Much Ado About Rogues (3 page)

“Both of us,” she corrected, wandering over to the large desk and opening the center drawer. “He never really wanted René to be like him.”

“All right, Tess, let’s do this now, get it over with,” Jack said, walking over to slam the drawer shut. “Your brother was young, foolish. And wrong. Sinjon never favored me over his own son. René had nothing to prove that night. Nothing.”

Her eyes flashed in the candlelight. “He had everything to prove. To our father—to
you.
He worshipped you. He wanted nothing more than to be like you. The so-brave and clever Jack.
See, René, how Jack does it. Observe and learn, René, Jack will show you how it is done. Jack, so fearless as he enters the wasp’s nest. Jack, who is steel to the core, with the mind of a devil and the skills of an army. Watch him, even if you can never hope to equal him. He is one in a lifetime. Fearless.
”

“Christ,” Jack bit out, putting the width of the desk between them. “Because I didn’t
care.
Because I had nothing to lose but my life.”
Until you,
he added silently.

“But it wasn’t your life that was lost, was it, Jack?”

“And do you think you’re the only one who grieves his loss? René was my friend.”

“No, he was never your friend. You have no friends, you make sure of that. I knew him better than anyone. René was meant for books and beauty, never destined to bleed out his life’s blood in that Whitechapel alley.” Tess pounded her clenched fist against her chest. “
Me,
Jack. I should have been there.”

“To die in his place?” Jack asked her, his voice hard, cold.

“None of you would have
been
in that alley if you’d allowed the original plan as my father and I drew it up, damn it, and you know it! René would never have been in any danger. We all knew he was too eager to please you and Papa, too eager to remember his lack of skill if the opportunity to…to…”

“To
show off
for us presented itself? Are you finally ready to admit that, Tess? Is Sinjon? Or am I still to take all the blame?”

“You convinced Papa to change the plan, to keep me out of it.”

Jack felt the fabric of his composure split. He’d never wanted Tess involved in any of their missions; that had been Sinjon’s choice to use his own children, Sinjon’s mistake. “Because I loved you!” he all but shouted, his words echoing back to him from the stone walls. “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.” He pulled himself back together, not without effort, then ended quietly, “And lost you anyway…”

Tess said nothing, the silence lasting nearly to the breaking point, turning the physical space between them into a yawning chasm that stretched across the lost years.

“Wherever he is, he’s well armed,” Jack said at last, looking toward the glass-fronted cabinet usually filled with weapons both deadly and unique. Tools of the trade. The cabinet had been the first thing his eyes had gone to when he’d entered the room, for he knew it would tell the tale. A man didn’t carry a dozen weapons into the woods with him if all he meant to do was blow out his own brains. Clearly it was destruction of some kind Sinjon had in mind when he’d done his flit, but not self-destruction.

He heard the drawer slide open once more. “There’s this,” Tess said, apparently just as eager as he was to put their recent confrontation behind them. “The Gypsy hasn’t been active in England for several years, not since…since René. Why would he have kept this?”

Jack returned to the desk to pick up the calling card Tess had placed there.

“Cheap theatrics,” he said coldly, looking at the card made of rich black stock and embossed with a golden eye with a bloodred pupil at its center. He passed it back to Tess. “I never agreed with Sinjon on that.”

“Papa says the government believes the man is Romany, and the eye symbol is that of the
querret,
the seeker. That’s why he was given that name. The seeker. As if he follows some higher purpose in what he does.”

Jack shook his head. As the son of an actress, he believed he could recognize a flair for the melodramatic when he saw one. “He seeks lining his pockets, and always has. Working for the French, working for anyone who will pay him, and filling the rest of his time working for himself. Whoever he is or once was, now he’s a thief and a murderer, and leaving these cards behind is his way of tipping his cap at those bent on stopping him. He’s an actor playing a part, and we who pursue him are his audience. Each time he places that card on another body, on the cushion where some treasure had been resting moments earlier, he’s taking his bow. We’d actually begun to believe him dead. But we found one of these cards a month or more ago, left behind after several very good pieces were removed from the Royal British Museum.”

Tess looked at him for long moments. “So he’s back. And you’re hunting him, aren’t you? Because of René. Because…because of everything.” Then her eyes went wide. “You…you don’t think…?”

“I don’t know, Tess. He’d have to be mad to try to find him on his own. Has he spoken of the Gypsy often?”

She sat down on the chair behind her, her long fingers tightly clasping and unclasping around the ends of the chair arms. She was nervous, a highly strung filly ready to bolt at any moment. Why? She should be searching the room, eager to see what was there. Was it him? Was it that difficult to be in the same room with him?

