Mistress by Midnight (11 page)

It was there for a second and then reality smashed through her pleasure banishing the look of a princess in a fairy tale. Horror was etched on her face and she pressed her fingers to her lips as though to scrub the kiss away.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no, not you!” And she turned and hurried away from him, her stockinged feet making a soft slapping on the floor that seemed to emphasize her agitation.

Garrick understood what she meant. If he had had a choice she would have been the last woman in the world he would have wished to be so attracted to. It was impossible. It was madness. And yet it seemed he had no choice.

M
ERRYN DID NOT STOP
running until she had reached the sanctuary of the library. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she was running toward people, not away from them, but with Garrick in her room there was only one other place to go that could give her solace.

There were plenty of guests in the hall. She fled past them, seeing their faces, curious and speculative, hearing the titters of laughter.

“Lady Merryn is such an original… Running into the library with her hair down and no slippers…”

Damnation, this time it was her shoes she had left with Garrick Farne. First her book, her spectacles, her
underwear
… Soon he would have sufficient of her possessions to equip a whole room.

She braced her forearms on the table in the library—such a pretty room, designed to a yellow floral pattern by her sister Joanna—and stared at her face in the mirror facing her on the wall. She was horrified by what she saw there. Long blond strands of hair snaked about her face. Her cheeks were flushed a warm pink. Normally she had very little color. From childhood she had been accustomed to people commenting on her disparagingly as
“an odd, pale little thing…”
She had not minded particularly. She had always thought looks were overrated. What use was it to be beautiful, unless to make a good marriage? People had spoken approvingly of Joanna and Tess because they were such pretty girls, as though that was the most important thing in the world. Merryn, with her reading and the stories in her head and her imaginary friends, thought it was better to be clever than beautiful, though that did not mean that sometimes she would not feel a tiny bit jealous… Jealous of Tess’s charm and dimples, jealous of Joanna’s thick golden-brown hair and vivid eyes… Jealous of the admiration and approval that was withheld from her because she was different.

But now, looking in the glass, she saw that her face had all the color and vivid animation it had previously lacked. Her hair was all disordered profusion. Her eyes glittered with a fierce light so deep and blue, her mouth looked soft, pink and stung with kisses. She pressed her fingers to her lips again. She remembered her words to him at the Octagon Library:

“I have never been kissed before…”

Well, she had now. Wildly, passionately,
pleasurably
kissed by an experienced rake. She had been kissed until her entire body had risen to Garrick’s touch.

It felt as though she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers. An echo of primitive heat and tension clenched her stomach. The kiss at the library had shocked her, so brief and ruthless. This one had seduced her. It had been strange, something so far outside her experience, new and different. But it had also been so much more than that, a world she wanted to explore, a hunger awakened, a fierce desire stirred. She knew she would never be the same.

She backed away from the mirror and sat down heavily in one of the armchairs. How was it possible to feel like this? She had spent twelve years hating Garrick Farne with a clear, cold passion. Then she had met him and that cold hatred had become confused by a different sort of passion. Disgust and despair shredded her. She did not understand how she could so betray herself and all that she believed in. Yet she was still trembling from Garrick’s kiss even as she despised herself.

She tried to tell herself that she would have responded in the same way to any man. She knew she lied. The thoughts cluttered her head, falling over each other. She ruthlessly demolished every justification with plain fact, too honest to deceive herself.

It would not have been the same with any other man. Two years ago, James Devlin, cousin to her brother-in-law Alex, had made his admiration for her very clear. He had even tried to steal a kiss and she had rejected him. Dev was a wickedly handsome man, charming and dangerous. Many young ladies would have adored being the object of his attentions. Yet his handsome face and elegant address had left her completely unmoved. She had not for one second burned for him as she burned for Garrick Farne.

Garrick intrigued her as no man had ever done.

Garrick Farne had killed her brother.

