Always a Temptress (12 page)

No man had seen them. No one had touched her. Kate had perpetrated a myth that she was the most promiscuous woman in London. In fact, Harry suspected she might be the most chaste.

Once, in the middle of the battle of Salamanca, Harry’s horse had been shot out from under him, sending him arse over teakettle, the horse rolling right over him, hooves, head, and saddle. He’d been left on his back among the bodies staring at the sky and trying to remember how to breathe. He felt that way now. Tumbled and battered and upended, trying to remember how to think. If he had been so wrong about Kate’s hedonism, believing in it so surely, what else about her had he mistaken?

“You were right, you know,” Drake said in that annoyingly languid tone of his. “Marriage is the only answer. Are you prepared to sacrifice your future to secure her release?”

No
. He had quite another future in mind, one in which a pampered duchess didn’t belong. In fact, in which no one belonged but him.

Harry emptied his drink in a swallow. Before him the globe whirred merrily along, continents and oceans blurring past. “Surely there’s another way.”

There wasn’t. He’d known that since the minute he’d opened his mouth back in the duke’s salon. Reaching over, he grabbed Drake’s glass and emptied that, too.

Drake didn’t seem to notice. “A marriage
would
be to your advantage.” Leaning back, he crossed his legs. “Kate has quite a tidy fortune of her own, you know. Surely enough to enable you to comfortably leave the army. I know you’ve wanted to.”

“I don’t need her money. Between my time in India and the acquaintance you secured for me with the Rothschilds, I don’t need anybody’s money.” Harry looked down at the smiling man. “Would
you
marry her?”

Drake chuckled. “Gods, no. But then, I won’t marry anyone. Besides, I’m not the one who publicly claimed her, am I?”

No, Harry thought.
He
was. And now it looked as if he would have to carry through with it. He crossed to the drinks table by the window and refilled the glasses. He was gracious enough to give Drake one.

“First things first,” Drake said, getting up with glass in hand, and walking over to sit at his desk. “We need a special license postdated at least a week.” Pulling out pen and paper, he set to scratching out a note.

Harry rubbed at the tension between his eyes. “So you’ve decided to help after all.”

Drake looked up with an enigmatic smile. “Well, I was hoping you’d offer so I didn’t have to insist. We really do need to find out what she knows, and that’s not going to happen if her brother has his way.”

“I’m so glad I could help.”

“Better you than Axman Billy.” Shaking his head with a grin, he went back to his note. “She does live the most colorful life.”

Harry slumped into a chair. God. He really was getting married. He suddenly felt as if he couldn’t breathe. “I understand you know the Axman as well.”

“He went after Gracechurch when he was in Brussels. Slippery devil. We haven’t been able to nab him since.”

Harry hoped like hell he’d done the right thing setting Thrasher down in the Dials to catch the bastard’s scent. “And the license? I assume you know someone in Canterbury’s office willing to perjure his soul.”

Drake looked over at him. “Happens I do. One of Canterbury’s secretaries. He…helps us on occasion.”

That got Harry’s attention. “Good God. One of Drake’s Rakes is a vicar?”

Drake’s smile was gentle. “He’d prefer to think of himself as auxiliary.” Folding the note, he sanded and sealed it, then pulled over another sheet of paper. “Now then, after the license, you need a couple of stalwart friends to support you when you go see her brother and get her out of wherever she is. Sadly, I am previously engaged.”

“Friends?”

Drake’s smile grew. “Chuffy, I think. No one ever thinks to question Chuffy’s word. And for a bit of intimidation, Ferguson.”

Harry gaped. “Ferguson? Good God, Marcus, I don’t need anybody swinging claymores in a duke’s sitting room.”

“I’ll tell him to keep quiet. He’s there for size and height.”

“And the suggestion that any minute he could go on a rampage.”

“Exactly.”

Actually, it was probably the perfect plan. Chuffy Wilde was as guileless and friendly as a spaniel pup, pudgy, smiling, and ever in search of his glasses. Ian Ferguson was his antithesis. A great large ox of a Scot, Ian had survived a brutal childhood to unexpectedly find himself the heir apparent to an English earldom. It hadn’t eased his brogue, his disdain for “Sassenach fops,” or his massive appetite for life. Thankfully, one of the few people he respected was Wellington.

