by Liz Carlyle
For an instant, Xanthia couldn’t catch her breath. When she finally did, it was tinged with his warm, deeply masculine scent. “Perhaps you’ve something you wish shipped?” she said with specious cheer. “You may, of course, trust all your transportation needs to Neville’s. We are the very best in the business.”
The strange intimacy was broken. Nash chuckled, and let her pass. “I shall remember that, my dear, when next I need something sent to—oh, where do you go, anyway?”
“To hell and back, Lord Nash, if there’s money to be made.” She motioned him to the chairs by the hearth. “But whatever it is you’ve come for, you may as well have tea first.”
Her timing was excellent. One of the clerks rapped softly on the door, then shouldered his way through with the battered old pewter tea service. “That Mr. George fellow is upset we haven’t any cakes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m to go up to the bakery and fetch some.”
Xanthia refused the cakes and sent him out again. She poured tea, and she and Nash exchanged opinions about the weather. Nash thought it might rain. She did not.
It felt so strange to discuss such mundane things after all that had passed between them. Xanthia knew she should concentrate on what de Vendenheim had asked of her, but she could not get past the fact that Nash was here—in her office, prowling around like a caged panther and interjecting himself into her ordinary world in a way which sent her senses reeling.
The man was the stuff of female fantasies; a man who made one think of breathless sighs and tangled sheets, not the sort of man who turned up for tea in the middle of one’s workday afternoon. But he was here, and he was behaving with restrained civility—though his dark, too-long hair and obsidian eyes made him look just a little untamed. She let her eyes drift over his snug breeches and tall, black Hessians, which emphasized his height and lean musculature. His riding coat was close-fitted across a pair of fine, broad shoulders, and tailored with a decidedly Continental cut.
Good manners took over and kept Xanthia from staring at him as pointedly and as intently as she might have wished. “You rode, I collect?”
“Yes, I wished to take the air,” he said.
She laughed. “In Wapping?” she asked. “Oh, never mind! Tell me, my lord, of your background. Was English not your mother tongue?”
He smiled self-deprecatingly, “No, not my mother’s,” he agreed. “She despised England and everything in it, I think.”
“Ah,” said Xanthia. “Where was she from? The Continent, I daresay, with that sort of attitude.”
He laughed again. “Yes, you are quite right,” he admitted. “She was from Montenegro. Do you know it?”
Xanthia nodded. “Oh, indeed,” she answered, setting down her cup and saucer. “It is a breathtakingly beautiful country, or so I’m told. I can imagine one might miss it a great deal.”
“You cannot imagine how truly lovely it is, Miss Neville, until you have seen it,” he answered. “The vivid blue of the Adriatic set against a backdrop of dark, richly forested mountains. As a child, I thought it an almost magical place.”
“You grew up there?”
The marquess shrugged. “Mother was a bit of a vagabond,” he said. “She was of Russian descent on one side, and she moved in only the best circles. We traveled incessantly. Vienna. Prague. St. Petersburg. But if we had a home—yes, it was Montenegro.”
“And Montenegro is to the north of”—Deliberately, she furrowed her brow—“yes, Albania, correct? And Greece?”
Nash smiled. “I suppose that in your line of work, one must have a good sense of geography.”
“Indeed,” she agreed. “And of politics, too. For example, we are not always able to refit in Athens when we might otherwise prefer to do so. Revolution can be a dreadful inconvenience to commerce.”
“I can assure you, my dear, that no one is more inconvenienced by the revolution than the Greeks themselves,” he said quietly. “But in the end, they will prevail.”
“Is that your wish?” she asked lightly.
Nash visibly stiffened. “I am no friend to the Turks,” he admitted. “My family has been fighting them for centuries. For what little it is worth, yes, by God, I hope the Greeks run the Aegean red with Turkish blood.”
Xanthia had struck a nerve, it seemed. It would be unwise to press this line of conversation. “Do you miss your homeland greatly?”
Nash nodded when she lifted the teapot. “I did miss it quite desperately, at first,” he answered, as she refreshed his cup. “But the war was raging, and my father had inherited an English title. He had responsibilities here.”