“Never. Not since René died. It was all over then, just as you said. The war, the assignments, the reason for the fight. Mama was still dead, and all the revenges he’d exacted for twenty years hadn’t changed that. He was given a small pension and told his services were no longer required. He still taught me things, although obviously he never trusted me, not if I wasn’t allowed to see this room.” She looked up at him. “But you know that. He’s never been quite the same since René died. Since you left. Suddenly old, and defeated.”

“I had no reason to stay, you’d made that plain enough. And it’s clear nothing’s changed there, either.”

“Not for you, certainly. You’re still working for the Crown, still doing their bidding. Which brings us back to why you’re here. You’ve as good as said Papa summoned you by disappearing. I think I know what the Crown would ask you to do once you found him. But what does Papa want from you?”

“When I find him, I’ll be sure to ask,” Jack said shortly, suddenly needing to be out of this room, out in the fresh air, away from Tess and her incisive questions.

“I won’t help you, you know. I’m not a fool. I know I can’t stop you. But I won’t help you.” She got to her feet. “In other words, Jack—for us, it ends here. I’ve seen your party trick with the cabinet and I thank you for it. But now I’m telling you to leave. You’re not welcome beneath this roof.”

He looked at her as she stood there. Magnificent. Frightened, but hiding it so well, the way she’d always done. He wanted her so badly he ached with it.

When she made to sweep past him, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her around, chest to chest with him in the flickering candlelight, her wrist still in his possession, their bent arms pressed between them. She raised her chin, stared at him in defiance, didn’t flinch, didn’t fight him, didn’t blink.

He needed her to blink.

“I know about this room, Tess. If you think there’s only one way in here, you’re not as intelligent as I gave you credit for being. I know every secret in this house, which clearly you don’t. If I want to be here, I’ll be here, with or without your permission. I will go where I want, when I want. Take what I want.”

He captured her mouth, grinding her tight against him by cupping the back of her head, holding her still as he plunged his tongue between her lips, pressed his leg between her thighs. Four years of longing, of needing, of pent-up frustration combined in that kiss, stripped him of his hard-won ability to mask his every emotion.

Her free hand snaked up his arm to his shoulder, clasping it firmly, lovingly, her fingertips lightly pressing against him. For a moment, she gave. For that moment, she let him in. For a moment, they were fire again.

And then the moment was over. She dug her fingers into him, pushing down hard on his shoulder with her hand as her knee came up swiftly, taking him and his arousal unawares. His knees buckled, his hold on her relaxed, and she was gone, leaving him to bend over where he stood, his hands on his thighs, forcing himself not to black out, or throw up.

“I taught her that,” Black Jack Blackthorn managed at last, speaking to the uncaring stone walls. And then, unbelievably, he smiled. “God, was I even alive these past four years?”

He looked at the far wall and then walked toward it, his hand out to push on one certain stone. It was time he saw what else Sinjon might be up to, what else might be missing.

CHAPTER TWO

T
ESS
DIDN
’
T
GO
where she most longed to go, because Jack might follow her. She couldn’t risk that. Not that she was safe anywhere.

He’d said there was more than one way into her father’s secret room. But even if she managed to find the other entrance somewhere in the cellars or a third on the other side of the manor walls and block them, it would do her no good.

Jack was right. He knew the house better than she did, she who had grown up here. He knew her father better than she did.

The way he’d kissed her, perhaps he even knew her better than she did. Because she’d been a heartbeat away from surrender, from tearing at his clothes, biting him, urging him to press her down on the desktop as she wrapped her legs high around his hips, let him fill up all the empty places inside her as she took, and took, and took…

She heard Jack’s boot heels on the stone steps and quickly exited the study for the hallway, but only to press her back against the outside wall, taking herself out of sight but not earshot. If he was going to search the room now, she couldn’t stop him. But that didn’t mean she’d go off to tend to her knitting, or whatever it was she might be doing if she’d been born in a different time, to different parents, had grown to womanhood in a different, less dangerous world.

But, although Jack didn’t immediately exit the study, she heard nothing during the long minutes she stood guard. If he was searching the room, he was doing it with a stealth she could admire, if not at this moment.

Maddening! What was he doing in there? Were there more secret places her father had hidden from her? She wanted to peer around the doorjamb and see what Jack was up to. Desperately. But that would be as good as admitting her father hadn’t trusted her with his closest-held secrets, and that she needed Jack’s help. Damn him.
Damn both of them.

“Boo!”

Tess nearly jumped out of her skin as Jack’s head and shoulders appeared around the doorjamb. “You’re not amusing,” she managed, trying to catch her breath.

“And you shouldn’t wear that lovely scent if you’re attempting to stay hidden,” he told her, walking into the hallway. “See that a room is made ready for me. My usual chamber…unless you want me to share yours? I’m fairly certain I could be talked round to that, if you ask prettily.”

