Blackstone's Bride (6 page)

Blackstone did not pat as the prince did. He gripped with a firm, uncompromising hold. His touch jolted her. Violet’s senses sputtered to life, like a fire catching in tinder and crackling, sending sparks cascading upward. Her fingers stilled under his touch. She did not do anything so foolish as to pull away. Cursed awareness streaked through her. She forced an answer past her tight throat.

“You should have informed your employer that we had a past history that makes you the wrong man for the job.”

He released her hands. “Sadly for you, Violet, they know all and chose me for that very history. Resign yourself to tell the world that you changed your mind, discovered that we do suit after all, and have put the past behind you.”

He stood, putting his back to her again.

Penelope would never forgive her. “Let’s do nothing yet. For now we need only deceive the prince.”

“No announcement in the papers then?” He glanced over his shoulder at her.

She shook her head.

“Very well.” He moved to stand behind the bench.

“What does Frank’s note say?”

“Frank didn’t write it.”

“It’s not his hand?” She could hear at once that he found that detail significant, as did she.

“It’s his hand, but the words are not his words.” Violet pulled the little note from her sleeve. “Someone must have told him what to say.”

Blackstone held the paper in the light. As he read, he seemed to forget her presence. “He always called you ‘V.,’ didn’t he? Will you trust Preston to make a copy for me?”

Violet nodded. Blackstone tucked the note in his waistcoat pocket.

She returned her gaze to Frank’s trunk.

“What’s your impression of the prince?”

“When he isn’t flattering me, he’s flattering England.”

“Did you get him to say anything about Frank?”

“Every mention of my brother led him to name some London wonder that Frank recommended his highness see. The prince can’t wait to ride in the park, visit a gasworks and the menagerie, dance at a ball, and attend a balloon ascension. But he didn’t act like a man with any guilty knowledge. He seems genuinely not to know where Frank went.”

“Did he mention meeting the foreign secretary?”

“Never. That is the purpose of his visit, isn’t it?” She remembered Frank telling her something like that.

“Yes, to report on his progress in building up the Moldovan army.”

“Is Moldova supposed to hold Russia back from Turkey?”

“It seems improbable, unless miles of gold braid will frighten the tsar.”

“Excessive, isn’t he?”

“He gives new meaning to the term.”

Blackstone’s familiar voice was having an effect on her, and she tried to shake it off. She would gain nothing by staring longer at Frank’s trunk. She rose again and returned to the hearth. No fire had been lit, and she felt the room’s chill. Frank had been away for weeks, and the cold had settled in the room. “Is that what he bought with the government’s money—miles of gold braid?”

“You think the money did not supply the prince’s army?”

“I doubt it. Bankers always follow the money trail. We think what happens to money explains people’s most desperate acts.”

“In this case you think the money was misspent?”

“Almost certainly, and Frank caught on to it.”

“Hence his report had to disappear.”

“And Frank.” Blackstone seemed to forget that point. She risked a direct look at him. He was so thin. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Surely, you didn’t expect full disclosure from me.” His closed face mocked her.

“This is not about us. This is about my brother.”

“You rearranged his drawers. What were you hoping to see?”

He noticed. Blackstone noticed everything. It was one of the reasons Violet had liked him in the beginning. One did not need to explain the obvious to Blackstone. He’d seen it first.

Violet wished she knew what to look for. Whoever had searched Frank’s trunk had undone Frank’s message system. The rows of parallel lines did not match up in any of the ways Frank usually aligned them. She came back to the bench.

“Think, Violet. The trunk must tell us something. It sat in your brother’s rooms in Gibraltar until porters removed it to a cart for a journey to the ship. Seamen brought it on board and put it in the cabin reserved for your brother. His trunk made the passage with or without him, and we need to know which. While everyone else went through customs, your brother’s trunk sat in his room.”

Blackstone stepped up to the trunk and pulled the cravat drawer from its slot. He turned, holding the drawer out to Violet. “Smell it.”

“Smell it?”

“Preston told us that someone else rearranged the clothes. Does it smell like a man’s hand passed through the clothes or a woman’s hand?”

“You can tell?” She took the offered drawer onto her lap. He watched her with that heavy-lidded look of his. “Why is Frank’s report of such importance to the government?”

“You said yourself that you think the prince has mismanaged the loan money.”

“Yes, but that’s not news. Princes are notorious spenders, as we know, and Frank would advise the prince openly if he saw him being taken in, you know.”

“Suppose, however, that Frank found a truth that’s uncomfortable for someone, dangerous even. Not mismanagement, but deception or fraud.”

“It would have to be someone powerful, which I don’t think the prince is, for all his extravagance, though I may be deceived by his manner.”

“Smell the drawer, Violet.”

