Some Like It Wicked (27 page)

Simon held up both hands. “Not the face, please.”

The man nodded politely, then buried his fist in Simon’s stomach.

Simon doubled over with a pained grunt. “Thank you,” he wheezed out before ramming the top of his head into the man’s chin. He followed that with a wicked right-left combination he’d perfected while sparring at Gentleman Jackson’s, laying his opponent out flat.

Before he had time to savor that triumph, a chair came down across the back of his head, splintering beneath the force. He dropped to his knees, a shower of stars exploding in his vision. He was still trying to shake them away when a wiry, sun-bronzed hand appeared in front of him.

Wary of any offer of help, he squinted suspiciously up at his potential savior. Kieran Kincaid’s rawboned visage slowly came into focus.

He blinked. He must have taken a much harder blow to the skull than he realized. But if he had to hallucinate, why couldn’t it have been a smiling Catriona bending over him instead of her surly clansman?

Kieran wrapped a hand around his arm and hauled him to his feet with surprising strength.

Rubbing the back of his head, Simon scowled at him. “Where in the bloody hell did you come from?”

“Scotland,” Kieran replied shortly. “Before that, me mum said I was just a twinkle in me da’s eye.”

“How did you find me?”

Kieran shrugged. “To be honest, it wasn’t much of a challenge. All we had to do was visit every brothel, alehouse and hellhole in London. It’s been real rough on me and the lads.”

As a freckled boy in a grubby tunic went sailing headfirst out the door, Simon realized that Kieran hadn’t come alone. At least a dozen of the Kincaid clan had slipped into the club and gleefully joined the fray.

“I heard ye were lettin’ Catriona give ye the boot.” Kieran shook his head in disgust.

“And I thought
she
was daft. Ye’re a bluidy fool, Wescott, to lose a lass so fine.”

Simon jerked his cravat straight. “You’re one to point fingers. You were fool enough to let her go too.”

“I know I did. That’s why I’m here. To get her back.”

The two men eyed each other thoughtfully, realizing they just might have more in common than they realized.

“I’ve been thinkin’ of her more as a sister or a cousin, but if ye don’t want her,” Kieran added casually, “I just might ask her to be
my
bride.”

Before he even realized he was going to do it, Simon had grabbed Kieran by the front of his tunic and slammed him up against the nearest wall.

The Highlander’s lips curved in a rare grin. “I allus did want me a sister.”

“I
f you’ll wait here, I’ll inform your father of your arrival,” the aged butler said stiffly, disapproval all but oozing from his pores.

“Thank you,” Simon replied solemnly. “I’ll try not to steal anything.”

The servant gave him a withering look before shuffling from the room. Unable to resist the childish urge, Simon poked his tongue out at the man’s bony back.

He sighed, knowing he would have ample time to rob his father blind if he were so inclined. The duke had always delighted in keeping his inferiors waiting, considering it a privilege of his rank.

The butler would have been surprised to learn that his greatest temptation wasn’t to pocket one of his father’s silver candle snuffers but to bolt for the door. After attending his brother’s burial, he had hoped never to set foot in this house again. He’d never excelled at swallowing his pride to please his father, much preferring to take a beating at some footman’s beefy hands.

Linking his hands at the small of his back, he took a turn around the room. It had been many years since he’d been allowed into the sanctuary of his father’s library.

Everything was much as he remembered. The imposing octagonal room had floors of gleaming rose marble imported directly from Italy. A priceless Aubusson carpet that was dragged outside for a daily beating rested in the center of the floor. There wasn’t a speck of dust to be found on any of the marble busts or
objets d’art
displayed proudly throughout the room. The only items that showed signs of neglect were the books that lined the mahogany shelves.

