Kasey Michaels (4 page)

“That would be Sodom and Gomorrah, Lester, I believe,” Callie corrected automatically, used to her friend’s butchering of terms unfamiliar to him.

“Whatever. Papa also warned that it’s enough to corrupt any man, yet alone a callow boy like me. And if he was to get wind that the school chum I’m visiting is actually you? That I let you talk me into tagging along with you to this pen of inquiry? Well, then there’d be the devil and all to pay and that’s the truth.”

“Give it up? Is that what you’re saying? The devil I will, Lester Plum, no matter if you turn tail and run! And that’s
den of iniquity
, you lovable idiot. London is not any of those things. It’s prodigiously fine, as a matter of fact, and I shall miss it when we leave. If only we had time to go to the theater, see a play, and maybe take a look in at one of those boxing saloons Justyn told me about, or even inspect the horses at Tatt’s—”

“Now, Callie,” Lester said reasonably, taking up the second bun, seeing as how his good friend showed no intention of eating. Wasting food was a sin for which Saint Peter would never be able to condemn Mr. Lester Plum! “We can’t do any of that, for we have neither the time nor the blunt. This was a mad scheme from the beginning, and you know it. Coming all the way to London just to shoot a man in the leg—”

“In the
knee
, Lester,” Callie interrupted heatedly. “In the knee. So that he can suffer the tortures of the damned for the rest of his miserable life,each time it’s damp, each time he goes all stiff and sore and can no longer spend his evenings on the dance floor or with his legs camped under a gaming table. I want Noel Kinsey to
suffer
, Lester. Suffer! And every time it rains, each day it is cold and damp, I want to think of him and his misery, and be glad for it!”

“You’re a heartless creature, Caledonia Johnston,” Lester said, looking at her in obvious adoration. “And mean to the marrow, I think. I can’t tell you how much I admire that in a woman. Marry me, will you?”

Callie threw back her head and laughed, as Lester had always been able to make her laugh, from the time they had been children together in Dorset. Older than she by a good three years, she was nevertheless the senior in their friendship, having found leading Lester by the nose to be as simple as doing a fine somersault downhill on a grassy slope. He was her friend, her companion, her earnest assistant and, on occasion, her willing dupe—but she loved him dearly. She really loved him, as she loved her brother, Justyn.

Blond as a summer morning, with eyes the color of the spring sky, Lester was a good half foot taller than Callie and weighed half again as much thanks to his love of good food, mediocre food, even victuals as poor as those two buns he had just downed as if they had been drizzled with the finest ambrosia. He was without guile, without selfishness, and possessed such a fine, giving heart. He was her puppy dog, her pet pig, the soft, comforting blanket she’d carried well into her fifth year, the friend of a lifetime. So why did she long to box his ears?

“Lester,” she began carefully, as if explaining sums to a toddler, “we went to the trouble to successfully lie to your father, to lie to my father—a lamentably easy thing to do with both the former and the latter, but still necessary. We saved for months to pay for our lodgings in this hovel. We rode as outside passengers on the stage for three days and two nights—which was jolly good fun until it began to rain. We found Noel Kinsey, followed him from his residence. Everything was working just as we’d planned.”

“Until you crawled into entirely the wrong coach,” Lester pointed out brightly if not too brilliantly, once more licking his fingers, then wiping them on his neckcloth: Lester never wasted food, but he did leave evidence of all he ate on his clothing.

Callie spread her hands wide, reluctantly nodding her agreement with her friend’s last statement. “All right, all right. So we made
one
small miscalculation.”

“
We
made one small miscalculation? Oh, I don’t think so, Callie, I think I had nothing whatsoever to do with that one small miscalculation.”

Callie smiled graciously, elaborately bowing to her coconspirator. “La, Mr. Plum, how very right you are, and how like me, such a poor, inferior female, to try to shift the blame onto your broad shoulders. Please, sir, do forgive me.”

“Whoops, I don’t like the sound of that, God’s truth, I don’t. You’re going to hurt me now, aren’t you?” Lester asked in some apprehension, pulling up one of his legs protectively and crossing his hands over his head. “I just said we’d had a bit of a problem, that’s all.”