“Go to blazes, you
bastard,
” she called out to his departing back, deliberately inflicting hurt where she knew it would cause the most pain.

His confident stride didn’t falter, and then he was gone.

Tess walked back into her father’s study and collapsed into his desk chair, dropping her head to her hands.

What was she going to do? She’d tried for a week—a full week!—to discover a single clue to her father’s whereabouts, cudgeled her brain attempting to remember conversations she’d had with him, hoping to recall something he’d said that might lead her to understand why he had gone, where he had gone and what he planned to do when he got there.

And nothing. If it hadn’t been that some of his clothing was missing from his clothespress, she could have thought he’d walked out into the trees and become lost, or was lying somewhere with a broken ankle, or worse. He’d been taking more and more long walks as of late, disappearing for entire afternoons. As it was, she’d spent half a day telling herself he had gone into the village and lost track of time, and half the night searching the nearby countryside before it had occurred to her that he’d simply gone. Left. Without a word to her. And without leaving behind enough of the ready to last them until the end of the quarter and the receipt of his pension.

He knew I’d come.

Jack was right. Her father had to know he was still being watched, the Crown never quite trusting the Frenchman, even though he had proven invaluable to them time and time again. He had to know that if he took a flit, the Crown would soon know of it. He had to know that the obvious choice to be assigned the job of finding their lost mercenary would be the man who knew him best.

But to expose her like this? How could her father do something so cruel? He knew how she felt about Jack, about everything else. Didn’t he, too, put most of the blame for René’s death at Jack’s door?

“Papa trained him. He knows what Jack can do. He needs him for something, but he’s too proud to ask for help. That has to be it. He’s trusting Jack to find him and then help him. What does it matter about his own flesh and blood, when the mission is all? At the end of the day, we’re all his pawns, and always have been. Nobody has mattered to Papa, not really, not since Mama. When will I ever accept that?” Tess exploded as she opened and slammed shut desk drawers for at least the tenth time, somehow still hoping she would see something she had missed in the last nine searches.

Instead, in the center drawer, she encountered an empty space where she’d seen something every other time she’d searched. She pushed back the chair, looked down at the floor, in case her last angry foray into the drawers had ended with her throwing something down…but no, there was nothing there.

She looked at the empty space again. What was it? What was missing? She squeezed her eyes shut, forced herself to breathe slowly, concentrate. In her mind’s eye she saw the contents of the drawer. The daily receipts book. A small knife to trim pens. Sealing wax. The funeral ring made up after René’s death, the one Papa couldn’t wear these past months because his fingers were becoming increasingly crippled by old age and hard use.

The newspaper.
That was it, a folded copy of the
London Times.
It was gone. Why would Jack have taken it, a newspaper more than a month out of date?

A month?

I last saw one of these cards a month or more ago, left behind after several very good pieces were removed from the Royal British Museum.

That was it. That had to be it! The newspaper had carried a report of the theft. She hadn’t read the article. The Gypsy had been responsible for the theft? Yes, that’s what Jack had said. He must have regretted saying it, and wanted any reminder of his slip removed before she could see the newspaper and remember.

His mistake. She had made a shambles of most of the room’s contents during this last search, causing him to believe she was sloppy and inept. The amateur he insisted upon seeing her as, if only to ease his conscience. But, even in her ever-increasing frustration, she’d been very careful to record everything in her memory, what it was, where it was, as she’d been trained to do.

Had a black calling card with the imprint of a golden eye with a red center been mentioned in the article? It must have been; otherwise, why would her father have saved it?

She heard footsteps and quickly closed the drawer.

“Lady Thessaly? You are requested upstairs.”

Tess smiled at her old nurse, easily falling into French along with her, as the woman may have reluctantly learned enough English in two decades of living on this damp island to get along, but she thought the language vile and “without music,” and avoided it whenever she could. “Yes, thank you, Emilie, I imagine I am.”

“But no more with the breeches the marquis so foolishly allows when you go riding on that devil’s spawn you favor. Master Jack has no need of such a show of immodesty.”

“It’s far too late for any modesty when it comes to Master Jack, Emilie,” Tess pointed out as she got to her feet, suddenly feeling as old as time, decades beyond her five and twenty years. “If you could have Arnette order up the tub for an hour from now and lay out my white watered silk gown, as I do believe Master Jack will be joining me for dinner.”

“The white, my lady? You haven’t worn that one in years. It will need to be freshened.” Emilie’s careworn face assembled itself into a knowing smile. “Ah, now I remember. As do you, as will he. It will be done as you say.”

“Yes, thank you, Emilie.” Tess sat back down after the servant left, the memory of the last time she’d worn that gown washing over her.

