Lady Rogue (4 page)

“I could not venture to say, Mr. Riley.”

The butler might suffer from a complete lack of curiosity, but then he was not the offspring of a smuggler and occasional thief. Seeing what might lie inside, though, would have to wait for a better opportunity. With a last glance at the door, she stepped around Wenton and across the hall, into the room she had saved for last.

The library was definitely masculine, and wholly the Earl of Everton’s. Evidently either the earl or one of his ancestors had loved to read, for she had never seen such a collection of books as lay in the Cale House library. She suspected the collector to be the present earl, though, for some of the manuscripts looked quite recent. The room had the comforting smell of old paper, and with a faint smile Kit made her way around the shelves, running her finger slowly along the spines of the books to read their titles. Reading was an extravagance she’d had little opportunity for as she got older, and one she’d never missed as keenly as she did right then. Perhaps before the fortnight was over she would have a little time, if Everton didn’t mind loaning out part of his collection.

With some servant or another in sight all day, exploring the house for anything useful remained impossible, and she wasn’t interested in seeing the remainder of the bedchambers. She’d seen the drawing room, and doubted the formal dining room or the ballroom on the third floor would hold any state secrets.

After luncheon she wandered into the morning room to look out the front window. Just across wide Park Lane, the grassy avenues of Hyde Park were crowded with well-dressed gentlemen and ladies. Kit pursed her lips, then gave a slight smile. They shouldn’t mind one
more young lad looking about. Quickly she strode back out to the entryway, settled her hat on her head, pulled the door open, and headed across the lane.

Less than half an hour later she ferreted out a promising rat. The group of lords talking together on horseback at the edge of Rotten Row didn’t even notice her as she strolled over to stand in the shade of an elm tree close by. They were discussing Napoleon and tariffs, so she turned to get a glimpse of them through the shrubbery.

“But he’s hurting our own commerce, as well,” a short, overweight man with a shockingly bright gold waistcoat was complaining, and Kit immediately ruled him out. Only a supporter of the tariff would be helping to enforce the blockade.

“You can’t expect even a wastrel like Prinny to sell goods to a country we’re at war with,” a second man returned. “And three years ago, Bonaparte was confiscating every piece of British property he could get his hands on. I’ll wager you weren’t complaining about commerce then.” He was younger than the first, with a jaunty smile and immaculately cropped brown hair, and he was mounted on a fine bay gelding. Kit took a step closer, using the trunk of the elm as shelter.

“Only that he wasn’t given a cut of the gold,” a third man chuckled.

“That’s not amusing, Rawlings,” the stout man snapped.

“Well,” the jaunty one said, smiling, “I don’t believe Donald’s share would have amounted to much, given the lack of success of the venture.”

“Indeed, my lord,” Rawlings answered, “and thanks t—”

Heavy footsteps approached from behind, and Kit jumped as hot wind breathed down her collar. She whipped around to find herself looking into the left eye of a magnificent black stallion, which gazed balefully back at her. The black’s rider sat looking at her with a mildly annoyed expression on his handsome face, his hands crossed at the wrists in front of him.

“Do you know what a roof is?” Alexander Cale queried.

“Of course,” she retorted, noting that the Earl of Everton had long, elegant fingers. Gambler’s hands, her father would say—but that didn’t explain why she found them so abruptly fascinating.

“I would therefore assume you know the difference between being indoors and out of doors,” he continued in the same tone.

She scowled at him, angry that she had allowed him to distract her so completely that she missed the rest of the conversation behind her. “I’m not a complete idiot, you know,” she snapped.

Everton looked at her for another moment. “I did not think you were.”

He kicked one foot out of its stirrup and held down a hand. With a sigh she stepped into the leather brace, swung up behind him, and wrapped an arm about his waist. His stomach beneath her hand was flat and hard, and she took a slow breath. He smelled faintly of cigar smoke and shaving soap, and she leaned forward a little to breathe him in more deeply. “I…was only bored,” she stated shakily, dismayed at what she was doing. She straightened, concentrating on acting like the male cousin she was supposed to be.