His father’s massive desk, where discipline and punishment had been meted out with equal zeal, still dominated the chamber. Simon had been summoned there on many an occasion—for lectures, scoldings, stern dressing-downs, and for the occasional caning when his father’s temper got the best of him. In truth, those were the only times his father ever really looked at him. As long as Simon was misbehaving, the duke couldn’t ignore his existence. But he also couldn’t be bothered to beat Simon himself and would order one of the servants to do it for him.

A huge gilt-framed portrait of Richard—resplendent in his scarlet army uniform—hung over the mantel. Simon knew he wouldn’t find even so much as a miniature of himself tucked away in some forgotten corner of a bookshelf.

Despite Richard’s petty—and unfounded—jealousy of him, Simon had always looked up to him. Richard was older, stronger, the apple of their father’s eye. But as he gazed up at the portrait, he frowned. It was almost as if he were seeing his brother for the first time.

Why had he never noticed the rounded slope of Richard’s shoulders, the weakness of his chin, the squinty hint of cruelty in his pale brown eyes?

“A remarkable likeness, is it not?” his father said from somewhere behind him.

“Indeed. I almost feel as if he could reach out and box my ears.”

Simon turned to face his father. Although they hadn’t seen each other in over three years, he was still shocked by how much his father had aged. His handsome mane of white hair was beginning to thin at the brow and crown. His gout must have worsened as well because he was using a cane to hobble around the desk.

“I trust this won’t take long,” his father said, sinking into his thronelike chair. Once it had added to his regal stature; now it seemed to dwarf him. “I’m assuming you need money to pay off some overzealous creditor or pregnant doxy. I was hoping your little stint in Newgate might do you some good. Build character and all that rot. Then I heard you’d run off with that mad Scots girl. I’m not surprised
that
ended in disaster. Everyone knows the Scots are a notoriously depraved and untrustworthy lot.”

He opened a drawer and drew out a leather-bound box. Flipping open the lid, he asked,

“So how much do you need? A hundred pounds? Five hundred?”

Simon reached over and closed the lid, gently but firmly. “I don’t want your money. You know very well that I’ve never asked you for so much as a farthing. I’ve always made my own way in this world.”

“I did purchase you a commission in the navy,” his father reminded him.

“To get me out from under your feet and to keep me from tarnishing your good name any more than I already had.”

“It didn’t work on either count, did it?”

Simon reached into his coat, drew out a folded sheet of stationery and handed it to his father.

His father snapped it open, scanned it quickly, then glanced back at Simon, hiking one snowy white eyebrow. “Do you really expect me to do this?”

Simon leaned over, planting both palms on the desk. “It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you. If you do it, you’ll never have to lay eyes on me again.”

“In that case,” his father said briskly, looking him dead in the eye, “consider it done.”

Simon straightened and started to turn away, ridiculously relieved to escape his father’s presence. But then he realized this would be his last chance to ask the question that had haunted him since he was a boy in this house.

He turned back to the desk. “Why did you hate my mother so much?”

“Already going back on your word, are you? As I recall, you just promised me that this”—his father tapped the piece of stationery—“was the last thing you’d ever ask of me.”

Simon shook his head at his own foolishness and strode toward the door, as eager to be free of this place as his father was to be rid of him.

He was only a few steps from that freedom when his father spoke, his voice so low Simon almost didn’t hear him. “I didn’t hate your mother. I adored her.”

Simon slowly turned and drifted back toward the desk, each step taken as if in a dream.

His father was reaching into the watch pocket of his waistcoat and withdrawing a shiny brass fob. A locket dangled from the end of it.

He offered the locket to Simon with a palsied hand. Simon took it and snapped it open to find a miniature of his mother tucked into the oval frame. She looked exactly as he remembered her—her lustrous blond hair curling around her face, her cheeks dimpled in a teasing smile, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

His father’s eyes had gone curiously misty. “My wife turned me out of her bed after Richard was conceived. She felt she’d done her duty by providing me with an heir.” He shrugged. “She could barely endure that part of our relationship anyway.

