Desired

by Nicola Cornick

  Garrick nodded. “It would seem so. Powerful propaganda, these cartoons,” he added. “It is no wonder that Sidmouth hates them.”

  Owen nodded. “They are dangerous,” he said. “An incitement to violence.”

  He pushed the cartoons into his pocket. The pile of clothes on the floor caught his attention and he stirred it with one booted foot. An evocative scent hung for a moment on the air, crisp and fresh, with a perfume he recognised. He squatted down and picked up the shirt, feeling the fine quality of the linen against his fingers.

  So now he knew what Tess had been wearing when she arrived at the brothel. Had she come there incognito because she did not want the ton to hear that she disported herself in a bawdy house? Or was her choice of clothing all part of a sensual game? Did she enjoy having a lover peel off those layers of masculine attire before he made love to her?

  Owen thought of Tess Darent’s body beneath his hands as he had lifted her down from the rope, the flare of her hips and the delicate curve of her waist. He thought of the heat of her skin through the slippery silk of the lavender gown, then he thought of what she might look like with those curves confined within the stark lines of the jacket and trousers, the thin cotton of the shirt pressing against her breasts. He raised the shirt to his nose, inhaled a long, deep breath and felt his senses fill with Tess, with her scent and her essence. Once again he was impaled by a jolt of lust that was hot and fierce and utterly uncomplicated.

  “If you have an imagination, Lord Rothbury, now would be the time to use it….”

  Owen, who had had no notion before tonight that he was such an imaginative man, found that imagination positively running riot.

  “I met your sister-in-law just now,” he said abruptly to Garrick.

  Garrick, unsurprisingly, looked completely floored for a moment by the apparent non sequitur. “Joanna— Lady Grant—is here?”

  “Is that likely?” Owen said. “No. I was referring to Lady Darent. I found her out in the street, shinning down a makeshift rope from one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

  Garrick’s face spilt into a grin. “Oh, I see. Yes, that sounds exactly the sort of thing Tess would do. She is thoroughly scandalous. She had probably been enjoying an orgy.”

  Owen grimaced. He had only just managed to force his imagination away from the vision of Tess naked beneath the thin cotton shirt and now he found his mind had filled with an entirely new and darker set of imagery representing the way she might have disported herself here in the brothel tonight. Tess, pale limbs spread in abandoned wantonness, her cloud of red-gold hair fanning over her shoulders, Tess tied naked across a bed… He swallowed hard and fixed his gaze on the middle distance in an attempt to distract his mind. Unfortunately the middle distance consisted of a painting of a nude nymph and a group of lavishly endowed gentlemen indulging in a riotous orgy. Owen raised a hand to ease the constriction of his neckcloth. Evidently the lewd atmosphere of the bawdy house was turning his mind.

  He wrenched his thoughts away from wayward visions of Tess and turned to find Garrick watching him closely, his gaze narrowed, perceptive. “Do you have an interest there?” Garrick asked.

  Owen ran a distracted hand through his hair. “In Lady Darent? I’d be a fool if I had.”

  “Which,” Garrick said, smiling faintly, “doesn’t quite answer the question, does it? Those Fenner girls,” he added, shaking his head, “could make a fool of any man.”

  “I know,” Owen said. “Born to drive a man to perdition.” He cast a last glance around the hallway. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “It’s doing strange things to my mind.”

  “Or you could stay,” Garrick said, with an expressive lift of the brows.

  Owen gestured towards where Mrs. Tong was leaning over the wrought-iron balcony on the first floor and watching them with a great deal of venom in her dark, disillusioned eyes.

  “I think we have already outstayed our welcome,” he murmured. “That basilisk stare would be sufficient to wither the most ardent man.”

  “White’s, then,” Garrick said, “and the brandy bottle?”

  “Capital,” Owen said. He bent to pick up the pile of clothing from the floor. Tess’s scent was growing fainter now. He remembered Garrick saying that the knife had been found in the jacket pocket. So Tess carried both a knife and a pistol. That was interesting. He wondered why she carried them and what she was afraid of. He wondered if she knew how to use them.

