Desired (2 page)

To her surprise Rothbury went down on one knee and presented the shoe to her with a grin that was pure wickedness, his teeth a flash of white in a face tanned by a climate somewhat more tropical than London in
winter. He slid one slipper onto her foot, his palm warm for a moment against the arch of her instep, and she felt a strange and disconcerting flicker of response deep within her.

“Thank you,” she said, forcing the tiny slippers onto her feet where they pinched like malicious crabs. “Just like Prince Charming.”

“I missed the bit of the fairy tale where Cinderella visited the brothel,” Rothbury said. He straightened up. “What were you doing there, Lady Darent?” His tone was still as courteous as before but that courtesy cloaked an edge of steel. Tess’s instinct for self-preservation snapped another warning. Rothbury was the government’s man here, the man sent to hunt her down. She was tiptoeing across a tightrope. One false step and she would fall. The only advantage she had was that he did not know the identity of the person he was hunting.

He was still holding her reticule. Behind him, Tess could see a posse of dragoons rounding up a few ragged protesters. There had been a riot that night and the street was littered with rubble and broken spars of wood. The gas lamps were smashed and someone had overturned a carriage. One of the shutters on the Temple of Venus hung off its hinge. Torn newspapers flapped in the wind. It was quiet now. Once the soldiers arrived the mob had faded away as quickly as they had come, and only the faint smell of burning hung on the cold tide of London air.

Tess shrugged, bringing her gaze back to Rothbury’s impassive face.

“Why does anyone visit a brothel, Lord Rothbury?” she said lightly. “If you have an imagination, now would be the time to use it.” She arched an ironic brow. “I assume you are questioning me on some authority and not simply because you are impertinently curious about my sex life?”

Rothbury shifted. “I am here on the authority of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,” he said. “There was an illegal political meeting at The Feathers Inn tonight. Do you know anything about it?”

Tess’s heart bumped erratically. “Do I look like the sort of woman who would know anything about politics, Lord Rothbury?” she said. “I have absolutely no interest in it at all.”

She saw Rothbury’s teeth gleam as he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “Then you will have equally little interest in the fact that I am hunting for a number of dangerous criminals including the radical caricaturist known as Jupiter.”

Fear breathed gooseflesh along Tess’s skin. She was no dangerous criminal. She was a philanthropist and all she wanted was reform. All she had ever worked for was to alleviate the appalling poverty and misery of the poor. But the Home Secretary did not see it that way. He saw the reformers as a threat to public order and a danger that he was set on obliterating forever.

She swallowed the sawdust in her throat. Not by a
flicker of an eyelash could she betray any knowledge of the reformers’ cause, still less that she was intimately involved with it. But under the perceptive gaze of this man she felt her defences stripped naked.

Pretend. Playact. You have done it before….

“You are hunting criminals in a brothel?” she said, affecting boredom. “What a singular way to combine business with pleasure, my lord. Have you found any?”

“Not yet,” Rothbury said. The tone of his voice sent another warning shiver down her spine. She looked at the reticule with its incriminating papers still sitting snugly in the palm of his hand. If he opened that and saw the cartoons…

“You mentioned Lord Sidmouth,” she said. “I do not recall him. Would I have met him at a ball or a party, perhaps?”

“I doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Lord Sidmouth is not a man much given to parties.”

Tess shrugged, as though the conversation was now thoroughly boring her. She glanced towards the door of the brothel, standing open now with light shimmering across the cobbles of Covent Garden Square. “Well, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “Delightful as it is to stand out here in the cold chatting to you, I really am quite exhausted. Worn out, in fact, by my excesses tonight. And I am sure that you have work to do.” She smothered a delicate little yawn, improving on the point. “So if you will hand my reticule over and excuse me, I shall take a carriage home.”

Rothbury weighed the little bag in one palm and Tess’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that at all costs she had to keep her expression blank. If she grabbed the reticule off him or made it clear in any way that she was protective of the contents, Rothbury would look inside and she would be clapped up in the Tower of London as a political prisoner faster than one could say
seditious cartoon.

“What do you have in here?” Rothbury said.

“The contents of a lady’s reticule are private only to her,” Tess said. Her mouth dried. “Surely you are gentleman enough to respect a lady’s discretion?” she pressed.

“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Rothbury said. “It feels like a pistol,” he added. “You must like playing dangerous games with your lovers.” His tone was dry.

