.

  Sudden inspiration struck her, and she knelt beside the bed. She lifted up the mattress, and gave a little cry of excitement when she uncovered a portfolio. Grabbing the folder, she took it out to the parlor.

  “Look what I found!”

  Marco stepped close as she undid the portfolio’s cloth tape fastening, then opened it.

  He started to laugh, and she fervently wished the myth of self-immolation was true, because she’d never been more mortified in her whole life, and that included the time she appeared at a debutante ball with her skirt tucked into her bustle.

  The portfolio held postcards. More specifically, pornographic postcards.

  Men and women tangled in numerous configurations, some of them downright gymnastic. She wanted to slap her hands over her eyes, or turn away, but she couldn’t. Her gaze remained fastened to the pictures.

  “These postcards must be doctored,” she heard herself exclaim. There were knots of limbs intertwined, mouths open, hands upon bare flesh. “People can’t really do those things.”

  “Can’t they?” he murmured. He picked up one particularly appalling/intriguing picture where a man held a woman up against a wall, her legs wrapped around his waist, the couple enthusiastically … coupling, if the blurriness of the postcard was any indicator. “This one’s always been quite fun.” He dropped it back into the stack and moved on in his search of the room.

  She tore her gaze from the pictures to stare at him. “You’ve done this?”

  “I might’ve,” he said over his shoulder as he rifled through another drawer.

  Now she was absolutely certain she would burst into flames. It was impossible to look at him now and not imagine him doing those filthy, wonderful things in the pictures. And he was so clever, he could come up with many more variations. Intelligent men had always intimidated and intrigued her—but this added a whole new dimension to what a quick-witted man might be capable of.

  As he continued to sort through the drawer’s contents, he asked, “You never did any of that with your husband?”

  Considering he wasn’t part snake, no, she thought. “Of course not,” she said aloud. The very idea that Hugh might even suggest such positions was ludicrous.

  “My apologies, Mrs. Parrish. I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “Apology accepted.” She gathered up the photographs. “Clearly, this has nothing to do with my fortune or Devere’s whereabouts.”

  He returned the drawer to its place in the cabinet. “But we did learn he likes a wank before bed.”

  She shot him a glance that said such comments were not appreciated.

  “While you were busy looking at those pictures,” he continued, turning back to her, “I found this tucked inside an empty marmalade jar at the back of a cupboard.” He brandished a sheet of thin, almost transparent paper that was covered with strange symbols as well as letters.

  “Those are the same symbols we found on documents at his offices yesterday,” she noted.

  From within his coat, he pulled out those same documents and spread them on the table. “Very kind of Devere, to leave me a means of cracking his code.”

  She glanced back and forth between the papers. It was an impossible task to take those arcane pictographs and turn them into something comprehensible, but Marco braced his hands on the table and studied the documents. He overlaid the new paper onto the ones from the office. The images on the papers suddenly formed completed letters.

  “That stronzo,” he muttered.

  “What?” she demanded. “What did he do?”

  Marco’s hands clenched into fists. “Devere was a gambler, all right, except he didn’t gamble with his own money.”

  Her eyes widened. “He used Hugh’s money.”

  “His, and other clients.’” He pointed to pieces of the paperwork. “See here. Details of some garden-variety gambling. Boxing matches, card games, horse races. But the bigger losses came with investments in business schemes. Like those newspaper clippings we found. Railway lines and housing developments, none of which were ever built. Just stole cash from fools like Devere.”

  “I cannot believe that Hugh would ever condone those kinds of investments.”

  “He didn’t. None of Devere’s clients knew.”

  “But if he lost all that cash,” she pressed, “why is it that none of those other clients have come forward demanding their lost money?”

  “Because he paid them all back.”

  “Not me,” she countered.

  “He didn’t have to.” Marco looked grim. “A widow with no living male relatives—who would you complain to? What recourse would you have to get your fortune back? If someone was going to be stuck with the bill, it was going to be you.”

  Rage clouded her vision. “He got away with it because I’m a woman. How … unfair.” A paltry word to describe what had happened.

  Marco tucked all the papers inside his coat. “A fair world for women, it’s not. Never has been.”

  There was Harriet’s mother, and all the women who’d suffered at the hands of men, with barely any legal recourse. All her own property had become Hugh’s upon their marriage. In truth, she’d become his property.

  “So long as I had books and a room in which to practice my violin,” she said bitterly, “I didn’t care.” She shook her head. “I hadn’t known. If I’d made myself pay attention, I could’ve done something. For myself. For other women.”

  “You’re doing something now.”

  “But what?” She spread her hands wide. “Devere took my money and ran off. There isn’t a sodding lot to do about it now.” She was too angry to care about her crude language.