  Then there were the cartoons, found hidden in a chamber on the second floor, Garrick had said. Tess’s resourceful escape down the sheet rope had been from just such a room…?.

  Owen felt the strange prickle of sensation again, an instinct, stronger this time, that he had missed something obvious, something that had been right beneath his nose. A thought slid into his mind, a thought that was so outrageous, so unbelievable, that it stole his breath. It told him that he had been played by a master hand, that he had been misdirected and fooled. He had believed what was before his eyes. He had not questioned it. He had met a notorious widow climbing out of a brothel window and he had believed her when she had pretended to be running away to avoid scandal.

  Owen recalled Tess Darent claiming not to know who Lord Sidmouth was and professing pretty ignorance of the radical movement. She had claimed to be in a hurry to get home and sleep off her sexual excesses.

  In truth she had been in a hurry to escape.

  He let the clothes slip through his fingers and instead took the cartoons from his pocket once more and scanned them. There was nothing, he thought, to say that Jupiter, the witty and dangerous caricaturist, had to be a man. Sidmouth had simply made that assumption, assumed also that the members of the Jupiter Club were exclusively male. But Jupiter could well be a pseudonym for a woman, the type of woman who carried a pistol in her reticule and attended radical meetings dressed in masculine attire. A woman who hid behind her reputation for scandal and pretended to be as light and superficial as a butterfly…?.

  It seemed impossible. And yet…

  Owen let out a long breath. No one would believe him, of course. Lord Sidmouth would laugh him out of town if he suggested that Jupiter was the infamous Dowager Marchioness of Darent. The evidence was no more than circumstantial. Even so, Owen was sure that his instinct was right. He had wondered what it was that Teresa Darent was hiding. Now he knew. All he had to do was to prove it.

  LADY EMMA BRADSHAW HAD just returned from the meeting of the Jupiter Club and was standing with one hand on the latch of her tiny cottage, listening to the fading sound of her brother’s carriage as it rumbled away down the hill towards the city, when a man materialised out of the darkness beside her, flung open the door and bundled her over the threshold. He had one arm locked tight about her waist and his hand over her mouth. It was so sudden and so shocking that Emma had no time to cry out. She struggled and fought, necessarily in silence, kicked him and bit him, and then equally suddenly, she stopped fighting because she had recognised his scent and his touch. Vicious shock flared through her; her knees buckled, she sagged in his arms and he let her go.

  “Tom,” Emma said. Her voice was hoarse. Tom Bradshaw, her husband, here, six months after he had deserted her and left her alone, penniless and with no word…?.

  The shock faded and she waited to feel something else in its place, anger perhaps, or disbelief or even love. Anything. Anything but this cold chill that seemed to encase her heart.

  The cocky smile that she remembered was gone from Tom’s lips. He looked older, not merely because of the pallor of his face and the deep lines that scored it, but because there was something different about him, some knowledge in his eyes that had not been there before, something of pain and suffering. He was emaciated, as though he had been ill. He did not try to touch her again or even to draw any closer to her. He stood just inside the door, watching her with wariness and a longing that did make Emma’s heart contract. She had never expected to see Tom look so vulnerable.

  She found t
hat she was wondering what on earth to say. Strange, when so many times before she had rehearsed exactly what she would say to the no-good, deceitful, swindling scoundrel should she ever have the misfortune to see him again.

  “What happened?” she croaked. “Where have you been?” She immediately hated herself for the banality of the words, as though Tom had merely been gone a few hours enjoying a pint or two at the local tavern.

  She saw a faint smile touch his lips as though he too recognised the inadequacy of anything either of them could say. In that moment Emma’s feelings came alive, and she hated him with so vivid and bitter a hatred that she could almost taste it. She put her hands behind her back to prevent her from pummelling him with the force of her rage. She could feel the rough plaster of the wall cold against her palms. The rest of her body felt hot, tight and furious.