“I only shoot the ones who fail to satisfy me,” Tess said, smiling sweetly.

She saw Rothbury smile in response, the warmth spilling into those green eyes like sunlight, a long crease denting his cheek. The smile did strange things to Tess’s equilibrium. Rothbury placed the reticule gently in her outstretched hand. Tess’s fingers closed about the silk and brocade and she felt the relief flood through her, so powerful that her knees almost weakened. Then she realised that there was no rustle of paper, no folded sheets beneath her touch. She gripped
a little tighter, desperately trying to make out the outline of the papers. Her stomach hollowed with shock.

They were not there.

S
HE HAD THE PRETTIEST FEET
he had ever seen.

It might not have been the first thing about Teresa Darent that most men would have noticed, but Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, was never attracted to the obvious.

He handed Tess up into a hackney carriage and watched as she kicked off the lavender silk slippers and tucked her feet up under the gauzy skirts of the gown. The slippers were far too small for her—Owen had noticed that fact when he had held one of them for her to put on earlier. The gown also could not belong to her. Owen was no expert on feminine attire other than in the removal of it but he had a certain amount of experience of the female form and he knew that a woman with Tess Darent’s opulent curves—and Tess Darent’s flamboyant reputation—would not wear a gown that was two sizes too large. So the outfit was borrowed, which raised the intriguing question of what Lady Darent had been wearing when first she had arrived at the Temple of Venus and why she had needed to change her clothes.

Tess Darent interested Owen. She had from the first time they had met. It was not merely that she had the
face of an angel and the reputation of a sinner. Public opinion held that she was as shallow as a puddle, mercenary, amoral, extravagant. She was an arbiter of fashion who had turned spending money into an art form. She simultaneously outraged and fascinated the ton with her profligate marriages and her decadent behaviour, and she was generally considered an utter featherbrain. There was no reason on earth he would find her interesting. Except that some stubborn instinct told him that she was not at all what she seemed…?.

“Thank you, Lord Rothbury.” Tess smiled at him prettily from the depths of the darkened carriage. The lavender silk gown shone ethereally in the faint light. Taken with the cloud of bright hair tumbling over her shoulders, it made her look impossibly alluring. Owen’s body reacted with an unexpected stab of desire. He wanted to peel that gown from her shoulders, to see it tumble to the floor as it had done before, to reveal the impossible curves and luscious, sensual plumpness of the body beneath. He remembered the pure line of her throat and collarbone when the gown had slid off her, so true and pale and tempting. He wanted to press his mouth to the hollow of her throat and taste her skin.

Which was not the matter on which he was supposed to be concentrating his attention.

“We’re hunting dangerous criminals here, Rothbury,” Lord Sidmouth had warned him when he had offered Owen the role of special investigator for the Home Office. “No bloody respect for law and order.”
He had tapped a rather fine caricature that was lying on his desk, a drawing that had evidently been crumpled by Sidmouth’s angry and impatient hand. “Treason,” the Home Secretary had grumbled. “Sedition. Stirring up trouble, inciting the masses to riot. I’ll see them all hang.” His brows had snapped down. “You’re a British peer now, Rothbury, even if we had to pass an Act of Parliament to make you so.” He drummed his fingers on the cartoon. “Need your help against these traitors.”

“Yes, my lord,” Owen had said, a little grimly. The irony was not lost on him. Once, not so long ago, Sidmouth would have had no hesitation in branding
him
a renegade and a criminal. As an American he had been an enemy of the British state when the two countries were at war. That was before he had inherited a British peerage and turned into a slightly unlikely pillar of the establishment. He owed it to his family to uphold their honour now. Once before he had disgraced the family name under the most appalling circumstances. He would never do it again. Accepting his responsibilities now was his chance to atone.

Tess Darent shifted within the depths of the carriage, drawing his attention back to her as she pulled the peacock feather cloak more closely about her. Owen could smell her perfume, a crisp light scent, tart but sweet, rather like Tess herself. It was perfect for her, pretty and provocative, another element of her charming and flirtatious facade. Owen wondered what it was that she was hiding. Her wide-eyed pretence would fool nine out
of ten men into believing her to be every inch as superficial as she appeared. It was a pity for her that he was the tenth and did not believe a word.