  “Not true.” He folded his arms across his chest. “This isn’t the end of the search.”

  “He could be anywhere,” she pointed out. “Japan or Peru or Norway.”

  “Then we go to Japan or Peru or Norway and wring that money out of him.” Again, Marco sounded so in control, so self-assured, but she couldn’t share in his certainty. “If he bolted in a hurry, then he left something behind that will tell us where he’s gone. He did leave behind this key to his code,” he added, nodding at the sheet of thin paper. “Need to keep looking.”

  He sorted through the other do
cuments on the table, but after several minutes, he’d offered no answers.

  Frustrated, she stuck her hands into the pockets of her cloak. Her fingers brushed against the edges of the notepad she’d taken. Her temper frayed, and she tossed the notepad onto the table.

  Marco’s focus sharpened. “Where did you find that?”

  “In the bedroom desk. You needn’t bother. There’s nothing written on it.”

  “Not now. But there was.” With that cryptic remark, he flipped open the pad and stared at the blank paper. From his endless supply of inner coat pockets, he produced a small piece of charcoal. He used it to lightly rub back and forth across the surface of the paper.

  Figures appeared on the sheet, figures pressed into the paper by a pen nib. The original writing was gone, but it had left behind a series of ghostly lines. A few words, but mostly numbers. My God.

  She read it aloud. “‘Dov. 12:45, 1:50, 6:32. Cal. 3:25, 5:15. 9:41.’ These are times,” she deduced.

  “A train schedule,” Marco said. “Ships, too. Steamer ships. Dov. is Dover.”

  “Which would make Cal. Calais,” she realized.

  “Our man fled to France.” He tore off the sheet of charcoal-rubbed paper and pocketed it. “It’s a good place for people fleeing financial misdeeds. Other misdeeds, too. But we’re not concerned with that.”

  She recalled stories of people like Beau Brummel and Byron who’d run to France to hide from their creditors. If Devere owed money to Charlie, and others, he’d likely do the same. “He won’t come back.”

  Marco’s expression was grim. “To break even, he had to steal, and I doubt there isn’t a single bridge he hasn’t burned in England. France gives him the chance to start over. We’ll find him there.”

  “My understanding of geography isn’t particularly vast,” she said, “but France is a fairly large country, with many places for someone who doesn’t want to be found to disappear.”

  “Two hundred and sixty thousand square miles, more or less.”

  “More or less.” His knowledge felt like a barrier, keeping her at a distance, even as she felt herself drawn closer as their minds worked together.

  Stalking to the window, Marco peered out at the street, his gaze always in motion. “Devere’s proven he isn’t the wisest philosopher in the agora. He won’t think of places like Lyon or Marseille. But he’ll want to find himself new work. A tiny mind like his will consider only one city—the biggest and most dangerous city in France.”

  The answer leaped forward in her mind. “Paris.”

  “Paris,” he concurred.

  Goodness, the more time she spent with him, the more her brain worked, like an unused muscle finally exercising. Would she be sore from the activity, the way her hands ached from her boxing lesson with Harriet?

  Her taxed mind recalled something he’d said moments earlier. “We’ll find him?”

  Light fell across his face in sharp angles as he turned from the window. “You’ve met Devere. If Nemesis has a chance of finding him, it’s because you’ll be able to identify him.”

  He spoke in such a matter-of-fact way about it, as though every week she took a train to Dover, hopped on a steam packet to Calais, and then ventured into Paris to track down a thief. Fear tightened along the back of her neck. What Marco proposed went far beyond even breaking into a man’s lodgings. This was …

  Adventure.

  Part of her reared back in fright at the word. It meant unpredictability, walking off the well-trod paths she knew, leaving the role she’d been playing all her life.

  Precisely why it intrigued her.

  But this sort of adventure would be far different from the sort she read about. This was real, with all the sweat, blood, and danger to go with it.

  Marco suddenly tensed. What had him so on guard? All she heard were the sounds of carriages and a few voices on the street outside. But then she caught it: someone’s tread on the stairs.

  Grabbing her wrist, Marco started to pull her toward the bedroom. But before they made it into the other chamber, the door to Devere’s rooms opened.

  A man stood on the threshold. He wore a decent but loud checked suit and a bowler hat. It wasn’t Devere. Seeing Marco and Bronwyn standing in the flat, the stranger’s eyes widened, then narrowed.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he challenged.

  “Who are you?” Marco’s voice changed, his accent much less refined.

  “A friend of the bloke that rents this place,” the man fired back. “He asked me to look in sometimes while he’s away.”

  “Where’s my rent?” Marco demanded.

  The man glanced at Bronwyn.

  “It’s been three months,” she said, striving to make her own accent more common, though she wasn’t as successful as Marco. “And not a cent.”

