My Wicked Marquess (3 page)

“Sir, wait!”

“What is it?” He paused, glancing back at the harlot.

“Be careful with them! This street is their turf! Every shop here pays them protection money.”

“Hm,” Max answered. He nodded to her and walked on. On his way out, he tossed a few extra gold guineas on the ratty bed.

A moment later, striding down the shadowed hallway, he heard the woman's exclamation of delight from her room as she counted his donation.

With a hard gleam in his eyes, Max smoothly descended the brothel stairs. As he crossed the foyer, however, the mirror caught his eye. He paused.

Chameleon time.

Yes. An old, familiar game.

In the blink of an eye, he had transformed his demeanor, untying his cravat to dangle around his neck, unbuttoning his waistcoat, messing up his clothes, and rumpling his hair
with a quick run of his fingers through it. He picked up an empty bottle of wine left behind on the window ledge after someone's drunken revelries the night before.

Damn, he thought, eyeing his changed reflection, now he surely looked the part of the debauched, pleasure-seeking Grand Tourist known to the world as the ne'er-do-well Marquess of Rotherstone.

Not the introduction to Daphne Starling that he would have liked. First impressions could be lasting. But it did not signify. She was in danger, and he had no choice but to intervene.

Taking out his coin purse, he loosened the strings with a slight grimace of regret. It would serve admirably as bait.

Without further delay, he strode toward the exit, and, bringing up his arms, blasted out through the double front doors, ready and willing as ever to raise hell.

W
ith catcalls and wolf whistles, rude leers and laughing invitations, the Bucket Street gang had begun surrounding her carriage. It did not take long for Daphne to realize they were still drunk on last night's gin.

She tried negotiating with them, but her voice was beginning to tremble. “Come now, pl-please! Step aside,” she cajoled them. “We really must be going—”

When one of them grabbed her horse's bridle, William barked at him, “Clear off!”

“What are you going to do about it?” The miscreant stepped toward him, but at that moment, a roar erupted from some distance down the street.

“Bring me my bloody carriage—now!”

The thunderous bellow brought all motion to a halt.

The rough fellows surrounding her gig turned to look; Daphne and her servants did the same.

A man—tall, handsome, and well-dressed all in black, and above all, quite intoxicated, judging by his weaving gait and the bottle still dangling from his hand—had just come staggering out of the brothel, squinting and shading his eyes against the daylight.

“Ow.” His mutter of pain could be heard as he visored his eyes with his hand, scanning the street. “You!” He suddenly pointed with his bottle hand at the gang member holding her horse's bridle.

“You, there!” he clipped out again in a loud, slurred, but still lordly command. “Bring me my carriage. I am through here,” he added with a wicked little laugh that betrayed the fact that he, too, was still three sheets to the wind, and also seemed to insinuate that he had not deigned to leave the house of ill-repute until he had sampled every blasted woman on the premises.

Good God.

Daphne stared, utterly taken aback by this obviously highborn libertine's shocking behavior and, worse, by her instant awareness of the raw masculinity that radiated from him.

His magnetism was unmistakable, despite the fact that he was a mess with his shirt hanging open and his dark hair tousled every which way, as though he had just stepped off the windy deck of a ship. He wore a short, neat goatee that surrounded his hard mouth, defined his square chin, and made him look, she feared, just a tad satanic.

Staring at him, Daphne found him something more than handsome. Compelling. Dangerous. A lawless sensation raced through her veins; she dropped her gaze in shock as he took a step closer, challenging the low ruffian who still held on to her horse's bridle.

“Are you deaf, man?” he insisted, unwittingly risking his neck in abusing these locals.

The gang member he'd been addressing laughed aloud and cast a stunned, indignant glance around at his fellows. “Who the hell is this fool?”

“Do you refuse an order from your betters?” the drunk lord challenged him, his aristocratic accent dripping with disdain.

“Oh, no,” Daphne whispered, risking another glance at the handsome, drunken hellion.

At the same time, Wilhelmina gripped her arm, sharing her fright. The two women exchanged a glance.
Is he trying to get himself killed?

This was not the place for safely inaccurate pistols at twenty paces, like a rakehell was used to. This was a place where men would cut your throat if you looked at them wrong.

“Are you talking to me?” the gang member barked back, letting go of her horse's bridle and taking a few steps toward the man.