“Obviously.”

Her father had always insisted that the titled English were thin-blooded, ingrown, stupid, nasty creatures, but as the long-lashed azure eyes glanced over his shoulder at her, she thought that Alexander Cale must be an exception. There was nothing thin-blooded about his tall, lean frame, or about the way the muscles of his thighs played beneath his breeches as he brought the skittish stallion about with deceptive ease.

“Where did you go today?” she asked, to break the silence.

“Out,” he responded, kneeing the stallion and heading them back to the edge of the park.

“Oh, how very exciting.”

He chuckled. “Not particularly.”

“Do we have to go back?” she asked, forcing a pleading smile. “Can’t you introduce me to any of your friends?”

“No.” They crossed the lane to Cale House. At the foot of the front steps he handed her down, then slid to the ground himself as Conklin came up to take the black.

“Are we going to Lady Sinclair’s soiree, at least?” Kit followed him inside and brushed at the new wrinkles her coat seemed to have picked up.

Lord Everton stopped to look at her. “I am. You’re not going anywhere else today, Miss Brantley,” he informed her. “You will remain here.”

Kit frowned. “But it’s so dull here!” she protested. He was making her task even more difficult than she’d anticipated—both by his stubbornness and by his very annoying and distracting presence.

He gave a half smile. “It’s only for a fortnight. Entertain yourself. I have a fairly good library. You can read, can’t you, savage?”

She made a face at him. “Only piratical tales with swordplay and blood in them.”

Lord Everton laughed, his eyes dancing. He had a rich, musical laugh, and the sound ran down her spine with an unexpected tingle. “I’ll see what I can come up with for you.” He headed upstairs to change.

Kit went up to her own bedchamber to clean up, for she had no intention of staying in. When Wenton later announced dinner, Kit decided she might as well eat while she attempted to figure out how she was going to attend Lady Sinclair’s party. She was in the process of dissecting a roasted game hen when the door opened and the earl entered. Kit froze, a wing halfway to her lips, and simply looked at him.

She had seen men dressed in evening finery before, of course, had even attended more than one Parisian soiree in her guise as a man. As she gazed at Alexander Cale, though, it occurred to her that she had never set eyes on anyone who looked so magnificently…male. His coat was of the finest dark gray superfine, while the cream-colored waistcoat and gold watch fob were im
peccable above black breeches that looked molded to those well-muscled thighs. With his black, wavy hair and bluer-than-sapphire eyes, he looked like some sort of English god. She swallowed.

“Here, cousin,” he said amiably, apparently unaware that she was gawking at him, and flipped a book onto the table beside her.

Kit spent another moment staring at his amused expression, then reluctantly turned her attention to the book resting at her elbow. “
Robinson Crusoe
,” she read aloud.

“I don’t recall if there’s any swordplay, but it is fairly piratical,” he noted as he leaned over the table to appropriate a steaming hot biscuit from a covered bowl.

“Thank you, Ev…” She stopped as his eyes flicked in Wenton’s direction. “Alex,” she amended, the name more comfortable on her tongue than she expected.

“Stay out of trouble, cousin,” Lord Everton suggested, his eyes speaking volumes. Then he turned and was gone.

Kit looked after him for a full minute before she remembered that she was supposed to be going with him. With a frown, she bit into the game hen. Outside, thunder rumbled over the mansion, and the patter of rain sounded against the window. Of course, they barely knew one another, but it annoyed her that he had donned his fine clothes for the pleasure of Barbara Sinclair, while she had only been laughed at and abandoned. “I hope he gets drenched,” she muttered, “leaving me here.” She looked over her shoulder. “Wenton, does Alex have any brandy?”

“Not for you, Mr. Riley,” Wenton answered. He raised an eyebrow when she scowled at him. “The earl’s orders.”

“Bah,” Kit replied.

T
he next day began exactly as had the previous one, except that she didn’t come to blows with Ben Conklin, and she didn’t see Everton at all. That seemed rather insulting. After all the care he had taken to discover her charade, and his subsequent suggestive remarks and bullying, now it seemed he couldn’t even be bothered to wish her a good morning before he vanished.

