Betina Krahn (10 page)

No doubt he expected that his wickedly good looks and silky manner would prove quite effective. She scowled, recalling her instinctive reaction to him. And well they might … if she didn’t know who and what he was … and if she weren’t much too clever to be flattered and beguiled by a bit of male heat.

As the carriage rumbled along the darkened city streets, she burrowed back into the seat and gave a sigh of satisfaction. It was all working out perfectly.

When the cab stopped outside the front door of her house, Hoskins was watching and bustled out with a lamp to help her inside. While he paid the driver, she hurried up the steps, into the hall, and deposited her wrap on the center table. Light was coming from the drawing-room doors, and she headed straight for them.

The large chamber was lit with numerous candles, and a small fire had been laid despite the seasonable warmth of the evening. A half-dozen cats were stretched out on the marble tiles that lined the hearth, and in the quiet their purring mingled with the ticking of the gilt mantel clock and the click of knitting needles. The several divans and upholstered parlor chairs in the room were occupied by
women whose hair ranged from gray tinged to completely white. At the sight of her they came to life, calling her name and nudging awake those who had found the waiting too tedious.

“Toni, dear!” Aunt Hermione was on her feet in a wink, hurrying to her side and unleashing a veritable barrage of questions. “What happened? Details—we must have details!”

“Was the earl there?” a tall, slender woman asked, leaning forward eagerly.

“Did you talk with him?” A rotund matron wriggled to the edge of her seat.

“Was there dancing?” a bent old woman with an ear trumpet demanded loudly.

“Did you set him straight on the Sister Bill?” Pollyanna Quimby asked, scowling and crossing her arms.

She looked from one adorably eager face to another, reading in them Remington Carr’s downfall. He would have to be made of stone to resist these faces. And her instincts told her he was not exactly made of stone.

“Hoskins!” she called out over her shoulder, and the old butler came shuffling into the doorway. “Champagne, please, and plenty of it!” She turned back to the women who shared her house and her life, with an exultant laugh.

“He will be here at nine o’clock Monday morning. He is ours for the next two weeks!”

Antonia was not the only one savoring the evening’s success. Remington Carr had quitted the Ellingsons’ for his club not long after Antonia left. As the cab carried him toward St. James Street, he settled back with his hands propped on the head of his walking stick, feeling quite pleased at the way he had managed to turn the Dragon’s fire to his advantage.

He couldn’t have planned it better himself. He had let her storm and fume and challenge him, accepting it all with infuriating good humor. And she had maneuvered and connived her way straight into his clutches. Astonishing, really. He could never have guessed she would seek him out and demand two long weeks of his undivided attention … in her own house, yet! He reached into his pocket for her card and on impulse brought it to his nose. The scent of roses made him smile. The possibilities for seduction in such a situation were endless. And to paraphrase her boast: he was a man who knew how to make the most of a possibility.

He hadn’t imagined when he agreed to this scheme that she would prove to be so young or desirable, or that he might find the task of luring her to his bed quite so interesting. There was no use denying it; he had found their first confrontations quite stimulating, and looked forward to future “encounters.” He conjured a picture of her in his mind, and his eyes glowed hotly at the thought of persuading those soft lips to yield, of sinking his hands into that mass of fire-kissed hair, of watching those opalescent-blue eyes darken with desire …

The drift of his thoughts suddenly alarmed him. Soft lips and alluring blue eyes? Dangerous thinking indeed, he realized, purging a traitorous trickle of heat from his blood and taking his lustful impulses in hand. She might be younger and a bit more interesting than he had expected, but she was still the devious and contriving woman who trapped wealthy bachelors into marriage. And his mission here had nothing to do with enjoying anything.

His plan was to trap her the same way she had trapped her wretched victims. How ironic that by her own conniving and audacity, she had just set the jaws of the trap herself. It added a rather satisfying twist to the situation to
know that she would be partly responsible for her own demise.

As they approached St. James Street, that last thought refused to die away. He stroked his chin, letting it circle in his mind. If he was using her own contrived conditions to entrap her, then just what was her original plan? She had come to Lord Ellingson’s ostensibly to continue their debate and to teach him about women and their place in the world. She was quick enough with the notion of a wager between them … wanted him in her house for some reason.

He scowled, thinking of what devious possibilities might lie behind her attempt to educate him on what she deemed to be women’s proper role in life. It struck him like a thunderbolt:
she had undoubtedly marked him as her next matrimonial victim!

“Good God,” he swore, feeling his muscles tighten defensively. Her threat to bachelorhood was no longer an abstraction; his own bachelorhood was at stake this time. She was every bit as dangerous as they had said. Clever, determined, and with more than her share of feminine wiles … she was quite possibly the most treacherous female he’d ever encountered. He would have to watch his step with her.

“No more sniffing … like some green clod just come to town,” he growled, stuffing the calling card back into his pocket. “And no more remembering blue eyes or shapely curves or twenty-button gloves open at the … What the hell kind of woman wears twenty-button gloves these days, anyway? They went out with hoops and crinolines. And I ought to know, I’ve paid enough haberdashery bills for gloves … and kerchiefs … and purses, petticoats, stockings, and dress improvers.…”

The weight of a thousand little outrages, the result of his experiences with women, settled on his shoulders and
combined with his conclusions about her to hone his resolve to a razor edge.

