Vanity (13 page)

If things had been different, she would have been part of this elegant throng, Octavia thought bitterly. She would have had her season, made a good, convenient marriage, and this would have been her world for life.

“I imagine your father lost his money before you had a season?” her companion observed, again evincing that uncanny ability to tune into her thoughts.

Octavia shrugged. “I don’t suppose I would have enjoyed it anyway.”

“Fibber,” he accused gently. “How old are you, Octavia? Twenty-one, two?”

“Twenty-two,” she answered. “On the shelf.” She laughed, but without humor.

“I doubt you’d have been happy with some fribble for a husband,” Rupert remarked, raising his hat and bowing to a
lady curtsying to him from the path beside the road. “You’re too fond of asserting yourself, Miss Morgan, to make a compliant wife for a conventional husband.”

Octavia wondered if this was a compliment or a criticism, but it had the ring of truth. “You seem to have a great many acquaintances,” she observed, adding tartly, “An extraordinary number for a highwayman, if I might be so bold.”

He chuckled. “But here, Miss Morgan, I am no more a highwayman than you are a pickpocket.”

He drew rein on the bank of the Serpentine beside a small wooden hut where a man was dispensing mugs of chocolate and chestnuts roasted over a brazier. A group of lads stood ready to walk the horses of the skaters, swooping and dancing over the ice to the strains of “Greensleeves” played by a troupe of gypsy musicians.

Rupert sprang down from the phaeton, a pair of wooden blades in his hands. “Allow me, Miss Morgan.” Standing beside the carriage, he deftly strapped the pair of blades onto the soles of her boots, then reached up and lifted her out. He carried her easily to the ice and set her down at the edge, his hands still at her waist until she got her balance. “Tell me when you’re steady.”

Octavia stood for a minute, getting the feel of the blades; then by way of answer she gave an exultant little chuckle. Turning out of his hands, she swooped away on a one-foot glide that carried her almost into the middle of the lake.

Spinning, she waved at him as he sat on the edge to strap on his own blades.

She reminded him of a canary released from a cage as she swooped over the ice, and he could hear her joyous laughter as he skated over to her. “Isn’t it wonderful!” Her eyes shone, her cheeks pinkened with the cold, her lips parted in a flashing smile.

A current of desire shocked him, jolting his belly. He wanted her with an incontinent urgency he didn’t remember ever feeling for a woman before. But he wanted her like this, awake and laughing, glorying in the purity of physical
sensation, not responding involuntarily to the dictates of a sensual trance.

She caught his expression and the laughter died abruptly, but her face remained open and alive, her lips still parted, her eyes still shining, but with a different light now, a light that matched his own. She glanced around the thronged lake with an almost desperate air, as if she too were in the grip of an urgent hunger that required instant gratification.

“Come, let’s skate farther along, away from the crowd,” he said, his voice a husky rasp, cutting the invisible line of tension between them. “I want you to listen to what I have to say without interruption.” He took her hand, drawing her around the lake to a less densely populated spot.

Octavia knew now that she was going to agree to anything he suggested. She was riding a tide of reckless inspiration like a piece of tumbling flotsam, and she would come ashore wherever the tide tossed her. She no longer knew how to define herself, knew only that the ghastly present and the equally grim future it would spawn must be avoided. She must seize the lifeline offered her or drown in the mire of hopelessness.

“So?” she invited, doing a neat three-turn that brought her round to face him. “What is your proposal, Lord Rupert?”

“A marriage,” he said simply. “A social deception that will enable you to be revenged upon the men who ruined your father and will enable me to be revenged upon my own enemy.”

Octavia’s jaw dropped. Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. “What do you mean, a social deception?”

“Well, of course I’m not suggesting we really go through a marriage ceremony,” he said, as if it were axiomatic. “Only that we present ourselves to society as a newly married couple. I have sufficient funds to set up the enterprise, a good house, servants, carriages … And then we will exchange vengeances.”

The light and laughter had faded from his face now, and his eyes were that arctic gray she’d seen before, his expression almost masklike. “Who … who deserves your vengeance?” she asked tentatively.

