by Kate Bateman
He smiled and Anya returned the gesture, delighted with this new information. Even Dmitri hadn’t discussed this kind of thing with her. Then she jumped as Wolff reached out, caught her fingers, and raised their joined hands between them. Her blood pulsed in her fingertips as he intertwined their fingers and then bent hers back with gentle force.
“Bend his fingers back,” he said softly, and his voice was lower, a rough murmur that seemed suddenly far more intimate, despite the gruesome subject matter. He increased the pressure, just to the edge of pain. “You might break a few bones that way.”
He released her, only to bring his hands up to her shoulders, left bare by the cut of the dress. Anya sucked in a breath.
He slid his hands upward to encircle her neck. A shiver of awareness slithered down her spine as his fingers disturbed the fine hairs at her nape beneath her upswept hair. His palms were warm against her skin as he applied just the slightest pressure.
His gaze snagged hers. “If someone’s trying to throttle you, put your hands together and bring your arms up and out, over his. That should break his hold. Try it.”
Anya did so and was pleased when the instructions worked. He let his arms fall back to his sides, but his gaze dropped to her mouth and awareness thickened the air between them, a bright, expectant tension, like the hush before a thunderstorm.
Anya could feel the warmth radiating from his chest; her body felt like melting wax.
“We should get down on the floor.”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“The gaming floor,” he clarified, with a thoroughly wicked chuckle. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Miss Brown.”
He stepped back and strode to the door, then shot her a challenging look over his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s put you to work.”
Chapter 22.
The noise from the Tricorn was an audible murmur from behind the connecting door. Wolff pushed it open and a wave of sound assaulted them as they stepped into a picture-lined hallway. Mickey stood at the far end at a podium, greeting guests who entered through the front door.
“The gaming rooms are on the upper level.” Wolff took her elbow and led her up an impressive curving double staircase. At the top, he paused and took two glasses of what appeared to be champagne from a tray on a stand. He handed one to her.
“For courage. But only one glass.” His gaze clashed with hers and his lips gave a devilish quirk. “Tonight, I want you sober.”
Anya took a deep gulp. Sober because she needed her wits about her to listen to her countrymen? Or sober because he wanted to make love to her in that state, as he’d promised last night?
Her heart pounded at the thought.
They crossed into the main salon, and Anya looked around with interest. This half of the Tricorn was more opulent than the private apartments, as luxurious and tastefully decorated as Haye’s. As ornate as her own residences back in Russia. Wolff nodded to a couple of acquaintances. Despite the early hour—it was only around nine o’clock—the place was already busy.
Guests gossiped and tried their hand at games of chance at the green baize tables. Anya had forgotten what it was like to be in such a crowd. She’d missed it: the laughter, the heightened sense of excitement that went along with the rattle of dice and the swish of cards. People drinking and enjoying themselves. It was a sight to gladden the heart.
She stayed close to Wolff, intensely aware of him beside her, of the occasional brush of their bodies as the crowd jostled them together.
They made a slow traverse of the room, and she listened in to the various conversations as they passed. The topics were the same as any salon in St. Petersburg or Paris; people seeking power and influence, jockeying for position. Bragging—who knew what, who owned what. The women they passed were elegant and animated, cheering their escorts with rouged lips and painted cheeks.
Wolff greeted several people, shaking hands and patting shoulders, while never relinquishing his grip on her arm. He didn’t introduce her to anyone, and the men slid knowing glances at her exposed skin and drew their own conclusions. Clearly it was not unusual to encounter a woman on Wolff’s arm.
They ended up at the far end of the room near a quartet of musicians, and Anya smiled as he turned his deaf ear to them.
“I think you would make an excellent diplomat,” she said. “You make everyone comfortable enough to spill their secrets.”
“That’s the aim. To gather information.”
“You enjoy your work for Bow Street?”
