Dangerous Seduction: A Nemesis Unlimited Novel (21 page)

The seating in the carriage had been designed so that a decent distance separated the knees of the passengers who faced one another. But he leaned forward, narrowing the space between him and Alyce.

“Give me your hands.”

The fact that she did so without questioning him indicated how rattled she was. She slid her hands into his—they were chilled, shaking slightly. He frowned. Even when it was bitterly cold outside, she never shivered.

Jesus—she was frightened. She was taking a huge risk, far greater than anything she’d ever done. Damned courageous woman.

She looked down, startled, when he slid a plain gold band onto her left ring finger. Something contracted in his chest as he placed the ring on her. It wasn’t the first time he’d gone in disguise as a married man—he’d done so half a dozen times with Eva and occasionally Riza. It shouldn’t unsettle him the way it did now. But he’d never put the ring on either of his colleagues’ fingers. And now, here he was, sliding a wedding band onto Alyce’s hand, in a shabby second-class train carriage.

It felt … wrong. As if it, as if
she,
deserved better.

“This makes me your wife, now,” she murmured, then added, “Temporarily.”

“Temporarily,” he agreed.

“Then I claim a wife’s privilege.” She leaned closer, her gaze flicking down to his mouth.

His body tightened in readiness, though his mind rebelled. They’d agreed not to pursue their attraction—and this was a public train carriage. If anyone spotted them kissing, he and Alyce would be thrown off for indecency.

But all those doubting thoughts dulled as he contemplated the tempting curves of her lips.

“Claim away,” he said.

“Dear husband,” she breathed, leaning even nearer. “You said we were going to Plymouth, so why the
hell
are we going to Exeter?”

CHAPTER 9.

Alyce carefully watched his face for the slightest hint of surprise, but he seemed perfectly at ease, damn him. Her heart was racing as fast as this awful train; she’d never gone beyond the borders of Trewyn without her family. And he’d casually slipped the bloody
wedding band
on her finger—as if being fictitiously married were something he did every day—looking as calm as a summer sky.

He glanced over at the sleeping man. When he spoke, his voice was just loud enough for her to hear him above the rattling train. “It’s for the mission. We’re meeting some Nemesis operatives there to help us get ready before moving on to Plymouth.” He raised one elegant eyebrow. “Thought I had nefarious designs on your person? After last night?”

Her face heated as she remembered practically
begging
him to make love to her, and his refusal. “I was thrown, was all.”

“I can’t step off the train in Plymouth claiming to be a solicitor but dressed like a machinist. Marco and Harriet are bringing us clothing, among other things.”

She looked at the cuff of what was her very best dress, worn to church, weddings, and funerals—including when she’d buried her parents. Good as Sarah’s needlework was, anyone could see that the seams of Alyce’s dress had been mended more than once, and the merino had grown thin and shiny in places. No one in Trewyn had fine, new clothing. Everything had been handed down for so many years, it was impossible to know how long a garment had been in the family.

How shabby she and the other villagers had to look to Simon. Like … like peasants.

Not once, though, had he ever looked at her or any of them as if they were beneath him.

But she wouldn’t let herself feel ashamed. Most of the world labored for the smallest bit of bread or the possibility of one shiny, new ribbon. There was no embarrassment in working hard and having little.

“Tell me about Marco and Harriet,” she said.

“How dare you say that about my parents!” he said loudly.

“I—”

“They’re not in the least bit common!”

A grumble rose up from the sleeping man. Alyce peered around her seat. The man had awakened and now stared balefully at her and Simon. Clearly, the passenger wanted them to quiet down so he could go back to sleep.

She turned back to Simon. “As common as sheep in Wales,” she yelled. “And the way your mother fusses about everything! ‘Oh, dear, are you sure that’s the proper way to boil a pudding? It doesn’t seem right to me.’ ‘Is that really what you’re going to wear?’ ‘Why is there always a chill at your house?’”

“Maybe if you were more respectful—”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a milksop—”

Muttering angrily, the other passenger got to his feet. He sent Alyce and Simon one last spiteful glower before slamming out of the train carriage.

Now that they were finally alone, Simon stretched his legs out, settling in for the trip. Despite the space between them, his legs were so long that his ankles brushed against the hem of her dress. An odd pride refused to let her shift her position and break the intimate contact.