While Drake finished his note, Harry returned to his place by the globe to find it finally slowing on the African continent. There at the top Harry could see the cities of Cairo and Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constantinople. Cities he had planned to explore once Napoleon was beaten and the roads opened. He had survived the nightmares of the last ten years by walking those hot, white streets in his mind, measuring and studying and absorbing the echoes of ancient places. He was going to wade through the bazaars and sit cross-legged in the coffee shops arguing history with old men. He would return to India to seek out the lost cities, trace temple carvings with his fingers, and climb the high mountains to savor the holy silences in flag-adorned temples. And then he would bring all of that experience home to England and draw his own buildings, so that one day someone else might find permanency and grace in them.

Had he forfeited his opportunity with that one impetuous gesture? Did he know how to redraw his life? Did he have a choice?

Behind him the door opened, and a footman came in to collect the notes Drake had written. “This might take a little time,” Drake said as the door closed again.

Harry refused to look up from the globe. “I don’t think we have time.”

“You truly think Kate will suffer where she is. Why are you so certain?”

Harry thought of those obscene scars on her perfect breasts, of the brittle shell she’d constructed to protect her soft center. He thought of women he’d known like her and what those women had been through. There was no question in his mind. If Murther had been enough of a monster to brand his own wife, the abuse hadn’t stopped there.

But it wasn’t Harry’s place to tell Drake the secrets she’d worked so hard to protect. “Suffice it to say that yes, I do think she’s suffering, in ways we can’t even imagine. And no matter what she’s done to me or anybody else, she doesn’t deserve that.”

“But what
has
she done? You’ve never said.” Standing, Drake returned to his drink and his armchair. “Beyond what I’ve heard about her interfering in your engagements, of course. But I can’t believe you really regret losing either of those ninnyhammers.”

Harry’s instinctive reaction was to deny that anything more had happened. He had never shared the truth with anyone but Kate’s father. It felt odd to think that of all the people he might spill his budget to, it could be Marcus Drake. Drake had certainly never been one of Harry’s intimates. Drake had gone to Eton. Harry had been grudgingly accepted to Rugby. Drake sat in the House of Lords. Harry marched with the 95th.

But it had been Drake who had changed Harry’s life, giving him his first chance to rise above his role as soldier. Ian Ferguson, then a captain in the Black Watch, had introduced Harry to Drake. But Drake had been the one to accept Harry into the Rakes. He had offered Harry opportunities to broaden his horizons, trusting him with information, with gold, and with lives.

Throughout the years Harry had known him, Drake had never deceived him or lied to him. More than once Drake had even protected him when Harry’s word was questioned. Harry didn’t take that kind of loyalty lightly.

Besides, Harry realized, he needed an objective ear. For the first time in nearly a decade, he was having doubts about what had actually happened.

He walked over to stand in front of the window. “Did you know Kate’s father?”

“The old duke? I did. Great friend of the pater’s. I liked him very much.”

Harry nodded. “I worshiped him. Him and the duchess both. My family lived near Moorhaven. My father was squire. Not much land, but doing all right. He played chess with the duke every Friday. The duchess was the kind of woman who invited all the neighborhood kids to birthday parties, no matter their rank.”

It wasn’t hard to pull up sun-soaked memories of laughter and mayhem and a petite beauty who’d stood at the center of it all like a calm sun watching orbiting planets. He only just remembered the duke smiling at her as if he only survived in her light.

The duke. Yes. Get on with it, Harry
. “There was a canal scheme the duke invested in. He convinced my father to join him. When it went bust, the duke lost quite a bit of money. My father lost almost everything.” His laughing, rough-housing, red-faced father. “The stress killed him. My brother took over, but it was years before we recovered. During that time, the duke helped support us. He said that since he’d talked my father into the venture, it was the least he could do. He made sure we boys were schooled and the girls had dowries. And every Friday, he invited me up to the castle to play chess.” He smiled. “I learned most of my most important life lessons over chess.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He never once made us feel inferior, and he never lied to us. Not even to protect his own reputation. And he loved his family so much.” He took a sip of his whisky and considered the next part of his story. “Did you ever know Kate when she was a girl?”