  “I’ve been on board a ship.”

  Tom took a couple of steps away from her, down the passage. His steps sounded loud on the flagstone floor. Emma wondered if the maid would wake and think she was entertaining a lover in the depths of the night. She caught Tom’s arm and pulled him into the kitchen, closing the door silently behind them.

  “On a ship?” She knew she was repeating his words like a parrot. Nothing was making much sense to her.

  “Someone didn’t like me very much.” Tom gave a half shrug. “They paid to have me knocked on the head and thrown into the hold of a ship going to the Indies, no questions asked.”

  Emma’s stomach swooped. She felt a little sick. So this was Tom’s excuse for deserting her and running off with her fortune. She did not believe him. She could not. Tom had always been a consummate liar. Of course he would not admit that he had abandoned her of his own free will, not if he wanted her back.

  “I’m surprised it took so long,” she said sweetly, even though the bitterness was sharp in her throat. “There must be a hundred people willing to pay to get rid of you.” She turned away from him, staring fixedly at the little watercolour of a country scene on the wall. The soft pastel colours swam in the candlelight. Tess Darent had painted it as a present for her when first Emma had moved to Hampstead Wells. She had said that it would soften the austereness of the whitewashed walls. Tess had been her staunchest friend when Tom had left her.

  “Why did you trouble to come back?” she said. “You are the sort of man who could have made a fortune in the Indies.” Despite her attempts to sound indifferent, her voice cracked a little. “I hear that there are opportunities in those places for men of your stamp.”

  “I came back for you,” Tom said. Emma was not looking at him but even so she could feel his gaze on her and knew that its intensity did not waver. “You were all I thought about when I was imprisoned in that hellhole of a ship,” Tom said. “It was only the thought of seeing you again that kept me alive—”

  He broke off as Emma brought her hand down hard on the kitchen table, sending the bread knife skittering away across the surface.

  “Tom, stop!” She took a breath, lowered her tone. “It’s too late,” she said. A void of hopelessness opened up beneath her heart. “I don’t know if I believe anything you say anymore. You always were such a liar.”

  “I love you,” Tom said. “I swear it’s true.”

  Emma shook her head. “Don’t, Tom,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Tom was very pale now. He swayed a little. Emma made an instinctive move towards him but stopped herself and dropped her hand to her side. She could never trust him now. He had abandoned her with no word, leaving her facing a life alone with no money, no home and no reputation left. She had known he was a scoundrel when she wed him. It was that very air of danger about him that she had found so fatally attractive. Now, though, the young girl who had fallen for Tom Bradshaw’s charm was like a stranger to her, someone from another life.

  “It was your half-brother who helped me,” she said, holding his gaze with eyes that burned hot with unshed tears. “You remember your half-brother, Garrick Farne—the man you wanted to ruin, the man whose wife you tried to kill?”

  Tom was white to the lips. “I admit I have done some terrible things,” he said, “but that is all at an end. I’ve changed. I’ll prove it to you. I promise you…?.”

  “Oh, Tom,” Emma said. “It’s too late to do that.” She turned away. “If you do love me,” she said, with difficulty, “the best thing you can do for me is never to see me again.”

  “No,” Tom said. “Emma—”

  “Go,” Emma said.

  When she turned back Tom had gone and the kitchen was empty and cold. The door swung closed softly with a click of the latch. Moving very slowly, feeling cold all the way through to her bones, Emma locked the door and went back down the passage to the little parlour. The fire had been banked down in the grate; she tried to warm her shaking hands before it. There was a plate of cold ham and bread and cheese for her supper and a glass of wine on the table, but she could not touch it now. Her mouth felt as dry as dust, her throat blocked.

  I don’t need him, she told herself fiercely, blinking past the tears. I don’t need Tom. He’ll only hurt me again.