“Then I met your mother at the theater one night. I never meant for anything to happen between us, but she was so beautiful, so funny, so warm…so loving. I wanted to leave my wife. I begged your mother to run away with me. But she refused, saying it would create a terrible scandal that would ruin me and my family’s good name forever. She swore she loved me, yet she sent me away that night and told me to never come back.”

“What if she believed she was doing what was best for you, even if it broke her own heart?” Simon asked, echoing the words Catriona had once said to him.

As his father lifted his eyes, the mist in them faded, leaving only contempt. “Every time I looked at you, I saw her and I remembered the night she sent me away.” He pounded his fist weakly on the desk, looking more like a petulant child than like one of the most powerful men in London. “She was a selfish, cruel, heartless woman! It wasn’t right for her to keep you from me for all those years. By the time she sent you here, you were nothing more than a stranger!”

“I was never a stranger, Father,” Simon said softly. “I was always your son.”

Slipping the miniature into his own pocket, he turned and walked out of his father’s library for the last time.

******************

Catriona stood on the landing at the top of the ballroom steps, fighting the desperate urge to duck behind a potted palm. The Argyle Rooms boasted one of the most beautiful ballrooms in London. The elegant theater was over a hundred feet long. A grand screen of Corinthian columns lined the walls, supporting the cove of a ceiling painted to resemble the sky. The ethereal blue daubed with fluffy white clouds reminded her of the Highland sky on a spring day.

She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to remember that at that very moment Eddingham and his men might be reducing to rubble all that was left of her ancestral home.

A half dozen cut-glass chandeliers, each containing a dozen pink wax lights, cast a soft glow over the milling crush below. Some of the ballroom’s occupants were dancing an intricate minuet to the genteel strains of Mozart wafting out from the orchestra. Others were clustered in cozy groups, fluttering their fans and sipping punch from crystal goblets. A few black-garbed dowagers were hunched over in the chairs lining the walls, whispering to each other and squinting disapprovingly through their quizzing glasses at the young people who were laughing too loudly or dancing too closely.

And in just a few minutes, they would all be whispering about her.

Catriona drew in a sharp breath and flattened a hand against her corset-clad waist, wondering how she could have allowed Georgina and Uncle Ross to talk her into this madness. When they had first presented the idea to her, she would have sworn it had merit. Since her annulment was to be final on the morrow, what better way to show all of London that her heart and pride were unscathed than to appear at an assembly ball with her head held high and a smile on her lips?

Georgina had even ordered her a special gown for the occasion from her favorite York Street modiste—a high-waisted confection of softly woven silk in virginal white.

Catriona was not immune to the irony.

In keeping with the elegant simplicity of the dress, she had woven a borrowed string of Aunt Margaret’s pearls through her upswept curls.

As she scanned the crowd, she knew she ought to take comfort in the fact that there was absolutely no chance of running into Simon. It wasn’t as if they would ever travel in the same social circles. He might be the son of a powerful duke, but he was still a bastard, which meant that there were some doors that would be forever closed to him.

Instead of giving her comfort, the thought made her heart feel as if the very last drop of blood were being squeezed from it.

She was turning blindly away from the ballroom, determined to flee before Georgina saw her, when Uncle Ross appeared on the landing beside her.

He linked an arm through hers and cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “Not thinking of bolting, are you, my dear?”

“How did you know?” she asked, eyeing him sheepishly.

He puffed out his cheeks in a rueful sigh. “I saw the same look in your aunt Margaret’s eyes on our wedding night.”

“Are you sure you want to be seen with a woman with such a scandalous past? It might cast a stain on the noble Kincaid name.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied, giving her arm a heartening squeeze. “I’m very proud to have such a bright and lovely young woman on my arm.”

Catriona blinked up at him, surprised to feel the sting of tears in her eyes.

“Besides,” he added, a corner of his mouth quirking in a grin, “you’re too young to spend the rest of your life listening to Alice whine and beating me at chess.”