“Meetings,” was the only explanation she was able to pull out of Wenton, who informed her that Lord Everton had again suggested she stay in the house.

The earl’s professed whereabouts sounded suspicious, especially for a rakehell, though her father had informed her that the only thing blue bloods were good for was talking, for they had more wind than brains. Rain had continued to fall throughout the night and into the morning, rendering Park Lane gray and running with water, but she’d been wet before and had no intention of remaining inside. Before she went hunting, however, there was one task at Cale House left for her to accomplish.

She informed Wenton that she would be reading in the library, then slipped across the hallway to examine the locked door of Everton’s study. She checked up and down the hall for the butler or any other members of the earl’s large household staff, knelt, and pulled the knife from her boot. The lock was more sturdy than she anticipated, but after a few tries she was able to wedge the door open.

The office was larger than she expected. A door off to one side stood open, and through it she viewed a billiards table and several faded, overstuffed chairs. This smaller room ran behind the staircase in the hall, and no second door opened from it back into the hallway. Fleetingly she wondered why Alex Cale would bother hiding his game room away in his own house.

Her main reason for breaking into the study, though, was not to analyze Everton, but to determine whether he had any hidden vices—such as ruining the lives and incomes of independent exporters. She gave a slight smile, hearing her father’s voice in her head, as she made her way around the large mahogany desk. The physical act of smuggling, Stewart Brantley always said, only touched on their work to bring tariffed goods to the citizens of Paris. She pulled open the first of the ornate drawers.

There was nothing of interest inside, only blank parchment and sealing wax, and she went on to the next one. And raised both eyebrows. It was filled with a haphazard collection of invitations to soirees, balls, recitals, routs, dinners, picnics, luncheons, horse races, breakfasts, foxhunts, and every other sort of entertainment she could imagine. The Earl of Everton was apparently an even more sought-after guest than she had suspected.

The next drawer contained a brace of pistols, but other than taking a moment to admire their exceptional quality, Kit wasn’t particularly interested in them. The long drawer across the top held a marked deck of cards, a geographical map of eastern Britain with several indecipherable markings along the coast, a handful of French coins, and a wrinkled, dirty parchment that said only “938 musket, 352 pistol.” She frowned at the paper, then put it back when she could come up with nothing more sinister in its meaning than perhaps a listing of the number of game birds shot on Everton’s estate last season and how they’d been dispatched. The coins, and especially the coastal map, bothered her, though. They meant she couldn’t eliminate Everton as a suspect. The objects might be innocent, and he might simply own a
yacht or some such thing, but she couldn’t take the chance of assuming that.

Beneath the map she found a rather suggestive letter from a Countess Fenwall, and a well-leafed-through catalog of farming tools and equipment, with a letter from Everton’s estate manager inserted between two of the pages. Apparently the estate’s largest hay rake had bent, and needed to be replaced before the next harvest. According to her letter, Lady Fenwall promised to bend over as well, if Alex could manage to be at Fenwall while her husband was away in Yorkshire. She also promised to do several other things that Kit was rather surprised to see a lady put into writing, though she wasn’t certain the spelling was correct. The letter was dated last year, and she suspected that the earl had kept the missive more because it was amusing than because he had answered the invitation.

She was taking far too long looking through his private things, but the task was fascinating. Reluctantly she put away the letters and moved on. His estate ledgers lay in the next drawer, and though it wasn’t necessary to her purpose, she pulled the first book out and flipped it open. Everton’s masculine scrawl filled the page, with notation after notation of income earned from his estates, of which there appeared to be at least three, and of money spent for salaries, taxes, clothes, theater tickets, furniture, a brood mare, and a hundred other items of various value. She sat back for a moment. Even from this small sampling, it was obvious that Alexander Cale hadn’t been joking before. He was as rich as Croesus.