It was hopeless, shameful. She would not,
could not,
allow herself to be drawn to Garrick. She did not understand how it could possibly happen. And yet she knew that there had been an affinity between them from the first moment that they had met. She could try to pretend that it was no more than a physical attraction, perhaps, although she knew little about such things and understood even less. But no matter how little experience she had, she would still know she lied. What she felt for Garrick was no mere infatuation. It was deeper than that. She lost herself when she was talking to him; he challenged her, he intrigued her. For a little while at least he made her forget who he was and what he had done.

She felt unutterably confused. Garrick had shown himself ruthless that night, as dangerous as she had feared, threatening to blackmail her, exposing her weaknesses. But her greatest vulnerability was her susceptibility to him. At the library he had exploited her attraction to him. Tonight—she trembled at the thought—he could have ravished her, taken her there and then, tumbled her on the pristine narrow bed in her spinster room, and she would not have stopped him. He had been a rake. He knew exactly how to provoke a response from her body. She shook harder as she thought of his mouth on hers, his hand against her breast. He could have seduced her, ruined her. She wondered why he had let her go.

If it were not so foolish, she would have said it was because he had some shreds of honor left. Her instinct told her it was so but surely her instinct must be mistaken.

Merryn shook her head to dispel such disturbing thoughts and went over to the bookshelves, taking a book down, a copy of
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
by Suetonius. It was a beautiful volume, bound in leather, the pages smooth beneath her fingers. She started to read, concentrating on the words, willing herself to forget Garrick. Books were her friends. They never failed her. They soothed, cheered, distracted and encouraged her. She had used them to help her through the worst moments of her life and to celebrate the best. But tonight they could not save her. The words danced before her eyes. She could not concentrate. Her mind was full of Garrick, of his voice, his touch. Her senses felt inflamed. She was bewitched.

After ten minutes she put the book aside, baffled and upset. The ball was still in full swing but she was tired. She wanted to go to bed. She hoped Garrick had gone or she really would be obliged to call a footman and have him forcibly ejected, no matter the scandal.

She hesitated outside her bedroom door, aware of the shivers of anxiety and anticipation running up and down her spine, but when she opened the door the room was empty. Her slippers lay just as she had kicked them off.

Something caught her eye—her journal, sitting not on top of the pile of books at her bedside but on the cushion of the chair Garrick had taken. She grabbed the book. A sheet of paper fell from it.

His writing was bold and strong, as she might have imagined.

“Love and war are the same thing and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as the other.”

Cervantes. She smiled a little, despite herself, as she recognized the quotation. She had been harboring notions of war and revenge for years. She knew nothing of love.

Then her eye fell on the second line of writing.

“Pray do not waste your time in writing poetry, Lady Merryn. It is very bad indeed.”

Garrick had read her poems. How dared he. She blushed with mortification. She had known they were bad. She did not need confirmation.

She thrust his note into the fire and watched it curl and burn.

It was as she was about to ring the bell to call her maid to help her undress that she saw the other book. It was not one of hers but was a new copy of
Mansfield Park
. There was a note in that one, too.

“Your other copy was damaged beyond repair, I fear, so please accept this replacement.”

She wanted no gifts from Garrick Farne. She wanted nothing from him. She rather thought that she had made that plain in the lawyer’s office that morning. Yet he had her now because she found that she could not throw a book away. It was impossible. Anything else she would have consigned it to the fire along with the note. The book she reluctantly placed on her shelf and she tried not to think too much of the man who had given it to her.

For the second night in a row she lay awake.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE
F
LEET PRISON
was not as Merryn had anticipated. Blessed with a lively imagination, she had thought that it would be infested with rats, the walls running with water, the inmates screaming in mad frenzy to be let out. It was none of those things. The floors were swept clean, the walls were dry and it was very quiet.

The unexpected trip to Mr. Churchward’s office the previous day had delayed Merryn’s plans but she was still determined to push ahead with them and seek out the doctor who had attended the duel between her brother and Garrick. He was the only witness she could find. She was sure he had been bought off and she was intent on uncovering what had really happened. Her encounter with Garrick the previous night had not dissuaded her. In some odd way it had made her even more determined to learn the truth. For now she was fighting against herself as well as Garrick, against her helpless attraction to a man whom she detested. She felt naive and stupid to have such a conflict of emotions, angry with Garrick, incensed with herself.