“Your line had not been expected to inherit?” she asked.
Nash shook his head. “By no means,” he said. “My brother and I were promised from childhood to Czar Peter—for his Imperial Guard—when we came of age. That was to have been our destiny, you see. But then Father’s brother and nephew died in a yachting accident”—here, he lifted his hands in a remarkably Continental gesture—“and destiny changed her mind, I suppose, and sent us to Brierwood, the family seat in Hampshire.”
Xanthia tried to relax in her chair. Hampshire. The man who had been murdered had been traveling through Hampshire. “How exciting it must have been for you,” she managed. “What was it like to first see your family estate and know that one day it would all be yours?”
“At the time, I was not the heir.” He paused to sip politely from his tea. “My brother Petar was the elder. Regrettably, he died young.”
This, Xanthia had not heard. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I gather your mother disliked England on sight?”
Nash smiled sardonically. “My mother remained in Hampshire but a short while, then chose to return to her old life. My father…well, things had been turbulent. I think by then he was not sorry to see her go.”
“How sad that sounds,” said Xanthia.
Nash shrugged as if it scarcely mattered. “My father had a new life; a life of wealth and English privilege,” he said. “And English duty. But those things meant nothing to her; she was cut off from her world. She said she could not breathe here. So she left—and died shortly thereafter.”
Xanthia did not miss the remorse in his voice. “How tragic,” she murmured. “But it was no one’s fault, was it?”
Nash lifted one eyebrow. “No, no one’s fault,” he answered, setting down his teacup. “Tell me, Miss Neville how does your business go on?”
Xanthia glanced at him across the table. Clearly the discussion of his family was at an end, too. “Quite well, I thank you,” she said. “We have increased our sailings by thirty-five percent, and our profits by almost ten since relocating.”
“Good Lord.” He shot her a look of surprise. “You must be minting money in the cellars and buying ships at a prodigious rate.”
Xanthia inclined her head in agreement. “Yet another reason for being here,” she said. “One can buy—or lease—almost anything easily and quickly.”
“And yet with all this expenditure of capital, you are still turning a huge profit?” he said. “I wonder you did not relocate sooner.”
Xanthia cut her gaze toward the window and the thronging river beyond. She tried to focus not on the deep, seductive rumble of Lord Nash’s voice, but on the task de Vendenheim had laid before her. She had to know if he was guilty. She could not delay—for any number of reasons.
“Unfortunately, London has its disadvantages, too,” she finally said. “Where there is opportunity, Lord Nash, there is always danger. Is that not an old Chinese proverb?”
“Danger? Of what sort?”
She smiled tightly. “Customs men are everywhere, for example,” she said. “And they are sticklers for the letter of the law.”
He looked at her darkly. “Miss Neville, you shock me.”
“Oh, come now, Nash,” she said. “Have you never drunk untaxed brandy?”
“God, no,” he said with a faint shudder. “I do not drink the stuff at all.”
She looked at him in
mild surprise. “What, pray, do you drink?”
He hesitated. “The occasional glass of red wine,” he said. “And okhotnichya.”
Xanthia furrowed her brow. “What is that?”
He smiled faintly. “A spirit made of rye.”
“Rye?” Xanthia wrinkled her nose. “Like a…what do the Russians call it? Like a vodka?”
He set his head to one side and studied at her. “Yes, a strong vodka,” he said. “You know it?”
Xanthia laughed. “Lord Nash, if it can be bottled or barreled, I have likely heard of it—and probably transported it,” she said. “I also know it is not a libation for the faint of heart.”
He laughed, a rich but faintly sardonic sound. “Deceivingly, Miss Neville, the word vodka means ‘little water,’” he said. “Russians are masters of the understatement.”
“And how is okhotnichya different from vodka?”
“Okhotnichya means the spirits were distilled with strong herbs,” he explained. “Like cloves and citrus peel—or even anise.”
“Anise?” said Xanthia sharply. “Like absinthe?”
