The Secrets of a Courtesan (2 page)

only one who truly knew him.

Perhaps it had been an illusion, but for a brief time it had made her happy. She had thought that

they had both been happy. From the start there had been an instant attraction between them,

blazing into vivid life the very first night they had met at the Cyprian’s Ball. She, the newest of

new courtesans, had been feted and courted as the gentlemen waited to see upon whom she

would bestow her favor—and her innocence. Her price was high. And then Rowarth had arrived,

cutting through the throng, and everyone else had faded away, pale imitations of men in

comparison with his natural authority and overwhelming charm. She had been his from that first

moment and miraculously, it seemed, he had been hers. She was not merely his mistress; they

had shared everything. It had been so wonderful that for a short while even she, raised on the

London streets, the illegitimate child of a seamstress and a sailor, abandoned as a baby and

forced to fight for everything she had ever had in her life, had started to believe in happy

endings. She had thought that there was more to their relationship than mere lust. She had felt

that they had had an instant affinity.

Eve swallowed what felt like an enormous lump in her throat. Those days and nights had been

full of color and excitement and joy, so far removed from her existence now that they had been

another world, a fading memory but one that was so laced with pain that it could never quite die.

“And you were always the only one who dared oppose me.” There was an odd note in Rowarth’s

voice now. For a moment it sounded almost like regret. “But in this, Eve, you cannot.”

“Watch me.” She was so cross now that she was prepared to argue with him in the street. She

started to hurry away; he followed, effortlessly matching her step, not even remotely out of

breath.

“With pleasure, as always.” He sounded as imperturbable as ever. “But it will make no odds.”

“You are as persistent as a stray dog.”

“A charming analogy. You always liked animals, as I recall.”

They had almost reached the pawnbroker’s shop that Eve now ran. It seemed that Rowarth knew

exactly where she lived and what she now did to earn that living. A shiver of apprehension

racked Eve as she wondered what else he knew and what he might do with that knowledge. His

reappearance in her life was not only shocking, it was dangerous as well. She had lived like a

nun since coming to Yorkshire. She had buried her past as Rowarth’s mistress and that was the

way she was determined it would stay. Small towns were notorious for gossip and she was

determined that nothing was going to ruin her reputation or her livelihood.

“We are at an impasse,” she said coldly, on the doorstep. “I shall not invite you in.”

“Then I will take you somewhere else where we may talk,” Rowarth said, “and I doubt you will

appreciate my methods in conveying you there. Your choice.”

Eve looked at him. Would he really carry her kicking and screaming through the streets of

Fortune’s Folly? Very probably he would, and without disturbing the cut of his jacket in the

process. He looked unyielding, implacable. And despite her anger she really did not want a scene

in the street.

“Very well,” she said, even more frostily. “Since you force my hand.”

She pushed open the door of her shop and stepped from the bright sunlight into the cool, dusty

shade feeling a strange sense of relief at least to be on her own property. She placed her

marketing basket on the counter with a little sigh. In the windows the sale items gleamed in the

sun; jewelry sending a shower of sparkling rainbow colors across the display, bone china pawned

by the wife of a brewer who was so fond of his own ale that he had spent too much time drinking

and too little working, bed linen from a cottager out on the road to Skipton, all manner of goods

brought in by people desperate to raise a bit of ready cash. There was also a very fine brace of

pistols that Eve suspected belonged to a man who had turned his hand, unsuccessfully, to

highway robbery, and a dinner service that a local banker had brought in when his bank had gone

bust and he had wanted to avoid his possessions being confiscated by his creditors. All the goods

told their own stories, Eve thought, of people struggling in what was a hard economic climate.

Joan, Eve’s assistant, came scurrying out of the back room, wiping her hands on her apron as she

heard the ring of the doorbell. She was an older woman, a former servant at Fortune’s Hall, the

local manor house and home to the squire, Sir Montague Fortune. She was the only person in

whom Eve had confided her past and Eve valued her friendship highly.

“I did not realize you were back, madam—” Joan broke off as she saw Rowarth, and her sharp

brown gaze swept over him, summing him up in one comprehensive glance. Her sandy eyebrows

rose infinitesimally.

“This gentleman and I,” Eve said carefully, “have business to discuss. Could you take over here

please, Joan?”

“Business, is it?” Joan said tartly. “I thought you had finished with that sort of business,

madam.”

Eve smiled. She was accustomed to Joan’s sharp tongue and knew it hid a protective heart. Joan

had been turned off for refusing Sir Montague Fortune’s advances and she had some hair-raising

tales to tell of the goings-on at Fortune’s Hall. She also had no very good opinion of men.

“Don’t fret,” Eve said. “I am done with it.”

Ignoring Joan’s snort of disbelief she ushered her visitor behind the counter and through the

doorway into the room at the back. The pawnbroker’s shop occupied two downstairs rooms in

the stone-built terrace. Eve used one as the shop front and the other, a much larger room, as a

combined office and a store for all the goods people brought in to pawn. Upstairs there was a

tiny bedchamber and some even tinier living quarters. She and Joan clung to their financial

independence by their fingertips. The premises were hardly sumptuous but the shop did at least

provide an independent living and it had been a lifesaving opportunity for Eve when she had run

from London—and from Rowarth—leaving everything behind, broken by a miscarriage, reeling

from the news that she would never bear another child. She had left behind the beautiful little

town house that Rowarth had given her in Birdcage Walk, where he had spent all his nights and

most of his days with her, the clothes and the jewels, and had climbed on the first stagecoach

from the Blue Boar Inn in High Holborn. She had told the driver she would go as far as her

money could take her and had ended up in Fortune’s Folly, working as an assistant until she had

accumulated sufficient savings to buy the shop, working her fingers to the bone, working, always

working, as she tried to forget…

She pushed the memories away. Rowarth was standing in her office and looking around him with

a lively interest. He looked elegant and polished, the epitome of wealth and privilege, utterly out

of place in these shabby surroundings. Never had the differences between them felt so stark.