By the time he reached White’s and entered the bar, his vengeful mood had given way to a sardonic smile. Forewarned was forearmed, he thought. Let her do her diabolical best; it would only make his inevitable victory all the sweeter.

The Dragon’s six victims were seated at their former table, at the far end of the room. They didn’t wait for him to be seated before they began firing questions at him.

“Was she there?”

“What was it like?”

“Will you see her again?”

“All that and more,” he said, beckoning to the barman and settling on the chair they had reserved for him. Before their widening eyes he produced her card from his vest pocket and waved it tantalizingly back and forth.

“Her address, gentlemen. I shall be spending the next fortnight at her house in Piccadilly, as part of a wager between us.” His aristocratic features took on a predatory cast. “Within two weeks, my friends, I will slay your dragon and present you with its heart.”

Two hours later the front door of White’s opened and a half-dozen well-oiled gentlemen spilled onto the damp street. Their voices brought to attention a form lounging against the railing of the nearby service steps. He ducked back against the corner of the building and squinted, searching the dimly lit figures and fastening on one form that was taller than the rest and noticeably steadier on its feet. As some of the men drunkenly hailed cabs, one fellow laughed and threw an arm around the taller figure.

Rupert Fitch crept closer and then pressed back against the building, staying in the shadows as he strained to hear
what was being said. He had followed Remington Carr here from Lord Ellingson’s party, hoping to learn something more about what had happened between him and Lady Antonia Paxton. Whatever it was, it had sent her home early and had sent him storming off to his club before the champagne had had time to get warm. The tall bloke before him was the Earl of Landon, all right. He’d stake what was left of his sainted mother’s virtue on it.

“Brilliant, Landon,” Remington Carr’s hanger-on declared. “Couldn’t be more perfect. A wager … and her idea … who’d’ve thought?” A hansom cab clattered up, drowning out much of the rest, but Fitch made out the words “luck,” and “Lady something,” which sounded very much like “Lady Antonia.”

Several of the gents piled into the cab, and the others decided to walk down the street to the nearest cab stand. The earl struck off in the opposite direction, tugging the brim of his top hat lower and raising the collar of his evening cloak against the dampness. Fitch waited until he was a discreet distance away, then slipped out into the street to follow. He did not intend to let his quarry give him the slip after he had spent a long, miserable evening in the wet streets for some clue as to what was happening between the Ladies’ Man and the wealthy widow.

A wager of some sort, he thought, as he stole along behind Remington Carr. The gent had been wishing the earl good luck on something with Lady Antonia. A wager on the lady’s virtue? Such things were not unknown in the elite and often dissolute world of the gentlemen’s clubs. But he discarded that possibility when he recalled hearing something about its being “her idea.” There was something brewing, he was sure of it. But to learn what it was, he would have to keep a watch on the earl’s posh digs and follow him to learn why he was going to need “luck.”

As he slipped from doorway to doorway and skulked
around corners, the news writer’s empty stomach growled, and he rubbed it with a grimace. Pulling his coat up about his neck and jamming his hands into his pockets, he hurried along after the unconventional earl, muttering to himself.

“Well, yer lordship, this ’ad better be good.”

The sun made a spectacular appearance that Monday morning in Piccadilly, giving a jewel-like luster to Green Park, which lined one side of the broad thoroughfare, and making the windows of the fashionable residences on the other side of the street shine as if they were gilded. The air was filled with the rhyming calls of vendors, the clop of hooves, and the banter between servants and tradesmen, while the avenue itself bustled with traffic: greengrocers’ and bakers’ pushcarts, milk wagons, and tradesmen of all kinds hurrying to make deliveries to their most lucrative clientele.

Among those making their way down Piccadilly, just before nine o’clock, was Remington Carr. His exquisitely tailored dress—understated charcoal suit, black vest and matching silk tie, and fashionable, square-crowned Cambridge bowler—set him apart from the others in the street. Few of the social elite were ever out and about before ten in the morning, and if it had been up to him, he would not have been out and about either. Beneath his hat his dark hair was still slightly damp, and his freshly shaved face was a bit gray, the result of a late night and of being roused at an ungodly hour to prepare for his first day of “women’s work.”

Searching the house numbers, he mentally compared them to the one on the card in his vest pocket. It couldn’t
be much farther, he thought to himself, reaching into his coat to check his pocket watch. He didn’t want to be late. Nor did he want to arrive too early or appear too eager—though, quite truthfully, there was little danger of that. In the clear light of day, without the golden glow cast over events by excellent champagne, the wager, and in fact the entire enterprise, was losing some of its allure. Romancing a matrimonially minded dragon, while prowling around her house with a feather duster in his hand, was not an especially inviting prospect.

But before he could slide too deeply into disgruntlement, he found himself staring at a set of polished brass house numbers that looked familiar. His field of vision widened to take in a small iron gate and four stone steps that led to the front doors of Paxton House. Halting, he stepped out into the street to have a look.