The Secrets of a Courtesan (3 page)

annihilated, destroyed by her betrayal. He was furious that they were not. Yet he was forced to

acknowledge that when he had first seen Eve in the Market Square he had felt all the old

emotions of desire and lust and longing as strong as they had ever been and searing in their

intensity. He had been told himself then that the memories, the hold she had had over his senses,

would never be permitted to cloud his judgment. That resolution had lasted all of five seconds.

He had seen her and he had wanted her with a hunger all the more acute for the years of denial.

But his business with Eve was precisely that—business. He was here on Hawkesbury’s behalf to

ascertain her connection to Warren Sampson and to use her, coldly, ruthlessly, to get to Sampson

so that the man could finally be arrested. That was his goal, no more, no less.

“I strongly suggest,” he said, “that you do as I ask.”

For a moment Eve stared at him, those glorious lavender eyes wide and blank and he wondered if

she had even heard him. Then an expression of fury came across her face.

“You bastard!” she said, picking up a very fine silver hairbrush from the desk in front of her and

throwing it at his head. “How dare you come here and threaten to take away from me everything

that I have worked so hard for?”

Rowarth caught the hairbrush absentmindedly in one hand before it made contact. He had always

been good at cricket. Eve was looking absolutely furious, her piquant face flushed and her

breathing quick and light. But it was more than anger he could see in her face. It was

desperation. There was so much passion and rage in her voice that for a moment the principal

emotion he felt was admiration that she was as strong as a tigress in defending the things that

mattered to her. Memory stirred again; when she had been his mistress he had given her money

and had been puzzled when she appeared to have spent it all on nothing. When pressed it had

turned out that she had given it all away to feed and clothe urchins living on the streets. Rowarth

had protested at her generosity and Eve had turned on him, saying that he was spoiled and

privileged and could not understand—all true, of course, for how could an Eton-and Oxfordeducated duke ever understand what it was like to struggle to survive? Most dukes would not

even care. They had argued passionately and then made love even more passionately and she had

lain in his arms and at last confided the truth in him.

“I did not know my parents,” she had said, her head against his shoulder, her hand resting over

his heart, “and I was cold and hungry and afraid more times than I care to remember.” There had

been a faraway look in her eyes, as though she were seeing far beyond the walls of her

bedchamber. “If I can spare even one child from suffering as I did then that has to be for the

good.”

Rowarth had felt humbled, made to look beyond the comfort that had shielded him since his

youth to another more painful existence. He knew that Eve had chosen to become a courtesan

only because she had seen it as a way out of such stark poverty.

“I was pretty,” she had once said lightly, “so I used it to escape.” But he knew those words hid a

wealth of bitterness.

“It is only the rich who can afford moral scruples,” she had once flashed at him when he had

commented on the hanging of a youth for the theft of a loaf of bread and he knew that she had

felt the same way about the choice she had made in selling herself.

Or he had thought he had known her until she had betrayed him.

But that was in the past and nothing to the purpose now.

He put the silver hairbrush on the desk. He suspected it was part of a quantity of stolen goods

that Hawkesbury had said Warren Sampson was almost certainly laundering via Eve’s

pawnbroking business. Which brought him back to the matter in hand.

“You are working with Warren Sampson to pass on stolen goods,” he said. “He runs a

housebreaking gang that robs property across the county and then his accomplices bring the

items here and you sell them, making him a double profit.”

She stared at him contemptuously. “That is utter rubbish.” She turned away from him with an

angry swish of skirts and took a couple of paces away across the room. She could not get any

farther away from him because the office was so small and he could sense the anger in her, still

simmering like a pot coming back to the boil.

“I barely know the man,” she snapped. “And what I do know I dislike intensely. It is both

insulting and plain wrong to suggest some criminal conspiracy between us.”

Hawkesbury had suggested that Eve might be Warren Sampson’s mistress, a cozy arrangement if

they were in bed and business together. And Rowarth was not simply going to accept her word

that it was not so. Just the thought of her tumbling between the sheets with Sampson made him

hot with rage and thwarted desire. Madness, when he had sworn he did not care and did not want

to want her.

“Shall we sit,” he suggested evenly, “and discuss this calmly?”

She gave him another look of searing disdain. “If we must. If it will hasten your departure.”

He bit back a reluctant smile. Never had a woman seemed so anxious to be rid of him. But then,

Eve had always been different.

“I shall want to see your accounts in due course,” he said. “I need to trace every one of your

transactions.”

“How tedious for you,” Eve murmured.

“I suppose that they are in order?”

“Of course not.” Eve glanced at the tottering plies of paper on the desk and the floor. “You may

have taught me to read and to compute mathematical sums, Rowarth, but you could not make me

like it.”

The memory touched him on the raw. It was true that she had been illiterate before he had taught

her. There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he thought of the sweetness of those lessons and the

gifts he had brought her, the books she had painstakingly learned to read, the columns of figures

she had haltingly added up while he had joked that at least that way she would know how much

money she was giving away to the poor. He slammed the door on such memories. Evidently she

had moved on and was able to calculate Sampson’s wealth very accurately and certainly well

enough to profit by it.

“It was not the only thing that I taught you,” he said harshly. “You may have been a courtesan

but you were not a tutored one.”

Color lit her cheeks at his reference to the fact that she had been a virgin when he had taken her

to his bed.

“I do not recall you having any complaints,” she snapped.

He had not. It had been blissful. He recalled the sweetness of Eve’s lissome body stretched

beneath his hands and the pure physical compatibility that they had achieved. And then he

thought of her running from him.

