Mistress by Midnight (3 page)

Merryn glanced around. He was going to keep her imprisoned in his
bedroom?
The big tester bed, so wide, so inviting, seemed to mock her. She remembered the cool smoothness of the sheets and the yielding softness of the mattress. For one scalding moment she had a vision of Garrick’s naked body bearing hers down into that silken embrace, of his hands against her bare skin, of his caresses… She looked from the bed to Garrick. He raised his brows a fraction of an inch and Merryn felt her body suffuse with heat.

“You could read your book,” he said gently, “to pass the time.” He held out her copy of
Mansfield Park
to her.

“Thank you,” Merryn said. She put out a hand to take it. He held on to it. She gave it a little tug. Garrick allowed her gesture to bring him a step closer to her. Their fingers were practically touching now on the deep red cover, hers slender and pale, his tanned and strong. She remembered his touch against her cheek and closed her eyes on a long shiver.

He took the final step. They were very close now. He was frowning, his gaze fierce beneath the dark brows. And then he leaned closer and
sniffed
her, delicately, as though she were a flower.

“Bluebells,” he muttered. He shook his head, sniffed again; looked up again, incredulous. His gaze had narrowed to an intense black stare.

“Have you been sleeping in my bed?” he demanded.

“I…” Suddenly Merryn’s mouth was dry and her wits seemed to have gone a-begging. “Yes, I have…” She licked her lips and tasted dust. His gaze had gone to her mouth and fastened there, his eyes darkening with an intensity that had her stomach knotting.

“An extraordinary intimacy,” he murmured.

Merryn had never been kissed but she knew with an instinct deep as time itself that in another moment Garrick Farne would kiss her, cobwebs and all. The fierce heat she could see in his eyes trapped and held her. Her heart hammered.

He closed the remaining distance between them and his lips brushed hers. Soft, so soft, and barely a touch at all and yet the caress seemed to awaken something fierce and burning inside her. Her head spun. She could smell his masculine scent and for some reason it made her knees tremble. Her whole body was alight with a sensation she had never experienced. Her lips parted on a little gasp of shock.

Garrick stood back, a look of stunned surprise on his face. Merryn seized the moment. She grabbed
Mansfield Park
from out of his hand and hit him squarely with it on the side of his head. Garrick gave an oath. The spine of the book was fragile and the pages came loose, showering him in paper like confetti, blinding him for a moment. It was all that Merryn needed. She whisked through the door and out into the passage. The key was in the outside of the lock. She turned it.

And then she ran.

CHAPTER TWO

“P
OINTER,”
G
ARRICK SAID
, sitting at his father’s desk the following morning, “do you think it would be possible to break into Farne House? Is it vulnerable to intruders?”

“Your grace?” The butler sounded faintly anxious.

“I only ask, you understand,” Garrick said, “because I found a strange female in my room last night.”

“Lady Harriet—” the butler began.

“Ah, yes,” Garrick said. He had packed Harriet and her chaperone off to stay with his mother in the country. Since the Dowager Duchess’s household would be in deep mourning for the foreseeable future, this seemed punishment enough for the promiscuous minx.

“Pray do not admit Lady Harriet to my presence again, Pointer,” he said. “Not under any circumstances.”

“No, your grace.” Pointer sounded subdued. “I did try to stop the lady but she was the late Duke’s ward and is much given to following her own desires.”

“She is indeed,” Garrick said. “Lady Harriet can be very persuasive. But this other woman—”

He stopped. What could he say?

I found a woman under my bed. She was small, with blue eyes that glow like agates and pale golden hair like a swatch of silk. She smelled of bluebells. I kissed her and she tasted of dust and innocence, and I have never wanted to bed a woman more in my life…

No, decidedly he could not tell Pointer his thoughts. Such vivid fantasies had no place in the life of a Duke shackled to duty and responsibility. Nevertheless Garrick shifted as he remembered the shape of the girl’s lips beneath his, the tiny gasp she had given when he kissed her, the shocking sensation of wanting to catch her in his arms and tumble her onto his bed and strip those cobwebbed clothes from her to discover the pleasures of her body beneath. He wanted to taste that tempting mouth again, to kiss her senseless. He felt his body harden into arousal.

Hell and the devil.

Pointer cleared his throat and Garrick jumped.

“Your grace…”

“Pointer?” Garrick said.

“Perhaps she was one of the servants, your grace, come to make sure you were comfortable,” Pointer said. He looked shifty. “I will ask the housekeeper to tell the maids not to trouble you.”

“That would be appreciated,” Garrick said. He knew his intruder had not been a servant. She had spoken with the instinctive confidence of a lady regardless of her pretense to be a waif from the streets. This morning he had found other evidence of occupation in his bedroom, too. There were the charred remains of a letter curling in the grate. There was a stick of striped candy on the dresser, wrapped in a twist of paper. He had found that rather endearing. There were even some female unmentionables neatly folded on a shelf in the wardrobe. Those had given him pause. How long had she been making free with his property and sleeping in his bed?

