Between the Devil and Ian Eversea (3 page)

“Oh, chocolate, please!” Despite herself, she gave a girlish clap.

A few moments of bustling later a cup of steaming chocolate was thunked in front of her, and Mrs. deWitt prodded Jordy with a toe because his head was lolling, before thunking her own solid behind in a chair across from Tansy.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. deWitt. It was just what I wanted.”

Miss deWitt’s smile was triumphant. “I knew it! I know a girl who likes chocolate, m’dear. The prettiest ones do.”

Tansy felt her pride settle into place again. “Have you worked for the Eversea family long?”

“I’ve known Miss Genevieve—Her Grace—since she was a wee thing. She was Miss Genevieve Eversea then. Mind
ye
, now, Genevieve is a beauty, but she’s always been quietlike; ye be pretty as an angel yerself,” the cook hastened to reassure.

“So I’ve been tol’—er, that is, you’re much too kind.”

Tansy rotated her cup of chocolate on the table abstractedly, then stopped. She prided herself on her ability to remain in control of any circumstance, whether it was a ballroom flirtation or an Italian shouting “forsake” up at the window, or reading a message about a carriage accident while the messenger, a curious stranger, looked on and waited for her to regain her ability to speak and breathe and to find a shilling to pay him for delivering the news of the end of her world.

“But ’tis the duchess’s sister, Miss Olivia . . . talk about a beauty! She does have a way of turning men into fools for her. And she’ll make a grand, grand match, too.”

Tansy’s pride yanked at its tether. She was used to stopping conversation when she entered a ballroom. She was used to dropping jaws.
Can you do
that,
Olivia Eversea?

It seemed an awfully long time since she’d been in a ballroom.

“Miss Genevieve spoke so affectionately of her brothers and sisters.”

“Oh, aye. There’s Master Marcus, married to Louisa, and Colin, settled and raising cattle but no babies yet. Miss Olivia, she may be married to a very grand viscount before the year is out, at long last, bless her poor sore heart. And then there’s Master Ian . . . Ah, goodness, that is quite a bright moon out the window!” she said abruptly.

Tansy swiveled her head. It was bright, all right, but such was the nature of the moon.

She half suspected the distraction was deliberate. Who had Mrs. deWitt just mentioned? Someone who hadn’t been mentioned by either the duke or the duchess earlier today, she was certain of that.

The cook appeared to have abandoned that thread of thought. “ ’Twill be a simple thing for a young lady such as yerself to make a splendid match. Perhaps even as fine as Miss Genevieve.”

She wished people would cease talking about her as if she were simply a shoe missing a mate. If it were
that
easy, surely she would even now be exchanging meaningful world-excluding looks of her own with one of those smitten swains from New York? Many of them had vowed eternal love, and many of them were at
least
as handsome as poor Giancarlo, and one of them had kissed her, because he was bold and she’d dared him. She had liked it, and stopped it immediately because she possessed more sense than her father had no doubt credited her.

Apart from an accelerated pulse, there really had been no consequence. He hadn’t captured the whole of her imagination, let alone her heart, for more than a day. And she was certain the man she married should be able to capture both.

Fortunately, she’d made a list of requirements for a husband. She thought the duke would find it helpful.

“You flatter me, surely, Mrs. deWitt,” she said.

Mrs. deWitt turned to look at Tansy, speculation written over her soft features. She studied her a moment.

Then she surprised Tansy by reaching over and patting her hand, a familiarity perhaps brought on by the fact that they were all wearing night robes.

“Dinna ye worry about a thing, Miss Danforth.”

It was probably a platitude, but it felt, in the dark kitchen, with Jordy somnolently turning the haunch at a soothing rhythm, that Mrs. deWitt had seen into her soul. Suddenly Tansy’s throat tightened and her eyes began to burn.

Probably just the steam from the chocolate.

Chapter 3

T
HE NIGHT WAS JUST
beginning to give way to dawn when Tansy’s eyes popped open.

The cloudlike mattress beneath her wasn’t swaying with the motion of the sea. The elegantly furnished room was all slim lines and dark woods and gilt and shades of blue. Not America. Not a ship.
Sussex
. Pennyroyal Green, to be precise.

A stripe of inviting rosy light was pushing its way through a crack between the curtains.

She drowsily slid out of bed, rubbed her fists in her eyes, heaved her heavy braid over one shoulder and followed the road like the road to certainty across the deep Savonnerie carpet.

She gently grabbed a fistful of the curtains, which were gold velvet and soft as kittens, and peered out the window.

The horizon lay before her in strata of colors: first the soft manicured green of the Eversea parklands, above that a dark line of trees both fluffy and pointy, which must be a forest, beyond that a broad expanse of darker green, mounded like a tossed blanket, of what had to be the Sussex downs, and finally a narrow strip of silver. Probably the sea.

The sky was just taking on a maidenly blush. She watched as the rising sun gilded mundane things one by one, as if allotting each of them a turn at glory. First a tall, neat shrubbery, then a white stone bench, then a fountain, then a man—

She sucked in her breath so quickly she nearly choked.

A
bare
man.