He had no grounds on which to arrest her, however. Visiting a brothel was not illegal and nor was carrying a pistol, and if she was a secret radical then he was the Queen of Sheba. The idea was absurd.

“Good night, Lady Darent.” He kept one hand on the carriage door. “I wish you a safe journey home.”

“And I wish you good luck in catching your miscreants.” Tess’s eyes were very wide and innocent. “What did you call them—madrigals?”

“Radicals,” Owen said gently.

“Whichever.” She made a little fluttering gesture with her hands. Her expression was blank. She even yawned. Owen wondered if she could possibly be as vacant as she seemed. If not, she was certainly an extremely good actress.

“Pray give my best wishes to Lord…Sidmouth, was it?” She paused. “Is he rich? Married?”

“Not at the moment,” Owen said.

Tess smiled. “Rich or married?” she queried.

“Yes, Sidmouth is rich and, no, he is not currently married,” Owen clarified.

Tess’s smile deepened. “Then I should like to make his acquaintance.”

“You’re looking for another husband for your collection?” Owen said ironically.

“Marriage is my natural state,” Tess said. “Is Sidmouth old?”

Owen laughed. “Probably not old enough to be relied on to die anytime soon.”

“A pity,” Tess said. “I always find that a useful attribute in a husband.” Her blue eyes mocked him, sweeping over him from head to foot in knowing appraisal. “What about you, Lord Rothbury?” she asked. “Are you seeking a rich wife to go with your pretty title? I hear that your coffers hold nothing but moths.”

“The gossip mongers have been busy,” Owen said shortly.

“It is their function,” Tess said. “Just as it is the job of every matron with an eligible daughter to parade her under your nose.”

“I don’t seek a wife at present,” Owen said. His feelings felt raw. Odd that Tess Darent’s clear blue gaze should, for a moment, strip away his defences. It was common knowledge that he had no fortune to go with his title. Only that morning he had had an awkward interview with his great-aunt by marriage, one of a host of elderly relatives his inheritance had also blessed him with. Lady Martindale was obscenely rich, eccentric and fearsomely opinionated. She had told Owen that if he wed, she would give him sufficient money to put his estates in order and would make him her heir. Owen knew he had reacted to her commands like a small, obstinate child; he had no wish to take a wife simply because Lady Martindale demanded it, and the alter
native, to seek a rich heiress, was equally abhorrent to him. He had never yet met an eligible woman who did not bore him.

Except for Tess Darent. She was not precisely eligible but she certainly did not bore him.

The thought caught him by surprise.

Tess was watching him. Owen observed that she had the same lavender-blue eyes as her sister Joanna and the same heart-shaped face. Her hair was a few tones lighter than Joanna’s, red-gold instead of golden-brown, but the darkness of the carriage smoothed out all subtleties of shading. Years before, Owen had had something of a passion for Joanna Grant, before she had had the bad taste to prefer his best friend, Alex, to him. Now he felt something move and shift in his chest, a pang of sensation as though his emotions were playing games with him. His rational mind knew that Tess and Joanna were very different women, but gut instinct and desire were not so logical, nor so biddable. He could remember when he had first seen Tess and had been winded by the physical likeness between the two sisters. But Tess Darent was not her sister. He needed to remember that. He could not have the one and he did not want the other, except in the most fundamental physical sense because she was a very desirable woman.

He released the door and gave the driver the word to move off, watching the hackney carriage as it disappeared into the dark. He had the strangest instinct that he had missed something important but he could
not put his finger on what it might have been. Shaking off the sensation, Owen strolled back up the white stone steps and into the chequered hallway of the brothel. The last few dragoons were leaving; their captain, a sour-looking man with a permanently pained expression saluted Owen grimly. Owen knew the regular troops disliked having to work with Sidmouth’s special investigators.

“Don’t mind Captain Smart,” his friend Garrick Farne said in his ear. “He took shrapnel in the groin at Salamanca so a raid on a brothel is a particular type of torture for him.”

“Poor fellow,” Owen said feelingly. “Did you find anything useful?” he added.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Garrick said. “If any of the leaders of the Jupiter Club fled this way they are already gone.”

Owen shrugged. “It was always going to be a long shot.”