Pointer was waiting. Garrick sighed. “To return to my original question. Is the house secure?”

“I will check, your grace.” Pointer sounded very stiff at the suggestion that he was not in control of every aspect of security at Farne House. “If there is nothing more, your grace, I shall go and do so at once…” Garrick knew the butler was mortally offended. They had already disagreed once that morning. The first thing Pointer had offered to do after breakfast was to visit the employment bureau in order to recruit more staff to open up Farne House again. When Garrick had told him that he did not intend to use Farne House as his London home, he had thought Pointer might well burst with disapproval.

“But, your grace—” the butler had forgotten himself sufficiently to protest “—Farne House is the…the
flagship
of your Dukedom, the very pinnacle of your position! It is the feather in your cap, the summit of your status—”

“Farne House is ugly, old, draughty and expensive,” Garrick had said. “I do not care for it, Pointer. I shall not be entertaining, nor do I have a Duchess who requires a social setting. I will return to my own house in Charles Street as soon as I have set my father’s affairs in order.”

“Charles Street!” Pointer had said, as though Garrick had suggested he would be returning to the London stews. “That may have done very well for you when you were the Marquis of Northesk, your grace, but you are the
Duke
now. You have a dignity to uphold. Your father—” He had fallen silent as Garrick had pinned him with a very hard look.

“I,” Garrick had said, “am not my father, Pointer.”

Now he waited as Pointer retreated, outrage evident in every stiff line of his figure.

When the door had closed behind the butler, Garrick turned back to the desk and sorted methodically through the papers, making a note of the people he needed to contact and the actions he needed to take. Regardless of the dislike in which he had held his father—actually, hatred would probably be a better word—he had to give the late Duke credit for being extremely well organized. All the papers were in order, the income from the Farne estates was up-to-date and clearly notated and everything appeared to run like a smoothly oiled machine, a tribute to the late Duke’s rather vulgar grasping after every last penny that could be squeezed from his lands.

The clock on the mantel chimed twelve. Suddenly restless, Garrick got up and walked across to the dirty window. Dusty drapes shuttered the room. His mother, who might well have taken Farne House in hand, had not been to London for years. Tired of her husband’s famously indiscreet infidelities, she had become a dowager before her time and had retired to a house in Sussex. Garrick wondered vaguely how she would greet the arrival of the ungovernable Harriet on her doorstep. No doubt she would have the vapors. It was her usual mode of response to any crisis.

Outside the day was bright and clear, the sort of November morning that had slanting sunlight and scurrying white clouds. Garrick felt as though he were trapped here in this cobwebbed mausoleum. He wanted to take his stallion and ride out, not in the park among the chattering crowds, but somewhere wild and empty where he and the beast could both let go of all restraint. He had lived abroad for many years and had a taste for empty spaces and the hot blue skies of Portugal and Spain. And though he had been back in London for over a year, still the city felt cramped and cold and strangely repressive to a man who only really thrived in the open air.

Duty called him back to the pile of estate papers. He was Duke of Farne now and regardless of how disappointing he was as upholder of the family dignity, he could not escape his responsibilities. He had had that drummed into him since he was a child. He strode back to the desk. In his study in the house on Charles Street he had plenty of work waiting, too, research relating to his academic studies into seventeenth-century astronomy, documents to translate for the War Office. He had worked for Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, during his time in exile. He had also done plenty of other, less official, work for the government as well. It was one of the reasons that his father had raged against him, the heir to the Dukedom of Farne, trying and consistently failing to get himself killed in the service of his country. But what was he to do? For years he had carried the burden of taking a life, that of Stephen Fenner. He had tried to give his own in reparation, but the gods appeared uninterested in taking it.

He picked up his pen. He put it down again. What he
really
wanted to do, he found, was to discover the identity of the woman who had penetrated his house and his defenses, his midnight visitor, she of the vivid blue eyes and the porcelain fair skin. She had run from him like a fairy-tale Cinderella.

He wandered over to the oak bookcases that lined two walls of the study. Here he paused, the hairs on the back of his neck rising with a curious feeling of awareness. Someone else had perused these shelves, and recently. There were tiny marks in the dust, as though someone had carefully drawn out the books and replaced them without wanting to leave a trace.

He turned back to the desk. Had she been rifling through the papers here, too? If so, what could have been her purpose?

He wondered how, in the whole of London, he might find one elusive lady. There were always the inquiry agents, he supposed, though he could give them precious little to work on. A physical description, based on all the things he had found so seductive about her, would not be particularly helpful.

Shaking his head in exasperation, Garrick resumed his work, untying the red ribbon that held the next set of estate papers.