  Her attempt at a Cockney tone must have been decent enough, because the man snapped, “Check your ruddy ledgers, because everything’s been paid. My friend took care of that before he left.”

  “You heard from him since he went?” Marco demanded.

  The stranger’s face closed up like a vermin trap. “I ain’t telling nobody nothing, especially not some rent collector who can’t read a sodding account book.” He pointed at the door. “Get moving.”

  “I’ll give it another look,” Marco vowed, “but if I read my numbers right, then you’ll be seeing us again.” He strode toward the door, and Bronwyn trotted quickly after him. They slipped past the glowering man, and though she wanted to run down the stairs, she made herself keep with Marco’s slower pace. She also resisted the impulse to look back over her shoulder, like a burglar fleeing a crime.

  Which is exactly what she was.

  They reached the street, and though the danger was behind them, her heart still knocked painfully from their encounter with the stranger in Devere’s room. It had all been so terrifyingly visceral and real.

  “A bunch of tripe,” Marco said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “We weren’t the only ones playing parts back there. That bloke was a thug looking for his employer’s money. Devere wouldn’t have paid for his room for months, not if he skipped out that quickly. He wouldn’t be coming back, so nobody would check on his flat.”

  “Oh,” she said softly. None of that had occurred to her.

  “It’s just a matter of time before the debt collectors ransack the place,” Marco continued, glancing up and down the street. “We were lucky we found the clues when we did.”

  He hailed a cab, and soon they were heading back to headquarters. Marco sat with that same watchful elegance he always displayed.

  Looking out the window, he muttered something.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

  “I said, ‘You did well back there,’” he admitted.

  “Believe me,” she answered, “I’m just as surprised as you are.” She hadn’t even thought about how to best play along with Marco’s rent-collector ruse. Only slipped into the part, though with less finesse than he’d shown.

  “Not just the gambit with that poorly dressed oaf.” He glanced at her. “Finding that notepad. Figuring out Devere was heading to Calais and Paris.”

  She picked at the stitching of her cloak. “You would’ve found the notepad and figured it out without me.”

  “Yes,” he answered easily. “But you deciphered a good deal, too. I’m trained. You aren’t.”

  Perhaps she was being as suspicious as Nemesis wanted her to be, but his praise sounded … grudging. As if he didn’t want to admit to himself, let alone her, that she could actually manage the situation, or even thrive within it.

  Annoyance heated her cheeks. “Why shouldn’t I be able to do those things? Because I’m a woman?”

  He lowered his eyelids. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that both Harriet and Riza are Nemesis agents, and female.”

  “My social class, then?”

  He gave another Italian shrug. She was beginning to hate those shrugs. They commun
icated so much while also remaining perfectly opaque. If only there was an English equivalent.

  “You may think me nothing but a silly society lady,” she said. “But I’ve seen things. More than most.”

  His brows rose in disbelief.

  “Consumption isn’t a pretty disease,” she continued.

  “I’ve seen it,” he replied, his gaze shuttered.

  “And I nursed my husband through the illness. I watched him die. Slowly. Awfully. My life hasn’t been all tea parties and regattas.”

  He bowed his head slightly. “Again, I have to offer you my apologies. Your maid didn’t tell us the extent of your involvement with Mr. Parrish’s illness.”

  “It was considerable,” she said tightly. “He took his last, labored breath in my arms.”

  “It’s not an easy thing,” he murmured. “To see death, to touch it, even, and be unable to stop it.”

  What had he seen to give him this shared, bitter knowledge? She’d been terrified when it had become clear that Hugh wouldn’t get better. And some of her fear wasn’t just for him, but for herself. If a young man like him could die, couldn’t she, too? Did Marco think of his own death when confronted with its specter?

  Instead, she asked, “When do we leave for Paris?”

  “Tonight.”

  She braced herself as the carriage rocked with a turn. “He’s been out of the country for three months. Surely we can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Doesn’t matter if he’s been gone an hour or a year,” Marco answered. “All time is valuable, and every moment we spend on this side of the Channel is a moment less for us to get your money back.”

  Arguing with him would be ridiculous. Clearly, Marco knew what he was about. This wasn’t his first assignment—anyone could see that. He’d already advised her to do precisely what he directed. So she had to trust him, though every part of her shouted that trusting him was almost as dangerous as whatever threat they faced abroad.

  * * *

  Marco couldn’t tally the number of times he’d made the voyage from England to France. He now preferred his intelligence assignments to keep him in Britain and had enough seniority so that his choices were usually honored. But when he’d been a young agent, he spent so many hours ferrying back and forth on the English Channel—on steam packets, fishing boats, cargo ships—he almost qualified as a sailor. Thank God he didn’t get seasick.