She lifted the drawer to her nose. It smelled like Frank, of course, like the sandalwood soap he favored and his piney cologne. She stirred his cravats gently. Another smell came, fleeting and rose scented. Violet waited to catch the scent again. It was unmistakably feminine.

“A woman’s hand.” She met his gaze and realized he’d already come to the same conclusion. “You smelled the drawer earlier.”

“I had a chance before you arrived, but I wanted to confirm my suspicion.” He took the drawer from her and slid it back into its slot. Once more he sat beside her on the bench, this time on her left. Violet told herself he was not too close. It was merely that his shoulders took up a good bit of space. He took her cold, ring-bearing hand in his warm ones.

“The note is a good sign, Violet. It means that whoever has Frank has kept him alive so far, and whatever they want, they don’t want it from you and your father.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t look at her, but at their linked hands. “They didn’t ask for a ransom. If money is not their object, then they must want something from Frank.”

“What could they want from him? They must have his report if all his bags are empty.”

“Not if he anticipated them and sent the report by some other means or encoded its message in some way. They want to know what he knows. And they may want to know who his informants were.”

“But by taking him, they have tipped their hand, haven’t they?”

“Not necessarily. Frank may not know who has him or even where he is. He was likely unconscious or blindfolded when they took him.” Blackstone was familiar with the abduction techniques of bandits and warlords.

“Why the note to us?” She couldn’t help the plaintive question. He looked up then.

They were face-to-face on the little bench. How had she imagined him changed? The intensity of his gaze, the sharp edges of his face, the commanding line of his mouth. He tilted her chin up to meet his dark gaze. “They want you to think Frank is alive, and they want to keep you from setting up an alarm. Whoever they are, they do not want the government looking for Frank.”

“And if they find out that the government is looking for him?”

“Frank’s situation will not be a comfortable one. Hence our ruse, Violet.” His gaze was steady, a reminder that she must play the role in which she had been cast.

“Then we must find him. Where do we begin looking?”

“You and I will be looking at the prince and his party. The government will be looking where the ship docked.”

“You are not in charge of me.”

“I am in charge of the government’s investigation.”

“You expect me to do nothing?”

“I expect you to act as if you believe your brother has been delayed and to pay sharp attention to the prince’s party. One of them knows something. What was Frank’s plan for the prince’s entertainment tomorrow?”

“Blackstone, do not presume the rights of true fiancé.”

“Only the rights of a government agent.” His gaze was unyielding. In any test of wills between them, he would be a tough opponent.

Violet did not want to give in, but Frank was somewhere in the worst of circumstances, and whatever else she knew of Blackstone, she knew he could find Frank if anyone could.

“The prince wants to settle his horses properly. Later, my father is to show him the bank and the exchange, and tomorrow evening the prince has planned a dinner for the officers of the bank to express his gratitude for England’s past support. His chef is to do all the cooking.”

“It sounds like a day for you to play hostess and tend to your guests’ comfort, Violet. Make sure their rooms suit them.”

He gave her hands an indifferent parting squeeze, as if his mind were elsewhere, rose from the bench, and was gone. Violet began to shiver, which was just the room and the shock of the news about Frank.

The worst was over. She and Blackstone had met again. Such a meeting would have happened sometime. She could count herself fortunate that it had not happened in a public place. She’d survived two shocks, the news of Frank’s disappearance, and the effect of Blackstone’s return. She folded her shawl around her to keep off the chill and snagged the silk on Blackstone’s diamond.

A score of candles burned, but she could hardly see anything clearly. With her free hand she pulled a delicate lilac thread from the brackets that held the false diamond. It made no sense Blackstone’s working for the government, not going home. He loved Blackstone Court. He had not always been comfortable there, but for the brief time of their engagement, he had been full of how it would be for the two of them to live there. He had promised her miles of bookshelves and a bed big enough to hold a boxing match in. So why had he stayed in London?

Chapter Six

“How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.”

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Blackstone found the ways of Hammersley House as familiar as if he had not spent five years in exile from the easy intimacy he had once enjoyed with the house and its occupants. After midnight when he left Violet at the top of the ridiculous grand staircase, he had descended, then circled back through the servants’ door and up another stair.

Now he passed from Frank’s bedroom around the central courtyard towards the guest rooms at the rear of the house. He stood awhile in the dark looking down the hallway. No sign of light came from under the door of any of the rooms assigned to the prince’s party. At the far corner of the courtyard, he spoke briefly to Stevens, the man Goldsworthy had added to the Hammersley staff.

“Anything to report?”

“A loud quarrel between the count and countess. Unfortunately, gibberish to me, Lord Blackstone. I don’t speak a word o’ any tongue but English.”

“How long a quarrel?”

“Ten minutes, I’d say.”

“And no attempt to hush it up?”

“No, sir. They seemed to enjoy going at it, like they wanted to be heard.”

“A quarrel staged for public notice?”