The bottom drawer was her last chance to find any further evidence, and she hesitated, realizing she didn’t want to find anything that could tip the balance toward his guilt. That was absurd. It didn’t matter who the spy was, so long as she found him in time to see that the next shipment went through and Fouché was appeased. With a quick breath, angry at herself, she yanked the drawer open. And stopped.

A box of chocolates, half-consumed, sat beside a bottle of port and a box of very expensive-looking cigars.
All of Everton’s vices, apparently, laid out together. With a surprised, immediately smothered chuckle, Kit took one of the chocolates and shut the drawer. She munched on the candy as she checked the single bookshelf and the few papers stacked on the corner of the desk, but found nothing else remotely of interest. Apparently Everton’s best-kept secret was a fondness for chocolate—or so he wanted everyone to think. Kit hadn’t made up her mind about him yet. Far from it.

She exited the study, making certain the door was locked and her finger marks wiped from the shiny door handle. After hurrying across the way to the library, she immediately turned around again to make a show of exiting the room and shutting the door behind her. Everton’s abandonment would make it more difficult to gain entrance to some of the places her quarry was likely to be found, but there wasn’t enough time for her to sit and wait for an opportunity. She needed to make her own luck.

Waiting about for luncheon at Cale House was out of the question, so she stepped into the breakfast room for one of the peaches left in a bowl on the sideboard. She hefted it in her hand, and then paused as she heard the front door open.

“Where is dear Alexander?” a male voice queried from the entryway.

“The earl is out,” Wenton informed the three gentlemen lounging in the doorway, as Kit stepped back into the hall. All three were well dressed, obviously fellow members of the
ton
, and she straightened as one of them spied her standing there.

“You’re the one,” he said, looking at her with twinkling brown eyes set beneath fashionably immaculate brown hair.

Kit’s heartbeat quickened as she coolly returned his baldly curious gaze. He was the tariff supporter from Hyde Park. And he was apparently friends with a man who kept notated coastal maps and French coins in his desk. “Which one?” she asked belatedly, hoping Ev
erton wasn’t such a fool that he had told everyone in London that his houseguest was a female.

The other two turned as well, and the shorter one, a dark-haired imp with high shirt points and an achingly intricate cravat, grinned and started toward her. “You’re right, Reg,” he said over his shoulder.

Kit repeated the name to herself and leaned sideways against the doorframe. “Exactly which one am I supposed to be?” she repeated, unconsciously imitating the slight, affected drawl of Alexander Cale’s guests.

“You know,” Reg said, following the other two as they stopped before her, “the one Barbara was chattering about all night. Everton’s cousin. The one who’s supposed to steal Caroline’s heart.”

“Who is Caroline?” Kit asked, trying to keep her attention on the conversation. Staring at her quarry would get her nowhere but arrested, if she wasn’t careful.

“The woman I’m going to marry.” Reg grinned.

“Poor, deluded boy,” the third one murmured, looking at Kit with dark, speculative eyes in a pale specter’s face. The others would be easy to deceive, she decided, but she would be wary of this one.

“I say, why don’t you join us at Boodle’s for luncheon, and we’ll let you in on the conspiracy?” Reg continued.

Kit grinned, delighted. But she had to play her part correctly, or they might suspect something. “I might, if you told me who you were.”

The pale one ran a hand through short blond hair and finally offered a faint smile. “Gads, what manners. That is Reginald Hanshaw, Lord Hanshaw for long, Reg for short.”

“I’m Francis Henning, Francis for any occasion,” the short, dark one offered, sticking out his hand. Kit shook it, and he jabbed a finger in the direction of their third companion. “And that’s Viscount Devlin. Augustus, to those who can tolerate him. He can be thoroughly unpleasant, you know.”

“Only to my friends,” the viscount replied with a slight nod.

“Devlin,” Kit responded, taking the specter’s hand. She had thought it would be cold, and was surprised to note the grip was both warm and strong. “Christian Riley, Kit for short.”

“Funny, Alex never said he was related to the Irish,” Reg commented with a glance at Augustus, motioning Kit to join them.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, feigning reluctance, and secretly ecstatic. Such a gaggle of English lords could gain her access to far more places than she could hope to enter on her own.