“Yes. It feels like I’m doing something useful. My older brother, Geoffrey, has a seat in the House of Lords, but making laws holds no interest for me. Government moves too slowly for my taste. I prefer situations that yield more immediate results.”
Anya nodded. She understood that. Justice was sometimes best served outside the strict parameters of the law. “What games are played here?”
“Faro. Cribbage. Ecarte, loo, whist, vingt-et-un, piquet. Rouge et noir. Whatever the clients want.”
“Do people try to cheat?”
He gave a dry chuckle. “All the time. Cardinal Mazarin used to call it ‘making the most of the game,’ I believe, but we don’t tolerate it here in any form. We employ those who know what to look for.”
“Such as?”
“Someone with an accomplice who looks at their opponent’s cards over their shoulder and sends a signal to give an advantage. Last month a chap tried to use the reflection in a silver snuff box to sneak a look at the cards as they were dealt. There are numerous other ways: weighted dice, marked cards.”
“How do they mark cards?”
“You make a tiny scratch with your fingernail so you know which one is a queen, for example. Or you give it a ‘wire edge’ by scraping the side to make it rough. You can get cards that have been cut so there’s a slight difference in size or dimensions so one is singled out—that’s called biseauté. Some are convex or concave in the middle, but only by the smallest amount.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Some cheats rub certain cards with soap to make them slick, or with resin to make them sticky, so they’re identifiable when being dealt or handled. I’ve seen cards pricked with a pin so they have a tiny hole. The raised bump is indistinct to the naked eye, but you can feel it with your fingertips.”
Anya shook her head in wonder. “Goodness! And do clubs ever cheat their guests?”
“Sometimes. You can tip the odds in the house’s favor by having roulette wheels with black segments slightly wider than the whites, to increase the chances of the ball falling into them. Or you can slip some coins beneath one leg of the table to tilt it and make it favor certain numbers. But we never resort to underhand tactics like that here. Anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics would realize we don’t need to cheat. The bank holds the advantage in any game of chance, thanks to the laws of averages. We get a steady return on investment.”
Anya glanced around at the opulent décor. “So I gather.”
Wolff leaned closer. “I’ve become quite adept at spotting liars and cheats, Miss Brown. It’s a necessary part of this business.” The subtle warning in his voice made her shiver. “People often give just as much away with their bodies as they do with their mouths.”
She exhaled nervously. “What do you mean?”
He tilted his head to indicate a young man at the nearest table. A woman stood at his side, leaning over to see the outcome of the dice throw. Like Anya, she was masked.
“Let’s take Lord Naseby and his companion over there as the perfect example.” A slight, cynical smile flickered over his mobile mouth. “He wants everyone to think he’s brought along a courtesan, but I rather suspect that’s his sister, Lady Penelope.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at the way he’s touching her. His arm’s around her waist, but there’s nothing lover-like about it. He’s shielding her, protecting her, but not in a jealous way. It’s more solicitous than sensual.” His warm
breath tickled the bare skin of her shoulder as he bent closer, and her body tingled in awareness. “There’s a big difference between the way a man touches his sister and how he touches his lover, Miss Brown. Surely you know that. A lover would be proud to have such a woman on his arm, favoring him with her company. He’d use small, proprietary touches to signal to every other man in the room that she’s with him.”
His voice dropped even lower, and Anya felt her breath quicken.
“A lover would want to touch her skin. He’d put his hand at the small of her back. He’d lean in and kiss the exposed nape of her neck.”
His own breath ruffled her hair by her ear and his lips ghosted across her skin. Goose bumps broke out all over her body.
“You’re very observant, my lord,” she managed.
“Indeed, I am. And I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe you’re being completely honest with me, Miss Brown.”
Anya gulped, but was saved from having to answer when he spoke again.
“You want me to teach you a real life skill? I’ll teach you how to lie convincingly.”
She lifted her brows. “How?”