Look at you. So beautiful. Light to my dark, blessed day to my lonely night. I love you, Tess. God help me, I love you. Let me love you…

Tess closed her eyes, hugging her arms close about her. She could feel Jack’s hot, hungry gaze reaching out to her across the empty years, began to blossom again at the memory of his touch as he’d instigated increasingly bold forays that had sent flames of awakening desire licking along her every nerve. She could still savor the terror and thrill inside her as the white silk gown had whispered down her body to puddle at her feet before he’d lifted her, carried her to the bed, joined her on the cool satin coverlet.

What had followed had been an initiation of the senses, a tutorial of such precise, intimate detail that there could no longer be any question as to why God had formed her the way she was, Jack how he was, and for what purpose they’d been brought together.

He’d taught her all her own secrets, and then encouraged her to explore his. They’d touched, tasted. He’d taken her to the brink, again and again, with his mouth, with his clever hands probing her, taking her hand and introducing her to the pleasures of her body, teaching her what she liked so she could tell him, so he could follow her movements with his own.

Together, they discovered just the right rhythms to turn her limbs to water, to coax soft whispers and whimpers from her throat, to make her so ready for him she never noticed the pain that came and went in an instant, to be replaced with a fullness that had her grinding her hips against him, begging him to finish it, to let her fly free of this glorious torment.

She put a hand to her breast now, felt her rapid heartbeat. Allowed her other hand to drift down to the juncture of her thighs, to press her fingers against the ache growing there, the longing that threatened to destroy her. Release, that sweet, sweet explosion. She needed it, craved it, knew how to find temporary respite in the dark of a lonely night when the memories and the hunger became too much. But never how to truly satisfy it. Not across the long years, not now. Only Jack could do that.

But she needed more than that temporary release; she needed parts of Jack he’d never given her, and never would. She needed to be
first
to somebody. Before Crown, before duty, before revenge or hate or the thrill of the fight. She needed a man who wouldn’t walk away, even when she ordered him to go.

So not again, never again. They’d destroyed each other once, and once had been more than enough. She was a woman now, with responsibilities and no room in her life for what might have been. She knew that when it came to Jack she had few weapons in her arsenal. But that gown should serve her as well as any suit of armor. Jack would remember, as she remembered, and he wasn’t the sort to knowingly make the same mistake twice.

Disgusted with her temporary weakness, she stood up and quit the room. She had much to arrange before Jack returned.

* * *

J
ACK
SETTLED
INTO
the chair in the private room of the Castle Inn, nodding his greetings to Will and Dickie as the latter filled a glass with wine from a decanter and pushed it across the tabletop to him.

“Learn anything today?” Will asked, using the point of his dagger to skewer a small bit of cheese and pop it into his mouth.

“Yes. There are times your table manners can be execrable.” Jack took a sip of wine. He wanted first to hear what they’d managed to unearth while he was at the manor house. “Dickie?”

“I agree, and we didn’t just learn that today,” Dickie Carstairs said, grinning at Will. “Oh, you want to know what we’ve managed to ferret out, don’t you? Very well. Your mentor departed this benighted village eight days ago on the public coach heading north. He carried with him a fairly large trunk, purchased just that morning, and a rather cumbersome cloth bag he declined to place in the boot but actually put down the blunt for its own seat, so that he could keep it with him inside the coach. Although he is well-known here, the bumpkins I spoke with didn’t know they were seeing the marquis board the coach.”

“How so?” Jack asked, if only to keep Dickie talking. He already recognized where this story was leading. After all, hadn’t a part of his training been to pass unnoticed under the eyes of the villagers who had been seeing him almost daily for a year?

“Oh, that. Yes, well, it would seem that the passenger they saw was described as looking much like a member of the clergy. One of those queer, foreign autem bawlers, you know? Wearing skirts, and with a rope of beads with a whacking great cross hanging at the end of it tied around his waist, a hat as flat and big as a platter pushed down over the cowl on his head. Kept trying to trace his blessings on everybody who came close, so the good citizens rather kept their gazes down as they steered around him, trying to avoid gaining his attention. A costume, of course.”

“And a good one if you’re walking where you would otherwise be recognized,” Jack said, nodding. The monk disguise had been among those missing from the collection in the hidden room. There were others. “Go on.”

Jack contemplated his wineglass as Dickie went on to explain that the stranger had taken a private room at this very inn two weeks earlier, appearing and disappearing with no regularity, probably going out and about, saving souls. But always generous with his tips as he asked that his privacy be maintained so that he wasn’t disturbed while at his prayers. He may have slept in his bed, he may not have, no one was certain. Overall, he was quiet and no trouble, coming in and out, always carrying something with him, the same cloth bag already mentioned.