“Title to the estate of Fenners in the County of Dorset…”

Garrick felt chilled. Icy memory trickled down his spine. He had had no idea that his father had bought up the Fenner estates. He ripped the ribbon away and sifted through the papers. His father, it seemed, had purchased not only the house of Fenners but also the land and all associated coal-mining rights. He had done so ten years previously when the estate had been broken up after the last Earl had died. The mining had proved lucrative; it had brought in a sum approaching a hundred thousand pounds.

The cold hardened inside Garrick, deep and dark. His father had profited by the death of Stephen Fenner and the subsequent extinction of the Earldom. While he had been trying to atone for Fenner’s death his father had been turning it to financial advantage. How utterly typical it was of the late Duke to act with such vile cupidity. Garrick felt sick and revolted. It was intolerable to inherit an estate that had come to him through violence and bloodshed, even more so when it was blood that he himself had shed. With a sudden burst of anger he brought his hand down and scattered the deeds across the floor.

He threw himself down into his chair and tried to think. He had been back in society for fifteen months, long enough to know that the eldest of the Earl of Fenner’s daughters was the famed hostess Joanna, Lady Grant, married to the equally famous Arctic explorer Alex Grant. The middle sister, Teresa Darent, was notorious, a widow who had run through four husbands already. Naturally enough he had not met either Lady Grant or Lady Darent socially; they would scarcely invite to their balls and routs the man who had murdered their brother in a duel. Ton society might be extraordinarily flexible, but it was not
that
flexible. He thought there was also a third girl, the youngest, but he knew little of her. She was unmarried, reputedly a bluestocking, almost a recluse, if gossip was to be believed.

Garrick reached for pen and ink and began to write. After he had finished the letter, sealed it and addressed it, he picked up again the papers relating to the Fenner estate but after a moment he let them drift from his hand down onto the desk before him.

Stephen Fenner had been his best friend at Eton and Oxford. He had been a rake, a gamester and a noted whip. His handsome face and winning charm had allowed him to cut a swath through the bedrooms and boudoirs of a number of ton ladies. It had been amusing to be one of Stephen’s friends, part of a dazzling raffish crowd who had lived for pleasure. Garrick had been seduced by the glamour of it all. It was such a far cry from the life of service and obligation that he had been raised to embrace. But then Stephen had chosen Garrick’s bride as his latest conquest and friendship had disintegrated into betrayal and disgrace…

There was a knock at the door; Pointer, Garrick thought, had evidently overcome his disapproval sufficiently to resume his duties.

“I have ascertained that a window in the east wing has been forced, your grace,” the butler said, looking with disfavor at the scattered pile of papers. “It is possible that an intruder may have found ingress into the house that way.”

“She broke in through a window,” Garrick said. “I see. Thank you, Pointer.”

“I have made the house secure,” Pointer finished grandly, “so your grace need have no further concerns.”

“I am confident to leave the matter of household security entirely in your hands, Pointer,” Garrick said. He held out the letter. “If you would be so kind as to see this is delivered to the offices of Churchward and Churchward, the lawyers, in Holborn please?”

“Of course, your grace,” Pointer said, bowing with exquisite precision and proffering a silver tray on which Garrick could place the missive.

“And then,” Garrick said, “I would like you to find me an inquiry agent.”

Pointer’s long nose twitched with shock. “An
inquiry agent,
your grace?” He repeated, as though Garrick had asked for something so outrageous he had no idea how to respond.

“Your esteemed father,” he added, “would
never
have required such a person, your grace.”

“I know,” Garrick said, grinning. “You are going to have to get used to some changes, I fear, Pointer. If you could expedite the matter,” he added, “that would be appreciated. There is someone I need to find urgently.”

When he had found his midnight bibliophile, Garrick thought, he was going discover exactly what her business was with him. And this time he would not let her run away.

“T
HANK YOU FOR YOUR CUSTOM,
Lord Selfridge. It was a pleasure to be able to provide you with the information you required.”

Merryn sat in a dark corner of the waiting room while her associate, Tom Bradshaw, ushered the peer toward the stairs. Selfridge barely noticed her and certainly did not recognize her. Merryn would have been astonished if he had. In her daily life, as the frightfully studious bluestocking sister of Joanna, Lady Grant, celebrated ton hostess, she was practically invisible. She seldom attended the high society events that both her sisters loved and when she did she hardly ever danced. Those people who took the trouble to engage her in conversation usually regretted it because she was only interested in erudite subjects and chose to have no small talk. Most young men were afraid of her, bored by her, or both. She was known as the Simple Ton by those society fashionables who deplored her bookishness and her lack of social graces.

Such insignificance made it far easier for her to live as she wished, pursuing an interest in all manner of scholarly activities on the one hand and working for Tom on the other. If her sisters had known that she worked for a living they would probably have had the vapors. If they had known she was employed by an inquiry agent the strongest smelling salts would not have been able to revive them. And if they discoverd that sometimes she stayed out at night to do her work and invented fictitious friends to cover for her… But then, Merryn thought, they never would find out. They would not guess because such thoughts were unthinkable.