Lord Nash shot her a strange look. “Ah, the French vice,” he said. “Surely, Miss Neville, you do not partake? It is a dangerous business.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never seen it,” she admitted. “But I daresay you have.”
He smiled faintly. “Yes, a time or two, in my misspent youth,” he confessed. Then his voice seemed to drop another octave. “But taken to excess, my dear, absinthe is a poison and a convulsant. I am the sort of man who prefers always to indulge my vices to excess—and if someone is having convulsions, I prefer it to be of the more pleasurable sort.”
Swiftly, she looked away. There was no mistaking the heat in his words, and if his intent was to make her heart flutter and her stomach bottom out, he had succeeded. Dear heaven! It was all too easy to imagine the sort of vices Lord Nash would enjoy to excess—and with a connoisseur’s skill, too, she did not doubt. Somehow, Xanthia found the grace to return her gaze to his, and to feign a mischievous smile.
“Your overly indulged vices aside, my lord, might I assume that your vodka always bears a customs stamp?” she teased. “And what of your cheroots? Your tobacconist imports his goods from where? Virginia? North Carolina? And he dutifully pays his taxes, does he not?”
Nash looked faintly chagrined. “Actually, I get my vodka through a rather disreputable fellow in Whitechapel, and my cheroots by courier from Seville,” he said. “I am very particular as to the taste.”
“Ah!” said Xanthia. “Indeed you must be. Spanish tobacco comes mostly from Cuba, or Venezuela. Tut tut, Nash! I do not think the King would approve.”
“Painting me a sinner and a tax cheat, are you, my dear?” he asked. “Really, what is a little untaxed tobacco? And vodka—it can scarce be had here, taxed or otherwise. But you, Miss Neville, are talking of doing something a good deal more dangerous.”
“I did not say I did such things, but merely that I know how they are done.” Driven by restless anxiety, Xanthia had left her chair to roam about the room. “It is not difficult, Nash, to circumvent a customs agent, or even to take on contraband cargo in a foreign port. A little grease to the right palm is usually sufficient—but one must choose that palm with great care. It is no business for amateurs.”
He coughed discreetly. “My dear, you frighten me,” he said.
But Xanthia could see she that she did not. Not really. There was a pensive light in Nash’s eyes, but whether from ordinary curiosity or something more speculative, she could not say.
In any case, she had pushed this business far enough. Were Nash the man de Vendenheim thought him, another word might kindle suspicion. She whirled about and laughed lightly. “But why are we speaking of this nonsense?” she said. “It must bore you. Tell me, Nash, why did you really come here this afternoon? Not, I think, to discuss customs agents?”
As etiquette required, he, too, had risen. “I just wished to see this for myself,” he said, making an expansive gesture about the room.
Xanthia opened her hands. “See what?” she demanded. “A woman doing an honest day’s work? Have you no servants to watch, my lord?”
He stepped closer and studied her from beneath his hawkish black brows. “I think you have the makings of a shrew, Miss Neville.”
“Thank you.” She smiled. “I thought perhaps you were here to take me up on my offer.”
He hesitated, as if surprised she had mentioned it again. “I am afraid not, my dear.”
“Well,” she said briskly, going to the map on the wall, “then I shan’t humiliate myself by repeating it.”
“Oh, but I wish you would,” he returned in his deep, resonating voice. “Nothing feeds a man’s psyche like a beautiful woman pleading for his sexual favors.”
Xanthia pulled out one of the yellow pins—the Mae Rose—and stabbed it a half inch nearer the Straits of Gibraltar. “I am not pleading, Nash,” she said coolly. “Nor am I particularly beautiful—”
“No, not in any conventional way,” he interjected.
Bloody hell. She liked him all the better for his honesty. “—and if you want me, Nash,” she managed to continue, “then you will be the next to make an offer. I have no wish to continue flinging myself at a man who will let conventional notions about breeding and conduct and—and virginity get in the way of what ought to be perfectly healthy appetites.”
Xanthia was still moving pins, sometimes just for the satisfaction of stabbing them into the wall again. She did not realize how close Nash was until she felt the heat of his body behind her. “Do you know,” he said, his breath stirring the hair near her ear, “I believe I am done with conversing.”