  The parlour was comfortingly warm but Emma found that the fire could not stave off the cold that was inside her rather than out. With a sigh, she picked up the tray and carried it through to the kitchen, replacing the food untouched in the cold larder and making her way upstairs to bed. It was only once she was beneath the covers, curled around the stone hot-water bottle, seeking a comfort she could not find, that she permitted herself to cry, because she had wanted to believe that there was an ounce of goodness in Tom, that he could reform, but to trust him would have been the most foolish thing she could have done. She had already been hurt far too much.

  She wished that Tess Darent were there to advise her. Emma often thought that she would do just about anything for Tess, who had shown her kindness and generosity when everyone else had turned their backs on her. She did not know Tess well and she understood her even less, for there was beneath Tess’s outward manner an impenetrable reserve, but she loved Tess all the same with a fierce loyalty she had never felt for anyone else in her life. She had often wondered if Tess, too, had suffered at the hands of men and if that was why she had helped her. Perhaps she would never know of Tess’s experiences. But she would always be grateful to her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TESS LOOKED FROM THE LETTER in her hand to the flushed, fatuous face of the man standing on her sister’s hearthrug, hands clasped behind his back, substantial paunch jutting. He was warming his posterior before the blazing fire. His smug stance said that he held all the cards and Tess, a skilful gambler herself, was rather afraid that he was correct. She was in a bind. There was no doubt.

  Play for time.

  “Let me understand you properly, Lord Corwen,” she said.

  You noxious toad…

  “You are proposing that I should give permission, as guardian to my twin stepchildren, for you to wed Lady Sybil Darent and if I do not—” her tone dropped by several degrees from cold to frozen “—you will foreclose on a private loan you apparently advanced to my late husband and oblige my stepson, Lord Darent, to sell off all unentailed parts of his estate. To you, of course.”

  You vile, grasping beast…

  Corwen smiled, a lupine smile that left his small eyes cold. “You have it precisely, Lady Darent.”

  Tess tapped the lawyer’s letter against the palm of her hand. News of the loan had come as a shock to her but she could not afford the scandal of challenging Corwen in the law courts and he knew it. She wanted to take him to court because she knew he was a charlatan who had tricked the elderly Marquis of Darent into signing away half his estate in exchange for the loan. Towards the end of his life Darent had been almost insensible from excess laudanum and would have signed almost anything put in front of him. There were plenty of scandalmongers who said that was precisely how Tess had persuaded Darent to marry her in the first place.

 
“I’ll pay the loan off myself.” Her heart thumped in her chest and the words stuck in her throat but she forced them out. Forty-eight thousand pounds was no small sum and she hardly wanted to throw it away on Lord Corwen, but three widow’s portions, a successful gambling career and some careful investment had made her a rich woman and she could easily afford it. It was also the least painful option for her stepchildren. She would die before she saw either of them fall into the power of this man.

  But Corwen was shaking his head, smiling a dissolute smile that made her skin crawl. “I will not accept your money, Lady Darent. The debt is against the Darent estate. And as I say—” he cleared his throat but it did nothing to disguise the thickness of lechery in his voice “—I wish for marriage to Lady Sybil and then I will cancel the debt entirely.”

  “Lady Sybil is fifteen years old.” Tess could not keep the distaste from her voice. “She is a schoolgirl.”

  And you are disgusting.

  “I am prepared to wait a year provided that we may come to terms now.” Lord Corwen rocked back on his heels. “Sixteen would be a charming age for Lady Sybil to wed. I saw her on her most recent visit from Bath. She is a delightful young woman. Fresh, biddable, innocent…” His voice caressed the final word.

  Tess set her teeth. Not long ago, a mere ten years, she had been a bride herself when not yet out of her teens. Twice. And Corwen, predatory, hiding his dissolution under that unpleasantly avuncular manner, reminded her all too forcibly of Charles Brokeby, her second husband. A tremor shook her deep inside. Sybil must never, never, be subjected to what she had endured.

  “And you are…” She looked at Corwen, at his fat jowls and the lines of dissipation scored deep around his eyes. “Forty-five, forty-six?”