Bare from the waist up, anyway.

He was standing on the little balcony next to hers, just feet away.

She ducked back into her room and dragged the curtain over her face, leaving just her eyes exposed, like a harem girl, and leaned forward for a better look. She could only see his back: a glorious burnished expanse of shoulders, a lovely trench of sorts along his spine, dividing two ridges of hard muscle, all of that narrowing into a taut waist.

Suddenly he thrust his arms up into the air, arched backward as though he’d been struck by lightning, and made a sort of roaring sound, like a pagan god calling down the morning. Though she doubted whether a god would sport fluffy black hair in his armpits.

He promptly disappeared back into his room, just as though he’d been a cuckoo popping out of a clock to announce the time.

His roar still echoed faintly.

All in all, not an inauspicious start to a day.

She climbed back into bed. If it was a dream, she wanted it to continue.

C
APTAIN
C
HARLES “
C
HASE”
Eversea swept into the Pig & Thistle, seized a chair, turned it around backward, straddled it, reached for Colin’s ale and took a gulp before lifting a hand to call over Polly Hawthorne, the Pig & Thistle’s barmaid.

“Thank you,” he said belatedly, gravely, to Colin, dragging the back of his hand over his mouth.

Colin scowled but it was more a formality than indignation. Of them, Chase was older, Colin the youngest, and the Eversea brother hierarchy was an unshakable thing. He wouldn’t even dream of protesting.

“Is . . .
regular
sitting passé now, Chase?” Colin asked mildly. “Afraid you can’t hold your increasingly aged torso up without the assistance of a chair back?”

“His baubles have grown three sizes now that the East India company has promoted him,” Ian said. “He needs the additional support.”

“If you accept that position with the company offered to you in London, you, too, can have enormous baubles, Ian. When did you get home?”

“Late last night. Too late for my own room to be ready, apparently, as I’m ensconced on the third floor. Rode in from London. And you know my plans, and not even the lure of a bauble-swelling promotion will change them. I’ll be gone soon enough. You’ll just have to savor my presence while you can.” He’d mapped out five ports of call, and he finally had precisely enough money saved—through scrimping and clever investments—to do it. China, India, Africa, Brazil. He’d pored over his map of the world so often, sometimes he thought it was singed on his retinas. He could see it when he closed his eyes.

“Ian probably needs to put his baubles on ice after the week he spent with Mademoiselle—”

Ian kicked Colin silent. Polly Hawthorne had suddenly appeared at the table.

Pretty thing, dark and slim and young, graceful as a selkie, Polly had nurtured an unrequited youthful yearning for Colin, and never forgiven him for having the unmitigated gall to get married. She still refused to acknowledge his existence, but Ian suspected that at this point it was partially out of habit. You had to admire the way the girl could hold a grudge, he thought. He admired consistency. The women he’d known tended toward the fickle, and though he’d definitely benefited from that more than once, he still didn’t like it. It was probably hypocritical, but there you had it.

Ian had watched Polly grow up here at the pub her father owned—the Hawthorne family had owned the Pig & Thistle for centuries. He was protective of her, and of Culpepper and Cooke, and everyone else who made Pennyroyal Green the home he’d known and loved his entire life. Perhaps unfairly, he wanted to be able to come and go as he pleased—to war, to exotic countries—and arrive home again to find all them still here, exactly where they belonged, if a little older.

He smiled at Polly, and she flushed and began fidgeting. Such was the power of an Eversea smile. He wasn’t stingy with them. Watching women smiling and flushing never got tiresome.

“Three more of the dark, if you would, Polly.”

“Of course, Captain Eversea.”

“Mademoiselle
who
?” Chase prompted immediately, when Polly had slipped away again.

“LaRoque.” Ah, Monique. He remembered rolling out of bed, her fingernails lightly trailing his spine, as she tried to persuade him to stay. He
never
stayed. With any of them. It was one of his rules. He had another rule about giving gifts—he simply didn’t. He wanted a woman to feel persuaded by him as a man. Not to feel bought.

“You haven’t a romantic bone in your body,” Monique had pouted as he dressed. “Merely a bone of passion.” Her command of English was often tenuous, but she’d still managed to more or less sum him up accurately. He wasn’t insulted. She still wanted him. Because he did know how to give a woman exactly what she needed.

“Monique LaRoque. The actress?” Chase wondered.

“Impressive, or should I say, unseemly, knowledge of London gossip you have there, Chase. Yes. The actress.”

“I’ve heard of her. My wife once saw her perform.”

It was a casual enough sentence. But the words “my wife” were faintly possessive and Chase delivered them as if they were a benediction.

They fell on Ian’s ears like an accusation. Colin did the same damn thing with the same damn words. When he wasn’t talking about cows. He shifted irritably in his chair, as if dodging a lowering net.

“She’s uniquely talented, Mademoiselle LaRoque,” Ian said. Perversely. To induce a reverie in the two recently married men.

There fell a gratifying hush.