Caught in midstab, Xanthia’s arm froze. At once, she felt the heat of his breath on her neck. Felt his warm hands slide around her waist. “Miss Neville,” he murmured, “how you do intrigue me.” Then his lips settled against the turn of her neck, searing and sure.
“Umm.” It was an exhalation of pure pleasure.
Nash never lifted his mouth from her flesh, though it was only her throat, her ear, then her jaw he kissed. But when his mouth brushed over the pulse point beneath her ear, Xanthia melted. She let the pin in her hand go skittering across the floor and let her body sag backward against the hard wall of Nash’s chest. Her head fell back onto his shoulder, giving him every opportunity to touch her.
His hands moved restlessly over her, stroking her waist, her ribs, then moving higher. He palmed the weight of her breasts, then lightly thumbed her nipples, which were already peaked with desire. In the slanting afternoon light, neither spoke—fearing, perhaps, to destroy the strange spell. Instead, he still nuzzled her throat, planting feverish kisses down the length, all the way to her shoulder whilst her breath ratcheted ever higher.
At last, when he touched her earlobe with the warm tip of his tongue, a sigh escaped her lips. In response, Nash drew a hitching breath and set one wide palm over her belly as the other slid lower. And lower—until Xanthia wished desperately to tear away her clothes, to give him free rein. To feel the heat and passion of his mouth in other, more secret, places.
Apparently, they were of a mind. Xanthia shivered when cool air breezed over her calves. Inch by inch, Nash was fisting up one side of her skirts, sending them slithering over her knee and up her thigh. A tremble of raw desire ran through her then, bone-deep and eviscerating.
Xanthia set her hands flat against the map, steadying herself. And then his mouth was on the nape of her neck, biting just hard enough to heighten her awareness. And his hand—oh, God, his hand. The froth of her petticoat and the fine lawn of her drawers was no barrier. Already Nash was sliding one finger back and forth in her wet, silken heat. The man was a master, wicked and tormenting as he twisted the fine thread of her desire to the breaking point.
Xanthia’s breath began to hitch with little gasps of pleasure. Nash sensed her need, easing his finger higher, stroking and teasing, ever so lightly b
rushing the swollen nub of her desire. As the intensity heightened, she collapsed fully against the wall, setting her feverish cheek against the chill of the map, her hands planted wide. She was trapped against the wall by his weight, the hard ridge of his cock pressing firmly and insistently into the cleft of her backside.
“God,” he rasped against her neck. “Good God, what I would not give to rip off those drawers and lift you onto—”
But it was too late. Xanthia’s hitching breath had become a soft, rhythmic sob. She could not wait. He was drawing her, making her throb and ache and pulse with need. Her entire being convulsed. She raked her hand wide, sending more pins scattering across the floor. Then, flat against the wall, with his hand working her into madness, Xanthia felt the world spin away. Felt the grime and grit and mustard yellow paint of her tawdry office whirl about her, then explode into shards of white light. The trembling rocked her, and washed over her, leaving everything pure and perfect in its wake.
When she came back to herself, still trembling, Nash had turned her in his arms, and was swallowing her gasping breath with his kisses. “Shush, shush,” he crooned, his mouth stroking over her brow bone. “Careful, love.”
Then it struck her. The office. The staff. Good God, Gareth.
Xanthia tried to nod, but Nash chose that moment to ignore his own advice and take her mouth on a tormented groan. Still greedy, she opened to him at once, and felt his tongue slide deep, plumbing the secrets of her mouth. He twisted his fist in her skirts again, and held her to him as if he were a drowning man and she his only hope. Over and over he kissed her, his nostrils wide, his breath rough, and one hand firmly grasping her derrière. Lifting her body firmly to his, he tore his mouth away, his eyes filled with something which looked like a mix of chagrin and regret.
Unable to look at him, Xanthia fell against him, and set her forehead to his shoulder. “I thought you were a sybarite, my lord,” she whispered. “I understood you thought only of your own pleasure.”