“Of course I'm talking to you, you piece of excrement,” he slurred with grand drunken dignity. “I'm talking to all of you! Somebody bring me my—bloody hell!”

Clumsy with drink, he suddenly spilled his coin purse onto the ground. A cascade of bright gold guineas tumbled all over the ground at his feet, rolling this way and that, all around his gleaming black boots.

The man cursed rather elegantly in several foreign languages in succession as he bent down, inch by unsteady inch, to retrieve his lost fortune.

The members of the Bucket Street gang homed in on the money with a visceral, white-hot intensity.

Promptly forgetting all about their game of harassing Daphne, they were drawn magnetically toward the gold.

Evil smiles spread over their faces to find such an easy target in their grasp. Moving in unison like a pack of wolves, they began walking cautiously toward the man.

He seemed oblivious to their approach.

“Sir!” Daphne shouted abruptly.

Wilhelmina grabbed her arm again. “Are you mad? Let's get out of here!”

“Aye,” her brother answered, still ashen-faced from the confrontation as he swung up into the driver's seat.

“But we can't just leave him there!” Daphne blurted out, turning to them in alarm. “They'll kill the poor fool! He's too foxed to defend himself!”

“Not our problem,” William muttered. “Let's get out of here before they come back for us!”

Daphne's heart was pounding. “It's his gold they want,” she reasoned. “Let them have it. We can still save his life if we take him with us in our carriage. Sir!” she started to call to him again.

“No, miss! Don't be daft!” her maid whispered, pulling her down into the seat. “Even if we could get him into the gig, you can't be seen driving around with a man like that! You'll be ruined instantly!”

“She's right!” William agreed. “He just came out of a-a—”

“An unmentionable establishment,” Wilhelmina quickly filled in, shooting her brother a prim glance.

“But we have to help him!”

“We came to help the
children
, mistress! You know you can't help everybody. Please don't get us killed!”

Daphne looked at her terrified maid and realized she had no right to risk her servants' necks along with her own.

“He'll be fine,” William declared, not too convincingly. “They're not goin' to kill him, miss. Maybe give him a bit of a thrashing, but he's so foxed, he won't feel a thing.”

“Perhaps it'll teach him a lesson about frequenting such places,” his sister muttered.

“Oh, look at him.” Daphne glanced back with a worried frown and saw the gang members closing in on him. “For heaven's sake, what's he doing now?”

The drunken lord was backing up slowly toward the brothel wall, but he wore such a sly and sinister half smile that she feared he was too foxed even to grasp the danger he was in. Indeed, he looked like he was having fun.

She jumped when he suddenly smashed his wine bottle against the brick wall, instantly turning it into a jagged weapon. He brandished it at the approaching gang with a daring smile that Daphne knew she would never forget.

“Looks to me like he can take care of 'imself,” William said flatly. “Besides, ‘rank' is written all over him. Not even these blackguards would dare taunt the hangman, murderin' a peer.”

William was right about that, she thought. Only an aristocratic rake of the first order would come staggering out of a brothel mid-morning, bellowing his demands at passersby. Clearly, he was insane.

“Come, miss, we have to go while they're distracted. Your father would never forgive me if anything were to happen to you.”

“Very well.” Daphne gave William a taut nod, her heart in her throat. “We'll go and fetch the constable at once. Let's go.”

“No need to tell me twice.” William applied the whip to the agitated horse's rump, and instantly the gig shot forward, the horse as happy as they to be gone.

Daphne's bonnet flew off her head with the sudden jostle, but the ribbon tied around her neck stopped it from blowing away. Her hat hung down her back as her carriage went careening toward the dilapidated little church ahead.

Behind them, however, shouts and a general ruckus could be heard; holding on to the seat's low side rail for dear life, Daphne turned to see what was happening.

She expected to find the gang members piling on the drunken rakehell, but an anxious glance over her shoulder revealed just the opposite: The man from the brothel was beating the blazes out of the gang!

He punched one fellow square in the jaw, and turning, all in one motion, jumped high to kick another in the chest. When he landed, he rammed his elbow into the throat of one who attempted to sneak up behind him, then brought up his fist with clockwork precision, felling the man with a neat blow. Coolly and methodically, he was mowing them down, one by one, with no sign of drunkenness whatsoever.

The most astonishing thought popped out up in her mind like a jack-in-the-box.

A ruse!

Why, he wasn't foxed at all! He had only pretended it…
to lure those brutes away from her.