He was accustomed to playing a long game. This sort of work was different from anything he had done before, but it required some of the same qualities of patience and resourcefulness and cool-headedness. It was not the same as exploring or sailing or fighting for his country, or any of the other things that Owen had done since he was old enough to make his way in the world, but it was still a challenge. The only thing Owen knew was that without a challenge, without action, he would fossilise. He might have accepted the responsibilities
of his role but he could not see himself becoming the classic English aristocrat, wedded to his club and his country estates, settling into a life of luxurious emptiness. He had too much of his American heritage in his blood, the desire to carve his own future, the need to achieve.

“No sign of Tom either, presumably,” he added.

Garrick shook his head. “I’ll keep looking.”

Garrick had accompanied him that night because there were rumours that his errant half-brother, Tom Bradshaw, had been heard of back in London, and with connections to the radical movement. Tom, Duke’s bastard son and master criminal, had wed an heiress the year before and then promptly abandoned her, absconding with her fortune and leaving her ruined. This on top of Tom’s attempt to ruin Garrick and murder his wife, Merryn, the year before had been enough to send Lord Sidmouth into near apoplexy. The Home Secretary had decreed that noblemen who had the misfortune to have such disreputable relatives should hunt them down and see them stand trial. Garrick had agreed, although his motives were more straightforward, Owen suspected. Tom had tried to kill the woman Garrick loved and he would move heaven and earth to capture him.

“Was there anything else of interest?” Owen queried.

“This isn’t the place for a happily married man,” Garrick said, smiling. “I had to avert my gaze on more than one occasion but despite my impaired vision I did find these.” He held up a shirt, a jacket and pair of trou
sers. “No one is claiming them though, particularly as there was this in the jacket pocket.” On the palm of his hand he held a wicked-looking knife with a carved ivory grip and a thistle design on the blade.

Owen’s brows shot up. “Very nice,” he murmured. He picked up the dagger and felt the worn handle slip smoothly into his palm. The knife was light but deadly sharp, with beautiful balance. “We might be able to trace this,” he said, “if we ask around.”

Garrick nodded. “And even nicer…” He put his hand in his pocket and extracted a set of crumpled papers, unfolding them and passing them to Owen. “I found these in one of the chambers upstairs, hidden beneath a pile of underwear in a dresser. The old bawd swears blind she had no idea they were there and there’s no budging her from her story. She says one of her guests must have left them.”

Owen looked at the cartoons. They were stunningly executed, conjuring a vivid image in only a few stark lines. One was a particularly cruel but accurate caricature of Lord Sidmouth as a hot-air balloon. The other showed a posse of dragoons trampling men, women and children beneath the hooves of their horses. The banner overhead read Freedom is Not Free. Owen grimaced at the sheer visceral shock and power of the picture. Something in it seemed to grab him by the throat. In the corner of each drawing was the signature of the cartoonist, a loopy black scrawl that simply read Jupi
ter. He let his breath out on a soundless whistle. “So Jupiter
was
hiding here,” he said slowly.

Garrick nodded. “It would seem so. Powerful propaganda, these cartoons,” he added. “It is no wonder that Sidmouth hates them.”

Owen nodded. “They are dangerous,” he said. “An incitement to violence.”

He pushed the cartoons into his pocket. The pile of clothes on the floor caught his attention and he stirred it with one booted foot. An evocative scent hung for a moment on the air, crisp and fresh, with a perfume he recognised. He squatted down and picked up the shirt, feeling the fine quality of the linen against his fingers.

So now he knew what Tess had been wearing when she arrived at the brothel. Had she come there incognito because she did not want the ton to hear that she disported herself in a bawdy house? Or was her choice of clothing all part of a sensual game? Did she enjoy having a lover peel off those layers of masculine attire before he made love to her?

Owen thought of Tess Darent’s body beneath his hands as he had lifted her down from the rope, the flare of her hips and the delicate curve of her waist. He thought of the heat of her skin through the slippery silk of the lavender gown, then he thought of what she might look like with those curves confined within the stark lines of the jacket and trousers, the thin cotton of the shirt pressing against her breasts. He raised the shirt to his nose, inhaled a long, deep breath and felt
his senses fill with Tess, with her scent and her essence. Once again he was impaled by a jolt of lust that was hot and fierce and utterly uncomplicated.

“If you have an imagination, Lord Rothbury, now would be the time to use it….”

Owen, who had had no notion before tonight that he was such an imaginative man, found that imagination positively running riot.