“Yes, Lester. Yes, we did. We’ve had a bit of a problem. A single small hitch after a string of sterling successes. Is that any reason to abandon our plan? Would you shy at the first fence? Would I? I think not, Lester. I think not. And cowering like that, for heaven’s sake—anyone would think I was going to throw this awful statue at you or something.”

Lester looked at her levelly, slowly lowering his arms, coming out of his protective crouch as he regained his good humor, and his teasing air. “You just want to keep wearing those breeches, that’s all,” he said, then smiled brightly to prove that he was only funning. It was either that, or prepare to duck out of the way when she picked up that revolting statue perched on the table beside her and winged it at his head.

Callie didn’t bother to hide her smile as she turned to look at her reflection in the cracked, dingy mirror that stood to one side of the doorway. She tilted her head to the right as she took in the sight of the tight-fitting inexpressibles Lester had eaten himself out of a half dozen years previously. So comfortable they were, so
freeing
, as were her borrowed hose and the high-top boots that made such a satisfying
click-click
against the flagway. How she adored striding long-leggedly down the streets of Solomon says Good-morrow as a man would, swinging her cane, tipping her curly-brimmed beaver to the ladies. Why, she could even spit into the gutter if the spirit took her.

She raised a hand to her throat, touching two fingers to her snowy neckcloth, then running those same fingers down over her buff waistcoat before smoothing the fold of the collar of her dark blue jacket. Lord, but she was fine! Too bad she had to suffer the indignity of binding her breasts. How unfortunate that she’d had to cut off most of her hair in order to cement her appearance as a young schoolboy off on a lark. And yet, all in all, she still would have said that there was nothing, simply nothing she’d like better than to dress in such freedom, such comfort, for the rest of her natural-born days.

She wheeled about smartly on her heels, one fist jammed onto her hip, striking a pose. “I do look famously fashionable, don’t I? All the crack, that’s Mr. Caleb Johnson, fit to rival Mr. Beau Brummell himself!” she pronounced, her smile pushing a single dimple into her left cheek.

“Well, you’re as purse-pinched as Brummell is reported to be, I suppose, but that’s the only resemblance I can see.” Lester pulled a licorice whip from his pocket and drew it beneath his nose, savoring the smell as another man would the aroma of a fine cigar. “Your eyelashes are too long, you don’t have the whisper of a beard, you’re inches too short, and you’re too round by half—at least in some places, you are,” he pointed out reasonably.

“Well, thank you, Lester,” Callie said, surprised to feel complimented by his words.

“Hah! Only you would think I was saying something nice, you know that? And how are you going to explain that mop on your head to your papa? Tell me that, will you? I have no idea how, seeing as how you told him I was taking you to your Aunt Mary Louise’s for a week. Even your papa won’t believe your Aunt Mary Louise would have had you shorn like a sheep. But, as long as we’ve come this far, and you’ve whacked off your hair and all of that, I suppose we can give putting a hole in the man one more try. What did you have in mind?”

Callie launched herself at Lester, squealing and falling on his neck, nearly causing him to lose his grip on the licorice whip, so that he cried out in protest. “Oh, you’re the best of good friends!” she told him, kissing him on both cheeks, then settled in next to him on the lumpy couch. “Now, the way I see it is, if we followed him once, we can follow him again. Yes? But this time we might be well to do our hunting in the daylight, so as to not repeat last night’s mistake.”

Lester took a bite of licorice and spoke around it. “Wasn’t
my
mistake, like I’ve been trying to tell you.
Take the horses and wait around the corner, Lester.
Did that.
Follow the coach I crawl into, Lester. It’ll be easy as tumbling off a log, Lester
. Believed that, too, for m’sins. And then I damned near wet myself when the coach turned around when we weren’t halfway to the Green Man, and I heard the bark of that pistol! We’re just lucky you didn’t kill the fellow.”

“I should have.” Callie muttered the words into her neckcloth as she crossed her arms over her midsection. “I vow to you, Lester, Viscount Brockton is the most condescending, maddening, talkative creature it has ever been my misfortune to kidnap. And he had the gall to laugh at me, you know. That was the worst of it.”

“Well, if it makes you feel at all better, I doubt he laughed much when you kicked that heavy clog at him, then shot him.”

“I did
not
shoot him, Lester,” Callie gritted out from between clenched teeth. “If I had shot him, he wouldn’t have been able to hop out of the coach so quickly. I swear I can still feel his hot breath on the back of my neck, even now that we are safely here again.”