She stared in amazement.

The last thing she saw before the church blocked her view was the crowd of
all
the other gang members swarming out of the pub, en masse, unleashing a collective roar as they rushed to their embattled mates' aid.

She turned white at the sudden reversal of fortune, looking forward again with a gulp. “Faster, William! Oh, never mind—move over!”

She snatched the reins from her startled footman, driving at top speed until she turned onto the busy Strand and spotted the nearest watchman's box ahead.

“You want me to go where?” the old constable echoed apprehensively after she had frantically gasped out her situation a few minutes later.

“Bucket Lane, I already told you!”

“Well, I'm going to have to call for more men.”

“Whatever it takes, just hurry! His life is in danger, I tell you!”

“Whose life?”

“I have no idea who he is! Just—some lunatic!”

 

“Oh, bloody hell,” Max whispered when he saw the rest of the Bucket Street gang come pouring out of the pub, forty of them at least.

There was a time and place for valor, but a gentleman knew when to make a graceful exit. He had thrown away a small fortune in that alley, and the gold had done the trick. But with Miss Starling out of harm's way, he had nothing left to prove.

Time to bow out.

Impressive how fast a man could run with a whole angry rookery on his tail. Lucky for Max—damned lucky—he was as well-trained in the wily art of escape as he was in fisticuffs. A bit of hiding, a bit of climbing, a bit of jumping from roof to roof, and then swinging back down to street level, and all he had left to do was to stroll back out onto the street and hail a hackney, the same manner of transportation by which he had arrived.

One stopped and he got in, but as it rolled away, Max spotted a cluster of uniformed lawmen rushing past in the direction of Bucket Lane.

He furrowed his brow, turning around to watch them out the grimy back window of the old coach. The fracas had only just happened. How could they have known—?

Unless
she
had told them.

He stopped, struck with sudden astonishment.

She had gone for help.
Well, hang me
. Miss Starling must have gone straight to the constable to fetch some officers in to assist him. She…cared?

Max stared blankly at nothing for a moment, not even
feeling the bumps and jolts of the ill-made coach rumbling over the cobbled street. The sudden woozy feeling in his brain had nothing to do with having been punched in the face. He shook his head as he realized uncomfortably that, a very long time ago, he had stopped expecting anybody to care what happened to him.

A strange, sweet, melting feeling softened his innermost core without warning, the place in him that he usually kept so steely.

But truly, it had never even occurred to him that Miss Starling might have given one thought for
his
safety.

My God
, he thought in wonder,
perhaps I really have found something here
…

When he walked into his Town mansion on Hyde Park a short while later, a bit banged up but none the worse for wear, his old butler Dodsley greeted him with a dry glance that took note of his dishevelment. “Good afternoon, sir. Shall I fetch the medical kit?”

“Ah, no thanks, old boy. Bit of a row. Do me a favor, if the constable comes knocking, tell him I was here all morning, will you?”

“Killed someone again, did we?”

“Never before luncheon, Dodsley. It's still early yet.”

“Indubitably, my lord.”

Max gave him a sardonic look, but headed at once for his study. He went straight for the file on Daphne Starling, still sitting out on his desk.

Obviously, he had to see her again, and soon.

He flipped the file open and turned to the social schedule that Oliver had so carefully researched and recorded, trailing his finger down the page.

There.

The Edgecombe ball. Tomorrow night.

Max's eyes gleamed with speculation.

Maybe he had been looking at this all wrong. This was a bride search, after all, not a hunt for an enemy agent. Wasn't a woman more than just a tool for one of his strategies? Perhaps, for once, he could let himself be a bit more of a human being and less of a spy.

He had served in the Order's secret war against the Prometheans for too many years, obviously; but did every choice he made still have to be so perfectly cold-blooded?

Miss Starling might be “problematical,” but why should that bother him? So Society was the obstacle? Well, he was trained in manipulation, in deception, in making people see what he wanted them to perceive, and only revealing the truth at the precise moment of his choosing.

If it turned out that he
really
wanted her, Max mused, he supposed he could probably have her. He would just have to work for it harder than he had ever intended to, would have to get a little more deeply involved than he had ever planned on doing…or was quite comfortable with.

On the contrary, he was accustomed to the rule of secrecy imposed on him by his vow. Holding others at arm's length had become second nature, until only his brother warriors—and perhaps his old butler—truly knew him at all.