“You play the part of harridan well,” he murmured.

“It’s easy when I’ve got such excellent motivation.”

“That
was
nicely done,” he said. “You transitioned to your role without a hitch. As good as any Nemesis operative.”

Brief pleasure surged in her. She could do this. She was more than a woman with a hammer. Her intelligence could be a weapon, too.

“You were going to tell me more about Nemesis before we had to wake our sleeping friend,” she said.

“Marco’s been with Nemesis since the beginning. Four years, it’s been. Back then, it was he, I, and Lazarus. Three strangers who happened to meet in a pub the night they executed William Vale.” He looked at her as if expecting her to know who that was, but she only shrugged. “The news of it wasn’t sensational enough to make it out to Cornwall, but it was a man’s life, just the same. Vale was a low-paid clerk who’d been thrown out of his tenement by a son-of-a-bitch greedy landlord. The landlord kept raising the rent, and Vale couldn’t afford it. Not an uncommon situation in London, but Vale had a wife and young son, and no place to go. And it was winter. The woman and child died, and Vale wanted restitution. Not money, but something to make up for the loss of his wife and child.”

“He didn’t get it,” Alyce guessed.

“The police and courts wouldn’t hear his complaints, so he took justice into his own hands. Tried to kill the landlord, but failed. They sentenced him to swing, of course.”

She winced at the casual note in his voice, but beneath that seeming coolness, his words were edged like blades, and his eyes were hard blue shards of glass.

“The night they hanged him, I found myself in a seedy little dockside pub, drinking and getting angrier by the minute. Since I’d left the army, I’d been…” He glanced out the window, but there was only blackness outside, the glass reflecting pale ghosts of her and Simon.

“Lost,” she filled in.

He nodded without looking at her. “There wasn’t anything to come back to but parties, gentlemen’s clubs, and drink. Perhaps marriage to some suitable, well-connected but meek girl and sire a line of children. Maybe go into law or medicine—but I felt too old to start over that way.”

She swallowed hard, thinking of the elegant girls that had probably been paraded before him. She’d heard the gentry conducted their courtships like horse fairs, trotting out the latest fillies in hopes of landing a rich bidder. It sounded awful—for everyone.

“And,” she added, “you’d been halfway around the world, fighting for your life every day. I’d think the life at home would be dull as blazes.”

“Dull,” he agreed. “Purposeless, too. Whenever I looked beyond the tidy gardens and marble-faced houses of my class, I saw that there were people living lives of degradation, poverty, hopelessness. Not just the poor, but all the people who’d fallen through the cracks. Shopkeepers and clerks working fourteen hours a day. Women going blind doing piecework. Girls standing alone on street corners, selling … selling whatever they could sell. Here I’d been to what were thought to be the most
uncivilized
places on earth, and yet I never saw as much suffering as I did in the great capital of London. Sickened me.”

He caught himself, and smiled ruefully. “Get me alone on a train in the middle of the night and I turn into a nattering magpie. You don’t need to know all that dull stuff.”

In truth, it was all she could do to keep from hanging on his every word, her mouth agape. This was the most he’d ever spoken of himself, and she found herself fascinated, learning things about him—not just where he’d been and what he’d done, but the hidden riches within him, like undiscovered ore, gleaming in the darkness. She couldn’t imagine many men of privilege thinking about those without such advantages, or caring about them.

Yet she had a feeling if she begged him to reveal more of himself to her, he’d close up like a strongbox—and she didn’t have the skills to pick the lock.

“How far to Exeter?” she asked instead.

“Forty miles.”

“Not much else to do besides talk. And if I’m going to be working with the lunatics of Nemesis, I need to know more about them. You said you and some other lads met in a tavern…” she prompted.

“‘Lunatics’—an apt term. We didn’t know each other at the time, Marco, Lazarus, and I, but drink and anger loosened our tongues. It seemed a gross miscarriage of justice that the man who’d been wronged was the one punished. The law and society had failed, so we decided we’d take matters into our own hands.”

“Did any of you know the executed man?”

“Only from what the papers had told us.”

She frowned. “Then why risk yourselves on his behalf?”

“Because no one else gave a damn.” His hand curled into a fist that pressed tightly against the armrest. “If it wasn’t us, then nobody would care.”