It was also pleasant, Merryn thought, to escape from the house in Tavistock Street as well, even if a visit to the Fleet might not be everyone’s idea of a trip out. Garrick Farne’s offer had caused deep divisions between her and her sisters. Merryn was barely speaking to Tess, who seemed incapable of understanding her rejection of Garrick’s gift as blood money and was already merrily planning all kinds of expenditure. Merryn thought of Tess’s greed, and tasted bitterness in her mouth.

That morning Joanna had agreed to take the money, too. Merryn found it easier to excuse Joanna because she knew she had her reasons; Joanna was deeply devoted to Fenners, not because she loved the house and the countryside, as Merryn did, but because it was their last link to their father and to Stephen. And Joanna and Alex were poor, unlike Tess, the rich widow. Alex had an estate in the Highlands of Scotland that ate money rather than generated it and he had his cousin Chessie, who was currently staying with relatives in Edinburgh, to provide with a dowry. So Merryn could understand why Joanna would accept Garrick Farne’s offer, even as her sore heart rebelled against her sister’s pragmatism.

Dr. Southern’s cell was off the third-floor gallery. He was sitting alone, reading, when Merryn arrived. The light was poor and he was squinting. He looked like a plant that had grown in the dark: spindly, gray-faced and weak. There was a bottle at his elbow with a clear liquid in it and a stench of alcohol in the cell that hit Merryn like a wall. When the jailer ushered her in—she had paid him six shillings for the privilege—Southern looked up and his pale eyes rested on her gently but without focus. There was nowhere to sit other than the pallet bed, so Merryn knelt beside his chair on the hard stone floor.

“Dr. Southern?” she said. “My name is Merryn Fenner.” She hesitated. She had been hoping that the doctor would know her name but there was no recognition in his face. So she had no choice—she had to plow on with what she had come for.

“You may remember my brother, Stephen,” she said. “Stephen Fenner?”

Even before he answered she knew it was hopeless and her heart swooped down to her feet. Southern’s gaze slid away from hers blankly. He reached for the bottle.

“Stephen?” he muttered.

“Stephen Fenner,” Merryn repeated. “You were the doctor present at the duel when he died.”

“Duel?” The doctor was fumbling with the bottle, tilting it to his lips. Some of the liquid ran down over his chin and splashed on his shirt. It smelled sweet but sharp at the same time, catching in Merryn’s throat.

“I remember no duel.”

“Twelve years ago,” Merryn said. “Stephen Fenner.” She felt desperate. There had been two seconds at the duel, if duel it had been. One was dead, the other thousands of miles away, beyond reach. This man had been the only other witness present. Other than Garrick Farne himself…

“Please try to remember,” she whispered.

“No duel,” the doctor said and for a moment Merryn’s hopes soared, until she realized that he was simply unable to remember anything. He was shaking his head, a little fretful, a little lost. His hand shook; the bottle nudged the book on the table and it fell into Merryn’s lap.

There was a bookplate inside with a coat of arms, a mailed fist and the motto:
Ne M’oubliez
.
Remember me.
Merryn did not need to see the strong writing, the initials
GF,
to tell her whose book it was. She knew the motto well. It seemed appropriate.

She shivered. So Garrick Farne had been here before her. Had he paid for Southern’s silence, with the gin in the bottle perhaps? For surely the doctor was going to give her no help. He was too drunk, too forgetful, too conveniently beyond reach even though he was sitting before her. For a second she felt an equal mix of fury and despair. Garrick had been a step ahead of her again. Was she forever to be outwitted, running after his shadow?

“The Duke of Farne visits you,” she said lightly, placing the book back on the table.

“Often,” the doctor said. His hands shook as he drew the book close in what was almost a protective gesture. “He bought me out of here,” he added.