“Oh, do come,” Lord Devlin cajoled. “We shall make Reg buy.”

She smiled, rather charmed by the three of them despite herself. It seemed her father’s view of the titled English was more grim than was strictly accurate. “All right.”

“Heavens.” Reg chuckled. “Even strangers are taking advantage of me now.”

“It’s so easy, don’t you know,” the viscount agreed, leading the way out the door.

“Mr. Riley,” Wenton said, stepping forward, “I do not think the earl would approve.”

“Then he should have provided me with better entertainment,” Kit replied flatly.

“Hear, hear,” Devlin applauded.

With a defiant look at the butler, Kit grabbed her old, stained greatcoat and stepped into the rainy streets of Mayfair.

“Where in damnation have you been?”

Kit started and nearly dropped the drenched greatcoat she was handing to Wenton. The Earl of Everton stood just inside the foyer. He was only half dressed, his shirttail untucked and his cravat smashed in one hand. In the dimness of the hallway his eyes glinted at her, piercing and dark as a demon’s. No aloof, cynical noble tonight. “Out,” she returned, giving the butler her hat and at
tempting to ignore the angry, impelling presence behind her.

“Out.” He turned away. “Why don’t you join me in the library for a moment, cousin?” he said over his shoulder, drawing out the last word as though it gave him some sort of authority over her.

“Go to the devil,” she answered, annoyed at his presumption. She gave her damp boots a last stomp. “‘Out’ was good enough for you, yesterday.”

For a heartbeat he froze. Then, with surprising swiftness, he strode forward and grabbed her by the back of the collar.

“Let me go!” she demanded, startled, and kicked.

He grunted as her boot made contact with his leg, then shifted his grip and grabbed another handful of coat. Unmindful of her struggling, he dragged her into the library. She hit him, and he grabbed her wrist with fingers as strong as a vise. Kicking the door shut with one foot, he then shoved her away from him and into a chair.

She sprang to her feet again. “You lout!” she yelled, her heartbeat wild. “Don’t you touch me!”

“That’s twice you’ve gone out when I’ve told you not to,” he snapped, rubbing at his shoulder where her fist had connected. Blast it, she had been aiming for his jaw. “You will not defy me again!”

“So you’re allowed to go about with your cronies, and I have to stay here like some sort of prisoner?” she protested, shrugging her coat back into place.

“You informed me that your father wished you kept safe…and pure,” he returned hotly, taking a long step toward her. “If you’ve decided to change the rules, then don’t expect me to abide by them either, chit. Is that clear?”

His expression made it quite obvious what he was referring to. “The rules have not changed,” she informed him stiffly.

He paused for a heartbeat. “I thought not. Pity, though.” Everton turned and pulled open the door again, apparently satisfied with the outcome of the argument.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, unwilling to let him have the last word.

“Whatever pleases you, cousin.”

“Well, I don’t know what you expected. Father never asked you to bore me to death.”

“I gave you a book,” he replied less heatedly as he started up the staircase.

She tromped up behind him. “That’s your idea of entertaining a guest? To give them a stupid book?”

“It’s a first edition,” he commented dryly.

She hadn’t known that. “Then it’s
old
and stupid.”

Belatedly Kit realized that she had followed him straight into his bedchamber. She stopped just inside the doorway. The room was twice the size of hers, and decorated in dark wood touched with green and gold accents over the ivory-colored walls. The four-poster bed was huge, but where hers was absolutely piled with pillows, there was only one on his. It didn’t have the look of a bed where one entertained a mistress, she decided.

“I didn’t think you wished to embroider.” He glanced back at her, cynical humor touching his gaze. “Or do I err?”

“Bah,” she snarled, trying to shake out of her mind the absurd idea that being in his bedchamber was significant of something. “Robinson Crusoe had more people to talk to than me.”

“Than I,” he corrected, tossing his cravat to a man watching the two of them.

“‘Than I,’” she repeated, mimicking his stuffy, cultured accent. “
Vous êtes un boeuf stupide
.”