It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (11 page)

It’s valuable, he thought, to occasionally see one’s self through the eyes of new people. Not the ones who see you nearly every day, and therefore never
really
see you.

“Friends, are we?” he asked.

She shrugged with one shoulder. “Certainly. Why not?”

“Why not, indeed.”

A little silence passed.

“I’m not precisely a rake, you know.”

“Oh, do forgive me. What
precisely
does one call a man who enjoys an allegedly unbroken string of conquests?”

“The word ‘conquest’ implies a great degree of effort. Can I help it if they just . . . fall at my feet?” He tried and failed to suppress a smile that was, admittedly, rakish. “It wasn’t always that way. And only a fool would refrain from the occasional partaking of such . . . serendipitous bounty.”

“They fall at your feet? The way birds plummet from the sky in a proverbial biblical plague?”

He whistled, impressed. “Not even my sister has yet thought to call me a biblical plague.”

“Except instead of birds, it’s blond women.”

He thought he might have detected the slightest, slightest whiff of judgment around the word “blond.”

“Yes. I prefer blond women the way I prefer spring days to winter ones, and I prefer simple women to the complicated ones, and I prefer an untroubled life to a troubled one. And while these may not be virtues, they are most certainly not vices. Surely you have preferences when it comes to men?”

“Wealthy and titled.” Very briskly said.

Well.

Oddly, it did sting just a bit.

He recovered. “You see? In a way, we are both creatures of simple tastes. I don’t set out to break hearts. Some are handed to me before I’m aware of it, and I am on occasion perhaps less graceful or perceptive about that than I prefer to be. I haven’t the dexterity of some, who can skillfully juggle a dozen or so hearts at once without ever dropping or committing to just one.”

She went still, suddenly alertly suspicious.

“Oh, yes,” he continued, “I imagine
quite
a mess would ensue if said juggler ever slipped up, or put a foot wrong, or added one too many hearts to the armload she was juggling. Or perhaps added the
wrong
heart. It could even get dangerous.”

She narrowed her eyes at that.

The clock swung off a few seconds.

“And you call
me
a rake,” he said softly.

The mutual stare continued another few seconds.

And finally she inhaled a length, then softly blew out a breath.

“Sometimes . . .” she began cautiously, “sometimes jugglers are conscripted into the . . . shall we say, circus . . . before they really know what it entails. And then it’s too late, and they’re too good at it, and they know full well they can never drop a heart, or, as you say, chaos could ensue.”

They locked eyes.

He suspected this was more than any other man knew about Thomasina de Ballesteros at the moment. Oblique as it was.

He felt the temptation:
ask
. Ask more. It was like peering down an intriguing corridor, all full of closed doors. What lay behind them? Delightful surprises? Or things of the sort you wished you hadn’t seen, as when he’d opened a door at the Redmond house and surprised a footman pleasuring himself over what appeared to be a lady’s fashion plate? But he wasn’t going to ask any more questions, because he knew one question would simply lead to another and another and another, until the bloody woman had him enmeshed.

“You see? It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine.”

They sat in a moment of righteous complicity. They shared the curse of the profoundly charming.

“Tell, me Tommy—may I call you Tommy? There are far too many syllables in the I’m sure not-at-all-fictional name of de Ballesteros. And Thomasina is also quite a mouthful.”

He watched amusement and irritation flicker over her features. “I was named for my father. My surname is quite real. And you may call me Tommy if I may call you whatever I wish to call you.”

“Done. Tell me—what do you plan to do with all of those hearts you’re juggling, Tommy?”

“I’ll marry one of them, Johnny.”

“Not Johnny. Or even John. You’ll just choose one, then, as if they’re truffles in a box? Yet again, I suppose every rake must retire one day.”

She remained silent.

“I hear
your
retirement is imminent,” she said finally, with a sly little smile.

Oh, God. The whole of London knew.

“We shall see,” he said inscrutably.

She smiled at that.

Jonathan let the silence stretch. The warmth of the room was lulling and quiet.

Quiet, that was, apart from what sounded like feet pattering about overhead. Little ones.

He cast his gaze upward. “Mice?” he wondered aloud. “Obese ones?”

“Mmm,” she replied noncommittally, without looking up.

The overhead pattering headed in the opposite direction, followed by a thump.

She sipped nonchalantly at her ale.

“My hair isn’t ginger, by the way,” she said suddenly.

“Oh, I know. It’s more of an oxblood.”

“
Oxblood!
”

He laughed silently. “Very well. Oh, let’s say, mahogany then. I called it ginger in order to irritate Argosy, who can only discuss you using rhapsodic metaphor, an affliction that comes over him when he wishes to impress a woman. He really is a good sort, and I hope you will be kind to him. And I said it to amuse you. It worked on both counts. You called me pretty.”

He’d slid the last sentence into the conversation so swiftly and surreptitiously, she almost didn’t notice.

And then she stiffened, as though she’d been caught in the act of stealing a sweet.

“And pretty men are legion in London, Mr. Redmond,” she said loftily. “Useful ones, on the other hand, are scarcer than honest ones.”

“Mmm,” he replied. With a faint smile.

I wonder if she knows, he thought idly, how perfectly her skin matches those pearls. No wonder a man was tempted to give them to her. He must have chosen them for that very reason. And he knew a moment of pity for the man whose hopeful gift was about to be heartlessly turned into cash again.

She looked at the clock. “Speaking of useful, Mr. Redmond, it’s time to earn your pearls! Follow me.”

She leaped out of her chair and flung on her cloak before he could push back his chair or offer to assist her or do anything gentlemen are bred to do, the way sheepdogs are bred to herd sheep.