Merryn frowned. “Garrick Farne paid your debts?”

“I only fell into more.” Southern was nodding gently, a whimsical smile on his face. “I try. I fail. I remember Stephen Fenner,” he added, surprisingly. “He was a scoundrel. No good. No good at all.”

Merryn smothered the instinctive protest that leaped to her lips. It was true that some people had considered Stephen a rogue. He had been feckless, careless with the money they did not possess, a gambler, a drinker. She knew that he had argued with their father over his debts. She had heard them on the nights when she had crept downstairs after bedtime. Sometimes they had left the study door open and a crack of light had crept across the hall carpet and the words had spilled out, too, angry words between father and son. She, perched on the stairs in the darkness, had heard it all. But each and every time Stephen had smoothed matters out with his generosity and his winning charm. The servants had shaken their heads over his conduct but they had been smiling even as they deplored his bad behavior. And even if Stephen had been the greatest wastrel in the world it did not mean that he deserved to die.

“I am sorry you remember him so,” she said stiffly. She got to her feet. Even after only a few moments kneeling on the stone she felt cold and sore, her heart colder still. There was nothing for her here.

The jailer met her at the door. This was a different man from the one who had admitted her. He had a thin face and a greedy gleam in his eyes.

“That’ll be six shillings,” he said, dangling the keys in front of Merryn’s nose.

“But I paid six shillings to get in,” Merryn objected.

“And now you pay to get out,” the jailer said. “Unless you prefer to stay here with him.” He jerked his head toward Dr. Southern, who was gulping gin from the bottle like a man possessed by the urge to find oblivion.

“I don’t have the money,” Merryn said.

It was evidently the wrong thing to say. The jailer took her arm in a grip that felt rather firmer than she would have liked. Suddenly the Fleet did not look quite as pleasant as Merryn had thought, a dark, cold, unfriendly, and alien place far removed from the world she normally frequented. She tried to wrench her arm from the jailer’s grasp but he held her fast and leaned closer. He smelled stale and his breath was foul.

“Listen, miss, it’s like this. Everything costs.” His gaze appraised her, lingering on the lace at her collar, the swell of her breasts beneath the line of her coat. “Unless you want to pay another way—”

“How much?”

The voice was lazy, authoritative. If Merryn had not heard the undertone of steel in it she would have sworn he was indifferent. She closed her eyes. Garrick Farne, here. Well, of course. He would be. This was a cat-and-mouse game they were embarked upon. Garrick would have made sure that Southern was too drunk to remember anything useful and then to make absolutely sure, he would have waited outside the cell while she interviewed the doctor. She was sure he had been listening to every word and that he had paid a great deal more than six shillings for the privilege of spying on her.

He did not look like her idea of a spy, hiding in corners, listening at doors. For a start he looked too elegant, in a casual single-breasted morning coat, breeches and boots with a very high polish. Merryn thought he should be out riding, giving vent to all the banked-down energy and power she sensed in him. Their eyes met. He smiled. It was not an encouraging smile and Merryn did not for one second feel reassured. She thought that it would probably suit Garrick’s purposes very well for her to be clapped up in the Fleet for a while. She looked at his hard expression and just for a moment she was afraid.

“You can buy her out for ten shillings, my lord,” the guard said.

“It was six shillings a moment ago,” Merryn said hotly. “And I do not even owe it!”

Garrick’s dark, sardonic gaze considered her. “What are you in for? House-breaking?”

“I’m not a
prisoner!
” Merryn said.

“You surprise me,” Garrick said, “given your penchant for crime.”

Merryn blushed. “I am trying to get out.”

Garrick took out his pocketbook. He looked at the jailer, raised a brow.

“Twelve shillings, your grace,” the man said, estimating Garrick’s rank upward and the sum of money accordingly. “And that’s a bargain.”

“I am not sure that it is,” Garrick murmured, his gaze bringing the hotter color up into Merryn’s face. “Believe me, you should be paying me to take her off your hands not vice versa.”