Colin had always been more innately a rogue, and Ian enjoyed prodding at him to see if the rogue in him was dead, killed by matrimony, or simply dormant. Then again, surviving the gallows could inspire any man to seek refuge in an institution like marriage. Or perhaps he’d gotten a little too used to Newgate after his notorious stay there to ever adapt fully to freedom again.

Finally, Colin asked hopefully, on a lowered voice: “
How
unique?”

Ian simply, cruelly, smiled enigmatically.

Monique
was
talented, but not particularly uniquely. Maneuvering her into bed had been a game involving copious charm, his very best innuendos, and outflirting other men. But not gifts. Never gifts. The conclusion had been nearly foregone, but they had both enjoyed it up to and beyond the moment she capitulated. She was skillful and nimble and soft-skinned and gorgeous and . . . showing distressing signs of devotion.

Which was why Ian was relieved to have an excuse to return to Pennyroyal Green—he’d promised his cousin Adam, the vicar, that he’d lead a crew of men—many of them admittedly a bit motley in character if willing in spirit—in much-needed repairs to the ancient vicarage. If he stayed in London too long, the mamas would remember how eligible Ian Eversea was. But if he stayed in Pennyroyal Green too long,
his
mama might remember how eligible he was, instead of devoting all of her attention to the matter of his sister Olivia. Who was, at last, submitting to a semblance of courtship from Lord Landsdowne, and in fact appearing to enjoy it.

Appearing
. One never knew with Olivia.

All of the Everseas had been holding their breath ever since. And the flowers from the hopeful—or masochistic—continued to arrive for her.

The bloods who had voted against her in the Betting Book at White’s were beginning to perspire a little. No one thought Olivia Eversea would wed ever since Lyon Redmond had vanished, taking, it was said, her heart with him.

Funny, but he hadn’t given Monique a thought since he’d returned last night from London. Which was likely ungracious, at the very least. Given that she’d been all he thought about for weeks before that.

If he stayed in Pennyroyal Green long enough, Monique would probably forget about him. He wondered whether this was a relief.

Until he returned to London, that was. And the game began again.

If he wanted it to.

The notion of
that
made him restless, too.

Polly returned with ales and thunked them down.

“Chase is paying,” Ian told her. With a brook-no-argument eyebrow lift in Chase’s direction.

Chase gamely produced the proper coinage.

“To large baubles and willing actresses!” Ian toasted his brothers cheerfully.

They hoisted their tankards “To large bau—”

Their smiles froze. Their gazes locked on a point over his shoulder.

“What?” Ian swiveled his head to look.

“To large baubles!” the Duke of Falconbridge said easily.

Bloody. Hell.

How did
he
get in here? It was a wonder the entire pub hadn’t fallen silent, the way singing birds do when a stalking cat is spotted in the garden. But no: everyone was drinking, talking loudly and making broad, ale-fueled gesticulations, as usual, and Culpepper and Cooke were at the chessboard, and Jonathan Redmond was throwing darts at the board with his usual alarming precision. No one had noticed that an infamous duke wended his way into the Pig & Thistle.

Ian knew firsthand that the man could be stealthy.

His sister Genevieve loved Falconbridge, that much was clear. She had married him, throwing over Lord Harry in the process. And Ian loved Genevieve.

But it was damnably awkward to be tangentially related to someone who had once ordered him at gunpoint to climb out of his erstwhile fiancée’s window.

At midnight.

Naked.

It was a testament to Ian’s fortitude and general pleasure in risk that he was able to walk all the way home wearing only one boot (the duke had thrown the other one out the window, along with his clothes) and the shreds of his dignity and one half of his shirt, the only other clothing he was able to retrieve in the dark. His turn on the battlefield had prepared him to stoically confront an infinite number of eventualities.

Then again, Falconbridge ought to
thank
him for climbing into this fiancée’s window if it stopped him from marrying the wrong woman and brought him to Genevieve.

He was fairly certain the duke didn’t see it that way.

He wasn’t known as a forgiving man—nobody liked him, apart, it seemed, from Genevieve—and he was known to have a long memory for any perceived wrongs perpetrated against him and for righting the balance no matter how long it took. Genevieve had fervently assured Ian the duke hadn’t murdered his first wife, as popular rumor had it, and though in all likelihood he would refrain from murdering Ian for Genevieve’s sake, one just never knew.

Ian was hardly proud of the episode. If he’d known he’d wind up related to the man, he would in all likelihood have never climbed that tree to Lady Abigail’s window.

The three Eversea men clambered to their feet and bowed to their brother-in-law, with cheerful and polite greetings, and then when they sat again, Colin extended a leg and used it to push out the empty chair next to Chase in an invitation.

Ian shot him a filthy look.

Colin fought back a grin.

Colin, who was the only other person (besides perhaps Genevieve) who knew about his midnight exodus from the window at gunpoint.

The duke settled into the chair, his shoulder within inches of brushing Ian’s.

Ian contracted all of his muscles.

Polly appeared as if by magic.

“Try the dark, Falconbridge,” Chase recommended.

Chase claimed to actually like the man. But then Chase enjoyed a number of things Ian found questionable, including goose liver, and puppets made him nervous. He might be a fellow war hero, but his judgment wasn’t sacrosanct.