“When you think about it, we lie to people all the time, especially in the ton. Little white lies. We say, ‘Delighted to meet you,’ and ‘You’re looking well,’ when we really mean just the opposite. But those are easy. We do them without thinking, with the intent to make the recipient feel better or to spare their feelings. It’s the big lies, the serious lies, that I’m talking about.”
“Go on.”
He leaned closer. “The trick is to always put a little truth in with the lie.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, let’s say I ask you, ‘Are you a courtesan?’ You can easily answer ‘yes,’ if you silently add some extra bit of truth in your own mind to clarify; you can think but only for tonight, in this room. That will make the lie far more believable.”
“I see.”
“Let’s try another example, and I’ll show you what I mean. Ask me something to which you know the truthful answer.”
“Do you live here in the Tricorn Club?”
“No,” he said easily. “I don’t live here in the Tricorn Club, in the gaming room. I live next door, in my own apartments. Your turn, Miss Brown.” The corner of his mouth curled upward. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
Anya’s breath caught. Oh, he was wicked. “You think you know the answer to that?”
“We’ll see. Tell me the truth or a lie. Your choice.”
“In that case, no,” she lied evenly, maintaining eye contact with him even though her pulse beat a reckless tattoo in her throat. “I don’t want you to kiss me.” Not more than fifty times a day, she added silently.
His smile widened. “That was excellent. I really can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”
He looked as if he would say more, but a disturbance from the card room broke the spell. He gave a deep sigh of irritation. “Let’s see what that’s about.”
He ushered her across the floor and growled deep in his throat when he spied a pair of young men slumped at one of the tables. Both were clearly well on the way to inebriation, judging by their loud, slurred conversation and heightened color.
“Here’s another life skill,” he growled. “How about I show you how we get rid of troublemakers here at the Tricorn?”
“Doesn’t Mickey just pick them up by their collars and throw them out into the street?”
“It’s tempting, but no. I have a more subtle method.”
He beckoned to one of the hovering staff members. “Evening, Tom. I see Alvanley and Stoke are already in their cups and starting to get annoying. I think it’s time for them to leave.”
The thin man smiled. “Very good, sir.”
Anya sent Wolff a confused glance as the servant slipped out of the room and returned moments later with two glasses filled with what looked like more liquor. He delivered them to the troublemakers’ table with a polite bow.
“What’s this?” The red-faced man with a disordered neckcloth peered upward, angry at the interruption to his card game. “I never ordered these.”
“On the ’ouse, gents,” Tom said calmly. “Compliments of the establishment.”
Stoke, or Alvanley, whichever one it was, softened visibly. “Oh. Well. Mighty kind of you.”
Both gamblers accepted their drinks and downed them in a drunken toast.
Wolff smiled. “Watch this. In five minutes, they’ll be asleep.”
Anya gasped. “You’ve drugged them?”
“Just a few drops of mandrake tincture in their brandy. Not enough to cause any lasting harm, just temporary insensibility. Lagrasse has the recipe.”
Sure enough, not five minutes later, both men began to yawn. Stoke—or Alvanley—sagged in his chair, while the other one slowly slumped forward until his forehead came to rest on the card table. He let out a snore. Tom leapt forward and caught the glass from the man’s limp hand before it could fall to the floor.
“That was particularly quick because both of them were already six sheets to the wind. It takes a bit longer on someone who’s sober,” Wolff explained.
“Amazing!” Anya murmured. “That’s far better than using force.”
Just imagine if she’d had something like that when dealing with Vasili. Obviously, as a means of defense, it still relied on getting the target to ingest it, but she would have felt far safer, knowing she had the ability to render him—or any other threat, for that matter—unconscious in a matter of minutes.
“Do you think I could have some of that stuff?”
Wolff sent her a skeptical look. “And have you use it on me? I think not.”
She frowned. “I promise on my life I will never use it on you, nor on any of your staff. You did agree to provide me with means to defend myself without weapons, remember?”