“Not really until after she was widowed.”

He nodded, his attention still out onto Piccadilly, where the traffic was thick with drays and hackneys and sleek racing curricles. What he saw in his mind were the verdant glens of Moorhaven. “I knew her brother and sisters, of course. But she was such a late child, and the duchess dying and all.” He shrugged. “I knew about her, of course. But she was never brought down when I was there, so I didn’t meet her until she was fifteen. I was twenty. I imagine it was inevitable, although I knew better.”

He rubbed at his eyes, suddenly feeling so old as he looked back on that summer when everything had still been possible. When he’d meant to explore the world and hand it to that bright-eyed, sharp-minded girl. When he thought he’d found his soul mate in the daughter of a duke.

“Were you lovers?” Drake asked.

“No. I was the only one who…” He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. She’d wanted to. She’d wept when he had refrained, mere seconds from taking her. He’d insisted he respected her too much. He’d been so close…

“No. Anyway, one day she came to me, frantic. Begged me to run off with her. She said she needed saving from her father. From what he planned to do to her.”

“Her
father
?”

He nodded. “He always seemed a bit distant from her, but the duchess had died in childbed with her. The duke never really recovered from it. But I knew he would never deliberately hurt Kate. She insisted that he would, though. That he was about to marry her off to a dangerous man, and I was the only one who could save her.”

“And did you?”

Harry thought a moment on those last days, and he wondered. “No. I didn’t. I went to her father. I knew she must have misunderstood his intentions.”

“What did he do?”

Harry’s shook his head. “He thanked me for coming to him. Told me he should have intervened before I fell victim to his daughter. He seemed…heartbroken.” Harry could still see the older man, posture perfect, with his leonine head of hair that had turned white overnight when his wife had died; those sad, sad eyes and sadder smile. “He told me that Kate was not what I thought. That she didn’t deserve a good man like me. When I protested, he said…” Harry took a breath, wanting to get over this part quickly. “He said that he couldn’t tell me everything. He’d made a solemn promise. But that she’d asked me to run off with her to avoid the consequences of her behavior. He said she was increasing, probably by one of the grooms, somebody named George she’d been sneaking out to see. Her fiancé had been furious when he found out.”

“That was Murther? But he married her anyway.”

Harry shrugged. “The duke said that Murther loved her. That since he already had heirs, it didn’t matter so much. He thought marriage to him could…help her.”

Harry thought of that brand and felt sick chills chase his spine.

“And you?” Drake asked.

Harry’s laugh was sore. “The duke said he was sorry for me; that I was innocent in all this. He bought me a commission in the Fifty-second and kitted me out.”

“The baby?”

“Miscarried.”

“And you didn’t ask Kate if it was true?”

Harry turned to face Drake and asked the real question. “Why would I? If her father was telling the truth, she just would have lied. And I had to believe her father was telling the truth, or else everything else I’d been taught would have been worthless. Don’t you see? I’d only known her two months. I’d known him my whole life.”

It was Drake’s turn to stand up. Walking over to the drinks table, he poured another whisky. “Yes,” he said, and came over to refill Harry’s. “I do see. Why have you changed your mind?”

Harry accepted the pour and took a long draught. “I don’t know that I have. I still can’t imagine her father saying those things if they weren’t true. He certainly didn’t have to make up lies to get me out of the county. You know perfectly well he would have been well within his rights to have me horsewhipped and handed to a press gang for so much as looking at his daughter, no matter how many times he played chess with me.”

“Can you trust Kate now?”

He looked down on the street and realized it had started to rain. “I don’t know that, either.”

“You still love her.”

He smiled, as if his entire body hadn’t just tightened. “I’d be an idiot to love her.”

For a long moment, except for the distant clatter of traffic, there was no sound but the tick of the mahogany bracket clock on the mantel. The windows groaned a bit with a freshening wind, and somewhere in the building a door slammed. But in this room, inevitability had been reached.