The heat of his words startled her, as much as the feelings behind them. It was impossible to miss how much he truly
cared.
He was a gentleman. Born into the ranks of the elite. The world belonged to him and men like him. Everything was weighted in his favor. Yet that wasn’t enough for Simon.

“You didn’t … murder the landlord, did you?”

He scowled. “We never kill in cold blood.”

“Not an entirely comforting answer,” she said, shivering.

“Some things can’t be avoided.”

Logically, she knew he’d been a soldier. And one who’d fought at Rorke’s Drift, where the Zulu casualties had been enormous. Simon had killed before—that was part of his job as a soldier—but to kill in peacetime,
here,
in England … He seemed ringed by a new shadow of danger. Not to her, but to the world at large. He had the appearance and manners—when he chose to use those manners—of a highborn gentleman. That was only one facet of a much more complex truth.

“Then tell me what you
did
do to get revenge on the landlord,” she said.

He drew a breath, as if calming himself. “Marco’s a government intelligence man,” he went on. “Knows everything and everyone. He got us in touch with Harriet. Nobody can work a financial ledger or the numbers of a banking account like Harriet. She helped us set up a ruse. Got the landlord to invest in a sham scheme.”

“And it fell apart.”

For the first time in a while, he smiled, but it was a cold smile. “The bastard lost everything. His money. Possessions. Ownership of the tenement. Found himself out on the street just like William Vane. Last any of us had heard, he was begging outside Charing Cross Station and sleeping in a rented pile of straw in Whitechapel. But he could be dead by now.”

He shrugged, unconcerned about the fate of the greedy man. Alyce discovered she didn’t care about the landlord’s fate, either, but she felt a dark satisfaction knowing he’d been punished, and that Simon and his colleagues had been the ones to make the punishment happen.

“We found a new landlord for the tenement, too,” Simon added. “One who charged a fair rent. And that was Nemesis’s very first mission. We didn’t know it at the time, or have a name for ourselves, but we’d started something and didn’t want to stop. Dealing out vengeance. Righting wrongs at any cost.”

He straightened at the sound of the train carriage door opening. A weary ticket collector appeared and held out his hand.

Simon presented their tickets. The collector eyed Alyce for a moment, and, though she wanted to glare back in defiance, she made herself look at her lap like a shy wife.

“Bit late for a woman to be out,” the collector noted.

She wanted to snap that it was none of his business, but Simon spoke first.

“We’ve eloped.” Simon took her hands in his, running his thumb over her fingers, especially the band on her left hand. She glanced up to see him looking at her with warm fondness, mixed with barely suppressed desire. Heat blossomed across her face. The look seemed so genuine, exactly how an eloping groom might look at his new bride.

It’s all pretend. He might want me, but that’s all it is. Lust and opportunity.

The ticket collector gave a soft snort as he punched their tickets. “Enjoy these weeks, lad, for they won’t last.”

“It’ll be different with us,” Alyce heard herself retort.

“Whatever the missus says.” Then the collector ambled off toward the other end of the carriage. He grunted as he pulled open the door connecting cars, and suddenly there was a loud whooshing sound and the clack of the wheels. Then the door slid shut, and the carriage fell silent again.

Simon smiled at her. “I’m glad you have so much faith in our
marriage.
”

She sniffed. “Who’s that old buzzard to tell us about our happiness. Maybe we’ll be the happiest damned couple in England.”

“For the next few days, in any case.”

Right.
It was all make-believe, as real as the prince and princess with tinsel crowns and a paperboard castle. She wouldn’t let herself feel deflated. She could play this game, too. Like any Nemesis operative.

Even so, she kept her hands clasped in Simon’s, telling herself it was because she had no gloves and his hands were so warm.

“And that’s how Nemesis came to be,” she said.

“Harriet’s the one who came up with our name,” he explained. “Nemesis—the goddess of retribution against evil deeds. It was she, too, who urged Lazarus, Marco, and me to spread the word on the street about us. Whispers here and there. Before we knew it, we had people searching us out, begging for help because no one else would. We don’t take every case—it’s just not possible. Haven’t got the manpower or financial resources. But since then, we’ve added a few more members. Eva. Desmond. Riza. Jack.”