“In exchange for you listening in to your countrymen. Which you have yet to do.”
He led her back into the main room and indicated a group of four men dicing at a table with Lord Naseby. “That’s Prince Trubetskoi, one of the Russian envoys. Go and see if you can hear anything useful.”
Anya nodded, and he slipped away through the crowd. She’d actually met Trubetskoi on several occasions back in Russia. She didn’t know him well, but he would doubtless recognize her if he saw her unmasked. Still, she was sure she looked so different now from the prim and proper ice princess he’d met in St. Petersburg that she’d be safe.
Russians had a saying: Listen more, talk less, and certainly some of the Tricorn’s guests should have heeded that advice. Anya hovered close to the group, and as Wolff had suspected, they were chatting freely in Russian between themselves. She quickly learned that the one called Kutzov was on a prolonged losing streak, that Krupin was pining after a well-endowed girl named Misha, and that all four of them planned to visit Haye’s later that evening.
Anya smiled at the thought of Charlotte’s delight at having five such good-looking new customers.
Unfortunately, her loitering did not go completely unnoticed. The man named Kutzov slid over and caught her playfully around the waist.
“Gut evening, pretty lady,” he breathed in heavily accented English, and Anya caught the fog of vodka on his breath. “Give Mika a kiss for good luck?”
Anya twisted her head away. As the man undressed her with his eyes, she resisted the urge to give him a set-down and instead, tried to imagine what Tess or Jenny would say in the situation. She gave a coquettish giggle and tried to mimic the accented tones of the Covent Garden flower sellers.
“Oi! Easy, sir. I’m wiv anuvver gent tonight. ’E might not take kindly to you breathin’ all over me.”
She wriggled free of his arm and stepped back, only to bump into a large body positioned directly behind her. The newcomer caught her arm.
“Leave her alone, Kutzov,” the man said easily in Russian. “There are plenty more where she came from. No need to piss off the locals by stealing a
cheap whore.”
Anya’s blood turned to ice, and with a sickening sense of dread, she turned to see the man from whom she’d been hiding for more than a year.
Chapter 23.
Vasili Petrov looked exactly the same. Anya glanced into his pale eyes and felt a wave of fear and loathing. His gaze was cold, as dead as a Siberian winter.
Unlike the others, he was dressed in his military uniform, all gilt braid and pale-blue jacket, exactly as he’d been the day he’d told her Dmitri was dead. His hair and blond mustache were neatly trimmed, and he flashed her a charming, meaningless smile, unaware that she knew he’d just insulted her.
She was reminded of a quote from Shakespeare: “O what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side.” Vasili hid a heart that was blackened and corrupt. Cruelty simmered beneath the surface, soul-deep.
Desperate to escape, she ducked her head and swirled away, thankful for her concealing mask. She threaded her way through the crowd and found Wolff near the doors to the dining room. He was talking with an elderly gentleman, but when he saw her, he held out his arm in a gesture of welcome and drew her into his side.
The older man sent Anya an indulgent smile and nodded at Wolff. “I’ll keep you informed, Mowbray. And cede the field to this delightful young lady who desires your company.”
He walked away, and Anya turned her body into Wolff’s chest, savoring the sensation of safety. She placed her hands on his shoulders and went up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. “Petrov is here!”
He sent her an easy, polite smile. She stared at him in confusion.
He bent his head to nuzzle her temple and despite the fact that her heart was still pounding in fright, she felt a traitorous curl of desire ripple through her. His lips skimmed her cheek and his nose brushed the pulse below her ear.
“I can’t hear you with that ear,” he whispered softly. “What did you say? If it was ‘Take me to bed, Sebastien,’ I’m all yours.”
A shiver of longing pebbled her skin even as she felt his muscles tense. With a heavy sense of inevitability, she dropped her arms as she saw Vasili and Prince Trubetskoi advancing on them. She thought she might be sick. God, had Vasili recognized her?