Stevens nodded. “I’ll be on duty, sir, until the other servants are up and about. The people here like Miss Hammersley and the young master. They’ll keep a sharp eye out.”

“Thanks, Stevens.”

Blackstone left Stevens on watch and completed his circuit of the upper story passing through the oval drawing room and George Hammersley’s study to stand outside Violet’s bedroom. He leaned his shoulder against the wall. Last week he had felt too weary to follow the willing Lady Ravenhurst to her bedroom. Now he was awake, against his body’s better judgment, in a state of sense-pricking awareness.

Violet, too, had put out her lights. That did not mean she slept. He imagined her restless mind working at the problem of Frank’s disappearance through the night and considered how he was going to handle her need to act.

He should feel only bitterness at her mistrust and her willingness to judge him, but sharing a bench with her reminded his body of other feelings she stirred. When polite London turned on him, he should not have been surprised. London was fickle in her favor at best, but when Violet had turned on him, the one person who knew him better than his own family knew him, that had been the unforgivable thing.

He laughed at himself for standing on guard outside her door. There could be only one reason for it.

She was a walking summons to a man’s most tireless soldier that he should stand and salute. Blackstone should know, he had begun having erections in her presence when he’d been a worldly seventeen and she, thirteen, plump as a partridge, with no breasts to speak of.

No one in his or her family had imagined there was any danger in their intimacy. He was older, her brother’s friend, titled. She was outspoken, unpolished, and bookish, an annoying younger sibling. The first time he’d visited the house, she had been confined to her room for attending a lecture on economics in male dress.

Experience had not lessened her impact on him. The black eyes, alive with sharp intelligence and unholy curiosity, had acquired depths. Violet had grown into her eyes. With each of his youthful visits he had watched her grow into a slim beauty with lush ripe breasts and wondrous dark hair. Tonight her hair was up, coiled in some cunning way so that it hung in soft curls about her face, but he had seen it down, lying against the pearl white swell of a breast, thick lazy curls unwinding like smoke in a clear sky.

When he thought of the first time Violet had roused him, he understood that his reaction had less to do with her appearance than with Violet herself and her dangerous need to know things. It was an extreme need that went far beyond anything Pandora or Eve had ever contemplated, and that insatiable curiosity was accompanied by a singular unwillingness to take no for an answer. After that first experience he had tried to stay away from her, to reestablish some fitting distance.

For awhile he had succeeded. His real downfall as far as Violet was concerned began when he’d been in town between terms at his college. Coming from university, he had felt himself a man of the world. Still he’d been seventeen and incautious enough to have an erection in her presence.

“Show me,” she had demanded.

He’d had no intention of showing her, but in the interest of satisfying her curiosity and ending the strange hold she seemed to have on him, he had yanked her hand and put it to his swollen shaft and told her to be boring. “Drone on with the dullest drivel you can manage, Violet, and you’ll see the swelling go away.”

Only it hadn’t happened as he’d planned. Violet’s hand on him had made him harder, and he had shifted so that aching part of his anatomy connected more fully with hers, and after that he couldn’t say what happened as his brain had ceased to function. It had involved a great disordering of their garments. Only Augusta Lowndes, Violet’s redoubtable governess, had saved them from disaster that time. She had interrupted and calmly suggested that in the future when Violet wished to know something, she choose her source of information more carefully.

Then at seventeen during the bullion crisis, Violet had wanted to know to an unholy degree how banks and stocks and money worked. As he was explaining, she had interrupted to observe that she supposed he had put his penis—she called it a penis—into any number of orifices. Female, of course, she assumed.

He had made his dry throat work to ask why she imagined such a thing. He could have asked why his particular penis had entered her thoughts at all, but of course, at the time he hadn’t been thinking clearly.

She had told him she thought he was daring.

He assured her that he was quite conventional and asked her where she had got the idea that multiple orifices might be involved.

She confessed that she’d been looking at one of her father’s books on the Greek vases and had come across a series of illustrations that suggested more possibilities than she herself had originally considered.

Blackstone reminded himself to be fair. Their youthful passion had hardly been Violet’s fault alone. He was born to be a connoisseur of erections. He knew them all, the ones like slow bread dough rising, or those like wild Congreve rockets soaring, or others like a water douser’s stick pointing straight at the source. When called upon to do his duty by a woman, he had taught himself to coax an erection out of the thinnest wisp of sexual stimulation. But that skill had come later after Violet had gone out of his life.

Still none of those was a Violet Hammersley erection. He hadn’t recognized them at first as being uniquely inspired by her. He’d just assumed they were an inconvenience a young man had to endure at an awkward time of life. It was later he recognized the connection with her.

Tonight he did not mistake Violet’s agreement to their ruse as a sign of docility or willingness to let him lead the investigation. The trouble with Violet’s need to know was that now it was likely to get them both killed.