“So,” she said, a little ungraciously, “I can give you two minutes, Rowarth, no more. Whatever

your business is with me, I do not want to discuss it.”

His gaze came back to rest on her, dark, brooding, and she repressed a little shiver.

“You will give me as long as I require,” he said. He straightened. “My business with you is this.

I am here on behalf of the Home Secretary. You are under suspicion of criminal activity. If you

do not help us we will ruin you. We will expose your true identity and we will take from you

everything
that you possess.” He smiled at her. “Now,” he said gently, “will you talk to me?”

She looked the same as she had done five years before. Alasdair Rowarth looked at his former

mistress and amended his view slightly; she looked almost exactly the same except that there

were shadows haunting those glorious lavender blue eyes now, suggesting a sadness that went

soul deep. He did not feel any pity to see them; she had left him, walked out on him for another

man, so whatever sorrow she had brought on herself was surely richly deserved.

The bitterness and resentment twisted within him and he ruthlessly subdued it. She was nothing

to him now. He was here to prove it. But he remembered that it was Eve’s clear and candid gaze

that had first enslaved him from the moment he had stepped into the ballroom at Albermarle

Street, persuaded against his better judgment by his friend Miles Vickery to attend the Cyprian’s

Ball. He had been bored and restless that evening, he remembered, searching as he always was

for something elusive, something he could not even name, grasping after that mysterious entity

that would fulfill him and provide a desperately needed balance to the lonely duty that was his

life. Rowarth had come into his dukedom young; so many people depended upon him, it seemed

that his days were never any more than a round of obligation and responsibility. He had searched

for someone to share that weight of duty with him, looked for a wife at Almacks and in the long

round of the London Season, and had been bored rigid by the witless pattern card debutantes he

had met.

And then he had attended the Cyprian’s Ball and there she had been, Eva Night, bright, dazzling,

so very alive, and in some way strangely untouchable even as she was effectively selling her

virginity to the highest bidder. He had been entranced. He was rich enough—so he had bought

her. And yet from the first he had thought that there was more to the transaction than that. It had

not been solely his money for her body. She had given him life and light and warmth, wrapping

him around with her generosity of spirit, her very presence lightening the load of the

responsibilities he carried. In return he had shared everything with her. Not simply his money but

his concerns and his cares, his deepest, darkest fears and his hopes for the future. Even though he

was a mature man of one and thirty he had fallen for her like a love-struck youth. He had wanted

to marry her. It had been perfect. Or so he had thought until she had left him, run away, denting

his pride, making him an utter laughingstock—the foolish duke who had wanted to marry his

venal mistress—and breaking a heart that until he had met her he had cynically believed could

never be touched.

He had been a fool. That much was clear. The thing that angered him most was that he had loved

her and believed his feelings were returned when in fact she had merely been using him for

money and advancement. He had been wealthy enough but nowhere near as rich as some of the

peers who sought Eve’s favor now that she was the toast of the
demimonde
. It had been madness

to think that he could hold her if another man offered more. When he had been a mere ten years

old he had seen his mother do precisely the same thing, betray his father, running off abroad to

be with her wealthy lover. There had been the most appalling
crim con
divorce case that had

dragged through the House of Lords and made his father look like a naive, impotent fool. And

Rowarth, who savagely told himself that he should have known better, had almost made the

same mistake as his luckless father. He knew he should be grateful that he had not committed the

ultimate folly of marrying Eve as he had wanted to.

After Eve’s defection he had gone abroad for several years—he had business concerns in India

that had occupied him most successfully until the pleas of his estate managers had brought him

back to England to face those responsibilities he had neglected. He had believed that he had put

aside thoughts of Eva Night until he had come back to London and found himself searching for

her face in a crowd or listening for news of her. He had learned that no one had heard of her

since she had run away from him. It had been the
on dit
at the time but Eve was now long gone,

her star extinguished, the brief time when they had been the glittering couple of the
demimonde

all but forgotten. Rowarth had tried to forget it, too, but every so often the memory of Eve would

stab him like a wound that had not completely healed.

Then Lord Hawkesbury’s letter had arrived out of the blue, asking for his help. Yes, he would go

to Yorkshire and confront his beautiful, treacherous former mistress. Yes, he would ascertain if

she were a member of a dangerous criminal fraternity, as Hawkesbury’s intelligence suggested.

And in doing so he would prove once and for all that he was free of the hold she had once

exerted over him.

Criminal she might be. Beautifully, wantonly seductive she most certainly was. Eve’s face still

had the vivid animation that Rowarth remembered: her creamy complexion was still dusted with

amber freckles, her hair was still a fiery red, and the quick, expressive movements of her body

were as ridiculously, dangerously appealing to him as ever. Not even her fearsomely respectable

worsted gown and dark blue spencer could hide the lush curves of a figure he had known

intimately and already ached to explore again in exquisite detail, unable to subdue the desires of

his body even while he deplored her and the hold she still had over him.

He had not expected to want her.

He had thought those feelings dead and gone. They should have been—they should have been