“But he knows you’re a woman.”

Callie shifted her green gaze to the window as if expecting to see that huge black coach bearing the Roxbury crest appearing on the street outside, then deliberately banished the notion from her brain. “He put forth that suspicion, yes. But he can’t know for sure, now can he?”

“And he knows you’re hell-bent to put a hole in Noel Kinsey.”

Callie shot a look at Lester from beneath her slitted eyelids, deciding that her friend was being entirely too astute this morning for a man who had admitted from his own mouth that he had nearly wet himself not six hours earlier. “So? You are trying to make a point, aren’t you? Go on.”

Lester tied a precise knot in what was left of the licorice whip, then twirled it back and forth between his fingertips. “All right, Callie,” he said after a moment “I’ve been thinking on this for a while. If this Viscount Brockton were to have taken umbrage at being kidnapped, at being shot at, say, he might just want to come looking for the person who kidnapped him and shot at him. Isn’t that possible?”

Callie wet her suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue, remembering her last sight of Simon Roxbury, her last glimpse of his handsome face wiped of its lazy, superior smile. “Yes. It’s entirely possible that he might want to find that person, perhaps even punish that person. However, as he’s not so much as seen my face, and since I won’t be making the same mistake twice and putting myself within a mile of His Obnoxious Lordship, I can’t see as he presents a problem.”

Lester held up a finger as if about to point out the flaw in that logic, then did. “And that’s just the thing, Callie,” he announced, squirming on the lumpy cushions, turning sideways so that he could look at her more closely as he spoke. “If
I
were the Viscount Brockton, and I wanted to find someone who said they wanted to shoot Noel Kinsey—well, I’d just keep myself close as sticking plaster to that same Noel Kinsey and wait for a too-short, too-female-looking gentleman and her likewise male companion to appear.”

He sat back against the cushions once more, crossing his legs at the ankle, and popped the knot of licorice into his mouth. “That’s what I’d do, Callie.”

“Damn,” Callie breathed out quietly. “Damn, Damn, Damn.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Lester sounded entirely too pleased with himself to suit Callie, who hopped to her feet and began pacing once again. “Oh, yes. I’m right. I can tell, Callie, because I think I can see smoke coming out your ears. Well, isn’t this the day! I’ve actually thought of something you haven’t. And Papa says you lead me around by the nose. Ha—a fine lot
he
knows!”

Callie ignored Lester as her mind turned over this new problem, the unlooked-for complication brought to her courtesy of the insufferably smug and arrogant Simon Roxbury. She hadn’t liked the man from the first moment he’d climbed into the coach and looked at her as if she, and her pistol, were nothing more than an immense joke that amused him at first, then quickly bored him to flinders.

Now he was throwing a spanner into the finer workings of her plan to punish that miserable cad, Noel Kinsey. Wasn’t that just like the man?

“We won’t have to worry about him recognizing the horses we’ve hired for the week,” she said at last, thinking out loud. “It was too dark for him to see either of them clearly, or you for that matter, except to know that you were, as you said, a man. I could go back to being a girl to throw him off the scent, I suppose, except that we have little money, I’ve brought none of my wardrobe here with me from Dorset, and he’ll probably be looking for a small, thin female, or for two gentlemen. So, as there’s nothing else for it, I’ll keep on being a green-as-grass youth here from the country for his first visit to the Metropolis, and not the clog-clad servant I was last night. We’ll carry guidebooks, saunter up and down the streets of Mayfair, and keep an eye open for Kinsey. We will have to make one small alteration to our appearance, however, to put him entirely off the scent. That will be easy enough once I explain it to you, dearest Lester. But we’ve only got three days left to us. We’ll have to work quickly.”

“You’re getting too wild, Callie,” Lester pointed out reasonably. “We can’t just shoot the man as he struts down Bond Street.”

Callie waved away his protests. “We won’t have to. I’ve already decided what we’ll do when we find him. Trust me, Lester, we’ll have the job done and be back on the stagecoach and on our way home before the week is out, leaving Viscount. Brockton to hunt mare’s nests for the next fortnight. I promise you!” She grinned at her friend. “Well, Lester? What do you have to add to that?”