The Duke's Men [1] What the Duke Desires (20 page)

M
AXIMILIAN HAD SPENT
the past few hours hardening his heart against her, determined not to let the devious
chit mislead him. He’d prepared himself for evasions, tears, begging. He hadn’t prepared
himself for Lisette calmly and unemotionally relating a tale so specific in its details
that it could only be the truth. Especially since it portrayed Bonnaud in a distinctly
unfavorable light.

By the time she finished describing how her family had escaped England in a harrowing
trip across the Channel on a smuggler’s skiff, he had to grit his teeth against the
feelings rocketing through him.

She’d been fourteen, for God’s sake. Fourteen! Little more than a child. Her feckless
father had failed to provide for his children, and as a result she’d had half her
family and all her belongings ripped from her in one fell swoop.

As the thought made something twist in his chest,
he let out a low curse. He was
not
supposed to care, confound it! She’d deceived him. She was probably deceiving him
even now.

“So your brother is not the saint you made him out to be when we first met,” he clipped
out as the coach rumbled through the night. “He’s a bloody horse thief.”

“He was seventeen! What would you do if your father promised you something on his
deathbed and your half brother made it all disappear out of sheer spite?”

He thought back to his own father’s deathbed. To his mother standing over his father’s
corpse, looking wild and frightened, with an empty vial of laudanum in her hand.

I didn’t mean to,
she whispered.
He was so unhappy and . . . he kept saying those . . . awful things and I . . . I
just wanted him to sleep.

Oh yes, Maximilian knew something about deathbed confessions and what they could do.

Determinedly, he buried the dark memories. This wasn’t about deathbeds. It was about
Bonnaud, who’d begun a life of crime early. Bonnaud, who was still eluding him, thanks
to the man’s deceitful sister.

Lisette was staring out the coach window, her expression bleak in the moonlight. “Tristan
felt he had to provide for us, so he did the only thing he could think of. And he
didn’t consider it stealing, since Papa had left him the horse anyway.”

When that tugged at Maximilian’s sympathies, he
snapped, “All the same, taking and selling that horse was rash and stupid.”

“That’s what Dom said.” Then her gaze shot to Maximilian, full of belligerence. “But
without that money, we would never have made it to France. And after we reached it,
we would have starved in the months it took Maman and Tristan to find work.”

Her voice hardened. “Without that money to grease the palms of our ‘loving’ relations,
we would have ended up in the street. They’d always hated that Maman had brought shame
on the family by becoming an English lord’s mistress. And that even after returning
home to Toulon, she had the audacity to stir up gossip again by going on the stage.”

“Toulon?” His temper flared again. “I thought we were going to Paris.”

“We are. I told you, Tristan works for the government now.”

“I said no prevarications, Lisette. Which branch of the government? Where? How can
I find him?”

She blinked, then tipped up her chin. “I’m getting to that. Considering that we won’t
reach Paris for hours, you’re awfully impatient.”

“With good reason,” he growled. “For all I know, you created this wild-goose chase
in the first place to get me away from London so that your brother—”

“Could do what? Set up an impostor as your replacement, I suppose?” She eyed him with
cool irony. “Yes, all along I’ve been engineering a master plan to destroy
you. That’s why I called you ‘His Grace’ when I was supposed to be hiding your identity.
Why I had to rely on
you
to pay our passage . . . and our meals and the bribes for the customs officers.”

Her voice grew choked. “Why I couldn’t even escape Hucker without your help. Because
I’m so very adept at diabolical schemes, at pretending to be someone else and trying
to keep secrets and—”

“Enough,” he cut in. “I see your point.”

This was the Lisette he’d come to know, the one who dreamed of being an investigator
and then got thorny when he pointed out that she didn’t know the first thing about
it. He grudgingly admitted that she was right. If she was a master manipulator, she
wasn’t very good at it.

For a moment, there was no sound in the carriage except that of the horse’s hooves
pounding the dirt and the creak of the carriage springs.

Then she dropped her gaze to her hands. “It’s as I told you from the beginning—I don’t
know where Tristan is. The last time I saw him, when I left Paris six months ago,
he was working for the Sûreté Nationale.”

That threw him off guard. “The police? Your brother the horse thief was working for
the
police
?”

She cast him a defiant glance. “Why do you think I didn’t want you dashing over here
to speak to his employer? I knew you would do your best to get Tristan dismissed.”

“You’re damned right I would have!” At her frown, he fought to restrain his temper.
So far, he hadn’t gotten
anywhere with Lisette when he was angry. He forced some calm into his voice. “I assume
that his employer doesn’t know he’s a criminal.”

“No. And if he finds out . . .” She trailed off with a hitch in her voice that got
him right in the gut.

Confound her to blazes. She had put him in an untenable position. Again. He didn’t
know which made him angrier—that her brother really had turned out to be shady or
that she still persisted in championing the fool. “With such a past, how did Bonnaud
even manage to get hired?”

“Well . . . it’s not as if broadsides have been published across the world about his
one criminal act. George had his hands full with dealing with Papa’s estate, so he
didn’t pursue it beyond England. And he didn’t know where we’d gone.” She shrugged.
“Besides, when Tristan went to work for the Sûreté, Vidocq was still at the head of
it, and he didn’t care.”

“Eugène Vidocq?” Maximilian broke in.

“You know him?”

“Not personally, no, but I’ve heard of him from the man who investigated Peter’s death.
We couldn’t come to France to search until after Napoleon had been routed and sent
to Elba. The investigator was the one to learn that Peter had already died in that
fire in Belgium.”