“Such debate gets us nowhere,” he said harshly. “Now, tell me the truth about Warren Sampson

this time.” He met her eyes directly. “Was he the man you left me for? Are you his mistress?”

“I do not believe that you have been hearing me,” Eve said wearily. She felt sick to her soul that

Rowarth, who had once loved her, should now hold her in nothing but contempt. “For the last

time, Rowarth,” she said, “I barely know Warren Sampson. I am neither his mistress nor his

business partner, nor,” she added with emphasis, “his associate in any way.”

Disquiet stirred in her. It was true that for the past couple of months she had been aware of some

very valuable goods passing through the pawnshop. The silver hairbrush was one such item and

there had also been some silver plates and a couple of gold snuffboxes. A rather dissolute young

man whom Eve had recognized as Tom Fortune, younger brother to the squire, had brought the

pieces in. The workmanship on them had been superb and Eve had given him a good price for

them. She had asked no questions at the time for she was well aware that people were very

sensitive about bringing in property to pawn for money and one of the reasons her clientele liked

her was because she was so discreet and kept their secrets. And yet she had not been comfortable

about the transaction. A sixth sense had told her that something was wrong even as she had tried

to persuade herself that Tom Fortune was probably only selling off the family silver to pay his

gambling debts.

Her disquiet turned to foreboding. Could Hawkesbury be correct, not in his suspicions of her, but

in the fact that Warren Sampson might be using her shop to launder stolen goods? Sampson was

a deeply unpleasant man, grotesquely, ridiculously wealthy with a fortune that had been made in

the mills of Leeds and Bradford. On more than one occasion Eve had caught him looking at her

with speculation and lust in his eyes and she had shuddered to imagine that he might know her

secrets, her background, her past. What Warren Sampson might do with such knowledge was

terrifying. But he had said nothing and had always treated her with outward respect, and Eve had

told herself that she was imagining things. Nevertheless, he always made her skin crawl.

Rumor, which swirled around Fortune’s Folly like the current of the River Tune, said that

Sampson had added to his money through various criminal activities but nothing had ever been

proven. Now it seemed that Hawkesbury was set on finding that proof and that Rowarth would

use her in any way possible to bring Sampson down.

Eve shuddered. She knew that if Rowarth had Hawkesbury’s authority he could enforce

whatever he wished and if Hawkesbury believed her guilty of criminal activity then she had no

hope. Suddenly she felt so tired, so vulnerable to this man and to the insidious appeal that he still

had for her and so miserable that he had nothing but disdain for her now. It appalled and

distressed her that he had accepted Lord Hawkesbury’s commission to bring her down.

But such regrets would not save her. With a sigh, she gestured Rowarth to a seat on one of the

rather rickety wooden chairs at the side of her desk. Accounts and correspondence spilled from

the table onto the floor. She gave vent to her feelings by giving the papers a violent shove so that

the ones still on the desk cascaded onto the floor.

Realizing that Rowarth was waiting, with impeccable manners, for her to sit first, she pushed

some books aside and took a chair. He immediately sat down opposite her. His presence seemed

to fill the space between them, powerful, authoritative. The room suddenly seemed too small,

cramped and close, and it was nothing to do with the piles of goods that were stored in there. It

was simply that Alasdair Rowarth had always been the most overwhelming man that Eve had

ever met and she felt angry that he could still affect her in such a profound way.

To cover her nervousness she tilted up her chin and subjected him to a stern appraisal.

“You cannot have any evidence at all to back up these ridiculous accusations,” she said. “They

are absolutely untrue.”

Rowarth inclined his head. His hair, glossy and thick, shone in a ray of sunlight that penetrated

the dusty window. He looked self-assured, Eve thought, with all the confidence that privilege

and position could bring. It only served to make her feel all the more vulnerable.

“The Home Secretary’s agents have had your shop under observation for several months,” he

said. “They know that you are fencing stolen goods.” He picked up the silver hairbrush again and

looked thoughtfully at it. “I am sure you are aware there have been a number of robberies

locally.”

“No,” Eve said. Her immediate instinct was to protect herself and Joan and all she had worked to

build up. But she could see as soon as the words left her mouth that Rowarth did not believe her.

His gaze rested on her face with the perceptive intensity that she remembered. She blushed and

saw the corner of his mouth lift in a smile, as though she had just confirmed her guilt. She could

have kicked herself.

“If stolen goods are being passed through this shop it is entirely without my knowledge,” she

temporized.

Rowarth held her gaze, his own implacable. Eve shivered to see the coldness there where once

there had been nothing but heat and sweetness for her.

“That does not make you innocent,” Rowarth said.

“It makes me a victim of Sampson’s criminality,” Eve said sharply, “not an accomplice.”

Rowarth raised his brows in blatant disbelief but he did not challenge her immediately. Instead

he picked up a monograph of some very naughty erotic drawings that Eve had failed to notice

was lying on the desk. As he flicked through the pictures Eve started to feel unconscionably

heated, her mind conjuring up visions of the past, of her body locked with Rowarth’s in the most

intimate and sensual of embraces, his mouth hot against the bare skin of her inner thigh, her cries

of need as his tongue flicked her tender core, the bliss as he took her, pushing her to the extremes

of pleasure…

She tried to steady her breathing. Her pulse was fluttering like a trapped butterfly. Her skin

tingled and she felt light-headed. She fanned herself surreptitiously, watching as Rowarth

assessed the saucy sketches, brows slightly raised, a faint smile still on his lips. Her fingers were

itching to snatch the book away from him and put an end to her embarrassment. And then he

looked up and the turbulent desire in his eyes flared strong and elemental, and Eve felt the need