“A man … the man responsible for the misunderstanding that drove me to the road,” he said, his voice curt. “You need know no more. Your task will be to pick his pocket. The item you will steal lies very close to his person, so you will have to become intimately acquainted with him. If necessary, you will have to seduce him…. I don’t believe you will find it difficult. He’s a man who can be relied upon to covet what belongs to someone else … a man whose vanity is such that the attentions of a beautiful and desirable woman will sweep away his guard.”

Octavia heard the venom in his voice, and its chill slowed the blood in her veins.

“I must seduce him?” she said slowly, struggling to grasp the implications of such a suggestion. “You would have me he with this man?”

“Yes, if it should prove necessary in order for you to remove from his person the object I require to achieve my own ends,” he said with cold detachment. “Somewhere on his body he carries at all times a certain very small ring, a ring to fit a baby’s finger. You will steal that ring.”

“But how can you be certain he always carries it?” She looked at him in confusion.

He knew because he carried his own. Philip would obey the same Wyndham tradition—superstition some might call it—that the ring must never leave its owner’s possession until either he placed it on the finger of his own son or it was buried with him.

“I am certain of it,” he said evenly.

And then, when he had the ring that fitted with his own, Lord Rupert Warwick would step forward and present himself as Cullum Wyndham, the legitimate Earl of Wyndham. Philip would be destroyed, his pride in the dust, his influence ashes in the wind.

“You would have me he with this man?” Octavia repeated
slowly, seizing on this one aspect as at least vaguely comprehensible in this extraordinary conversation.

He looked at her, his eyes snapping into focus. “In exchange for which I will engage to ruin the men who ruined your father, and I will return your fortune to you.”

“But how will you do that?”

“I’ll explain how later, when we have set the stage. But you may be assured that I
will
do it, and when our little play is over, you and your father will have your fortune and property returned to you.”

It was too much to absorb. Whatever scheme he might have for fulfilling his side of such a preposterous bargain, the whole idea was impossible to take in. How could she deliberately set out to seduce and lie with a stranger?

“And this … this marriage?” She grasped feebly at another loose end waving just beyond her comprehension.

“When we have no further use for it, then we will part company,” he said easily. “You will have what you sought, and I will have what I sought. We will create some fiction to ensure that you can live the life you choose.”

“You would have me play the whore,” she stated flatly. It was suddenly the only simple fact. The highwayman
was
attempting to buy her as he would buy a whore. But not for his own enjoyment—as a tool to accomplish his own purpose.

“My dear, in this world liaisons are common practice, and women who practice them are not called whore,” he returned. “I would ask you to do what countless other women are doing, have done before you, and will do after you. Your mind and emotions will not be engaged.”

And what of her father? Where did he come into all this scheming? But, presumably, the highwayman hadn’t given Oliver Morgan a thought. And at this moment, even to Octavia, her father’s role in all this seemed irrelevant.

Octavia turned away to hide from Lord Rupert the confused responses chasing across her countenance. Her voice sounded stifled to her ears as she said, “And what of us? Of this counterfeit marriage? Is that also to incur no involvement of the mind and emotions?”

He was silent for a moment, then said dryly, “I doubt that.”

When she said nothing, but remained half-turned from him, he continued in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, “But if you would prefer to play the part of my wife only in name, then I would respect that.”

“Is that what you would prefer?” Still she wouldn’t look at him.

“No,” he said readily. “No, I would not wish that.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and gently turned her toward him. His eyes were soft now, his mouth smiling. He cupped the curve of her cheek in his gloved hand. “If you enjoyed the other night, Octavia, I swear to you, sweeting, that it was as nothing compared to what could be.”

Octavia swallowed, felt herself melting under the buttery warmth of his voice, the heat of his eyes, the lascivious intent of his words.

“We would have all that together, and we would be revenged upon our enemies. And we would make fools of every one of the vain, posturing idiots who see nothing of the world that exists beyond the sugary confection of their own making.”

