Sins of a Virgin (28 page)
“The guards hadn’t touched me.”
“What?” Gabriel asked even as a sick feeling warned him he wouldn’t like the answer. He knew of abuses, especially to young, unprotected women in Newgate.
But he still sent women to prison, many in fact. It was his job as a Runner. What was his alternative? To leave criminals on the streets because they were women?
“I managed to convince the guards they didn’t want me.”
“How?”
“By doing the same thing I do now. I watched them. I knew who would fear me if I claimed to have the pox. Who had daughters at home I could compare myself to. Who would back away at the sight of vomit.”
Her face was blank as she recited her list. This time, he didn’t begrudge her the shield she pulled around herself. She shouldn’t have to experience it again.
She shouldn’t have had to experience it at all.
In the absence of guards for pummeling, he was tempted to throw Maddox and Campbell out the window. They were, after all, the only reason he couldn’t pull Madeline in his arms.
Because of their presence, however, she was able to continue. “I knew which women would shield me and which would trade me to the guards. It turned out I had a talent for noticing little things about people and using them to my advantage. So I perfected that skill, and in return, I escaped hanging.”
“Then why this auction?”
A thin smile pulled her lips. “Haven’t you heard? The war is over. We were given our pardons and let go.”
“
Our
pardons?” He should have known.
Maddox bowed. “Criminals, the lot of us. Well, not anymore, I suppose.”
“You worked together then?”
“We were a team.” Pride crept into Madeline’s voice, the first emotion since she’d started her explanation. “Does that answer your questions about me?”
It hadn’t even begun to, but he intended to find out the rest after he’d expelled their audience. “The attempts on your life?”
Madeline repeated what the note had said about Paris and about the threat.
“Do you know who would have a reason to hold a grudge in Paris?” Gabriel asked.
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “The list is extensive, but everything we have pursued so far is a dead end.”
“I have a lead.”
Maddox and Campbell glanced at each other, then broke formation and approached, the animosity in Campbell’s eyes tempered by interest. “What did you find?”
Gabriel hoped Madeline would follow them, but she remained seated at the desk, content with the distance between them.
“The fellow who tossed Madeline into the river. I’ve discovered his identity.”
Madeline’s lips parted with a swift inhalation. “Who is he?”
The tiny gleam of admiration in her eye made him long to puff out his chest. “A man by the name of Nicholas Toole, who suddenly has a large amount of money to spend.”
Campbell’s brows lowered. “Where do we find him?”
“
You
don’t find him anywhere. I will arrest him at a high-stakes game of cards he frequents.”
“You’ll spook him. You look too much like a Runner,” Campbell said.
“And you could do better?”
Maddox clapped him on the back. “We’ll deliver him to you in a nice package. Not too many pieces missing.”
There was no way he’d trust Campbell and Maddox on their own, but they had a point. The organizers of the game hired spotters to raise the alarm if the law ever came too close. And Gabriel knew his face had become well-known to the criminals of London. “Meet me at the corner of Ash and East Thicket at midnight. I’ll tell you where the game is to be held then.”
Maddox shook his head at Madeline. “Not a very trusting sort, is he?”
Not of these two. He wouldn’t risk Madeline’s friends deciding to act without him.
Campbell’s head jerked once. “We’ll be there.”
“Good. Now I need to discuss the auction with Madeline.”
Campbell and Maddox glanced at Madeline and she shrugged. “I can handle Gabriel.” As the door clicked shut behind them, Madeline leaned back in her chair. “So are you content? The puzzle of my existence has been solved.”
The picture was indeed clearer, but he was nowhere near content. Gabriel closed the distance between them. “So all those stories you taunted me with, marching across France, the czar, those were the truth?”
His proximity did nothing to discomfit her. If anything, it seemed to amuse her. “I’ve never lied to you.” Her lips nudged upward at his dubious expression. “Just told the truth in an unbelievable way.”
“Why?”
“Because the truth is far stranger than any lie I could have created.”