Chapter 10

S
HE LED THEM ONCE
again on a circuitous, labyrinthine route that somehow ended with the two of them standing on Drury Lane.

And all along the way, surreptitiously, as often as he could, Jonathan pinched off and pressed little bits of one of the pink marzipan raspberry clusters against walls of alleys and buildings. He’d found them wrapped in his coat pocket, and he’d decided he could sacrifice at least one of them. Not all of his marzipan markers would survive until the next day, or even stay put for the night. But he suspected enough of them would. He’d be looking for them tomorrow.

“This is where all of this”—she swept a hand up and down through the air in front of Jonathan—“becomes truly useful.”

“ ‘
This?
’ ” he queried dryly.

“The boots by Hoby, the coat by Weston, the accent, the eau de I’m-oh-so-wealthy-and-scrupulously-bred that wafts from your very pores like gin from a St. Giles footpad. We’ll need a hack,” she said decisively. “I warrant one will stop for you straightaway.”

She was right. It was a cold evening, but fortunately Jonathan’s conspicuous height, bearing, clothing, and his obvious and surprising sobriety, rare in an aristocrat at this time of night in London, got them a hack within minutes.

“Grosvenor Square, please,” she directed the hackney driver, who was clearly
not
sober. But drinking was a requirement of his job, if one didn’t want to freeze to death.

“Of
course
Grosvenor Square,” he muttered dryly, and cracked the ribbons.

In the carriage Tommy was quiet for such a good long while, and her nerves were so clearly growing tauter and tauter, that Jonathan wanted nothing more than to yell “Boo!” He suspected her head would touch the ceiling if he did.

“Boo,” he said softly but with a great burst of feeling.

She hopped gratifyingly.

He smiled crookedly.

“You are a
child,
” she said irritably.

Her big green eyes in the shadowy light of the hack glowed almost spectrally. They
might
have spooked a less stalwart or sober man. He refrained from sharing this with her.

“If I guess correctly, will you tell me what we’re about?”

“You’ll never guess,” she said absently

“Do you intend to steal something?”

Silence.

He could almost hear her mental
bloody hell
at his instantly correct assumption
.

“A warning: I’ll know it if you lie to me, Tommy. I don’t recommend it.”

She turned to stare out the window at London as if she’d freshly arrived from a foreign land. Or was seeing it for the last time.

“I don’t
consider
it stealing,” she said finally, carefully.

Oh, splendid.

“So we
are
stealing something.”

She hesitated. “We are . . . liberating something.”

And quite surprisingly, here she turned to him and grinned, a pure rascally grin, a grin that had a reckless swashbuckling quality to it. A do-or-die sort of grin.

Oh. Bloody. Hell. He
was
in trouble.

And yet a part of him thought:
I will of course
excel
at stealing whatever it is we’re stealing,
because he refused to fail. Perhaps his father was right after all to attempt to rein him in, since clearly the promise of pearls could lead him so easily astray. The new things he was learning about himself lately were flowing thick and fast.

He imagined saying from Newgate, “Well, if you didn’t want to visit me here, you shouldn’t have cut off my allowance, Father.” It was one thing the Redmonds could hold over the Everseas—not one of them had yet been in prison.

“You’ll want to wrap your boot heels in a handkerchief or your cravat, by the way,” she added absently. “We shall need to be silent as cats.”

Surprisingly, he did as he was told without question.

Grosvenor Square was quiet. All the aristocrats were tucked up in bed or the houses shut up for the winter. They witnessed no comings and no goings. That could, of course, change at any minute. And suddenly Tommy thumped the ceiling, signaling the driver to stop.

Jonathan craned his head out the window and realized things had just taken a turn for the worse.

For he knew precisely where they were.

“This is Lord Feckwith’s town house.”

“Yes,” she said, sounding faintly surprised, as though he was stating the obvious. “Why don’t you pay the driver to wait for us and impress upon him the need for utter silence. And ask him to douse or cover his lamps. We shouldn’t be more than a minute or two. Any longer and . . .” She trailed off ominously.

Jonathan cocked his pistol, a sound that never failed to stir his blood, pushed open the carriage door, and swung down. He immediately swiveled and lifted Tommy to the ground before she could squeak a protest. She was remarkably easy to lift, not heavier than, say, a sturdy chair. She gave herself a little shake like a disgruntled cat and immediately darted toward the narrow passage that led to the mews.

After he had a brisk word with the driver, he followed her, his bandaged boot heels muffled on the stone, her slippers barely more than whisperlike scuffs. She ran like someone who was used to running silently. Like a wraith. Her cloak like something cut from shadow, billowing behind her.

They were eventually going to crash into things, he just knew it. No light reached them from the moon or through a lamplit window. The shrubberies in these gardens were usually treacherously low. If he tripped, he’d likely shoot himself or Tommy.

“
Tommy,
” he hissed.

She halted so quickly he crashed into her, sending her staggering and windmilling forward another foot. He grabbed a fistful of her cloak before she could topple onto her face. Apparently she didn’t precisely have the eyes of a cat, because she went no farther. Instead, the two of them pressed themselves against the wall of the house and waited. In short order, shapes came into focus in the darkness and became recognizable as a low round ring of shrubbery, the door leading to the kitchen, and what must have been a servant’s privy, tucked more or less discreetly behind another mass of shrubbery.

The hush was palpable. It was as if a dark cloak had been thrown over the whole world. He began to breathe more slowly, and on one breath he took in the scent of something sweet.
Tommy uses French milled soap,
he knew then. He leaned forward for another surreptitious sniff, wondering—

BAM!

They both shot a few inches skyward out of their shoes when the privy door banged open, releasing an unholy stench and a burst of light.