“Was that the same trip when you came to consult with your great-uncle’s lawyer?”
she asked, clearly perplexed. “Did the lawyer know something about it?”

Cursing himself for saying enough that she’d
connected those two in her mind, he avoided the question. “I know Vidocq is famous
in some quarters, but the fellow we hired had nothing good to say about him. Claimed
that he had a reputation for hiring criminals. Which does explain how your brother
ended up employed by him.”

With one last curious glance at him, she nodded. “Vidocq hires criminals precisely
because he was one himself once. During that time he learned a great deal about how
they operated. Then when a friend of his was hanged, he began to realize that criminals
generally come to a bad end. So he went to work for the other side, and most effectively,
too, given his inside knowledge.”

He hated to admit it, but that made a sort of perverse sense. Besides, he had never
been all that impressed with the man his father had hired to find Peter.

“I daresay if Vidocq had been investigating your brother’s death,” she went on, “you’d
know far more about it than you do.”

Never mind that he’d just been thinking something similar; her obvious admiration
for the famous investigator gave him pause. “You seem to know the man very well.”

“I do. Before he resigned last year, I worked for him, too.”

Suddenly, several odd bits about her fell into place. “Vidocq is also well-known for
hiring women as agents.”

She shifted a bit on the swaying seat. “I wasn’t an agent. I wanted to be, and he
wanted to hire me as one, but Tristan wouldn’t allow it.”

Maximilian smiled grimly. “My respect for your brother just rose a notch.”

“Now see here, I could have been very good at it!”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“All right,” she grumbled, “perhaps not as good as I always imagined, but only because
I had no training. If he’d had time to train me properly, I might have succeeded.”

“Whether you would have or not is immaterial,” Maximilian ground out. “It’s one thing
to help Manton question people. But being an agent for Vidocq would be treacherous
work. Your brother would have been a fool to let you put yourself in such danger.”

She looked out the window. “You’re just like him, you know.”

“Vidocq?” he said incredulously.

“Tristan. Both of you think you know everything. You’re both proud and overbearing,
and you both—”

“Care about you,” he finished for her. When her gaze shot to him, he cursed his quick
tongue. “Enough not to want to see you hurt.”

A long silence spun out between them, catching them both in a tangle of frustrated
desire. He fought to ignore the fact that they were alone in the dark, that she sat
inches away from him, looking pretty and vulnerable and lonely. As lonely as he felt
right now.

No, he wouldn’t let himself be ensnared by her charms, confound it! “So if you didn’t
work for Vidocq as an agent, what
did
you do for him?”

“The same thing I do for Dom, mostly. Vidocq used
to keep track of every criminal he’d ever dealt with. He had their features, their
aliases, their criminal habits, their known haunts—everything—written down on cards.
By the time I went to work for him, he had sixty thousand, and they all had to be
organized. It took four of us working full time just to keep track of them all.”

“Now,
that
, I imagine, you were good at.”

A soft smile lit her face. “I was, actually. You may have noticed that I like to keep
things tidy.” She gave a rueful laugh. “And Vidocq has no idea what tidy is, I swear.
If not for me, that office would have been a nightmare of discarded disguises and
boxes of cards and Lord knows what all. The man is brilliant as an investigator, but
he’s not very good at taking care of himself.”

The obvious affection she felt for her former employer stung him. As he recalled,
Vidocq was also known for being something of a rogue around women. “So you didn’t
just take care of his office,” he said hollowly. “You took care of him, too.”

“You might say that. Especially after his wife died and everything went to hell in
a handbasket.”

“He was unmarried when you were working for him?”

“The last few years, yes. Why?”

“So you valiantly stepped in to look after the poor man.” Though he could hear the
jealous edge in his voice, he couldn’t seem to stop talking. “And what did that entail,
exactly? Making him tea? Darning his stockings? Warming his bed?”

To his annoyance, she burst into laughter. “Are you mad? Vidocq is old enough to be
my father, for pity’s sake.”

“But he’s
not
your father, is he?” Maximilian said, jealousy still riding him despite her levity
on the subject. “And he has quite the reputation with women, I’m told.”

As the depth of his obsession seemed to sink in with her, she cocked her head to regard
him intently. “Indeed he does.” Her eyes glittered in the darkness. “He
is
rather handsome for his age. And he can be quite charming when he wants.”

“Oh, I’m sure he can,” he grumbled, not sure whether she was deliberately tormenting
him or simply being honest. “That’s all that matters to you, I suppose. Never mind
that the man used to be a criminal, that he knows half of the underworld. He’s handsome
and charming, and that’s good enough for you.”

“It’s better than being baleful and irritating like a certain troublesome duke,” she
shot back. “At least Vidocq knows how to treat a woman.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“He doesn’t assume at every turn that she’s some untrustworthy creature engaged in
plans to ruin him.”

He gritted his teeth at that apt description of how he’d reacted. “Can you blame me
for being suspicious? Your brother is a thief and you didn’t bother to tell me.”

“If I had, would we even be here? Or would you have had me arrested and forced to
reveal his whereabouts?
Would you have destroyed Dom’s business just to find Peter?” She crossed her arms
over her chest. “I was protecting my family. You of all people should understand that.”

He did, damn her. He understood and sympathized. That was the trouble with wild roses—they
grew under a man’s defenses when he wasn’t watching. Despite all of his determination
not to be taken in, he’d been taken in.

Or perhaps he’d just recognized what he’d sensed all along—that at her core she was
forthright and loyal. The kind of woman his mother had been, sticking by her husband’s
side to the very end, standing up for him throughout the worst of Father’s madness.
The kind of woman he would want for a wife.