Her tongue swept her lips in a gesture that might have been nervous if it wasn’t so damned seductive. He followed the path of her tongue with his thumb. “So what happened last night?”
“Which part? The ball, the attempted kidnapping, or the pleasuring each other by the fountain?”
Had he expected her to be timid about it? “Definitely the fountain.”
“What part confused you? Or do you just want me to recount it in erotic detail?”
His body was happy to agree, but he was determined to avoid thinking with certain throbbing pieces of his anatomy. “What did it mean?”
She sighed. “That neither of us can resist playing with fire.”
“Should we resist?”
“Unless you intend to marry me.”
Gabriel choked. “I—”
“Have no intention of that, correct?” Madeline asked, scooting her chair back, her voice wary. “You said you didn’t.” She looked as though he’d lied about having the plague.
“I have no intention of marrying anyone.”
“Good. Then unless you have a fortune I don’t know about, we can’t risk another event like last night.”
G
abriel’s hand’s tightened at his sides. “Does it have to be about money?”
She was fast coming to the conclusion that a romantic lurked somewhere deep inside Gabriel’s heart. She didn’t have the luxury of being one. “What else should it be about?”
He picked up a quill from the desk and trailed the feather along the edge of her bodice. “Pleasure.”
She gasped, her eyes closing, not strong enough to draw away, not when she could so clearly remember the sensations of last night. He freed her breasts from the low neckline of her bodice and circled the already taut peaks with light flicks of the feather.
“What good is pleasure?” she managed to ask in a credibly audible voice.
He lifted her from the chair to the edge of the desk and raised the hem of her dress, baring her legs. The feather traced a torturous path up the inside of her thigh. “Do you really need to ask that?” His fingers replaced the quill.
Despite her resolve, her body was just as susceptible to him as it had been last night. But while he could distract, she wouldn’t let him deter. “Do you think we could leave it at this? That neither of us would be tempted to take this further?” She wasn’t that much of a saint. Even this very moment, she wanted to lie back on the desk and feel the smooth wood on her back as he drove into her.
“Would it matter if we did?”
“I’d be lacking my only valuable commodity.”
Gabriel’s fingers paused. “Then you were telling the truth when you said you were a virgin?”
Madeline scrambled away from his hand. “I told you everything I said was the truth.” What good did it do to share her secrets if he still thought her a liar?
Gabriel caught her before she could escape him. “Then what was your role as a spy?”
“To seduce information from the men I was ordered to pursue.”
If Gabriel had said anything at all or even just raised an eyebrow, she would’ve had the strength to let Gabriel form his own conclusions. But he was silent. And so she had to prove she was telling the truth even though she could think of no logical reason for the necessity. “In case you didn’t know, there are more ways to pleasure a man than by spreading my legs. Like using my mouth,” she said, her shoulders aching from the effort it took to appear nonchalant.
But Gabriel refused her bait. “There must have been men who weren’t satisfied with that.”
She hated not knowing if he believed her or not. “Ian procured a certain drug that when mixed with alcohol, had a strong sedative effect.”
“You put them to sleep?”
She nodded. “Except for a few who refused to drink, then a blow to the head achieved the same effect. I arranged the room so they’d think we spent a tempestuous night together before they’d passed out.”
The skin next to Gabriel’s eyes crinkled. “You didn’t happen to give me anything last night, did you?”
He believed her. Her heart could have floated from her chest. “Last night? Why? Did you think something happened last night—”
Gabriel caught her chin with a growl and kissed her. “I couldn’t have imagined that.”
Her blood was coursing too quickly through her veins to taunt him further. But when he would have claimed her lips again, she turned her head aside. She had to make him see the futility of this before she was lost. “How would I support myself while we spend our nights making passionate love?” And mornings and afternoons.
“I would provide for you.”
“How is that different than whoring? Simply not calling it by its true name doesn’t make it nobler.”
“So every woman who sleeps with a man is a trollop?”
Madeline paused, Gabriel’s point surprisingly valid. Was it possible to make love to a man simply for the joy of it? But she found the flaw in his question. “She is if she’s using her body to support herself.”
