Once in a Blue Moon (23 page)

The hackney slowed to turn a corner, and a boy ran up alongside, tossing a handbill into the earl's lap. He crumpled the paper in his fist and tossed it out again, swinging his head toward her, his earring winking like a golden eye.

His hand lashed out to fling open her cloak. He stared at her forever, and she felt the strangest awareness of her own body within the exotic clothes. Her breasts, taut and aching, pressing against the stiff satin of the doublet. Her legs, covered only by the thin silk hose and quivering as if they were naked.

He spoke through tight lips. "You have always had a propensity for trouble, but even at sixteen I doubt you were capable of hatching such a half-baked, bird-witted scheme that could so ruin you in the eyes of the world."

She jerked the cloak from his grasp, hugging it close to her chest. She hadn't wanted to ruin herself; she only wanted to earn some money to see her family through the next couple of months, until her marriage next June.

"Say something, damnation."

Her head snapped around. "Why should I? You're making enough clack for both of us. My lord."

A muscle jumped along his jaw, and his fists clenched. "Tomorrow I shall have a word with the man who operates that—that circus. I assure you that he will no longer be requiring your services."

"Thank you very much. My lord. And while you're about it, perhaps you will tell me how we're all supposed to eat without the twenty shillings a night Mr. O'Hare was going to pay me."

"I should have thought you had plenty of blunt. After your big winnings at Newmarket the other day."

"I told you that we did not crimp that race." She looked into his eyes, alternately shadowed and then starred in the flickering light. "It could have been you. Indeed, it is just the sort of cheating, dishonorable behavior you Trelawnys are known for."

If she had meant to wound him, she hadn't succeeded. His face was more of a mask than the one in her lap. She had never been able to tell what he was thinking when it mattered.

"If you are really so desperate, why didn't you apply to your betrothed?" he said. "Cousin Clarey has enough tin to feed half of London and not feel the pinch."

So Clarence had mentioned their betrothal to his cousin; he had known it all along. And though she was loath to admit it, especially to herself, it hurt to realize that the earl of Caerhays didn't seem to care.

She lifted her chin. "We Lettys do not borrow from our friends. Or lovers," she added. She cast a sideways glance to see what he would make of that.

He seemed to make nothing of it at all, merely shrugging. "I might be badly dipped myself but I can still spare a pound or two. Enough to keep you and your grandmother from starving."

"I wouldn't take the world's last crust of bread if it came from you." It was another silly remark, and she knew as soon as the words left her mouth that he would pounce on them.

He didn't disappoint her. "Instead of joining the circus," he drawled, "you should have gone on the stage. You have such a flair for the melodramatic delivery."

"It was not a circus. It was an Equestrian Spectacle."

"It was indeed a spectacle."

"And you are a vile... an odious... a despicable..." Words failed her. "An utter cad," she finished lamely, thinking that once again she was sounding like the beleaguered heroine of the worst sort of blue book.

He leaned into her, and something menacing flickered in his eyes. She felt the power of him that was a heat in the night, and she was drawn to that heat the way one would hold out cold hands to a flame. She could understand what had so attracted her at sixteen—the dark side of him that was wicked and lawless, exciting in its very danger. It attracted her still. She wanted to taste that danger, to see if she could tame it. She wanted him. It was primal in its power, this wanting. Seductive in its inevitability.

Her head told her there was no future with him. Yet in the charged silence she licked her lips, tasting fear and excitement... wanting him.

His gaze fastened on to her mouth, and she knew from the taut look on his face and the lazy-lidded heat in his eyes that he wanted her as well. Her head told her a man could desire where he did not love. Yet deliberately she wet her lips again.

He lowered his head, and his hand stole up to frame her face. His thumb stroked the line of her jaw. Mesmerized, she watched the creases alongside his mouth deepen as his lips moved. His breathy words caressed her cheek. "If you want me to kiss you, Miss Letty, why don't you just ask? It is no great distance after all from the circus ring to the brothel—"

She swung a fist at his head. His hand shot up, grabbing her wrist. His lips parted in a hard smile. "I wouldn't do that were I you. I just might be the sort of vile, odious, despicable, and
utter cad
who would hit you back."

She tugged against his grip. "Let go of me, you bloody bastard."

He clicked his tongue, shaking his head in mock dismay. "Such naughty language, though hardly original. Have you been keeping bad company again?"

Their rough breathing filled the carriage as they glared at each other in aroused hostility. Muttering an oath, he swung his head away from her. He called to the driver on the box to pull up, and the carriage jolted to a stop. As if awakening from a trance, Jessalyn looked around to see where they were. They appeared to be in the middle of the market piazza of Covent Garden.

The driver let down the steps, and McCady descended first. He held up his hand to her. "Get out," he said in a voice of silk and steel.

Jessalyn deliberately ignored his hand. She climbed down, stepping onto paving stones that were slick with walnut husks and rotting cabbage leaves. Her left foot shot out from under her, and she grabbed him to regain her balance, her arm sliding around his waist beneath his coat. She felt the sinewy muscle that encased his ribs, felt it tauten as he sucked in a sharp breath, and she thrust herself hard away from him.

She saw his chest jerk, heard the rasp in his breathing. Her heart seemed to be wedged up in her throat, choking her. Whatever had been between them five years ago was still there, stronger than ever.

A roasted chestnut man rolled his cart toward them, shaking his pan, and the air was filled with the smell of burned nuts. The theaters were just letting out, and the streets were crowded with playgoers. Fruit sellers shoved among them, offering their wares with a cry: "Chase some oranges! Chase my nonpareils!"