“Don’t pay him,” Merryn snapped. She felt angry, torn. “I don’t want to be in your debt,” she said.

“You have made that quite clear before,” Garrick said. He shrugged and slid the pocketbook back into his jacket. “As you wish.” He turned to walk away.

The jailer smiled unpleasantly and tightened his grip. “Well, then, missy, I’m sure we can find a nice cell for you until
someone
chooses to pay up. Assuming that they do…”

“Wait!” Merryn called. Her heart was thumping. She saw Garrick pause but he did not turn. His back looked very broad and very uncompromising. “Please,” she added, and there was rather more pleading than she liked in her tone.

Garrick turned back to her. A smile tugged at the corners of his lean mouth. “Are you going to beg?” he inquired gently.

“No!” Merryn said. She moderated her tone. “But I should be very grateful…” She stumbled a little over the words. Damn him for enjoying her discomfiture. She could have slapped him, she was so angry.

“Of course,” he said courteously. With a sigh he took out his pocketbook again and paid the jailer, who let Merryn go with every sign of disappointment. Garrick offered her his arm.

“Permit me to escort you back to Tavistock Street, Lady Merryn.”

“No,” Merryn said. “I—”

“It wasn’t a question,” Garrick said, taking her arm and propelling her down the stairs. “It was an order.”

They reached the first landing. Merryn stopped. “I will pay you back,” she said.

Garrick slanted a look down at her. “How? I thought you said you had no money.”

It was a fair question, Merryn thought. Tom paid her a generous amount but she had spent the last of her wages on a copy of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
. She had not enjoyed the book; now she wished she had the money instead. And she could scarcely ask Garrick to knock the sum off the thirty thousand pounds he had promised her—and she had rejected.

Garrick waited a moment, then smiled and urged her down the next flight. “I won’t press you for payment,” he murmured.

Merryn stopped again. “I’ll borrow the money from Joanna,” she said fiercely. “Or Alex. Or anyone. I’ll go to the moneylenders. Anything not to be in your debt.”

“Anything?” Garrick said. He grabbed her, turning her against the wall. The cold stone pressed against her back. He put one gloved hand against her cheek, tilting her face up to his. The leather of his glove felt cool and smooth against her hot skin. He kissed her.

This time Merryn was a little more prepared, not quite so stunned by something so utterly beyond her experience. Now, instead of discovery, there was an edge of wicked excitement and a heat that lit her from the inside out, burning her up, making her long for more. She knew she wanted this. Garrick had shown her that there was a part of herself she had not realized existed, a wild, wanton side so different from the cool, rational Merryn Fenner whose life had been lived vicariously in the pages of books.

She opened her lips to Garrick and touched her tongue eagerly to his. He tasted delicious. She could not name the sensation that held her but it felt like temptation distilled. She was drowning in it, so potent, so hot. There was a tight, tense ache in the pit of her stomach. Her mind spun. The solid stone of the Fleet seemed to rock beneath her feet.

She felt Garrick groan deep in his throat. He laced his hand in her hair and gave her back all she asked for, more, deepening the kiss, his tongue moving against hers, demanding a response she barely understood. Merryn forgot where she was, forgot every last one of the rules that guided a lady’s behavior and slid her arms about his neck so that she could draw him closer, pressing her body against his as though the layers of clothing between them simply did not exist. His tongue slid along the inside of her lower lip, his teeth closed about it, biting softly, and Merryn’s body clenched tight as a fist, deep inside.

Someone laughed close by, a lewd sound, full of suggestiveness. There was a crash from near at hand and someone swore loudly and the sounds and smells of the prison slid back into Merryn’s mind.

“Sure I can’t hire out a cell to you so you can finish your business, sir?” a voice said and Merryn pulled herself from Garrick’s arms and turned to see the jailer leering at them.

For a second she caught Garrick’s expression. His eyes were blazing and his face was taut with desire. They were both breathing as though they had been running. Then his face changed. The naked desire was gone, replaced by his habitual cool indifference.