“But what if she isn’t? What if she’s with the man because they desire each other? Care for each other?”
The walls around her heart trembled. If she let Gabriel continue, they’d crumble. And the last thing she needed was for him to convince her that a night with him was worth a lifetime of poverty. She placed her hand on Gabriel’s chest and pushed away. “If I meet that woman, I’ll ask her.”
G
abriel knew which house belonged to the man who sired him much in the same way he knew which shopkeepers sold tainted meat. There was a foul stench that couldn’t be disguised. The butler showed him into the study where Northgate stood next to a large pile of ledgers on his desk.
Gabriel stiffened. “There’s no need for you to be here in person, Northgate.”
“I’m quite concerned with the outcome.”
Gabriel had to fight through his contempt in order to shrug. Every moment his time was wasted here was a moment when he wasn’t finding the evidence he needed on Billingsgate. “Do as you will, it’s no concern of mine.”
Gabriel sat at the desk, leaving Northgate to find a chair elsewhere, and flipped open the first ledger. While Northgate wasn’t his murderer, Gabriel did hold a slight, petty hope the man’s solicitor was robbing him blind.
His fingers trailed down the neat rows of figures adding the numbers and checking for inconsistencies. Incomes from rents on three different estates were distributed to butchers, coal vendors, servant wages, and everything else required to run an empire as large as Northgate’s.
Beatrice Huntford.
His finger stilled on his mother’s name. Next to it was listed a particularly large outlay of funds. What the devil? Three entries down, the money was logged back in. As Gabriel continued through the pages, a pattern built—Northgate withdrew a large sum of money from his accounts in his mother’s name, then a few days later, returned the funds. Gabriel’s head throbbed as he flipped through the ledgers. Every month was the same. Every blasted month. The money went out, then was returned.
Gabriel finally looked up at Northgate through narrowed eyes.
The other man relaxed in a leather armchair, his fingers loosely steepled together. “How is your mother, by the way?”
Gabriel closed the ledger and slowly looked up at the marquess. Criminals often asked after their victims, receiving sick pleasure from the answer. It didn’t surprise Gabriel that Northgate was the same. “You lost the right to ask that question long ago. Perhaps you should ask about the woman you plan to deflower instead.”
A muscle ticked in Northgate’s jaw. “I have no interest in Miss Valdan.”
Gabriel couldn’t savor the brief moment of relief. “Then why am I here?”
“I bid to force you to speak to me.”
That’s what this was about? Didn’t he understand the implications of Gabriel’s refusal to respond to his missives? Unfortunately for Northgate, Gabriel was immune to whatever manipulation he had in mind. “If you aren’t bidding on Miss Valdan, I have no reason to be here.” He stood.
“Don’t you want to know why I send money to your mother? Or shall I shout it from the rooftops until you hear me?”
Gabriel stilled. He didn’t take well to threats, but he couldn’t have the marquess tear apart the reputation his mother had finally rebuilt. “Then speak. But keep in mind, you have nothing to say that I want to hear.”
“I love your mother.”
Enough. The man was still a liar as well as a cozening bastard. Gabriel had experience dealing with his type. He narrowed his eyes and glared at Northgate. “You ruined an innocent under your brother’s protection, then left her to face the consequences alone. Where is the love in that?”
Northgate flinched but didn’t lower his gaze. “Damn it. It wasn’t something dirty and base. She knew my situation. We both knew. We didn’t mean for it to happen. But I have not once in thirty years regretted our actions.”
“You don’t regret leaving her to raise two children in poverty?”
“I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me until after I had already wed.”
“How fortunate for you.”
Northgate raked his fingers through his hair. “After I found out, I tried to take care of her. Of all of you. You can have every last penny I have if you want it.”
The man was a silver-tongued snake. What did he hope to gain by this? Even if what he said was true, his guilt came far too late. “You think you can buy forgiveness for what you did to my mother?”
“I wasn’t trying to buy forgiveness. I was trying to do the right thing. But your mother would never accept any help, not even when you were destitute.”