An untidy collection of lean-tos and tumbledown sheds covered the piazza. It smelled of overripe melons and rotting onions, for Covent Garden was the site of London's vegetable market. In a few hours the square would be crowded with carts and wagons heaped with fresh country produce, costermongers in their gaudy waistcoats and greengrocers in their blue aprons. But at night the place was given over to revelry and sin. The once noble mansions that surrounded the square had long ago been converted into penny gaffs and chophouses, bagnios and brothels. Sex in all its permutations could be bought within sight of the fat columns of St. Paul's Cathedral.

The lamplights looked like big, shiny flat sequins in the hazy darkness, casting a golden pall over the scene. A Fashionable Impure wearing a magnificent plumed headdress strolled slowly across the church portico. Her soft white arms and rounded breasts were displayed to the cool night air, and the material of her gown was so diaphanous it was more suggestion than substance.

A young blood dressed to the nines joined the woman on the portico. He said something to her and squeezed her exposed breast as if testing for its ripeness. Then the two of them descended the steps and rounded the corner, disappearing into the night.

McCady's boots crunched on the shells and husks as he came up behind her. "Flying around Vauxhall's rotunda in spangles and hose makes you little better than her," he said, his breath rustling her hair, but his voice was edged with a raw anger. "Is that what you want, Jessalyn?"

She stiffened. "I fail to see the correlation, my lord. Indeed, I find your insinuation insulting."

"Dammit, Jessalyn. If your behavior tonight ever gets out, you will be utterly and completely ruined, and you know it."

"Only you know that it was I behind the mask. A gentleman would vow to keep a lady's secret."

"A
lady
would never indulge in such scandalous behavior in the first place. A lady would never have taken the risk. If your Mr. Clarence Tiltwell, MP, ever got wind of it, he would be forced to repudiate you publicly—"

"Clarence would never do such a thing. He loves me."

"Clarence loves himself. And in his position he cannot afford even a breath of scandal. He would cry to the skies how you had deceived him, and by the time he was through, there would be men piled up outside your door nose-high like pilchards in August offering you proposals. And they wouldn't be marriage proposals."

She caught a note of something in his voice, something she didn't dare to trust. But it was almost as if he
cared
what happened to her, cared about her reputation and her future happiness. She wanted to push him, to see how far his caring would go. But this path led to heartache, and she had been down it before. She thought of one of Gram's favorite sayings: that only an addlepated fool bit into the same rotten apple twice.

Still, she had to know....

She turned to face him, arching her brows and arranging her lips into a soft moue. "In truth, I had not considered entertaining those sorts of proposals," she said. "But now that you put me in mind of it, my lord, I can see where becoming some wealthy man's—how do you young bloods put it?—some man's
ladybird
is indeed an alternative."

He did not react as she had hoped. Instead he lifted one brow in turn and looked her over slowly as if judging just how viable an alternative. "Look around you then, Miss Letty. You'll find quite an aviary of ladybirds here at Covent Garden, from plump white doves to the scrawniest crows. You should understand the value of what you're selling and price yourself accordingly. For instance, if you were a virgin under thirteen, you could fetch upward of two hundred pounds. But a virgin at twenty-one—you are still a virgin?"

"I might be. It is no concern of yours."

"It will be the concern of the man who buys you. He should know what he's getting. A dried-up old maid..."

He paused, but she did not rise to the bait. "On the scale of virgins a dried-up old maid is worth a lot less than a nubile ingenue fresh out of the schoolroom."

"Why should I care what scale the man uses, since I shall be the one to do the choosing, not he? He will have to be well breeched, of course." She flicked a finger at the gold band in his ear. "Not one up to his pretty earring in debt. And he must be handsome as well, with no fat around his belly and no bald spots on his head." She gave these portions of his anatomy a scathing look as if he were already going to seed.

"A woman past her prime with red hair and freckles cannot be too particular."

"I am hardly in my dotage and—"

"Positively antiquated, I would say."

"—and I no longer have freckles."

He caught her jaw with two fingers and twisted her head around, so that the flambeau from a nearby cigar-divan shone full on her face. He rubbed his thumb across her cheekbone. "Liar. I see a good two dozen right here."

His gaze moved over her face as intimately as a caress, and the constant noise in the crowded piazza seemed suddenly to still. The wind snatched the hem of her cloak and wrapped it around his leg. His head dipped, and her lips parted, waiting, no longer breathing, waiting until even her heart seemed to pause in anticipation of what was to come.

He let her go, and she squeezed her eyes shut against a sudden plunge of disappointment. "I—I shall insist he give me jewels," she forced out through her tight throat. "And a house with the deed in my name."

"Very wise. Because your attractions, dubious as they are, will probably only last another three years. Perhaps four."

"Gram says I have enduring bones."

"Enduring bones or not, he'll soon grow tired of you. You'll be older then, and used. You will not be able to be so choosy the second time. In another year or two, another man or two, you'll become like that little dolly-mop over there."

She followed the direction of his gaze. A woman in low-cut, gaudy satin and a fringed shawl clung drunkenly to the arm of an old man in a greasy greatcoat. Her face was caked with yellow powder, her cheeks rouged orange like marmalade stains.

"Her jack will take her into a dive behind the colonnade there. He will consummate the arranged transaction— which, if she is fortunate, will be a normal consummation and not the nasty sort of play that can only be described in Latin phrases. Then he will pay her five shillings, four of which will go to her abbess, or her pimp. She has already started on the downward slide, you see. Into the gutter with her."

He nodded toward a brick wall covered with faded, peeling posters. At first all Jessalyn saw were shadows. Then the shadows stirred and became a woman in a ragged duffel cloak and rusty black poke bonnet.

"She has to ply her trade in parks and alleys because she is so diseased that no house or pimp will have her. She gets two pennies, and if I told you what she is willing to do for them, you wouldn't believe me."