Suddenly he laughed and the intensity was broken. “Will you teach them such a lesson, Miss Morgan?”

She looked behind her at the brightly clad crowd of skaters in their furs and velvets, secure in the knowledge that food and warmth and pleasure were theirs for the taking. She saw the children, barefoot in the frozen gutters, eyes sunken in their starved faces. The women sprawled in the mud, clutching an empty gin bottle to their breasts, the neglected babies wailing thinly on the ground beside them.

She and the highwayman knew that other face of London. Dirk Rigby and Hector Lacross had ensured that she and her father would know that face intimately for the rest of their lives.

What the highwayman was proposing was preposterous. It was madness. But if it could work …? Oh, if it could work, it would be an adventure to challenge fantasy.

But if it was necessary, could she cold-bloodedly seduce some unknown man?

For such a purpose and such an adventure? Yes, of course she could. The Octavia Morgan who would have reacted to such a prospect with revulsion had long lost her delicate sensibilities. They were a luxury she hadn’t been able to afford for three years. Besides, it wasn’t as if she were still a maid. And for a woman who regularly risked her neck picking pockets for a living, simple seduction was nothing. It wouldn’t put her neck in a noose … unless, of course, she was caught stealing the ring.

An icy shiver ran down her spine. In this scenario there’d be no crowd in which to lose herself.

But she wouldn’t be caught. She was too good at it for that. Too deft and quick. She would
not
be caught. And when it was done … oh, when it was done, there was the promise of restitution and once again a future worth having.

Rupert watched as her thoughts flew across her expressive countenance, and he read them as clearly as if they were written on the pages of a book. He didn’t need to hear her speak her agreement and said after a minute, “Do you know the names of the men who robbed your father?”

“Men?” she said scornfully. “Swine.”

He inclined his head in grave acceptance of this correction. “Do you know the names of these swine?”

“Dirk Rigby and Hector Lacross. Do you know them?”

“They’re intimates of the Prince of Wales, I believe,” he said. “I know them to bow to across a room. But it shouldn’t be difficult to deepen that acquaintance. Do they know you?”

Octavia shook her head. “I was away when they approached my father. He was taking the waters at Harrow-gate, and they made themselves agreeable to him….” She shrugged.

“Good. Much better that they don’t know you,” Rupert said briskly. “Come, you’re getting cold. Let’s skate back to the crowd. I would show you your prey.”

Octavia remained where she was for a moment. “But what are we to do with my father while we’re putting the world to rights?”

“Tuck him up safe and warm with his books,” the highwayman said airily. “Whatever you wish to tell him, I’ll back you up to the hilt.”

Octavia knew perfectly well that her father wouldn’t ask awkward questions in case he didn’t like the answers. He’d accept a change of circumstances with his usual insouciance, at least on the surface.

So there it was. A wild, fantastic contract lay between them. Her life was about to change out of all recognition. And yet there was nothing to mark such a momentous bargain. Not even solemn words of acceptance.

He had taken her hand and was drawing her along beside him as they skated back to the wider area where the fashionable skaters congregated. She glanced sideways up at his face and saw no change. She’d half expected to see some demonic twist of satisfaction to his mouth or in his eyes, but he wore his usual expression of cool serenity with the little half smile of mockery playing over his lips.

“Over there,” he said quietly. “Do you see the tall, slender gentleman in the burgundy velvet cloak with the fair curly hair? That is the man who calls himself the Earl of Wyndham.”

“Calls himself?” Octavia looked sharply at her companion. “You mean he is not?”

“No, he is not,” said the Earl of Wyndham quietly. “But for the purposes of our little play, you will acknowledge his title.”

What mystery was this? Octavia looked across the ice toward the man she was to seduce and rob. He was skating with marked grace, his willowy figure moving elegantly around his partner. He wore no hat, and his unpowdered hair was a luxuriant tumble of golden curls, restrained at the nape of his neck with a scarlet ribbon. He was too far away for her to form any impression other than of fair grace and assured elegance.

“What is he to you?” she asked, unconsciously whispering.